In Iraq, the federal army is pushing out the Mahdi Army which is the the Militia of al-Sadr.

The good news is, Iraqi forces are heavily engaged with the Mahdi Army with U.S. troops in a supporting role, all over the place. The weird part is, al-Maliki has supposedly taken a lead role in directing operations against his erstwhile bedfellow al-Sadr. The key question, in all matters requiring an element of trust in either al-Maliki or al-Sadr, is which one can you throw farther? The Sadrists are claiming it’s all political, to cut them out of provinicial elections, and if al-Maliki’s that interested, there’s got to be a sleazy political angle to it. On the other hand, if it in fact has the effect of ending Shiite infighting and lawlessness, and edges out Iran, then there is a distinctly unsleazy strategic angle to it. Al-Maliki has given the Mahdi Army 72 hours to lay down their weapons. Disarming illegal militias is a legitimate act of government.

For those of you less than enthralled with defining the state as the entity with a monopoly on coercion I ask what purpose does the Iraq federal goverment serve in disbanding this militia? Why should the federal state force a local armed force to put down their weapons and obey the state?

Just to head off the obvious criticism, the argument is that the essential definition of the state is it’s monopoly on coercion. Its clear that the state can be defined in many different ways, but if you strip away all the properties of the state which property do you find present in every state? Most certainly the common property that connects states together is their monopoly on coercion.

Its awesome! Ain’t it?

When will they care about poor people.

As you have probably seen on TV and elsewhere, in September 2006, Wal-Mart launched its $4 prescription program. Now, 18 months later, it reports that it has saved consumers over $1 billion (yes, billion) as a result of that program. That’s $1 billion that poorer consumers have to spend elsewhere on the things they need (or that is reducing insurance costs and premiums), not to mention they can now buy prescriptions they might not have been able to afford before or not have to cut pills in half to save money. Moreover, that program prompted Wal-Mart’s competition to create similar programs, the benefits of which can be placed on top of that $1 billion. For some strange reason, the major media didn’t cover this story when Wal-Mart’s press release went out last Friday.

It’s because of their monopoly that they can so callously ignore the pain and suffering they cause the poor by saving them money. Thank god there are affluent liberals that would never stoop to shopping at Walmart eager to take up the cause of regulating increased costs on all the goods as means to helping the poor by making things less affordable.

Massachusetts Board of Education is debating the very difficult problem of what to call schools that suck.

The board has spent parts of more than three meetings in recent months debating the linguistic merits and tone set by the terms after a handful of superintendents from across the state complained that the label underperforming unfairly casts blame on educators, hinders the recruitment of talented teachers, and erodes students’ self-esteem.

While many educators support the largely symbolic changes, others call them sugarcoating and unnecessary, feeding into the sentiment that children are coddled. Debating the terms, they say, wastes time when the board should be coming up with a plan to fix the state’s 114 low-performing schools. Changing the labels seems to be intended to appease overly sensitive educators, critics say.

I’m guessing the sissy boys whining about being called ‘chronically underperforming’ didn’t like the movie Incredibles.

Seriously, as if the fact that public education is an infinitely growing money pit that fails to actually educate large swaths of students wasn’t enough now its a matter of public discourse what labels should be given to incompetent schools. This is one more reason to favor privatizing education. Namby Pambys that prefer to have their children, and more importantly their administrators, coddled can select schools that will do just that. By privatizing education, a citizen has way more control over how much coddling administrators get then when its is determined by a simple majority. Private markets provide way more control over education then a democratically elected school board.

Apparently a lady on the phone to 911 was shot to death while waiting for the police to arrive.

A California woman was shot to death as she pleaded with emergency dispatchers to come and help her. Her death will not make the network news programs this evening, but this is the latest reminder that we must take responsibility for our own safety and not rely on the police.

Darwin has argued on occasion that firearms are unnecessary for self protection because law enforcement serves that role. I wonder what his response would be to this story.

Jamie emails:

…. That you haven’t been dutifly reporting how the media (mainly fox news) has been playing portions of a speech (Wright’s sermons) intended to smear a candidate, even though portions of the speech have been taken completely out of context. This is clearly the media tryint to steer politics. I thought you were against such things.

Sorry Jamie, I don’t watch Fox News. Its way to bias for my tastes. You want to talk about bias you should read CNN some time. Or perhaps NPR or, obviously, the NYtimes. Compared to those guys Fox News is a bunch of amateurs.

Nietzsche strongly condemns religion. How Ironic then is it, that religion does a better job at creating uberman then any other ideological system. Religion breeds confident people, and it takes confident people to create value. In this day and age, anyone can tear down value, thats the promise of democracy and science, but to create value? That requires the audacity of a tyrant and tyrants don’t have the luxury of insecurity. Insecurity is for the scientist and technocrat. Confidence is the domain of the tyrant, the uberman.

The uberman is the priest? Surely this can’t be so!

Apparently the writer Daniel Hannan has not read any of Dan’s response to my condemnations of communism.

Ponder the stories of two African states. Kenya banned the killing of elephants in 1979, effectively nationalising its herd. At around the same time, Rhodesia (as it still was) made elephants the property of those whose land they were on. The result? Thirty years on, Kenyan elephants have been all but wiped out, while Zimbabwe’s are as numerous as ever.

Had Hannan read those comments, he would know that the elephants death had nothing to do with economic policy but some magical variable that unluckily occurred in Kenya. It was luck in Rhodeisa, and not ownership of property, that kept the elephants alive. When will these people realize that socialistic economic policy does not kill, its unlucky events that occur while that policy is instantiated that kills. You always have to consider magical variable when comparing the death rates of differing economic systems. Everybody knows that.

Whats interesting though is that in Kenya, its was decided that elephants were much to important to be left up to free markets. Since elephants were such a valuable resource it was decided that it would be wiser to let the government control that resource. Just like we see, in countless examples before, giving the one entity that has monopoly on coercion total control over some resource squanders the resource. If you seriously think that a resource is to valuable to be squandered, the last thing you should do is give government sole control over that resource. This reminds me of public education. Since education is to important, we let the government control it and as a consequence when we compare kitchen appliance to education we find that only microwaves improve.

Elephants and education are to important to let the markets do their work. Better to have the government squander and ruin those resources then let the powerful innovative force of competition do its work on these ‘valuable’ things. When will people see that government is not the solution to the problem?

Or as a fellow coworker likes to say: “I’m from the government, I’m here to help”.

The old sixties song by John Lennon called Imagine, sounds like hell.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

Quite literally you are stupid if you honestly believe man would be better off if there were was no private property. Only through ownership does man progress. This kind of silly liberal thinking gets people killed. For example Mao imagined there were no possessions of land and then starved 60 million people to death. And to add insult to injury, because Mao imaged no religion those that survived the famine could not use it as a means to cope for the massive loss of life.

I have the version of the song that A Perfect Circle covers. I’m not sure if its intentional, but their rendition makes it sound like a fascist cult trying to persuade others to drink the cool aid with them. Thats the perfect fit for such a scary song.

We can only hope?

They predict that today’s individualist, consumer-driven culture will eventually produce a politics to match. “Much of this new activity will be explicitly libertarian, since the decentralization of control and individual empowerment is so deeply embedded in Internet technology and culture…. The Long Tail future of politics just as surely belongs to the president and party that figures out the secret to success is giving away power by letting the voter decide more of what matters.”