Nelson Mandela, Movies, and History

"Many know the story of Mandela's support for the nearly all-white national team in the Clint Eastwood-directed film Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela.

What the film didn't tell you is that the team, known as the Springboks, was habitually guilty of dirty play. Bad enough to almost get disqualified from the tournament.

This I learned later, when I watched The 16th Man, part of ESPN's great documentary series 30 For 30.

That made the story far more interesting. It should have been part of Invictus. Apparently, it didn't fit the narrative. For me, it just would have been a more interesting narrative without neglecting that Mandela helped unite the country through his support for the team."

More...http://partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=3921

If The State didn't exist, would you invent it?

If the State didn't exist, would you invent it?

Think of all the things you want or need, from street repairs (or street building), to education, to legal services, to security services, to good health, to sound money.

Then, take the cost of all these things from your budget, hand it to somebody else, who THEN, by committee or assembly, prioritizes these things for you. You have no control of the matter, except for "votes" that are more likely to be miscounted by error or fraud than to actually make a difference and elect the "right people."

Would you think that's a good idea?

How does it make any sense?

Pearl Harbor Day

In my teens and twenties, some NFL teams moved around and/or changed names. Even today, when the Colts play Baltimore, my head still explodes.

In 1996, Bob Dole was on the campaign trail. A Japanese pitcher threw a no-hitter for the Dodgers. Dole acknowledged this and congratulated him and "Brooklyn."

He misspoke, and I empathized. For the first 35 or so years of his life, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, not L.A. They were "embedded" in Dole's brain as Brooklyn, and even though everyone knew that Dole knew they were L.A.'s team, his subconscious made him utter "Brooklyn."

Lots of people made hay out of this, as if Dole was getting senile. There were lots of reasons to oppose Dole, but this wasn't it. 

But eight years before, something far stranger happened. On the campaign trail, George H.W. Bush made a stump speech to veterans on September 7, 1988. Reading something somebody else obviously wrote, he said September 7 was "Pearl Harbor Day."

He didn't notice the obvious error and kept on speaking.

And Bush was a teenager when the Pearl Harbor attack happened. He fought in the war, and I think his plane was shot down twice.

And he didn't know about December 7?

What impresses me is that he was able to skate through this, just like Obama skates through nobody knowing his college transcripts.

But maybe Bush is just that forgetful. Multiple websites claim that Bush says he doesn't remember where he was the day of the JFK assassination. Forget one, you probably are able to forget the other.

But that's pretty damn forgetful.

No wonder some people think our "leaders" are literally from another planet.

         

Mandela, commies, imperialists, and walking in their shoes.

The death of Nelson Mandela provokes reflection on his admittedly mixed philosophy and legacy.

To be honest, I don't really know much of the details at all. Did he associate with communists? Yes, obviously. Was he a communist? Maybe, or maybe it depends on how you define "communist."

Did he support armed resistance to the oppression he faced? Yes. Did this make him a terrorist? Maybe, but then weren't the founders of Israel also terrorists? Isn't EVERYONE who will use violence, and disagrees with a regime, a terrorist by regime standards?

Was Mandela a good President of South Africa? In the end, I think he was, if for no other reason than in preserving peace between blacks and whites in an uncertain time.

But did crime increase during and after his Presidency? I hear it did. Could it have been better under any other President? I strongly doubt it. Ultimately, there's a choice to be made in South Africa, to become more like the West in its laws and government, or become more like Zimbabwe. I really have no stake in the outcome, but I do have my preference, which I don't think I have the right to impose on them.

What I wonder is, if you didn't become a communist under Apartheid, what would have you become? 

I ask because Communism, as it manifested itself, wasn't just or mainly about ideology. It's about structure and organization.

I was reminded of this when realizing that Vo Nguyen Giap, perhaps the most successful general of the 20th century, was just two degrees of separation from me; I met his biographer, Cecil Curry who was a good friend of my dad. (Both Giap and Curry have passed away; Giap just two months ago at 102.) I haven't yet read the entire biography, but got the sense that Giap's motive wasn't to impose Marxism as it was to liberate the Vietnamese from foreign domination.

I could imagine Mandela with the same motive. My understanding of Apartheid was that it was far, far worse than the Jim Crow laws of the American South, with which it's so often associated. If the fellow travelers with whom one would throw off the tyranny are communists,and there aren't any other allies siding with you, wouldn't you become a communist? Not knowing what you know, now, in the Internet Age and 40 years of knowledge not accessible to Mandela, but rather, what would you have done if you were oppressed?

In that context, maybe the party structure of the communists made sense as an organizational mechanism for revolution. I'm not saying it's moral or right, but those who lionize ANY statesman from the United States and/or West in general must admit they used immoral means to achieve their goals.

In all, I'd suppose that, all things considered, Mandela was neither a saint nor a devil, but considering the circumstances, probably better than most statesmen.

Death Tax Irony

Rose Wilder Lane was born this day in 1886. She was a popular writer in the 1920's and 30's, but is now known primarily for being the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books. (Also, she's known as a founder of the modern libertarian movement.)

As I understand it, she made good money, very good money, in the 1920's, though might have lost quite a bit in the 1929 stock market crash. In any case, her mother's works, which began in the 1930's, far surpassed her own in popularity. The bulk of Rose's fortune in her later years was inherited from her mother.

So, she didn't "earn" the money. She merely inherited it. Why shouldn't she have been taxed most or all of the inheritance?

That's only fair, right? 

Except... isn't she primarily responsible for the success of the books? Compared to other aspiring authors, Rose's mother had in the daughter a professional writer editing (some say co-writing) the books, who also had enough notoriety and influence in the publishing industry for Little House in the Big Woods and its sequels to go to market.

If Laura earned the money, in what way would Rose not have been entitled to the inheritance?

Would you have taken it away from her, at the point of a gun?

In what way did her inheritance, her property, suddenly become the property of everyone else?

And if you think Rose was "deserving" whereas spoiled rich kids are not deserving to inherit wealth, where do you draw the line?

Here's where I draw the line: No matter how "deserving" or not I view my neighbor's wealth, I don't take what doesn't belong to me.

And if it's wrong for me to take what doesn't belong to me, it's wrong for the State to steal as well.

Brigham Young's Curse

How a national champion nobody liked changed college football. My latest: The Partial Observer - Brigham Young's Curse

Official Stories and Blowback

On the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, the only real commentary I might have made would have been making the same points I did below. So here is "Official Stories and Blowback," originally printed on March 31, 2011 at the Downsize DC Foundation:

Perhaps you don't believe the Official Story on 9/11, the JFK Assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, or anything else. Or maybe you do. I won't try to persuade you either way.

But it is interesting that within the Federal State's Official Story you see evidence that its own policies led to these disasters.

In 2000, Chalmers Johnson published Blowback. His thesis is that America's endless foreign interventions and illegal activities overseas lead to unintended consequences.

Terrorism is one form of blowback.

If you assume the Official Story of the attacks of Sept 11, 2001 is true, it is the textbook case of blowback. The 9/11 Commission Report admits that Osama bin Laden, the alleged sponsor of the attacks, was motivated by . . .

• U.S. support of corrupt Middle Eastern dictators
• The stationing of U.S. troops ("infidels") in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam
• Sanctions on the Iraqi people after the first Gulf War
• U.S. financial and diplomatic support for Israel in its conflicts with Palestinians

9/11 wasn't the first case of blowback, and not all forms of blowback directly "boomerang" so dramatically on the American people. But what is interesting is that the most shocking blowback event, next to 9/11, is rarely viewed as blowback at all.

The JFK assassination has many unanswered questions, and I don't necessarily believe the following scenario, but it does make me think. Gary Brecher suggests this in his American Conservative essay on interventionism:

I don’t want to jump in the black lagoon of “Who Killed JFK?” but Castro is a prime suspect. Oswald was a KGB asset, the theory goes, the Kremlin passed him on to the Cuban intelligence agency, CGI, and after a few hundred failed attempts on his own life, Castro lost his sense of humor and gave the go-ahead. That was Edwards Jay Epstein’s conclusion in Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it’s supported by new German research.

Imagine, however, that the above isn't true, and that Oswald acted alone as the Official Story says.

What could have motivated him?

As most people know, the Official Story says that Oswald was a communist who had temporarily defected to the Soviet Union. He was later the sole member of the "Fair Play for Cuba" Committee in New Orleans. During these years . . .

• The U.S. maintained a trade embargo on Cuba (and still does)
• The CIA sponsored the failed "Bay of Pigs" invasion to overthrow Castro
• The CIA attempted to assassinate Castro countless times

Is it surprising that a fanatical ideological supporter of Castro's Cuba would blame the U.S. President for this anti-Castro foreign policy?

The Official Stories of both 9/11 and JFK illustrate the futility of an interventionist U.S. foreign policy. If we didn't meddle in the Middle East, Osama wouldn't have had any reason to target U.S. citizens in terror attacks. If the U.S. didn't relentlessly harass Cuba, Oswald wouldn't have targeted JFK.

The JFK Assassination was blowback.

And we see "blowback" in domestic policy as well.

You never see an assassination because a law was repealed. You never see a terrorist attack because funding for a government program was cut. But you DO see backlash - blowback - of one kind or another when government meddles in the economy or private lives. And by "meddle," I mean, "use force against people who haven't done any harm to others."

As with 9/11 and JFK, unresolved questions surround the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. But if the Official Story is correct, that tells us that Timothy McVeigh was motivated to assault the federal government because of the federal government's wholly unconstitutional and illegal assault on the Brach Davidian compound.

If the Official Stories are correct, then the 9/11 hijackers, Oswald, and McVeigh were deranged. But we must also recognize that the trigger that set off these disturbed people was a perceived injustice. Not only that, it was a REAL injustice:

• In the case of 9/11, the U.S. Government shouldn't have been involved in the Middle East and shouldn't have intentionally impoverished the Iraqi people.
• In the case of JFK, the U.S. Government shouldn't have attacked the head of the sovereign Cuban government.
•  In the case of Oklahoma City the U.S. Government shouldn't have attacked U.S. citizens in Waco two years earlier, who were merely exercising their First and Second Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and the right to bear arms.

Blowback is a permanent feature of The State. Once the people in charge decide that force is the answer to the problems of the world or the problems of the country, they will, sooner or later, find out that the results are dysfunction, retaliation, or both.

If the Official Stories on 9/11, JFK, and Oklahoma City are even partially correct, they provide all the evidence we need that that federal government should stay out of other countries and out of our own lives.

Don't ask me about 2016

Obama's not even finished the first year of his second term. The next Inauguration Day is more than three years away.

Please, give me two more years of peace and quiet about the 2016 Presidential race!

For one thing, talk and speculation now doesn't matter. It amounts to as much as the talk about the governor of Minnesota or whoever was the darling four years ago. (Was that Pawlenty?)

Second, I don't care, and won't care even in 2016. In 2012, I didn't even watch the returns on Election Night. Which might seem odd, considering my interest and career in public affairs. But, frankly, I think even those with decent intentions - and I think all of them do have good intentions in their own minds - won't do, or can't do, what they've promised.

Third, I don't respect the office. To explain, I'll reprint the last paragraphs of my Max Schmeling, James Harrison and Me essay from the Partial Observer, March 22, 2011:

If I was a championship athlete, or I saved 100 orphans from a burning building, I would probably be invited to the White House to be congratulated and have a photo-op with the President. And that would be exceedingly awkward. I'd decline the invitation, regardless of who is the President.

That's because it's not the President's job to congratulate me. He has no authority over me. He's not my "leader" and, because I'm not in the military, he's not my "commander-in-chief." He's not my boss. He's not a cultural icon. He's not a spiritual leader. All he is is a guy with a job that happens to make him the top law enforcement officer in the U.S. and commander in chief of the armed forces.

This makes him a dangerous man, not someone I'd want to meet.

As long as Presidents like Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama attack countries that never threatened us, I see no reason in giving them any sign that the office of the Presidency is worthy of respect and honor.

I'll comply with the government's dictates. I'll obey under coercion and compulsion. But I might as well be governed by a foreign people. The values and mindset in Washington are so far removed from mine, that as a matter of conscience it would seem best to avoid the President and politicians whenever I can.

  

JFK and the Fool

Without consulting a dictionary, I think of a "fool" as someone who, well, should know better. Especially when they hold two sets of beliefs that, if not absolutely opposite, are certainly not in sync.

That is, they believe one thing, but then believe something else that doesn't logically follow. If you believe in A, you shouldn't believe in B. You should know better.

And I don't mean one's a fool for not having the education or experience to spot logical fallacies. By should, I mean there's an ethical responsibility to know better when one does have the capacity to recognize the fallacy.

One example of the fool: someone who says, "Only stupid people play the lottery," but then says, "Your vote can make a difference." If the odds of winning the lottery make it not worth the dollar to play, how is spending a chunk out of one's day to vote worth anything, when the odds of that vote making a difference are astronomical? Can one be that bad at math?

It's more sensible to say, your vote can make a difference, in the same way you can win the lottery.

This week, however, brings to mind another kind of fool: those who believe that JFK was murdered by the CIA (or even think it's possible), who then go on to express hope and faith in other Presidential candidates, and in our system of government as a whole.

If one believes the CIA could do this and get away with it, one must concede the CIA is, or is part of, a Secret Government that's in control of the visible, "democratically-elected" government.

And even if one doesn't believe in the CIA theory, but only believes it's possible, that itself is proof there's no reason to have faith in "our system of government." To think it's possible that a Secret Government exists, is to express sufficient doubt to make "faith" in our government a waste of energy.  

To think of the CIA theory as possible or probable, and to STILL have faith in the system, is to believe that at some point, post-JFK, this Secret Government voluntarily give up its power.

Instead of living with such delusions, it's better to give up faith in our "government" altogether.  

Baylor: STILL College Football's Crownholder

My latest at The Partial Observer - Baylor: STILL College Football's Crownholder

Who needs football?

Two items from football over the past few weeks seem related:

• Enrollment in Pop Warner football is down 10%.
• The Joe Incognito-Jonathan Martin "bullying" scandal in the Miami Dolphins.

Is the drop in football participation due to the fear of concussions? Or of injuries in general? That's probably the most sensible explanation.

I submit, however, that it's not the fear of injury that's the issue, but the risk-reward equation has changed.

Today, there are more things for children and teens to do, and more ways in which to excel. Let's say that there are two otherwise equally-good options for fun and development, but one carries a small risk of injuries ranging from a broken arm to long-term brain damage. Doesn't it make sense to go with the other option?

Maybe in earlier days football was a way to build social capital in one's school and community. Today, many of our communities are online, and many children and young adults find satisfaction and development in niche sports or hobbies rather than in central community events like football games.

In other words, life is better because we have more choices.   

Which leads us to the bullying scandal. The Incognito-Martin situation is unique for a variety of reason, but in essence Martin's action conveyed the message of "I don't need to put up with this." Probably every day, some young person playing in a team sport somewhere in America does the same thing. 

While many kids stay miserable and "suck it up" because they'd feel ashamed if they didn't "stick with the program," some kids quit precisely because they won't tolerate the abuse of their coaches or peers. They recognize they have other options, and, again, they don't need the favor of their school or community to develop social capital.

While I enjoy watching football, the more young people realize, "I don't need football [or some other sport]," the better. That will create incentives to develop healthier locker room cultures and safer games.

Homer was Homer

I just listened to the November 9, 2011 (two years ago) episode of This Week with Larry Miller.

He makes an important observation that many smart people are too clueless to get. He takes on the claim that William Shakespeare could not have written the literature attributed to him: he only had a fourth grade education; he couldn't have known about military tactics, etc.

Larry notes, however, that his own grandmother was born in Lithuania. She never went to school, and went to work at a box factory at the age of seven to help pay for her brother's schooling. She went on to sing opera in five languages and could speak seven.

Larry says, "No, she couldn't have done it! It was the Earl of Oxford who worked in that box factory!"

Game. Set. Match. 

Captain Phillips: Thoughts

I went to the movies for the first time in, I think, over a year when I saw that Captain Phillips was playing locally.

Some thoughts...

1. Among prominent actors, only Tom Hanks or Brian Cranston could have pulled this role off. In a vacuum, Cranston could have been equally good. In the Hollywood star system, Hanks was the best choice.

2. Unless portraying a specific historical character or role (eg, Southerner), an actor is better off just speaking "normal American" or whatever the actor speaks normally. Hanks's contrived New England accent is the worst part of the movie.

3. Captain Phillips is what the Big Screen is for. I'm mildly visually impaired (they say red-green color-blind but for me it's spotting the deer in the grass and trees that's impossible whatever the colors) and 3D gives me headaches. The director is up close and personal.

4. This is not the "feel-good" movie of the year. It's a dramatization of a brutal reality. It's a bleak world where people will volunteer for piracy in order to avoid hunger. I'd say, "put yourself in their shoes," but they don't have any.

5. SEE IT. No, it's not a "date night" kind of movie, but if these kinds of issues are important to you both, it's a good time for dialog.

Irrefutable Proof that the Will of the People is Insane

If the Will of the People exists, why does it behave irrationally?

George Mason professor Don Boudreaux explains:

You walk into an ice-cream store and ask what flavors are available today.  The clerk says “We’ve got vanilla and strawberry.”  You ponder for a moment and tell the clerk “I’ll have strawberry.”  Just before the clerk starts to scoop out your strawberry ice cream, he turns to you and says, “Oh, I almost forgot.  We also have pistachio.”  In response, you ponder for another second and then tell the clerk, “Well, in that case, I’ll have vanilla.”

Obviously, such a response by you would be (for lack of a better term) irrational.  It would certainly be odd and unexpected.  If you prefer strawberry to vanilla, why in the world would your learning of the availability of pistachio change your preference between these two flavors (strawberry and vanilla) from strawberry to vanilla?

And yet this is how the "Will of the People" supposedly choose their rulers:

• If the People preferred Bush to Clinton in 1992, why would the additional presence of Perot change the People's preference from Bush to Clinton?
• If the People preferred Gore to Bush II in 2000, why would the additional presence of Nader change the People's preference from Gore to Bush II? (Or at least made it a virtual tie?) 
• If the People preferred Party A to Party B, why would the presence of a stronger-than-usual Party C change the People's preference to Party B?

Read Boudreaux's post here, and Arrow's Impossibility Theorem on which it's based here. 

My takeaway is that the "People," as a collective, has no will or independent agency. Vote results do not determine what they want, even as what they want under the realistic circumstances.

In an environment with more than two contenders, especially when a third (and possibly fourth, fifth, or more) may attract more than fringe voters, it's impossible to know what the "majority" of people really wanted in a close election. There are just too many variables to explain electoral outcomes. Party, ideology, personality, experience, personal life, and education are just parts of it. Someone may vote Democrat all one's life then vote Libertarian in an election and think it's true to one's ideology. Someone may vote Libertarian or Green all their lives then vote Democrat or Republican in one election for strategic reasons.

The fact is, nobody knows what the Will of the People is in an election. The winner is chosen for a variety of reasons too numerous for us to know. All we know (or as the media claims), the winner in a Two Party System is often NOT who the winner would be if not for the presence of stronger-than-usual alternatives.

In other words, the Will of the People is not a Will of anyone at all. It's random chance.

Is that how you want to be "governed?"