Many Words and Many Lies

The vertical axis shows the number of words (blue line). The US Constitution is 7583 words

The U.S. Constitution is the shortest on the American continents. All of the people’s states, caudillo juntas and banana republics have constitutions up to ten times as wordy as the U.S. Constitution. People face danger and expense in order to flee those countries and try to enter These United States, not each other’s countries. Is this coincidence? Is the number of words or pages in a country’s Constitution a negative indicator for individual freedom and prosperity?

Economic Recovery, 1923

Dry law ignored 1921-22 the way hemp laws repealed after 2008 Crash

Stock markets began falling in 1916, despite War profits, because investors feared the approach of national Prohibition. Prohibitionist States had never been beacons of economic success–rather the contrary. The Crash arrived with the Volstead act the night of January 16th, 1920, and sure enough, the depression arrived. Yet two years later a fairly swift recovery had set in, (link) mainly on account of popular nullification. (link)

Prison terms replace light Bargain Day fines. (link)

This changed radically after the fanatically dry Ku-Klux Klan abandoned the Democratic party after “Whiskey Al” smith ran for president in 1928. Back then inauguration day was March 4th, and by March 2, the lame-duck Congress had gotten president Coolidge to sign the Jones Five & Ten law making beer a federal felony good for 5 years in the slammer and over half a million dollars in fines at current gold prices. With typical American humor Illinois papers that gloomily predicted a Dry Autocracy were soon advertising (non-Irish) Autocrat coffee. (link)

Just like a Latin American dictatorship

Federal Prosecutor Willebrandt had meanwhile weakened 4th and 5th Amendment protection to make way for really enforcing the first coercive amendments to the Constitution–the 16th importing the communist platform graduated income tax and the 18th, jointly yielding to the mystical fanaticism that loosed the Comstock Laws, Panic of 1893 and Panic of 1907–as apocalyptic plagues upon the former Land of the Free. Her tell-all exposé was published in August and September, 1929, as a syndicated column titled “The Inside of Prohibition.” (link)

Luckily for America, we still had unsubsidized elections and the Liberal Party’s 1931 repeal plank was published in time for the Democrats to copy it into their 1932 platform. (link) After Republican asset forfeiture enforcement brought on a Great Depression and Hoover’s Moratorium on Brains helped Hitler gain power in Germany, that wet plank walloped God’s Own Prohibitionists right out of the ballpark for the next five elections. (link)

Get the complete story in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or amigra.us

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Trump Brennt Paris?

Remember the debates? the platform? The Republican party published a huge platform way before the election with lots of fanfare. (Disclaimer: I vote libertarian!)

1. We oppose any carbon tax.
2. We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower.
3. We support expedited siting processes and the thoughtful expansion of the grid so that consumers and businesses continue to have access to affordable and reliable electricity.

The other kleptocracy party, instead of a repeal prohibition plank, ran to Paris like Woodrow Wilson with an opium cartel League of Nations. There, its leader tried to circumvent the Senate with a non-treaty transferring sovereignty to National Socialist and International Socialist parasites in Europe. Trump had nothing to do with the clumsy trap nor with plans for disarming it. All he did was accept the job of shoving that published platform down everyone’s throat. Here’s how voters reacted:

The GOP energy plank is their only plank that makes sense and is almost kind of libertarian in places. When was the last time you saw these platform planks mentioned anywhere? Here is another one you definitely will not see mentioned.

Protection Against an Electromagnetic Pulse
A single nuclear weapon detonated at high alti­tude over this country would collapse our electrical grid and other critical infrastructures and endanger the lives of millions.

Clearly the platform portrays electricity and access to energy as  positive thing, like the capacity to do work, earn a living and survive catastrophes. That anyone feels the need to point this out is sufficient cause for alarm. It shows that government and mystical schools have produced a populace unable to understand the elementary definition of energy, much less grasp the work-energy theorem or safety statistics. But Republican emphasis on mystical prohibitionism, asset forfeiture and the bullying of pregnant women guarantees they will again lose as soon as the Democrats learn and delete carbon taxes and efforts to ban electricity from their platform.

The Libertarian Party seeks unfettered access to energy. Its platform is short and easy to understand. Each one of the 4 million libertarian votes cast in the presidential race alone packs the law-changing clout of sixteen votes wasted on the corrupt looter kleptocracy.

If this helped make Econazi Europact rejection announced by the US president less mysterious, just think how well this translator can clarify legal or engineering documents written in Spanish or Portuguese.

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

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Why Dems lost election and pseudoscientists get fired…

Zeke Hausfather has provided the latest excuse for trying to erase the hiatus, so let’s have a look at his work. He claims my US temperature adjustment graph is flawed because of changes in average station latitude and altitude over time. Zeke’s graph below also shows huge amounts of data tampering by NOAA, but shows 1940 cooler than…

via Zeke Debunks Himself – Twice — The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

The Visible Hand

The visible hand is the one that’s invisible to Socialist congregants… it holds a deadly weapon. 

Adam Smith’s formulation of the forgotten, unproductive and withering hand of parasitism

Every socialist, communist and miscellaneous looter is fond of reciting Smith’s mention of the visible “invisible hand” of freedom, for it gives the impression of mystical superstition and life-after-death as the basis for valuing freedom as opposed to coercion. When was the last time you saw THIS tidbit of Adam Smith’s writings?

But if we consider the matter more closely, we shall find that this interested diligence of the clergy is what every wise legislator will study to prevent; because, in every religion except the true, it is highly pernicious, and it has even a natural tendency to pervert the truth, by infusing into it a strong mixture of superstition, folly, and delusion. Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sects, and continually endeavour, by some novelty, to excite the languid devotion of his audience.

William Graham Sumner’s original formulation of The Forgotten Man included a cast of four characters: A and B, who put their heads together to decide what C shall be forced to do for D. “C” is the Forgotten Man, the robbery victim, the slave. The Forgotten Hand is an appendage of which of these characters?

The Forgotten Hand, the one holding the gun, belongs to B–the man A sends to rob C in order to pay the both of them for pretending to be doing something benevolent for D. “B” is a gang of government agents, paid to believe that whatever “A” decides is good enough to kill for, nothing more. “A” is the real culprit. “A” is the Congress that assures the crowd that freedom is selfish, that only the terrified, fearing for their lives, can be generous (or else!).

“A” is also the voter who elected to send men with guns out to take someone else’s money by force. Why? So that A and B can preen and strut as beacons of selfless nobility and disinterested altruism. In the Republican version “A” is the Congress, “B” is the IRS and DEA, CIA, FATF, AML, TF, CFT, DNFBP, IRS-CID, INL, ICRG, GIABA, GAFISUD, FSRB, FIU, FinCEN, EAG. In the Democratic Party version, “B” is the IRS and FDA, HEW and an alphabet soup of other, equally unproductive parasites.

These are the armed and infatuated ruffians who arrogate the power to destroy wealth in furtherance of some scheme of  expropriation. A “protective” tariff, such as caused the Rebellion of 1776, the Nullification Crisis, then the Civil War, is promptly countered by speculation in smuggling. Smith described the economic results of an entrenched kleptocracy’s resort to asset forfeiture:

By the ruin of the smuggler, his capital, which had before been employed in maintaining productive labour, is absorbed either in the revenue of the state, or in that of the revenue officer; and is employed in maintaining unproductive, to the diminution of the general capital of the society, and of the useful industry which it might otherwise have maintained.

The domino effect of confiscation, withdrawal of deposits, collapse of credit, liquidity crises and widespread bankruptcies brought about by Presidents Harrison, Hoover, Reagan, Bush and Bush Jr is simply the reaffirmation of what Adam Smith wrote in 1775, and Ayn Rand improved and set on an ethical footing in 1957. There, too, was The Forgotten Hand:

I mean that I hold the upper hand!”
“With a gun in it?”
“Oh, forget about guns! I—” 

If you want to change America back into a free country, consider making a small donation to the State Libertarian Party in places like Oklahoma, Ohio and Alabama. This is easy to do over the internet using a PayPal account (except to the suicidal Travis County Libertarian Party).

Need Spanish or Portuguese translated into English?
Visit my foreign blog…

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

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Translating political expressions

A translation website explains how libertarians can skirt actual points of disagreement when “talking” to belligerent fundamentalists (“conservatives”)
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=103158

The first problem here is that politics and law are all about the use of harmful, coercive and deadly force. Force only serves freedom if limited to the suppression of actual “victimizing” (as opposed to “victimless”) crime. Belligerent fundamentalists, Christian or Mohammedan, see coercion as their friend and tool of policy, which to them boils down to prohibitionism and indoctrination. The whole idea of not initiating the use of force is as alien to the fundamentalist mindset as the notion of geologic time, or of women as individuals.

Science-fiction writer Jack Vance illustrated this in “The Dragon Masters,” an interplanetary war story in which dragons raise captured human children as slave-warriors of their own. A philosopher explains to a human protagonist that no meaningful communication was possible with those humans bred and raised as slaves by an alien race for use in war against mankind. Arguing with mystics is pointless precisely because mystics have nothing but scorn for the facts of reality or formal reasoning–unless exploitable for purposes of coercing females or waging a Holy War. Would you debate a believer who is flying a passenger plane into a building?

Instead, as zoon politikon we cast about for something else they value. In the democratic systems surrounding these bewildered bigots, the ticket to laying hands on unearned money with which to purchase the votes of politicians turns out to be the votes of individual citizens, including airline passengers or people who work in tall buildings. By getting these people to vote against the taxes, coercion, torture and war so valuable to fundamentalists–thus threatening their hold on the reins of deadly force–individuals multiply the bargaining power of their puny individual votes. Conscientious voting aggregates ballots into something more akin to the power of votes wielded by politicians–those “some” animals who are “more equal than others.”

Voting “against” a watered-down version of populist communism offered by one looter party by propping up the watered-down Christian national socialism of the other major contender makes no sense when one has the opportunity to cast a powerful libertarian spoiler vote against “both” variants of creeping totalitarianism. Votes are the coin that can buy you some freedom (if used wisely) or turn you over to the worshippers of death (if squandered foolishly). More: search “The case for Voting Libertarian“, now available in two languages.

As working linguists we of course have to interpret different speakers or writers’ handling of concepts the way they intended that they be expressed. Nothing in the job description, however, bars us from having an objective understanding of what is actually going on. Linguists shift into and out of different characters as needed to convey the meaning and intent of different messages, but that does not require that we buy into them. To a witness lying on the stand or a politician hypnotizing the masses, their subjectively understood message is the important thing.

For details on how prohibitionism crushed the U.S. economy and brought on the Great Depression, why not download Prohibition and The Crash–cause and Effect in 1929? The book is live on Amazon Kindle and you can read it on a cellphone for the cost of a craft pint at a pub.