TheAgitator.com
Morning Links
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010- Someone put this on Naomi Klein’s reading list. Milton Friedman’s policies saved tens of thousands of lives in Chile.
- Sheriff Joe is in trouble again.
- The family of Sal Culosi will get their day in court.
- Police officer shoots fenced-in dog while making arrest at neighboring house.
- Do not want!
- Great photo: F-15s over Neuchwanstein.
- Amazing story: The British POW who broke into Auschwitz.
‘broke into Auschwitz’
Pretty hardcore. Though I have to say that since he only traded places for one day, this guy has him beat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
From the Sal Culosi article:
Actually, I don’t think it does hit them in the wallet. It hits taxpayers and probably some union insurance fund in the wallet. This kind of thing continues because there are no serious repercussions. Policy reform gets a little lip service, sometimes they institute an impotent civilian review board, but mostly nothing happens. Meanwhile, at election time, the people go out and reelect the same city council and district attorney.
And they probably said that before they even knew any of the details, because the facts wouldn’t have really been a factor in their explanation anyway. Cops are trained and officially encouraged to lie and they have a long tradition of deception, trickery, and corruption. They wouldn’t know the truth if it climbed up and pooped in their lap.
Even the belief that they are the tough protectors of the public, putting themselves between danger and the people is a complete myth. Cops, probably more than anyone else on the planet are trigger-happy pussies who don’t have the courage of a mailman. Their answer is to shoot first and ask questions later. For anyone in his right mind, cops are among the last people on earth that should be running around with a loaded gun. They’re bullies and thugs and the only thing we have going in our favors is the fact that, as union protected civil service employees, they are also typically lazy.
Milton Friedman was a great man and an outstanding economist. He earned his Nobel prize when the awards still meant something.
While he was being savaged by the left for his association with Chile it was fascinating almost to the point of amusement to watch him speak as he was heckled from the audience. Here was the allegedly evil bully, all of about 5 feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, with a wry smile, low key demeanor and oversize bottle-bottom glasses. He pleasantly heard the hecklers out; then replied substantively point by point destroying the heckler’s positions.
Friedman developed his libertarian/conservative economic beliefs as an empiricist, largely through his experience as an applied mathematical/statistician during the Great Depression and World War II.
There is no one alive today who understands the follies of activist monetary policy and the severe costs of interventionist government economic policies better than did Milton Friedman.
In my case, reflecting on Friedman’s writings, his remarks and his works was key to understanding the financial meltdown was coming not in late 2007 and 2008 as it was well underway, but during 2006 and early in 2007 when the first of the cards began to fall. Though I was a voice in the wilderness at the time, at least, due to Uncle Milt, I was able to protect and build the nest egg through these turbulent times that will fund my children’s education.
Thank you Professor Friedman. Thank you.
So cops get to shoot dogs to be heroes. We “civilians” do it, and it’s animal cruelty along with whole host of residual charges. As many times as I hear about these cases, I never hear about any animal rights groups screaming bloody murder about it. Maybe I’m wrong, but rarely do these articles include a comment from the ASPCA or PETA condemning the murder of an innocent animal. Are these organizations lobbying to get police protocol changed at any level of government?
Listen, I like Freeman as much as the next libertarian, but I don’t know that that article is a nail in any coffin of left wing propaganda. So the basic argument is that Freeman made Chile more wealthy and wealthier countries can enforce government regulations more consistently? That is a stretch. Now if they had privatized building code enforcement, maybe. But I don’t really see the argument, as is, stopping Klein and her cronies in their tracks.
President Obama lost a wager with the P.M. Harper of Canada over a hockey match. If Obama had been a private citizen living in Virginia, the same activity would have justified a SWAT raid as “illegal gambling.”
Another view of Friedman and Chile:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2010/03/02/chicago_boys_and_the_chilean_earthquake/index.html
Quote…Some might find it intellectually provocative to cite Milton Friedman’s authority in an argument that depends on the foundation of successfully enforced government-mandated building code regulations. The building inspector is not exactly a libertarian hero. Others might wonder if a more important factor in Chile’s relatively tough building codes might be the devastating 9.5 earthquake the country endured in 1960. Haiti hadn’t experienced an earthquake as bad as the one this January in 240 years. Earthquake resistant building codes tend to be taken more seriously in regions that are accustomed to regular bouts of annihilation…
…But a more pertinent question might be to ask just how much credit really is due Chicago-school economics for Chile’s current relative prosperity? Mining alone accounts for 20 percent of Chile’s GDP, and it is very much worth noting that the country’s crown jewel, the copper industry, is completely dominated by one state-owned company, Codelco. Ponder that, for a second: Latin America’s poster child for Chicago school economics features state control of the single most important economic resource. Huh…Unquote.
And, I’ve never understood why people are so squeamish about human breast milk once they’re past weaning age. Not lactating – obsession bordering on psychopathy. Lactating – EWWWWWWWWW!!
Does not compute.
From the Culosi article’s comments:
“While I am not a Law Enforcement Officer, I do hold the majority (98%) in high respect for doing a, mostly, thankless and dangerous job.”
I never understand this argument. Thankless? What would you call a $50,000 salary with a high school diploma? I certainly wouldn’t call it thankless.
The Friedman article is based on fallacious reasoning: correlation is not causation. While it’s certainly possible that Chile’s building codes were effective because of that country’s wealth, it’s also possible that Chileans took them more seriously because of previous quake experience, as noted in #8. While Friedman’s advice may indeed have been helpful overall in Chile, this lazily-argued opinion piece is not the source you want to be citing for that proposition.
#3 “They wouldn’t know the truth if it climbed up and pooped in their lap.”
If the truth could poop, it would get shot WAY before it could get close to their lap. :)
A different take on the Friedman – Pinochet bit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/02/wsj-columnist-attributes_n_482326.html
(Though I DO NOT like Naomi Klein.)
Klein knows she is a liar. She never wrote her book to be debated or to prove a point. It was simply to slander so that slander gets mentioned and discussed in public. It’s a tactic from rules for radicals. Lie, lie, and lie some more until one of those lies stick. Say it again and again until it becomes accepted truth.
It’s this kind of lefty that inspires Fox News to resort to the same strategy. Fight fire with fire until the truth is just ashes. She (and Glen Beck for that matter) is a mass murderer of honesty, which is acceptable collateral damage for these people.
@goober
Not to mention all the figurative handjobs they get from the media and politicians. Thankless is a garbage collector working in Anacostia, or a special ed teacher in the poorest of Appalachian school districts. Cops get thanked every fucking day, whether they deserve it or not.
and @ Dave K. – yep, they are also pussies for whining constantly about how tough their jobs are and how they have to deal with these pesky “rights” things. Poor, poor widdle babies.
@ Dave K
You missed a key thing that makes most of them so bad: no personal honor. You don’t hear a marine or soldier talk about their life versus civilians the way that police often do because to talk that unprofessionally is not only cowardice, but a disgrace to the uniform. On some level, I think the police hold their own uniform and profession as less honorable than the public does because they are so quick to dishonor it.
What’s more fun than than seeing self-righteous megalomaniacal
law enforcement officers like Arpaio in trouble
with the law?
I mean, besides sex.
Shoots a dog in the neighbors’ yard?
I can’t decide whether that is the nadir of cowardice or sadism.
Does this cop fire three rounds under his bed every night so the monsters can’t crawl out and eat him while he sleeps?
Grimly humorous sidebar to the story about the cop shooting the neighbors’ dog:
There are three google ads for finding jobs in law enforcement at the bottom of my view of the linked story.
Are they trying to hire Michael Vick?
Justice for Sal!
@ #9: Joey–I wonder the exact same thing. I personally find the idea of drinking breast milk utterly revolting…and I cannot for the life of me explain why. It makes absolutely no sense, but it makes me squeamish the way placenta tacos do.
It makes me wonder if there is something in our evolutionary history at work here…like maybe you need to lose the taste for it so you move on to meat and veggies and your mom can nurse your siblings? I don’t know.
#3 Mr Krueger, I salute you. Great post.
Why is it these fuckwads are always “acting responsibly” every single time they murder someone’s pet????
Yeah, I’ve never really understood how when it comes out of cow nipples it’s delicious with brownies, but when it comes out of human nipples it’s disgusting. I mean I do get that there are cultural norms that are currently in the middle of a Victorian “ew, humans are mammals” phase, but it just seems like some pretty significant cognitive dissonance to me.
Oh and also along similar lines, since some commenters mentioned evolution, I find it really interesting that most cultures through time didn’t drink milk at all past about age 5 – human or otherwise. So I don’t really think it’s that weird that milk sounds gross to adults, I just think it’s weird that animal milks DON’T but human milks DO in our current culture.
Neuchwanstein photo: Three F-15’s, with an F-104 Starfighter in the lead slot. The F-15’s are 33rd Fighter Wing (Eglin AFB — Florida). Dunno about the ‘104 because the markings aren’t visible, but it just about has to be German: that airplane went out of USAF service in 1969.
Nice shot.
~~~~~
Justice for Sal!
Trivia regarding F-15s over Neuchwanstein: that’s an F-104 in the lead, given that most were retired by the time F-15s were prevalent, it’s probably an Italian F-104S…
Warbirds over a work of art. Hmmm. Kind of sad to me.
Don’t give the State an ounce of respect.
And it needs to be said daily — police are cowards. If safety is your bag, find a different line of work, like crocheting.
C in C:
Do you have any idea how many people are admitted to hospital this year with crochet hook injuries?
;)
More Salon linkage about Chile and the Chicago school: http://www.salon.com/news/chile_earthquake/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2010/03/03/chicago_boys_and_the_chilean_earthquake_2
Here’s a quote from Sebastian Gray, a professor of architecture at Universidad Catolica de Chile:
and
I have never tasted human breastmilk, but the thought inspires no strong reaction in me one way or the other. But we already knew I’m a freak of nature.
Aresen, the grim humor goes beyond the ads. My view of the linked story features 8 headlines under “MORE NEWS.” One of them is Mpls. officer sued for assault, battery, defamation (and the cop being sued previously won $4.5 million himself after another cop shot him with a sub-machine gun) and another is Ex-Prior Lake police officer gets 30 days in jail.
I agree, Cynical. Neuchwanstein’s an amazing place to visit, lots of Wagner-themed art. Ludwig, the guy who built it, was a twisted bastard. It’s kinda soiled by the fighters, but the place shouldn’t have been built in the first place. It’s a 19th century playhouse, not a castle from medieval times…
I accidentally tasted breast milk once. Long story not worth telling. Involved a bottle and not a breast. But it was incredibly sweet and very, very tasty. I didn’t take a second toke though.
Neuchwanstein gives me very mixed feelings, like the cathedrals of Europe.
Yes, Neuchwanstein and the Cathedrals are beautiful and magnificent.
But I can’t help thinking of the oppression that went into funding the construction.
after reading the dog story, this sounds like a planned arrest. maybe all actions initiated by police should be documented like they do in Maryland with the Calvo legislation. SWAT team deployments aren’t the only police-initiated aggressions…
if they have to document planned aggression, maybe they’ll go back to hiding behind billboards or napping to dodge the paperwork…
I’ve never been a fan of breast milk, although I do have an affinity for some of the containers it comes in.
Does anyone know if there are donations being accepted for the poor doggie?
Milton Friedman was a proponent of building codes and government regulation?
That chapter must have been left out of my copy of “Free to Choose.”
C-in-C: Evil exists, and “The fighter pilot had to be born.”
The state is not necessary to this value.
I was just coming by this post to ask the same thing. I couldn’t find the owner’s name in switchboard.com white pages (and if I had, wasn’t sure how he’d feel about a call out of the blue). But if anyone knows how to reach the family, I’d happily throw a bit of cash their way. It’s one of those few dog-shooting cases where instead of just feeling horrible for the family, Agitator reasons can do easily do something useful.
Oops, by “the same thing”, I meant the same thing as Mike Leatherwood #36 said.
It would be nice if all the liberals could give an unqualified rejection of Castro’s dictatorship, all the conservatives could give an unqualified rejection of Pinochet’s dictatorship, and all “proud” Americans could forthrightly acknowledge that, at home and abroad, the public should be free to vote for “sub-optimum” economic policies in fair, democratic elections if that is their will.
Alas, no. To certain editorialists at WSJ and The Nation, civil liberty, political democracy and respect for human rights is secondary to supporting the side that enforces the “correct” economic ideology by whatever means necessary.
Query: if Cuba were to have a Haiti-size earthquake but suffered substantially less damage than Haiti, would WSJ columnists credit Karl Marx?
Milton Friedman’s backing of a brutal dictator hardly seems like something you should champion. And, as already stated above, I don’t recall him backing strict building codes.
#2 Comment by Dave Krueger posted my feelings exactly, that “judgment in favor of the Culosi family could be the best thing for area law enforcement. It speaks the only language county bureaucrats understand. It hits them in the wallet.”
However, it really doesn’t hit the government officials or the government in the wallet in the slightest.
It hits only the TAXPAYERS in the wallet. If the Culosi family justifiably wins a multi-million dollar judgement, the chief of the police, the county executive, deputy, etc. are not paying one thin dime of their own money.
They are paying a settlement or judgment with the taxpayers money.
And, frequently, because of the extreme length of time litigating, the county officers and police management who were in office during the incident are long gone, either moved on to other jobs, retired, or been elected to higher office.
That provides a built-in defence to the new administrators when the settlement/judgment day comes, who will then chime that they had NOTHING to do with the original claim.
All in all, as Radley Balko’s articles and commentary have shown many, many times, there are NO CONSEQUENCES to the government officials and police for bad acts commited by their underlings. None.
I think Bob Barr might have an opinion on breast milk cheese.
Maybe some brave locality can make a law that says all monetary judgments made against officials cannot come from public funds. This would force the officials to pay out personally (or through some private insurance plan). This would have two direct effects. It would save taxpayers money and make people wary of becoming so-called “public officials.”
Milton Friedman’s backing of a brutal dictator ….
For the last time, Friedman never “backed” Pinochet. He never approved of Pinochet.
Pinochet asked Friedman, then some Friedman acolytes, for advice on economic policy. Friedman gave him some. And Chileans are a hell of a lot better off for it. Friedman has advised governments around the world. He advised Nixon to end the draft (and convinced him). Does that also make Friedman responsible for Watergate?
For the last time, Friedman never “backed” Pinochet. He never approved of Pinochet.
yeah, but did he ever try breast milk?
If Knapp’s neighbors were crack whores squatting in a burnt out abandoned house, I’d have to give more credence to … Knapp’s neighbors.
Guess what pigs? You’re getting your asses kicked in the PR battles and you have nobody to blame but yourselves.
Personally, I thought Neuschwanstein was kind of lame. It was built by a rich prince after the monarchy fell and he had nothing better to do with his money. I prefer castles that actually served a military purpose. In retrospect, I regret that I didn’t visit Hohenschwangau when I was in Füssen (though I did get a sweet picture of it from Neuschwanstein). Hohenschwangau was the actual functioning castle used by the Bavarian royal family when it was still in power.
I don’t understand the revulsion at human breast milk. I’d drink it to see what it tastes like, chilled and in an icy mug of course (warm milk grosses me out no matter what animal produces it.) Even better if it was skimmed human milk with some chocolate chip cookies.
Perhaps part of it is apprehension over the fact that it’s basically treating a woman like a cow? Something to that effect. Whatever the reason people freak out about it, it has to be pretty healthy, babies drink it by the gallon.
See, IBM never backed Hitler, they were just asked for their advice about the best way to tabulate and track certain industrial processes.
I never noted an admiration for Friedman among the Chileans that I knew. It´s true that the only Chilean that I really talked was a woman that was Arts Professor, but still….
Milton Friedman is being used as a synechdoce for the “Chicago Boys”. But I think his connection to Chile is far more tenuous, and so the Boys themselves should be credited.
@34 But then how would the poor little piggies get their adrenaline fix?
Frankly, Chile shouldn´t be used as political football. There are other factors, like Chile small and mostly European population and a very good mineral reserves. It was always a relatively wealthy country by Latin American standards. The South of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay are also relatively richer then the rest of the continent.
And Chile still has it´s good dose of state owned companies(By the way, it also has a single payer health care system), and at least to me it looks like a smart social democracy, not a paradise of Friedmanism.
The article said he used two gallons of breast milk to make two quarts of cheese.
Two gallons?
What are they feeding the baby?
(I’d try it in a heartbeat, by the way, in either raw or cultured form.)