Rand Paul – Bumbling Bees

Last Week in Weird

3 April 2017 by Darien Sumner

You have the obligation to remain silent

Ah, America. Land of the free! Home of the Barves! Where the only thing more cherished than apple pie, baseball, and motherhood is the absolute, rock-solid, George Washington-approved, First Amendment-guaranteed right to free speech. I’m sure you know it by heart:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Of course, as any fule kno, the Constitution is a "living document." What necromantic rites were involved in this black sorcery your humble narrator shudders to think, but apparently the Constitution, quite unlike every other piece of paper in the history of the world, has the power to update itself whenever the disembodied flying devil head of Uncle Sam wills it to be. And, in an astonishing turn of events, He communicates His grand design to us through the federal judiciary. Last week, the holy judiciary handed down the magical new text of the First Amendment, which has apparently been updated with a rider adding "… unless minor bureaucrats don’t like it."

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Last Week in Weird

19 September 2016 by Darien Sumner

Cognitive Dissonance

A great many people, when first beginning to explore philosophy, will hit upon the idea that reality is not what it appears to be; in ye olden days, it was common to describe it as a dream or a vision, but, in a post-Matrix world, the zeitgeist has shifted such that people tend to describe this creaky old philosophical trope in terms of giant computer simulations instead. Regardless of the precise form, this is a very common idea, yet not one quite so common as to disabuse people of the notion that they are unique great geniuses when they first hit upon it. Said list of people now apparently includes a great many high-level political cronies, such as those at Bank of America:

Top bank analysts claim there’s a 50% chance our world is a computer simulation and we’re all plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality.

And they also reckon if it’s true — then there’s no way we’ll ever find out about it.

The Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch made the astonishing claim in a research note citing comments by top scientists, astrophysicists and philosophers.

If you think this is breaking news, just wait until next week, when they unveil their startling conclusion that there’s a 70% chance that you’re being stalked by a giant, ferocious, man-eating tiger — but you’ll never be able to find it, because the tiger is invisible.

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Last Week in Weird

12 September 2016 by Darien Sumner

I return smack ack

Now that the Republican primary season is safely far, far behind us, the real senator Rand Paul has apparently been released by the Borg slavers who captured him in the spring of 2015 and replaced him with a neocon replicant. He’s made waves recently by opposing the Obama administration’s plans to sell the Islamic fundamentalists who run Saudi Arabia yet more weapons of mass destruction — this time totaling more than a billion dollars — to be used to slaughter additional tens of thousands of helpless Yemeni civilians. Paul’s opposition to this senseless waste of human life is based, apparently, on trivial things like law and morality, which came as a tremendous shock to ancient robotic newscaster Wolf Blitzer, who once won a Peabody award for announcing that being annihilated by a hurricane is bad for you, but can’t seem to extend the metaphor to cover annihilation by bombs:

"So for you this is a moral issue," he told Paul during the Kentucky Republican’s appearance on CNN. "Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?"

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Has the Libertarian Moment Passed?

1 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

James E. Miller, writing for Taki’s Magazine, certainly thinks so. While he has some interesting and some worthwhile things to say, it’s interesting to note that he also clearly has no idea what he’s talking about — he doesn’t exhibit any knowledge of what libertarianism is, where it comes from, or what its aims are, nor does he appear to care very much. His article is very much an alt-right victory lap, heavy on the fist-pumping and potty mouth, and rather light on the actual research. Still and all, he’s not entirely wrong, as we see when he opens his piece with:

There is no libertarian moment.

Miller is entirely correct; the libertarian moment does not exist. It never did. What exists in America is perhaps best described as an anti-establishment moment; the great mass of the American people is becoming increasingly dissatisfied with "business as usual" in Washington, and wants a change it can believe in — hence the rise of Obama in 2008, and the popularity of perceived "outsider" candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, not one of whom has the tiniest shred of libertarian leaning. Ron Paul also received the benefit of this "moment," and that misled a lot of people into believing that America was now ripe for a libertarian revolution, in spite of the fact that a greater-than-ever (and still rising) percentage of Americans is presently dependent on government largesse in one form or another. However attractive the idea of liberty may be, most people will take the money instead.

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