Today, I’ve got a brief commentary on various interesting news items.  But I also note that more and more people are talking about the potential for violent confrontations right here in the US, and that violence is rising in Europe and Asia.  This means that the Korean revival of a 60-year-old war isn’t too much out of line with what is going on worldwide.

What next?

East Asian front
North Korea: Regime nullifies 1953 armistice
(New York Times)  “North Korea declared the 1953 Korean War armistice nullified on Monday, following through on a longstanding threat that it renewed last week amid rising tensions with South Korea. … However, there were no signs of hostility along the border between the two Koreas. South Korean officials said they were increasing their vigilance amid fears that North Korea might use the United States-South Korean military drills and a fresh round of United Nations sanctions as an excuse to create an armed skirmish against the South.” (03/11/13)

Nathan: Legally (and even morally), Korea and the US have every right to immediately resume hostilities: air strikes, naval strikes, round-up of PRK government officials everywhere, and a demand for immediate surrender under threat of annihilation of every government office and base and civilian and military personnel.  They won’t, of course, because if they can’t whip up enough support to attack and/or invade Iran, who is going to do that to North Korea?  And as I have pointed out before, Seoul learned from the German reunification and don’t want to be beggared.

Mama’s Note: How in the world could there be any moral “right” to attack these people? If, by some wild chance, the pudgy dictator managed to fire a rocket toward the US, THEN there would be some justification for a defensive strike, but I don’t see any otherwise.

Congress in action
Political Elite: Swallow This
(LFB.org) Simon Black:  in just a week’s time, the political elite in the Land of the Free gave us bills that:

1) Ensure the government cannot assassinate its own citizens with drones
2) Impose price controls with insurance premiums
3) Award the government with more power to initiate biosurveillance operations
4) Create a quota system in the labor market

Nathan: Simon points out that NONE of these bills are a good idea, and that NONE should be needed in a free, constitutional government – even from a statist point of view. Of course, from a free-market, liberty-loving point of view, there is NO justification for “giving” anyone the power to pass laws like this.  By what authority?

Stupid politics 2013 – Hoplophobes and hoploclasts
Colorado Democrats Ready to Spark a Revolution?
(Examiner, via Freedom Outpost) Anthony Martin reports, Democrats who run the state government in Colorado, however, have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the warnings and protests of citizens. On Monday, the state Senate passed a gun control package

Nathan: I’m seeing this first hand.  It isn’t “revolution” of course, but counter-counter-revolution.  In Colorado, MOST Democrats and SOME Republicans are trying to steal the liberties and properties of five million people (and millions of visitors and “guest workers”) and accomplish what they failed to do after Columbine, by using the twin excuses of two nut-jobs who took advantage of laws that created target-rich, low-threat environments (“hunting preserves”) in a theatre and a school.  Not only are they doing this without majority public support (not that stealing liberty and guns are matters subject to popular vote), but they are doing so in a way that not just ignores the protests and appeals of people and local officials and their own colleagues, but destroys the very concepts of “democratic” government that these people claim to value.

I do not think that they are trying to spark a rebellion; I think that they have decided that Coloradoans will submit to these evil so-called laws the way the people of states like New York and Massachusetts and Maryland and Illinois have submitted, and that this will open the gates to a full-blown nanny state in Colorado.  I think (and pray) that they are wrong.

American Socialist State
The Myth of America’s Cowboy Capitalism
(The American, via Daily Policy Digest) The Federal Register, which contains all proposed rules and regulations, has grown more than 2,848 percent since its first volume…

Nathan: the synopsis of the article makes it clear to me that there is no reason NOT to call what we have now what it is: socialism and fascism in the clearly defined sense of the words and not simply as pejoratives.  Indeed, the federal and state governments regulate and micromanage and tax business and industry to a degree NOT found in either the Third Reich or Fascist Italy or Spain or Argentina.  Or in most of the world today.  We are a sick society and economy, and the blame rests squarely on the government and the idea that “We, the People” are so inept and incompetent that we cannot be trusted to run ANYone else’s life.

Mama’s Note: And again, by WHAT legitimate authority?

No “government” can control the lives of the people without their consent, which doesn’t at all require their actual agreement, but only the willingness to avoid personal responsibility and accept the myth that they can live by theft and coercion as long as it is through the proxy of “government.”