Shaun Kenney

I have no idea what an internet sweepstakes cafe is, but I do know that I desperately would like to see some latitude for poker rooms run in the same way as bingo halls.

Because this is just too weird:

The fluorescent green colouring appeared to start about 500 metres on the Victoria side of the entrance to the park and, over the course of an hour, the substance flowed down into the environmentally sensitive estuary.

By 5:30 p.m. the river, known for its dramatic salmon runs, eagles and other wildlife, was back to its normal colour.

You always wonder about stories from the Old Testament where the Nile turns red, and what sort of geological phenomena would have caused that.  Green?  I really hope this isn’t your garden variety Photoshop hoax.

Yes, Virginia.  Such awesomeness exists:

That’s right – drinking establishments that have lined their walls, and shelves, with everything from hardbound classics and modern novellas to law encyclopedias and philosophical tomes. Actually, alcohol and the written word have a close correlation and long history; among the famous writers who were heavy drinkers include Hunter S. Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

Now if Virginia would just overturn that stupid smoking ban, we might stand a better-than-even chance of restoring the atmosphere of a French cafe…

Jonathan McWhorter is one of my more favorite contemporary social historians. So I can’t help but be just a tad bit disappointed with this argument:

Notice, though, that Darnell is a perfectly rational, normal human being. Just as I am not describing a choiceless victim of “institutional racism,” I am not describing a monster or a wastrel. What we need is not a forum where people clap at zestily-enunciated lines about “responsibility.” We need simply to imagine a day when a Jevon thinks about dropping out of school and selling drugs and realizes that he can’t do that because drugs are available for low prices at Rite-Aid and CVS, after checking Prices For Prescription Drugs and others online.

He’d stay in school. Watch. And this is a prime reason the War on Drugs must end. It tears poor black communities to pieces. Not only by flooding them with police – but by encouraging bright young black people to work the black market and lending it an air of heroism.

This is not about being Libertarian. This is not about me trying to redeem myself with people under the impression that I am a Republican. This is not about Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out. This is about making black lives better – and via that, making America better. We should heed the Neill Franklins and Bob Ainsworths among us and take meaningful action. All year I have noticed a quiet groundswell in this direction; I hope it continues.

The article is worth reading. Of course, McWhorter is indeed making the libertarian argument for drug legalization, with it’s myriad of pitfalls. The end of prohibition did not destroy the careers of gangsters and racketeers, nor will drug legalization destroy the crack peddler or inner city gangs. It will only serve to legitimize them.

Free societies require rational beings. The moment individuals resign their rationality, they resign their willingness to participate in that free society, and may be restricted by law — the force that society uses to protect us from bad guys. Children are handled this way, those who are mad or insane are handled this way. Those on the path to destructive behaviors are often under the penalty of law for many of the same reasons — because our actions never occur in a vacuum, but indeed affect those around us. Your liberties stop where mine begin.

Until someone can identify the reasonable, sane amount of crack or PCP to consume, the idea that the “benefits” of drug legalization outweigh the consequences falls remarkably short.

As for the African-American community, about half of the solution is to quit patronizing and start offering the resources to get those communities back on their feet. If our failing neighborhoods were Wall Street banks…

One wonders just how many Solzhenitsyn-type diarists there really are out there, and how many accounts such as Yuli Margolin’s account have gone unnoticed:

Born in Pinsk, Margolin earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1929, but became a resident of Palestine in 1937, after meeting Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other leading Zionists. Unfortunately, Margolin decided to visit his homeland in 1939, just before war broke out. He was arrested in Pinsk in 1940 and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police as a “Ze-Ka” (or Z/K). The term is a Russian-language abbreviation for zakliuchyonnyi, or “inmate,” a term which originally referred to prison laborers who built the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s. Unlike 8,000 of the slave laborers who died in that earlier project, Margolin survived his imprisonment in several gulags. He returned to Palestine in 1946, where he wrote his memoir in Russian, finally finishing the book in 1947.

However, Israeli publishers and politicians did not want to hear about the gulag system in the USSR, which was seen as a wartime ally against Hitler. In February 1946, Margolin wrote letters to such leading Israeli politicians as Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett and Yosef Sprinzak, informing them of the situation of Soviet Jews imprisoned in the gulags; none of these leaders replied. Nor did English-language publishers take any interest, despite the advocacy of Arthur Koestler. (Jurgenson notes that Koestler “tried in vain to interest influential English-language personalities to get the book published.”)

Fascinating article of the lives of those Jews who suffered under persecution, only for their suffering to be refused recognition in the aftermath.

Too bad this particular book is in French, and sadly… I am simply too American to know any language but my own.

If you have any love for books, and even a faint bit of respect for the Republican Party… prepare to lose your respect:

Now I would have to admit — I would probably stop for a moment and flip through the rolodex of remarkable books that have impacted my life in one way or another.

Books that would not make that list?  The Reagan Diaries, To Kill a Mockingbird, War and Peace, and most certainly not Decision Points.  Frederic Bastiat’s The Law was probably the most intellectually probing book on that list… and even that was a bit of a mulligan.  How’s about a serious answer on a book that really formed your intellectual maturity?  Maybe a bit of a follow up on why and how that influenced you?

Buckley would not have been amused.  Then again, I’m not sure most folks in the audience cared.

UPDATE:  Yes, lightning does strike twice.   Lowell agrees with me again.  Of course, I was not aware that this was a previously held opinion of me:

“(A)bout whom Josh Chernila wrote on December 29, 2006, “He (Kenney) can be counted upon to be on the wrong side of nearly every issue, and the more wrong he is the more violently cruel he becomes.”

I gotta admit — that’s a Chuchillian quote right there… a bit hyperbolic, but wow.

“I don’t trust liberals, I trust conservatives.”

That’s pretty darned hardcore, Seneca.

Did he really say this?  I dunno, but as I’m sure my left-of-center friends will be quick to point out, Seneca did advise Nero…

Charlottesville talk show host Rob Schilling raises a worthwhile question about priorities:

Since the city presently employs an official arborist, Tim Hughes — who is paid more than $72,000 per year by Charlottesville taxpayers — it is unclear why the (Tree) Commission is necessary in the first place.

…

The Charlottesville City Council never has seen fit to establish a “commission” on the defense of human babies residing in the womb (sadly, a most vulnerable location). This is in spite of ongoing, rampant and wanton destruction of the unborn in Charlottesville—often justified, and even celebrated here by secular and religious pro-death apologists.

While trees are a critical natural resource and a valuable commercial product—in both forms, important to human life—unborn babies are human life. Without human beings to enjoy and consume trees and their byproducts, the trees are of no value.

The Charlottesville Tree Commission, eh?

Now obviously, I like trees as much as the next guy (for building homes and making baseball bats, for instance) — but is it really necessary for the government to be spending local tax dollars on something the community could very well volunteer to do themselves?

Schilling makes a great point regarding priorities:

What is valued by elected representatives (and what is not), speaks volumes on the character of a community.

Righty-o.  When government begins to overstep those boundaries, there no telling what they will and will not include in the definition of “public services” on your behalf.

That’s not power I’m willing to surrender to my government, to be sure.

This is a fascinating article on the history of the Boston Tea Party, and whether the origins of the American Revolution in New England were based on the purity of principle or the concerns of the merchant class.

Ironically, the Founding Fathers did not appear to be all that sympathetic to the Boston Tea Party.  In fact, they were appalled:

George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it “an Act of violent Injustice on our part.” But the Revolution was not yet in the hands of the Founders, although it had left those of the merchants, who now dodged and stalled as the people—passionate and heedless of economic niceties—called for a ban on all tea, even what was smuggled from the Dutch. The merchants were also losing their ability to control crowd violence. Breen reports that, in early 1774, a New Hampshire supporter of Parliament bled to death after a mob forced him to ride a sharp fence rail, which left a four-by-six-inch hole in his groin.

Britain overreacted, closing the port of Boston, restricting town meetings in Massachusetts, and giving the King the power to appoint the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature. British troops arrived in Boston in May. A Salem newspaper called Britain “more cruel than Sea-Monsters towards their young ones,” and a meeting in Wrentham declared that Britain seemed to want to reduce colonists “to nothing short of the miserable and deplorable State of Conquered Slaves.” A few merchants still hoped that Boston might pay for the tea and reconcile with Britain, but they were too intimidated by the outbursts of popular anger to give voice to their proposal at a Boston town meeting.

This is part of a fascinating thesis by Barbara Clark Smith in her recent book The Freedoms We Have Lost, which goes through the stark differences between how the British government relied upon citizens to enforce laws — and therefore citizens had the ultimate trump card of merely not enforcing the laws they emphatically disagreed with.

Quite a contrast to the American system where the government enforces the law.  More to the point, you can see where the Boston Tea Party was an assertion of citizen rights rejecting the impulses of Parliament, and how the overreaction from Britain pulled the “pragmatists” into the orbit of the merchant class.