As a Hispanic, watching the media’s use of terms like “white” and “Hispanic” and “Latino” in the Zimmerman-Martin case has been an occasion for much eye-rolling. The way the press uses these terms betrays just how completely ignorant most reporters and talking heads are about even the basics of ethnicity and race in this country. Also, it’s a fair bet that the “journalists” at CNN and NBC have never actually seen a Hispanic who wasn’t scrubbing toilets or peeling potatoes back at the reporters’ Chevy Chase estates, so they can be forgiven for being so clueless on this matter. Our media elite might have to leave Martha’s Vineyard to actually meet a Hispanic who didn’t fit their preconceived notions of race and ethnicity.

With the Zimmerman-Martin case, Zimmerman is labeled as simply white, in spite of his claims of Hispanic heritage, because that’s what the media has determined will produce the most fertile ground for “racial” conflict. Had Zimmerman been the victim of a shooting, and the shooter were also white, then Zimmerman would of course then be labeled Latino, and the case would then be a national story on the oppression of Latino persons of color by whites in this country. In fact, Zimmerman is pretty obviously white or perhaps mestizo. What is not deniable however that he is also Hispanic. I don’t know why this is so hard for the media to grasp, but let’s just make this clear: According to anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, and census takers, “Hispanic” or “Latino” is not a racial designation. It is a term that denotes ethnicity.

Hispanics can be of any race. There are white Hispanics, black Hispanics, and even Asian Hispanics. Examples would be former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Cuban musician Ibrahim Ferrer, and former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, respectively. There are also, of course, mestizo Hispanics, such as Benito Juarez. White non-Hispanics are properly referred to as “non-Hispanic whites” in the technical jargon, and among us Hispanics, we simply refer to such people as “Anglos” for lack of another easy-to-use term. We all know, however, that only the mestizo Hispanics, who look like the stereotypical Latinos in the minds of many Americans, count as fully “Hispanic.” Indeed, my mother who is a dark-skinned Hispanic is often forced to have conversations like this with Anglos and other non-Hispanics:

Stranger: What are you? I mean racially? Mom: Uh, well, my parents came here from Mexico Stranger: Hmmm, you don’t look “Hispanic” Mom: Maybe if I donned a sombrero and put my hair in braids I would look Hispanic enough for you?

And so on.

Left liberals are often the worst about this. Being utterly parochial about race and ethnicity, as so many Anglo leftists are, they fancy themselves the arbiters of who is sufficiently Hispanic and who is not. Such is the case with the talking heads during the Zimmerman-Martin affair. Zimmerman, perhaps because of his German last name, is deemed white without any qualification because, well, that plays better as racial high-drama. And we all know that all Hispanics have Spanish surnames just like Nestor Kirchner, Salma Hayek and Bernardo O’Higgins, the George Washington of Chile.

Vicente Fox, Person of Color

Why should we refer to Zimmerman as a Hispanic? Well, because we know that he and his family claim that he is Hispanic. They know better than we do. A Hispanic is simply a person raised in a culture in which Hispanic cultural elements are a dominant or influential factor in one’s life. Such things include the Spanish language, a feeling of shared heritage and cultural solidarity with other Hispanics, and sometimes but not necessarily, Roman Catholicism. If someone has been raised in or lives in such an environment, such a person is probably Hispanic. It has nothing to do with race, and it has nothing to with the origins of one’s last name.

There is a reason that questionnaires with demographic information ask two questions to determine one’s status as a Hispanic or Latino: What race are you? and “Are you Hispanic or Latino?

NB: I don’t know if Zimmerman is a murderer or not. We have trials to sort those things out.

Many libertarians, perhaps most notably Thomas E. Woods, support the decentralization of power from the federal government, including the power of nullification. Many people fear and denounce this power, often because they like the immense power of the central state and are supporters of big government. There are, however, some very real concerns by people who desire freedom as their highest political goal. A simple question, which is asked in various forms is “if decentralization leads to more freedom, why did African slavery thrive in a more decentralized America, and only go away (well, sort of) when the central state forced it to go away?” Similar statements could be said of Jim Crow.

Tom Woods briefly addresses a critical point which bears emphasis: a major problem with decentralization is that decentralizing power may have huge negative effects for people who cannot vote.  The very people who are most obsessed with them not having political power are the people who are most empowered by the receding power of the central state. This points to the people that libertarian activists should concentrate on protecting: non-citizens (including both legal and illegal immigrants) and convicted felons in states which strip them of the franchise. As most minorities have the ability to exercise the vote, the greatest evils of the past have no chance of being repeated. And some unprecedented benefits may come about. Without the significant support of the federal government, individual states could not maintain the murderous drug war at the levels at which it is currently prosecuted.  Family and morals-destroying welfare programs would have to be greatly scaled back without the ability to print money. Taxes would have to be levied to pay for these things, forcing citizens to carefully evaluate just how much they wish to impoverish themselves in the attempt to eradicate various victimless crimes.

The benefits don’t end there. Freedom would be catching in this country for several reasons. Our national myths support the value of freedom. The proximity of states and the freedom of movement among them, in the face of massive differences in the amount of liberty inside them, would mean that the most inventive, industrious people would tend to leave less free areas and go to more free ones. This would impoverish the most oppressive states, further pressuring them to liberate. Perhaps the single most important factor which would allow liberty to really catch in the United States is that the US military would not be looking to crush these efforts, as it does in other countries. If liberty is to be permitted by any government, it is likely that it will have to be permitted in the USA, as the American government is among the world’s most fervent supporters of foisting government on people, whether they like it or not, in the name of “stability.”

Physicist Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, sent me a copy of his scathing letter to the Wall Street Journal in response to Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence, a global warming screed by Prof. Michael E. Mann. It was not published, but the text of the email is appended below, with permission. Hayden is also author of the books A Primer on CO2 and Climate and the recent Bass Ackwards: How Climate Alarmists Confuse Cause with Effect, among others. See also my previous post, Physicist Howard Hayden’s one-letter disproof of global warming claims.

As noted in my post Access to Energy, Hayden helped the late, great Petr Beckmann found the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further Beckmann info here; further dissident physics links). Hayden later began to publish his own pro-energy newsletter, The Energy Advocate, following in the footsteps of Beckmann’s own journal Access to EnergyI love Hayden’s email sign-off, “People will do anything to save the world … except take a course in science.”

Here’s the letter:

***

December 5, 2011

Editor
Wall Street Journal

Re:  Michael Mann:  Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence

Dear Editor:

One of the problems with being brilliant far beyond the rest of humanity is that you go through school so fast that you manage to skip a few things along the way.  The Geniuses of Deep Science (GODS), such as Michael Mann and the railway engineer who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are in that category.

While we peons were in grade school learning about the Vikings settling Greenland in the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), the GODS were studying advanced electrodynamics and quantum mechanics. In our art courses we studied paintings from the Little Ice Age (LIA), but the GODS skipped that to concentrate on the Standard Model and string theory.

Not only did the GODS skip over basic science classes, they mastered the art of focusing people’s minds.  They were so good at the craft that they convinced their lesser colleagues and the Nobel Committee that one study of tree rings could supplant thousands of papers in geology journals, paintings in art galleries, and records of crop production from around the world.  Gone was the MWP.  Gone was the LIA.  Who needs that stuff, anyway?

The GODS even invented a new kind of hockey-stick statistics that is so brilliant that a committee of ordinary professors of statistics couldn’t even understand it, so they called it faulty.

You and I might try to draw a connection between CO₂ concentration and temperature by making a kind of freshman-algebra graph with a measure of CO₂ on one axis and temperature rise on the other.  But the GODS are so superior that they’ve never had to stoop to such childish maneuvers.

With the release of two sets of Climategate emails, the GODS have lost a little luster, but they should be able to hide the decline.

Best Regards,

Howard C. Hayden

Prof. Emeritus of Physics, UConn

Economist Brad DeLong has come out swinging against Austrian economics again, and once again he’s punched himself in the face. But he’s too numb to realize it. There’s a great response on the Mises Economics Blog by Jonathan Catalán, and I take a stab on my site, Wirkman Netizen.

It’s interesting that neither Catalán nor I attack, in our respective longer efforts, the worst calumny of DeLong’s, his insinuation that the Austrian distrust of fiat money comes down to anti-Semitism: “[I]n its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: ‘good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers.’”

Since Mises was a Jew, and was treated badly for anti-Semitic reasons at times — why does DeLong think Mises left Austria? — and that  Mises never, ever supported anti-Semitism (nor did Hayek, for that matter), this is especially vile. It’s just another example of those leaning left (which means: technocrats who mislabel themselves as “liberals” and “progressives”) playing the racism/anti-semitism card when they lack a good hand.

DeLong should be ashamed of himself. But, then, one of the perks of being in the managerial class of the technocratic state means never having to say you are sorry.

After a horrific and murderous weekend in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg, frustrated that folks determined on committing crimes are ignoring those magical incantations and spells enacted by local legislators, does what must necessarily follow in the mind of the statist: call the feds.

“We cannot tolerate it,” Bloomberg said while speaking at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. “There are just too many guns on the streets and we have to do something about it.”

New York has the toughest gun laws in the country, but Bloomberg said the city alone cannot stop the onslaught of shootings. “We need the federal government to step up,” he said.

The problem of crime is that it finds a way. And prohibitions are, at best, marginal; but they are totalitarian nonetheless and have no place in a free society. To try to control the means of the few by subjecting the entirety of society to the dictate of a despot is a symptom of desperation. After all, not every place experiences the same level of overall crime or the same numbers of crimes committed by firearms.

And then there is the elephant in the room. As Robert Wicks points out, “‘getting guns off the streets’ is just code for ‘getting poor urban minorities to disarm themselves.’” Indeed, NYC’s own government report on crime shows that minorities both commit and experience a higher percentage of crimes. Yet because most minorities are not criminals but potential victims, gun disarmament leaves minorities in a greater situation of peril. Of course, politicians do not understand economics or how incentives work so they would never think that ending drug (and gun) prohibition, welfare, taxes, zoning and licenses, rent control and compulsory education would radically lower crime across the board.

As for Bloomberg, his policies, and the policies of Albany, are–let’s face it–pretty much an epic fail. The last thing anyone needs is the federal government coming in to “fix” things.

Yahoo News reports the death of a motorcyclist during a protest ride against New York’s helmet laws. While it is certainly tempting to simply cite this as a case of someone “asking for it” and getting it, consider the specifics of this case: Philip Contos was riding without a helmet at this place and at this time specifically because he was protesting against the state. Whether or not he normally wore a helmet, even, is irrelevant. He would not have been riding there and then if not for the state. The sad truth is that protesting laws against risky behavior unfortunately requires actually engaging in risky behavior. I, a nonsmoker, despise anti-smoking laws. How could I protest against these laws, however? By engaging in the banned behavior is the most obvious way. So, too, with helmet laws.  At minimum, Contos’s death, whenever it would have happened, would not have happened at that time at that place, under those circumstances, except for the meddling of the busybodies who claim the right to decide what is best for a 55 year old man.

Reason’s Matt Welch criticizes Rand Paul for Paul’s assertion that the right to healthcare implies slavery. While it is true that in minds of many, the term “slavery” specifically refers to chattel slavery as practiced in the United States prior to the end of the American Civil War, the term itself is not so limited. And this is not the first time that a prominent person has used the term in regard to employment restrictions: Curt Flood was well known for saying “A well paid slave is nonetheless, a slave.” The same applies here. Indeed, I have compared modern attitudes and events to slavery myself, more than once. Of course, there are critical differences between Rand and Flood and myself, with melanin levels likely being the most important one. But just as Flood’s comparison in the past was apt, so to is Paul’s comparison in the present an accurate description. It is easy to see that there have been far worse tortures in the past than waterboarding, or even beatings, but I would certainly still call the latter “torture.” So, too, would I call forced labor of any sort “slavery.” Wearing a smock rather than rags does not change the name.

How else could one explain this?

A 7-year-old child allegedly shot a Nerf-style toy gun in his Hammonton, N.J., school Jan. 18. No one was hurt, but the pint-size softshooter now faces misdemeanor criminal charges.

Dr. Dan Blachford, the Hammonton Board of Education superintendent, said the school has a zero tolerance policy.

“We are just very vigilant and we feel that if we draw a very strict line then we have much less worry about someone bringing in something dangerous,” said Blachford.

I bet “school boards” also have zero tolerance even against non-mainstream views (that is, against any view that dares to criticize the establishment’s views on everything, especially on the state).

“Pryor and four teammates were suspended Thursday by the NCAA for the first five games of next season for selling championship rings, jerseys and awards. They also received improper benefits — from up to two years ago — from the tattoo parlor and its owner.”

~ Article at ESPN.com

The situations of Ohio State University Quarterback Terrelle Pryor, leading rusher Dan Herron, No. 2 wide receiver DeVier Posey, All-Big Ten offensive tackle Mike Adams and backup defensive end Solomon Thomas should be pretty well known to the sports fans in our studio audience.  The sports airwaves have been chock-full with commentary on it for the last few days.  From a sports reporting standpoint, the coverage has often been quite good and pretty far ranging.  ESPN generally, and Pat Forde and Adam Rittenberg specifically, have covered the issue and the rather obvious duplicity of the NCAA in some detail.  For the overarching view of the issues, I recommend those columns.  To get an impression of my view of the duplicity of the NCAA, I highly recommend this video from Michael Smith.  Smith and I agree completely, the NCAA was duplicitous in its application of sanctions against these players and against The Ohio State University.  But there is more to it than that, and it is upon those differences that I will focus in this brief rant.

To make a long story short, and save the reader from wading through the MSM reporting, here is the synopsis.  These players sold and/or bartered with items and notoriety they had been given or “earned” in their capacity as football players at The Ohio State University.  Those benefits included both cash and services, in the fashion of tattoos from a local tattoo parlor in Columbus.  (No, I’m not making this up.)  They have been found guilty of “receiving improper benefits.”  Their punishment is:  being suspended for five games next football season.  They will all compete in the Sugar Bowl this season.  (No, you didn’t misread anything.  That is exactly what is happening.)

There are really only two issues of interest from my libertarian perspective.  First is the issue of ownership and its privileges. One would hope that rules imposed by the NCAA would somehow reflect an understanding of private property ownership.  Let us call that Standard One.  Secondly, there is the issue of rules and regulations.  If there is a rule in place that circumvents my ownership, e.g., an agreement, either implicit or definitive, that I will not receive “benefits” from ownership until such time as said agreement is no longer in place, what punishment fits the “crime” of breaking that contract?  One would hope that penalties levied by the NCAA would reflect some understanding of punishment that fits the crime in the most obvious sense.  Let us call that Standard Two.

These are the only questions that exist in the Ohio State Affair, or Tattoo Gate, as I will hereafter refer to it.  As anyone who has witnessed the amazingly transparent actions of the NCAA over the last few months can attest, what can be generally said about the imposition of NCAA sanctions is this:  The NCAA generally opts for a punishment that fails to meet either standard.  This case is no different.  In fact, Tattoo Gate is an object lesson in how to be damned certain that one’s actions meet no discernible standard at all.

If a person owns an item, the disposition of that item should be the business of that owner only.  In short, he can do whatever he wishes with it, including, but not limited to, sell it, give it away, bury it in the back yard, or burn it for warmth.  The obvious (read:  statist) exception of intellectual property aside, this seems pretty straightforward.  Clearly then, something else must cover the case of NCAA athletes.  This is where Standard Two comes in.  The NCAA apparently believes, and I’ll even agree with them for arguments sake, that the “contract of scholarship athleticism” precludes actions that might otherwise be appropriate for an owner of real property such as a championship ring or other soon-to-be-useless whatnottery.  Tattoo Gate is not about ownership.  Tattoo Gate it is about rules.

So then, a scholarship athlete cannot sell NCAA-sanctioned trinkets while participating in NCAA activities and/or while maintaining eligibility.  To do so constitutes the receiving of improper benefits and is justification for punishment.  Clearly, the players in question broke the rules.  Just as clearly, imposing a sanction of five games—approximately one-third of a college football season—is a hefty penalty.  Why then would the NCAA impose the penalty next season, effectively allowing the players and the team to benefit from their presence in a (high-profit-generating) bowl game?  That’s a very good question, and a question that no one seems able to answer.

If the infractions were egregious enough to warrant a large penalty—like five games—it would seem to warrant immediate imposition of said sanctions.  If it the infraction is minor enough to allow for imposing a sanction that won’t take place until next season (when at least two or three of those players could be gone to the NFL) it would also seem to not be worth mentioning.

What the NCAA has done, effectively, is harshly punish while simultaneously not punishing.  That’s an elegant implementation of justice and a fine example of what those of us who watch the actions of the NCAA have known for quite some time:  The NCAA is, in the vernacular, FOS.  (That means, loosely translated:  Full of Feces.)  Of course, many of us knew that before Tattoo Gate.  Didn’t you?

This is why:

“I would be a liar and an idiot if I didn’t thank Sarah Palin for helping get me here tonight. My partial resemblance and her crazy voice are the two luckiest things that have ever happened to me. Politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women…unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years — whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know, actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster.”

What a silly liberal! The disaster is that you and your kind continue to support Bush III’s empire of death, and have elevated the presidency even more after you claimed to hate the previous tenant. Sure, institutionalized prevention (and even support, because of the legislative baggage) of same sex marriages is indeed a problem, and not one to take lightly. Yet compared with the atrocities of war and empire, this rant is worthless, “Tina.”