avelloso.com

Sábado, Dezembro 01, 2001

Mr. Potatohead, the Ruler of Heck
Isso é bom demais para que deixemos de registrar aqui - as 41 características do esquerdismo, tais como listadas por Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, citadas em artigo de Bob Wallace:
1. Materialism: biological, economic, sociological.
2. Messianism assigned to one group: a nation, a race, a class.
3. Centralization: elimination of local administrations, traditions, characteristics.
4. Totalitarianism: pervasion of all spheres of life by one doctrine.
5. Brute force and terror: not authority.
6. Ideological one-party state.
7. Complete state control of education.
8. Socialism: the opposite of personalism.
9. Provider (Welfare) State: from the cradle to the grave.
10. Militarism (not bellicosity): conscription.
11. Rigid ideology enforced by the State.
12. Antimonarchical leader system.
13. Antiliberalism: the hatred of freedom.
14. Antitraditionalism: against the historic past.
15. Territorial expansionist tendencies as a form of self-realization.
16. Exclusiveness: no other deities tolerated.
17. Elimination of intermediary bodies.
18. Conformity of mass media.
19. Elimination or relativizing of private property: where it survives in name, it is totally under state control; the entrepreneur is merely the steward of his "property."
20. Persecution, subjection or control of all religious bodies.
21. "Right is what benefits the People".
22. Hatred of minorities.
23. Glorification of the majority and the "average man."
24. Glorification of revolution, revolt, upheaval.
25. Plebianism: fight against the former elites.
26. Hunt for "traitors;" resentment against emigrants.
27. Populism and "uniformism."
28. Ideological roots in the French Revolution.
29. Constant reference to democratic principles.
30. Dynamic monolithism: state, society, people become one.
31. Coordination through slogans, poems, songs, symbols, phrases.
32. Secular rites replacing religious rites.
33. Conformism as vital principle.
34. Incitement of mass hysteria.
35. Technology in the service of power.
36. Freedom – below the belt.
37. Everything for, everything through the state, nothing against the state.
38. Totally politicized life: tourism, sports, recreation.
39. Nationalism or internationalism as opposed to patriotism.
40. Struggle against extraordinary people, against "privileges."
41. Total mobilization of envy in the interest of party and state.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 11:11 AM

Sexta-feira, Novembro 30, 2001

Founders wary of long, long struggles
James Madison, o quarto presidente americano, sobre o caráter destrutivo das guerras, que são a saúde do Estado (citado por John Nichols):
"Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 4:08 PM

Vírus Badtrans atinge 135 países; veja como se proteger
Existe alguma coisa mais chata do que velhos fascistas chorando porque o governo atual está destruindo a "herança de Getúlio"?
Talvez em política isso seja mesmo o máximo de chatice a que se pode chegar, mas na informática surgiu uma chatice maior: o vírus Badtrans, que vem em anexos auto-executáveis e que já me teria contaminado, não fossem as modificações de segurança introduzidas recentemente no Outlook Express.
Anyway, vários pessoas que costumam me mandar e-mails estão contaminadas, portanto, sugiro que dêem uma olhada no link acima, que mostra como identificar e como extirpar essa praga.
postado por Alvaro Velloso 4:04 PM

US 'hero' may have triggered Mazar revolt
"The United Nations has joined human rights groups in demanding an urgent inquiry into the carnage at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, even as new information is emerging about how it started and the two Pakistani Taliban reported to be the last men alive in the fort, until the violence finally subsided on Wednesday.
"Even as the CIA saluted its slain colleague, the first American fatality in Afghanistan, 'American hero' Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann, who died in the prison revolt, British journalists in Mazar-i-Sharif have begun reporting that Spann was less an innocent victim than the one who allegedly provoked the riot.
"With allegations of 'war crimes' against the US and UK coming in thick and fast for ignoring the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Commisioner, Mary Robinson, has echoed Kate Allen, director of the London-based Amnesty International in calling for an urgent inquiry.
"Amnesty has said it is willing to send an observer to Afghanistan to monitor an inquiry.
"On Wednesday night, the BBC’s authoritative domestic television programme Newsnight interviewed Oliver August, correspondent for The Times, London, in Mazar-i-Sharif, who said that Spann and his CIA colleague, Dave, were thought to have set off the violence by aggressively interrogating foreign Taliban prisoners and asking, 'Why did you come to Afghanistan?'. August said their questions were answered by one prisoner jumping forward and announcing, 'We’re here to kill you'."
Eis aí o primeiro herói da guerra americana...
postado por Alvaro Velloso 4:00 PM

Quarta-feira, Novembro 28, 2001

When a Pro-Life President Kills
Comentando a atitude do Presidente Bush de preocupar-se mais com a vida de um suposto embrião que os cientistas nem sabem ao certo se é mesmo humano ou não do que com a de seres humanos concretos no Afeganistão, Lew Rockwell lembra que esse tipo de aberrante incoerência moral é característica do Estado:
"It strikes me that here we have a very interesting case of human psychology. As a man, Bush wouldn’t hurt anyone, particularly not innocent people. As president, he believes it is his responsibility to defend the right to life. But as commander-in-chief, he can in good conscience oversee the wholesale slaughter of innocents and lose no sleep. He can smile, laugh, and enjoy 85 percent popularity.
"Of course, many thinkers have exposed the immorality of the State and its wars, including Frederic Bastiat, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Betrand de Jouvenel, Herbert Spencer, Franz Oppenheimer, and Murray N. Rothbard, among many others. Their writings provide brilliant insight into how the State 'thinks,' and its exaltation of itself and its interests over everything else on earth.
"These intellectuals show, for example, that the State purports to punish theft and murder while making theft and murder the very essence of its domestic and foreign policy. The State claims to make and uphold the law, yet exempts itself from punishment when it transgresses that law. It claims to punish evil doers, yet its own actions, in war and the regular conduct of domestic policy, inspire and motivate evil doers to copy the State’s ways. And when it comes to actually punishing crime, it hits crime against itself far more severely than crimes against its citizens."
Em contraste com os cortesãos que celebram esse tipo de exercício de força bruta como a "grandeza" necessária aos "estadistas", Rockwell aponta o insight moral essencial da tradição liberal - a lei moral é universal e o Estado não está isento dela:
"There’s no cracking some mysteries of the human heart, but I think the answer has something to do with the ideology of public service, and particularly the mythology of the moral burden of the presidency. For generations, every historian of note has held up the most mass-murdering of presidents for public adulation. The 'moral burden' of the presidency amounts to doing very immoral things, under the cover of statesmanship, and not letting it affect one’s sense of well being.
"'The evil that men do lives after them,' Shakespeare has Mark Antony say. 'The good is oft interred with their bones.' But with US presidents, it’s usually precisely the opposite.
"Can all the top historians be wrong? Yes, certainly. But it takes a special kind of intellect and moral courage to reach this conclusion. You have to be an extremely independent thinker. If you are like Bush, a conventional sort of guy, you are perfectly willing to believe the conventional wisdom: that what a president does in wartime is not mass murder but rather statesmanship, that leaders of great nations are not held to the same standard of right and wrong that binds the rest of us.
"That is why it is more urgent than ever to underscore the essential idea of the liberal tradition, that morality is universal and that the State is not exempt from it. The religious dimension to that idea says that God is no respecter of persons, that the same standard will someday be used to judge us all. The social-political implication is that we should not grow life in order to destroy it, by any means, whether science or war. Only the tradition that applies that view consistently can restrain the State, and it must be taught to a new generation."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 6:19 PM

Comunismo europeu
Notícia mencionada no "retrato da semana" da Spectator:
"The European Court of Justice found unlawful the practice of buying Levi jeans cheap outside Europe and selling them at prices lower than the makers’ recommended price."
Diante de decisões como essa (sem falar nos inúmeros "exames" pelos burocratas das fusões de empresas), é possível duvidar de que a União Européia, apresentada por seus defensores como o modelo máximo das grandes conquistas da civilização contemporânea, é uma organização socialista dedicada a expandir o poder de seus burocratas e atacar a liberdade individual?
postado por Alvaro Velloso 6:13 PM

FBI Is Building a 'Magic Lantern'
Não sei o que é mais revoltante: o fato de o FBI estar usando as táticas dos hackers para construir uma espécie de vírus, a ser implantado, sem controle judicial, nos computadores de "suspeitos" a fim de bisbilhotar o que eles estão fazendo na internet, ou o fato de a McAfee, fabricante de programas anti-vírus, ter garantido ao FBI que não permitirá que seus programas detectem o programinha bisbilhoteiro. Eis o que faz a histeria provocada pelo governo para aumentar seu poder: uma empresa declara, em público, que seus programas não servirão a seus consumidores!
'The FBI is going to new lengths to be sure it can eavesdrop on high-tech communications, secretly building "Magic Lantern" software to monitor computer use.
'Separately, the agency is urging phone companies to change their networks for more reliable wiretaps in the digital age. At a Nov. 6 conference in Tucson -- and in a 32-page follow-up letter sent about two weeks ago -- the FBI told leading telecommunications officials that increasing use of Internet-style data technology to transmit voice calls is frustrating FBI wiretap efforts.
'The FBI told companies that it will need access to voice calls sent over data networks within a few hours in some emergency situations and that any interference caused by a wiretap should be imperceptible to avoid tipping off people that their calls are being monitored.
'The Magic Lantern technology, part of a broad FBI project called "Cyber Knight," would allow investigators to secretly install over the Internet powerful eavesdropping software that records every keystroke on a person's computer, according to people familiar with the effort.
'The FBI envisions one day using Magic Lantern to record the secret key a person might use to scramble messages or computer files with encryption software. (...)
'Magic Lantern would largely resolve an important problem with the FBI's existing monitoring technology, the "key logger system," which in the past has required investigators to sneak into a target's home or business with a "sneak-and-peak warrant" and secretly attach the device to a computer.
'In contrast, Magic Lantern could be installed over the Internet by tricking a person into opening an e-mail attachment or by exploiting some of the same weaknesses in popular commercial software that allow hackers to break into computers. It is unclear whether Magic Lantern would transmit keystrokes it records back to the FBI over the Internet or store the information to be seized later in a raid. (...)
'At least one company that makes anti-virus software, McAfee.com Corp., contacted the FBI on Wednesday to ensure its software wouldn't inadvertently detect the bureau's snooping software and alert a criminal suspect.'
postado por Alvaro Velloso 6:08 PM

Terça-feira, Novembro 27, 2001

Is There a Constitution?
Artigo de Joseph Stromberg, brilhante como sempre, sobre as mudanças no constitucionalismo americano, mudanças que tornam a Constituição um documento inútil, que serve apenas de pretexto para qualquer projeto socialista apoiado pelos doze oráculos da Suprema Corte:
"The idea that the Constitution exists in the realm of 'becoming' had great appeal for late 19th Century American intellectuals. Starting from Hegelian, Pragmatist, Instrumentalist, or post-millennialist Protestant premises, such folk could 'find' a charter for their preferred programs in an ever-changing Constitution, whether the program was corporatism, socialism, or endless social therapy."
Com base em John Taylor, Stromberg analisa o ponto central do constitucionalismo mutante, a vertente que prevaleceu já no século XIX:
"What was ratified at the end of the 18th Century was a fairly simple text, long on procedure and short on moral theory – something suited to being read narrowly, like a contract, rather than as 'a charter of learning,' as Robert Hutchins once grandly put it. There was little need for creative writing by judges and lawyers, who might imagine they were reinventing the common law or breaking new ground in social theory.
"Alas, the Supreme Court took up creative writing rather early. John Taylor of Caroline (that is, of Caroline County, Virginia), the most hard-core theorist of Jeffersonian republicanism, emerged as a very perceptive critic of John Marshall's jurisprudence. In Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820), Taylor got to the heart of the matter.
"Taylor utterly rejected the European, international lawyers' notion of 'sovereignty,' on which so much of Marshall's deductive structure rested. Sovereignty was an attribute of God, 'sacrilegiously stolen' and 'impiously assumed by kings' (p. 26). The American Revolution had specifically 'endeavored to eradicate [this idea] by establishing governments invested with specified and limited powers' (p. 28).
"Thus Taylor rejected the notion that there is some thing called 'sovereignty' which is an inherent attribute of states, a thing whose 'powers must be boundless' (p. 31), as a source of endless mischief. American constitutions reflected a belief in 'self-government' rather than sovereignty (p. 37). At most, we might – lacking a fitting substitute – use the latter word in reference to the independence of the states from one another, except in their federal relations, and with reference to the independence of those states and their federation from foreign control. There were no grand deductions to be made from such a usage.
"The sheer radicalism of Taylor's outlook is lost on most commentators, who wish to force him into some residual category like 'Southern agrarian reactionary.' They thus fail to spot resemblance between Taylor's thought and that of such thoroughgoing classical liberals as Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, or even Gustave de Molinari. For such thinkers, coherent societies preexisted states. Their institutions, including property, were not gifts of the state, but instead, states, where they existed, were meant to protect those institutions. If there existed a final power anywhere, it rested with actual peoples, and it was hardly 'boundless' since it had to do only with provision of security."
Ainda sobre essa "soberania nacional", que justifica qualquer aumento do poder estatal, vale repetir outro trecho de Taylor citado por Stromberg:
"When I read those [arguments] extracted from the words ‘sovereign, supreme, sphere, paramount, necessary and convenient,' I thought I saw the end of the sound revolutionary good sense by which our governments were constituted, as Rome saw puns and quibbles substituted for the masculine eloquence which preceded the age of Augustus. It seemed like extracting poison from vipers, under an opinion that it would be medicinal. If I were asked, how has it happened that men in power can inveigh against, oppose, support, and practice the same maxims? I should reply, by artificial phraseology.... And what is this artificial phraseology? It is the vocation of stripping evils of unseemly attire in order to dress them more handsomely, or of subjecting the federal constitution to the needles of verbal embroiderers, in obedience to the saying, ‘the tailor makes the man' (pp. 200-201)."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 11:10 AM

Liberdades civis - cartum de Chip Bork

postado por Alvaro Velloso 11:01 AM

Segunda-feira, Novembro 26, 2001

Frederic Bastiat on Government
A citação é longa, mas vale a pena. Essa é a versão abreviada do ensaio "Government", de Frédéric Bastiat, compilada pelo economista Gary Galles (grifos meus). Há poucos textos tão relevantes para a discussão política contemporânea, especialmente nestes tempos de fé crescente no poder do Estado:
"I should be glad if you had really discovered a beneficent and inexhaustible being, calling itself the Government, which has bread for all mouths, balm for all sufferings, which can provide for all our wants, correct all our errors, repair all our faults, and exempt us henceforth from the necessity for foresight, prudence, judgment, sagacity, experience, order, economy, temperance, and activity.
"Nothing could be more convenient than that we should all of us have within our reach an inexhaustible source of wealth and enlightenment--a universal physician, an unlimited treasure, and an infallible counselor, such as you describe Government to be.
"Man recoils from trouble, yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. What means can he adopt to avoid both? Only one way, which is to enjoy the labor of others. But our disposition to defend our property prevents direct and open plunder from being easy.
"The oppressor no longer acts directly and with his own powers upon his victim. The Tyrant is still present, but there is an intermediate person between them, which is the Government. We all therefore, put in our claim, under some pretext or other, and apply to Government. We say to it 'I should like to take a part of the possessions of others. But this would be dangerous. Could you not facilitate the thing for me? By this means shall I gain my end with an easy conscience, for the law will have acted for me, and I shall have all the advantages of plunder, without its risk or its disgrace'.
"We are all making some similar request to the Government; but Government cannot satisfy one party without adding to the labor of the others. Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. Every one is, more or less, for profiting by the labors of others. No one would dare to express such a sentiment; he even hides it from himself. A medium is thought of; Government is applied to, and every class in its turn comes and says, 'You, who can take justifiably and honestly, take from the public, and we will partake.'
"Alas, Government is only too much disposed to follow this diabolical advice. Government is not slow to perceive the advantages it may derive from the part which is entrusted to it by the public. It is glad to be the judge and the master of the destinies of all. But the most remarkable part of it is the astonishing blindness of the public through it all. What are we to think of a people who never seem to suspect that reciprocal plunder is no less plunder because it is reciprocal; that it is no less criminal because it is executed legally and with order?
"But the thing that never will be seen or conceived is that Government can restore more to the public than it has taken from it. It is radically impossible for it to confer a particular benefit upon any one without inflicting a greater injury upon the community as a whole. Our requisitions, therefore, place it in a dilemma. If it refuses to grant the requests made to it, it is accused of weakness, ill-will, and incapacity. If it endeavors to grant them, it is obliged to load the people with fresh taxes-to do more harm than good.
"Thus the public has two hopes, and Government makes two promises--many benefits and no taxes. Hopes and promises, which, being contradictory, can never be realized. The contradiction is forever starting up before it; if it would be philanthropic, it must attend to its exchequer; if it neglects its exchequer, it must abstain from being philanthropic.
"In all times, two political systems have been in existence. According to one of them, Government ought to do much, but then it ought to take much. According to the other, this two-fold activity ought to be little felt. We have to choose between these two systems, but exacting everything from Government, without giving it anything, is chimerical, absurd, childish, contradictory, and dangerous.
"For ourselves, we consider that Government is and ought to be nothing but the united power of the people, organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens, but, on the contrary, to secure to every one his own, and to cause justice and security to reign."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 4:53 PM

World War II and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex
Neste como em diversos outros artigos, Robert Higgs lembra um fato incômodo para aqueles que se dizem ou se imaginam liberais, conservadores ou simplesmente opositores da expansão estatal e, ao mesmo tempo, não podem ouvir falar em guerra que vão procurando um tambor para bater. (Especialmente, claro, se puder delegar a outros a tarefa de efetivamente participar do combate...)
O fato, simples e irrefutável, é que a guerra é a saúde do Estado, e que em tempos de guerra as restrições sociais normais à expansão estatal ficam retraídas, abrindo caminho para a produção de todo tipo de medidas ditatoriais.
Higgs trata especificamente da guerra preferida por todos, aquela que supostamente "salvou" a civilização ocidental, mas que na verdade implantou o comunismo em metade da Europa e implantou uma espécie de fascismo nos EUA.
Especificamente, a Segunda Guerra criou, nos EUA, o poderoso complexo industrial-militar, que se alimenta de guerras e de pesado financiamento estatal. Higgs compara os gastos militares americanos até 1939 e depois:
"The powerful role played by the MICC in the second half of the twentieth century testifies to a fact that has seldom been faced squarely: World War II did not end in a victory for the forces of freedom; to an equal or greater extent, the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies represented a victory for the forces of totalitarian oppression in the Soviet Union and, later, its surrogates around the world. Hence, in 1945, we merely traded one set of aggressive enemies for another. In reality, the war did not end until the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the degeneration of its armed forces in the early 1990s. In America, the long war—from 1940 to 1990—solidified the MICC as an integral part of the political economy.
"Its antecedents hardly suggested how quickly and hugely the MICC would grow. Prewar military budgets were very small: during the fiscal years 1922-1939 they averaged just $744 million, roughly one percent of GNP. In those days, military purchases were transacted according to rigidly specified legal procedures. Normally, the military purchaser publicly advertised its demand for a definite quantity of a specific item, accepted sealed bids, and automatically awarded the contract to the lowest bidder. (...)
"But conditions changed dramatically between mid-1940 and late 1941. During that period, Congress appropriated $36 billion for the War Department alone—more than the army and navy combined had spent during World War I. With congressional authorization, the War and Navy departments switched from using mainly sealed-bid contracts to mainly negotiated contracts, often providing that the contractor be paid his costs, however much they might be, plus a fixed fee. Contracts could be changed to accommodate changes in the contractor's circumstances or poor management in performing the work. In these and other ways, military contracting was rendered less risky and more rewarding. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson said at the time, 'If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalistic country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work'. (...)
"The government itself became the dominant investor, providing more than $17 billion, or two-thirds of all investment, during the war. Besides bankrolling ammunition plants, the government built shipyards, steel and aluminum mills, chemical plants, and many other industrial facilities. Thanks to government investment and purchases, the infant aircraft industry soared to become the nation’s largest, building 297,000 aircraft by the war’s end. One might justifiably call this government investment 'war socialism'.
"But it had a peculiarly American twist that makes war fascism a more accurate description. Most of the government-financed plants were operated not directly by the government but by a relatively small group of contractors. Just twenty-six firms enjoyed the use of half the value of all governmentally financed industrial facilities leased to private contractors as of June 30, 1944. The top 168 contractors using such plants enjoyed the use of more than eighty-three percent of all such facilities by value. This concentration had important implications for the character of the postwar industrial structure because the operator of a government-owned, contractor-operated facility usually held an option to buy it after the war, and many contractors did exercise their options."
Durante a Guerra Fria, período em que pseudoconservadores como William Buckley diziam que os EUA precisavam de uma "burocracia gigante", a relação do governo com esse cartel se institucionalizou e tornou-se grande fonte de incentivos para inúmeras aventuras militares. Como diz Higgs:
"This waste of money had many other pernicious consequences. With great corporations, powerful military authorities, and members of Congress all linked in a mutually self-serving complex, there was little incentive to end the Cold War. Not that anyone craved World War III. But wealth, position, power, and perquisites all rode on the shoulders of the MICC. The best of all worlds, then, was massive, ongoing preparation for war that would never occur. But with the nation well-prepared for war, national leaders launched more readily into military adventures like those in Korea and Vietnam, not to mention a variety of smaller projections of force abroad. Among the costs of the MICC, we might count the more than 112,000 American deaths sustained in the Cold War’s hot engagements.
"In retrospect, we can see clearly that World War II spawned the MICC and that the war’s long continuation as the Cold War created the conditions in which the MICC could survive and prosper. America’s economy sacrificed much of its potential dynamism as the massive commitment of resources to military R&D diverted them from the civilian opportunities being pursued with great success in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. For the period 1948-1989, national defense spending consumed, on average, 7.5 percent of American GNP. The costs to liberty were also great, as national defense authorities, using the FBI, CIA, and other agencies, violated people’s constitutional rights on a wide scale."
Na guerra atual, o ditador Bush, ao mesmo tempo que louva os heróicos bombeiros, policiais e soldados (mas não os empresários mortos no WTC, já que só funcionários públicos podem ser "heróis"), já invoca a sagrada memória do ditador FDR para justificar seus esforços para transformar os EUA numa ditadura socialista, com aplausos gerais da mídia americana e olhares de invejosa admiração da mídia brasileira (que, como imagina que os EUA são o representante máximo do capitalismo, adora quando o país parece "reconhecer" a superioridade socialista). Segundo o Telegraph:
"THE IMPERIAL presidency is back in Washington as the man who ran for the White House against the powers of centralised government assumes wider controls in his conduct of the campaign against terrorism.
"With virtually no complaint from members of Congress, President Bush has taken new emergency powers while widening the scope of 'big government', which previously he campaigned against.
"In justifying stringent new powers to detain aliens and put them on trial in secret, Mr Bush has compared his position to that of Franklin D Roosevelt in meeting the Nazi and Japanese threats 60 years ago.
"The actions against 'alien suspects' are finding general favour as the national mood is now firmly behind the government and its workers - notably the police and firemen - who served bravely in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. (...)
"'I need to have that extraordinary option at my fingertips,' Mr Bush said, defending his new powers.
"'I would remind those who don't understand the decision I made that Franklin Roosevelt made the same decision in World War Two. Those were extraordinary times as well.'
"In other areas, Mr Bush is taking decisions himself which previously would have been made by consensus with Congress or with other arms of the government.
"On security grounds, Mr Bush has curtailed the briefings he formerly gave to senior members of Congress about the progress of the military campaign in Afghanistan. And the White House is no longer giving details of how many suspects have been arrested in connection with the terrorist attacks.
"'It is not uncommon in times of war for a nation's eyes to focus on the executive branch and its ability to conduct the war with strength and speed,' said Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman.
"It is certainly true that US administrations tend to assume greater powers in times of crisis. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, while Japanese-Americans were interned after Pearl Harbor. (...)
"One irony of the new security regime is that the FBI and CIA, the two agencies which so badly let down Americans by failing to foresee the September 11 atrocities, have been rewarded with a vast expansion of their authority.
"With a personal approval rating of 87 per cent and public support for the campaign against terrorism still solid, Mr Bush seems to have calculated that he can afford to ignore the protests in the press and from civil liberties groups.
"But his actions still represent a remarkable turnaround for a man who campaigned for the presidency by highlighting the dangers of a too-powerful executive, and who repeatedly cast the federal government as a problem rather than a solution."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 4:44 PM

Data marcada para orgasmo
Na época das eleições, ano passado, recebi um panfleto de um candidato petista que, entre suas plataformas de campanha, falava na defesa do "direito da mulher ao prazer sexual", e tentei imaginar como seria a lei que regulamentasse esse direito.
Provando mais uma vez que aqui no Brasil tudo o que se imagina como piada depois vira lei, um vereador petista da cidade de Esperantina, no Piauí, resolveu dar o primeiro passo na implantação dessa importante legislação progressista, e embora ainda não tenha criado "agências reguladoras" nem imposto a obrigatoriedade do prazer sexual, criou o dia municipal de debate sobre o orgasmo - para que, ao contrário do próprio vereador, os homens passem a pensar sobre como fazer que suas parceiras cheguem ao orgasmo:
"Aprovado em setembro, o projeto de lei que cria o Dia Municipal de Debate Sobre o Orgasmo emperrou na legislatura passada. O então vereador petista Arimatéia Dantas andou pelas ruas da cidade a buscar adeptos. Foi motivo de chacotas e críticas, mas não desistiu. Bateu de casa em casa para ouvir as queixas das mulheres. 'É um problema feminino, claro. Os homens sempre chegam lá.' O ex-vereador, hoje assessor parlamentar da Comissão de Fiscalização e Controle da Câmara dos Deputados, em Brasília, fala com conhecimento de causa. A idéia de pensar sobre a plena satisfação sexual surgiu após uma relação frustrada - para sua parceira. 'Ela era muito fogosa, mas demorava a chegar ao clímax. Segurei o que pude, mas não consegui esperá-la', relata, desinibidamente. Socialista convicto, Arimatéia resolveu dar a sua contribuição para socializar o prazer. 'O socialismo começa nas relações mais próximas', acredita. Resolveu levantar o assunto na cidade. 'O problema começa com os homens. Muitos têm ejaculação precoce e não estão nem aí. Outros são impotentes e não sabem o que fazer. O jeito é conscientizar todo mundo', acredita."
postado por Alvaro Velloso 4:15 PM