false bravado

There was jitters in the air this morning as the local news-media prattled endlessly about an early morning explosion at the military recruitment station located in Times Square, which resulted in no bodily harm and minor property damage.

Michael Bloomberg, ever the bloviating yenta, wagged his fingers and called out against the coward who perpetrated the attack, if one can call it that. 

What I can't understand is why this presently-unknown figure was labeled a coward, and why it should be considered an appropriate epithet in this case. Is it wrong that he lacked resolve to take life, and instead chose to 'attack' when it was certain nobody would be in harms way?

If anything, one can legitimately make the opposite case-- that this is one hell of a brave fellow, who is risking life and limb to deliver a middle-finger salute to the imperial U.S. war regime and her insatiable hunger of destroying human life in her relentless meat grinder of "foreign policy". I reckon that Times Square is one of the worlds most surveilled locations, up there with Orwell's London, and this courageous act sends a loud message to our oppressors in blue that we are resolved to overcome their trigger-happy, cattle-prodding enforced servitude.

Just compare this bomb-throwing 'coward' with the Hercules cavalcade of police squad vehicles which goes on pretty much every day in NYC. For those who've never heard of the Hercules, 

"And there are the Hercules Teams, elite, heavily armed, Special Forces–type police units that pop up daily around the city. It can be at the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, or the stock exchange, wherever the day's intelligence reports suggest they could be needed. These small teams arrive in black Suburbans, sheathed in armor-plated vests and carrying 9-mm. submachine guns—sometimes with air or sea support. Their purpose is to intimidate and to very publicly mount a show of force." - article link

Pray tell, what bravery do these hostile brutes exhibit? Do they suppose it to be especially courageous to parade around the killing fields of Manhattan while waving around machine guns under the protection of cover from air support? The biggest danger any one of these S.S. knuckle-heads face is painful priapism from the hard-on they get from being 'in control of the situation'.

If it were up to me, I'd reverse the conventional doublethink application of the labels for coward and courageous. But as everyone knows, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

capitalism, misdefined

A couple of days ago, I commented on a post at lowercase liberty in regards to R.A.W. and his knowledge of economics as I understood from his writings.

I then realized that my initial comment was harshly imprecise; while R.A.W. could have been knowledgeable in economic theory (although I'm convinced he wasn't), he certainly was sloppy in confusing normative ethics prescriptions with economic systems.

Please witness this one egregious abuse:

"When Playboy fired him, Shea endured terrible anxiety about keeping his house, and dashed off a few novel outlines while looking for another job. He sold his first novel before finding a job and never stopped writing again. I still treasure his comment on why the Bunny Warren cast him out. "I worked hard and was loyal to the company for ten years," he wrote. "I guess that deserves some punishment." I treasure that as the best comment I have ever heard about capitalist ethics."

Erggh!!! I'm certainly not sympathetic to the "bosses are evil" definition of capitalism, and to say what social behaviors are prescribed by capitalism is bunkum.

As far as I know, capitalism is a description of economic system in which individual rights and ergo, property rights are respected, and while some may seem to have better bargaining power, at the end of the day, its the little guy, the consumer who is unforgiving, disloyal, tough to please and is always punishing those soon-to-be non-producers who aren't serving their desires adequately. So no hard feelings dude, its not personal.

Inigo Montoya's timeless words are thus suitable for this misdefintion of capitalism -- "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."