Feature of the Week
Hijackis a cool graphic that’s a little tricky to navigate to, so here’s a direct link. With recent political developments, particularly confirmation of some truly wacky judicial nominees, it’s more clear than ever that the new GOP is perfectly represented by the Hijack! Page’s 21st Century elephant!
06.11.05 @ 09:09 PM EDT [link]

Europe – The Dittohead Paragon of Freedom
It hit me on the autostrada (just north of Pescara, as I recall) that the European approach to auto liberty closely follows Dittohead anti-regulatory inclinations. My wife insisted on being the one to write it down because it’s difficult to drive and write on the autostrada. In fact, it’s difficult to drive and stay alive on the autostrada! You discover why you have two eyes – one is for watching the road ahead and the other is for watching the rear view mirrors for Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches barreling down the road in your lane at twice your speed. I saw no indication that anything resembling a speed limit exists on those highways. I never saw any speed limit signs or, for that matter, Polizei. I recall from my years in Bavaria that if you get hit from behind in the left lane, it’s your fault! The bottom line in Europe is that every driver feels he (and it’s usually a he behind the wheel) has a right to go as fast as his wheels will turn, and the police are happy to go along with this. Instead of stopping speeders, their role is to clean up the messes on the roads that occur all too often. I saw plenty over the years, and am lucky I wasn’t involved with any of them! This is right in line with Dittohead values. So what if driving like a maniac causes fatalities among people not actually putting the pedal to the metal? Who said life was fair? And speed limits aren’t the only way that the European driving experience reflects proper right wing libertarian values. Just consider my manual-transmission rental. I’ve driven a manual for most of my driving career, but was totally shocked to discover that my Euro-car had no neutral safety switch. This is the device that prevents the car from being started if the car is in gear and the clutch is not depressed. It’s been standard on American cars since forever, and is quite useful in ensuring that people standing in front of a car being started don’t get squashed. Yet in Europe this simple safety feature isn’t required. Considering how the right wing feels about meddling government regulations, you can be sure they’d be holding Europe up as an example if they weren’t so busy bashing its wimpiness for non-support of American military adventures!
06.10.05 @ 10:07 PM EDT [link]

Europe – the Dittohead Property Rights Paradise
Another very obvious aspect of life in Europe that Dittoheads would doubtless find endearing is the respect afforded to private property. The beach at Rimini is an excellent example. Imagine a very wide and very long stretch of gorgeous beach, comparing favorably to, say, California. Recall that in California there is no private ownership of a beach. Citizens of California are free to walk for miles along their beaches, even in front of celebrity homes. You can walk on the beach in Rimini too, but you have to pay. Kilometer after kilometer, there is one private beach after another, each about 100 meters in width. There are literally hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They’re usually associated with private clubs, or with resorts plopped on the other side of the main boulevard. Beach access isn’t cheap – I paid 10 Euros – about $12 - for the privilege of using the beach for a couple of hours. In fairness, that payment included an umbrella and beach chairs, but rental of these items was mandatory. This isn’t an isolated situation – Europe doesn’t have the concept of Eminent Domain found in the US Constitution, that government can compel sale of private land when there is a compelling public interest. This puts significant limits on government initiatives, a feature Dittoheads are perfectly comfortable with. It also mirrors European uneasiness with strong American-style federalism, exhibited by recent failure of referenda on the Euro Constitution in France and the Netherlands. This is the same Federalism that Dittoheads themselves reject. The bottom line: France is now a Dittohead inspiration!
06.09.05 @ 07:37 PM EDT [link]

Europe – The Dittohead Economic Paradise
A key Dittohead virtue is everyone paying their own way. They hate “socialism,” which they define as the government providing a service that could be provided by the private sector. I put socialism in quotes because they interpret any spending to “promote the general welfare” (using the phrase from the Constitution) as taking from one citizen to give to another. If the government doesn’t provide any services whatsoever to individuals, then this “taking” problem is solved. What does this look like? It looks like every individual individually paying for anything and everything. And, to a large degree, this is what Europe looks like. Despite its reputation for socialism, there is a far larger degree of pay-as-you-go than most Americans would believe. Let’s consider some examples I personally experienced last week in Italy. I drove a rental car halfway across the country on the autostrada, the Italian version of the interstate system. Contrary to the US, where a sizeable percentage of the interstate system is free, every inch of the Italian system requires payment of a stiff toll. This toll is high enough so that, years ago on my first driving trip into Italy, I tried taking a back road across the Apennines to avoid them. I learned a lesson from that experience – life’s too short to risk on insanely narrow roads and big oncoming trucks when there are no road barriers to stop a plunge of half a mile down the mountainside! Here’s an even better example of the pay-as-you-go services that full-scale implementation of Dittohead economic ideals would have on our daily lives – the European washroom. For example, in the Milano Centrale train station, a major transportation hub, the restrooms all had turnstiles that required exact-change payment of 70 Euro cents - about $1 (not on the stall, but on the main door to the washroom itself). What kind of service did this payment entitle you to? The sole fixture of the men’s and ladies’ stalls was a hole in the floor. A Dittohead economist would interpret this as a perfectly reasonable illustration of the “whatever the market will bear” principle. If you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go, so why shouldn’t somebody be able to make the appropriate amount of money from this imperative? This being a basic need, people should be spending some basic cash! If you don’t want to pay, or want to be able to sit down, you can just hold it in (or, judging by the smell in the elevators, think creatively!)
06.08.05 @ 08:28 PM EDT [link]

Europe as a Dittohead Paradise
Last week was my first trip to Europe since starting this Journal. I’ve been there frequently over the years, even living in Bavaria for four years at one point, but never had the extra observational impetus, the sharpening of sensitivity to irony, that maintaining a daily personal record brings. This trip was particularly useful in that respect, considering how diversely frenetic it was. It included virtually ever aspect of European life – major cities like Milano and Roma, isolated mountain villages, ritzy resort areas like Bellagio on spectacular Lake Como, and the Jones-beach style everyman scene in Rimini on the Adriatic Sea. To get between these I took all the common forms of transportation, including planes, trains, and automobiles (not to mention plenty of hiking). During these experiences I began thinking of what America’s right wing Dittoheads would make of these experiences. Not that experiencing cultures that developed in parallel with American culture would be high on their priority list. For one thing, Europe consists entirely of Foreign Countries. For another, it has a reputation among US right wingers of being a hotbed of socialism and government activism. This is why Bush’s first visit to Europe was remarkably late in life (considering how cosmopolitan his Dad is). My diverse experiences last week, sharpened by my sensitivity to the right wing inconsistency, convinced me that Dittoheads are missing out by not looking to Europe as an embodiment of economic and libertarian values they espouse. Let’s spend a couple of days considering this question.
06.07.05 @ 08:45 PM EDT [link]

Quick Note from Roma
Doing this from an industrial grade internet operation at the end of Via Veneto in Roma. It has been our practice on Italy trips to spend the last night in a nice hotel in Roma before taking the early train out to Fiumicino airport for the flight back. Rome is a perfectly fine city, but not my favorite Italian city by any means. It is a good decompression stop before returning, though. The trip was quite successful. The main event was showing up at the town hall of the remote medieval village in an isolated but extremely beautiful area of Italy in the Abruzzi mountains. There is no English there at all, and unfortunately Italian is my fourth in proficiency after Russian and German, but I have been applying myself during the commute to improve the basic travellers Italian Ive gained over the last five years. Im pleased to report that everything went quite well. We spoke with the mayor, the chief of police, and the town patriarch, who arranged a jeep ride out on some mountain roads to the site of some property my wife has inherited. The view was spectacular! Once Im back Ill upload some pictures. We spent a good amount of time speaking with town inhabitants, visiting the mausoleum, supporting the town economy, and other worthwhile activities. Prior to arriving in the Abruzzi, we spent a day on the beach in Rimini, Italys answer to the Jersey shore. (BTW appologies for spelling it Riminini on the last post. A little too much vinono just before!) Looking forward to getting back tomorrow. Lots of thoughts and observations tied to experiencing European culture this last week. Ciao e ciliamo presto!
06.05.05 @ 01:27 PM EDT [link]