Lex Libertas

If you’ve ever taken spanish in school, you’ll appreciate the “One Semester of Spanish Spanish Love Song.”

I’m tired of race. It’s a stupid concept and an outdated theory. People have tried to compare the Jena six to the civil rights movement, but it doesn’t even come close. The civil rights era was about giving equal rights to people who were denied them, and could give clear examples of mistreatment of blacks at the hands of whites. These kids brutally beat a person on the ground. It wasn’t a fight, it was a sickening example of pack behavior, wrong no matter who is on either side. If you’re trying to get sympathy, it’s a lot better to have Rosa Parks as your rallying point than six kids who participated in a beat down.

The best and most in-depth article that I have seen on the matter, oddly enough, comes from the AP:

Black and white, they say that in its repeated retelling — enhanced by omissions and alterations of fact — the story has taken on a life of its own. It has transformed a school-yard stomping into an international cause celebre, and those accused of participating in it into what one major Southern daily came to describe as “latter-day Scottsboro Boys.”

I used to be sort of neutral on global warming. However, over the past few years, it seems that in no other issue is there so much bullying and pressure to conform to a hypothesis that is, in fact, far from proven. The big scientific fear of thirty years ago was a coming ice age. It’s amusing to see the same people change their position 180 degrees, especially when it is coupled with complete intolerance for anyone who dissents from their views:

Did NASA scientist James Hansen, the global warming alarmist in chief, once believe we were headed for . . . an ice age? An old Washington Post story indicates he did.
…
The public deserves to know how he was converted from an apparent believer in a coming ice age who had no worries about greenhouse gas emissions to a global warming fear monger.

This is a man, as Lockwood noted in his message to the Times’ John McCaslin, who has called those skeptical of his global warming theory “court jesters.” We wonder: What choice words did he have for those who were skeptical of the ice age theory in 1971?

Read the whole article, it’s short, and points out some of the hypocrisy of those who sensationalize the burning of fossil fuels.

I have no idea where he came up with this one. Perhaps it’s not just Republicans who claim to have a direct line to God. Whereas Bush only consults with Him on the big matters, eg. the war in Iraq, Bill Richardson seems to involve the almighty in many other facets of political life:

“Iowa, for good reason, for constitutional reasons, for reasons related to the Lord, should be the first caucus and primary,” Richardson, New Mexico’s governor, said at the Northwest Iowa Labor Council Picnic.

The date for Parliamentary elections in Russia has been set for December 1st. Sean summarizes:

Russia’s Duma is based on proportional representation. For parties to gain seats they must get at least 7 percent in the polls–a slightly higher threshold than the previous 5 percent.

There are fifteen parties listed as eligible, but according to polls, only United Russia, Just Russian, the Communist Party and the Liberal Democratic Party will win enough votes to gain seats.

The parliament used to be half-elected based on party lists, and half on single-member districts. That meant that 225 seats were open to proportional representation, based on the aggregate total of votes for parties nation-wide. If, for example, Party A got 35% of the national popular vote, then they would receive 40% of the 225, or 90 seats. It was slightly more complicated, because you didn’t count the votes for any parties that didn’t make it over 5%. Thus the main parties actually got a few more seats than their percentage indicates.

The other 225 were based on geographical districts each electing a deputy (member of Parliament), like the the American House of Representatives. This meant that it was possible for a party that didn’t break the 5% barrier to proportional representation to get people in parliament if elected in the single-member district.

After the last elections, they decided to make the whole body elected by proportional representation based on the national vote. This means that individual members will now all owe allegiance to the party, and not to any specific citizens. This means that citizens will have no one person to turn to as a representative to the Federal Government, and entrenches power in the hands of the few people who run each party.

In a proportional system, each party makes up lists of candidates. The numerical order is vitally important. If a party gets, for example, 230 seats, the the first 230 people on the list become deputies. You can gauge someone’s importance in the party by their position on the list. The more important you are, the higher your name on the list, thus increasing your chances of getting a seat in Parliament. As such, the main people in each major party are guaranteed seats, and accordingly jobs and power. You could never have a situation in this system as what happened in the US, when the leader of the Senate Democrats was voted out of office. Also, people in the party become much more dependent on the party leadership. It is they who determine your ranking on the list. You cannot disagree with your party based on the interests of your constituents (as often happens in the US Congress), because you don’t have any. You instead must do all you can to ingratiate yourself with the party leaders. No matter how popular you may be with the people, they don’t put you in office.