90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, February 22, 2021

Pelosi, Who Claims to Oppose Gerrymandering, Funnels $300,000 to Democratic Gerrymandering Group

After calling for an end to partisan gerrymandering, House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) quietly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to former attorney general Eric Holder's effort to redraw electoral maps in favor of Democrats, filings show.

Pelosi's leadership PAC, PAC to the Future, pushed $300,000 to Holder's National Democratic Redistricting Committee late last year. In 2019, Pelosi said partisan gerrymandering efforts "compromise the integrity of our democracy."

Holder’s group is gearing up for a once-a-decade redistricting process that significantly influences which party controls Congress. It will serve as a data and legal hub and as a go-between for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and state legislatures, according to Politico.

Paul Pelosi, the speaker's husband, oversees the finances for her PAC, the only political committee linked to a politician that has donated to Holder's group in the past two years. The group is at the forefront of left-wing gerrymandering efforts, the likes of which Pelosi once opposed.

"This year, the Democratic Majority passed H.R. 1, the For The People Act, which works to end to partisan gerrymandering by requiring all states to establish independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions to draw open and transparent statewide district maps after each Census," Pelosi said in 2019. "We will continue to fight partisan gerrymandering, ensure every citizen's vote counts and oppose any attempt to compromise the integrity of our democracy."

Holder's group has also received a six-figure contribution from George Soros's Democracy PAC, which is primarily funded by...

Where Does Swalwell Find The Time In Between Making Bang Bang With Fang Fang?

Islamophobia: BBC Under Fire for ‘Hostile’ Interview of Muslim Leader

This is what happens when you ask a member of a protected class a tough question.

The BBC has been up-front about owning up to its sins against leftist orthodoxy, reporting Thursday: “A BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour interview with the first woman to lead the Muslim Council of Britain has been criticised for being ‘strikingly hostile.’” The government-subsidized far-left British network’s self-incrimination session was prompted by the fact that “more than 100 politicians, writers and other prominent figures have signed an open letter complaining about Zara Mohammed’s ‘mistreatment’ on the show.” What mistreatment? Was Zara Mohammed accused of being a terrorist? Classified as a “hate group leader”? Accused of “bigotry” and “intolerance”? No, nothing like that, but in what was likely the first time ever in Britain, a Muslim leader was asked a challenging question.

It seems that BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour host Emma Barnett asked Mohammed several times how many female imams there were in Britain, and persisted when Mohammad offered double-talk and platitudes in answer to the question.

For this, those “100 politicians, writers and other prominent figures” have charged that Barnett “appeared intent on re-enforcing damaging and prejudicial tropes” about Islam.Predictably, the gallant defenders of Zara Mohammed’s honor and good name in the face of this relentless right-wing Islamophobic yahoo who somehow became a BBC presenter were all prominent figures of the British left, including the grievance-mongering Muslim peer Baroness Warsi, Labour MPs Diane Abbott and Naz Shah, journalist Afua Hirsch, Rizzle Kicks’ Jordan Stephens, and the Muslim Council of Britain’s Sir Iqbal Sacranie.

In high dudgeon, these guardians of journalistic integrity wrote that “the BBC needs to address its engagement with and representation of Muslim women.” Apparently those representations up to now haven’t been enthusiastically hagiographical enough. Barnett was way out of line for “persistently” asking Zara Mohammed about how many female imams there were in Britain, because “despite Mohammed’s repeated claims that religious adjudication was not within the parameters of her role leading a civil society organisation, Barnett asked the question about female imams four times, each time interrupting Mohammed’s answer.”

The interview, they continued, “mirrored the style and tone of an accountability interview with a politician, rather than authentically recognising and engaging in what this represented for British Muslim women.”

Stung by the criticism, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour deleted the clip of the interview from its Twitter feed.

This is incredible. These 100 “prominent figures” are enraged over an incident that amounts to nothing more than a BBC interviewer asking a Muslim leader a tough question. Not even a series of tough questions, but apparently only one. Many of these self-appointed guardians of what is acceptable and what is not in journalism no doubt signed on to this because they assume that Muslims are subjected to widespread discrimination and harassment in Britain and all over the West, and so should be given special consideration.

However, as is always the case with leftist outrage, reality is otherwise. The fact that there is any outrage at all over this is an indication of how far that assumption is from the truth. Zara Mohammed is not downtrodden; she is privileged. That’s the real reason why there is this outcry: Emma Barnett dared to challenge a privileged person whom she should have regarded with reverence and...

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Market Governance and Polycentrism

The contemporary conversation concerning the market vs the state is one that tends to focus on value judgments between greed and altruism, prosperity and equality, and, especially as of late, freedom and security. However, there is an even more important and existential debate regarding whether the market or the state is the optimal mechanism through which to organize society. There are limited resources that exist and the flourishing of society and those within it calls for the most optimal method of allocating goods and services in the face of unlimited demand.

In humanity’s natural state, poverty and deprivation are the baseline. Some form of system, be it the market or the state, is needed to create the conditions for self-improvement via the creation of value and the exchange thereof. In order to manage society, we need a governing system; be it one of freedom and markets or one of authority and direction. This debate regarding the free market vs central planning, liberty vs authority is one that has raged for over a hundred years in the Western World. This essay seeks to deepen this conversation by expounding upon the systems of governance that exist within the free market that allow it to be a superior form of societal management rather than simply a chaotic realm of self-interested interactions.
The Importance of Polycentric Governance

The inspiration for this essay stems from the work of 2009 Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose empirical work revealed the importance of polycentric governance: essentially a form of government where power is decentralized. As described in her Nobel Prize biography,

“Challenged the conventional wisdom by demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization.”

Her work described the necessity for power and decision-making rights to be dispersed rather than centralized under one authority. In an essay, Ostrom wrote,

“Research has repeatedly demonstrated that order and high performance are more likely to be achieved in effective, local public economies established within broader national systems where large, medium, and small governmental and nongovernmental enterprises engage in diverse cooperative as well as competitive relationships (see Frey and Eichenberger 1996).”

The most important element of Ostrom’s work is the separation of power via competition and diversity of decision-making rights. Systems become corrupted and incompetent when powerful interests of any kind obtain a monopoly on power. Ostrom is quoted in a book in which she says,

“While all institutions are subject to takeover by opportunistic individuals and to the potential for perverse dynamics, a political system that has multiple centers of power at differing scales provides more opportunities to innovate and to intervene so as to correct maldistribution of authority and outcomes. Thus polycentric systems are more likely than monocentric systems to provide incentives leading to self-organized, self-correcting institutional change.”

Efficient systems of political organization are often polycentric because they are able to incorporate diverse interests, empower those closest to the problem, encourage competition among interests, and prevent the domination of individual interests.

It is through this medium of analysis that we seek to explore how the market and market mechanisms successfully act as a form of polycentric governance. We recognize that Ostrom does not assert that complete privatization or governance by the market is representative of polycentric governance. Rather she advocates for a system that competently employs a combination of state and market mechanisms to address certain collective action problems. We acknowledge this and instead seek to use her insight regarding polycentric governance to explore how market mechanisms and individual liberty mirror the institutions of polycentric governance.

Markets as a Form of Polycentric Governance

Adam Smith observed and articulated in The Wealth of Nations (1776):

...And It's Taxing...

HATE HOAX: Former NFL QB Colin Kaepernick Spins Harassment Fantasy about Proud Boys

Kaepernick is taking notes from Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett.

Washed up former National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick is spinning an assault fantasy about the Proud Boys in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.

Kaepernick is trying to drum up interest for his upcoming reality show, Colin in Black & White, which is set to debut on Netflix. They are promoting Kaepernick hard despite the fact that he has not been a relevant figure for years now:

Because of lack of interest, Kaepernick is engaging in a likely hate hoax about the Proud Boys. Anti-white blog Complex reported about the vague threats that were allegedly received by producers on the set.

“Sources close to the production told the outlet that the anti-Black Lives Matter group was planning a protest at a location shoot last Friday. Although the demonstration never came to fruition, it worried cast and crew in terms of the lengths the group might go to disrupt production. Two production assistants also claim that a suspicious phone call was made to the production office this past week,” they wrote.

Kaepernick and his producers seem to be adopting the Jussie Smollett/Bubba Wallace model to gain undeserved and unwarranted publicity and praise. This is how privilege works in a diverse and multicultural society.

Big League Politics has reported on Kaepernick’s crusade against America, which has been sponsored by corporations such as Nike that are owned by China:

What in the fresh hell is this? This is a taste of Joe Biden’s America—and it’s quite nasty. The political correctness mobs, the seminars, the pseudo-intellectual race theories—they’re all trickling through and it will take brave whistleblowers to expose this nonsense. Take the Coca-Cola company. It’s soda. It’s delicious. And it’s being tainted by this left-wing crapola. An internal whistleblower at the company sent screenshots to Dr. Karlyn Borysenko, a YouTube vlogger and psychologist, who did a deep dive into this seminar from hell.

I mean, the screenshots are enough to make you puke. Coca-Cola apparently wants their white employees to be “less white.” What does that entail?

It means white folks need “to be less oppressive, less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, and be humbler.” Oh, and I forgot that they should listen, believe, break with apathy, and break with white solidarity. I’m adopted and apparently, I was raised by white devils.

Somehow whites were always arrogant, oppressive, and ignorant. Isn’t that racist? I mean, I’ve encountered people of color and other Asians who were all of those things—arrogant, defensive, ignorant, oppressive—and I just thought they were total a-holes. In fact, regardless of race, that’s what you are when you embody a lot of these…so-called problems, I guess. This isn’t a racially exclusive issue. It never was, until woke morons decided to make all things bad a ‘white people problem.’