Senator John Kerry (D-MA), in a remarkable stroke of frankness, told MSNBC on Friday that the media have a responsibility to ignore the Tea Party and others who opposed the recent increase in the debt ceiling from about 14.5 trillion to about 15.4 trillion. Take it straight from him:

 The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

It doesn't deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what's real, of who's accountable, of who is not accountable, of who's real, who isn't, who's serious, who isn't?

Senator Kerry's views are utterly backwards in every way. He seems to think it perfectly ordinary and mainstream to casually take on more trillions of debt, while he blasts as "dangerously radical" the notion of not spending more than one receives.

The Importance of Language

"Political chaos is connected with the decay of language," said George Orwell. He was right, of course. Language is the tool the mind uses to understand its interactions with the physical world. With an effective language, one identifies things for what they are. As politics relies heavily on mass deception, an obfuscation of language is always integral to the advancement of the state. With this in mind, I'd like to propose a new conception of statism.

The Free Dictionary defines "statism" as the practice or doctrine of giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy. That's not a worthless definition, to be sure, but it leaves a bit to be desired. How much economic planning is enough to count as statism? Exactly how centralized is "centralized," really? Is it not also statism to advocate a coercive theocracy, even one which leaves the market comparatively unhindered?

With this in mind I propose to define "statism" as quite simply the belief that the state exists. This fits conveniently with other "-isms" such as theism and polylogism, and it suggests its own antonym, "astatism." Here I take "the state" to mean the legitimate monopoly on coercive governance in a geographic region. Statists, then, are those people who recognize a notion of such a monopoly. Most statists in America view the U.S. federal government as the state, though some prefer other organizations such as the North Carolina government.

George Orwell would be proud. The United Nations is now considering expanding its operations to include "climate change peacekeeping."

No, really.

The proposal includes the creation of a military force called "green helmets" which would be charged with "peacekeeping operations" in conflicts caused by global warming and depleted natural resources. Of course there is only one thing that an armed force under the command of an international government can ever do, and that is go to war. A war over weather, if you will. But they'll call it "peacekeeping operations" and that will make it okay.

One has to wonder what such a war would really entail.

Clearly, military conflicts do arise from scarce natural resources, as the endless oil-related wars in the Middle East demonstrate. Yet after decades of global military intervention, those wars are not any closer to ending. If anything, those in the Middle East -- on both sides -- have simply shifted part of the financial burden of war onto Western taxpayers, allowing billion-dollar wars to escalate into trillion-dollar wars and perpetuate across generations.

Just recently I wrote about Nancy Pelosi's odd view that continuously increasing government debt is a necessary precondition to functioning American businesses. Now President Obama is one-upping her, warning of economic armageddon if the debt ceiling is not raised, though like Pelosi he gives no explanation of why he thinks government powers the private sector instead of the reverse. In the face of such blatant hyperbole and scare tactics, the most appropriate response is simply to laugh.

Yet it stands as a grave and sobering moment for those who remember the year 2006, when then-Senator Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling and famously said, "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally." At that time the proposed debt ceiling was about five trillion dollars lower than the current federal debt, and President Obama wants to see it raised again.