FYLR!

Humor
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It started out as an in-joke among us here at TLS; now it’s set to become part of Internet lore, as ubiquitous on Web forums as LOL and “all your base are belong to us” jokes: FYLR!

Initialism for “FUCK YEAH LEW ROCKWELL!”

An exclamation of delight at some wondrous gift bestowed upon the world by the magic of the free market, or triumph at the erosion of some bullshit government department or program, in the form of a winking, semi-serious attribution to the ongoing efforts of heroic libertarian educator and advocate Lew Rockwell.

Alternatively, an informal pseudonym to be used when making adoring reference to Lew.

More generally, an exclamation in celebration of any occasion of total overwhelming pwnage, such as Lew consistently delivers.

Properly used with exclamation point, no matter where found in a sentence.

FYLR! is gonna be interviewed on Colbert next week, FYLR!!!!!

We’ll know this meme has truly arrived when it merits its own entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW).  In the meantime, say it with us: FYLR!

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Our Efficient, All-Volunteer Killers

Imperialism, War
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Steve Chapman extols the benefits of having an all-volunteer military force:

A few decades ago, the draft was a requirement for any major military undertaking. No one would have dreamed of fighting the Germans and Japanese, or the North Koreans and Chinese, without calling up young men for mandatory service. Not until the waning years of the Vietnam War did the nation elect to rely entirely on volunteers.

It was a controversial step, and one whose durability was very much in doubt. But in the intervening decades, the draft has gone from being indispensable to being unthinkable. Even the extraordinary demands of two difficult wars have not induced a reconsideration.

Anti-conscription badge from WWIEven the military’s leadership recognizes now that armies perform better when they’re filled with people who actually want to be there, and as Chapman points out, it’s a more efficient use of training dollars to spend them on Army careerists than on guys who’d rather be smoking pot and watching football.

If this is the extent of Chapman’s argument then I agree, but I’m not any more comforted by the fact that the military’s bombing and killing of poor people overseas are performed by people who actually want to do that sort of thing.  And he ignores the fact that young men must still notify the government of their whereabouts via Selective Service in case the draft is reinstated.  If the military really does not want conscripted men (and possibly women) among its ranks, why does the infrastructure for conscription still exist?

More dubious is Chapman’s concluding paragraph:

It was once a novel experiment: fielding a force to protect freedom without grossly violating freedom by dragooning young men to serve. But it’s worked so well we’ve almost forgotten there’s an alternative.

“Protect freedom” is a canard I expect from National Review, not a supposedly libertarian publication such as Reason.  Few if any all-volunteer forces have ever been used to protect Americans’ freedoms, even during the Revolutionary War (see volume 4 of Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty); and there isn’t a single military campaign undertaken in the past century that could be called a legitimate defense of freedom.  If one wishes to sing the praises of America’s efficient, all-volunteer killers, at least one shouldn’t pretend they exist for any reason other than to satisfy the imperialist aims of the Washington elite.

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Digging Up Holes and Filling Them Back In

Eminent Domain
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highway to nowhereNearly forty years after the Baltimore city government eviscerated a neighborhood for a massive, abortive highway project, it decides to build a parking lot instead:

Lillian Duckett was a teenager when Baltimore officials bought the Mulberry Street home she shared with her eight siblings, parents and grandmother, and then tore it down.

The Ducketts were among the nearly 3,000 residents who were uprooted from their predominantly black West Baltimore neighborhood four decades ago to make way for a highway project to connect Interstate 70 with I-95. But construction stopped nearly as soon as it began, leaving a concrete bridge that rises near the site of the Ducketts’ former home and ends abruptly in a grassy slope.

Duckett sat in her current home, which overlooks the ill-fated project, on Friday as Gov. Martin O’Malley, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and other officials announced a $2.5 million plan to demolish the hulking dead end that has become known as “The Highway to Nowhere.”

All of this being funded by Obama’s barrels of stimulus cash, none of which will ease the pain and resentment of being victimized by eminent domain abuse all those years ago.  For the crime of destroying hundreds of people’s homes, not to mention a significant part of their economic activity, this seems like a pathetic Band-Aid.

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A Reprieve from Bureaucrats

Nanny Statism
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Our friend Fester writes:

The other day a friend on Facebook commented on the show “Hoarders”. In this show they have a psychologist and a junk clean up crew come into a house and clean it up. She was upset because she did not feel as if the crew helped the people they cleaned up because they only spend about a week at the house and she didn’t feel like this was enough time to address the deep psychological issues these people have.

While I agree that these people probably have mental issues that are not being addressed by the show, if you watch the show you will notice that almost all of the people who ask to go on the show have a legal issue surrounding the hoarding. These people are being pursued by code enforcement officers, by child protective services, by fire marshals, etc. They may not be getting the psychological help they need, but they are getting a reprieve from the evil government officials who would kick these people out of their homes, or steal their children away from them, etc. It may only be temporary, but if it gives them another year of peace from the bureaucrats then the show is doing a good service to these people.

You can watch Hoarders on A&E.

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All You Ever Need to Refute a Paul Krugman Column

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism
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Courtesy of Tim Cavanaugh at Reason, we now have a basic template to refute just about anything Nobel Laureate, neo-Keynesian, and regime apologist Paul Krugman ever publishes:

[destroy whatever economic fallacy Krugman promotes this week]

The rest of his column is political speech and unworthy of note. The above is all the intellectual content, and it is very shabby.

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