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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE Keeper of the Flame of the Enlightenment HONG KONG STUDENT PROTESTS The differences between student-led movements in this country and in Hong Kong are striking. One need look no further than their respective demands and the ideas that animate their protests. When American college students are moved enough to organize, they are almost always calling for more “freebies,” not more freedom, as the courageous students today in Hong Kong are doing. The students in Hong Kong are speaking truth to serious power, with all too real consequences for questioning and challenging their ruthless masters in Beijing. When...

The differences between student-led movements in this country and in Hong Kong are striking. One need look no further than their respective demands and the ideas that animate their protests.  When American kids are moved enough to organize, they are almost always protesting for more "freebies," not more freedom, as the courageous students today in Hong Kong are doing.  The students in Hong Kong are speaking truth to real power, with all too real consequences for questioning and challenging their ruthless communist masters. When the Hong Kong protests have subsided, those lucky enough to avoid imprisonment will face a bleak future.  With their...

Americans are caught up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting the White House and the president's family. But what is transpiring in Hong Kong may be of far greater consequence. Last weekend, Hong Kong authorities used pepper spray and tear gas to scatter the remnants of a student protest of the decision to give Beijing veto power over candidates in future elections. The gassing was a blunder. Citizens poured into the streets in solidarity with the protesters. Hong Kong police lacked the nerve or numbers to remove them. The People's Liberation Army stayed in its...

Hong Kong protesters stockpile supplies, fear fresh police advance By Donny Kwok and Yimou Lee HONG KONG Tue Sep 30, 2014 7:26am EDT (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters extended a blockade of Hong Kong streets on Tuesday, stockpiling supplies and erecting makeshift barricades ahead of what some fear may be a push by police to clear the roads before Chinese National Day. Riot police shot pepper spray and tear gas at protesters at the weekend, but by Tuesday evening they had almost completely withdrawn from the downtown Admiralty district except for an area around the government headquarters....

The Hong Kong government said Monday that riot police have pulled back from pro-democracy demonstrations around the city. Explaining the move, the government said in a statement that the protesters on the streets are "calm again." It urged the protesters to disperse to allow emergency vehicles, public transport and other traffic to pass.

Hong Kong police have fired repeated volleys of tear gas to disperse pro-democracy protests and baton-charged the crowd blocking a key road in the government district after official warnings against illegal demonstrations. Student groups are spearheading a civil disobedience campaign along with democracy activists to pressure Beijing into granting full democracy to Hong Kong. The city's central district descended into chaos on Sunday as chanting protesters converged on police barricades surrounding their colleagues, who had earlier launched a "new era" of civil disobedience. Riot police staged repeated pepper spray and baton charges and threw tear gas at the crowds. Police...

The American people have had enough with the assault on their first amendment rights. They just want to be left alone by their government and government-affiliated pressure groups. It is the establishment in both parties, who is on the take from these pressure groups, that prevent ordinary Americans from speaking their minds like the civilized people we ARE. People disagree, sometimes vehemently. That’s normal and healthy, and it shouldn’t be the job of the government to shut people up. That’s not American – that’s totalitarian. How do we fix this? It’s remarkably simple. We, the normal people, outnumber the control...

What if you were allowed to vote only because it didn't make a difference? What if no matter how you voted the elites always got their way? What if the concept of one person/one vote was just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy as it has come to exist in America today is dangerous to personal freedom? What if our so-called democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the reasons for government and instead turns political campaigns into beauty contests? What if American democracy allows the government to do anything...

With the rise of Islamist organizations, repressive regimes, and civil conflicts which threaten regional stability, the promise of the Arab Spring of 2011 quickly devolved into an Arab winter. In an expansive article in The Economist, the threat to the Middle East is discussed in appropriately grave terms; Syria and Iraq are in flames while Jordan looms as the next domino to potentially fall. Libya and Yemen, where Islamic terror networks operate with impunity, are labeled “failed states.” Those Middle Eastern nations that are not in danger of imminent collapse are either absolute monarchies or counties which merely maintain...

The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America, by F.H. Buckley, Encounter Books, 2014, 319 pages, $27.99.Try making sense out of what Americans tell pollsters. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than one in five of us trusts the federal government. Gallup says that nearly three quarters of us consider it "the biggest threat to the country in the future." Yet by equally overwhelming margins, Gallup shows Americans agreeing that "the United States has a unique character because of its history and Constitution that sets it apart from other nations as the greatest in the...

July 1 marks 17 years since the former British colony became a Chinese Special Administrative Region. Calls for popular representation are growing ever fiercer in the freewheeling metropolisWhen typhoons begin to lash along Asia’s coastlines each midsummer, Hong Kong usually manages to escape serious damage, since storms in the South China Sea tend to lose their muster over the Philippines and Taiwan by the time they make landfall. Some locals will cheekily boast that the city, constructed across an archipelago and on a peninsula extending south of the Chinese mainland, is protected by an invisible dome that blocks out these...

For the past few centuries, the Western world has witnessed a contest of historic visions. On the one side was the dream of the beautiful collective. Human progress was a one-way march toward socialism. People would liberate themselves from religion, hierarchy and oppression. They would build a new kind of society where equality would be the rule, where rational planning would replace cruel competition. On the other side was . . .

Is the election of a pro-business, pro-American, growth-oriented prime minister in the world's largest democracy good news or bad news for the world's oldest democracy? We in that oldest democracy are currently governed by the Democrats, a party that has more in common with the defeated Congress party in India than with the victorious Bharatiya Janata Party. You could tell that the White House was less than overjoyed at the election of Narendra Modi when the spokesman recited boilerplate praise of a "free and fair election." Are there sensitivities regarding this particular small-government guy? Sure. India is not Indiana. The...

Until We Learn to Be Sovereign, the Illegitimate State Will Continue.A recent editorial column here at the PanAm Post spoke of the failures of the opposition parties in Venezuela and their culpability in the collapse of their country. The article raises some very important questions about democracy itself. Democracy, after all, is a very good system, and can produce some very positive results. However, it is also a system fraught with incredible danger. Democracy represents the will of the people, but it also represents their whims, their fears, and their prejudices. The Historical Legacy: False Promises, Division, Failure It was...

...and also Russian Orthodox church offices. Firefox, Thunderbird, WebMaker, etc.

We're better than those damned Russians and their Putin; we have democracy! Well, maybe not. Quote: Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Lots of big words in that paragraph. Let's distill it down -- the argument presented is that America is really no different than...

The startling thing about the books academics typically dismiss as relics of the past is the uncanny manner in which they anticipate the present. “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1848. “Democracy attaches all possible value to each man while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.” “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” The de Tocqueville quote was resurrected nearly a century later by Friedrich A. Hayek in The...

The National Popular Vote effort, which could see the 14 states with the largest populations decide the presidency, is more than halfway to its goal of legally bypassing the Electoral College established in the Constitution. Now 10 jurisdictions possessing 136 electoral votes are part of the plan, just over half of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring the National Popular Vote interstate compact into effect. The NVP effort is fully partnered with a George Soros-funded election group, as WND was first to report. The group, the Center for Voting and Democracy, received original seed money in 1997 from the...

How did our relations with Russia go so far wrong so quickly? The Obama administration hoped to have a “reset” of our bilateral ties by wiping the slate clean. In giving the Russians a reset, we were showing a willingness to let bygones be bygones. Or, in their case, let Putin’s 2008 invasion of neighboring Republic of Georgia be forgotten. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. But the trouble with our Russian relations goes further back. After the collapse of Communism and the largely peaceful dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991, it seemed...

n most states, elected officials, usually state legislators, are responsible for assessing what education funding in the state should be and will be. Recently, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that in fact, the judicial branch has jurisdiction over this crucial area of the budget. Although the Court didn’t answer the broad question of what constitutes the “adequate school funding” requirement in the Kansas State Constitution, it did say that lawmakers must fund schools equally. And while this ruling will have some impact on present school funding formulas, the Court made sure to clarify that it has jurisdiction over what counts...