A jet plane given to Osama bin Laden by a Russian arms dealer has turned up at the airport in Jeddah, Saudi Occupied Arabia. The Brits say they’re going to complain to the UN because the plane has allegedly been used to supply arms to al Qaeda.

I hate timeouts when I’m composing a piece. Maybe that’s one reason why I haven’t gotten into this blogging business sooner.

I sat here typing in a narrative about today’s events—two severe thunderstorms, which I observed as part of a local amateur radio storm-spotter net—only to have the several hundred words lost when it turned out the Blogger.com server had timed me out and wouldn’t post it. Nor could it be retrieved by clicking my “back” button.

I mean I really hate timeouts. So I’m composing this in my text editor, and when I sign back in to Blogger.com I’ll just copy and paste this into the text window.

The whole idea of “Nightcap” is supposed to be an end-of-day journal-type entry about the day just past. I’ve tried without success to keep a journal, and I hoped this medium could make it happen.

But if this timeout business is going to keep up, I may just say to hell with it.

You have no idea how much I hate timeouts!!!

Flyover readers may have noticed that not only have I not commented on the alleged controversy about cloning, I haven’t even covered it. Why? I just don’t think it’s a serious issue at this point; it’s been characterized more by tabloid claims by wack-job “scientists” than by real Dolly-style news in recent months. But that hasn’t stopped the pundits of blogdom, most noticeably Glenn Harlan Reynolds of InstaPundit.com, and James Taranto of OpinionJournal.com’s Best of the Web Today, from contributing to an energetic but mystifying spectacle.

There is apparently some news on the issue revolving around a bill to prohibit human cloning and President Bush’s statement of support for the bill, and this has touched off all the bloviating. For the record, I don’t think the Constitution protects cloning any more than it protects birth-control-by-infanticide (euphemistically known as abortion), and if there is indeed some greater good to be had from allowing therapeutic cloning to take place, we’ll see evidence of it from animal trials and have the opportunity to reverse a ban on the practice in humans.

In the meantime, the issue is more entertainment than anything else, just like the media formats in which human cloning has been familiar lo these many years.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul (RINO, but in a good way—he’s really a Libertarian) has introduced a bill aimed at putting an end to the use of Social Security numbers as ID numbers by government. It’s a start, but the best way to stop the abuse of SSN’s is to privatize Social Security 100%, something that has yet to find its way into serious legislation.

But we can dream, can’t we?

Earlier in the week there was a news report out of San Diego about how a high school vice principal (female) was checking girls’ underwear as they tried to get into the prom. Now, I will admit I was as outraged as the girls’ parents were as I read the article; although there is certainly no justification for jailbait girls to be wearing thong underwear under short skirts at a dance, I figure it’s up to the girls’ parents to police whether their daughters are going to go out dressed like the Hooker Youth Korps.

Michelle Malkin offers a different take, and I have to admit I can see her point, but I still don’t think school officials have any business doing this kind of thing just because parents are abdicating their own responsibilities. In my opinion the high school should address this problem by formulating a dress-code policy for events like this, making sure parents as well as students are aware of it, and then simply turning away students who don’t comply. There will just as surely be an uproar for this as there was for the skirt-lifting, but at least the school’s position will be more secure.

I do find it ironic that girls who wear these teeny-tiny straps in place of real clothing are so outraged that “everyone saw everything”—isn’t that the whole point of dressing like a streetwalker? But the vice principal might have done better to go down to the border crossing and borrow one of those little mirrors on the end of a long handle. It would have been less spectacular than pulling up skirts in front of a crowd.

OpinionJournal.com’s “Taste” commentary today is a tribute to Louis L’Amour, who although best known for his Westerns (such as Hondo, made into a movie by John Wayne, and the Sackett books) was actually a well-rounded writer of adventure stories including pulp-style South Seas adventures during the inter-war years.

The paperback market lost one of its best when L’Amour died in 1988, and this fan has been looking for new sources of such good yarns since burning through almost his entire bibliography during the 1990s. There are a few Western writers whose works I look for on bookshelves—Ralph Cotton’s “Big Iron” series is an example, though I have been frustrated to discover that the inaugural title, “Montana Red”, is out of print.

The occasion of John J. Miller’s OpinionJournal tribute is the donation of 250,000 copies of L’Amour books to military recruits; for as Miller notes, “There is certainly nothing wrong with good triumphing over evil.”

Well, although I’ve been doing Flyover for about a month now, and did something similar for a few months last year, this is my first try at actual “blogging” with an actual blog engine. This won’t replace the regular Flyover, but those looking for new items on weekends (I don’t update Flyover on weekends) may be rewarded on occasion.

Even as it’s being decided there’s no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, that question becomes increasingly unnecessary. After all, he was offering Palestinian human-bomb terrorists an inducement, in the form of $25,000 to their families, and now we have some idea where this money was coming from.

Let’s face it—if the Bush Doctine is to have any meaning beyond high poll numbers for Dubya, Saddam Hussein needs to go down. So do the theocrats in Iran, who are increasingly facing a restive populace, not excluding their own most respected clergy. And let’s not forget the pampered princes of petroleum who preside over the Arabian occupied territories from their palaces in Riyadh.

As for Old Stinky (more charitably known as Yasser Arafat), with one of his top lieutenants dropping a dime on him to Shin Bet, his fall ought to be accelerating presently, even without the Bush Administration onboard. Joel Mowbray’s piece at TownHall.com starts out sounding like a criticism of Israel, and there’s criticism aplenty for Israeli tactics that might not be up to snuff from our rarified perspective (a perspective not yet coarsened despite 9/11), but he lays most of the blame on Old Stinky and his henchmen. There’s a lot to be said for some UN culpability there too.

Editor’s Note: Although there are entries in this weblog dated earlier than this one, those were previously published pieces that were later incorporated into Flyover Blogdom. This is the first actual blog entry I ever wrote.

I lived in Alaska for five years, which explains in part why I frequently include Alaska-related items in Flyover Country Today, although I also believe many seemingly remote issues simmering up yonder are of significance to the rest of us.

Although the highest-profile Alaska issue as seen from the Lower 48 is the question of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, another issue—at first blush affecting only Alaskans—has been a thorn in the sides of Alaskans for many years: the federal government’s insistence that the state’s Constitution be amended to provide for a “rural” (read, Native) subsistence preference in the taking of fish and game.

The culprit in this insistence is allegedly a provision in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980, a law best known for expanding and renaming what had been Mt. McKinley National Park, and splattering the state’s map with dozens of brand new and mostly inaccessible national parks and reserves of various kinds. Late in the Bush (41) Administration, the Interior Department began to argue that ANILCA requires the State of Alaska to set aside preferential rights to Alaska Natives for fish and game because of the importance of a “subsistence lifestyle” to Native culture.

There are a number of problems with this position. First, and the one that initially aroused opposition among Alaskans, was that the state’s own Constitution specifies that all Alaskans, regardless of race, culture, or place of residence, should have equal rights to make use of the state’s natural resources, including wildlife. Second, the original demand for a Native preference is racial in nature; Interior has since tried to finesse the issue by adjusting its demand to a “rural” preference, but this has rightly been characterized as trading discrimination by race for discrimination by zip code, neither of which passes muster with Alaska’s founding principles.

The third problem, which doesn’t seem to get a whole lot of attention, is that when it comes to America’s Native peoples, “culture” is frankly nothing more than a code word for religion. So in effect we have a federal agency, barred by the First Amendment from respecting an establishment of religion, trying to force the State of Alaska to respect a select few (selected, lest we forget, on the basis of race).

The means of this power play has generally been coercive, with Interior first threatening, and then proceeding, to usurp the constitutional authority of the state over its own land and resources. To satisfy both the feds and their own state courts, Alaskans must amend the Constitution, essentially eviscerating its protections of equality before the law.

This is one reason why Alaskans ought to be watching the assisted-suicide ruling in Oregon’s federal district court last week. If the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes both Oregon and Alaska, upholds District Judge Robert E. Jones’ conclusion that the Attorney General of the United States lacks the authority to block a state law enacted by a vote of the people, it seems logical that the Secretary of the Interior also lacks authority to demand, let alone engineer, the overturning of a fundamental protection enshrined in a state’s Constitution.

There are differences between the cases, however. Attorney General John Ashcroft had no Act of Congress on which to base his effort to halt implementation of the Oregon law, while Interior Secretary Gale Norton can, like her predecessors, point to ANILCA. And while Alaska’s attempts to block federal takeover of wildlife management have included arguments that ANILCA expressly forbids the federal government from violating Alaska’s own laws, no court has yet accepted that view.

Still, Alaskans concerned about their state’s sovereignty might be excused for wishing Judge Jones were sitting on Alaska’s district court instead of Oregon’s.

Karl Marx, of course, had it all wrong.

Marx claimed that the only value of economic significance was labor—and that the “exchange value” so important to capitalist markets was simply a fig leaf to hide the theft of labor value, in the form of profit, from the workers who invested their labor in creating a good or service.

The hole in Marx’s view is pretty obvious: if labor is the only value in economics, then it is to be assumed that a good or service for which there is no demand—such as a refrigerator in Antarctica, or graffiti on a freeway overpass, or, well, Communism—nevertheless has intrinsic economic value because somebody had to go to some trouble to create that good or provide that service. Furthermore, because dipping water requires less work than fashioning a precision timepiece, a Rolex should be worth more to a man dying of thirst than a sip of water. Yet the so-called Labor Theory of Value remains entrenched among America’s academic, media and political elites.

Yesterday was Tax Day in the Land of the Free, and it resurrects for me the question about the moral defensibility of taxation as we know it. I have a problem with income taxes because wages are the result of a (theoretically, at least) voluntary contract between employer and employee, each being under the impression that what he receives from the other will be of equivalent value to what he gives the other. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” and all that. I don’t see what there is in an employment contract that justifies seizing such a huge percentage of a person’s income for taxes. Ditto sales taxes, since the sales transaction is no different economically than an employment contract—both are voluntary and based on the mutual assumption of equivalent value.

(Actually, and this is what Marxists then and now still choke on: both parties to a market transaction honestly believe they are getting more value than they are giving. One party has money and wants/needs something more tangible from the other; the other has something tangible to offer, and wants/needs money. This notion that what a party to a transaction wants has some economic meaning, completely mystifies Labor Theory adherents.)

Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments about how government services benefit us all and we all need to pay our fair share. And to the extent that government services benefit no one of us more than any other—national defense is the first that comes to mind—there is certainly a strong moral argument in favor of levying and paying taxes. But just how much of what our government spends each year, meets this standard? Even Social Security, which is widely understood as a government-run anti-poverty retirement insurance fund, is really nothing more than a transfer of income. The money paid to a retiree in 2002 is not the money he paid in FICA assessments back in 1962. It comes instead from the wages of a newly minted member of the workforce who no longer reasonably expects the system to be there for him when he retires in 2052.

How would our Founding Fathers feel about these redistributive programs? They could very easily have established the U.S. Post Office as a tax-supported agency, on the argument that a well-funded postal system was of general benefit to everyone, including those who could neither read nor write—but they didn’t do it that way. Instead they instituted a system of user fees for those who use postal services. This user fee has survived to this day, and is known as the postage stamp.

There is the further immorality of taxation as we know it, in that tax rates are no longer fixed for the purpose of maximizing revenue to the treasury. If that were the objective of those who write today’s tax laws, rates would be much lower than they are, particularly on the upper brackets. Instead, the purpose of tax rates today is to penalize those who earn more, on the Marxian assumption that making gobs of money is theft from people who haven’t won life’s lottery.

It’s commonplace these days to hear of arguments about what method of taxation is morally superior, or “fairer” than another. Why should we argue over pennies? Vast fortunes are consumed because at the rates assessed today, there is no such thing as a fair or morally defensible method of taxation. That is because the most prominent feature of taxation as we know it, is not the method of assessment and collection, but the incredible amount of money involved and what it gets spent on.

The irony of the recent debate over campaign finance “reform” is that it was allegedly about “getting money out of politics.” Yet the dirty money collected by political candidates seeking election, is chicken feed compared to the dirty money collected by the Internal Revenue Service.