The Obama administration is abandoning plans to treat the OHA as a tribe, but is apparently still planning to screw over sovereignty supporters:

Because of the overwhelming numbers of testifiers throughout Hawai`i as well as the US that stated they were against the DOI proposed plans, both in person at the hearings and online, the US Department of Interior itself has decided not to issue any new rules or re-recognition.

However, because those few who would stand to benefit directly from such a move have lobbied the White House intensely, the Obama administration will instead either issue an executive policy statement (as was done in Alaska) federally recognizing the Native Hawaiian roll, or they will instruct the DOI to issue an administrative policy that the Obama administration will then support.

Either of these actions are actually worse than any DOI rule making.

This yet to be announced policy statement will empower OHA and the Roll Commission to form a governing entity that will be rubber stamped with no oversight or advance public input whatsoever.

Bill Kauffman’s speech at LPAC this year (read the whole thing). I called Campaign for Liberty yesterday to get on their case for taking so long to put the speech on YouTube. Hopefully it’ll be up soon, I’ll post it here when it is:

Under the Hillary Clintons and the bevy of squawking Republican chickenhawks, America is never to be a country at peace. We would live out our lives in a bleak future of endless war, endless mobilization, in a regimented and increasingly paranoid nation on red alert. Peace, to our mandarins, is unthinkable. An America that is small, that is modest, that is humble, that speaks in a dizzingly beautiful variety of accents: unthinkable.

That nightmare bears no resemblance to the country that is in my heart and in my eyes.  Their empire isn’t a country at all—it’s the cold projection of military might, of political influence—it’s the enemy, above all, of the real America, the Little America, the America that plays the unheard music.

I am a patriot. And I love my country. And this country is only healthy insofar as its little pieces are healthy. Lowell, Massachusetts. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Batavia, New York. Red Cloud, Nebraska. Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I saw the distinct identity—the meaning—of my own place fading and that’s why I raised my voice.

That’s why hundreds of thousands—millions—of Americans from the Gulfstream waters to the Redwood forests are raising their voices. We refuse to lose our country.

Speak, act, even vote, if that’s your thing, for place. For peace. For the possibility of a life that is not lived in the dark shadow of perpetual war and crony capitalist oligarchy but rather in the reviving sunlight of liberty, of community, of home.

Yuval Levin on the main problem with our politics of nostalgia:

Perhaps the foremost trend our nostalgia keeps us from seeing is the vast decentralization of American life, which has characterized the early years of this century and looks only to grow. The postwar order was dominated by large institutions: big government, big business, big labor, big media, big universities, mass culture. But in every area of our national life—or at least every area except government—we are witnessing the replacement of large, centralized institutions by smaller, decentralized networks.

To which Peter Lawler responds the way he usually does; by avoiding coming to terms with modern political realities by assuming a supposedly Tocquevillian equanimity.

How the automobile killed the parish church

Dis on seasteading (must-read):

I don’t think the colonial lens necessarily sets a meaningful frame in which to understand seasteading – even though you could say it’s rooted in a narrative sequence beginning with Manifest Destiny (then hitting the Pacific Wall, and reopening the idea of the frontier via a literal application of Blue Ocean Strategy).

But yes, frustration and anxiety for sure re: broken governance systems that have been experienced across the political spectrum. There’s a whole lot to be said about the current, and to a certain degree generational, disposition towards “exit over voice.” The tendency to favor opting-out over staying in, to create new structures rather than improve what already exists, to build a startup instead of a tracked career in existing organizations – or to start a new country. Exitcore might then be the aesthetic limit of utopia.

Adam Gurri’s been on fire recently

Sovereignty is not property

Three rival forms of liberty: federalism, property, and liberation

Gurri the Elder on the unbundling of the nation-state

The long history of LA cults

Churchill’s alternate history wherein the South wins the Civil War and JEB Stuart thwarts World War I

Patri Friedman on social technology and social capital

Jake Bacharach on the Cathedral

Review of John Michael Greer’s new book

*****

Doug MacKinnon’s book is starting to get picked up by the usual suspects, plus the mainstream media secession pants-wetters. I ran him weeks ago at TheDC. He seems to have put a lot of work into gaming out how it all would work, but his knowledge of other secession movements seemed limited. The worst part about his plan is that he would name the new nation Reagan, thereby promising to give the whole game away before it even starts.

Dems in South Florida propose secession, for, of course, “smart reasons”

Church-bullying piece of shit Ed Sebesta claims a scalp because St. Paul’s in Richmond isn’t hosting the United Daughters of the Confederacy this year, pretends it’s a significant thing to get Episcopalians to kowtow to the weltanschauung. I recall reading something about an Obamacare sign-up event at St. Paul’s, legislation the Episcopal Church officially supports as the berobed adjunct of the Democratic Party, so none of this should be surprising.

Dems hitting Bob Beauprez for supporting Colorado secession effort

America’s selective support for separatism

$PLC covers the NPI Budapest contretemps

Coach reinstated after being fired over his team’s post-game ritual of smashing watermelons, which some likened to the Confederate flag

Second Vermont Republicans set their sights on what they want to expropriate

Robert Caruso tweets awful things about Syria, lies about it

Flagger roadshow comes to Danville

Patriotism in Little, Kentucky

*****

Japanese say no to new base construction

Vietnamese Catholics want their land back

Uighurs reject Al Qaeda

Massive pro-independence demonstrations in Southern Yemen

China launches massive rural surveillance project in Xinjiang

Greenland gets its own office in the Danish embassy in Washington

The Islamic State encroaches on Baghdad

Secession in northern Malawi

Catalan president proposes referendum by other means

*****

Friends of the Ordinariate fall/winter newsletter

h/t Iosue Sartorius