The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
It’s not about that. It is about gaining power for your segment of the population. More specifically, it’s about gaining some control over the government’s use of power. That’s all that this global warming movement is about … it is a fraud and a scheme created to empower people who would otherwise be selling Che Guevara t-shirts at a street fair.
Neal Boortz, THE GLOBAL WARMING MOVEMENT ISN’T ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
Yup.
Men are Pigs
But I have to admit, this made me laugh until I cried:
From an AR15.com thread on the subject of a certain actress. (*WHEW*) Had to wipe off the tears.
Damn. I’m such a neanderthal.
Quote of the Day
Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So which is it — stupidity, ignorance or insanity — that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?
According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress’ approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you’ll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? “Government ought to do something!” When people call for government to do something, it is as if they’ve been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It’s the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.
Walter E. Williams, Americans Love Government
Sounds suspiciously similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Those are the opening paragraphs. Read the rest.
Nice of ‘Em to Actually Admit It
Dancing in the blood of the slain, that is:
Gun controllers say rampage aids cause
Gun-control advocates seized on the Holocaust Museum shooting Wednesday to call on Congress to reverse its drift toward loosening firearms restriction.
They said it highlights the need for lawmakers to reconsider efforts to ease the District’s tough gun laws and allowing firearms into national parks.
D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray said the shooting underscored the need for strict gun laws in the nation’s capital.
Uh, right. The shooter was a convicted felon. The law said: A) He couldn’t possess a firearm. B) he couldn’t carry a firearm into the museum. C) He was prohibited by law from firing a firearm in the city. And D) Murder is a crime.
So we need more laws to prevent his actions?
“The philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again only HARDER!!“
The gun ban, er control, um safety groups still aren’t getting any traction. I’ve covered this before, in Birchwood, Wisconsin is Not Hungerford, England. Neither is Washington, D.C.
(h/t: Uncle)
. . . shoots two guards at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., killing one.
The Left and the media (but I repeat myself) are now touting the recent DHS “Rightwing Extremist” document as prophetic.
The guy was an 88 year-old WWII veteran and ex-con, white supremacist, holocaust denier, and general nutball. Oh, and illegally in possession of a .22 caliber rifle.
I am reminded, however, of a quote from Neil Strauss’ recent bestseller Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life:
Few of the most brutal periods in medieval history – from the sack of Rome to the early Inquisition – were as coldly barbaric as what happened in our supposedly enlightened modern Western civilization.
And though I left the (Holocaust) museum with the reassuring message that the world stood up and said “never again” to genocide, it only took a minute of reflection to realize that it happened again – immediately. In the USSR, Stalin continued to deport, starve, and send to work camps millions of minorities. As the bloody years rolled on, genocides occurred in Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in 1975, Rwanda in 1994, and in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.
All these genocides occurred in ordinary worlds where ordinary people went about ordinary business. The Jews were integrated into every aspect of the German social and professional strata before the Holocaust. The entire educated class in Cambodia – teachers, doctors, lawyers, anyone who simply wore glasses – was sent to death camps. And as Philip Gourevitch wrote in his book on the Rwandan massacre, “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.”
—
So what I ultimately learned at the Holocaust Museum was not “never again,” but “again and again and again.”
Chew on that.
I Know I’m Going to Regret This . . .
. . . but it needs to be done.
Billy “Doesn’t Play Well With Others” Beck has once again more than eloquently expressed his overweening misanthropy, not just here but at his own blog, and since Mr. Beck doesn’t allow comments at his site I figured I’d go ahead and stick the proverbial fork in the wall outlet here at TSM. It seems Mr. Beck was less than enamored of Bill Whittle’s recent video paean to Star Trek, TOS after Maureen Dowd’s attempt to hijack it for her own nefarious purposes:
If that guy is what passes for an intellect in these times, we are more fucked than I have previously imagined, although it doesn’t surprise me.
Mr. Beck expounded further at his own site on the topic, sort of (excerpts, skipping multiple contemptuous references to Glenn Reynolds):
If you’re going to take seriously someone who dresses up in a goddamned Star Trek outfit and tells you that reason and logic are impotent, in order to explain the intellectual rot in America today, then you deserve where you’re going.
—
As for Whittle, he’s a wanker and a creep. Sooner or later, he will expose himself to the dumbest among you, and I am content with all I have to say about him until then.
Odd, that wasn’t the message I took from Whittle’s piece at all, but then I’m not the towering philosophical intellect Mr. Beck is and have never claimed to be. Still, somehow I doubt that that was Billy’s last word on Mr. Whittle.
Thus I generated this:
We’re just not worthy to share the planet with you, Billy. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Please forgive us and allow us to scrape lick the mud off your boots, since that’s apparently all we’re suited for.
UPDATE: Billy posts a response:
You’re wrong.
Again.
Of course. That’s what the poster says!
UPDATE II: Apparently I struck a nerve. Via email:
That’s my photograph, and I’m not going to let you use it for that.
You will take it down, quietly or with an explanation to your audience —
it doesn’t matter to me — but you will take it down as fast as you can
arrange it after you see this.
It’s not worth the hassle of arguing over it. I’ve had enough of Drama Llamas for one month. Use your imaginations. Or just go here.
UPDATE III: Since I asked him, Beck sent me a picture with permission to use it for the poster. Picture updated. Who says Billy doesn’t have a sense of humor?
From a post at Samizdata:
At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.
Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten – required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.
Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress”. Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.
The author is Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA.
RTWT. And note the title of his piece.
In its entirety, a rant of beauty by LabRat right here in my comments:
I just finished reading this whole thread after looking at it once when the number of comments was 3.
UJ and others are doing quite all right at the quote-fisk game. They have that covered.
So far as I can determine from having read Round XIV of Markadelphia versus everyone else including, apparently, Fox News and an imaginary army of slavering violent right-wing neojihadists who will begin mutilating the genitals of women, blowing up school buses, introducing compulsory Christianity on pain of death, and outlawing nonBiblical education just as soon as, um, they finish their beers or something, the following is the grounds for argument. I provide so we can understand each other better, and as we all know all conflict stems from a lack of understanding.
Furthermore, any and all dishonest or incompetent thing that any liberal does- especially Mark himself- is just fine because unidentified conservatives do it all the time only more betterer and Dick Cheney said something about it just last week and by the time you finish watching the obvious violent enemy of all that is good in the world by watching Fox News we’ll have entirely forgotten whatever thing Mark the liberal did because LOOK A PONY
Conservatives are bad, terrible people that hate freedom and anyone different from them and education and intelligence and success and the beautiful flower of human reasoning and hope and we will all be better off just as soon as we’ve gotten rid of them. Oh, and the worst thing about them is they try to fool you into seeing your normal fellow Americans with different opinions as stupid and evil.
If you have ever agreed with a Republican about anything you obviously LOVED it when Bush spent like a drunken trophy wife with no plan for debt and you’re a HUGE HYPOCRITE for disapproving of Obama spending like a drunken Imelda Marcos with no plan for debt. Also you hate doing ANYTHING about ANY problem and you just want problems to continue because you hate change. Any sputtering about how you actually want to overhaul most of American government, just not the same way Obama does, IS VICIOUS LIES. So stop lying, dammit! It gets us nowhere.
Obama has proved forever he’s nonpartisan because he’s kept basically the entirety of Bush’s evil antihuman terror policies also Republicans never have useful plans except when they do only it’s evil but not after Obama redeems it SO DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD WATERBOARD DEMOCRATS OR WHAT? HUH, YOU LIBERTY-HATING SECURITY FREAK oh hey pony
We will spend our way out of this recession even though I said that was lies and foolishness when it was the Bush administration and we should believe Obama utterly on this because he’s said he’ll make mistakes. The economy will turn around under his policies because the Republican policies I will now make up wouldn’t work.
And now I’ll make a prediction. One week from now, in a distant other thread of the FUTURE:
“Taxes? Economy? Torture? Libel? Stop waving all those links to sourced information. What the hell do you people want from me, I have a life, I don’t have time to feed your goddamn pony.”
LabRat, I am not worthy. Thank you for that inspired response. I hereby tag this post with the coveted “Moment of Zen” tag.
The entire premise of the new movie is that Spock takes an extraordinary risk to make sure that he himself is not sitting in the command chair because no one knows more than Spock just how dangerous it is to have an intellectual in charge.
You HAVE to watch the thing all the way through the credits!
Mr. Whittle, I bow in your general direction. We are not worthy.
Now, get to work on the new “Common Sense.”
They cause you do to stuff like this to guns:
Found at AR15.com