Month: July 2009

Well THIS is Interesting

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I received an email this morning:

Dear Editor of The Smallest Minority,

According to Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged has gone from fiction to fact in 52 years. If you haven’t already, now is the time to finally read it, and I would be happy to send you a review copy.

Atlas Shrugged has received praise from Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox, CNN.com, among others. Below is an article from the Ayn Rand Institute, explaining the significance of Atlas Shrugged and the tea parties that will be going on this weekend, July 4th.

If you like the article, please feel free to reprint it on your site. There are excerpts and other materials available. Please let me know if you’d like me to coordinate an interview with a representative from The Ayn Rand Institute. Feel free to contact me with your editorial needs.

I’m looking forward to working with you on this controversial novel.

This was from the Publicist for a book marketing company. It would appear that another industry has now embraced bloggers and blogs as a new way to reach a mass audience. Pretty cool, though I don’t think I’m her particular target audience in this case.

Oh, and here’s the rather brief article:

The Significance of Ayn Rand’s Novel Atlas Shrugged
From The Ayn Rand Institute
“I refuse to apologize for my ability — I refuse to apologize for my success — I refuse to apologize for my money.”

The U.S. economy is in shambles, with every nightly newscast bringing word of new government interventions. Americans are alarmed and desperate for answers: How did we get here? How will we recover? That might sound like a description of today’s world, but in fact it’s also a sketch of the world Ayn Rand created in her classic novel Atlas Shrugged.

The tea parties testify to the outrage that many Americans feel toward Washington’s explosive growth in the past few decades — especially under Presidents Bush and Obama. Atlas Shrugged not only gives voice to this outrage, it provides both a profound explanation of the cause of today’s crisis — and a positive, radical solution to it.

Why is it that every problem seems to call for increased government intervention at the expense of freedom? Why is it that businessmen inevitably take the blame for any crisis? Why are the most competent, most successful Americans smeared as greedy and selfish? To these questions and many others, Atlas Shrugged gives answers unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns — or dollars. Take your choice — there is no other — and your time is running out.”

* * *

“If we who were the movers, the providers, the benefactors of mankind, were willing to let the brand of evil be stamped upon us, and silently to bear punishment for our virtues — what sort of ‘good’ did we expect to triumph in the world?”

* * *

‘Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. You are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will now take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality . . . but to discover it.”

Learn the meaning of these quotes — and the revolutionary ideas behind them — by picking up Atlas Shrugged. Discover why Ayn Rand held that nothing less than a total separation between state and economics can save this country. Discover Ayn Rand’s defense of the individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness — the indispensable precondition of his political right to pursue his own happiness. Discover a gripping novel that challenges today’s intellectual mainstream and provides an alternative to the anti-freedom ideas that are undermining American liberty.

Discover Atlas Shrugged.

Personally, I appreciate her philosophical essays far more than her attempts at novels, but your mileage may vary. I could not get through John Galt’s 70+ page speech, myself.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

A “boiling pit of sewage and death and destruction.”

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I was going to respond to this comment by reactive target Markadelphia a couple of days ago, but I discovered I didn’t need to. John Stossell, one of the few in the legacy media who doesn’t qualify as a “gerbilist” already has:

“Better” Health Care?

by John Stossell

President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there’s no free lunch.

In England, health care is “free” — as long as you don’t mind waiting. People wait so long for dentist appointments that some pull their own teeth. At any one time, half a million people are waiting to get into a British hospital. A British paper reports that one hospital tried to save money by not changing bedsheets. Instead of washing sheets, the staff was encouraged to just turn them over.

Wow. That sounds . . . sterile. Then there was the recent case of a British patient in hospital for an abscess on her neck who took it upon herself to clean the ward she was in because it was filthy.

Obama insists he is not “trying to bring about government-run healthcare”.
“But government management does the same thing,” says Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute. “To reduce costs they’ll have to ration — deny — care.”

Like the New Zealand hospital for all intents and purposes told a Samoan family that they should let their deformed newborn daughter die, and denied her care. The government went so far as to deny her a visa to travel to where she could get care. That child eventually did get to the U.S. for treatment, and has now returned home, still alive.

There’s a difference between having the government insist on denying care, and the family making that decision. That difference is who’s paying.

“People line up for care, some of them die. That’s what happens,” says Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of “The Cure”. He liked Canada’s government health care until he started treating patients.

“The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting for radiation therapy, waiting for the knee replacement so they could finally walk up to the second floor of their house.” “You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! Just wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! Just wait six months.”

As others have noted, in 2005 (the most recent data I’ve been able to find) Canada had 5.5 MRI scanners per million population, and 11.3 CAT scan machines per million. The U.S. had at that time 27 and 32 per million population, respectively. Canada’s are still backed up for months. Here you can get an elective “heart-saver” CT scan for about $100, usually within a couple of days of calling to make the appointment.

Greedy bastards.

These machines are quite expensive, but you’ll note that our hospitals generally have them. Canada’s, not so much.

Polls show most Canadians like their free health care, but most people aren’t sick when the poll-taker calls. Canadian doctors told us the system is cracking. One complained that he can’t get heart-attack victims into the ICU.

In America, people wait in emergency rooms, too, but it’s much worse in Canada. If you’re sick enough to be admitted, the average wait is 23 hours.

“We can’t send these patients to other hospitals. Dr. Eric Letovsky told us. “Every other emergency department in the country is just as packed as we are.”

In the UK they decided to DO SOMETHING about long ER waits – they enacted a rule mandating that patients be seen within four hours of entering the ER.

Essentially, the government rejected our reality and substituted its own.

One response? Keep patients waiting in ambulances outside the ER, so the clock doesn’t start. Another? Rush patients through the ER in order to meet the standard.

At least one doctor has said “Some patients may have died as a result. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”Australia is having problems with long ER waits as well. They followed the Mother Country’s lead.

More than a million and a half Canadians say they can’t find a family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries to determine who gets a doctor. In Norwood, Ontario, “20/20” videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor.

Ronald Reagan warned in 1961 what socialized medicine would lead to:

First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

How long before the Canadian government decides that this will be a good idea?

Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery “elective.”

“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” she said.

It’s true that America’s partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

“[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment,” Dr. Gratzer says.

“Literally we’re surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You’ve got to pay a price for that type of advancement.”

Canada and England don’t pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we’d get 2009-level care — forever. Government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do.

We saw this in Canada, where we did find one area of medicine that offers easy access to cutting-edge technology — CT scan, endoscopy, thoracoscopy, laparoscopy, etc. It was open 24/7. Patients didn’t have to wait.

But you have to bark or meow to get that kind of treatment. Animal care is the one area of medicine that hasn’t been taken over by the government. Dogs can get a CT scan in one day. For people, the waiting list is a month.

So not quite a “boiling pit of sewage and death and destruction,” but there’s definitely some death there, some sewage, and I’m sure some destruction. And Fido and Fluffy get more prompt, more complete care than their human masters – and the only difference is who pays, and who makes the care decisions. Governments making decisions about who should live and who shouldn’t, rather than the patients or their families, because government is paying the bills – with the money they extort from those patients and their families, unless those patients and their families don’t actually, you know, pay taxes.

And innovation? Forget it. Directors Czars of Government programs aren’t interested in risk-taking.

UPDATE: Irons in the Fire links to this story you ought to read: Chickenpox Boy Died After Hospital Release

Here’s a taste:

Fabio Alves-Nunes suffered multiple organ failure after a severe reaction to the illness.

His death was the result of a series of “significant failings” by East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, an independent report said.

(My emphasis.) Here’s the kicker, a photo of the boy on the day the hospital initially RELEASED HIM:

Read the whole thing. Then tell me you don’t want to kill someone.

Is that enough “sewage and death and destruction” for you?

Here are some more “associated stories”:

‘Whistleblowers Ignored By NHS Managers’

‘Lives At Risk Due To NHS Target Culture’

‘Hospital Equipment Cleaned In Bathrooms’

And, of course:

‘Shocking’ £350m NHS Consultancy Bill Slammed’

The key graph from that one:

Some £273m of the money spent was not related to patient care, said RCN chief executive Peter Carter.

He added that was the equivalent of 330 fully-staffed 28-bed medical wards, 9,160 experienced staff nurses or 267,647 bed days in an intensive baby care unit.

(My emphasis again.) Hey, it’s not like it’s real money or something . . .

UPDATE:  The original JSKit/Echo comment thread is available here, thanks to John Hardin.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won’t ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I’ll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Happy Independence Day

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Happy Independence Day

The Unanimous Declaration
of the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Snopes details the fates of many of the signers.

I’m going to the range.

The Mindset is More Important than the Tool

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The Mindset is More Important than the Tool

The Gun I Didn’t Have

By Robert M. Engstrom

I was walking home a few weeks ago when two young men, one with a knife in his hand, blocked the sidewalk and demanded my wallet and camera. I’m accustomed to having a means of defense other than my fist and an umbrella at hand. I’ve been in Washington, D.C. for three months and had almost gotten used to not having a weapon handy. At home in Arizona, I regularly, and legally, carry a concealed pistol and reluctantly left my guns at home and trusted on instincts and awareness to stay out of trouble.

The hoodlum who tried to rob me was unprepared for resistance and expected compliance to his demands because thugs know that the District of Columbia’s firearm laws and security measures punish law-abiding people who might otherwise carry a defensive weapon. My umbrella didn’t survive the confrontation, but I left the scene with my wallet, camera and the punk’s knife, a cheap piece of junk that is now in a storm sewer.

Foolhardiness on my part and a bit of good luck protected me, but there have been a few nightmares of emergency rooms, lacerated livers, and worse since that night. Training, practice and preparation for carrying a concealed firearm helped me recognize the potential threat before the knife appeared, but having my .45 along that night would have eliminated the danger of the physical contact that ensued.

But without the proper mindset, the .45 wouldn’t have been helpful, either. If you have to wander around D.C. carrying an umbrella, I’d recommend this one. Pricey, but what’s your life worth?

It’s NOT About Gun Rights

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It’s NOT About Gun Rights . . .

It’s about unreasonable search and seizure:

ACLU files suit over gun rights

A New Orleans man is suing the city and its district attorney for refusing to give back a gun that police seized when he was arrested on drug and firearms charges.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday filed the federal suit on behalf of Errol Houston Jr., who was arrested last year following a traffic stop.

The suit says the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute Houston but has refused to return his .40 caliber firearm.

Houston claims Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro has instituted a policy that firearms seized during arrests will not be returned to their owners.

The ACLU says that policy violates Houston’s constitutional rights.

Cannizzaro says his office decides on a “case by case basis” whether to return confiscated guns.

It’s a FOURTH Amendment case, not a Second Amendment one. I’m sure they’d be doing the same thing if his car had been confiscated instead of his firearm.

I’m equally sure that the ACLU still hasn’t changed its tune with regard to the Second.