The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Two Thumbs Down
Oscar Gives Michael Moore’s Love Story the Shaft
Oscar won’t be tacking a happy ending onto Capitalism: A Love Story.
Michael Moore ‘s latest diatribe against the powers that be, this one directed at Wall Street and the government that let it run amok, did not make the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ short list of films that still have a shot at winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Awwwwww… Mikey’s not liked by the Anointed anymore?
From a “Primary Source”!
Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.
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In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system.
—
The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.
Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.
In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.
— Dr. Jeffery S. Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, The Wall Street Journal – Health ‘Reform’ Gets a Failing Grade
(Emphasis is mine.) I will be referring back to this post at a later date.
Canada’s Long-Gun Registry is Doomed
Doomed, I tell you!:
Why I changed my mind about the long-gun registry
Patricia Dawn Robertson
Wakaw, Sask. — From Thursday’s Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 4:44PM EST Last updated on Friday, Nov. 13, 2009 1:57AM ESTI’m not a hunter. I also don’t own a gun. Yet, after five years of residing in the country, I’ve radically shifted my position on gun control from pro to con.
Before you start humming the eerie banjo strains from Deliverance, hear me out. Not every rural resident is a gun-toting, liberal-baiting, paramilitary commando.
Nor are rural Canadians stand-ins for the laconic cast of Fargo. I’m a feminist, a progressive and an organic gardener, yet I support the Conservative bill to pull long guns from the national registry.
After many years of fighting to have long guns exempted, lobbyists are finally seeing some movement from Ottawa. Conservative backbencher Candice Hoeppner, the Annie Oakley of Portage la Prairie, introduced her controversial private member’s bill last week to end the long-gun registry. Its passage is a victory for rural Canadians. But why can’t they convince their dogmatic city neighbours that it’s a fair compromise?
In December of 1989, as the Montreal massacre unfolded, I was enrolled in women’s studies at York University. Like many Canadians, I wanted my government to do something.
Which is typical. As Congressman Adam Putnam put it, governments only do two things well: nothing, and overreact. The urge to “DO SOMETHING!” is overwhelming, when doing nothing is usually the appropriate response.
When the registry was introduced in 1995, I supported it. But, as an urban resident, I only saw the issue from that perspective.
And the population concentrated in urban areas – ignorant of wider perspectives – are almost uniformly Leftist. It’s a “captive audience” effect, I suppose.
The Prime Minister must make good on his promise to scrap the registry. The Liberal approach has proved to be an overzealous and ineffective strategy for fighting urban crime. Allan Rock’s bill was predominantly targeted at reassuring his urban base that city streets and campuses would be safe again. When the registry was first introduced, vocal opponents were dismissed as gun nuts, while the Liberals took the moral high ground in a misguided bid to reduce urban crime and violence against women.
I’m not the only feminist who identifies with the Annie Oakley demographic. I wrote a feature about gun control for the Western Standard in 2004, and my subjects, educated female hunters, loathed the registry. This bloated $2-billion policy proved to be a knee-jerk response to a deeper social problem – why wasn’t all of this money allocated to stem the flow of illegal handguns across the Canada-U.S. border?
This complex issue is at the heart of the urban-rural split in Canada. I’m living proof that it’s possible to be a New Yorker reader and a long-gun registry debunker.
What changed my mind about such a hot-button issue? Living side by side with Prairie farmers has been an invaluable lesson in tolerance. While urbanites fear the sound of gunshots on their streets, the sound of gunfire is as commonplace in the country as the roar of Cherry Bomb headers on an F-150.
Rural long-gun owners are responsible, respectable citizens, not criminals who need to be tracked and tagged. They use guns for pest control on their farms. They hunt deer and elk to fill the freezer just as urbanites stock up at Costco. For farmers, it’s a much harsher, frontier way of life.
And this is why it is crucial for the gun-owner demographic to not decline to the point where they have no voice in the political process, which has happened in the UK. “Normalization” of gun ownership is a requirement to maintaining that voice. People must see gun owners as “responsible, respectabl citizens, not criminals who need to be tracked and tagged,” and for that to happen they must be SEEN. When less than one-half of one percent of a population legally owns a firearm, that can’t happen.
Camo-clad hunters aren’t holding up 7-Elevens. These wealthy American sportsmen are the mainstay of Saskatchewan’s tourism economy.
The Daily Show mocks Sarah Palin for her hunting expeditions, but she’s right in step with the rural lifestyle. Self-sufficiency is the key to survival: Chop wood, carry water, grow your own food, hunt for protein, shingle a roof. In the country, a gun is another tool, like a reciprocating saw – not a weapon. Next, paranoid urbanites will demand that farmers “register” their eight-pound chopping mauls.
She even gets in a pro-Sarah shot! I’m shocked!
Common sense dictates that tracking hunters and farmers is not the answer. Why not target rejected engineering students, angry loners, frustrated WCB claimants or military personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder?
Because that would be profiling!
My own private citizen’s bill would propose a BlackBerry registry for urban nano-nerds who drive and text. They’re far more dangerous than that gun-toting Elmer Fudd of the Back Forty.
And she concludes with a shot at the Fudds! (Though I doubt she’s familiary with the term from a gunnie’s perspective.
When self-professed Leftist Feminists (but I repeat myself) oppose the registry, it’s toast, sooner or later.
Two imperfect and wildly incompatible world views have been on collision course for decades, and it’s going to stay that way until we, as a society, remember why we intentionally made a government that is powerless in areas in which people will never agree, because at the heart of the matter is using the naked power of government to enforce ones preferences on the other.
Part of that process is realizing that you’re going to have to give up the club your own team would use to enforce its preferences. For the Left, the list of offenses against Liberty is endless. For the Right, amongst other things, that means getting over antipathy towards homosexuality, and it also means recognizing and accepting that the definition of abortion as murder hinges on the ensoulment of the fetus, because until that happens, there is no party whose life is deprived. Since this is a question that cannot be answered without appealing to the unprovable propositions of religion, it is therefore a private matter, and not fit for public policy.
The only other alternative is that those who insist on their right to decide on these things for others wipes out those who disagree, which is the precedent that the bulk of human history offers us.
The Geek is at least a half-magnitude brighter than I am, and I am constantly humbled by his ability to say, and say more precisely, in ten words what it takes me 50 to attempt.
Blog more, Geek.
Interesting piece from “Robin of Berkely” – “a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal” now writing for American Thinker. In her latest piece, Obama’s Mind Game, she opens:
It’s a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone’s eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman’s heart shrinks after her husband’s abandonment.
The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what’s lost is irretrievable. It’s like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.
I witnessed this alteration recently when I visited my goddaughter, a radiant girl. Her mom, a hardcore progressive, has started exposing her to the darkest elements of the left. And the last time I looked in the girl’s eyes, the light had gone out. Disappeared. Just like that.
I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.
And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.
A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin’s church is torched. Bullies intimidate voters.
Last week, an esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punched a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege.
He has no history of violence. So why now?
Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood — why now?
It’s Obama, of course.
Quite aware of what she just said, she follows it with:
Liberals will excoriate me for writing this.
Can I have “DUH!” for $1,000, Alex?
Interesting piece. The howls of anguished outrage will be more interesting still.
(h/t: MK Freeberg)
Why? I’ll Tell You Why.
Yesterday Glenn Reynolds said that he still didn’t understand “what the White House’s calculus is” on trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists in New York in civil court.
Back in 2006 when I wrote The United Federation of Planets, I explained it:
The “state of nature” is the ultimate objective reality. In it, people will do whatever is necessary to survive, or they don’t survive. In point of fact, throughout history – even today – people have not only defended their lives, liberty and property, they have taken life, liberty, and property from others not of their society. And they have done so secure in the knowledge that their philosophy tells them that it’s the right thing to do. This is true of the The Brow-Ridged Hairy People That Live Among the Distant Mountains, the Egyptians, the Inca, the Maori, the British Empire, and the United States of America. It’s called warfare, and it’s the use of lethal force against people outside ones own society. Rand explained that:
A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.
That’s a critical definition. If a society truly believes 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
then that society cannot wage war. It cannot even defend itself – because to take human life, to destroy property, even to take prisoners of war is anathema to such a society, for it would be in violation of the fundamental rights of the victims of such action. (See: the Moriori. Or the Amish.)
This creates a cognitive bind, then, unless you rationalize that the rights you believe in are valid for your society, but not necessarily for those outside it. Those members that violate the sanctions on freedom of action within the society are treated differently from those outside the society that do the same. Those within the society are handled by the legal system, and are subject to capture, judicial review, and punishment under law, whether that’s issuance of an “Anti-Social Behavior Order” in London, or a death by stoning in Tehran. Those outside of a society who act against that society may be ignored, or may risk retaliatory sanctions up to and including open warfare, depending on the situation. (See: Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons.)
—
(W)hen a society faces the fact that its philosophical foundation does not match objective reality, it is inevitable that there will be a loss of confidence and a societal change.—
If you examine it closely, (the Left) has wrapped itself in a philosophy that attempts to extend all of the West’s “rights of man” to the entire world – up to and including those who are actively seeking our destruction, and the Left holds itself as morally superior for doing so. Attempting to intercept terrorist communications is “illegal domestic wiretapping” – a violation of the right to privacy. Media outlets showing acknowledged Islamist propaganda is exercise of the right of free speech, but suppression of images from the 9/11 attacks – specifically, the aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center, or its victims jumping to their deaths – is not censorship. The humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib is described as a “human rights violation,” as is the detainment of prisoners at Guantanimo without trial. For the Left, the war between the West and radical Islamists should not be handled as a war – it should be handled as a police matter – as a society would handle internal violators. Our enemies shouldn’t be killed, they should be, at worst, captured and counseled. Our enemies are not at fault, WE are, because we are hypocrites that don’t live up to our professed belief in absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights. If we just lived up to our professed beliefs, the rest of the world would not hate us. Yet to believe this, the Left must ignore objective reality.
It’s Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” Destroy the enemy’s society so you can build your new one on top of the ruins.
The Zen of Shooting
LabRat does a helluva job explaining it.
I Repeat:
I wish I could say I was surprised.
UPDATE: Reader “eeky” points out this earlier story:
Man accused of attacking DVLA inspector with broom walks free
Monday, September 29, 2008
A man accused of beating a DVLA inspector with a broom handle as walked free from court after claiming his alleged victim had exaggarated the incident.
Inspector Hayden Hart had claimed he was attakced my[sic] Paul Clarke, 26, as he patrolled Wood Street, Merstham, checking parked cars for out-of-date tax discs.
The inspector said he was clubbed repeatedly by his attacker, who warned him: “If you come near my vehicle again, I’ll break your f****** legs.”
But Mr Clarke, of Wood Street, Merstham, walked free from the Crown Court at Guildford after winning his appeal against conviction for assault by beating at Redhill Magistrates Court on March 12 this year.
Mr Clarke, 26, of Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, denied the offence, insisting he had never actually struck Mr Hart during the confrontation on June 12 last year (2007).
The court was told that Mr Hart was driving along Wood Street stopping to inspect parked vehicles to make sure that they were displaying valid vehicle excise licenses.
Giving evidence at the appeal hearing, Mr Hart said: “I had seen four vehicles which I was going to report for not having up-to-date tax discs.”
He said he was inside his Honda filling out the appropriate forms when he heard a loud bang on his window and looked up to see a young man.
Mr Hart said: “He was carrying a broom stick without the head on the end of it.”
He said the man appeared very aggressive and threatened violence against him.
“As I got out of my car to ask him what he was doing, he struck me on the arm two or three times with the handle,” he said.
Mr Hart said he grabbed hold of the stick and there was a scuffle before the other man walked off.
He said he suffered extensive bruising on his arm and had to have time off work because he felt so shaken by the incident.
“I felt very depressed,” he said.
However, under cross-examination by defence counsel Richard McConaghy, he admitted the bruises might have been caused when he had leapt out of his vehicle to see what was going on.
Mr Clarke said he had confronted Mr Hart because he thought he had seen him trying to steal something from his pick-up truck.
“I didn’t realise he was a DVLA inspector. He might have been a prolific thief,” he said.
He said he had the broom because he had been sweeping up some glass in the road – and the head, which was loose, had fallen off during the fracas.
Mr Clarke accused Mr Hart of exaggerating his injuries, adding: “I reckon he wanted some time off work and compensation.”
After the court was told that it was not possible to prove that the bruising to Mr Hart’s arm had actually been caused by Mr Clarke, prosecuting counsel Laurence Aiolfi applied to have the offence changed from assault by beating to one of common assault.
But the judge, Mr. Recorder Stuart Lawson-Rogers, refused to agree to this – allowing Mr Clarke’s appeal to succeed.
Eeky and I seem to agree that someone decided Mr. Clarke needed to pay his debt to society for failing to conform to the “passive victim” standard. Loaded sawed-off shotguns don’t magically appear in most people’s gardens.
In fact-checking a recent comment, I found a review of Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story which contained this fascinating bit:
Early on, Moore admits that he, too, fell in love with post-war capitalism as a child, and that the system used to work pretty well for the average middle-class American — even if it was made possible by a lack of global competition made possible by the United States’ military dominance. The problem is that there is no middle class anymore –– there is only, as one subject of the film puts it, “the people who got nothing and the people who have it all”
Boy, that sounded familiar. Where had I heard that before?
Oh! Here:
At one time, there were wealthy people in this country who enjoyed comfortable lives, a middle class that never really had to worry about money, and poor people. Now we have wealthy people who have rigged the system and have seized more money (see:power) than this world has ever seen, no middle class, many who are one illness away from losing our homes, and an underclass that resembles Third World countries.
Now, I haven’t seen Moore’s latest “masterpiece,” but I’m willing to bet that Moore uses those exact words, verbatim in it: “NO MIDDLE CLASS.”
And my dauntless crusader for Truth, Justice, and the “GOOD Capitalist” way (that of redistribution of wealth) Markadelphia repeated it because it fits his worldview perfectly – even though I doubt seriously that he is neither of the “got nothings” or the “have it alls,” which pretty much disproves the assertion from the word “go.”
Projection, thy name is “Markadelphia.”
Just for Fun
I received this via email today:
Thought you might enjoy that.