Your Moment of Zen
Time for another:
That’s Mt. Kanchenjunga, highest peak in India, 3rd highest peak in the world. Helluva view.
Author: Kevin
Quote of the Day
And this one’s not from John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education for a change:
I understand good manners involve one side acting completely guilty and the other side acting completely innocent. I understand the protocol expected is for the righty-tighty to leap, chest-downward, on the grenade. I understand the expectation is to repeat the scene where Tom Sawyer gets the whipping so Becky whats-her-name’s glorious butt cheeks remain unscathed. I get all that.
I’m just tired of doing it. It comes down to something very simple. ONLY LIBERALS CAN PRESENT “FACTS” WITHOUT BECOMING EVIL. — House of Eratosthenes, “Tired of the Charade, Pretending it’s My Problem”
The topic was economics rather than guns and gun laws, but the principle is precisely the same. Some more:
I’m tired of ignoring the elephant in the room, and the elephant in the room is this: The abrasive thing I did was to present factual evidence incompatible with the desirable trope. I presented some hard numbers that would compel a newcomer to at least remain open to an alternative point of view. That was my infraction. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise. Did I mention how tired I am of it?
No 24-Hour TV Coverage, No Obituaries in News Magazines
No 24-Hour TV Coverage, No Obituaries in News Magazines . . .
I found out today via Irons in the fire that Darrell “Shifty” Powers passed away on June 17 of this year.
Who is Shifty Powers, you ask? (Well, some of you, I’m sure.) Perhaps this will jog your memory:
That’s Shifty on the left, as played by Peter Youngblood Hills in the 2001 HBO mini-series “Band of Brothers.” A pretty good job of casting, as here’s what Shifty looked like back in WWII:
And here’s what he looked like just a couple of years ago:
Quite simply, Darrell “Shifty” Powers was considered to be the best shot in all of Easy Company with his M1 Garand.
Firehand found out by email, and I suggest you read the whole thing, but here’s the part that I want to emphasize:
Shifty died on June 17 after fighting cancer.
There was no parade.
No big event in Staples Center.
No wall to wall back to back 24×7 news coverage.
No weeping fans on television.
And that’s not right.
Let’s give Shifty his own Memorial Service, online, in our own quiet way. Please forward this email to everyone you know. Especially to the veterans.
Rest in peace, Shifty.
One other thing: In March of 2006 a very dedicated man did a very nice thing for Shifty. You might want to read that, too:
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Might there be an instructive parallel between teaching a kid to drive as my uncle taught me to do at age eleven, and the incredible opportunities working-class kids like (Benjamin) Franklin were given to develop as quickly and as far as their hearts and minds allowed? We drive, regardless of our intelligence or characters, because the economy demands it; in colonial America through the early republic, a pressing need existed to get the most from everybody. Because of that need, unusual men and unusual women appeared in great numbers to briefly give the lie to traditional social order. In that historical instant, thousands of years of orthodox suppositions were shattered. In the words of Eric Hoffer, “Only here in America were common folk given a chance to show what they could do on their own without a master to push and order them about.” Franklin and Edison, multiplied many times, were the result. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Utopian schooling is never about learning in the traditional sense; it’s about the transformation of human nature. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
And, if you believe in the Constrained Vision of human nature, destined to fail.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Words can’t adequately convey the stupendous radicalism hidden in our quiet villages, a belief that ordinary people have a right to govern themselves. A confidence that they can.
Most revolutionary of all was the conviction that personal rights can only be honored when the political state is kept weak. In the classical dichotomy between liberty and subordination written into our imagination by Locke and Hobbes in the seventeenth century, America struggled down the libertarian road of Locke for awhile while her three godfather nations, England, Germany, and France, followed Hobbes and established leviathan states through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Toward the end, America began to follow the Old World’s lead. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Quote of the Day
. . . what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway—without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I’m correct, we’re in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two.
If you obsess about conspiracy, what you’ll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we’re in, it won’t be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Well THIS is Interesting
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
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
“Whenever you see errors of that magnitude . . .
“Whenever you see errors of that magnitude . . .
. . . you can almost always guarantee that government played some role.”
The Ayn Rand Institute hosted a presentation by John Allison, chairman of the board of BB&T Corporation on “The Financial Crisis: Causes and Possible Cures.” It runs about 86 minutes. Worth your time.