The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
“Cookie Cutter Curriculum”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx5qSJ37lk0?rel=0]
Quote of the Day:
And like Obamacare, with Common Core all of the faults get incorporated into a single point of failure. And then that point fails. But you can always call the toll-free number: 1-800-IMSHOKD, which will play you a recording directing you back to the Common Core Website, which will direct you to call 1-800-IMSHOKD.
Please hold for the next available bureaucrat.
Got this one in an email tonight. Actually, it’s a pretty damned good idea.
Doesn’t have a snowball’s chance, but it’s a good idea:
Amend the Constitution:
.
Amendment 28: If during any Federal fiscal year the government operates at a deficit equal to or greater than 3% of Gross Domestic Product, no sitting member of Congress shall be eligible for re-election during the next election cycle.
Hi, my name is Kevin, and I’ve been away for a little while.
In trying to get caught up on my blog reading, I ran across a link to a little piece by Daniel Greenfield over at Sultan Knish that I think more people (lots more people) should read. It’s titled The Supersessionists of the Liberal Confederacy, (h/t Otto). Daniel’s premise is that, well:
Ted Cruz has come the closest to understanding that the other side just doesn’t play by any rules, but lacks the leverage to make much of that. Cruz is still a product of a system in which there are rules. And that system is as unfit for challenging the left-wing radicals running things as trying to play a game of chess against an opponent who feels like moving the pieces any which way he feels like and always claims to have won.
Law is a consensus. If you stop keeping the law, the police arrest you. If a gang of left-wing radicals in a basement somewhere stopped following the law, they might be locked up. It’s not a certain thing considering that mad bomber Bill Ayers is a university professor. But once those same left-wing radicals control much of the system and the media that reports on the system, they have no reason to follow the law.
He explores the consequences of this loss of consensus. To wit:
On one side there is no consensus and no law; only sheer will. On the other there is a body of legal traditions going back centuries.
It’s painfully clear that two such approaches cannot coexist within a single government. And those who have the power and follow no rules have the supreme advantage of wielding government power without the legal restrictions that were meant to bind the abuse of that power.
I’ve read the piece twice. I don’t think he’s wrong.
I’m reminded once again of Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, his magnum opus. I recommend you read (if you haven’t) my überpost on it from January, 2010.
This will not end well.
Edited to add: Just after hitting “Publish” on this piece, I went and read Bill Whittle’s latest essay, Bamboo Spears. Also highly recommended.
Not exactly (my) original content, but…
The comic is Failure to Fire. NSFW. Definitely done by someone a bit Left of the political center, but definitely a gunnie.
…no blogging, it’s because I’ve put in 38 hours at work since Sunday. Tomorrow looks like it might be a bit more reasonable, but you can never tell for sure.
What have I been missing?
Got this one via Instapundit. (Sorry for the dearth of posting, but I’ve been working a LOT of hours.)
So a Yale law professor (and apparently amateur statistician) did a study. Reports Politico:
Yale law professor Dan Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.
However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.
At the actual post, the Professor says:
I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension.
But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party.
Paging Pauline Kael!
All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the “paper” (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).
I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.
Of course, I still subscribe to my various political and moral assessments–all very negative– of what I understand the “Tea Party movement” to stand for. I just no longer assume that the people who happen to hold those values are less likely than people who share my political outlooks to have acquired the sorts of knowledge and dispositions that a decent science comprehension scale measures.
But that’s not the best part.
The blog comment thread is.
At the time of this writing, it runs 249 comments long, overwhelmingly pro-TEA Party, and IMHO this one is the best:
Let me add an international twist:
I am a Brazilian self-taught Software Engineer. I also taught myself English, to the point where I managed to hold a Cambridge CPE, despite the fact that I’ve never stepped on anglophonic soil and zero formal training. So my analytic and reasoning faculties seem to be in working order.
Now, with that out of the way, here’s why I strongly identify with the Tea Party: in my view, they are right, and they are the US’s lifeline. They represent the virtues that led to American Exceptionalism (and YES, this does exist).
I find caricaturing Tea Partiers extremely ironic, and it would be hilarious, weren’t it so revolting. In my experience, being a lefty liberal is EASY. It is the default stance of the intellectually lazy. All you have to do is feel (specially “good about myself” kind of feel), and never solve anything. Here’s, in my view, why:
I live in the logical endpoint of Fabian socialism. Born to and raised in a culture where the concepts of “right” and “left” are non-existent (I take that back, actually “right” is a language stand-in for “evil”). We have over 30 political parties, and they are all some variant of the left. From Social Democrat parties to “Trotsky-ish” parties. Our *current* constitution, which dates back all the way to the Gun’n’ Roses era (1988), is pretty much a Soviet Constitution (1936) copy/paste job. Culturally, the population is in pretty much a state of “1984 meets Brave New World” in terms of ideology.
Brazil is also a country where:
– the utter government control of the private sector trough bureaucracy managed to destroy entrepreneurship. To the point that it exists, it has to deal with the accepted fact of life that the bribes which feed the corrupt bureaucrats demand to allow business to exist have to be factored in business plans.
– a crushing tax burden that sustain a permanent dependent underclass of favelados in welfare ensures the populists remain eternally in power and that any semblance upward mobility is quickly “corrected”. For an employer to put 10.000 in the pocket of an employee, with will costs him nearly 18.000, so jobs market are always tepid at best so informal work and tax dodging schemes are commonplace.
– The relentless attack on Catholicism (the historical prevalent brand of Christianity practiced here) over the past decades eroded any semblance of morality form a large chunk of the country, and that coupled with utter corruption and/or incompetence of law enforcement made way for drug cartels to take over. Violence and crime spiraled to such inhuman degrees that between the 50K murders in average a year, this year we saw a soccer referee stab a player to death and then be beheaded and quartered in the field by the spectators for his trouble. His head was placed in a spike in the middle of the field, as an added dramatic bonus (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2357453/Brazilian-referee-beheaded-Angry-fans-head-stake-stabbing-player.html).
This act barely caused a murmur.I could go on for ages with more evidence of social rot, but you probably already got the gist of it.
Now, remember, being immersed in this cultural cesspool since birth I, like most Brazilians, never even *knew* that this wasn’t actually just “the way things are”. I mean, we get a gut feeling that something is off, but like Plato’s cave dwellers, light is something really frightening and instinctively avoided. And the *obvious* solutions by all the *smart people* are always the same: more government “compassion”. More “social programs”. More “awareness”. Less “greedyness”.
Imagine my shock when by a quirk of fate a Mark Levin book ended in my hands. That led me to Burke, Locke, Smith, Mises, Friedman, Hayek and many others. Conservative philosophy is what gave me a glimpse of the shinning city in the hill and a will to fight, along with a battle plan, to improve my lot in life, and of those I can reach.
So, Dan, I understand you are surprised that your results showed Tea Partiers not the raging bufons the media portrays them as being. The most obvious things are often the easiest to miss. But never doubt that being conservative is quite the intellectual effort, if only to overcome the moroseness of the mind that liberalism creates imposes with all its group-think and easy answers.
Best wishes,
Rodrigo
PS: written in a hurry on lunch break, no time to proof-read, so apologies in advance for eventual typos.
October 18, 2013 Rodrigo Del Cistia Andrade
The anti-Tea Party comments? Mostly ad hominems and “Your data/conclusion is not valid” arguments.
I cannot help but wonder if we’re not approaching another preference cascade.
Edited to add: I’ll just leave this right here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg_SsaP-9V4?rel=0;start=11]
Not I. The only thing I found surprising was they waited that long.
Someone likened the Republican “government shutdown” gambit to attempting an amphibious invasion without air superiority (media support). [ETA: It was Instapundit.] Can’t say I disagree with that assessment. The major media outlets were in full uniform howl, predicting doom-‘n-gloom, downplaying and avoiding the embarrassingly childish acts of the National Park Service, blaming the Tea Party for its intransigence, and hurling epithets like “hostage-taker,” and “terrorist.” It’s almost like there’s a narrative or something. (*cough*Journolist*cough*)
And, honestly, I think the Republicans would have been far better off to have made noises about their inability to affect the implementation of Obamacare, and pointing out its every single failure – and they are legion. Where else have you seen this image?
Certainly not in the major media. That’s the 7-foot, 11,500,000-word stack of regulations spawned by the 2000+ page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that we had to pass to find out what was in it.
As some wag put it, “Pass it to find out what’s in it? That’s not a law, that’s a stool sample.”
Why isn’t Rand Paul or Ted Cruz wheeling one of these stacks around everywhere he goes? Apparently we’re learning more every day, but we’ve got a long way to go.
Remember this?
Those are pocket editions of the Constitution, and include the Declaration of Independence. As P.J. O’Rourke famously said of it:
The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free.
Today? Not so much. It’s keepers have fallen down on the job.
Edited to add this:
Sarah Hoyt has an interesting post up, Fifty Shades of Marx*, a discussion of her assertion that the ideas of Marx are currently ascendant – an assertion I concur with. This bit reminded me of something:
You want to look at the decay of Western civilization? It’s mostly the unexamined absorption of Marxist ideas.
Now, I’m one of those people who live too much in books and theories, and, as such, I can tell you why they’re absorbed and treated as gospel: it’s because they make internal sense. This is not the same as having even a glimmer of real world application, of course, but they satisfy the minds of intellectuals by dividing everything into categories and presenting a (false but deceptively smooth) system for historical change and, in general, sounding REALLY plausible.
Take the Marxist theory of value. It is utter nonsense of course. The idea is that what gives value to something is the labor put into it. You can see how this would appeal to Marx, or, indeed, to any intellectual. Laboring forever over a book that sells one copy is now a genuine, bonafide “injustice”. The book is valuable. Just look how much work you put into it.
This came to mind immediately:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R28GPPl_5FA?rel=0&start=6]
RTWT
