The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Found here:
Let’s look at what we have learned from this election: Twenty-one of 22 incumbent senators were re-elected, and 353 of 373 incumbent members of the House were re-elected. The American people have re-elected 94 percent of the incumbents who were running for re-election to an institution that has an approval rating of about 9 percent. This indicates, as an electorate, we are a nation of idiots.
100+ years of Publik Edumacashun FTMFW!
I’ve got nothin’ for you right now, but US Citizen pointed to this excellent video that repeats some of what I’ve been saying for years here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooa98FHuaU0?rel=0]
They don’t care about violent crime. They care about disarming the citizenry.
PJTV: Chicago Murder Rate Proves That Liberals Do Not Care About Gun Deaths:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIgJMoXOSes?rel=0]
And “gun control” isn’t about guns, it’s about CONTROL.
Wherein the editors tell us how they really feel:
Trying to rein in Leviathan is somehow depicted as “obstructionist.” One must never obstruct the bloody beast. One must continue tossing raw meat into its maw. Anyone who stands in the beast’s way is full of “hate” and “anger.” We know who the problem is here, right? It’s those Tea Party redneck rural paint-huffing Bible-thumping cousin-humping bigots who aren’t like we are and whose chief sin is that they don’t like people who are different than they are. We all know it’s a scientific fact that those people are only against abortion because they prefer the taste of newborn babies.
The average naïve and uninformed American seems to believe that a politician’s main role is to care about his or her feelings. As long as the words sound vaguely compassionate and the soundtrack is uplifting, they’ll swallow whatever ball of honey-coated dung that politicians feed them. In truth, politicians care about us so much, they even indenture the unborn to lifetime financial servitude.
If you oppose taxing the lifeblood out of the people until their bodies are dried-up like beef jerky, well, you’re obviously a racist. Not that there’s any correlation. There doesn’t need to be a correlation in a world where feelings trump facts.
…but now I want to build a shrine to him. And I now understand why Piers Morgan moved to the U.S.
Clarkson punched him.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_2ZsMFY0fg?rel=0]
And doesn’t want him back.
Former Blogger Jed Baer sent me an email New Year’s Eve with a link to a recent speech given by George F. Will at St. Louis’ Washington University for their John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. I respect Mr. Will quite a bit, having quoted him numerous times on this blog including the entire text of his keynote speech at the Cato Institute’s biennial Milton Friedman Prize dinner from May of 2010. I won’t do that again, even though I have much better PDF version of this speech from which to work than I had of the previous one. No, this time I’ll just embed the video.
Mr. Will explains that he is “secular,” by which I assume he means small-“a” atheist or agnostic, but his defense of religion in America had me nodding along throughout the speech. If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend the speech and Q&A that follows:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbA5ab18SCo?rel=0]
I will excerpt a short bit, though, to whet your appetite:
When people today speak of nature, they generally speak of flora and fauna, of trees and animals and other things not human. But the Founders spoke of nature as a guide to and and a measure of human action. They thought of nature not as something merely to be manipulated for human convenience, but rather as a source of norms to be discovered. They understood that natural rights could not be asserted, celebrated and defended unless nature, including human nature, is regarded as a normative rather than a merely contingent fact.
This was a view buttressed by the teaching of biblical religion, that nature is not chaos, but rather it is the replacement of chaos reflecting the mind and will of the Creator. This is the creator who endows us with natural rights, that are inevitable, inalienable, and universal, and hence the foundation of democratic equality. And these natural rights are the foundation of limited government, government defined by the limited goal of securing those rights so that individuals may flourish in the free and responsible exercise of those rights.
A government thus limited is not in the business of imposing its opinions about what happiness or what excellence the citizens should choose to pursue. Having such opinions is the business of other institutions, private and voluntary institutions, especially religious ones that supply the conditions of liberty. Thus the Founders did not consider natural rights reasonable because religion affirmed them, rather the Founders considered religion reasonable because it secured natural rights.
There may, however, be a cultural contradiction in modernity. The contradiction is that while religion can sustain liberty, liberty does not necessarily sustain religion. This is of paramount importance because the seminal importance of the Declaration of Independence.
And he goes on to explain why.
Worth your ninety minutes.
A while back, I chipped in some cash so that the documentary FrackNation could be finished. Well, it’s finished:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRyyzoARJo?rel=0]
Yup, it’s going to be on cable, on AXS TV. I’ll DVR it. Should be interesting when compared to Matt Damon’s oil-money-funded feature drama Promised Land.
UPDATE: And they’ve upped the ante with respect to Promised Land:
Accompanied by this photo:
Movieline.com attended on a panel discussion about “Promised Land” featuring Damon and reported that Damon said the movie wasn’t political.
“I don’t want to call Matt Damon a liar but he’s a liar, really,” McAleer said. “It’s a deeply political movie and it’s deeply disingenuous for Matt Damon to say otherwise. … Matt Damon isn’t telling the truth.”
In a sane nation, “Contempt of Congress” would not be a crime. It would be a Pulitzer Prize category. – Jim @ The Travis McGee Reader
Or a Nobel Prize category….
Just sayin’.
From The People’s Cube:
Rachel starts the year off right with the title to her post, which I made QotD:
Thank God our heroic president spent more than three million dollars of our money to heroically help our heroic Congress heroically do exactly shit-all.
After the title, she really gets going.
Read it all, and all the links. Quoting Rachel again:
When I encounter people in conversation who acknowledge the set of facts about what’s happening in the Western world right now and then say, “Meh, bah, blah blah, there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just going to enjoy my life,” I literally – I do mean literally – almost burst into tears because it feels so hopeless and frustrating if even the most reasonable of us flat-out do not give a shit. I actually have burst into tears when certain people very close to me have offered those rhetorical shoulder-shrugs.
Sorry to be so pessimistic. Last thing I want is for this blog to become depressing for anyone who likes it. It’s just that I read all that insanity about the fiscal cliff “deal” today, and then a trainload of terrifying anti-2nd Amendment rhetoric by fascists dressed in sheep’s clothing, and then two pieces by the excellent historian and writer Victor Hanson Davis, and I’m ready to offer a cash reward for anyone who can convince me that America as we’ve known it is not irretrievably gone.
I’ve got nothin’ else for you today.