The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
A European Shell commercial that is music for car enthusiasts:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_kwxzU4wL4]
From a comment at The Truth About Cars review of the Bugatti Veyron comes this bit of universal truth:
I could never afford one, but I don’t want to live in a world where things like this are not possible.
The complete inverse, I gather, of what the proles are supposed to feel.
This column is so right that it’s very difficult to pull just one piece out of it for a quote of the day, but Janet Daley’s UK Telegraph op-ed If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth is today’s must-read:
We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.
The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe’s ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.
That is the problem. So profound is its challenge to the received wisdom of postwar Western democratic life that it is unutterable in the EU circles in which the crucial decisions are being made – or rather, not being made.
The solution that is being offered to the political side of the dilemma is benign oligarchy.
Yes, that’s what’s being offered, but it’s not what will be delivered.
Read the whole piece. Twice. At the time of this writing there are nearly 800 comments. One of them was this:
…this article is the most important one I have ever read in the mainstream media.
I concur.
Brilliance from REALMREYNOLDS.com:
Someone should run tell the National Institute for Civil Discourse!
Edited to add, seen in a comment thread elsewhere:
“Let’s assume that everything you say about me is true. That makes your problem somewhat bigger, doesn’t it?”
Apparently the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan was a war crime against Britain.
The bombings of Hiroshima (66 years ago today) and Nagasaki were anti-British no less than anti-Japanese acts, designed to prevent the War from instead being ended by the British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific…
(My emphasis.) I’m almost afraid to point to it. The crazy might follow back here.
From that WSJ page mentioned in the previous post:
The “two different worldviews” that divide Washington, explains Eric Cantor, are too far apart for anything more than an armistice.
That sounds remarkably like Anarchangel’s quote from a while back:
There can be no useful debate between two people with different first principles, except on those principles themselves.
I quoted that in What We Got Here . . . is Failure to Communicate. Also Thomas Sowell, from an Uncommon Knowledge interview:
Peter Robinson: If you had a sentence or two to say to the Cabinet assembled around President Obama, and this cabinet holds glittering degrees from one impressive institution after another, if you could beseech them to conduct themselves in one particular way between now and the time they leave office, what would you say?
Thomas Sowell: Actually, I would say only one word: Goodbye. Because I know there’s no point talking to them.
Sounds like Eric Cantor finally figured it out.
I saw this on a Wall St. Journal web page today:
Wow! A High Interest Rate of 1.00%!
I think I’ll just go run up my credit cards.
Reader Pascal sent me an email with a series of beautiful photographs, of which (for some reason) this one struck me most:
This is the work of Clark Little, and more of it can be seen here.
Joe Huffman runs Boomershoot, an annual long-range shooting event held every spring in upper Idaho. At Boomershoot, the goal is to hit small (4″ square and 8″ square) targets with rifles at long range. How long? The closest targets are more than 300 yards away, the farthest are 700 yards. Joe does this to promote the skill of long-range shooting. I’ve been to the shoot (2009). Trust me, hitting a 4″ square boomer at 640 yards is very rewarding. Two in a row is an almost indescribable ego-boost.
It looks like long-range shooting is gaining popularity. As some wag once said, “A golf course is a waste of good rifle ranges.” Now there is Rifle Golf.
A round of “rifle golf” works like this: Accompanied by a guide, you drive a six-mile loop on a dirt road on a sheep ranch. Along the way, you stop at four different shooting stations. The stations have tables and chairs for benchrest shooting. At the first station, your first target to shoot at is a black wooden silhouette of a moose, at 442 yards away. At the place where a hunter would place an ideal shot on the moose (at the center of the heart/lungs area), there is a hanging half-circle white metal plate, about 11 inches in diameter. If you hit the plate on the first shot, that’s scored as an “eagle” (2 under par). If you get the plate on the second shot, that’s a birdie (1 under par). If you miss the first two shots at the distant target, you take your third shot at something closer; on “hole” 1, that’s a deer at 285 yards.
RTWT. It actually sounds like a LOT of fun.
But it would be more fun if the targets exploded.
Just sayin’.
And hey! There’s video!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLxHaGdlrTY]
So our public education system has resulted in a population in which 1 in 7 adults are functionally illiterate, and “only 12 percent of high-school seniors, who are getting ready to vote for the first time, have a proficient knowledge of history.”
What about math? I think this picture says the proverbial 1,000 words:
Well, it’s good to know in these dark days of mass ignorance that our institutions of higher learning have their standards! Or, at least are considering having standards.
The local junior college, Pima Community College has a standard: students must be at least sixteen years old. But now they’re considering imposing some new ones:
The question boils down to how smart you should have to be to attend Pima Community College.
Currently there is no requirement. You only need to be age 16.
But Pima’s governing board is considering changing that to require new students to have a high school diploma or GED. Students also would have to pass a reading, writing and math assessment test with the skills of a sixth or seventh grader.
Pima Chancellor Roy Flores says, “We need to find different pathways for those students that are testing in at second, third, fourth and fifth grade levels.”
Sweet. Bleeding. Jeebus. No, it’s not a question of how smart you are, it’s a question of how educated you are. Ignorance is correctable, but as comedian Ron White has said, “You can’t fix stupid. There’s not a pill you can take; there’s not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.”
Bear in mind, this is a college. Yes, you can go learn to weld at PCC (and if you don’t test out at above sixth grade, be prepared to suffer a lot of burns for the rest of your life), but you can also go get a 2-year associate’s degree. When I moved to Arizona I went to PCC for the first two years and got caught up on my freshman and sophomore courses before transferring to the University of Arizona (at in-state tuition rates, which I couldn’t get at the U of A until I’d lived here a year.)
Read the last line in the above excerpt again: “We need to find different pathways for those students that are testing in at second, third, fourth and fifth grade levels.” These are, at minimum, sixteen year-olds. The vast majority of them are over 18.
And as Say Uncle put it this morning, “their vote counts just as much as yours.”
You want to know how we ended up with the government we have? This is how. In 1983 the report A Nation at Risk on the state of public education in America pulled no punches when it stated:
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.
Our government-provided schools have produced generation upon generation of government-approved product. It’s a positive-feedback loop, and it has achieved full screeching saturation.
So a recent Rasmussen poll reports that 46% of “likely U.S. voters” believe that “most members of Congress” are corrupt. That’s up 7% from June, by the way.
And I thought that only 1 in 7 adults was functionally illiterate.
Well, it would seem that their belief is well founded (quelle surprise). Watch the video:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G96TY5JsV-s?rel=0]
I’d like to see the data. And the list of names.