The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
It’s not about that. It is about gaining power for your segment of the population. More specifically, it’s about gaining some control over the government’s use of power. That’s all that this global warming movement is about … it is a fraud and a scheme created to empower people who would otherwise be selling Che Guevara t-shirts at a street fair.
Neal Boortz, THE GLOBAL WARMING MOVEMENT ISN’T ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
Yup.
Quote of the Day
Philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” And, it was Albert Einstein who explained, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So which is it — stupidity, ignorance or insanity — that explains the behavior of my fellow Americans who call for greater government involvement in our lives?
According to latest Rasmussen Reports, 30 percent of Americans believe congressmen are corrupt. Last year, Congress’ approval rating fell to 9 percent, its lowest in history. If the average American were asked his opinion of congressmen, among the more polite terms you’ll hear are thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks. But what do the same people say when our nation faces a major problem? “Government ought to do something!” When people call for government to do something, it is as if they’ve been befallen by amnesia and forgotten just who is running government. It’s the very people whom they have labeled as thieves and crooks, liars and manipulators, hustlers and quacks.
Walter E. Williams, Americans Love Government
Sounds suspiciously similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Those are the opening paragraphs. Read the rest.
From a post at Samizdata:
At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.
Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten – required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.
Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress”. Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.
The author is Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA.
RTWT. And note the title of his piece.
The entire premise of the new movie is that Spock takes an extraordinary risk to make sure that he himself is not sitting in the command chair because no one knows more than Spock just how dangerous it is to have an intellectual in charge.
You HAVE to watch the thing all the way through the credits!
Mr. Whittle, I bow in your general direction. We are not worthy.
Now, get to work on the new “Common Sense.”
Given President Obama’s recent Middle-East Apology Tour speeches, I am reminded of a Quote of the Day from last October, and the prediction of another damned fine intellectual, Thomas Sowell:
“There is such a thing as a point of no return,” he says. If Obama wins the White House and Democrats expand their majorities in the House and Senate, they will intervene in the economy and redistribute wealth. Yet their economic policies “will pale by comparison to what they will do in permitting countries to acquire nuclear weapons and turn them over to terrorists. Once that happens, we’re at the point of no return. The next generation will live under that threat as far out as the eye can see.”
“The unconstrained vision is really an elitist vision,” Sowell explains. “This man [Obama] really does believe that he can change the world. And people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians.”
Ran across that perusing the archives for something else, and thought it bore repeating.
Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.
A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.
Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days, The Reckoning
A very good piece on why so many people connected to reality are considered “anti-intellectual,” written by a damned fine intellectual. RTWT.
Don’t MAKE US Come BACK THERE!
Tam had a very interesting post this morning:
Remember when you were little and you were whining to go to Disneyland or order a large pizza for supper or to get that shiny new toy, and your dad said “No, we can’t afford it.”
He said that because he was a grownup, and it was his job to be responsible.
We need a new political party in Washington, to get the checkbook away from the 537 people who have been kiting checks like a runaway teenager who boosted mom’s purse. Not the G.O.P., because they’re part of the problem.
We will call ourselves the G.U.P.: the GrownUp Party, and our motto will be “No we can’t!”
Chant it with me now:
“But all the other kids have ice cream and free universal health care!”
“No we can’t!”
RTWT.
Government has been incrementally taking on the responsibilities of our parents for decades, but only recently has it become too obvious to be ignored any longer. In 2005 when I wrote Tough History Coming, I quoted an Albuquerque Tribune piece by Jeffry Gardner entitled Save Us From Us. (The Trib is another paper that has failed, so the links are broken.) Here it is again, since it’s pertinent:
During the 1992 presidential debates, there was a moment of absurdity that so defied the laws of absurdity that even today when I recall it, I just shake my head.
It was during the town hall “debate” in Richmond, Va., between the first President Bush and contenders Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.
A grown man – a baby boomer – took the microphone from the moderator, Carol Simpson of ABC News, and said, in a fashion: You’re the president, so you’re like our father, and we’re your children.
See? My head’s shaking already. Where did that come from? Would a grown man have told a president something like that 100 years ago – or 50?
We’ve got our wires crossed, and our ability to accept responsibility for our lives – once so ingrained in our American nature that President Kennedy felt comfortable telling us to “ask not what your country can do for you” – has been short-circuited. We’ve slouched en masse into an almost-childlike outlook: You’re the president, so you’re like our father.
The fact that an adult – on national television, no less – would say this and later be interviewed as though he’d spoken some profound truth struck me then, as now, as more than a little absurd. It was alarming.
That attitude certainly hasn’t abated over the past 12 years. In fact, that helpless, innocent-child routine has crept into nearly all aspects of our culture.
At the top of this blog I have three quotes that are illustrative of the purpose for its existence. The third is from Kim du Toit:
I don’t just want gun rights… I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance….I want the whole bloody thing.
I’m not sure there are enough grown-ups left. What adults there are out there sure as hell aren’t in elected office. I’ll join the G.U.P., but I’m afraid we’ll have a smaller membership than the Greens. After all, we won’t be offering to “bribe the public with the public’s money.” Hard to compete with that when the electorate isn’t made up of grown-ups already.
Entropy wins.
I Have Something for All Who Voted for Obama
Granted, I didn’t think his victory would be quite as bad as it’s so rapidly turned out to be, myself, but now that the fringe left is disowing the Obamessiah, here’s something I’d like to give to those who saw a Chicago machine politician as the beacon of HopenChange:
And I’d like to give it to you good and hard.
I’d also like to give it to the people who thought that John McCain was the best we could do on the Republican side, and every bit as hard.
Quote of the Day
Instapundit commenting on a story where “the Tennessee Firearms Association is seeking to publicly identify each law enforcement officer and prosecutor who attended Gov. Phil Bredesen’s veto of a bill to allow people with handgun carry permits to take their weapons into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol”:
If government officials do it to citizens, it might be an effort to chill people’s speech. But when citizens do it to government officials, it’s called political accountability.
Damned straight.
Forget Glenn Greenwald,
. . . when you’ve lost Ted Rall, it’s all but over:
Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.
And remember who is next in line, anyway.
But still – WOW.