The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
A leading Republican, who was in Congress for more than 10 years, answered my question: “Who can beat Obama?” with a casual, “a mammal”. Then he added sadly: “But they are all reptiles.” — Mark Mardell, BBC North American Editor, “Are the Republican candidates all crazy?”
Pithy.
And read this associated QotD from July of 2010.
More disturbing, I think, is the extent to which America has suffered not a failure of the elites, but a failure of the people. Do we measure up to the founders of this country? The fact that Americans fought a revolution against Britain in the first place continues to astonish me. When in all of history have prosperous men with property — farms and businesses — risked their lives and fortunes to establish a better political order? Only a spiritual grandeur of a depth we barely can imagine today can explain it. When in all of history has a country gone to war and sacrificed a 5% of its total population to suppress slavery? The evangelical zeal that sent the North to war, singing of the grapes of wrath in the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 63, surpasses our understanding today. — David P. Goldman, Has the Conservative Elite Really Failed?
A failure I blame on public education.
What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice. — Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts
From The Corruption of America, linked yesterday:
What gives me confidence for the future? Gun sales, for one thing. U.S. citizens legally own around 270 million firearms – about 88 guns per 100 citizens (including children) today.That’s a hard population to police without its consent. America is the No. 1 country in the world as ranked by the number of guns per-capita. That plays a major factor in the kind of government you will see take root in America. Things might go too far in this country for a while… And I’d argue they’ve been going the wrong way for too long. But the government can only take things so far before they’ll be faced with a very angry, well-armed opposition.If the government attempts to take our guns… my opinion would change immediately. But that’s one right the Supreme Court has been strengthening recently. It gives me hope that most people in America still understand that the right to bear arms has little to do with protecting ourselves from crime and everything to do with protecting ourselves from government…
RTWT. I mean it.
I’ve begun reading Thomas Sowell’s Dismantling America, a collection of his short pieces. I just finished “What are they Buying?” and wanted to share it with you. Here it is in video. It’s absolutely worth your 4:45.
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
Pullquote:
What are the Beltway politicians buying with all the hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending? They are buying what politicians are most interested in — power.
If you’re running an Apple product, the YouTube link is: http://youtu.be/8GWtJcPjxvE
…no matter how highbrow your tastes, sometimes you need to just shut up and eat your awesome. — Tam, I’m impressed.
From her review of Larry Correia’s Hard Magic and Spellbound. Good advice for all occasions, though. (How does she do that?)
If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell
From Thomas Sowell: Peerless Nerd in the December issue of Commentary magazine. By all means, read the whole thing.
Another excerpt from the article, and an example of what the QotW is talking about:
(A)s Sowell reminds us, reality is not optional; facts must be accounted for. It is not as though he is in possession of secret, arcane knowledge. For instance, these facts are easily documented: Gun-control laws began to be passed during times when crime was declining, rather than climbing. Crime began climbing after gun-control laws were passed. Places with very strict gun-control laws typically have more crime than do places without them—a fact that holds true between countries and between regions of the United States. There is little or no relationship between the rigorousness of gun-control laws and criminals’ access to guns. Many countries have lots of guns but relatively few murders, while others have few guns but relatively many murders. Swimming pools kill many more people in accidents than guns do. You do not have to be a great scholar to look at those facts and ask: What is the point of gun-control laws?
ETA: Dr. Sowell put in another appearance on Uncommon Knowledge back in October. He discusses his latest book, The Thomas Sowell Reader, the subject of the Commentary piece. You can watch it here.
Why is it that you have to take a series of tests to drive a car, but there is NO testing requirement to drive a government, which is far more dangerous? — Historian
From the comment thread to Edumacation, We Don’t Haz It.
Another one from Tam:
Look, without getting into my usual rants about public education (in which I point out that the adjective “public” modifies the noun “school” the same way it does “transportation” or “restroom”: serving as a warning that it is filthy and full of junkies and criminals,) can we agree that the school board has larger fish to fry than this minnow? After all, what good does it do to be able to laboriously copy out “See Spot run” in the most elegant of scripts if you haven’t successfully been taught to read it in the first place?
UPDATE: This one from Tam is better, and would have won had I seen it first:
Central governments have managed to turn murder from a hobby pursued at home by individual craftsmen into a wholesale industry churning out slipshod and substandard corpses in numbers that can’t be read without sounding like Carl Sagan.
It’s connection to education? We should learn from our past.
I remember when “Insane Clown Posse” was just the name of a band, and not a description of our political class.