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
If you’re a journalist, want to help people and want to tell the truth, what truth are you going to tell? Why, the truth you think helps people, of course!
Technically, that’s the truth.
But it’s very different than the truth.
Barbara Oakley, Why Most Journalists are Democrats: A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches
h/t to Dr. Helen for this one – a definite must-read! And you might want to peruse my January, 2008 essay The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, too.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
I have been more than a little discouraged and disgusted with those who purport to be my fellow countrymen. Everywhere you turn it seems that there is another street-corner evangelist preaching the gospel of government control, and they always seem to have a crowd around them.
It is human nature to seek the most gain from minimum effort, and nothing can be more minimum than having someone else do it for you. These are the people who turn to Mommy Government to solve all of their ills.
In 1865 the country climbed out from under a civil war. Freed slaves reveled in new found freedom.
They soon found out, however, that freedom has its cost. Slavery is safe, because someone takes care of you. It may be only a minimum level of care, barely enough for sustenance, but it is provided to you. Food, clothing and shelter, the first three items on the hierarchy of needs, are given free of monetary cost. The only thing you pay for these things is your soul.
Freedom, however, means that you are left to fend for yourself. Being responsible for yourself means that you must provide for your own food, clothing and shelter. No one is waiting to pick you up when you fall, you live or die by your own actions and decisions. You own yourself, body and soul.
Freedom is scary.
This is why so many people opt for any kind of soft slavery rather than hard freedom.
— Last Refuge of a Scoundrel – This Time the Union Can Keep the Slaves
If ye love wealth better than liberty,
the tranquility of servitude
better than the animating contest of freedom,
go home from us in peace.
We ask not your counsels or your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.
May your chains set lightly upon you,
and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
–Samuel Adams, 1776
Today’s Quote of the Day from EarnestThing at To Which I Replied…:
Imagine waking up in a bed you didn’t want, taking a cold shower you didn’t want, driving to a job you didn’t want, in a car you didn’t want, then returning to a home you didn’t want, to a family or roommate you didn’t want, eating a dinner you didn’t want, and going back to sleep in that bed you didn’t want knowing tomorrow was going to be exactly the same.
Imagine living a life you didn’t want, without the choice to change it.
That, my supposedly well educated friend, is socialism.
“Single-Payer” Health Care from a “Primary Source“
Commenter “Grumpy Student” left the following comment to the post On Health Care. Around these parts, Grumpy Student is what’s known as a “Primary Source.” His comment is today’s Quote of the Day:
Living as (I currently do) in the UK, I find the debate about socialised healthcare in America pretty funny. Especially when the NHS (our nationalised healthcare system) is so appallingly bad. Even funnier is when the NHS is held up as some great example of how things should be done.
Some truths about the NHS:
1) If your treatment is considered “not an emergency” (by which I mean you are not gushing blood or whatever) you will go onto a very long waiting list.
2) Because of 1) the government got snappy and decided to set targets for waiting list times. Hospital managers came up with a novel solution: Secret waiting lists to get onto waiting lists. This meant they didn’t have to improve care, but the governments figures improve. Everyone who matters is happy. In the NHS, patients don’t matter.
3) Killer hospital acquired infections like MRSA are endemic in NHS hospitals.
4) NHS accountants make decisions about what treatments are worth spending money on. If the accountants decide your treatment isn’t financially worth it, tough luck. You can always go private.
5) Which brings us to private healthcare in Britain. In order to make up for their horrifyingly low salaries, most doctors also are involved in private practice. If you choose to go private, you still have to pay for the NHS. Not only are you paying for your care, but also for care other people are not really getting. It’s a fantastic system!
6) If you are struck by 4) and decide to pay for the treatment, then you are struck off the NHS with immediate effect and expected to pay for all your healthcare for issues related to the one you are paying for. You are still charged for the NHS through your taxes – you just can’t use it. If the condition you have is terminal then it’s likely that all the health issues you have will be related and you will have to pay for all of them.
These last two points conspire against the middle classes. Because taxes are so high, they can’t afford to also pay for private healthcare and so get worse healthcare than they would in the US. The poor get some healthcare which is better (I guess) and the rich can happily pay for private healthcare and the NHS at the same time. If they pay taxes in the UK at all.
7) Healthcare is not even free. I still have to pay for prescriptions, dental care, eye care and many other things that the NHS accountants have deemed non-essential.
You don’t want socialised healthcare in the US. Trust us. We live in Britain.
Of course, this wouldn’t happen here. We’d have the Right People in charge!
Quote of the Day
Anyone who is being honest recognizes the country is on a path towards a major calamity. We have been living beyond our means for decades and the fiscal mismanagement of the country will come to a dramatic climax in the next decade. What many deny is that this crisis was pre-ordained based upon a predictable timeline of generational forces repeating over and over again throughout history. The elites are continuously stunned that every 20 to 25 years a fresh mood engulfs the country and new generations act differently than the generations who proceeded them. The privileged are astounded because they don’t want to accept the fact that progress is not linear and that society will undergo highs and lows over the course of a century.
— Financial Sense Editorials, Boomers – Winter is Coming
Found at Bloodletting
Quote of the Day
Van der Leun again:
As the dew dries to crusted smegma on the Obama rose, we need to find better metaphors for the Obamallationist media that’s looking for a way to rinse the acrid taste out of their morning-after mouths.
Yes, with every passing day spin is getting more and more difficult and desperate for those that stapled their scrotums to the axles of Obama’s juggernaut.
He does “evocative imagery” well, doesn’t he?
Quote of the Day
We were young.
And we were very, very stupid for college kids. Check that. We were stupid because we were college kids.
Many of the most committed of us, decades later, are still in college and even dumber. We’re professors now and our ability to be dumb has never been deeper.
Others of us are well ensconced in the various parts of what passes for the media. We’re there with a lot of others just like us and, even if we thought differently, we’d never say it for fear of losing regard, position, grants, or promotion. Besides, we’ve been around others who think like us for so long its no problem at all to top up the latte and nod in blind agreement.
Nope, we never sold out. We bought in. But we kept the Che poster pinned up forever in our hearts.
And now, we’ve arrived at our rendezvous with history.
In our aging but fitness-crazed hearts, we hate what we’ve become and, like any good group of neurotics, transfer that hate to the country that gave us everything including the Long Peace in which to enjoy it.
We’re the first in line to bitch and moan and hate a country that makes our freedom possible. More than that we’re also in love with the privilege, comfort, money and safety that makes it possible for us to mouth off without limit. And finally, we’re coming to understand that we are not our parents’ generation, we’re “The Not-So-Great” Generation, and, like our president, deep down we’re cowards.
We say we’re ‘afraid’ of losing our cherished ‘freedom’ to the jackbooted legions of Conservative Brownshirts that might stifle our dissent from every street corner. That’s really what a lot of us think. That’s really just how bull-goose looney we’ve become.
We’re so afraid that we can’t look at what scares us but instead pull the covers over our head and dream of the ChristerBoogeymen. Why? Because they’re an illusion. They are not really scary at all. Why? Because they are all “just pretend,” and we know it. What many of us simply cannot face is the real terror of the times, terror.
We’re really afraid of the wrath of those who, unlike us who believe in nothing, believe in something so deeply that they’ll kill us for it and die doing it. The bomb in the baby carriage that’s wired to the radio. The teenager in the Army sweatshirt with three pounds of C4 wrapped inside of two pounds of ball bearings showing up at the Mall for a Big Mac Attack. The Muslim-American who decides one afternoon to park his Jeep on top of as many of our kids as he can find in a group. That guy sitting next to the window at 36,000 feet with fuses coming out of his Nikes and a t-shirt on that says, “Just Do It.” The Immam with a plan who is so tense that he decides to walk into downtown San Francisco and unwind with a small shooting spree. All these realities disturb our dreams and threaten to pull the covers off our heads. We want to elect magic soothing daddy-cools to smarm us to sleep.
As a result, we like the slogans, books, movies, TV shows, politicians and publications that confirm for us the deep liberal dream that if we are just understanding enough, long enough, apologize for living enough, and offer enough in the way of bribes, the oppressed of the world will come to love us… and then just leave us alone.
— Gerard Van Der Leun, American Digest: Goodbye to the Way We Were
(R)eading and understanding are two different things. Good reading is the fluent and effortless cracking of the symbol-sound code which puts understanding within easy reach. Understanding is the translation of that code into meaning.
It is for many people a natural and fairly harmless mistake. Since they read for meaning, the code-cracking step is forgotten. Forgotten, that is, by those who read well. For others, self-disgust and despair engendered by halting progress in decoding sounds sets into play a fatal chain of circumstances which endangers the relationship to print for a long time, sometimes wrecking it forever. If decoding is a painful effort, filled with frustrating errors, finally a point is reached when the reader says, in effect, to the devil with it.Another piece of dangerous philosophy is concealed inside whole-word practice—the notion that a piece of writing is only an orange one squeezes in order to extract something called meaning, some bit of data. The sheer luxury of putting your mind in contact with the greatest minds of history across time and space, feeling the rhythm of their thought, the sallies and retreats, the marshaling of evidence, the admixture of humor or beauty of observation and many more attributes of the power and value language possesses, has something in common with being coached by Bill Walsh in football or Toscanini in orchestra conducting. How these men say what they say is as important as the translating their words into your own. The music of language is what poetry and much rhetoric are about, the literal meaning often secondary. Powerful speech depends on this understanding.— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Quote of the Day
Thirty-two people were murdered and more wounded by one s.o.b. at Virginia Tech, because of the hundreds of people who saw Seung-Ho Cho walk by them no one, not one, fought back.
Holing up in the room waiting for the door to be kicked in so you can stand unarmed between a gunman and your family is a senseless and cowardly way to die. Frankly. It is pathetic that your entire life (and that of your family) led up to the moment of being slaughtered because you (and they) did nothing to prevent it.
I would rather my life end in a fight in the hall or doorway with an empty and dented fire extinguisher than found in pieces on a blood smattered hotel wall and bed with my wife, while the gunman walked to the next room and did it again.
— Straight Forward in a Crooked World, Dark Arts for Good Guys Series: Fight & Flight, Pt. II