Myrhaf

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog At the same time Obama gives a speech in which he whines that his patriotism has been questioned, he sends General Wesley Clark out to question McCain's military service. It's not the first attack on McCain's service: Democrats have belittled it on several occasions now. In May, it was Bill Gillespie, another Obama backer in Georgia and a candidate for the House. In the same month, Senator Tom Harkin questioned McCain’s mental state for having willingly served in the military. In April, Jay Rockefeller accused McCain of being more or less a coward for being a military pilot, and again in May the New York Times quoted unnamed Senate colleagues of McCain suggesting that he didn’t understand the Vietnam War because he didn’t fight on the ground and spent most of it lounging around Hanoi in a POW camp. Whoever is behind this strategy, it is idiotic and will backfire. Bringing up McCain's service at all makes Obama look bad. I'm sure I'm not the only American who has thought, "Who the hell is this leftist sissy to send out surrogates to attack McCain's military service?" Is partisan revenge driving this smear campaign? The Swiftboat attack on Kerry was a phenomenal success that, as much as anything, defeated Kerry. The Democrats have not forgotten it and they desperately want to do the same thing to McCain. I suppose it would be too much for them to grasp that McCain and Kerry had rather different war experiences. McCain spent six years as a POW. Kerry spent a few months in Vietnam, then came back to America to throw away his medals, lie about US atrocities and compare our fighting men to Genghis Khan. But don't question Kerry's patriotism. Sure, he made anti-American statements, but... look, just don't mention it. The rules are that any unpatriotic statements or gestures by any Democrat must not be identified. Do not say that the Emperor's dick is hanging out for all to see. If every last one of us does not evade reality, then we're "questioning patriotism," which must not be done. Obama has laid down the rules in his speech: I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign. And I will not stand idly by when I hear others question mine. He won't question the patriotism of a man who served in Vietnam and spent six years as a POW. That's awfully big of Obama. In return, any mention of the following is off limits: Obama's communist father; his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis; his terrorist friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn; his days as a "community organizer," which some define as a leftist rabble rouser; his 20-year relationship with spiritual mentor and anti-American preacher, Jeremiah Wright; his teaching the ideas of leftist radical Saul Alinski; his wife's anti-American statements; his flag pin controversy; his reluctance to hold his hand over his heart during the National Anthem. Bringing up any of these could come under heading, "questioning his patriotism." It's not a bad deal for Obama. But his high-mindedness is specious because he has questioned the patriotism of others: ...during the flag lapel pin flap, Obama said this: "A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary? "That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism." Questioning one's patriotism is a horrible smear -- unless a Democrat questions a Republican's. Then it is valid. The patriotism of leftists is questioned because they are unpatriotic. It's not like evil Republicans fabricate the issue out of thin air. If there were nothing there, the charges would not be so effective. The whole patriotism issue is based on the more fundamental issue of leftist anti-Americanism, which is based on the yet more fundamental issues of leftist anti-capitalism, which is caused by leftist altruism, statism and collectivism. These are based on the more philosophical premises of moral relativism and subjectivism. Of course, political campaigns never focus on underlying philosophy, but on relatively trivial and symbolic subjects such as flag pins. The shallowness of our political discussion works to the liberals' advantage. Obama can stop reasonable doubts about him with lines like: ...at certain times over the last sixteen months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged - at times as a result of my own carelessness, more often as a result of the desire by some to score political points and raise fears about who I am and what I stand for. Instead of having to confront difficult, legitimate questions about leftist anti-Americanism and his life-long relations with communists and other radicals, Obama can dismiss it all as the patriotism issue. What a deal! Democrats must secretly wish another Joseph McCarthy would come along so they could make it all about him and deflect criticism from their candidate altogether. **** Aside from Obama's defense of his patriotism, the rest of his speech on America is rather mediocre, welfare state boilerplate. Powerline has noted the gaffes that would make headlines if said by a Republican. After all of Obama's flip-flops and disassociating with long-time allies that become controversial, his words have little weight. The implication of the speech's title, "The America We Love," is that there is another America we do not love, one we must never forget, even when we praise our country. Moral relativism won't let leftists think of America as essentially good; it has its good and bad, and neither is more important than the other. Obama, feeling magnanimous with the Fourth of July coming, focuses for the moment on America's greatness, but also notes the bad side for all his liberal friends who are uncomfortable with all that barbaric flag waving. Obama equates patriotism with sacrifice to the state. ...the call to sacrifice for the country's greater good remains an imperative of citizenship. Sadly, in recent years, in the midst of war on two fronts, this call to service never came. After 9/11, we were asked to shop. The wealthiest among us saw their tax obligations decline, even as the costs of war continued to mount. Obama sees 9/11 as a missed opportunity to expand the power of the state at the individual's expense. The "call to sacrifice" is the call of those in power to make the people voluntarily enslave themselves to the state. Those in power have nothing to lose from this! All the statists need is for people to accept the altruist premise that selfishness is bad. 2,000 years of Christianity make this a widespread idea in the West. Obama expands on his vision of a new American slavery, a vision he shares with McCain: In spite of this absence of leadership from Washington, I have seen a new generation of Americans begin to take up the call. I meet them everywhere I go, young people involved in the project of American renewal; not only those who have signed up to fight for our country in distant lands, but those who are fighting for a better America here at home, by teaching in underserved schools, or caring for the sick in understaffed hospitals, or promoting more sustainable energy policies in their local communities. I believe one of the tasks of the next Administration is to ensure that this movement towards service grows and sustains itself in the years to come. We should expand AmeriCorps and grow the Peace Corps. We should encourage national service by making it part of the requirement for a new college assistance program... Before long, no one but the children of the very rich would be able to afford college without suffering two years of servitude to the state. This is the moral ideal that excites Obama as the nation is about to celebrate -- a holiday that originally celebrated the opposite of Obama's vision. Obama is something of an undistinguished cipher. Geraldine Ferraro, though reviled by the left, was right when she stated the obvious fact that he got the nomination because he is black. Ideologically, Obama is just the latest mediocre representative of the collectivist counter-revolution to the American Revolution. The American Revolution stood for the Enlightenment values of individual rights, liberty and prosperity. The counter-revolution stands for collectivism, statism and sacrifice. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Democrats struggle to unite behind their candidate. After a long primary campaign, Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee for president. The dream of America advancing to the point where it could elect the first woman president must be deferred and no one can say for how long. Women who feel they have waited a lifetime for a chance to vote for a woman for President now must wait even longer. In addition to this disappointment, there is real anger about how the campaign was conducted and covered in the media. All this acrimony over what? Obama is a black man and Clinton is a woman. This is all that has driven the division among Democrats. Ideologically, Obama and Clinton are Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Will Obama being a black man or Clinton being a woman make either one a better President? No, it has nothing to do their philosophy, their policies, their experience. Democrats have made the symbolism of nominating "the first black man" or "the first woman" more important than which candidate would actually be a better President. I have to think that if FDR or JFK were brought back to life, they would not recognize this campaign as the Democrat Party. Hubert Humphrey saw the beginnings of the New Left in the streets of Chicago in 1968. Now those rioters are the party elders. What a decline in 40 years! This is how the premise of multiculturalism distorts priorities in America. Instead of making America a color blind culture that focuses on character and ideas, it makes us an intensely racist and feminist culture. People are considered first by their race and sex, then by their character. Note that the conflict between Obama and Clinton was heated and emotional, but there was very little rational argumentation of ideas be both sides. All Clinton had was mud to throw, and she threw a dump truck full. At one point she even called herself the candidate for white people, a statement that would have ended any Republican's career. Obama threw some mud back, but being in the lead he was able to take the high road and play Messiah to the masses. How much can reason do in multiculturalist conflict? When people take sides because of biology instead of ideas, there's no point in arguing. Only force can decide such a dispute. Allegiance to blood leads to blood on the streets. The conflict between Obama and Clinton was not violent -- it descended only to the level of smears and demagoguery -- but it portends a bleak future. Multiculturalism can only lead to violence and hatred as various ethnic pressure groups fight for their turf in the welfare state. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Scott Powell considers voting neither for Obama nor McCain this November: Like so many people, I have thought over the coming election and studied the field of candidates. As a result of my analysis of the coming vote and especially of its historical significance, I have tentatively switched to the “None of the Above” camp. Judging from the comments to Powell's post, abstention might be a popular choice among Objectivists this year. Obama is the farthest left candidate in American history. McCain is a "national greatness" conservative who consistently sneers at the pursuit of profit and believes the state's role is to direct the people in sacrificing for something greater than themselves. Hitler and Stalin would have approved of McCain. (John Stossel looks at McCain's latest ignorant statement: "I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators to find out whether speculation has been going on and, if so, how much it has affected the price of a barrel of oil. There's a lot of things out there that need a lot more transparency and, consequently, oversight.") For many who have been voting for the lesser of two evils all their life, this choice is just too much evil to suffer. The way to abstain, for those who decide that way, is to take the time to go vote, but don't vote for President. Then one's non-vote shows up in the numbers. If this caught on, it could make a powerful statement. Imagine news reports that began, "Two million voters were so dissatisfied with the candidates that they did not vote for any of them." (Well, you wouldn't read this in the New York Times because it makes the Democrat look bad.) It's too early to decide how to vote yet. We still have the conventions and the VP picks. The campaigns don't really get serious until Labor Day. At this point I have reservations about abstention. It reeks of agnosticism. In metaphysics the agnostics refuse to take a side on the existence of God. Despite the lack of evidence for the existence of any supernatural being, which makes the idea arbitrary, the agnostic can't make up his mind either way. Like the political moderate, the agnostic thinks the superior choice is to take no choice and look down on those who do as unenlightened fools determined by their passions. Agnosticism is fundamentally subjectivism, which makes it very modern indeed. Beneath all the condescension and logical fallacies of the agnostic lies cowardice. The agnostic is afraid to take a stand. If one of the candidates will be worse for America, should one not vote for the other guy, however bad he is? My thinking is that McCain will be worse because he will be more effective in power. The Republicans in Congress would go along with whatever he wants, whereas they would make Obama's life hell every step of the way, just as they did to Clinton. The Democrats in Congress would only fight McCain on foreign policy. What if, because I wanted to feel good about myself by not stooping to vote for either candidate, McCain was elected and then he instituted a national service program in which every young person was forced to serve the state for two years of his life? How would I feel then about not soiling myself with a vote against this monstrous Republican? By this reasoning, I should wear a gas mask and vote for... Obama. Ugh. Have you read about this guy? He is the purest demagogue to be nominated by a major party in my lifetime. He seems to bask in the adoration of mass crowds like an American Mussolini. Watching him turns my stomach. How can I vote for someone with a radical Marxist background who at the same time seems to have no principles but like Peter Keating will say what people want to hear? The more I think about Obama, the more attractive abstention looks. My thinking at present is full of confusion. The fact that this decision is agonizing to individualists and lovers of freedom says something about the decline of America. We're worse off than we were 20 years ago. A lot worse off. Given my confusion, it's probably best that I have not yet made up my mind. But the time to decide will come soon enough. UPDATE: Literatrix agrees with Scott Powell. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Back in the 1990's I had an argument with a coworker about the price of computers. I had just paid something like $3,000 for my computer, monitor and printer. I argued that the price would come down dramatically in the coming years. My coworker scoffed because, you see, the corporations would never allow the price to go down because they're greedy. It is true that they are greedy, and there is nothing wrong with that. IBM wants to make every penny of profit it can; that is their purpose as a business. Unfortunately, Dell, Compaq, Apple and a host of other computer manufacturers also want to make a profit. Each manufacturer will do what it can to win market share from its competitors, such as undercutting their price. Prices always come down in a free market. At first only the rich can afford new gadgets. The first transistor radio was $150. The first ball-point pen was $25. This was back when $150 was real money. The profits from all those disgusting rich people engaging in an orgy of conspicuous consumption and "keeping up with the Joneses" was reinvested into the production of more radios and pens. Production became more efficient and the price plummeted. Now you can buy cheap pens for pennies. Moog Music has just released a new guitar that has infinite sustain. You can check out their http://youtube.com/watch?v=b3SsYQrgcyA. The price? $6,495. Lou Reed can afford one, but most people will pass. The price will come down big time, especially when other guitar makers produce guitars that do the same thing but don't have the prestigious Moog name attached. Pretty soon any garage band will have a guitar with infinite sustain if they want it. I bring this up because I see today that Dell has a desktop that starts at $269; IBM's start at $409. You can get the whole set-up with monitor and printer for well under $1,000 with a processor and hard drive memory that make what I bought in the '90s look like a Model T. (To carry this analogy farther, the electric typewriter is the horse and buggy.) When you consider that inflation has devalued the dollar at least by half in the last 10 years, not to mention all the other economic distortions caused by government intervention in the economy, it's clear that I won the argument. Some people might object that this economic principle does not apply to gas. The price of gas is artificially high because of government intervention. Factor in inflation and take away all taxes and the price goes way down. Another complication is the restriction on production caused by the environmentalist movement. As I recall reading, there have been no new refineries built in the USA in the last 30 years. The environmentalists are capitalism's (and freedom's) greatest enemy because they don't want prosperity, they want deprivation. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog During this blog's hiatus in 2006 I posted a review of Talledega Nights on my myspace page. I look at that page infrequently these days. I don't understand the attraction of myspace. There is no intellectual stimulation; it's just people asking other people to be their friends. It's like a cyberspace cocktail party without any witty banter -- a party full of people who say "dude" and "LOL." I'm surprised when I hear people say they spend hours on myspace. Doing what? I hate to sound elitist, but the overwhelming popularity of mindless pursuits such as myspace unsettles me. I mean -- these people are voting. Ben Franklin, when asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention would give the nation, replied, "A republic -- if you can keep it." How can we keep it with an ignorant, intellectually lazy populace? People with passive minds are susceptible to the emotional appeals of any cheap demagogue, such as one who promises nothing specific but "change we can believe in." But I digress. I just reread that review of Talledega Nights; it makes an argument I have not read elsewhere, so here it is reposted in its entirety. **** Talledega Nights Talledega Nights is a funny, absurd comedy that is ruined because the movie romanticizes the hero and makes him learn something at the end. The arrogant Ricky Bobby learns humility and the movie becomes a tedious bowl of mush. An unrealistic comedy about fools is more interesting and honest if it refrains from making its cads and morons better people at the end. The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Beavis and Butthead and Dumb and Dumber leave their idiots as idiots and that is the right way to do outrageous comedy. An actor as homely and goofy as Will Ferrell should not try to be Cary Grant in a romantic comedy. Why does Hollywood insist on destroying the integrity of its comedies by giving their morons a character arc? Several reasons I can think of. First, when you go the idiot-stays-an-idiot route, you lose the women in the audience. Women don't like the Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy; these characters exist in a permanent boyhood without romantic interest. Women like grown up men who have sex and fall in love and get married. Second, star comic actors are rarely content to remain idiots. They all yearn to show off their serious and romantic sides. Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and now Will Ferrell all make boring movies because they try to be leading men. They should remain the Fool to Robert de Niro's King Lear, instead of trying be King Lear. Steve Martin has never been as funny as he was in his first movie, The Jerk. You watch him in a depressing, naturalistic bomb like Pennies From Heaven and wonder what the hell he's thinking. Doubtless, the early deaths of John Belushi, John Candy and Chris Farley spared us heartbreaking dramas of misunderstood fat guys. Imagine if Moe of the Three Stooges had said one day, "I want to make something serious and meaningful." He'd have been laughed off the studio lot. Today, no one dares tell a Steve Martin or Jim Carrey that serious and meaningful is not such a good idea. Actors hate my point of view. They don't want to be stereotyped. Doing both comedy and tragedy is fine if an actor can pull it off; Jack Lemmon did. But most of today's comic actors come from sketch comedy and stand-up. They spend their youths being funny, they train being funny and they gain success being funny. It takes an extraordinary comedian who also has acting talent and romantic charisma to be able to act serious. Most of them are just not that interesting when they get away from funny. Finally, you have producers with their vapid ideas of what a movie should be. They force creators to romanticize their idiots: give them a love interest, a character arc, redemption, a happy ending. Hollywood's precepts suck the life out of comedy and turn it into predictable swill. Mind you, I'm not opposed to romantic comedy. I love it! But it has to make sense. If your hero is Butthead for 85 minutes, I don't buy him becoming Jimmy Stewart for the last five minutes of the movie just to satisfy Hollywood's template for successful box office. The more outrageous a comedy is, the less I buy a realistic character change. Talledega Nights wants to be both outrageous and have a realistic character change. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog You can't fake who you are on TV. Especially if you're on week after week for decades, the real you comes out. Tim Russert always seemed like a man without pretensions or agendas who wanted to get the truth from those in power. He would ask tough questions of those on the left and right. One got the sense that he was a man of deeply held values. He loved Buffalo, where he grew up, he loved his father, he loved the game of politics, he loved sports and he loved America. Tom Brokaw's voice betrays his emotion a few times as he announces Russert's death, but his professionalism holds the day and he does not break. It must have been a difficult task. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog 1. A woman attempts actually to teach in public schools. She fails. 2. He's apologized, but Rupert Everett's statement about today's soldiers being wimps reveals him to be a very stupid man. It's funny coming from this pansy. Famous liberal actors suffer from living in a double cocoon -- the liberal cocoon and their circle of yes-men and ass-kissers. Within that double shell their idiotic statements go unchallenged. 3. The Clinton Age is not over. The vampire is not dead until you drive a stake through his heart and the morning sun incinerates his body to ashes. Hillary Clinton will be back. 4. Life expectancy in the US continues to rise. Here are the 2006 life expectancy figures for each of those groups: White women: 81 years African-American women: 76.9 years White men: 76 years African-American men: 70 years Can we conclude from this that social security, in part, is a system in which African-American men subsidize white women? 5. This is dumbfounding: "Should Congress quit funding for Public Television and NPR, Public Radio?" A man named Richard Guess from someplace called Charlestown says, "Congress should continue paying for it because if they don't, the taxpayers will end up paying for it." O.M.G. 6. Edward Cline examines Barack Obama in depth. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog George W. Bush misunderstands himself: President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq.... In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.” Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.” Bush has it completely wrong. His warlike statements showed the world America's moral purpose. Along with his tax cuts they are the best thing he did in his eight years in office. Those who mistook Bush as a "guy really anxious for war" would have thought ill of him no matter what he said. Those people oppose any assertion of America's national self-interest. This is another example of the worst side of George Bush: his lack of intelligence. He picked up on the American sense of life in response to 9/11 and made some good statements at that time -- but he never intellectually understood what he was doing. Now he misunderstands -- and misunderestimates -- himself. Worse, he is going out as an appeaser and will do damage to American foreign policy through his ignorance. ...He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran. ... The unilateralism that marked his first White House term has been replaced by an enthusiasm for tough multilateralism. He said that his focus for his final six months in office was to secure agreement on issues such as establishing a Palestinian state and to “leave behind a series of structures that makes it easier for the next president”. Sounds to me like a total collapse to whatever the liberal State Department wants. Thus does eight years of the bumbling Bush administration end. It was a time of holding action, a prelude to something far worse to come. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I first heard the name Rush Limbaugh when a friend of mine told me I should listen to him because, "he sounds like you." That piqued my interest. I found Rush on the AM dial. This was during the George Herbert Walker Bush presidency. This was before my nephew, who graduates high school this month, was born. What a breath of fresh air Rush was! I had never heard anyone on the radio praise free markets and liberty. I had never heard a broadcaster expose liberals as the socialists they are. After getting the liberal point of view from the mainstream media all my life, Rush felt like a long overdue voice of justice. Finally, someone rose up to point out the emperor wore no clothes. It is only a slight exaggeration to mark my reaction as, "You can say this stuff on the radio?" And this was not "Crossfire" or some other cable TV argument show in which pundits have 10 seconds to condense an argument into a sound bite. As Bill Clinton would later complain, Rush had three hours unopposed every weekday. Rush has never been perfect. He is just a conservative. He believes in God. Once he attempted to prove the existence of God by asking, "Where is the universe?" Stick to liberals, Rush. Don't do metaphysics. Rush's conservatism has always undermined his message of freedom and individualism. He is incapable of defending his politics with a moral argument, as the altruist morality of his religion contradicts the individualism of his politics. In the end, conservatism keeps him rather shallow. You will never hear philosophical depth from Rush Limbaugh (except the occasional embarrassing foray into religious metaphysics as noted above). I remember when Clinton was elected a liberal caller taunted Rush, saying that Rush's show was finished now and Rush would have nothing to talk about. Quite the contrary, Bill Clinton was the greatest gift right-wing talk radio ever got. Bill Clinton was a President who thrilled in trying to get away with minor corruptions. Right-wing radio was a medium dedicated to not letting Clinton get away with anything. The conflict was some of the best radio in history. The circus of politics was the best show in America. Rush Limbaugh was hurt, not by the election of Clinton, but by the election of George W. Bush. As Bush led the Republicans in the embrace of big government and liberalism, Rush lost his edge. As he admitted after the 2006 election, he was carrying the water of Republicans who didn't deserve it. Just today on his show he brought up that statement about carrying water as he talked about his not supporting John McCain. If his support for Republicans is now guarded, his attacks on Democrats continues unfazed. But isn't this a contradiction? What is the point of attacking one faction when those attacks help another faction that you no longer support? What was the point of Operation Chaos? Rush urged voters to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to draw out the Democrats' agony of not having a presidential nominee. The Democrats were hurt by Operation Chaos, but who was helped? John McCain, the Republican that Rush refuses to endorse. Rush was helping a big government Republican with whom he disagrees. We're not talking about a purely ideological attack on liberals in the name of conservatism. There was nothing ideological about it. Operation Chaos was all about partisan politics. It was about Democrats vs. Republicans. Despite his protests to the contrary, Rush carried John McCain's water. This is not the first time Rush has been caught in a contradiction. Usually, he wiggles out by playing the satirist card -- the "I was just joking" move beloved by weasels everywhere. Whether or not Operation Chaos was a big joke that no one got, it hurt the Democrats and helped the Republicans. Conservatives like Rush don't seem to understand the way welfare state politics play out. The welfare state turns the two parties into coalitions of pressure groups. Neither party fights for liberty; both parties fight over the loot stolen from the producers of wealth. Rush's commentary has ossified into shtick; he still attacks the Democrats as if they were the greater threat to freedom. Meanwhile, Bush has bloated the government to a $3 trillion budget and expanded regulations in countless ways. He increased steel tariffs, bloated the Department of Education (that conservatives once advocated eliminating), passed the Prescription Drug bill that is the biggest advance in the welfare state since LBJ and outlawed the incandescent light bulb. The inflation we will suffer for years to come is all Bush's fault. One might object that a show about expanding government and diminishing freedom would lead a host into wonk territory. It would be boring radio. I think it can be made interesting, but it would take someone who can first show listeners why individual rights are important and why government intervention in the economy violates those rights. It would take a lot more work than skimming the internet to amass a stack of stuff about the Democrats' latest absurdities. It would take an understanding of philosophy and economics that Rush Limbaugh, who learned what he knows from National Review, never had. It would take a host who can show what lovers of liberty are fighting for, not just the idiocy they are against. Philosophic and economic education are desperately needed in an America whose government schools indoctrinate children in New Leftist morality and acceptance of the welfare state. Specifically, America needs the spread of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. It would be nice if the powerful medium of syndicated radio were tapped for that purpose. We're waiting for the genius to come along who can put it all together. (More on talk radio here and here.) View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I'm reading Louis XI: The Universal Spider by Paul Murray Kendall, which seems to be the only book in English on this king. The 15th century struck me as a fertile background for romantic drama. It has colorful figures such as Joan of Arc and Francois Villon. The period is late middle ages, with lots of intrigue among many factions. At this time local dukes and barons and so on had a lot of power. The Duke of Burgundy was actually more powerful than the King of France. Louis XI in effect ended the middle ages by consolidating royal power and creating the modern nation-state with centralized power. Doubtless this is enough to make him a great villain to anarchists and libertarians. But what better provides justice, peace and liberty, feudalism or the nation-state? Doesn't the market work more efficiently among nation-states than among a crazy quilt of duchies and fiefdoms? Louis kept his tenuous hold on power through a network of spies, thus his nickname "The Universal Spider." This spider sat at the center of his web and knew everything that was happening not only in France but in England, Italy and elsewhere. This raises the question: can good come through evil means? Or does a good end make all means good? If the USA tortures to defend its freedom, does that make torture good? There is a difference between murder and killing in self-defense, right? Purpose determines whether an action is good or bad. I have long maintained that all historical dramas set in pre-capitalist times are fantasies. They might not have overt fantasy elements, but these stories have little to do with the reality of pre-capitalist life. The brutality and deprivation of life back then is so disturbing and alienating that a realistic portayal would detract from anything I, for one, would want to write. Historical dramas are greatly romanticized. Just to give a few examples of the brutality, Louis was once so outraged by the report of a messenger that he wanted the poor fellow tied in a sack and thrown in a river. He was talked out of it and the messenger merely spent months in a dungeon. When young Louis led a band of freebooters looting Alsace -- an act that rocked all of Europe and made everyone take note of this new force on the scene -- the freebooters liked to stuff a peasant in a chicken coop then rape his wife on top of the coop. Ghastly stuff. That the freebooters would get their kicks from this is evidence of how living in a "might makes right" culture perverts a man's psychology. Louis was not all bad. He was on the side of the towns people and the merchants, who looked to him for national security against the rapacious nobility. These merchants and towns people would become the great middle class of capitalism. Louis was phenomenally organized and energetic. His top value was competence; his messages are filled with commands like, "See that there are no slip-ups!" When he found a competent man he would be loyal to him even when such loyalty was not necessarily in his interest. Louis cared nothing for luxury or the rituals of state. He wore modest clothes and did almost nothing but work and hunt during his waking hours. History is for the most part the story of thievery. The Romans were glorified gangsters when it comes down to it. The Vikings were glorified pirates. Diplomacy is the polite phase of extortion and blackmail before the phase of war. It makes one appreciate all the more the thinkers and producers who somehow brought man out of this world lit only by fire. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Barack Obama revealed himself to be a second hander in an infamous statement he made on foreign policy: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said. "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added." -- Barack Obama His focus is on what other countries think of us, not on the facts of reality and how they determine what we should do. He has made another revealing statement: “I am like a Rorschach test,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.” Who would say, "I am like a Rorschach test" but someone who tries to be all things to all people? Reminds me of Bill Clinton, who had a talent for saying what the hearer wanted to hear. I wonder if this spineless desire to please all is produced by progressive education's mission of "socializing" students or if it is just an occupational hazard of politics. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog The opening chords surprise you: they sound contemporary. Bill Haley, bless him, sounds like something out of the 1940's. Even Chuck Berry, the godfather of rock guitarists, has an early sound. Bo Diddley, though -- there's no mistaking -- that's rock. He must have been the first to distort his guitar. His most famous song, "Bo Diddley," is an improbable hit; it has no bridge, no chord changes. The infectious beat drives the song from start to finish. Bo Diddley is the only rock artist I can think of who has a beat named after him. That his big hit was named after himself and he had two albums named Bo Diddley -- not to mention Bo Diddley Is a Lover, Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger, Bo Diddley's a Twister, Bo Diddley's Beach Party, Go Bo Diddley and many more -- prove him to be a master of self-promotion. Leftists might write something cynical here or excuse his blatant self-interest as what a black man had to do to succeed in a white man's world. Altruists always assume there must be something wrong with self-interest and the pursuit of profit; this keeps them at odds with capitalism -- and human nature. I prefer to think he was just cheerfully proud of who he was and he marketed the hell out of it. Bo Diddley became a brand name. That's show biz. He was an American original. (Billy Beck met him once.) UPDATE: Slight revision. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Three Novellas by Joseph Roth is fiction from a point of view I had never read before. These stories reflect the sad longing of a man in the 1930's who wished the Austro-Hungarian Empire would reform and live again. Joseph Roth (1894-1939) loved the Hapsburg Empire in which he was born and raised. In 1916 he volunteered to fight in what would later be called World War I. The war and the collapse of the Empire in 1918 had a profound effect on Roth; for the rest of his life he would think of himself as homeless. In the 1920's he made a successful career in Berlin as journalist and novelist. The rise of the Nazis forced the Jewish Roth to move to Paris in 1933. There he lost interest in living and committed slow suicide by alcohol. Perhaps dying in 1939 was not a bad time for him to go; this nineteenth century man was spared the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. In "The Bust of the Emperor," the protagonist, Count Morstin, who surely speaks for the author, rails against nationalism and nation-states. And all these people who had never been anything but Austrians, in Tarnopol, Sarajevo, Bruenn, Prague, Czernowitz, Oderburg or Troppau; all these who had never been anything but Austrian, began in accordance with the "Spirit of the Age" to look upon themselves as members of the Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Roumanian, Slovenian and Croatian "nations," and so on and so forth. It must seem reactionary from our contemporary point of view to pine for an Empire filled with officials in silly uniforms, an Empire that was a backward, atavistic remnant of the Middle Ages. And yet, I must think that something of value was also lost in the cataclysm of WWI. Both Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises wrote that it is impossible to express to people born later the benevolence and happiness of the world before WWI; I think that benevolence is really what Roth missed to the point that he no longer wished to live without it. Count Morstin notes that there were no passports before WWI. Think of that -- a world without passports! No two-bit martinets demanding, "Papiere, bitte." It was also a world without major wars and without inflation. How is that worse than the totalitarianism that followed? How is that worse than Europe today with its vast welfare states and advancing dhimmitude? Many readers will not like these three naturalistic stories -- "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster," "The Bust of the Emperor," and "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" -- about Austrians who, like their author, are out of step with the world and not entirely in touch with reality. The mysticism in these stories is not surprising, given that the author was an alcoholic who had given up on living in this world. The heroes are not terribly heroic -- they are quixotic, almost comic men who cannot succeed in reality -- but they are all unwaveringly loyal to their ideals. I found their loyalty to their values quite moving, if sad and pathetic. UPDATE: Corrected the German phrase, as per Wolfgang's comment. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog In Barack Obama's Wesleyan Commencement Address he urges students to dedicate their lives to service to others rather than the pursuit of money. Obama equates altruism and collectivism with Americanism: You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should by. You can choose to narrow your concerns and live your life in a way that tries to keep your story separate from America’s. Obama doesn't seem to understand that individualism and the rational self-interest of our "money culture" are expressed in America's founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. He has it backward. America's prosperity and liberty depend on individual prosperity and individual liberty. Why does the poorest American today have luxuries that kings did not have 100 years ago? Because Americans have been free to pursue their greed in a free market. Because rapacious capitalists have made billions of dollars in profits that Obama considers obscene and thinks should be taken from them. Battalions of social workers wiping babies' butts in ghettoes will not create an ounce of wealth that can be invested in our future and make us more prosperous. New cures for diseases, new drugs, life extension, higher quality of life -- all of these things and many more depend on capital savings invested by individual capitalists. All the state can do -- if it tries to do more than protect and defend individual rights -- is interfere with that process. When the state interferes with the economy it only destroys; it destroys wealth and it destroys our future. But then, Obama probably does not equate prosperity with our "collective salvation." Maybe he thinks we would be better off spiritually if we were all wallowing in mud in an orgy of mutual self-sacrifice. You don’t have to be a community organizer or do something crazy like run for President. Doesn't that just make you want to throw up? Yes, Obama is merely doing his community service by attempting to gain power over America and enslave us all to his vision of collectivism and altruism. You so crazy, Obama! I ask you to seek these opportunities when you leave here, because the future of this country – your future – depends on it. At a time when our security and moral standing depend on winning hearts and minds in the forgotten corners of this world, we need more of you to serve abroad. As President, I intend to grow the Foreign Service, double the Peace Corps over the next few years, and engage the young people of other nations in similar programs, so that we work side by side to take on the common challenges that confront all humanity. Our moral standing does not depend on America sacrificing more for the socialist hell-holes of the world in make work programs like the Peace Corps that serve only to allow altruist young Americans to strut around in moral exhibitionism. Those forgotten corners of the world that think America is in low moral standing do not understand American liberty and capitalism -- and neither does Barack Obama, who might spend the next four years working to destroy it from the Oval Office. At a time when our ice caps are melting and our oceans are rising, we need you to help lead a green revolution. We still have time to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change if we get serious about investing in renewable sources of energy, and if we get a generation of volunteers to work on renewable energy projects, and teach folks about conservation, and help clean up polluted areas; if we send talented engineers and scientists abroad to help developing countries promote clean energy. The man is ready to enchain our economy for a fantasy. At a time when a child in Boston must compete with children in Beijing and Bangalore, we need an army of you to become teachers and principals in schools that this nation cannot afford to give up on. I will pay our educators what they deserve, and give them more support, but I will also ask more of them to be mentors to other teachers, and serve in high-need schools and high-need subject areas like math and science. He plans to turn American education into another welfare state scheme of redistributing wealth. On the big issues that our nation faces, difficult choices await. We’ll have to face some hard truths, and some sacrifice will be required – not only from you individually, but from the nation as a whole. Ever notice how power-lusters are always willing to make the rest of us sacrifice? We're all just insignificant parts of Obama's excellent community service adventure; we exist only so he can dictate how we will all suffer and then preen about his altruist morality. You know, Ted Kennedy often tells a story about the fifth anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps. He was there, and he asked one of the young Americans why he had chosen to volunteer. And the man replied, “Because it was the first time someone asked me to do something for my country.” I don’t know how many of you have been asked that question, but after today, you have no excuses. I am asking you, and if I should have the honor of serving this nation as President, I will be asking again in the coming years. How do you "ask" something with a gun in your hand? That's like the Godfather saying, "I'm asking you to do me a favor." You can do what he asks or you can end up at the bottom of the East River. The whole apparatus and propaganda of the welfare state serve only to obfuscate the common denominator between the Godfather and Barack Obama. If Obama becomes President, we will be electing a mediocrity who is too goddamned stupid to understand that you cannot make America better by violating individual rights. All Obama can do with his altruist-statist-collectivist premises is make America less free, less prosperous, less happy and less successful. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will all suffer at the dictates of a two-bit, sanctimonious, dull-witted social worker. Obama will leave America mired in cynicism, bitterness and despair because statism does not work. And he will do it all while orating insufferable banalities about service to the collective. If McCain is elected, we will be electing the same ignoramus. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Charles Krauthammer has an entertaining piece on "Obama's Growing Gaffe." Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace." After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity. It is an absurdity, but it should be remembered that Obama's statement is not a true gaffe, such as Al Gore's saying a leopard cannot change its stripes. (For you young people still serving out your sentence in public schools, leopards have spots, not stripes.) Obama's pro-appeasement statements accurately reflect his far leftist ideas. In the liberal cocoon he inhabited before running for President, nothing Obama has said is controversial. More recently, In a speech to Israeli lawmakers this morning, President Bush suggested that statements from Democrats –including Barack Obama – about reaching out to America’s enemies were akin to appeasement of Hitler ahead of World War II. This drew a quick reaction from the Obama camp. Bush said: “The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. .. Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” Obama's immediate reaction, "He's talking about me!" reminds me of this passage from Shakespeare's 12th Night, or What You Will: MALVOLIO: 'Besides, you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish knight,'-- SIR ANDREW: That's me, I warrant you. MALVOLIO: 'One Sir Andrew,'-- SIR ANDREW: I knew 'twas I; for many do call me fool. Sir Andrew is a comic character, so addled-brained that he is almost retarded. Obama is an American politician. Since the McGovern rout Democrats have approached the Presidency by hiding their far leftist ideas, especially on foreign policy. They ride tanks and wear flag pins, hoping to fool voters into thinking they're as strong on defense as voters mistakenly think Republicans are. Obama is something new. He "missed the memo," as the current phrase goes. His sincerity has helped him among his base and young people. He exudes idealism and morality. No more of that cynical, Clintonian triangulation for Obama! His speeches induce swooning among Democrats. They haven't tasted this wine since the days of Camelot with JFK. But more discerning and intelligent people find Obama surprisingly naive. Over and over, in blogs and comment sections of those who support free markets and individual rights, people have written something like "He really means it!" For all of this, we should not be lulled into thinking Obama is without Machiavellian duplicity in the pursuit of power. Take this disturbing news: His mild-mannered style has thrown off even some angry black radicals, who want him to speak out more forcefully about the legacy of U.S. racism and economic inequality. One is Princeton professor Cornel West, a militant black and self-described socialist. Reportedly, West was reluctant to join the refined Obama's presidential campaign until Obama took him aside and explained to him that he had to walk a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites. West is now solidly on board his campaign as an adviser. (HT: Kriegsgefahrzustand) If this is true, then as far left as Obama has been in his statements, he could go even farther were he not walking "a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites." All his life Obama has been deeply cloistered in the liberal cocoon. His father was a communist, so hardline that he sneered at communists who compromised Marxist principles to make them practical in this world. His preacher and mentor is a radical who believes in "black liberation theology." His wife is an ardent collectivist and typical anti-American leftist. A life in the cocoon has left Obama out of touch with reality. The 20th century is one big laboratory experiment demonstrating the failure of socialism; Obama does not seem to have noticed. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog George Packer has written a long essay in the New Yorker called, "The Fall of Conservatism." Dan Flynn has written a post on Packer's essay. AmSpecBlog has some interesting posts on the essay here, here, here, here and here. To sum up the essay up briefly, Packer concludes correctly that conservatism has failed, then talks to big government conservatives like David Brooks and David Frum, who suggest that the solution is for conservatives to embrace big government. Although it is predictable that Packer, a liberal, thinks the right should become more liberal, the essay is interesting for being packed with information about the last 40 years of politics. One thing I must object to is the idea that Nixon won over Democrat voters because he... ...adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few. I have read elsewhere the notion that the Republicans appealed to racism and other dark passions to steal voters from the Democrats. Nixon certainly worked hard to get Democrat votes, but even if the Republicans had not noticed that there were Democrats out there for them to steal, the Democrat Party would have lost those voters anyway. The Republicans did not so much win those voters as the Democrats lost them when they became a party of New Leftists. No way culturally conservative, pro-American voters would stay in a party that moved away from them. The real "dark side" that pieces such as Packer's never mention is the darkness of collectivism and statism adopted by the Democrat Party. I must also object to the ever-appalling David Brooks, who calls small government conservatives "un-American." As Philip Klein responds, But conservatives believe in limiting the size and scope of government not because of some random whim, but because it is a necessary way of preserving liberty. Unlike anarchists, we believe that government is necessary to protect individual rights -- through a police force that catches criminals, a court system that prosecutes them and settles disputes among individuals, and a military that protects us from foreign threats. Far from being "fundamentally un-American," these are precisely the principles on which the nation was founded. The Declaration of Independence reads that "governments are instituted among men" to "secure" our unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit --not attainment -- of happiness. The U.S. Constitution also envisioned a federal government of limited scope. The welfare state that Brooks supports came from Bismarck's Germany. Bizarre, isn't it, that he sees this foreign import as the essence of Americanism? Of course, neither Packer nor his conservative critics get close to the fundamental reason for the failure of conservatism: the political movement has been undercut from the beginning by the ethics of altruism. Capitalism cannot be defended by an ethics of sacrifice, only by an ethics of rational self-interest. Conservatism was doomed when Buckley made religion an integral aspect of the movement. One of the key moments of the last 40 years, the government shutdown of 1995, is a perfect example of how conservative politics are undermined by altruist ethics. The Democrats stood firm with moral righteousness -- because they knew the morality of altruism that they shared with the Republicans was on their side. Once the TV networks started showing sob stories of government workers not getting their paychecks, the Republicans collapsed like a cheap lawn chair. After '95 came the defeat of Bob Dole in 1996. In 1997 Brooks wrote his first piece on "National Greatness Conservatism." The fight was over. The idea of limited government had lost. Where does the fall of conservatism leave America? It leaves us waiting for next crisis. How we respond will determine our course into the 21st century. As Mises has written, crises caused by government intervention in the economy tend to lead to further intervention and eventually dictatorship. Hayek called it the road to serfdom. I don't want things to get worse, but I expect they will. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Although it is old news now, I have a question inspired by that special congressional election in Mississippi that was the third special election in a row won by a Democrat. Does not the unpopularity of Republicans show what a disaster George Bush's policies (supposedly thought up by Karl Rove) have been? Bush let Kennedy write the education bill; he passed the prescription drug bill, the biggest welfare state handout since Johnson's Great Society; he expanded government regulations, such as outlawing the incandescent light bulb; he increased steel tariffs; he sent spending through the roof. The theory behind all this is the very old mixed economy program of spending money to buy votes from various pressure groups. You might call it the Republican version of Clinton's "triangulation," or defeating the enemy by joining it. What has this orgy of big government bought Bush and the Republicans? Bush is now hated by both the left and the right. Bush could have spared us the massive explosion in spending and regulations -- and who knows, he might have ended up more popular than he is today. I think even many Republicans will agree that Bush's presidency must count as a failure and a tremendous waste of treasure. His is not the template for future Republican presidents. When a party spends money to buy votes, the least it should get is more votes. If they're too incompetent to get even that, then they deserve to lose. (So much for the myth of Karl Rove's genius.) So why did Bush pursue a program so damaging to the Republican Party? Because it is a program of altruism. Bush, a committed Christian, thought all that government spending was the right thing to do. Bush was not primarily motivated by partisan advantage, but by morality. When people pursue their morality, they will follow it even it ends up destroying them. This brings us to the lingering war, a huge factor in Bush's unpopularity. It took us four years to defeat the Germans and Japanese in WWII. Seven years after 9/11 we are still mired in the Middle East, as taxpayer money and military lives go to bring a state of semi-freedom to Muslims who have never known freedom. We are establishing a program of permanent American sacrifice in the Middle East because we no longer have the confidence and boldness to wage a serious war to destroy our enemies. Politicians tend to take the easy way out instead of showing leadership and taking risks. It might be hard to understand at first, but Bush's war policy is the pragmatic, easy way out. Waging serious war in America's self-interest would incur the wrath of the world, the intellectuals, the media and the State Department. It would take a President with a spine of titanium to stand up to all that altruist opprobrium. More precisely, it would take a President with a philosophic understanding that America has the right to defend itself and to demolish its enemies. Poor little George Bush, who holds Jesus as his favorite political philosopher, is hopelessly incapable of such an understanding. Instead of waging serious war, he has package-dealed war with setting America up as the nanny state of the Middle East. Bush could not conceive of America reducing a nation to rubble without also spending trillions to clear the rubble and rebuild the buildings. By the standards of altruism Bush is a moral, noble, great president. Unfortunately for America, the morality of sacrifice can lead only to failure and death in this world. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Simon Cowell announced today that Big Brown, winner of this year's Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, will be allowed to compete in tonight's "American Idol" final. The decision to allow the horse to sing in the final competition is controversial, as Big Brown did not have to endure the entire process like the other two finalists, David Archuleta and David Cook. "I decided to let Big Brown compete because he has a chance to make history," Simon explained. "Big Brown could win the Triple Crown and be the American Idol, which has never been done before. Plus, it's nice to have a final contestant not named David." Big Brown is scheduled to sing a blues number, "Don't Take Me to the Glue Factory, Mama," and a reggae song, "I Shot Eight Belles (But I Didn't Shoot the Deputy)." The horse is reported to have a lively baritone that is fast out of the gate and closes well. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Since the Republican Party and the conservatives gave up being a political faction that stands for limited government, what issues excite voters on the right? Abortion, immigration and gay marriage. The Republicans have become a party of religion and bigotry. What genius thought up that? I know I'm courting controversy by dismissing opposition to immigration and gay marriage as bigotry. Intelligent people have sophisticated arguments against both. But underneath the legalistic arguments lie ugly passions and irrationality. Gay marriage has become an issue in California. (Since it is in the news, I will focus on this issue and set aside abortion and immigration.) The California Supreme Court ruled yesterday that gays have a constitutional right to marry, striking down state laws that forbade it, in a decision that is likely to reenergize the election-year debate over same-sex marriages and gay rights. Conservatives see this as the court "legislating" from the bench. If a majority of voters pass a law violating the individual rights of a minority, conservatives think the judicial branch should allow the unjust law to stand. Democracy over all! Religious people oppose gay marriage because of anti-homosexual passages in a book written in ancient times called the Bible. Their opposition rests on superstition. (Religion is superstition widely held and therefore respectable.) I can see nothing wrong with two people of the same sex marrying. How does their mutually consenting contract violate anyone else's right? On what basis do we deny homosexuals the right of marriage? Because 2,500 years ago some semi-barbaric tribe wrote down its hatred of homosexuals in a group of writings that Christians and Jews today worship as the word of God? By that reasoning, we might as well start burning witches again. I say gays have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us. Let them marry. I realize that I am redefining the traditional concept of marriage. But note that capitalism has from the start been a revolutionary force redefining the traditional values of feudalism. Capitalism cares naught for tradition; it cast aside the values of God and king to give individual rights to man. In this respect, medievalist conservatives such as Richard Weaver and Hillaire Belloc are right in seeing capitalism as the enemy. Some traditional values needed to go, such as primogeniture, serfdom and women as chattel. If we redefine marriage to include same sex unions, rights will only be expanded and strengthened. The marriages of heterosexuals will not be threatened in the least. Abortion, immigration and gay marriage -- on all three issues, conservatives come down against individual rights. Liberals deny rights in the name of collectivism; conservatives deny rights in the name of mysticism. No wonder the right is on the losing side: who, aside from the deeply religious, wants to fight for a political agenda based on superstition? Conservatism is as wrong, as foolish and as dangerous as liberalism. Let us cast aside these old standards and forge a new movement dedicated to individual rights in both the economic and the spiritual realms -- a movement of radical capitalism. UPDATE: Revision. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog John McCain's worst enemy is John McCain. Both Obama and Clinton are so inadequate and weak that they don't pose much of a threat to McCain. Obama, if he ends up the Democrat nominee as most people think probable, will be the least distinguished nominee of a major party in my lifetime, and perhaps in American history. He is the emptiest of suits, a mediocrity who ascended through Chicago politics by networking, going to a church shepherded by a raving leftist anti-American and socializing at the salon of aging radical terrorists. He is an effete liberal who views America as a foreign country and longs to transform it into France. An Obama presidency would look much like Jimmy Carter's, with a naive, appeasing President being bitch-slapped into reality by a mean world that wants to destroy America. Clinton has high "negatives," the touch of death in a profession that lives on votes. Not only that, she has a way of energizing her enemies, who see her as the Wicked Witch of the West, Mussolini and their mother-in-law rolled into one woman. All John McCain has to do is smile, kiss babies and stand tough on America's defense and he can waltz into the White House against either of these losers. Unfortunately, he seems determined to prove he is as bad as any Democrat. McCain wants to take on the highly speculative, dubious problem of "global warming." McCain's major solution is to implement a cap-and-trade program on carbon-fuel emissions, like a similar program in the Clean Air Act that was used to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that triggered acid rain. Industries would be given emission targets, and those coming in under their limit could sell their surplus polluting capacity to companies unable to meet their target. Now, for any reader who might think there is something to all this global warming talk, consider this from Walter Williams: Over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun's output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined. Why is it that environmentalists never put global warming in the context that Dr. Williams provides? Could it be that they're trying to scare us with bad science? Could it be that their real goal is state control of the economy and the destruction of capitalism? John McCain doesn't give a damn about capitalism and freedom. He loves state power; he holds sacrifice to the collective as the moral ideal. He thrills to the idea of mandating vast regulations on industry in the name of "saving the planet." As a man who has confessed his ignorance of economics, it doesn't matter what the actual, practical effects of his regulations will be; all that matters is his feel good fantasy and massive sacrifice. To altruists the gesture of sacrifice is an end in itself unconnected to any practical benefits. Nay, practical benefits would make sacrifice more of a selfish long-term trade, and where is the morality in that? But McCain being McCain, he has to take the dishonesty of his proposal a little further by calling his massive regulations a "free market" solution. (In reality his "cap and trade" policies will amount to K Street lobbyists buying off politicians to get favors for their clients.) He does not understand that a market dictated and controlled by the state is not free. Laissez-faire capitalism is the separation of state and economy. The word for McCain's vision of private industry dictated by the state is fascism. On the heels of this environmentalist nonsense, as if McCain were on a mission to rub the nose of small government Republicans in shit, the word comes out that he is considering Huckabee as his Vice President running mate. Could he make a worse choice than a religious nanny-stater? (Maybe he wants Huckabee at his side because the Arkansan is the only prominent Republican who makes McCain look smart about economics.) View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I am struck by how blind the left is to Obama's weakness as a candidate. They have their usual rationalizations for every criticism from the right. Obama's father was a communist? McCarthyism! Obama is not electable? Electability is a code word used by racists! Obama has terrorist friends? Ayers is a distinguished academic. So what if he had a radical youth -- who didn't? Obama's preacher is an anti-American conspiracy theorist? White America cannot understand black rage! It seems that Obama himself does not understand the criticism against him. Obama denounced what he called the Republican campaign plan: "Yes, we know what's coming. ... We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas." The attacks are just name calling? This is the kind of self-serving delusion that keeps the left from realistically assessing the American electorate. Voters are smarter than the Democrats think they are; they understand that there are ideas behind the names and the labels. If Obama is surrounded by far-left anti-Americans, is it not logical to wonder if maybe Obama agrees with them? Is he trying to BS his way to the presidency without revealing what he really thinks? His wife raises even more suspicions in the minds of voters who are of the far left. She has some sense of humor: "Asked how she feels about Bill Clinton's use of the phrase "fairytale" to describe her husband's characterization of his position on the Iraq war, (Michelle Obama) first responded: "No." But, after a few seconds of contemplation, and gesturing with her fingernails, she told the reporter: "I want to rip his eyes out!" Noticing an aide giving her a nervous look, she added: "Kidding! See, this is what gets me into trouble." This unpleasantness comes on top of her anti-American statements and her altruist-statist-collectivist vision of widespread sacrifice: ...Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed. There are profound ideas involved here, and questioning them is not name-calling or McCarthyism. People are justified in wondering just how Barack Obama intends to make them work. It looks to me like we are in for a dreary autumn season of the left demonizing anyone who criticizes Obama as they strive to shift the focus from his ideas -- anything but an honest examination of what he really believes -- to the evil character of those who would oppose him. The left is projecting its own postmodern contempt of reason onto its enemies. This is the road to defeat for Obama, as I must not believe the American people are yet so dumbed down and corrupted that they cannot see beyond names and labels to the abstract ideas that words denote. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Here is an interesting signpost of how America is changing. Up to the '70s, one heard "goddamn" in polite conversation. It might have been considered salty, but it was something adults said regularly, kind of like saying "hell." You can find the expletive in Ayn Rand's novels. I remember being surprised in the early '80s the first time a religious man asked me not to say "goddamn." I could hardly believe this person took the idea of God so seriously as to object to a meaningless swear word. Hell, I was an atheist saying the curse. It's not like I meant "Let a supernatural creature come forth and consign thee to the everlasting bonfire!" Today the word has become less common. I think it has joined the four-letter words as a dirty word one should not say. I take this as another indicator that religion is taken more seriously today. Lawrence Auster objects to the use of this word in the title of a book by William F. Buckley. 30 years ago, Auster would have been dismissed as a puritanical freak. Today I fear he is the future of conservatism. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog What do we conclude from Hillary Clinton's 10-point win in Pennsylvania? I don't think it matters which one wins, Obama or Clinton -- they're both Dead Democrats Walking. Neither can beat McCain. Clinton carries more baggage than a Greyhound bus. Obama, if he won the nomination, would be the furthest left-wing candidate for a major party in history. More is coming out about Obama's terrorist friends, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. They remain anti-American to this day; four decades of experience have failed to dent their radical premises. Dohrn is the only prominent voice who expressed approval of the Charles Manson murders. These are the people Obama chooses to hang around. The more I watch Obama, the less I think of his intelligence. This is not something the MSM talk about at all. I suspect his vapidity and lack of substance come from a slow mind. The way he got rattled and incoherent in his last debate is more evidence. The guy is not sharp. Obama makes Clinton look experienced, competent and of sound judgment. So Obama has accomplished something remarkable in his life after all. I base my thoughts about Obama's hopelessness on what we have seen in Presidential elections since 1972. One big X factor could prove me wrong: have the American voters changed significantly? Is there a new "paradigm"? We keep hearing about these new voters, the Millennial Generation, who are always reported as the most altruist-statist-collectivist (and therefore, I would add, stupid) generation in history. These young Americans, we are told, are not afraid of the government, unlike those cynical older generations. I wonder if liberal reporters are not projecting their premises on the Millennials. They see young people, who are typically idealistic, and think, "If they're idealistic, then they must be liberals, because right-wingers are selfish and immoral." Leftists have always hoped to change human nature and form people who act as selfless cogs in the state machine. In the USSR they strove to create homo sovieticus. In the Millennials, they hope they have found the novo homo americanus. But. But... maybe they have succeeded in creating voters so lacking in independence and pride that they will go along with the mob at the orders of a dictator. Young people are voting for Obama over Clinton, for whatever that's worth. Of course, this election is complicated by the Republicans electing a big government candidate, John McCain. It's still too early to decide -- I intend to wait at least until Labor Day -- however, at the moment I think the candidate who would accomplish the least amount of damage to American freedom would be Hillary Clinton. It would not be for lack of trying on her part, but that she is so widely hated that she would have little support for any big sweeping changes. And the Republicans in Congress would be energized to fight her every step of the way. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I had this conversation with a fellow actor the other day: ACTOR: I tried out for this play by Ann Rand. ME: Ayn. ACTOR: Ayn. I forgot the title. ME: Night of January 16th. ACTOR: Yeah, that's it. I decided not to do it. It's got her philosophy in it. ME: I know all about it. I'm an Objectivist. I subscribe to her philosophy. ACTOR: Oh. (Pause.) Yeah, well, it seemed like kind of an old-fashioned play, so I decided not to do it. I never thought there was much philosophy in the play myself, but it bothered this fellow -- until he learned he was talking to someone from whom he would get neither agreement nor sympathy. Then he switched his objection to the play being old-fashioned, which it is (and that's a good thing). I think a great deal of the antipathy to Rand comes from people who lack the virtue of independence and go along with our cultural leaders because they don't have the spine to do otherwise. Once Objectivism begins to spread, I suspect there will come a moment when the "go along to get along" types become sympathetic as they see that others have paved the way and made it safe. It will be a watershed moment. Right now altruists on the left and right can still scare the weak into line with a sneer and a contemptuous laugh. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog 1. Boortz makes a remarkable assertion: Much of this mortgage crisis came along when the loony left started demanding that mortgage lenders do more to bring minorities and people with marginal credit into the wonderful world of home ownership. As a result of threats from leftists in government the subprime mortgage business was born. Now we see the results. Is this true? Are subprime loans a PC welfare scheme that would not exist in a laissez-faire capitalist economy? It makes me wonder how many hidden economic distortions there are because of our mixed economy. How radically would life be different if we had a separation of state and economy? 2. Mike Huckabee has begun running for President -- in the 2012 election. And if you don't think he's a serious candidate, remember this recent news about Paul Weyrich, Mr. Conservative: The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.” In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy. Indeed, Huckabee is the conservatives' guy. He might bring socialism to America, but by golly, he believes in God! 3. The Return of Big Government. The return of Big Government? The smart-aleck response here would be something like "Really? I didn't know it ever left." I confess, that was my first reaction to that headline. Here's a little straight talk: Whether you pull the lever (or fill in the oval or touch the screen) for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or even John McCain in November, you're probably still going to end up in 2009 with a push for Big Government of the sort not seen in a generation. More taxes. More regulation. More spending. "It's going to be like watching That '70s Show," says Daniel Clifton, political analyst at Strategas Research Partners, which provides research to institutional investors. Great. Our taxes will go up to pay for the second mortgages of Washington bureaucrats who stand around the water cooler all day doing Jim Carrey impressions. 4. At first I thought this SKYY Vodka response to the Absolut ad was a parody because of this: “Don’t get me started on the Gadsden Purchase,” continues Karraker. “I think the folks in Tucson and Yuma would be rubbed the wrong way if they hear this landmark deal was somehow nullified as suggested by Absolut, a Swedish-owned brand.” Nobody seriously says "Don't get me started on the Gadsden Purchase." Looks like Karraker is trying to be funny and cash in on Absolut's controversy at the same time. 5. Funny cartoon. 6. Just one more reason why Obama would be a disastrous president: If elected President, Senator Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, putting the saved money into a new $18-billion-a-year education program that would, in essence, nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond. Nationalized early education? That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. H.L. Mencken Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace. Ludwig Von Mises , Liberalism, p. 114 The boy must be transformed into the man; in this school he must not only learn to obey, but must thereby acquire a basis for commanding later. He must learn to be silent not only when he is justly blamed, but must also learn, when necessary, to bear injustice in silence. Adolf Hitler Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. Joseph Stalin It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity. Benito Mussolini , from "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932. He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future. Adolf Hitler What good fortune for governments that the people do not think. Adolf Hitler View the full article