Category Archives: Human Accomplishment

Microsoft Surface: ‘A Truly Productive Tablet’

Business, Capitalism, Human Accomplishment, Politics, Private Property, Technology

Today is an important day for America’s rotating kleptocracy and the comitatus—that is “the sprawling apparatus … that encompasses not only the emperor’s household and its personnel … but also the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals.” The Democratic incumbent and the Republican candidate for president prepare for another round in the debate circuit, to see which one of them will inherit the earth.

It is no wonder that productivity and creativity are lost in the din over parasitical politics.

Today, the Microsoft Surface tablet went to market. To call this magical thing a “tablet” would be to undersell it. If it fails to win wide general appeal it’ll be because there is nothing quite like it, and because it is “a truly productive tablet.” Yes, The Surface provides the features that keep the average individual’s brainwaves from flatlining. But it does so much more. For example, “It runs as a full computer,” and sports a physical keyboard.

The no-nonsense Windows chief Steven Sinofsky is “almost unwilling to truly define the Surface as a tablet: ‘I’ve used a lot of tablets and this is not a tablet, but this is the best tablet I’ve ever used. And I’ve used a lot of laptops and notebooks, but this is not a laptop or notebook, but it’s the best laptop or notebook I’ve ever used.'”

Sinofsky has also ventured that The Surface “provides the best WiFi reception of any tablet today.”

The Surface’s dual Wi-Fi (“wireless networking technology that uses radio waves to provide wireless high-speed Internet and network connections”) antennae are the part my genius and his team nailed.

Congratulations.

Global Tax Troglodyte

Business, Economy, Hillary Clinton, Human Accomplishment, Propaganda, Taxation

“There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries” was the obscene comment made by Hillary Clinton, at the Clinton Global Initiative, on Monday.

Worse than her global crusade against under-siege, “market-dominant minorities” worldwide is Clinton’s crushing ignorance. As Economist George Reisman put it, “a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of Living of a Largely Ignorant and Ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent.”

Contrary to such beliefs, in the modern world in which we actually live, the wealth of the capitalists is simply not in the form of consumers’ goods to any great extent. Not only is it overwhelmingly in the form of means of production but those means of production are employed in the production of goods and services that are sold in the market. Totally unlike the conditions of self-sufficient farm families, the physical beneficiaries of the capitalists’ means of production are all the members of the general consuming public who buy the capitalists’ products.
…the wealth of the so-called one percent is the foundation of the standard of living of the so-called ninety-nine percent … the “greed” of those who seek to become part of the one percent, or to enlarge their position within it, is what serves progressively to improve the standard of living of the ninety-nine percent.

To comprehend what Reisman wrote you’d have to, first, have a mind. And second, be in possession of moral fiber such that you were not jealous of those who have what it takes.

MORE.

UPDATE II: Why I Am So Sad (It’s not About Libya, Israel or 9/11)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Private Property, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)

UPDATE II: Clint Eastwood Keeps it Local, Lively and … Liberty-Oriented

Democracy, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Private Property, Propaganda

If it were Yoko Onanism who jousted in public with a (symbolic) empty chair, the left would call it performance art.

Clint Eastwood is not a member of the pack animals on the left. For this reason, he has become the focus of terribly unkind cuts, following the “12-minute discourse” he delivered at the Republican National Convention.

In response to the rabid responses to his Empty Chair routine—and characteristically—Eastwood spoke first not to the country’s moron menagerie, but to a local, award-winning, libertarian-leaning newspaper, The Carmel Pine Cone.

Seceding from the palsied haters is classic Clint Eastwood.

More interesting than the rather quotidian details Eastwood furnished in the interview is the background of the TCPC’s editor. PAUL MILLER was clearly entrenched in the establishment (CBS and NBC), before breaking away to focus on “the [local] struggle between property rights and environmental regulations, the machinations of the California Coastal Commission, and on the epidemic of ADA lawsuits against small businesses.”

The vaunted vote Miller has exposed too for the farce it is “in a series of reports, ‘Voter Fraud: Simple as 1, 2, 3,’ [which] involved registering a fictitious person to vote. That story was featured on the CBS News program, ’60 Minutes,’ on November 1, 1998.”

Yes, there are a LOT of people here in the US who vote for a living—for dibs on the livelihood of those who work for a living—a topic CBS will not be exploring anytime soon, and certainly not before the election.

Anyhow, to hate Clint Eastwood is to hate the best of America. I begrudge Eastwood only two things: The first is “Invictus,” a “reverential biopic” about the sainted Nelson Mandela.

The second is that he made too few Dirty Harry films.

UPDATE: Readers can be fabulous. Writes “RandHaf” under “Top Comments,” following Yoko’s Onanism:

wtf is wrong with this cunt
RandHaf 2 weeks ago 27

Why, wasn’t she giving voice to modern-day ennui?

UPDATE I (Sept. 9): Gran Torino is hackneyed rubbish. I had never intended to watch it. It came on today, and I, well, sat. What schmaltz.

Eastwood is also guilty of making on-screen love to Meryl Creep, but that I most certainly did skip. (I never watch chick flicks.)

UPDATE II (9/10): Gran Torino is packed with PC cliches, which, quite stupidly, seem to confirm the un-PC, unmentioned truths, such as what do-or-die diversity does to neighborhoods and neighborliness.

And worse: No wonder older, white men can’t get work! Have all you older white men considered how the protagonist is portrayed in this film?! Why, he has to die for his sins before gaining the respect he deserved from the get-go.

The only realistic lesson once can take away from Gran Torino, a horridly PC effort, is that you don’t owe your relatives a dime if they treat you like dirt. I liked that message (because I’m generally a sucker).