Category Archives: Liberty

Update III: Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable

Democracy, Education, Elections, English, Etiquette, Family, Intelligence, Liberty, Propaganda

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM weekly column, “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable”:

“Don’t ask why the ‘news’ is all aflutter for Meghan McCain, but earlier in February, she issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, on a forum – ABC’s ‘The View’ – that is a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity:

The Tea Party Movement was ‘innately racist,’ Meghan said. This was why “young people were turned off by the movement.” And , in her most grating Valley-Girl inflection: ‘I’m sorry—revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English.’

The rude reference was to Tom Tancredo’s observation that people ‘who cannot spell the word vote or say it in English’ are determining elections in America.

The former congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was on to something. The Founding Founders decided in their wisdom that only propertied males would vote. To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than ‘Meghaan.’ As to the other limitation: The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics – and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. And all too well did the founder know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.

But what would ‘Meghaan,’ a member of the Millennial generation, know about a group of truly great revolutionaries whose average age, in 1776, was 44?

“The ‘Meghaan’ Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason.” Yes, ‘Meghan is a member of a studied cohort, born between 1980 and 2001.” Read more about these “needy and narcissistic dullards.”

The column is “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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Update I (Feb. 19): To the critic hereunder: The column references “The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work,” an article that distills the conclusions of a book packed with data. The method of the column: go from the particular to the general; go from one colorful case everyone knows and move to the general.

Update II: “Thomas” below is yet another instructive case study on the Millennials, their demeanor and capabilities. Note the run-on, ungrammatical, misspelled, incoherent sentences. T. has not been taught to write a simple sentence with a subject, a verb and the attendant clauses. Not his fault, I guess, but I know many self-taught individuals who’ve made up for the deficiencies of their teachers just fine.

He’s arrogant and insulting; is big on the ad hominem and the non sequiturs; but incapable of putting forth an argument. An example of a non sequiturs hereunder: I should be picking on another generation, he says. Maybe, but this column is about his generation (I presume). The the fact that another generation is problematic doesn’t invalidate a critique of the Millennials. See what I mean by a non sequituir?

My column argued that, for the most, not his but my generation has invented and is perfecting the gadgets he cannot do without, yet he repeats the following fallacy: The twitterering twits are prescient and streaks ahead of us, their parents.

In fairness to the poor creature, I have received many such letters in my career. They tend to be from younger people, but not always.

Finally, another typical sign of grandiosity: He has not read the posting policy on this blog. Since rules are not for his ilk, he does not dare limit the reader’s exposure to this word salad of his. A good teacher would have red inked this letter, and taught the young man to say what he is struggling to say in one short paragraph.

As you can imagine, there are a dozen more insulting messages demanding space on this, my private property. The insults, moreover, evince the utter absence of intellectual curiosity—T. had not read any of my writings or my bio, so has cheerily lumped me with all of Hannity’s handmaidens.

Update III (Feb. 22): Robert’s point I’m afraid is simplistic; and certainly not the thrust of my article. Hint: Most everything I direct my cultural commentary at, and this column is no exception, can be summed up thus: ORDERED LIBERTY. Ordered liberty is about hierarchy. Read “THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES.” Perhaps the larger philosophical point of everything cultural I write will become clearer.

Update II: A Sprinkling Of State Star Dust (Behold: A Commission)

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Energy, Free Markets, Government, Internet, Liberty, Socialism, Taxation, The State

In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the late economist Milton Friedman put his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Friedman best articulated why idiots don’t understand freedom.

Obama is an idiot. The guy really doesn’t comprehend how it is that he can’t create jobs. He keeps sprinkling state star dust, but nothing happens. He honestly believes that as the head of an entity that only consumes wealth and has no means of producing it, he should, nevertheless, be able to generate viable jobs. Indeed, BO’s bewildered, because his are the economics of voodoo..

If it is to expand, nuclear power should be privately financed. But, as explained, BO has a hard time with the market place, being too dim to understand its workings. So today, instead of lifting the 40-year-old restrictions on the construction of nuclear plants and leaving the rest to an industry with skin in the game, BO has decided “to back the construction of two nuclear reactors with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees.”

By BO logic, a wave of the wand is bound to bring into being a viable industry.

Not quite.

“We are missing a historic opportunity to expand nuclear power the right way [through private financing] and instead settling for a handful of government-subsidized reactors,” says Jack Spencer, a research fellow for nuclear energy policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The same species of dimness inflicts the First Lady. When Michelle O launched her Fat-Based Initiative, the FLOTUS showed that she too is inured to the workings of the market. MO was challenged as to whether she was not interfering in the lives of Americans, to which she answered that she agreed government should not meddle. Seamlessly, she went on to explain that “We,” as in the Royal We, needed to offer parents options… and educate them, etc.

MO had drawn a complete blank; unable was she to even fathom how information would disseminated outside the purview of government.

Update I: STIM TURNS 1 TODAY. Obama understandably defends it, but so do the Keynesians—proponents of centralized banking—at the Wall Street Journal. As I wrote, “How much to hand out; who to hand it to; which handout makes the best use of taxpayer money…—that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”

No premise of central banking is more honored than the idea that the system needs a lender of last resort, without whom holders of good collateral can go belly up in a liquidity panic

[Holman W. Jenkins Jr., WSJ]

Obama’s defense has far more credibility, given that he is a central planner, and the WSJ poses as pro-market:

Obama, in a White House speech, said he believed the stimulus will save or create 1.5 million jobs in 2010 after saving or creating as many as 2 million jobs thus far.
His point was to show that the stimulus, while admittedly unpopular, had the effect of keeping the U.S. economy from plunging into a second Great Depression.
‘Our work is far from over but we have rescued this economy from the worst of this crisis,’ he said.

Update II (Feb. 18): BEHOLD A COMMISSION. “Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.” It is for reason that “President Barack Obama named a bipartisan panel on Thursday to tackle exploding U.S. budget deficits and promised it broad leeway to recommend ways to put the country on a path to fiscal responsibility.”

A commission can do absolutely nothing about the debt and the deficits this president, like his predecessor, has wracked-up. What it can do is put distance between the president and the “tough decisions” the country he is bankrupting must make.

Taxes will be raised, despite Obama’s promise “during his campaign that families making less than $250,000 would not face tax increases.”

Fishy accounting, in the final analysis, will allow this smooth, slippery president to claim that he has tackled a problem Bush created and he exacerbated.

Quote: “There’s no doubt that we’re going to have to also address the long-term quandary of a government that routinely and extravagantly spends more than it takes in.”

Question: Are Americans the kind of meatheads that’ll accept BO’s version of events whereby he and his Big-Spender Government are two different entities, never the twain shall meet?

Updated: The Fair Lady Endorses The Randian

Elections, libertarianism, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Outsourcing, Republicans, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Technology

Sarah Palin has donated the maximum allowable in support of Rand Paul’s bid for the Kentucky U.S. Senate seat. Neoconservatives are furious. David Horowitz’s new NewsReal blog offers an attempt at an analysis of the contradictions of a Palin endorsement of a Paul.

Since very few brain cells went into designing the site, I will be unable to quote from it. Not only is NewsReal incredibly busy in a bad, ADHD kind of way, but someone really “clever” has ensured one cannot “Ctrl c” so as to “Ctrl v” any excerpts therefrom. In other words, you can’t cut and paste for quotation purposes.

I’m certainly not going to bother typing this stuff out—no body is. Maybe the web designer thought that the originality of the contents warranted anti-copying software.

Rand Paul’s site, on the other hand, is original in all the right ways and reproducible. Sarah for Rand is here. And yes, “Rand is for real”:

Rand Paul is beating all U.S. Senate candidates in both parties and … has huge Tea Party and grass roots support driving his overwhelming success against establishment politicians and their budget-busting ways.

If Sarah helps send Tea Party Paulites to DC, and snubs establishment Republican oinkers—she will have done America more good than most.

Update: On the petty issue of being able to “cut n’ paste” from the NewsReal blog: Could it be that the webmaster fixed the flaw following my post? I suspect so.

The facility is working now, but another reader informed me just a couple of hours back that “cut & paste” was possible, albeit by right clicking only on the text. I’m glad the facility is working now, pursuant to my complaint.

As to the busy, boggling nature of the site: I fully admit that the youth is more inclined than me to white noise. I like clean, clear, and unfussy. However, as Hollywood has made clear for decades, the older generation has nothing on the youth when it comes to technology, style, smarts, etc.

Enable sarcasm. I live with someone who makes the innards of the toys and telephones our deeply stupid, attention-deficient mites depend on to sustain brain waves. He himself doesn’t use all that crap technology (other than a PC and a cell, when needed). Telling, ha? Most thinking people like clear, clean, and unfussy.

The white-noise producing toys, by the way, are usually made by older people (with advanced engineering degrees)—often Asians, many of whom are older—beavering away under one or two really smart Americans (also older), all in an effort to keep the brainwaves of the younger generation (mostly Americans) from flatlining.

The News In Brief

Debt, Democrats, Economy, Glenn Beck, Ilana Mercer, Labor, Liberty, Ron Paul, Taxation

• “The first national Tea Party convention opened its doors Thursday night amid widespread interest and some controversy,” reports CNN. I’m not sure what CNN considered controversial, other than that Anderson Cooper and his house boys had not been invited. Naturally, I worry about the direction of the Tea Party’s leadership. I see that no leaders from Ron Paul’s platoons have been invited. On the other hand, since I am unlikely to be asked to partake, having been excluded from at least one of the forums, I don’t intend to sweat the issue.

• When he spent more than he had stolen from taxpayers, Bush simply raised the ceiling on a whopping $6.8 trillion national debt. At the same time, Mr. Bush made a loud commotion about returning plunder to the people in the form of a tax cut. Barack has followed suit. House Democrats voted yesterday to raise the nation’s debt ceiling to more than $14 trillion. This time, Republicans opposed the move.

• The WSJ’s uneasy headline today reads:

U.S. Payrolls Slide;
Jobless Rate at 9.7%

The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly declined to 9.7% in January, but the economy shed 22,000 jobs, casting doubt over the labor market’s strength.

* Opinions Split on Job Creation
* Immigrants Top Ranks of Jobless
* CEOs Remain Hesitant to Hire

Unlike Glenn Beck, the WSJ, at least, had not forgotten to add immigrants to the unemployment miasma (I have not read further, but, no doubt, perfunctory excuse-making will follow).
Glenn put on an informative show today, examining “what puts states with progressive policies at greater risk than states with more conservative ideal,” except that Beck omitted the illegal immigrant variable, the expenditure on which would pretty much overwhelm all other considerations.

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My weekly, WND column will be back next week. In the meantime, do read (which means purchase) my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!