Category Archives: Objectivism

Welcome To The Jungle Of Post-Constitutional America

Constitution, Democrats, Elections, Objectivism, Politics, Republicans

Nowhere has this libertarian declared in support of Donald Trump. I chronicle and analyze our politics, but, until now, I’ve refrained from partaking in it. This could change, but that’s how it is right now. Nevertheless, at least one reader has confused an analysis of The Positive Process of Trump with an endorsement of the candidate.

A careful reading of The Trump File will show that matters of process are being emphasized:

1. Differences between political incentives in operation and apolitical incentives (Trump’s) in operation. Trump cannot be compared, on the meta-level, to a politician.
2. The Constitution is a dead letter. In this post-constitutional jungle, the law of the jungle is what prevails. Do we get a benevolent authoritarian to veto Obama’s legacies, or do we continue to submit to Demopublican diktats? That’s the best we can hope for until the center falls apart and gives way to the process of secession.

Speaking of dissolving the chains that bind us to the center: Viva Catalonian secession from Spain. Good for Catalonians. They have begun the process.

The Fourth Estate (Media) Moving Country Into Third Dimension

Hollywood, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, Technology

Being part of major US media—the Fourth Estate—means moving into a Third Dimension of your own making and taking the country with you. What was it that the Bush neoconservative Karl Rove once asserted at the heights of that regime’s manipulation of reality?

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

As was suggested over these pixelated pages, the “Hollywood hack hysteria” was a media event, not a journalistic investigation, as all news reporting should be. Accordingly, “the moron media shared speculations but not much credible evidence as to the source of the hack.”

It was left to an unconventional citizen-journalist-cum-blogger using conventional journalistic methods to uncover Jonathan Gruber’s utterances. Ditto the Sony hack attack. A blog called North Korea Tech by Martyn Williams did the digging. It

details inconsistencies in the Sony attack and past attacks by North Korea.
“Computers at Sony displayed a message threatening the release of internal documents if undisclosed demands were not met. North Korean hackers have never made such public demands,” Williams writes.
He also notes that little is known about Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. No group has claimed credit in past North Korean hacks.
Williams said that the hackers stole sensitive information about movie stars, staff, and Sony management. In an apparently personal attack, the hackers posted a message on the Twitter accounts of Sony employees. This gives credence to the growing theory that the attack was an inside job.
Tommy Stiansen, the chief technology officer for Norse, a hacker-tracking company, told Bloomberg that he plans to approach the FBI and Mandiant, the private company researching the attack, with information that implicates a disgruntled Sony employee in Japan in the attack.

MORE.

Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon

Economy, Education, English, Literature, Objectivism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture

“Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND. The WND version has been scrubbed of the “salacious sex scene,” excerpted below, which happens to be required reading in some kids’ English class:

The fraught relationship between state and society carries over into classroom and town hall. Something of a commonplace in police state USA is the scene in which a citizen is arrested for speaking his mind to a public official, pedagogue or politician.

Our story begins with a dad, William Baer, a lawyer, I believe, who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.” For speaking out of turn at a school board meeting, Baer was cuffed and carted out of a forum of educrats and obedient parents, herded together at the Gilford high school. An arrest and a charge of disorderly conduct followed—Baer, after all, had exceeded the talk time allotted to him.

“It was basically, you make a statement, say what you want and sit down,” the dad told a local television station. “‘Sit down and shut up’ … [is] not how you interact with adults.”

In the background to the online YouTube clip of the event one can hear the dulcet voice of a female emcee, delighting in the petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.

Mr. Baer was protesting a novel which was required reading in his 14-year-old daughter’s English class: “Nineteen Minutes” by home girl Jodi Picoult. (One of Australia’s finest writers, also the copy editor of this writer’s last book, relates that every time he gets on a train or a bus, there seems to be some female or three reading a Jodi P. “masterpiece.”)

Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Picoult’s novel is the rotten writing throughout:

“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ”
… She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
… (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.
“Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”

The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political. Inculcating kids early on with these cumbersome, constricted constructs serves to stunt young minds. The young reader is intellectually disemboweled, as he is steered into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines. …

… Without the literary canon, young minds are doomed to become as dim and sclerotic as those of the educators who assign them the piss-poor reading material aforementioned

… Read the rest. “Fight Classroom Idiocracy With The Literary Canon” is the current column, now on WND.

State-Mediated Terrorism

Healthcare, IMMIGRATION, Objectivism

It’s all very hush-hush. An epidemic of Enterovirus 68 is striking down hundreds of the country’s children. Paralysis is its latest complication.

Writes WND’s Chelsea Schilling: “Just weeks after the Obama administration let more than 37,000 illegal-alien children into the U.S. without health screening, more than 1,000 kids across 10 states have been stricken with a respiratory virus – prompting widespread concerns about a major outbreak sweeping across the nation.”

On his Monday show, talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh explored the possibility of a link between the flood of illegal aliens and the spread of a severe and rare respiratory virus known as Enterovirus D68, or EV-D68.

“Obama will not tell anybody where all of the children that have crossed the border in the last four months have been relocated to,” Limbaugh said.

“There are a bunch of people who want to know. We had these kids cross the border from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, wherever they came from in Central America, and they were processed real quickly. They were gotten in, gotten out, and they’ve been distributed all over the country. And Obama won’t tell anybody where he put ‘em. … The regime will not announce where they are.”

Limbaugh asked, “Are the two stories related or are they not? Does this sweeping, mysterious virus that’s multiplying across the Midwest, does it have anything to do with it or not? We don’t know. That’s the answer. We just don’t know. But some people think there may be some kind of a connection.”

Another talk-radio giant, Michael Savage, blasted Obama for releasing the illegal-alien children in all 50 states: “This population in America, which once enjoyed the greatest health on earth, is now being devolved into a second-world nation in terms of health because Obama is so corrupt, was so ignorant, was so evil that he’s taken what was once the greatest nation on earth and devolving us into a second nation status.”

Savage, who earned a doctorate in epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley, declared on his show Monday, “For 20 years, I’ve been trying to warn America about the unscreened immigrants being brought in. Now, of course, it’s coming home to roost and the American people are being lied to by the Centers for Disease Transmission. They used to be the CDC; they’re now the CDT.

All this has thrown into sharp relief the work of the late, dazzling Randian, Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq.:

TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to foreign born people who have up to eight times higher incidence. Apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines, and Vietnam. [“Illegal Aliens and American Medicine,” by Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq.]

Chagas disease is yet another disease that has been imported from Latin America and has infiltrated America’s blood supply. “Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs,” cautioned Dr. Cosman. “No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected. After 10 to 20 years, up to 30 percent will die when their hearts or intestines, enlarged and weakened by Chagas, burst.”

Seven thousand cases of leprosy over the last 30 years may seem negligible, but “leprosy, a scourge in Biblical days and in medieval Europe,” had been eradicated in the US. Now it’s back. By the reluctant admission of the New York Times, it was brought over from Asia and Latin America.

Other diseases with similar origins and vectors of transmissions are dengue fever, polio, malaria, Kawasaki disease, intestinal parasites, and the ghastly, deadly brain worm. Even Wikipedia, the online Southern Poverty Law Center of encyclopedias, divulged that “cysticercosis in the U.S is an imported disease … found in immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America.”

MORE.