SECTION ONE: The Word:
How 'bout them Super Bowl commercials, huh?

SECTION TWO: Things That Amuse Me:
Simians and other aminals*:
Animal advocates sue over USD monkey tests
*Yes, I know it's "animals," it's just that I always found the childhood mispronunciation really, really cute . . .

Travel:
Stay at home. Work. Consume. Big Brother is Your Friend. Palin is evil. Obama is good. Work. Consume.

Sports:
Weekend review

Science Fiction and Writing:
Zoomorphism in Science Fiction—In or Out?
Writing cultures: insider vs. outsider
Writers on Writing–Emotion
The Write Way and the Wrong Way
Ways to Trash Your Writing Career: Surrender, Dorothy!
Hey, remember when I used to post long, half-thought-out posts on big topics?
Least Favorite Authors of SF
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Science, technology, and space:
Nook Review
Looking At Light
Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

Miscellany (amusing things not fitting above, or below):
NBC throws Conan down the memory hole, deletes his online content

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

I understand there's a football game today. However . . .

SECTION ONE: The Word:
People think that the Tea Party coalesced out of the political ether when Rick Santilli gave that rant on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. They're wrong.

The Tea Party spirit--the spirit of self-government which has made the United States unique among all the nations of the world--didn't began to revive when Sarah Palin was convinced to run for Wasilla City Council. It did begin to go national when McCain named her as his Vice-Presidential candidate. What happened with Santilli in Chicago last February is that the traditional American value of self-government finally found its voice after decades of disuse, under the oppressive attack of the progressives, the leftists, the socialists. The Fair Deal. The New Deal. The Square Deal. The Great Society. Hope and Change.

Palin isn't the leader of the Tea Party so much as she is its most prominent current expression. I find it amusing (and a bit distressing) that so many seem concerned that Palin or anyone else is "hijacking" a movement which at its core is the simple re-assertion of the sovereignty of the individual over the state.

If there are few Democrats participating in Tea Parties--if the Tea Party movement does not represent the Democratic Party--it is because the Democratic Party has now utterly rejected the traditional American political philosophy of individual liberty and limited government, for the system of industrial socialism and unlimited government created by 19th Century German political philosophers. (And yes, many Republicans have also basically embraced German socialism, as well.)

So let me be blunt:

If you are for government-provided welfare, you are a socialist.

If you are for government-provided health care, you are a socialist.

If you are for government mandates to "fight global warming" you are a socialist.

If you oppose the Tea Party movement, you are either a socialist, or you simply haven't thought things through yet.

The lesson of history, over and over and over again, is that socialism does not work It does not produce the "greatest good for the greatest number." It does not help the "little people." It does not feed the hungry, it does not clothe the naked, it does not care for the sick. What socialism does do, better than almost any other political system invented by mankind, is corrode and corrupt the human spirit. It corrupts those who aspire to the power socialism gives over their fellow men, and it dispirits those who have no opportunity to exert power, even over their own lives. Socialism is the philosophy of the parasite.

Socialism kills the human spirit. It also, as we have seen around the word, by incompetence or malice, kills people in staggering numbers--by the millions in the 20th Century alone.

If you are a socialist, you have embraced evil, suffering, corruption, and death. You either seek virtue by sacrificing yourself for others, or you seek power by sacrificing others on the altar of your own misguided "wisdom." You must kill others, or kill yourself. That is what socialism is, at its ugly core.

If you are a socialist, you are a blithering idiot.

Fortunately, blithering idiocy is not forever--it is treatable, it is cureable. The first step towards the cure is to realize that you have a problem. That problem has a name. That name is socialism.

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

The fact that the opportunities open to the poor in a competitive society are much more restricted than those open to the rich does not make it less true that in such a society the poor are much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society. Although under competition the probability that a man who starts poor will reach great wealth is much smaller than is true of the man who has inherited property, it is not only possible for the former, but the competitive system is the only one where it depends solely on him and not on the favors of the mighty, and where nobody can prevent a man from attempting to achieve this result.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

(It's morning somewhere . . . )

SECTION ONE: The Word:
I've gently re-formatted the Whip, the better to shine a light on the rampant epidemic of blithering idiotry amok upon the world. Yes, those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who do.

Other than the fact that I woke up at 11:30 this morning (yeah, sleep is good), I have no comment today.

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

The choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances. This is no less relevant because in a system of free enterprise chances are not equal, since such a system is necessarily based on private property and (though perhaps not with the same necessity) on inheritance, with the differences in opportunity which these create. There is, indeed, a strong case for reducing this inequality of opportunity as far as congenital differences permit and as it is possible to do so without destroying the impersonal character of the process by which everybody has the right to take his chance and no person's view about what is right and desirable overrules that of others.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

SECTION ONE: The Word:
I've gently re-formatted the Whip, the better to shine a light on the rampant epidemic of blithering idiotry amok upon the world.
In case you're wondering, "blithering idiotry" has its foundation in 1) believing you know better than someone else how they should run their lives, and 2) acting on that belief, almost always to the ultimate detriment of that other person, not to mention the corruption of your own soul in the process. And it's everywhere, but nowhere more concentrated than in governments big and small, and those sad, sorry people making up those governments.
It is not a virtue to be generous with somebody else's money.

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope of freedom. -- Lord Acton

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

A (mostly) daily review of what's out there that caught my attention.

I surf the Web, so you don't have to!

Section One: The Word:
An occasional comment, rant, or snark, brought on by the flow of events:
Jonah Goldberg: Liberal Fascism "is simply useless against zombies, save in bulk. If you dropped a pallet of books on one, it would probably kill it, or at least delay its advance long enough for the double-tap. Obviously, this means people need to start buying it in bulk."

Who says conservatives don't have a sense of humor? And, perhaps THIS is why Sarah Palin was buying up all of those copies of her book. Don't believe that story about owing thousands of copies to donors of her PAC. That's obviously a smoke-screen. She knows something we don't. Maybe about sheep.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Watch out for sheep. Especially demon sheep. California demon sheep. I can't imagine those California dairy cows are very contented right now.

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

It is often said that political freedom is meaningless without economic freedom. This is true enough, but in a sense almost opposite from that in which the phrase is used by our planners. The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

A (mostly) daily review of what's out there that caught my attention.

I surf the Web, so you don't have to!

Section One: The Word:
An occasional comment, rant, or snark, brought on by the flow of events:

From the Cato Institute

We are so screwed. And it's not defense spending that is screwing us. We're doing it to ourselves.

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

In all this time not one of the many people who have (promised "potential plenty" have) produced a workable plan of how production could be increased so as to abolish even in western Europe what we regard as poverty--not to speak of the world as a whole. The reader may take it that whoever talks about potential plenty is either dishonest or does not know what he is talking about. Yet it is this false hope as much as anything which drives us along the road to planning.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

Section One: The Word:
An occasional comment, rant, or snark, brought on by the flow of events:
JUST SAY NO TO NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY.

OPPOSE THE OBAMA BUDGET WITH YOUR EVERY BREATH.

PUNISH ANY POLITICIAN WHO BACKS ANY PORTION OF IT.

CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND SENATOR AND TELL THEM: IF YOU SUPPORT THIS BUDGET, YOUR POLITICAL CAREER IS OVER.

WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

The Federal budget deficit, explained in video:


And now . . . A (mostly) daily review of what's out there that caught my attention.

I surf the Web, so you don't have to!

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

It is significant that the confusion prevailing on all these subjects that it should have become a cause for reproach that in a competitive society almost everything can be had for a price. If the people who protest against having the higher values of life brought into the "cash nexus" really mean that we should not be allowed to sacrifice our lesser needs on order to preserve the higher values, and that the choice should be made for us, this demand must be regarded as rather peculiar and scarcely testifies to great respect for the dignity of the individual. That life and health, beauty and virtue, honor and peace of mind, can often be preserved only at considerable material cost, and that somebody must make the choice, is as undeniable as that we all are sometimes not prepared to make the material sacrifices necessary to protect those higher values against all injury.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

A (mostly) daily review of what's out there that caught my attention.

I surf the Web, so you don't have to!

Section One: The Word:
An occasional comment, rant, or snark, brought on by the flow of events:

InstaComment of the Day: The “Bush was as big a spender as Obama” line is just a flat-out lie, which the apologists for the powers that be hope you’ll buy because . . . well, because a lie is pretty much all they’ve got at this point.

Accompanied by the Graph of the Year:

The National Debt under Bush, and under Obama

And that's from last summer. It's gotten worse since then. So, Washington politicians, STOP LYING TO US.

Another random thought: Governments tax the rich for the very same reason that Willie Sutton said that bank robbers rob banks: "That's where the money is." The analogy between government and bank robbers runs fairly deep, although bank robbers don't lie to you about how much their robbery is going to help you--how their theft is good for "social welfare" or the "good of the community," sometime in the indeterminate future. (Actually, some bank robbers have justified their theft by saying that they're "spreading the money around." Sound familiar?)

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

Although the professed aim of planning would be that man should cease to be a mere means, in fact--since it would be impossible to take account in the plan of individual likes and dislikes--the individual would more than ever become a mere means, to be used by the authority in the service of such abstractions as the "social welfare" or the "good of the community."

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

First, A Public Service Announcement

If you receive e-mail without anything in the subject, DELETE IT!
If you send e-mail without putting anything in the subject, turn your computer off and throw it away. You suck at the Internet.
Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Whip.

A (mostly) daily review of what's out there that caught my attention. (Yeah, it's possible I might have ADD . . .)

I surf the Web, so you don't have to!

Section One: The Word:
An occasional comment, rant, or snark, brought on by the flow of events:
Behold my "Awesome Zelazny Riff" at Ace of Spades HQ here: Advice for Governor Palin. My comment is at #194, which you have to scroll down through the whole dull, tedious thing for, because for reasons I don't understand, the direct link doesn't work. Bummer for you, eh? No, seriously, go. It'll be worth your while. Trust me! Have HOPE.

Lord of Light is, I think, my all-time favorite book. Of all time.

Oh, another thing that I just think is the funniest thing:
Guantanamo eyed for 9/11 trial -- So . . . we . . . have to . . . close the prison there . . . so we can . . . hold . . . the trials there? Huh? WTF?

In other news, Mark Steyn speaks Truth to Power:

In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.

Hope! Change! Perpetual Servitude To Your Masters In Washington (who, of course, love you)!

More after the "read more" . . .

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

. . . the state can do a great deal to help the spreading of knowledge and information and to assist mobility. But the point is that the kind of state action which really would increase opportunity is almost precisely the opposite of the "planning" which is now generally advocated and practiced.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.

A (mostly) daily review of what's out there that caught my attention. (Yeah, it's possible I might have ADD . . .)

I surf the Web, so you don't have to!

Section One: The Word:
An occasional comment, rant, or snark, brought on by the flow of events:

OK . . . does anybody other than me detect the inherent contradiction reflected by this Reuters article title: Obama assails Republican foes, urges bipartisan effort? Would it help if I pointed out that Obama waited ONE ENTIRE FRICKIN' YEAR to have this meeting? Why shouldn't the Republicans feel just a bit miffed--at least? Obama has spent the entirety of the last year demonstrating by his actions that he and his party didn't give a rat's ass what the Republicans wanted, and had absolutely no interest in talking to them, hearing what they thought, or even paying them the simple courtesy of respect. Anybody remember "I Won?" But now, all of the sudden, Obama wants to play Mr. Bipartisan, and oh by the way, you Republicans are the bad guys?

Who held all the cards for the past year, Mr. President? Who sat in the White House? Who had 60 votes in the Senate? Who had an unassailable majority in the House?

If the Congressional Republicans were smart they'd tell Obama to take his "Bipartisanship" and stick it where the sun don't shine. This is your show, big guy, they would say, and it's been your show for the past year. If you can't do the job, it's not the Republican's fault.

Obama, you are headed down a road that will completely ruin the American economy. What you are doing has been tried before. It does not work. So yes, indeed, we hope you fail at that. You, sir, are not FDR, and this is not 1934. You are much more Herbert Hoover than you are Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it's much more like 1930 than it is 1934, and a huge section of the American public knows it. (Oh, by the way, the New Deal was pretty much a disaster, too, extending the Great Depression by six long years (according to UCLA economists)--extending it by implementing precisely the same kind of policies you are inflicting on the country now. ) You don't know the right things to do to heal the American economy, and the things you think will help will wind up causing much, much more damage, and much, much more suffering for the people you were elected to serve. That's "elected to serve," not elected to reign over, by the way. So pull your nose down out of the sky and stop trying to look (and act) like Benito Mussolini.

See you in November, Il Duce.

More after the "read more" . . .

From The Road To Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, 1944, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, 1994, The University of Chicago Press.

In a directed economy, where the authority watches over the ends pursued, it is certain that it would use its powers to assist some ends and to prevent the realization of others. Not our own view, but somebody else's, of what we ought to like or dislike would determine what we should get. And since the authority would have the power to thwart any efforts to elude its guidance, it would control what we consume almost as effectively as if it directly told us how to spend our income.

Excerpted under Fair Use for purposes of non-commercial education, discussion and comment. Any transcription or typographical errors are mine.