Props to Thomas Sowell
Who? Glad you asked. Merely on of todays great thinkers, and widely reviled because of it.
In an article at Townhall.com Mr. Sowell points out the great fallacy in the thinking of all the big government collectivists- they call themselves “progressives”, I call them “Stalinists”- that somehow governments can better figure out how we should run our lives than we can.
John Stuart Mill’s classic essay “On Liberty” gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people’s decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing “that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.”
Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that “people make a lot of mistakes.” Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging. (Boy, can I! – ed.)
What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.
Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.
Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?
And that superior sort of folks will never, ever leave us be. See the Lewis quote at the top of the blog.
He then provides a list of great moments in government- World War One, the Holocaust, the Great Depression… I’m sure if you think a moment you can come up with numerous other examples, both micro and macro.
Too many among today’s intellectual elite see themselves as our shepherds and us as their sheep. Tragically, too many of us are apparently willing to be sheep, in exchange for being taken care of, being relieved of the burdens of adult responsibility and being supplied with “free” stuff paid for by others.
Problem is, the ‘others’ are getting restive and resentful. In response, our government has purchased billions of rounds of ammunition and 2700 MRAP’s for the DHS. Am I the only one who finds that a wee bit frightening? When the hammer comes down, I will not be on my knees. How many of you can honestly say the same?
How many of you are sheep?
Thanks to Samizdata for the pointer.
Drudgetaposition Part 6.we’re-screwed
ROFLMAO
Keep on telling us that, boss…
Our Preznit, nothin’ if not classy
How frelling juvenile. I can’t even imagine BillyBoy sinking this low. I guess I’m just old-fashioned, but I expect a modicum of dignity out of the guy who represents us to the whole world- not this childish frat-boy bullshit.
But I’m in the minority- the people have spoken- I just can’t seem to get with the program…
The mask slips
Just two guys, hangin’
Never truer than it is today
In re sequestration:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken
Airline pilots as they should be
[jwplayer mediaid=”1688″]
via IMAO
The landscape I look upon
…is downright disturbing. I’m just going to grab some headlines out there right now:
Unemployment Stories, Vol. 27: ‘We Eat a Lot of Soup and Crackers.’
Five Months After Benghazi Murders: Killers Frolic Untouched There.
The Devil Made Them Do It: Senate Democrats try to dodge responsibility for ObamaCare.
Ohio Officials: Poll Worker May Have Voted Six Times. It wasn’t for Romney.
PHOTOS: Four months after Hurricane Sandy, Jersey Shore still a wasteland…
‘Slap her! Punch her hard!’ 10-year-old girls forced to fight…
Al Nusrah Front detonates 50 IEDs in massive ambush
Colorado Dems vote to disarm women-tell the rapists you are menstruating
We’re coming apart as a functioning society. I blame Chimpy McBushitlerburton. After all, it would be unfair to blame the 52% of my fellow citizens who voted for this – and who will blame anyone but themselves for the spot we find ourselves in.
Look, a squirrel!
From Beyond
I learned a new word today- “Probamaganda”. Just kinda rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Right to the top of my lexicon it goes…
Yep, I just can’t stop stealing from Bill Quick. You know he’s the guy who named the blogosphere, right? Just ask him.
Headline competition
A snippit of a Twitter conversation, with slight explanations. No animals were injured in the making of this post; we may have a disappointed badger however…
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/302515197451583489
Chubby Checker Sues HP Over Penis Size App
Posted by majestic on February 15, 2013
Some men might be flattered if a penis size app was named after them, but not Chubby Checker, reports WebOS Nation:
Attorney Willie Gary of Stuart, Florida, has filed a federal lawsuit in the United States District Court, Florida’s Southern District, against HP and Palm on behalf of performer Ernest Evans over the Silicon Valley firms’ hosting of an app titled “The Chubby Checker” hosted in the webOS App Catalog. The app, a play on the stage name of Mr. Evans – Chubby Checker, was created by developer Magic Apps, was designed as a calculator for estimating the penis size of a man given the input of his shoe size.
The app was downloaded 84 times before being removed from the App Catalog in September of 2012 and no longer available in the store on device or in the App Catalog web listings. “Chubby Checker” is held as a trademark by the Ernest Evans Corporation. The lawsuit claims that HP and Palm’s “use of the name ‘Chubby Checker’ in its app is likely to associate platiff’s marks with the obscene, sexual connotation and images,” and that Evans has “received no compensation for the unauthorized use of the Chubby Checker name and trademark”.
Additionally, the lawyers allege that customers that have looked at or purchases The Chubby Checker app “are being misled into believing that the plaintiffs have endorsed the defendant’s app.” Up to its removal, The Chubby Checker had clocked fewer than 100 downloads. The lawsuit is demanding that HP and Palm cease sales of the app bearing the trademark of or similarity to Chubby Checker and triple damages of the profits HP derived from sales of the app. When listed, The Chubby Checker retailed for $0.99; with sales of no more than a hundred copies and the 30% cut taken by Palm and HP from the App Catalog, damages could total upwards of $90.00…
@Popehat Re headlines, I beg to differ: http://t.co/ML38QPol
— Josh King (@joshuamking) February 15, 2013
Body Search In Arboretum Reveals Big Beaver
Published Aug 28, 2010, 12:00pmA search for a body near the arboretum this afternoon ended after police found comedy gold floating in Lake Washington.
Sometime between 2:00pm and 3:00pm, someone called 911 and reported that a body was floating amongst the lily pads in Lake Washington, on the northeast side of the arboretum.
Patrols officers and the harbor unit responded to the scene, closed off the park, and found the “body.”
It took officers a little while to reach the floating “body” but when they did, SPD spokesman Mark Jamieson says they discovered the “body” was actually a “large, dead, decaying beaver.”
In other news, has anyone seen Courtney Love lately?
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/302524921899266048
@Popehat perhaps, perhaps. But what of this? http://t.co/PDk4IKZD
— Josh King (@joshuamking) February 15, 2013
Gordon Ramsay’s Porn Dwarf Double Eaten by Badger
U.K. tabloid Sunday Sportrecently introduced the world to Percy Foster, a 35-year-old dwarf porn star whose career was just beginning to catch fire. It was all because an observant production assistant on the set of Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It’s Up Your Arse We Go had noticed how much Foster looked like celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. But just as Foster was set to join the rarefied ranks of celebrity lookalike dwarf porn stars, tragedy struck: The body of the 3′ 6″ performer has been discovered in a badger’s den, partially eaten.
According to Sunday Sport‘s follow-up account, Foster was found “deep in an underground chamber by Ministry of Agriculture experts ahead of a planned badger-gassing programme near Tregaron, west Wales.” They write that “expert CSI teams had to use fingertip technology to remove his body from the six-foot-deep burrow.” (I have no idea what fingertip technology is, but I imagine it’s akin to one of those claw cranes you find in arcades and drugstores.)
Officials have not yet ruled out suicide, and adult film producer Dexter Yamunkeh’s comments — in which he intimates that Foster may have cracked under the pressures of being the world’s leading Gordon Ramsay-lookalike-sex-dwarf — certainly don’t invalidate the possibility:
“Percy was a little guy with big problems. He was doing well but he was under pressure, 24/7, like everyone in this goddamned business.”
It’s more than a little curious that the internet, aka God’s porn dumping grounds, contains not a single reference to either Percy or Dexter prior to these two news items. But that’s just the cynic in me talking. So tonight, we pour out a little (and I do mean little) gin in memory of poor Percy. We may never get to see his work in Midget MasterChef: Assbasters 7, but his memory will live on all the same.
I stand (or, after reading that last article, sit) in awe of the power of the internet.
No comment needed
Random thoughts from a random mind.
Sometimes you find wisdom in the oddest places. One of those today was the comments at Ms. Althouse’s blog, where a discussion had begun regarding atheism and religion.
I believe the term to describe people in the post Christian Western World is Neopagan. Pagans can be polytheists or atheist, religious or nonreligious. One characteristic Pagans all share is that they have no objective moral standard, in other words they have no moral core. What passes for morality among pagans is nothing but a reflection of the current popular culture.
Because Pagans have no objective moral standards, they have no defense against totalitarian leaders such as Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc. Because the leaders dictate the popular culture in which Pagans live, Pagans internalize their leaders whims as moral imperatives. The leaders become their Gods. In Pagan Rome, the common religious experience which tied the empire together was emperor worship. In Germany their god was Hitler, in Russia it was Marx and his disciple Lenin, in China Mao, among pagans in the US many view Obama as God like.
I can’t argue with that at all. I’ve had my own struggles with this question, and have come to my own personal decisions, none of which I care to share here. Let’s just say I feel very sorry for a true atheist.
We’re all gonna die!
Global Warmening causes asteroid encounters?
CNN anchor Deb Feyerick asked Saturday afternoon if an approaching asteroid, which will pass by Earth on February 15, “is an example of, perhaps, global warming?”
Moments earlier, before an ad break, she segued from the Northeast blizzard to a segment with Bill Nye “the science guy,” by pointing to global warming: “Every time we see a storm like this lately, the first question to pop into a lot of people’s minds is whether or not global warming is to blame? I’ll talk to Bill Nye, ‘the science guy,’ about devastating storms and climate change.”
As the man says, you just can’t make this stuff up.
Ammo B. Gone
Wonder world and ammunition went? Donald Sensing has a pretty good clue.
But why did Walmart sell out so quickly after the Sandy Hook shootings? The reason is simple. My source says that the very day of the shootings, managers of licensed gun stores went straight to their local Walmarts and cleaned the shelves out. They took the ammo back to their own stores, locked it up and let it sit for a couple or three weeks. Then they put it out for sale at double what they paid.
Ah, capitalism at work. You could hardly blame them.