October 2009
1 post
“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to
whatever living...”
– Ayn Rand
September 2009
4 posts
“The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair...”
– John Dewey
Let Us Alone!
“Since “economic growth” is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to “stimuate” it—to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth—I wonder how many people know the origin of the term laissez-faire?”
Ayn Rand, 1962
The above quote is 47 years old and it could...
“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the...”
– Samuel Adams
A Man
I will remind you that it is not books alone, or by books chiefly, that a man becomes in all points a man. Study to do faithfully whatsoever thing in your actual situation, there and now, you find either expressly or tacitly laid to your charge; that is your post; stand in it like a true soldier. Silently devour the many chagrins of it, as all human situations have many; and see you aim not to...
August 2009
12 posts
No Call for Sacrifice
Did it ever occur to you that there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires—if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another—if men understand that reality is an...
Sense of Life
She often saw [the boys] wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world— a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the rocess of discovering that he...
“There is no more powerful argument than the truth.”
“Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the left still adheres to the...”
– Robert Tracinski, “Whose Life is It, Anyway?”
“You have died of dysentery.”
– The Oregon Trail
Monopoly
This is a monolopy. The government has artificially stopped a company from competing in an open marketplace because “nobody’s regulating them”. This is a clear case of guilty until proving innocent. It also hinders innovation but most fundamentally it infringes on the rights of the owners and the private citizens to engage in free enterprise.
...
“Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat...”
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
Definition: Company
A. a chartered commercial organization or medieval trade guild B. an association of persons for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise C. those members of a partnership firm whose names do not appear in the firm nam
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/company
Fannie Mae is not a company and to call it such is an attempt to destroy the concept of what a company is. A...
To Serve Man
The Twilight Zone is one of the all time greastest shows. They could take a philosophical principle and put it into an entertaining 30 minutes. In this case, someone clipped an episode down to less then five minutes but it still gets the point across.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WudBfRa0ETw
“Environmentalism has many of the hallmarks of failed European socialism and...”
– Ian Plimer
Definition: Philosopher
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/business/02bbt.html?hp
“Professor Leiter conducted an informal poll in March on his philosophy blog, asking, “Which person do you most wish the media would stop referring to as a ‘philosopher’?” The choices were Jacques Derrida, Ms. Rand and Leo Strauss. Ms. Rand won by a landslide, with 75 percent of the roughly 1,500 votes cast.”
Defition of...
July 2009
6 posts
Social Security
According to the Social Security Administration’s own calculator (http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/quickcalc/index.html), an individual born in 1984, 25 years old this year, who makes $50,000 per year and retires at age 65 in 2049, can expect to receive a whopping $1,529 per month (today’s dollars). What would that yield be on a true investment? That same 12.4% of $50,000 ($6,200), compounded yearly at 8%...
Collectivism and the Jews
“By 1938, about 150,000 German Jews, one in four, had already fled the country. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, however, an additional 185,000 Jews were brought under Nazi rule. Many Jews were unable to find countries willing to take them in.
Many German and Austrian Jews tried to go to the United States but could not obtain the visas needed...
The Messenger Series: Richard Feynman →
“I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.”
– Humphrey Bogart
“Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights,...”
– Ayn Rand
“Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the World, a...”
– Terry Pratchett
June 2009
13 posts
Bears
So meet a bear and take him out to lunch with you And even though your friends may stop and stare Just remember that’s a bear there in the bunch with you And they just don’t come no better than a bear
Lyle Lovett
Papa Bear
Momma Bear
The above links reference Dr Mitchell Taylor, a man who has studied bears for some thirty years and has concluded that polar bears are not the...
“[The pre Lochner era of] judicial philosophy essentially stopped every effort by...”
– Barack Obama
Argos
As they were thus talking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Ulysses had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any work out of him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule...
“I am naturally very jealous for the Rights and Liberties of my Country; &...”
– Silence Dogood
“You cannot have individual rights when you are a god’s pawn.”
The Return of the Primitive →
Michigan roads are being reverted to gravel because the cost of maintaining them are to high. The author claims it costs $100,000 to pave one mile of road.
“A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be...”
– Ayn Rand
Faces of Evil →
They smile because they have passed “legislation that gives the government control over the production and marketing of tobacco products”. How far off are the rest of the industries?
“The stretches don’t make you taller but the hamburgers do make you wider.”
– Unknown
“I love America because America trusts me. When I go into a shop to buy a pair of...”
– Janina Atkins
“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is...”
– Daniel Webster
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle