The Thursday 12/19 Detroit News carried an editorial by Reynolds Farley who once conducted the Detroit Area Study at the University of Michigan. Titled “The often-overlooked roots of Detroit’s bankruptcy” it looks at these ‘roots’ only in terms of details, of concrete particulars as if no underlying principles were involved. This detail caused that detail […]
I normally post on editorials or news stories in the media but today I want to post on an excellent letter to the editor in the Nov 1st Detroit News titled “blame the media” by Walter Konarzevski. It’s in response to an editorial by News editor Nolan Finley criticizing the White House press core’s way […]
I watched a fascinating movie, Caesar’s Messiah, based on the book by Joseph Atwill. Atwill’s thesis is not just that Jesus did not exist, but that he was created as propaganda by writers close to the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius. The author explains his argument here. I should confess here that not only have I […]
“How should men best live together?” — Aristotle, The Politics This is the basic question that Aristotle took to be the beginning of politics, the first and basic question which gives rise to the field. Until recently, I thought so as well — until I realized the error involved. There is another question that comes […]
Before the blood had even dried from the Sandy Hook mass murder, the control-freaks in the media and Washington were already screeching for new laws to infringe and destroy our right to keep and bear arms, and with it, our right to self defense. Others have already detailed the ways in which their proposed laws are […]
The Dec 28th 2012 Detroit News carried two opeds on gun control, one by Charles Krauthammer and one by Clarence Page. While Mr. Page blames the NRA and Mr. Krauthammer blames Hollywood, neither gentlemen focus on a mindless injustice that certainly contributed to such horrific events as Sandy Hook. I’m talking about the absurd practice […]
Well, my kitchen is clean, which means I’m avoiding novel writing. (I have only one resolution this year: at least 1,000 words a day, which is 4 pp.) Let me put it off a little longer by writing my first blog post of 2013. I just read Obama’s election night speech because a recent PJTV […]
Dated 12/14/2012: I’m not going to talk about guns right now. I’m sure someone is going to call for some law at some point, and drag me into that. But, right now, I want to highlight that sick, murderous freaks are a product of a sick society. Ours is a sick society. One that does […]
I thought Romney would win in a landslide. I was not alone. There was a lot of confidence on the right. Even Romney’s campaign, with all its super-secret polling that is supposed to be so much better than anything we laymen see, was surprised by the defeat on November 6, 2012. How could we get […]
The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful […]
Naturalist writers who don’t have the imagination to come up with new ideas run out of stories to tell. They make a big splash with a novel about their youth or their particular racial niche, and then they are pretty much done. They “write themselves out.” Barack Obama’s speech at the 2012 Democrat National Convention […]
Had H.L. Mencken been revived from his grave to watch the last night of the Republican National Convention, he would have recognized the scene. He would have heard the anecdotal, folksy speeches, the paeans to family and God, and he would have understood that the booboisie is alive and well in America. He would have […]
Mitt Romney chose Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconson to be his Vice-President running mate. This is the boldest and most impressive move of Romney’s political career so far. He chose his intellectual superior to run with him, the opposite of what Obama did when he chose Joltin’ Joe Biden, man of a thousand gaffes. Let’s […]
Health care, like all goods and services, is a limited resource. Once it is removed from market forces by turning it over to the government and giving it away for “free*,” rationing is the inevitable consequence. Do you know what “rationing” means in the context of health care? This. This is what it means.
The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be […]
The federal government long ago expanded its powers far beyond anything James Madison and his fellow framers imagined. The Constitution is in reality meaningless, but the Supreme Court, whose purpose is to make sure our laws conform to the Constitution, twists its reasoning to justify interventionist laws as the mixed economy marches toward fascism. Yesterday […]
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” – attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt As many Objectivists, myself included, are the geeky sort, today’s XKCD has already become the subject of some discussion, particularly at Jenn Casey’s place. The following is a refined version of the comment I left there. Randall […]
This LTE was printed in the Detroit News on March 7th. Letter: Focus on nation’s founding values “The Feb. 18 editorial brief “Appropriate driving law” is an example of a true statement that can be misleading in terms of the principle involved. The sentence: “This new legislation expands a smart law that rightly punishes drivers […]
I never knew Andrew Breitbart, but I admired his courage. The left despised him; in fact, they still do, and they are now heaping scorn on his corpse, as one would expect from the tolerant and kindly left. They hate him because he was effective. He took down Acorn, their instrument for undermining elections in […]
Sara Robinson of AlterNet is unhappy. Red states take more government money than blue states, which Ms. Robinson thinks is ironic, since the red states are full of right-wingers who admire Ayn Rand. She thinks the productive blue states should “Go Galt” against the parasitical red states. Now, a state is a large political entity […]
