Category Archives: Pages

Touchdown!

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Not much of a big deal was made out of the event, but on Sunday night there was a human achievement of epic proportions. I am not referring to Olympians who could run fast, or jump high, I’m talking about the staggering achievement of gently landing a complex mobile science laboratory, with pinpoint accuracy, on the surface of another planet. The Mars Curiosity Rover exemplifies rational Man at his very best.

Curiosity left this planet 8 months ago and traveled 352 million miles at about 13,000 miles per hour to rendezvous with the red planet. A gentle landing required that many completely new inventions all would work flawlessly the first time they were tried. There would be no possibility of human intervention during landing. The millions of lines of code directing the landing events all had to be written correctly in advance.

I watched the successful landing and had the same feelings I had 8 years ago when a much smaller Rover landed on Mars. I thought again about the relatively trivial things that are considered big news and the relatively meaningless things that capture human emotions. I wrote an essay back then about my counter-cultural views on human achievement – real vs. imagined: Continue reading →

“You didn’t build that” prompts some questions

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Douglas Herz, in a column at American Thinker asks some questions about the “you didn’t build that” philosophy:

“If I owe others for my success, don’t they owe me? Doesn’t everyone owe everyone else? Wouldn’t all this just cancel out, leaving only individual drive, initiative, and entrepreneurship?

•Variation: if everyone owes everyone else, shouldn’t it be by the amount of taxes they pay? So, shouldn’t the 50% who pay no taxes owe the top 5% the most? And, since the 50% who pay no taxes vote mainly for Obama, doesn’t he actually owe the top 5% for his presidency, and so shouldn’t he represent their views? “

Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman

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Milton Friedman, great defender of freedom, would have been 100 years old yesterday.  His television series, “Free To Choose” was one of the best things ever shown on public television.  Watching Friedman clips on YouTube is time well spent because he so simply and concisely explains principles of liberty.

This is one of my favorites:

Two Friedman quotes:

“If you put the Federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

Dancing Nurses and Dead Brits | A follow-up post…

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Jeannie DeAngelis writes:

“Regardless of futile attempts at liberal do-goodery, the goal on the left is always the same: constantly demanding undeserved praise for well-intentioned but failed acts of benevolent socialism. That sort of predictable imagery-before-reality mentality was on display during the London 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies, where tribute was paid to the Brits’ failing socialized National Health Service, affectionately known as the NHS….”

Read it all at: Dancing Nurses and Dead Brits | Jeannie-ology.

Would you like some Marxist history with your Olympics?

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The Olympics is a great celebration of individual achievement, cloaked in nationalism.  Friday’s long opening ceremony was intended to be a dramatic portrayal of British history.  Great Britain does have a great history, with many magnificent contributions to civilization.   But the job of portraying the history was given to a leftist movie maker (sorry for the redundancy) so what we saw portrayed was a decidedly Marxist view of history.  We apparently can’t get away from that propaganda, even in sports.

Briefly, Peter Boyle’s history went something like this:   In ancient times, everything was green and beautiful.  The background  music was beautiful.  The people were so very happy.

Then the Industrial Revolution was portrayed as the end of everything green.  The scene turned ugly and dark, the music was harsh and dissonant.  And the people were poor and sad, except for the wealthy captains of industry who stood tall in their fine clothes, smoking cigars and smugly observing the scene of destruction before them.  Evil had triumphed.

Later in the saga, there was a long adulatory scene portraying the wonders of Britain’s National Health Service.  Goodness had prevailed after all.  The children were happy and danced with the nurses around the hospital beds.

In the real world, life in the pre-industrial ages was nasty, brutish and short.  At that time you would expect half your kids to die young and the lucky ones who lived could hope to scrape out a very meager existence for 30 years or so.

The Industrial Revolution changed all that.  Division of labor allowed people to be immensely more productive than ever before in history.  For millennia before that, life had changed little for the common man.  Now there was real progress.  Entrepreneurs created a world of choices.  There was increasing prosperity for everyone.  The benefits spread around the world.  Life expectancy improved dramatically.

The advances in medicine from the free enterprise system were spectacular; new drugs and new treatment methods improved the quality of life.   Eventually there was enough prosperity that politicians could buy votes by telling people they would give them “free” medical care.  Of course, nothing is free, and nothing done by government is managed efficiently or economically.  Nothing.  England’s National Health Service proves it.

Yet the Marxist delusions persist.  And Friday night, nearly a billion people watched a dramatic portrayal of false history.

The Narrative is Always Ready

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This time it’s about the violence in Colorado….

The narrative is this: Those Tea Party people and talk radio people are dangerous,violent extremists.  The media sell this narrative as fast as they can in any situation where they think it might work.  The technique was most visibly displayed in the Giffords’ shooting in Arizona.  But if you watch the first news report on many violent incidents, you see the media rush to the desired narrative… only to have the narrative undercut when the facts come out.

Sometimes, when the false narrative has been sold well enough, it sticks even when the facts come out.  Many people know, for example, that Sarah Palin was partially responsible for the Giffords shooting.  Rush Limbaugh, too.

Here is how Brian Ross reported on the Colorado shootings on Good Morning America:

“There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, CO, uh Paige, on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last summer. We don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it is Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.”

Here is what goes through the minds of propagandists like Ross:

We have some violence by a white guy. Great opportunity! Is there any way at all that we can tie this violence to Tea Party people or talk radio people?  Let’s rush to that story first and hope it’s true.  It’s going to be so exciting if it’s finally true this time.  Let’s call the President and see if he wants to get ready for a solemn speech about loving one another.  We’ll put him on prime time.  And then we’ll have some solemn commentary afterward to condemn those Tea Party bastards.

Breitbart was right. The media are the enemy.

 

 

Are Race Riots News?

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There has been an alarming increase in race mobs in our country and the media is doing it’s very best to cover up this trend.  If a “racist white Hispanic” goes out in his neighborhood for the sole purpose of shooting cute little black boys, that story is worth publishing, even if it is completely false.  But true stories of race-based crimes are not.

Thomas Sowell noticed this and his observations are worth reading in full.