Cathy Young Nails Ayn Rand

Get your mind out of the gutter. Via Sipsey Street Irregulars comes a very sharp analysis of Ayn Rand and her philosophy. It's a bit longer than Dipnut's from a few years back, but it goes into greater detail.

All the News That Fits the Agenda

All the News That Fits the Agenda

I really get a kick out of Matt Drudge and his skill at arranging (and titling links). Example:


The authoritative New York Times tells us that all this cold and snow we're getting may be the result of Global Warming! (Which even the high priests of Global Warming have admitted has been on a ten-year hiatus and they don't know why: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t." Kevin Trenberth from the East Anglia computer hack/leak.)

But the philosophy cannot be wrong!

However, there's this interesting bit of continuing fallout concerning the "Paper of Record":

UPDATE 3-New York Times ad outlook dim, shares fall

Print advertising declines to continue in first quarter

* Q4 adjusted EPS $0.44 vs $0.38 average analyst estimate

* Q4 revenue down 11.5 percent to $681.2 million

* Shares down almost 9 percent

NEW YORK, Feb 10 (Reuters) - The New York Times Co (NYT.N) warned on Wednesday that print newspaper advertising will continue to decline, sending shares down nearly 9 percent, even as the company slashed costs to reach a higher-than-expected fourth-quarter profit.

The results, like that of other U.S. newspaper publishers, show that revenue declines are easing as the economy improves and advertisers are taking ginger steps back into the market. Even so, they are reducing what they spend on print media anyway, keeping newspapers' long-term futures uncertain.

Obviously this is yet another of the myriad of problems we're told that are caused or worsened by Anthropogenic Global Warming!

Getting Your Priorities Right

Getting Your Priorities Right

This photo is one of a series ostensibly taken in Quebec City, Canada. They've had a bit of snow this year. This woman has her priorities straight, however:

Word of the Day

Word of the Day

Gorewellian
That is all.

Quote of the Day - "Green Police" Edition

This is in relation to the previous post on this topic, Audi's Super Bowl "Green Police" ad. Reader Perlhaqr in the comments:

Now I have "the Green Police... are buried under my shed..." running through my head.

First runner-up comes from SayUncle's post yesterday, Ad Fail:

The ad says that, by virtue of buying this car, you will be a compliant citizen. In essence, you’ll be a better sheep. Fuck that.

The commercial should have ended with a guy in a big ass Ford Earthfucker^tm that gets 5 miles per gallon with seats made from baby seals blowing past the roadblock billowing smoke. And, for effect, the driver flips them off. I’d buy that car.

Let's see, the Escape, Explorer, Expedition, Excursion, Exclusion, and Earthfucker. Helluva lineup!

Quote of the Day - Tea Party Edition

Quote of the Day - Tea Party Edition

(T)hat grass-roots, “never-done-this-before” sense of excitement and empowerment is the first thing that really hits you.

These are the most regular, decent people you’ll meet, and with very few exceptions not one of them has been involved in politics in any way. It’s just that – like so many of us — They’ve just had enough!

Of course, the media coverage has tried very hard to portray the normal, average, every-day Americans of the Tea party rallies as dangerous and angry racists and Wal-Mart knuckle-draggers, while identifying the mass-produced signs, the mass-produced T-shirts, the mass-produced members of bused-in wiccan nihilist anarcho-Maoist lesbian eco-weenie anti-war protestors as somehow the genuine voice of the American people. - Bill Whittle, Eject! Eject! Eject! - PARTY TIME!

With apologies to lesbian wiccan capitalists everywhere (this means you, Deb). No offense intended.

Time for a New Moment of Zen

Time for a New Moment of Zen


Click for the full-sized version. No, I don't know where this was taken, sorry.

Well, Audi is a German Company

My mouth literally fell open while I watched this for the first time.

All I could think was, (and I'm sure the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Bunch will salivate at this) I'd kill them first. Then I'd go after their bosses.

UPDATE - Quote of the Day, seen elsewhere, but I can't find the link right now (paraphrased from memory) Cbullitt has it:

Bubba Thudd (21:35:23) :

I don’t get it. It’s supposed to be an advert for cars, but after watching it, I want to buy shotgun shells. What gives? Is there some kind of subliminal message?

Wow, China's Really Into "Green" Energy

Wow, China's Really Into "Green" Energy!

Australia signs huge China coal deal

An Australian firm has signed a $60bn (AUS$69bn; £38bn) deal to supply coal to Chinese power stations.

Clive Palmer, chairman of the company, Resourcehouse, said it was Australia's "biggest ever export contract".

Under the deal, the firm will build a new mining complex to give China Power International Development (CPI) 30m tonnes of coal a year for 20 years.

Err, no, you'll be selling them 30 million tons of coal a year for 20 years. Words mean things.

Analysts say it is further evidence of China's strong demand for resources boosting Australia's economy.

Most of China's power stations rely on coal - and demand has risen sharply in recent months after a government stimulus programme re-energised its economy.

Odd, isn't it, how a "re-energized economy" demands more energy?

Here's good news for my industry:

The plan involves building a huge new mining complex in the Australian state of Queensland, and laying 500km (311 miles) of railway line to move the coal to the coast.

Resourcehouse's executive director, Phil McNamara, said the "once-in-a-century project" would include open-cast and underground mines, with construction likely to begin later this year.

The complex in the Galilee basin, to be called China First, is expected to start coal production in 2013 and will churn out some 40 million tonnes a year.

And the extra 10 million tons per annum will go . . . where?

My employer has a lot of experience in the mining industry, so perhaps we'll get a chunk of the design work. If not, it means whoever does won't be available to compete against us on other projects.

But the lucrative Sino-Australian deal will almost certainly disappoint some environmental groups, says the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney.

They believe Australia's reliance on plentiful reserves of coal, both for domestic electricity generation and for export, should be reduced in favour of renewable sources of energy.

They call coal the wonder-mineral. You can do anything with it, except mine it or burn it.

Here.

Pure carbon! Except for the sulfur in it that produces sulfur dioxide and acid rain, and the mercury that is released largely from coal-fired power plants. I wonder if the Chinese power plants will have particulate scrubbers and such like ours do? And then, of course, you've got the release of all that CO₂, the "greenhouse gas" that we're told we have to cap.

I wonder if NASA's James Hansen will travel to China to protest? Or will he, perhaps, go to Queensland where it'll be safer to hold a protest sign?

Blogroll Bleg

Blogroll Bleg

OK, it's well past the time to do some site maintenance. It looks like it's going to rain here all day, and I don't have a dog in The Big Game™^®©, so I thought I'd spend the day cleaning up the left sidebar and getting things squared away. I realize that a lot of people will be watching the game, etc. but if you have TSM blogrolled and I don't have a reciprocal link up, please drop me an email and I'll try to correct that over the next week or so.

I'm also going to revamp the "Best Posts" list and try to organize them by general topic, dropping some, and adding others. If there's anything you think I need to add, let me know.

One last thing - if there are any truly outstanding essays by other bloggers (including yourselves) you think I should link to, I'm giving serious consideration to putting in a section of those. Suggestions are welcome.

Quote of the Day - Out of the Mouths of (Relative) Babes Edition

Quote of the Day - Out of the Mouths of (Relative) Babes Edition

Usually, the State of the Union address is a laundry list of proposals spiced with sycophantic applause and dipped in an admixture of boredom and bravado. It is rarely a statement of basic philosophy.

Not for President Obama.

President Obama's State of the Union address was the greatest American rhetorical embrace of fascist trope since the days of Woodrow Wilson. I am not suggesting Obama is a Nazi; he isn't. I am not suggesting that he is a jackbooted thug; he isn't (even if we could be forgiven for mistaking Rahm Emanuel for one).

President Obama is, however, a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause. He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats. He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict. He sees himself as embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms -- not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually.

Ben Shapiro, Human Events - Obama's Philosophically Fascist State of the Union Address

(h/t to Neo-neocon for the link.)

*Sigh* - I Wrote a Long Post Because I Didn't Have Time To Write a Short One

*Sigh* - I Wrote a Long Post Because I Didn't Have Time To Write a Short One

Via House of Eratosthenes comes a truly excellent (as in concise and spot-on) post saying in about 3/4 of a page what I spent 25 pages on last week. Please read Is it Crazy to Call Obama a Socialist or a Fascist? over at the appropriately-named Clue Batting Cage.

Quote of the Day - Vicious Circle Edition

I made my first appearance on Vicious Circle Thursday night. The other guests were JayG, Aepilotjim, LabRat, Stingray, Breda (for about half the show), and our host Alan. The topics of discussion were Hollyweird and movies (our favorites, least favorites, Avatar etc.), and my most recent überpost, What We Got Here Is . . . Failure to Communicate. Aepilotjim zinged me with this one:

The money-quote for me in your post, and I've got it up here and I'm going to quote it, I mean, this sums up the entire thing for me in one nice little line. You said, "I know this post is already excruciatingly long."

I actually liked this one better, though, by Jay :

This is a good parallel for 2001, because reading Kevin's überpost, I felt like the monkey staring at the monolith.

Vicious Circle #38 is now available for your listening . . . pleasure?

Quote of the Day - Shameless Edition

Quote of the Day - Shameless Edition

Whether or not you believe the authenticity of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s quote of 1939 – “We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot” – the substance is true. The New Deal made the Depression worse – and we are doing it again, only with bigger numbers and more zeros. Furthermore, now the Chinese own us. We enact this nonsensical budget and we might as well give them the whole thing – the Statue of Liberty, McDonald’s and Apple Computer. No backsies. They can have Steve Jobs’ next iPad extravaganza in Shanghai. They build everything over there already anyway.

But unfortunately this is no joke. The passing of this budget is a straight out act of economic insanity. Everyone knows it. The 217 Democrats who passed it surely know it too. Only they are too corrupt to face it honestly. Shame on them. Shame on them. Shame on them. - Roger L. Simon, 217 Democrats take suicide pact

They have no shame, Roger. They haven't for decades. They're politicians elected to national office who have made, as Mencken described, so many compromises and submitted to so many humiliations that they have become indistinguishable from streetwalkers. The shame has been campaigned out of them.

And this isn't limited to Democrats.

But What Happens When One Becomes the Other

But What Happens When One Becomes the Other?

I found a very interesting quotation from Henry Louis Mencken tonight that raises that very question:

THE VALUE the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

H.L. Mencken, The Scientist, first printed in the New York Evening Mail, March 25, 1918

What happens when someone who should have a "boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown" instead becomes enraptured with the idea of doing good?

We get Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change.

And when these people are exposed for what they are, they pull themselves down those rat-holes and try to disappear.

Quote of the Day - Previous Election Edition

Quote of the Day - Previous Election Edition

From this comment thread:

My favorite comment from last election (I think it was here, actually) was "I like Cthulhu's foreign policy of destroying everthing and devouring everyone, but not so much his domestic policy of destroying everything and devouring everyone. Still better than Hillary, though." - Ken

I don't care who you are, that's funny right there.

They Never REALLY Mean It

They Never Really Mean It . . .


That's User Friendly, one of my daily reads.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You . . .

Fool Me Once, Shame on You . . .


. . . fool me twice, shame on me. And still we're stuck with the lesser-of-two-evils choice.

That's by Nate Beeler of the Washington Examiner.

More Misbehavin'

More Misbehavin'



Traveling from out of state to campaign for a candidate for Senate, on your own dime. Good on 'ya, mate!

Misbehavin'

Misbehavin'

More vehicular free speech seen on the streets of Tucson today:


If you can't read the bumper sticker, try this:


It says "B.O. Stinks." And painted on the window, obviously, "Marx Sux." I couldn't read the fine print on the way by.

Obviously a racist.