The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Saw this on Facebook yesterday and decided to use it as QotD today. This is from Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey. That book just went on my Wish List. At the time this incident occurred, Sowell was still a Marxist, but he says that working for the .gov cured him of that particular disease.
I imagine this was a big part of the cure:
As others have said elsewhere, nobody knows anything yet except the body count, and I won’t speculate. My thoughts are with the victims and their families, as I hope yours are.
…when he said “YOU LIE!” to President Obama, just not (necessarily) on the right subject.
Of course, all politicians lie, but Wilson was objecting to Obama’s claim that the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” wouldn’t cover illegal aliens.
I want to talk about this lie:
“First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”
In actuality, a lot of people were “talking about” it. But Obama promised that wasn’t going to happen.
He lied.
Case in point, Say Uncle, and thousands like him and his family.
The Mrs. has a part time job at a local health care concern and, basically, she goes there to work, get away from kids, and for the benefits. She was told today that, effective 1/1, she could no longer purchase insurance on their plan. Now, it’s a good plan but it’s not cheap. Us and the two rug rats runs just north of $1,000 a month. But even that rate won’t be affordable under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
Especially since, now we’ve passed it and are finding out what’s in it, we discover that
A “glitch”! Oh, my! But one that means thousands of dollars in expenses to millions of Americans who right now have coverage.
Says Uncle:
And the funny thing is, I talk to my insurance guys, lawyers and financial guys and not a one of them knows what to do. Seems all this nonsense is still up in the air among professionals until the .gov provides additional guidance or unfucks itself.
Which will happens some time around… never.
This is what government does. Either deliberately or through unintended consequences, when it sticks its nose where it doesn’t belong it fucks things up.
This is why the powers of the Federal government are supposed to be “few and defined.”
And they are anything but, these days.
At some point the difference between incompetence and malice becomes indistinguishable and irrelevant.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GfJaLzbm40?rel=0]
Nineteen minutes of brilliance.
Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned writes:
We are not facing the anti-gun crowd, save Bloomberg. We’re facing the left-wing of the Democratic Party, and they mean to destroy us. They are betting this trend is real, that the country will be increasingly urban, left of center, and more in favor of gun control. They are betting the farm that we’re on our way to extinction. Are we?
Call your Congresscritters.
Daily.
From Samizdata a couple of days ago:
Let’s see – Native Americans were wards of the state for a century, and, until the recent casino boom, were the most impoverished, addiction ridden, unemployed group in society; the family farmer has been the object of endless state programs to save him for most of the 20th century, and his numbers have shrunk from over half the population to under 2%; black people were “adopted” by the modern welfare state about 50 years ago, with the result that the black family has shattered, perhaps irreparably, and the male part is massively either in prison or unemployed, while the female half now has a 75% or so rate of births out of wedlock, and single parent families struggling with poverty lead to homicide from gang activity being the primary cause of death for young black males.
The wars on poverty and drugs continues to decimate the very populations they were supposed to help, the federal education programs have overseen a massive decline in the competency and educational achievements of our youth across the board, and catastrophically poor literacy rates among the minority communities.
The Fed decided to massively aid the housing market, to assist people in buying homes, and within a few decades, the housing and financial markets collapsed into a recession which we are still struggling to climb out of, and return to a semblence of our former economic levels.
And so now, the progressive state under the current progressive regime is going to come to the aid of the struggling middle class?
Yeah, that will work out just fine…
– Samizdata commenter ‘veryretired’
And NOW they’re going to take over HEALTH CARE!
What could possibly go worng?
Actually, he gets two. First up, this one, from his post on Gun Control Politics:
Resort to theatrical efforts at emotional blackmail is an admission that you have no intellectual arguments. Which is par for the course with the smarmy Diane Sawyer, of course, and with the even-smarmier gun control movement.
I would ask “have you no decency?” — but we already know the answer to that.
Which presents me the perfect opportunity to insert this video clip of the “smarmy Diane Sawyer” from 2007:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
The second quote is from an older post having to do with the civil war in Syria, but it has more a more universal applicability:
In a revolution, if you’re not willing to die or kill for your beliefs you’re basically irrelevant. Tweeting doesn’t count.
A comment to the Market-Ticker column, Fox Gets It Right (!) On Guns:
Sorry to sound tinny, but I’m pretty convinced that this sudden, intense push for gun control is directly related to the fiscal issues facing this Nation. They don’t want an armed citizenry when the SHTF. This may be government recognition that we have passed the event horizon. – Mdm
And to add to the tinfoil, it also helps explain the massive quantities of ammo purchased by various Federal departments recently. Go read the original piece and all the other comments to it. Some are really excellent.
But that wasn’t the QotD. This is, from a comment at Rachel’s:
Attestations by liberals and leftists of what it is they desire bear no resemblance to what they’re after.
Obamacare has nothing to do with health; cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming; anti-gun laws have nothing to do with saving lives; free schooling has nothing to do with education; universal suffrage has nothing to do with governance.
What is it they’re after? What all –isms are after – acceptance, compliance, concession, cooperation, and submission; Utopia.
Utopia: if it saves but one life it’s worth the death of millions. — George Pal
From his Townhall piece, The Role of Educators:
Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education — one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas.
John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.
A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions. The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America — and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.
If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers’ attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn’s book.
That book has sold millions of copies, poisoning the minds of millions of students in schools and colleges against their own country. But this book is one of many things that enable teachers to think of themselves as “agents of change,” without having the slightest accountability for whether that change turns out to be for the better or for the worse — or, indeed, utterly catastrophic.
A People’s History has even made inroads into popular culture. I wonder how many books that clip sold?
“Agents of Change” explains things like The George Orwell Daycare Center, too.
Here’s another little example, a worksheet from a fifth-grade Scholastic Teaching Resources mathematics workbook on the distributive property of multiplication. Check the graphic:
Tell me, what does “distributing the wealth” have to do with the distributive property?
Found here:
Let’s look at what we have learned from this election: Twenty-one of 22 incumbent senators were re-elected, and 353 of 373 incumbent members of the House were re-elected. The American people have re-elected 94 percent of the incumbents who were running for re-election to an institution that has an approval rating of about 9 percent. This indicates, as an electorate, we are a nation of idiots.
100+ years of Publik Edumacashun FTMFW!