Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. Frédéric Bastiat
As most Atlas readers know, the wellspring of all of my ideas and activism is individual rights. That is my battle, and I fight the enemies of individualism. So it was particularly enjoyable to do a whole show discussing this very thing. Andrew Wilcow did a whole show on
"Bastiat's Warning Against Big Government." Joining me on the panel were
Leo Rota from The Bastiat Society, Harry Binswanger from the Ayn Rand Institute, and Katherine Mangu-Ward from Reason Magazine.
Everyone should be made to read Bastiat. But generally it is the self-taught who have come to know and admire him. Universities embrace the haters of logic and reason (i.e. Kant), and Bastiat is hardly taught in a public school system that champions statism and collectivism. Bastiat asserted that the sole purpose of government is to protect
the right of an individual to life, liberty, and property. And this it is
dangerous and morally wrong for government to interfere with an
individual's other personal matters (clearly NYC Mayor Bloomberg isn't reading him).
He concluded that
the law cannot defend life, liberty, and property if it promotes "legal [or legalized] plunder,"
which he defined as using government force and laws to take something
from one individual and give it to others. And like Ayn Rand, Bastiatstates that "We cannot doubt that self-interest is the
mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word
is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting
from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the
word selfishness."
One of Bastiat's most important contributions to the field of
economics was his admonition to the effect that good economic decisions
can be made only by taking into account the "full picture." That is,
economic truths should be arrived at by observing not only the immediate
consequences – that is, benefits or liabilities – of an economic
decision, but also by examining the long-term second and third
consequences.
It was a marvelous hour -- yes, an hour on philosophy, reason and
morality. Utterly fantastic. If I can find the whole hour, I will post.
The blog is named for her opus and I am a big fan. Ayn Rand is the most brilliant philosopher. Period. Her contribution to philosophy and the nature of knowledge is as significant as that of Einstein to science, Edison to technology, or any of the titans of progress.
It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve
political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John
Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on
unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were
not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was
not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional
system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from
both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual
welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what we
should have been teaching the world. Ayn Rand
3 crucial lessons Ayn Rand can teach us today Yaron Brooks, Don Watkins, FOX News, Published February 02, 2013
Today is the birthday of Ayn Rand, author of the 1957 classic
"Atlas Shrugged," and one of history’s most celebrated champions of
capitalism. Here are three of the crucial lessons Rand offers those of
us who want to fight for a freer, more prosperous America.
1. Celebrate Business
Today business is the scapegoat for virtually every evil. Whatever
the problem or crisis, “greedy” businessmen take the blame, and the
solution is always held to be more controls, more regulations, more
taxes. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, for instance, Republican
leaders raced to blame “greedy” bankers, not government policy.
President Obama has intensified this outlook.
According to Rand, this is one of history’s worst injustices.
Businessmen are the ones who create the medicines, food preservatives,
sanitation systems, irrigation systems, and millions of other
innovations and labor-saving devices that have nearly tripled our
lifespans and provided us with a standard of living unimaginable by our
forefathers. As she explained in 1961, the businessman is the great
liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released
men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the
terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their
barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences,
from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had
lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries.
Capitalism
is good, said Rand, because it protects each man’s ability to make the
most of his own life—and government intervention, which strips such men
of their wealth and their freedom, is morally wrong.
If we want to limit government, Rand warned, this is something we
need to celebrate. To slam business is to attack a core part of what
makes America great.
2. Don’t Apologize for the Profit Motive
Underneath the attack on business is an attack on the motive that
drives businessmen: the desire for profits. The profit motive, we’re
constantly told, leads businessmen to lie, cheat, and steal their way to
a buck—or at minimum taints them morally.
Just recall the criticisms of Mitt Romney. Even his Republican
challengers criticized him, not for passing RomneyCare, but for having
been a profit-seeking businessman. But if the profit motive is dangerous
and immoral, how can we tolerate the profit system?
Rand sets the record straight. A profit, she notes, is the insignia
of production: you make a profit when you produce something of value,
something that others want to buy because it makes human life better,
longer, easier, more enjoyable.
Capitalism is fueled, not by the Al Capones or the Bernie Madoffs of
this world who seek to get money by hook or by crook. It is fueled by
individuals who make money by creating wealth. This is the actual nature
of the profit motive: it is the desire to earn rewards through
productive achievement.
That, says Rand, is the kind of attitude toward one’s work, toward
one’s wealth, and toward other people that pervades a free market. Free
markets drive out of business the short-sighted, unproductive moochers
who don’t create value—and a capitalist government locks up predators
such as Madoff when they try to defraud others.
Capitalism is good, said Rand, because it protects each man’s ability
to make the most of his own life—and government intervention, which
strips such men of their wealth and their freedom, is morally wrong.
3. Run from Anyone Trumpeting “The Public Good”
Today government grows at the expense of individuals: at the expense
of their rights, their freedom, their wealth. The supporters of Big
Government have always justified this by appealing to “the public good.”
How have defenders of capitalism responded? Not by challenging the
notion of “the public good.” Instead, we have accepted that notion and
tried to persuade people that only capitalism can achieve it.
But the justification for capitalism, Rand stresses, is not that it
serves “the public good” or “the public interest” or “the common
welfare.” All of those slogans are dangerously vague: they can mean
anything, and so they can be used to “justify” everything. The
justification for capitalism is that it is the only system based on the
individual’s inalienable right to pursue his own life, liberty, and
happiness.
Society, Rand observes, is not an entity but a collection of
sovereign individuals, and the essential political value they have in
common is freedom.
Freedom, Rand stresses, means that individuals can exercise their
rights free from coercion and compulsion. They can work to make a
successful life for themselves, acting on their own independent
judgment, keeping the fruits of their labor, and dealing with others
through voluntary exchange to mutual advantage. The government’s role is
to protect their freedom by barring the initiation of physical force.
The economic system that emerges when government is limited and
individual rights are secured is capitalism.
If you want to stop the growth of the state, you have to get rid of
any ounce of the idea that individuals exist to serve some social
purpose or goal. Capitalism is the system rooted in the conviction that
each individual is an end in himself and has a right to exist for his
own sake.
Ayn Rand’s Winning Formula: Capture the Moral High Ground
If you wanted to boil down what makes Rand so successful and what she
can teach us today, it would be that she teaches the free market side
to take the moral high ground.
We “must fight for capitalism,” Rand says, “not as a ‘practical’
issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a
moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will
save it.”
But how can a system driven by self-interest and the pursuit of
personal profit be moral? That is the question Rand answers in her
works, and it is the question we address in our book, the national
bestseller "Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government."
We can limit today’s unlimited government. But to do so we will need
to mount an unapologetic moral defense of freedom. The first step is to
arm ourselves with Ayn Rand’s unsurpassed stockpile of intellectual
ammunition, and then to speak out for freedom.
How fantastic! Just discovered, Ayn Rand on Johnny Carson. Could this ever happen on today's shows, with second-handers like Letterman and the rest of the thumbsuckers? (thanks to Big Fur Hat)
What is needed, what is required in America now, is a philosophical war. The futile and exhausting political games we are subjected to on a daily basis are nothing more than propaganda contests with the left (proponents of modern enslavement) winning hands down, as the enemedia does their bidding.
"You don't have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is–say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise." -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, Ch. 4
And as Rand observed, while a military battle of any scope is like a “political battle”—“merely a skirmish fought with muskets[,] a philosophical battle is a nuclear war”—and only rational ideas will ultimately win it (“‘What Can One Do?’”).
Indeed, and this is what is required. As a human being, you must have a philosophy. Invariably you do, even if you are not consciously aware of it.
A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation -- or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It
A know-nothing political movement has taken power and successfully abolished reason, logic, and individualism. Teaching collectivism in public schools and universities, demonizing and destroying the few pro-freedom voices in the public square.
There must be a revolutionary reaction against this destructive movement. Enlightened people must revive the American idea of individualism, capitalism (fully free economy), and laissez faire although this is difficult as they have largely forgotten what it was. All they have are fragments which is why we find ourselves in a state of grave disorder. Take for example, entitements, the battle isn't which entitlement program (food stamps, cash for clunkers, Obamacare, etc), the battle is about why entitlements or why government. Period.
We must have this battle. People in politics are looking in the rear view mirror. They are a reflection of cultural and educational trends.
Would Rand be welcome to speak at Yale or Harvard in 2012?
(A lecture delivered at Yale University on February 17, 1960, at Brooklyn College on April 4, 1960, and at Columbia University on May 5, 1960. Published as a pamphlet by the Nathaniel Branden Institute in 1967, and now included as a chapter in the book, Philosophy: Who Needs It) _____
[...]
... The three values which men held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism -- as a cultural power -- died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism -- as a political ideal -- died in World War II. As to altruism -- it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it. But it has caught up with them -- and that is the killer which they now have to face and to defeat. That is the basic choice they have to make. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
... Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. ... Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality, but to discover it.
What is morality? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions -- the choices which determine the purpose and the course of his life. It is a code by means of which he judges what is right or wrong, good or evil.
What is the morality of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to live for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice -- which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction --- which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as the standard of the good.
Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: "No." Altruism says: "Yes."
Now there is one word -- a single word -- which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand -- the word: "Why?" Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it -- and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.
It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it -- or, to be exact, to escape the necessity of justification. One does not justify the irrational, one just takes it on faith. What most moralists -- and few of their victims -- realize is that reason and altruism are incompatible. And this is the basic contradiction of Western civilization: reason versus altruism. This is the conflict that had to explode sooner or later.
The real conflict, of course, is reason versus mysticism. But if it weren't for the altruist morality, mysticism would have died when it did die -- at the Renaissance -- leaving no vampire to haunt Western culture. A "vampire" is supposed to be a dead creature that comes out of its grave only at night -- only in the darkness -- and drains the blood of the living. The description, applied to altruism, is exact.
Western civilization was the child and product of reason -- via ancient Greece. In all other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant -- the handmaiden -- of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated -- imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals -- but still, dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that.
The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death -- of freedom or slavery -- of progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of consciousness versus unconsciousness.
Let us define our terms. What is reason? Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. Reason integrates man's perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man's knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic -- and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as "instinct," "intuition," "revelation,' or any form of "just knowing."
Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Identity.
Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality -- other than the one in which we live -- whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.
You realize, of course, that epistemology -- the theory of knowledge -- is the most complex branch of philosophy, which cannot be covered exhaustively in a single lecture. So I will not attempt to cover it. I will say only that those who wish a fuller discussion will find it in Atlas Shrugged. For the purposes of tonight's discussion, the definitions I have given you contain the essence of the issue, regardless of whose theory, argument or philosophy you choose to accept.
I will repeat: Reason is the faculty which perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. Mysticism is the claim to a non-sensory means of knowledge.
In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of the mystics. "Renaissance" means "rebirth." Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason -- of man's mind.
In the light of what followed -- most particularly, in the light of the industrial revolution -- nobody can now take faith, or religion, or revelation, or any form of mysticism as his basic and exclusive guide to existence, not in the way it was taken in the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the Renaissance has automatically converted everybody to rationality; far from it. It means only that so long as a single automobile, a single skyscraper or a single copy of Aristotle's Logic remains in existence, nobody will be able to arouse men's hope, eagerness and joyous enthusiasm by telling them to ditch their minds and rely on mystic faith. This is why I said that mysticism, as a cultural power, is dead. Observe that in the attempts at a mystic revival today, it is not an appeal to life, hope and joy that the mystics are making, but an appeal to fear, doom and despair. "Give up, your mind is impotent, life is only a foxhole," is not a motto that can revive a culture.
Now, if you ask me to name the man most responsible for the present state of the world, the man whose influence has almost succeeded in destroying the achievements of the Renaissance -- I will name Immanuel Kant. He was the philosopher who saved the morality of altruism, and who knew that what it had to be saved from was -- reason.
This is not a mere hypothesis. It is a known historical fact that Kant's interest and purpose in philosophy was to save the morality of altruism, which could not survive without a mystic base. His metaphysics and his epistemology were devised for that purpose. He did not, of course, announce himself as a mystic -- few of them have, since the Renaissance. He announced himself as a champion of reason -- of "pure" reason.
There are two ways to destroy the power of a concept: one, by an open attack in open discussion -- the other, by subversion, from the inside; that is: by subverting the meaning of the concept, setting up a straw man and then refuting it. Kant did the second. He did not attack reason -- he merely constructed such a version of what is reason that it made mysticism look like plain, rational common sense by comparison. He did not deny the validity of reason -- he merely claimed that reason is "limited," that it leads us to impossible contradictions, that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can never perceive reality or "things as they are." He claimed, in effect, that the things we perceive are not real, because we perceive them.
This is the low state of the world we have become inured to. The absence of morality and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, renders dinners with terrorists for ...... $2,500.
For the low, low price of $2,500, you can have dinner cooked for you by Weather Underground agitators and terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
Yes, the absence of reason. And this is the essential failure of our public education system. Take, for example, this talk I gave to a class at NYU (New York University) last week. Listen to the first question posed by a student. It best illustrates the absence of reason. The class, BTW, was uniformly but politely hostile, all of the same mind. After the class a couple of students quietly thanked me and said they agreed with me. So they may not be free to speak in class, but they are free to think. And this is who we must encourage. Click below for video
Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual seeks an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.
But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others—regardless of whether the demonstrators’ goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such.
The forcible occupation of another man’s property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength—i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes—the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others—loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.
Politically, mass civil disobedience is appropriate only as a prelude to civil war—as the declaration of a total break with a country’s political institutions.
Today, Professor Zimmerman penned a piece on this very thing, American exceptionalism, for The LA Times: "Exceptionalism and the left," here. His title is a contradiction. Read it.
Instead, the president should invoke America's long tradition of left-wing exceptionalism. The great warriors for social justice in our history all insisted that America had a providential destiny. Unlike present-day conservatives, however, they also indicted the nation for abandoning this mission. They used American exceptionalism to critique America's vices, not just to sing its virtues.
[....]
"The Socialist Labor Party of the United States … reasserts the inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the party's 1896 platform declared. "With the founders of the American republic we hold that the purpose of government is to secure every citizen in the enjoyment of this right; but … no such right can be exercised under a system of inequality."
Finally, and most famously, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would quote the Declaration in his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, calling on America to "live out the true meaning of its creed." And that creed, King made clear, was both distinctively American and divinely inspired.
But America doesn't have a monopoly on it.
Of course, King was on the right, he was a Republican, but let's not split hairs. America does have a monopoly on it. She was the first moral country, founded upon individual rights, and our fidelity to that principle ensured our exceptionalism.
Zimmerman writes a lot to say very little.
Consider Zimmerman's ideas juxtaposed to mine. Of course, socialism, statist and communism are anathema to American exceptionalism. "American exceptionalism" is "individual exceptionalism" -- individual rights is what made and makes America exceptional, noble and magnificent.
The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law. The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history. All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals. All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights. Ayn Rand
It's Ayn Rand's birthday. I love her. She is the one thinker I turn to repeatedly for her clarity and logic. Her thinking is seamless, mathematical even, the process flawless.
The name of this blog was inspired by her monumental contribution to mankind, Atlas Shrugged. It applied to everything that is happening on so many levels, even if you were unfamiliar with Rand's work: the icon, the idea of Atlas Shrugging, of what would inevitably happen if Atlas shrugged. The world would fall down. Indeed.
And while I had no clue that America would throw away her greatness, her exceptionalism, her leadership, with the election of a clown, albeit a dangerous clown, we could see it coming ... for decades.
The one quote from Rand (there are so many) that best defines my work (and inspired my ideas for my banner) is "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one
sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the
details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them.
The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other
religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some
dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling
temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some
leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek
a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore
of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no,
I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten
this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these
buildings with my body. Ayn Rand
On this, her birthday, I thought I would run Rand's essay on Marilyn Monroe, after her untimely death by a thousand cuts.
This commentary by Ayn Rand, excerpted from The Voice of Reason, was originally published two weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death on August 5, 1962.
The
death of Marilyn Monroe shocked people with an impact different from
their reaction to the death of any other movie star or public figure.
All over the world, people felt a peculiar sense of personal
involvement and of protest, like a universal cry of "Oh, no!"
They
felt that her death had some special significance, almost like a
warning which they could not decipher--and they felt a nameless
apprehension, the sense that something terribly wrong was involved.
They were right to feel it.
Marilyn
Monroe on the screen was an image of pure, innocent, childlike joy in
living. She projected the sense of a person born and reared in some
radiant utopia untouched by suffering, unable to conceive of ugliness
or evil, facing life with the confidence, the benevolence, and the
joyous self-flaunting of a child or a kitten who is happy to display
its own attractiveness as the best gift it can offer the world, and who
expects to be admired for it, not hurt.
In real life, Marilyn
Monroe's probable suicide--or worse: a death that might have been an
accident, suggesting that, to her, the difference did not matter--was a
declaration that we live in a world which made it impossible for her
kind of spirit, and for the things she represented, to survive.
If
there ever was a victim of society, Marilyn Monroe was that victim--of
a society that professes dedication to the relief of the suffering, but
kills the joyous.
None of the objects of the humanitarians'
tender solicitude, the juvenile delinquents, could have had so sordid
and horrifying a childhood as did Marilyn Monroe.
To survive it
and to preserve the kind of spirit she projected on the screen--the
radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked--was an
almost inconceivable psychological achievement that required a heroism
of the highest order. Whatever scars her past had left were
insignificant by comparison.
She preserved her vision of life
through a nightmare struggle, fighting her way to the top. What broke
her was the discovery, at the top, of as sordid an evil as the one she
had left behind--worse, perhaps, because incomprehensible. She had
expected to reach the sunlight; she found, instead, a limitless swamp
of malice.
It was a malice of a very special kind. If you want
to see her groping struggle to understand it, read the magnificent
article in the August 17, 1962, issue of Life magazine. It is not
actually an article, it is a verbatim transcript of her own words--and
the most tragically revealing document published in many years. It is a
cry for help, which came too late to be answered.
"When you're
famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way," she
said. "It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that,
well, who is she--who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel
fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say
anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature--and it won't hurt
your feelings--like it's happening to your clothing. . . . I don't
understand why people aren't a little more generous with each other. I
don't like to say this, but I'm afraid there is a lot of envy in this
business."
"Envy" is the only name she could find for the
monstrous thing she faced, but it was much worse than envy: it was the
profound hatred of life, of success and of all human values, felt by a
certain kind of mediocrity--the kind who feels pleasure on hearing
about a stranger's misfortune. It was hatred of the good for being the
good--hatred of ability, of beauty, of honesty, of earnestness, of
achievement and, above all, of human joy.
Read the Life article to see how it worked and what it did to her:
An
eager child, who was rebuked for her eagerness--"Sometimes the [foster]
families used to worry because I used to laugh so loud and so gay; I
guess they felt it was hysterical."
A spectacularly successful
star, whose employers kept repeating: "Remember you're not a star," in
a determined effort, apparently, not to let her discover her own
importance.
A brilliantly talented actress, who was told by the alleged authorities, by Hollywood, by the press, that she could not act.
An
actress, dedicated to her art with passionate earnestness--"When I was
5--I think that's when I started wanting to be an actress--I loved to
play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of
grim--but I loved to play house and it was like you could make your own
boundaries"--who went through hell to make her own boundaries, to offer
people the sunlit universe of her own vision--"It's almost having
certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world
in on only for a moment, when you're acting"--but who was ridiculed for
her desire to play serious parts.
A woman, the only one, who was
able to project the glowingly innocent sexuality of a being from some
planet uncorrupted by guilt--who found herself regarded and ballyhooed
as a vulgar symbol of obscenity--and who still had the courage to
declare: "We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity
so many people despise and crush this natural gift."
A happy
child who was offering her achievement to the world, with the pride of
an authentic greatness and of a kitten depositing a hunting trophy at
your feet--who found herself answered by concerted efforts to negate,
to degrade, to ridicule, to insult, to destroy her achievement--who was
unable to conceive that it was her best she was punished for, not her
worst--who could only sense, in helpless terror, that she was facing
some unspeakable kind of evil.
How long do you think a human being could stand it?
That
hatred of values has always existed in some people, in any age or
culture. But a hundred years ago, they would have been expected to hide
it. Today, it is all around us; it is the style and fashion of our
century.
Where would a sinking spirit find relief from it?
The
evil of a cultural atmosphere is made by all those who share it. Anyone
who has ever felt resentment against the good for being the good and
has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an
artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of
reality which represent his fundamental view of man's
nature."
The fundamental view of man's nature reflected in American films
of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was noble, just, and courageous. Gone with the Wind was made was 1939. ‘39 was the apex, the
zenith, of the golden age of Hollywood. The thirties, forties, and fifties boast
a treasure trove of classic, brilliant film masterpieces, but ‘39 was unmatched.
Movie historians and cinemaphiles alike agree that 1939 was the greatest year in
film history. Consider the exceptional Dark Victory,
Ninotchka, Rules of the Game, The Wizard of Oz, The Young
Mr. Lincoln, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Juarez, Goodbye, Mr.
Chips, Destry Rides Again, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Of Mice and
Men, Stagecoach, The Women, Wuthering Heights, and Gone
With the Wind -- all made that year.
When America was America, films like these were made in large
quantities. Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Cagney, Ingrid Bergman, Fred
Astaire, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, Deborah Kerr, Cary
Grant, Robert Mitchum, Paul Muni, John Garfield, Hedy Lamar, Gene Tierney,
Taylor, Burton, Vivien Leigh, Laughton, James Mason, Marlene Dietrich -- I
derive succor from these people the way the folks on the Left pop
meds.
This is why I do what I do. Islamic law forbids representational
art. It forbids music. With its laws
allowing polygamy and wife-beating, it forbids love. And these are the kinds of
laws they are trying to bring in to Europe and America today, right under our
noses.
And so that is why I fight: for art, music, and
love.
When I have a rare, stolen moment (say on a plane, for example, with no internet access :), I read. And I am always drawn back to Ayn Rand. I read Rand to refresh, renourish my soul. She fortifies me, my epistemology. I have been reading "The Voice of Reason" while vaca-ing with the Atlas kinderlach. One of her essays resonated so strongly during this statist seizure of America under the Communist Obamao - I thought I would share it with you.
The fundamental
principle of capitalism is the separation of State and
Economics - that is: the liberation of men’s economic activities,
of production and trade, from any form of intervention, coercion,
compulsion, regulation, or control by the government. This is
the essence of capitalism, which is implicit in its theory and in the
operation of a free market - but this is not the way most of its
advocates saw it, and it is not the way it was translated into
practice. The term “laissez-faire capitalism,” is capitalism,”
which one has to use today in order to be understood, is actually a
redundancy: only an economy of total “laissez-faire” is
capitalism: anything else is a “mixed economy,” that is, a
mixture, in varying degrees, of freedom and controls, of voluntary
choice and government compulsion, of individualism and collectivism.
A full, perfect system of capitalism
has never yet existed in history. Various degrees of government
intervention and control remained in all the mixed, semi-free
economies of the nineteenth century, undercutting, hampering,
distorting, and ultimately destroying the operations of a free
market. But during the nineteenth century, mankind came close to
economic freedom, for the first and only time in history. Observe the
results, ernment control was the degree of its progress. American was
the freest and achieved the most,
When two opposite principles are
operating in any issue, the scientific approach to their evaluation
is to study their respective performances, trace their consequences
in full, precise detail, and then pronounce judgment on their
respective merits. In the case of a mixed economy, the first duty of
any thinker or scholar is to study the historical record and to
discover which developments were caused by the free enterprise of
private individuals, by free production and trade in a free
market-and which developments were caused by government intervention
into the economy. It might shock you to hear that no such study has
ever been made. To my knowledge, no book dealing with this issue is
available. If one wants to study this question, one has to gather
information from random passages and references in books on other
subjects, or from the unstated implications of known but unanalyzed
facts.
Those who undertake such a study will
discover that all the economic evils popularly ascribed to capitalism
were caused, necessitated, and made possible not by private
enterprise, not by free trade on a free market, but by government
intervention into the economy, by government controls, favors,
subsidies, franchises, and special privileges.
The villains were not the private
businessmen who made fortunes by productive ability and free
trade, but the bureaucrats and their friends, the men who made
fortunes by political pull and government favor. Yet it is the
private businessmen, the victims, who took the blame, while the
bureaucrats and their intellectual spokesmen used their own guilt as
an argument for the extension of their power. Those of you who have
read Atlas Shrugged will recognize the difference between a
businessman such as Hank Rearden, the representative of capitalism,
and a businessman such as Orren Boyle, the typical product of a mixed
economy. If you want an historical example, consider the career of
James Jerome Hill, who built the Great Northern Railroad without a
penny of federal help, who was responsible, practically
single-handedly, for the development of the entire American
Northwest, and who was persecuted by the government all his life,
under the Sherman Act, for allegedly being a monopolist. Consider it,
then compare it to the career of the famous California businessmen
known as “The Big Four,” who built the Central Pacific Railroad
on federal subsidies, causing disastrous consequences and
dislocations in the country’s economy, and who held a thirty-year
monopoly on railroad transportation in California, by means of
special privileges granted by the state legislature which made it
legally impossible for any competing railroad to exist in the state.
The difference between these two types
of business career has never been identified in the generally
accepted view of capitalism. By imperceptible degrees - first,
through the default of capitalism’s alleged defenders, then through
the deliberate misrepresentations and falsifications of its
enemies-the gradual rewriting of our economic history has brought us
to the stage where people believe that all the economic evils of the
last two centuries were caused by the free-enterprise element, the
so-called “private sector,” of our mixed economy, while the
economic progress of these two centuries was the result of
government’s actions and interventions. People are now told that
America’s spectacular industrial achievements, unmatched in any
period of history of in any part of the globe, were due not to the
productive genius of free men, but to the special privileges handed
to them by a paternalistic government. The fact that much more
autocratic governments, with much wider privilege-dispensing powers
and policies, did not achieve the same results anywhere else on earth
is blanked out by the proponents of this theory.
The only counterpart of the theory’s
grotesque inversion and monstrous injustice is the mystics’
doctrine that man must give credit to God for all his virtues, but
must place the blame for all his sins upon himself. Incidentally, the
philosophical motive and purpose in both these instances is the same.
If you want a contemporary
demonstration of the respective merits and performances of a free
economy and of a controlled economy – a demonstration that comes as
close to an historical laboratory experiment as one could hope to see
– take a look at the condition of West Germany and of East
Germany.
No politico-economic system in history
had proved its value so eloquently or had benefited mankind so
greatly as capitalism – and none has ever been attacked so savagely
and blindly. Why did the majority of the intellectuals turn against
capitalism from the start? Why did their victims, the businessmen,
bear their attacks in silence? The cause of it is that primordial
evil which, to this day, men are afraid to challenge: the
morality of altruism.
Altruism has been men’s ruling moral
code through most of mankind’s history. It has had many forms and
variations but its essence has always remained the same: altruism
holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service
to others is the only justification of his existence, and that
self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value.
The philosophical conflict which,
since the Renaissance, has been tearing Western civilization and
which has reached its ultimate climax in our age is the conflict
between capitalism and altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are
philosophical opposites; they cannot coexist in the same man or in
the same society.
The formal code which is implicit in
capitalism had never been formulated explicitly. The basic premise of
that code is that man – every man – is an end in himself, not the
means to the ends of others, that man must exist for his own sake,
neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to
himself, and that men must deal with one another as traders, by
voluntary choice to mutual benefit. This, in essence, is the moral
premise on which the United States of America was based: the
principle of man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to
the pursuit of his own happiness.
The more things change (hope and change), the more they stay the same. Another media dahlink. A reader posted this comment back in November 2008:
I thought I would never be able to experience what the ordinary, moral
German felt in the mid-1930s. In those times, the savior was a former
smooth-talking rabble-rouser from the streets, about whom the average
German knew next to nothing. What they did know was that he was
associated with groups that shouted, shoved, and pushed around people
with whom they disagreed; he edged his way onto the political stage
through great oratory and promises. Economic times were tough, people
were losing jobs, and he was a great speaker. And he smiled and waved a
lot. And people, even newspapers, were afraid to speak out for fear
that his "brown shirts" would bully them into submission. And then he
was duly elected to office, with a full-throttled economic crisis at
hand [the Great Depression]. Slowly but surely he seized the controls
of government power, department by department, person by person,
bureaucracy by bureaucracy. The kids joined a Youth Movement in his
name , where they were taught what to think.
How did he get the people on his side? He did it promising jobs to the
jobless, money to the moneyless, and goodies for the
military-industrial complex. He did it by indoctrinating the children,
advocating gun control, health care for all, better wages, better jobs,
and promising to re-instill pride once again in the country, across
Europe, and across the world. He did it with a compliant media - Did
you know that? And he did this all in the name of justice and .. . .
change.
(rare WWII photos hat tip aric)
Over at Gates Of Vienna (here's an excerpt) -- hat tip jane:
“Hitler
was a unpredictable idiot. A dictator who ruled Germany with an iron
fist. He had a special gift: with his speeches he was hypnotizing his
audience.
“The industrialists financed the Nazis to make profits
from the German rearmament. Hitler was nothing more than a sock puppet
of the capitalists. Hence the fierce struggle of the Nazis against the
Social Democrats and the Communists.
“The Holocaust was anti-Semitic madness. But without the German law-abiding culture, the Holocaust could not have happened. “Befehl ist Befehl” [An order is an order] was the motto.
“The
followers of Hitler were socially frustrated. The middle class were
hoping to climb the social ladder with a membership in the NSDAP.
“With the military defeat in 1945, Nazism was consigned to the dungheap of history.”
That
was roughly the image of Nazism I grew up with. The image that was
presented to you in history class, in films, and in the newspaper. This
image we might call “the Hitler myth”.
It is not the first time
that myth has won out over reality. Perhaps Plato’s myth about the
death of Socrates is the oldest example. Another historical myth
is the idea that the Indians had a high culture, a pacifist mentality,
and lived in harmony with nature, and that they were exterminated by
white settlers.
This poses the following question: when does a myth win out over the reality? My answer: when all parties that benefit prefer the myth over the unwelcome reality.
The Indians have an interest in their role as victim. And from the side
of Westerners, history is written by left-wing pseudo-intellectuals:
they want to paint capitalist society, and Christian America, in as bad
a light as possible.
Back to the Hitler myth. At some point in
time I started doubting. Just as children start having doubts about
Santa Claus. It simply cannot be true. In this I was struggling with
the following questions:
If Hitler was a madman, how could he come to power?
Can anyone really hypnotize his audience with a speech?
If Nazism only attracted losers, how could they suddenly grab power?
The
Holocaust is a major operation and a historically unique. Would the
motive for this have only been anti-Semitism? For anti-Semitism is
(literally) as old as the way to Rome.
If Hitler was a sock puppet of the major capitalists, why did he call himself a national socialist?
This
was the first speech of Hitler as Chancellor… a strange little man that
is just screaming anything. Do you feel the spell of his hypnotic power
come over you?
Via a “health care fund” the Dutch State
pays the cost of health care of the below average income segment of our
people. This fund is hailed as “a pinnacle of civilization”. However,
it was established by the Nazis on November 1, 1941 [during the occupation of the Netherlands].
In
2006, the PvdA (Socialists) blocked the loosening of Dutch employment
protection. The labor unions even called this employment protection “holy”. However, this measure was also introduced by the Nazis.
After a long leftist life, Jacques van Doorn wrote German Socialism. In this book he demonstrated that historians traditionally portray the conservatives, the
Reichswehr, the nobility and industrialists as the trailblazers to
Hitler. However, the NSDAP was one of the few political parties in the
German Weimar Republic that was not funded by these groups.
Did the massive support for Nazism really suddenly evaporate in 1945?
With
so many contradictions, our image of Hitler cannot possibly be based on
reality. There is a Hitler myth, but how could that occur?
Where did the Hitler myth come from? And why would you believe it?
In Part I demonstrated that a Hitler-myth
exists. Our image of Hitler and Nazism is a fantasy. This fantasy was
created by some special interest groups, who together wrote history.
This section deals with these stakeholders: - - - - - - - - -
1.
The pre-war political establishment, which was restored after 1945.
2.
The baby-boom generation, which took over power in the 1960’s.
3.
The Germans who survived the war.
What special interest did they have?
1. The pre-war establishment had to explain why they did not stop Hitler and the Holocaust.
They also, after 1945, had to channel popular support for Nazism to
their aid. The following components of the Hitler myth were in their
interest:
Hitler myth versus the interest:
“Hitler was a unpredictable madman.
— The political establishment had been unable to predict the Second World War or the Holocaust.
“The followers of Hitler were mainly socially frustrated.”
— Hitler’s followers were standing outside the establishment. Hitler was hated by the establishment.
“With the military defeat in 1945, Nazism was consigned to the dungheap of history.
— The political establishment is responsible for the cleaning up the remnants of Nazism.
2. The baby boom generation were the first “children of the welfare state”.
They pinched the power of the establishment. In this struggle, the
leveling of the “fascism-reproach” proved to be a strong weapon: anyone
who stands in the way of the baby boomers is called “a fascist”.
Hitler myth versus the interest:
“Hitler was financed by the great industrialists.”
—
The baby boomers saw capitalism as an obstacle on their way to power.
Therefore capitalism had to be portrayed as the breeding ground of
Hitler and Nazism.
“The Nazis disputed social democrats and communists.”
—
The baby boomers identified themselves as socialists and/or communists.
Now they also could delude themselves as the “victims of Hitler
The Holocaust was enabled by the German law-abiding culture.”
—
If a law-abiding culture had led to the Holocaust, then the fight
against the authority simply had to be justified. And the baby boomers
fought against authority in the 1960s
“The followers of Hitler were the middle class that grabbed the chance to improve their situation through he Nazis.
— The baby boomers view themselves as real intellectuals. They detest the middle class.
3. Germans who survived the war had to find ways to justify their participation. Therefore the reality was modified:
Hitler myth versus the interest:
“Hitler ruled Germany with an iron fist. And with his speeches Hitler hypnotized his audience.”
— The Germans themselves were also victims of Hitler
“Hitler was financed by the great industrialists.
— Against this financial force majeure the Germans stood no chance
“With the military defeat in 1945, Nazism was consigned to the dung heap of history
— Nazism is a black page in history, but fortunately we left that behind us. As you can see, the Hitler myth has something in it for everyone. But can we still find out how it really stuck together?
Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her
name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits
including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and
her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," is selling at a faster rate today than at any
time during its 51-year history.
There's a reason. In "Atlas," Rand tells the story of the U.S.
economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and
regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds
with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?
The novel's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. "If you
understand the dominant philosophy of a society," Rand wrote elsewhere in
"Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "you can predict its course." Economic crises
and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the
product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society -- particularly its
dominant moral ideas.
Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state?
Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so
few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because
businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is
dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote
"affordable housing," which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified
home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not
they can afford to pay for houses.
The message is always the same: "Selfishness is evil; sacrifice
for the needs of others is good." But Rand said this message is wrong --
selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean
exploiting others à la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness -- that is, concern with one's
genuine, long-range interest -- she wrote, required a man to think, to produce,
and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.
Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can
justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism -- and that so
long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will
continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and
economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the
free market instead of government intervention -- and how proposed solutions
inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of
self-interest.
Rand offered us a way out -- to fight for a morality of
rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression.
And that is the source of her relevance today.
Dr. Brook is president and executive director of the
Ayn Rand Institute.
.....brought this email from reader Erskine Fincher:
Either you have never read Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness,"
or you are a liar. Her philosophy is grounded in the principle that a man's
survival qua man is the moral purpose of his life. In her view, the virtues of
rationality, productiveness, honesty, integrity, etc., are the means by which we
achieve happiness and success over the course of our lives. She never
advocated sacrificing those virtues for any chimerical short-term gain. It is
very true that she disagreed with conservatives on issues such as abortion, but
she did so on moral grounds.
As for her view of free markets, unlike conservatives who base their
support for capitalism on pragmatic grounds and on the view that man is too evil
to live in a socialist utopia, Ayn Rand advocated capitalism because it is the
only moral system. It is the only system that requires men to deal with each
other by reason instead of force. It is the only system that acknowledges a
man's right to pursue his well being and achieve his own happiness. If you
honestly don't know that, then you need to read what she wrote. If you do know
it, then you have acted immorally, betraying your own self-interest by
misrepresenting her in an attempt to subject her ideas to ridicule.
Then there's this blog
entry, accompanied by a photo of your humble columnist that has been altered
to make us look foolish and unattractive (although the nearby photo of the
unnamed blogger undermines the attempt):
This is just disgraceful. Was Taranto really that desperate
for a bit premise? He starts the silly thing asking what Obama and Rand have in
common. He procrastinates (go figure it) on the project. He finally points out a
distinction between Rand and Obama, but not before he snides on the word
"Selfishness" as if he understood a single thing about Rand's book other than
how to spell the word.
Memo to Taranto, you bloody poseur: that book is all about
"moral and cultural concerns." You can keep trying to fool people who've never
read and understood it, and you'll probably even get away with that. Should any
of them actually do that, though, they'll see right through you in an
instant.
When it rains it pours blue heaven today Pamela,Ibn Warraq and Andy Bostom Bat Yeor and Andrew Bostom
Ibn Warraq and
David Littman Pamela, Leading scholar Ibn Warraq, UN specialist David Littman
Bat Yeor (AUTHOR OF Eurabia), David Littman, Ibn Warraq
Ibn Warraq and me. I will be attending his book signing at Columbia on Monday. Will vlog his remarks. He is without peer, the leading scholar on Islam. Read his books, he is joining me next week on my radio show.Go here and read Ibn Warraq on how to debate a Muslim.
the gang in the pantheon of warriors in the fight against the tsunami of islamic jihad
Books at the table
Bat, Atlas and the man among men Dr. Andy Bostom
LOVE HIM! Andy! Andy! Andy!
MWAH!!!
BOSTOM! Brilliant scholar, wonderful husband, fabulous wife, gorgeous children. He is all that and a bag of pork rinds. He is the dearest friend I have. I am blessed.
US: State Sponsor of Judeophobia an editorial by Pamela Geller
Last week, a line was crossed. A terrible line was crossed at Annapolis. As the world looked on, the President of the United States sponsored the first Judeophobic
conference legitimizing an Islamic terrorist state. Jew hatred was acceptable, understandable even.
Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned
Jew hatred. The Jew is now contemptible, inferior, ignorant and politically and socially disenfranchised. Reminiscent of how African Americans were treated in the South, the Jewish attendees had separate entrance ways,
service entrances and were refused the touching, or shaking of hands by the so called moderate members of the Arab world as if the Jews were lepers. Certain members refused to wear the translation earphones when Olmert spoke.
"Saud Al-Faisel ears, underneath his red keffiyah, were left bare. And no, it
wasn’t because he understood Hebrew. It was the Saudi method of demonstrating
their relationship to the State of Israel. Even as the Israeli Prime Minister
was greeting him and speaking of peace, they were refusing to listen. For a
minute I thought I was wrong that maybe there was a technical problem. But then
I saw his aide next to him – also leaving his ears demonstrably naked.”
Then, as Olmert’s speech ended, and the audience applauded. “The Saudi
representative also brought his palms together in order to appear polite. Only
someone who sat very close to him could see that the never touched. The little
game that the Saudis were playing was just one contradiction – the least
noticeable one – in a day full of contradictions.” ...(More
here)
Submitting to Saudi demands, the Americans prohibited Israeli representatives
from entering the hall through the same door as the Arabs. This vile
behavi0r was sanctioned and institutionalized by the President of the
United
States
. I thought
Bush was a Christian, A man of faith? Shocking. He has squandered his second term, betraying our fight against the war on terror
and betraying the reason d’etre for the State of Israel, home of the Jews. We did not elect him to carry
Condi's water.
It is unfathomable to consider this kind of behaviour occurring
with any other race, creed or color. Imagine separate entrances for the leader of an African nation because a
"white" leader refused to walk through the same door as the black man? Because
it would be unclean.
And Israel, Israel took it like the ghetto Jew. They should have walked out like any self respecting human would have done. But no, they lowered the bar yet again. Offering all, and getting nothing, the Sheba Farms, Golan, Jerusalem - all of it in play. The post Oslo Jew has returned to the pre- Holocaust mentality of the 'ghetto' Jew. The Jew that doesn't want to be noticed, the Jew who will do anything to appease those that hate us, just to live in peace. Instead of asserting OUR rights, OUR will that we have a right, are the rightful heirs of Israel and Jerusalem, we are acting as if we have no rights and instead are begging, begging, our enemies to recognize us and accept us!" Behaving like beggars! And the silence of American Jews, well it's the ghetto mentality mixed with those that have assimilated into American culture, the let's not rock the boat crowd.
Appeasing and continuing in this tragedy, Condi Rice later proclaimed," 'I
know what it's like as a Palestinian.'" Such willful stupidity is
unacceptable in a US Secretary of State. Rice knows little about the history of
the Middle East, the politics, the Koran, the Jews, none of it. This ignorant
remark says it all, the Palestinians are not the blacks of the Civil Rights
movement or era, Abbas is not the great non-violent civil rights leader Dr.
Martin Luther King (what an insult to even think this!) and Dr. King was a
Zionist, lover of Israel and the Jewish people's right to it. The Jews are not
the KKK or police with the dogs either, this is not the old South, this the very
violent, blood lusting Middle East.
She doesn't know what it means to be a Jew, to watch innocent people,
babies, children, the old, the young, the tourist, being blown to bits, shards
of flesh flying in every direction, blood, guts strewn everywhere, missing body
parts and the survivors, with nails, nuts and bolts throughout their bodies,
marred for life. My dear friend wolf nailed it she said “Rice doesn't know what
it's like to have monsters throwing rocks at your car as you drive, to have
bombs thrown at you, to live under constant mortar fire and have to spend the
night in a bomb shelter. She doesn't know the feeling of the parents who lost
their sons that went on a hike near where they lived, only to find that their
children had been brutally murdered by these barbarians who had bashed in their
heads beyond all recognition and left alone to be discovered in a cave . She knows rein,
nothing...”
First, it's got to use the actual word in Arabic for "peace," not the phony
substitutes.
For it turns out there are three different words in Arabic for "peace." Only
one of them is for real. And it's not the one used at Annapolis, just like it
wasn't the one used at Camp David II, Oslo, or Camp David I. All failed a
linguistic test, a test which any real Arab-Israeli agreement must pass, the
Test of Suhl.
The three Arabic words translated as "peace" in English are salaam, hudna,
and suhl.
Salaam is the peace of submission. It's the drawn out pronunciation of "slm"
in "Islam," (written Arabic has no vowels) the Arabic word for submission and
obedience, and in "Moslem" or "Muslim," the Arabic word for "one who submits."
There is peace, salaam, among Moslems when they submit to Allah and the
teachings of the Koran. There is peace, salaam, between Moslems and kafirs,
infidels, only when the latter submit to the rule of the former.
In other words, salaam, Moslem peace, is not the absence of violence as it
is for us, but the absence of disobedience. Just like it was for the
Communists. In Lenin's words:
As long as capitalism and (Soviet) socialism exist, we cannot live in peace.
In the end, one or the other will triumph - a funeral dirge will be sung over
the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.
Or, as the Soviet Military Encyclopedia stated it: Peace is impossible
without Soviet socialism. A truly lasting peace is impossible and cannot be
achieved without a proletarian revolution.Compare Lenin's words to the words of
Allah, as dictated to Mohammed in the Koran: Fight and slay the unbelievers
wherever you find them. Seize them, confine them, lie in wait for them in every
place of ambush. (Sura - verse - 9:5) Believers! Do not befriend your fathers or
your brothers or your sons if they choose unbelief in preference to belief in
Allah. (Sura 9:22) Fight those who do not believe in Allah, those who do not
forbid what Allah and his apostle have forbidden, fight them until they pay
tribute to the believers and are utterly subdued. (Sura 9:29)
Mohammed is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are merciless towards the
unbelievers but kind to each other. (Sura 48:29)
O Unbelievers! We renounce you. Enmity and hatred will reign between us until
you believe in Allah alone. (Sura 60:4)
Just as there could not be peace with the Soviets until we sang a funeral
dirge over the Soviet Union, there cannot be peace with Moslems who believe that
salaam requires Islam to be a religion of the sword.
Hudna, the second Arabic word translated in English as "peace," means
cease-fire, a temporary truce.
When the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, for example, proposes a hudna
with Israel, it's hailed in the Western media as a peace proposal. It is instead
a tactical, temporary break in hostilities, giving Moslems time to re-organize,
re-arm, then renew the Jihad against the kafirs when they can be most caught
off-guard.
A line in the sand was crossed last week. and anyone claiming that
Annapolis was a big yawn and that nothing would come of it, is living in the land
of unicorns and moonbeams. The Jew as dhimmi was made official and the world
was there to sanction it and bear witness. Moreover, Israel laid itself down, the sacrificial lamb, ready for slaughter while Sheba Farms, Golan,
Jerusalem were thrown on the table like so many marbles, all of it in play.
Bat Yeor was dead to right when I asked her what had become of the people of
Israel, "Israel is unworthy of her ancestors."
Today Atlas Shrugged is 50. Published 50 years ago today. Feels like it was written tomorrow. Rand called it, she called it all.
Atlas Shrugged defines me.
I read the book in my early twenties when my dearest, singularly closest friend, whom I respected enormously, casually mentioned it was her favorite book. Bonnie, by occupation the Corporation counsel for the city of NY, had majored in philosophy (she passed away over 10 years ago, but not going there.)
It was the first thing of Rand's that I read (I have consumed everything she wrote and uttered since.) Why isn't Atlas mandatory reading in every public school in America? That it is not is yet another stark indication of the choke hold the left holds on our education system.
Atlas Shrugged defined my thinking. It perfectly articulated my epistemology. I was the quintessential "romantic realist" (man as he ought to be in the real - the low state - of the world.) And while it's been over 20 years since I read that tome, it is as fresh and as important and as relevant (if not more so) to me now as it was then.
Atlas Shrugged is a treatise delivered in a fictional novel to better understand Rand's philosophy. Rand is, IMAO, the greatest philosopher in human history. It is man's great failure that it turns away from reason and truth and romanticizes barbarism, communism, socialism despite the 100 million deaths outside of war under those failed systems. Like Rand, I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
My blog is exemplar of A is A. That's what I deliver here ....A.
It's purpose is clearly defined by Rand's philosophy. Evil is made possible by the sanction you give it. WITHDRAW YOUR SANCTION.
A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human
being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy.
Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious,
rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical
deliberation -- or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of
unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined
contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and
fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious
into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid
weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your
mind's wings should have grown. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It
What struck me was when I first read Atlas was living by the coda of moral values. Man's moral value -his value through his work. His value through his his achievement and the evil that seeks to undermine it and destroy it at every turn.
I live by the glorification of the rights of the individual. Self reliance. American greatness.
In celebration I shall pick up Victor Hugo and read, perhaps, Les Miserables, as a gift to me from Ayn.
Robert Stacey McCain ran a wonderful piece this morning in the The Washington Times on Atlas Shrugged, Atlas, at last, on the map . It's a must read and yes, I am quoted (which we love.)
That influence has gained a new life on the Internet. Pamela Geller's blog,
"Atlas Shrugs" (AtlasShrugs2000.typepad.com), is named in tribute to Rand, whom
she calls "the greatest philosopher in human history."
I am not alone in my admiration for Rand's work. I find myself in excellent company.
Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster.
She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an
architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s
inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New
York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began
praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to
Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr.
Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”Ayn Rand's Literature of Capitalism
[...]
Shortly after “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a
letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was
written out of hate.” Mr. Greenspan wrote: “ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration
of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and
undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who
persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
Rand’s magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr.
Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.
Rand called “Atlas” a mystery, “not about the murder of man’s body, but about
the murder — and rebirth — of man’s spirit.” It begins in a time of recession.
To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government
interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food
becomes scarce.
Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers
and how viciously it treats them” and to portray “what happens to a world
without them.”
In this context, we can see the widest significance of Ayn Rand's literary
and philosophical achievement. She was the first thinker and artist to fully
grasp the meaning of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution and to give them
expression both in literature and in philosophy.
The most radical aspect of Atlas Shrugged is that it is a sweeping,
serious novel of ideas that is based in the business world, the last
place mainstream intellectuals would have thought to regard as the inspiration
for epic drama or profound new ideas. What makes Ayn Rand distinctive is that
she found drama, heroism, and profound philosophical meaning in the achievements
of the entrepreneurs and industrialists who were reshaping the world.
Atlas Shrugged was written in an age of creeping global socialism.
Extrapolating from the trends of the day, Ayn Rand projected a future in which
most of the world's nations are collapsing into the poverty and oppression of
socialist "people's states," while America itself is collapsing under the weight
of increasing government takeover of the economy.
She saw the dramatic potential in asking a single question: what would happen
if the innovative entrepreneurs and businessmen—after decades of being vilified
and regulated—started to disappear? What if the men condemned as parasites who
somehow grow rich by exploiting manual laborers—the whole Marxist view of the
economy—what if those "exploiters" were no longer around? The disappearance of
the world's productive geniuses provides the novel's central mystery, both
factually and intellectually.
[...]
Literarily, she recognized the romanticism in the extraordinary feats of
these business innovators. In Atlas Shrugged this is perhaps best capture
in repeated references to the legend of Nat Taggart, the swashbuckling young
adventurer who founded the railroad for which Dagny Taggart works—a character
based, in part, on the real-life swashbuckling of Commodore Vanderbilt's early
career.
Or consider this passage, from an early chapter of Atlas Shrugged, in
which steel tycoon Hank Rearden reflects on the process by which he invented a
revolutionary new metal alloy.
He did not think of the ten years. What remained of them tonight was
only a feeling which he could not name, except that it was quiet and solemn. The
feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to
make it. But the parts, unrecalled, were there, within the feeling. They were
the nights spent at scorching ovens in the research laboratory at the mills—
—the nights spent in the workshop of his home, over sheets of paper which he
had filled with formulas, then tore up in angry failure—
—the days when the young scientists of the small staff he had chosen to
assist him waited for instructions like soldiers ready for a hopeless battle,
having exhausted their ingenuity, still willing, but silent, with the unspoken
sentence hanging in the air: "Mr. Rearden, it can't be done—
—the metals, interrupted and abandoned at the sudden flash of a new thought,
a thought to be pursued at once, to be tried, to be tested, to be worked on for
months, and to be discarded as another failure—
—the moments snatched from conferences, from contracts, from the duties of
running the best steel mills in the country, snatched almost guiltily, as for a
secret love—
—the one thought held immovably across a span of ten years, under everything
he did and everything he saw, the thought held in his mind when he looked at the
buildings of a city, at the track of a railroad, at the light in the windows of
a distant farmhouse, at the knife in the hands of a beautiful woman cutting a
piece of fruit at a banquet, the thought of a metal alloy that would do more
than steel had ever done, a metal that would be to steel what steel had been to
iron—
—the acts of self-racking when he discarded a hope or a sample, not
permitting himself to know that he was tired, not giving himself time to feel,
driving himself through the wringing torture of: "not good enough…still not good
enough…" and going on with no motor save the conviction that it could be done—
—then the day when it was done and its result was called Rearden Metal—
—these were the things that had come to white heat, had melted and fused
within him, and their alloy was a strange, quiet feeling that made him
smile at the countryside in the darkness and wonder why happiness could hurt.
The central philosophical theme of Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's
demolition of the intellectuals' dichotomy between the high-minded pursuits of
the intellect and the allegedly grubby, un-intellectual world of business and
industry. Ayn Rand's answer to this is provided early in the novel by Francisco
D'Anconia. A flashback shows us Francisco and Dagny Taggart as teenagers combing
through the machinery of a junk yard, to the disapproval of a friend of the
family:
Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw
them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile.
He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, "A young man of your position
ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world." "What
do you think I'm doing?" asked Francisco.
Later, Dagny's observations about the motors of a railroad locomotive provide
a deeper explanation of this view of the products of industrial capitalism as
testaments to the power of the human mind.
For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent
and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections,
more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational
connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for
the first time.
It is a measure of the success of Atlas Shrugged that this message may
not seem as radical today as it did 50 years ago. With the discrediting of
Marxism and the rise of the "information age," it is now commonplace to
recognize that knowledge is the engine of production—that ideas, more than
physical labor or raw materials, are the primary source of wealth. Yet Ayn Rand
originated this idea during the old industrial age, when the brute muscle power
of union workers was still widely put forward as the source of America's
industrial might.
It may be easier to recognize the central role of the mind when looking at
advances in high technology. But Ayn Rand grasped the role of the mind in
all aspect of business. Late in the novel, Dagny Taggart observes the
reign of Cuffy Meigs—a kind of railroad czar empowered as chief regulator of the
industry—and surveys the havoc that his arbitrary decrees wreak on the rational
planning of private businesses.
She knew that no train schedules could be maintained any longer, no
promises kept, no contracts observed, that regular trains were cancelled at a
moment's notice and transformed into emergency specials sent by unexplained
orders to unexpected destinations—and that the orders came from Cuffy Meigs,
sole judge of emergencies and of the public welfare. She knew that factories
were closing, some with their machinery stilled for lack of supplies that had
not been received, others with their warehouses full of goods that could not be
delivered. She knew that the old industries—the giants who had built their power
by a purposeful course projected over a span of time—were left to exist at the
whim of the moment, a moment they could not foresee or control. She knew that
the best among them, those of the longest range and most complex function, had
long since gone—and those still struggling to produce, struggling savagely to
preserve the code of an age when production had been possible, were now
inserting into their contracts a line shameful to a descendant of Nat Taggart:
"Transportation permitting."
That the central "planning" of government actually consists of the disruption
of rational planning by millions of private individuals is a point that had
already been made by pro-free-market economists like Ludwig von Mises. Ayn Rand
grasped that these economic principle were not dry, academic abstractions, but
dramas played out in the real world—that the laws of economics are a matter of
life and death, of triumph or tragedy. Here, for example, is one episode of the
tragedy that plays out in the novel's later pages:
Six weeks ago, Train Number 193 had been sent with a load of steel,
not to Faulkton, Nebraska, where the Spencer Machine Tool Company, the best
machine tool concern still in existence, had been idle for two weeks, waiting
for the shipment—but to Sand Creek, Illinois, where Confederated Machines had
been wallowing in debt for over a year, producing unreliable goods at
unpredictable times. The steel had been allocated by a directive which explained
that the Spencer Machine Tool Company was a rich concern, able to wait, while
Confederated Machines was bankrupt and could not be allowed to collapse, being
the sole source of livelihood of the community of Sand Creek, Illinois. The
Spencer Machine Tool Company had closed a month ago. Confederated Machines had
closed two weeks later.
The people of Sand Creek, Illinois, had been placed on national relief, but
no food could be found for them in the empty granaries of the nation at the
frantic call of the moment—so the seed grain of the farmers of Nebraska had been
seized by order of the Unification Board—and Train Number 194 had carried the
unplanted harvest and the future of the people of Nebraska to be consumed by the
people of Illinois. "In this enlightened age," Eugene Lawson had said in a radio
broadcast, "we have come, at last, to realize that each one of us is his
brother's keeper."
Atlas Shrugged is about more than capitalism, and Ayn Rand carried her
observation about the role of the rational mind beyond economics into art,
family life, and yes, even sex—where she rejected brute materialism just as
thoroughly as she did in economics. To understand fully the lessons of
capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, she grasped, required that one
understand the validity and life-sustaining power of reason in human
life.
The passage I quoted above also hints at a second philosophical theme that
remains the novel's most revolutionary idea. Altruism—the notion that "each one
of us is his brother's keeper"—is still regarded as practically synonymous with
morality. Yet Atlas Shrugged concretizes the destructive impact of a
moral code based on sacrifice and shows us the virtues of selfishness.
Throughout most of mankind's history, moralists have warned that individuals
driven by "greed" and left free to pursue their self-interest would plunge
society into a destructive war of all against all, a system of brutality,
plunder, and exploitation—precisely the qualities Marx projected onto the new
capitalist system. Instead, capitalism produced a system of freedom,
independence, prosperity, and super-abundant creative energy—while the societies
most thoroughly dedicated to the sacrifice of the individual to the collective,
the 20th century's Communist regimes, were guilty of the greatest crimes ever
recorded.
The lessons of this history were not lost on Ayn Rand, who had escaped from
the Soviet Union to America in the 1920s, experiencing in a brief span the most
complete contrast between opposing social systems. In one of the novel's most
powerful metaphors, a character describes the collapse of the 20th Century Motor
Company, a once-prosperous firm that descended into rancor, petty tyranny, and
economic squalor after its employees voted to adopt a "bold experiment" in
egalitarian socialism. The tale's narrator concludes, "This was the end of the
20th Century." Literally, he is referring to the fate of the company;
symbolically, Ayn Rand uses the story to sum up the moral catastrophe of 20th
century socialism.
As her own answer, Ayn Rand offered a morality of self-interest in which the
individual's central moral goal is the pursuit of his own happiness. As one of
the novel's philosophical speeches expresses it:
For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who
claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to
your neighbors—between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for
the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is
self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say
that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
Yet Ayn Rand's most radical idea is not merely her defense of
self-interest—others have grudgingly accepted self-interest as a necessary evil,
a "private vice" that makes for "public virtue"—but rather her redefinition of
the moral meaning of self-interest.
Most intellectuals have accepted the old altruist caricature of self-interest
as brute criminality, as if the only choice we face is between forms of
sacrifice: sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others or sacrificing others to
ourselves. Yet this caricature is thoroughly refuted by the history of
capitalism, in which the most self-interested men are not looters or vandals,
but creators who built railroads, steel mills, and computer networks. The
philosophy of altruism gives us a choice between two moral models: Mother
Theresa or Al Capone. Yet where is the room in this philosophy for a Bill Gates,
a Thomas Edison, or any of the thousands of other figures who populate the
history of capitalism, building their own fortunes through the creation
of new ideas and products?
For the first time, Ayn Rand recognized the reality and significance of these
men and drew a profound moral lesson: that genuine self-interest means, not the
short-range conniving of the brute, but the creative thought and productive
effort of the entrepreneur.
These philosophical insights were radical and new—but they were the only
genuine, honest response to the evidence provided by the achievements of
capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Ayn Rand's detractors sometimes
dismiss her novels as "unrealistic," but it is today's mainstream intellectuals
who seem like they are wandering around in a fog of unreality. Stuck in a battle
between two pre-conceived conventional notions—the religious traditionalism of
the right versus the secular collectivism of the left—they have missed the
monumental lessons of two centuries of history.
The era of encroaching global socialism—the dominant trend when Atlas
Shrugged was written—has since given way to an era of global capitalism. But
the deepest meaning of capitalism and its achievements has still not been widely
understood and embraced. Capitalism is beginning to transform the lives of
billions of people across the globe, from Eastern Europe to India to China. But
there is no one to help them understand what it is, its deepest personal meaning
for their lives and values, and why it is good.
And that is why Atlas Shrugged is, if anything, even more relevant and
more necessary today than it was when it was first published five decades ago.
This is a view of the innovative entrepreneur as a kind of crusader, driven
by a profound commitment to moral excellence.
More than a century earlier, one of the most honest and insightful observers
of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, had recounted the extraordinary exertions and
risk-taking of American merchant sea-captains and concluded that "the Americans
put something heroic into their way of trading." But Tocqueville never really
took this idea seriously or followed its consequences. Ayn Rand did.
When she followed the consequences of this idea, it led her to two crucial
philosophical identifications that Atlas Shrugged introduced to the
world.
Running this Wallace interview again. Watch it over and over and over. love the cigarettes.
Kick back and watch Rand with Mike Wallace; Part I
Part II
Part III
I
swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the
sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
My parents are G-d and Ayn Rand. I forget who said that but it could have been me. 50 Years ago, Atlas Shrugged was published.
If Rand was alive today she would be apoplectic over the appeasement to savages. Her treatise seemed outrageous when she published it. Today, it seems tame in comparison to what is happening in the war on Islamic jihad. But she called it. She called it all.
I often quote Rand, "when you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are."
Kick back and watch Rand with Mike Wallace; Part I
Part II
Part III
I
swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the
sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Much thanks for Tiger Hawk reminding me that Atlas Shrugged turns 50 today. How brilliant, prescient Rand was. She defined my epistemology and helped to teach my how to think, question and deduce. This blog pays tribute everyday - in its very existence.
Rand ought to be required reading starting with We the Living. Throw the leftarded trash out of the classrooms and replace it with the exalted individualism, self reliance, meritocracy. Read all of Tiger's post here; hat tip Larwyn
With that enigmatic opening line,
author-renegade philosopher Ayn Rand began her 1957 novel "Atlas Shrugged,"
which remains a controversial book 50 years after publication.
More than 700,000 copies of Rand's
books sold in 2006, 25 years after her death. Several years ago, when the Modern
Library published readers' choices for the best novels of the 20th century, four
books by Rand made the list: "Atlas Shrugged" (No. 1), "The Fountainhead" (No.
2), "Anthem" (No. 7) and "We the Living" (No. 8).
A survey in 1991 by the
Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found "Atlas Shrugged" the
second most influential book in the United States. The Bible was
first.
"Centuries
ago, the man who was ”no matter what his errors” the greatest of your
philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence
and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have
never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete
it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." This passage is part of the radio broadcast
delivered by John Galt to the people of America in Part Three, Chapter
VII.
More on my journey with Atlas.
I came to Atlas Shrugged in a very personal way. Atlas Shrugged was the favorite book of my dearest friend, a brilliant lawyer for the city of New York. A girl who I immediately bonded with at 11 years old and who remained my dearest, most precious friend (of which I have few) until she died of ovarian cancer 8 years ago July 22nd. I owe her more than I could ever say or repay. I loved her unconditionally and she me. She gave me Atlas. Thank you Bonnie.
Alexandra, who encompasses all things beautiful, ran this exquisite post. Watch the video, twice. Mike, the last of a dying breed, sent it to me with this dear note;
One of my buddies stationed with me in England in the early 1970's sent this, then I soon found it on this beautiful blog. My buddy was an F-4 pilot, two tours in Thailand during the Viet Nam war, and four years in England flying for the 78th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 81st Tactical Fighter Wing, RAF's Bentwaters and Woodbridge. I mention this because when I got his email I could just feel that he was hurting to be back in an F-4 flying a low-level mission. I can only dream, and envy him his memories. Even though I was in the Air Force for over 21 years, I was ground-bound, but I worked with the greatest bunch of guys in the world, fighter pilots, and listened to their tales. They were surprisingly quiet and humble, had great self-deprecating senses of humor.
George W. Bush was a fighter pilot, and it shows to his advantage as long as you leave the liberals out.
Strap in tight, turn up the volume, the music is great too, and prepare to use a Mirage as a weed-eater probably somewhere over South Africa.
UPDATE: Wanted share these pics shared with me;
Jay writes;
Noticed a few Air Force fighter jets on your site today. Airshow in
Quebec City last weekend. The Blue Angels and a F15 stole the show with
their incredible acrobatics. The humidity was 98%....notice the
pulverization cloud surrounding the F15...literally, the speed of these
jets can pulverization the H2O molecules....creating this vapour
cloud...
Thnaks Jay, you made my day. The previous Angel Decoy pctures can be viewed here.
Excellent post here, especially for those in search of how to think. (hat tip Eric)
"You are a wonderful fighter for liberty" -- Bat Ye'or
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"Pamela Geller is a dynamo of energy and
a paragon of courage and fearlessness.
--Robert Spencer, JihadWatch in his book Stealth Jihad
"You do great work. You are a hero". -- Geert Wilders, Dutch MP
"You are my hero!" -- Wafa Sultan, Former Muslim, Author human rights activist
"Hot female host with a good sense of humor based in NYC? I nominate Pamela."-- Michelle Malkin
"An American and Jewish national treasure." -- Steven Goldberg, National Vice Chair, ZOA
"A nationally recognized authority on the threat of radical Islam" -- Rep. Steven King (R-IA)
Pamela is one of the nation's most vigorous opponents of bigoted violence.- John Hinderaker, Powerline
" "A beautiful and articulate speaker and writer who has risen to prominence in the US for her steadfast commitment to exposing the deadly pathologies of Jew hatred, misogyny and other prejudices inherent to jihadist ideology." -- Caroline Glick" -- Caroline Glick
"I honestly think that one day historians will write about the defense of Western values and virtues in the 21st Century and speak of heroes. And one will be Pamela Geller." Michael Coren, TV host, Sun TV
"I'm cheering you on!" -- Amanda Carpenter
"Great site," Dick Morris
"A brash New Yorker and an irrepressible firebrand" -- Robert Tracinski, The Freedom Fighter's Journal and The Intellectual Activist
"Indeed, some of Israel's best friends and most articulate defenders can be found in the blogosphere .... Atlas Shrugs, [et al] all provide a refreshing alternative to the moral relativism and politically correct anti-Israel blather of the media. Michael Freund, Jerusalem Post
"She does more in one week than most of us do in a frickin' lifetime -- Pamela Geller!" -- Jaz McKay, Talk Radio KNZR
"Influential online fanatic" --- Max Blumenthal, Writer, Al Jazeera and The Nation
"I never go to MSM for news. Atlas is where I go. I am amazed at all that is happening, that only Atlas readers know about"". --- JCL, Atlas reader
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“Geller had joined Stop the Madrassa and blogged often about the matter on her website, Atlas Shrugs. Blessed with sultry Hollywood sex appeal and a sassy, scythe-like wit — a personable Ann Coulter and articulate Sarah Palin rolled into one — Geller would ride the Park51 project protest to superstardom.”
- Southern Poverty Law Center
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Village Voice
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"Geller and Spencer are probably the most important propagandizing Islamophobes in the world, these people's voices speak very loudly — not just here in the United States but overseas." Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project
"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body." Ayn Rand
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“Hitler
was a unpredictable idiot. A dictator who ruled Germany with an iron
fist. He had a special gift: with his speeches he was hypnotizing his
audience.
