Scott Brown’s election win in Massachusetts yesterday is being heralded as “a Boston Tea Party event” – a signal to their government by Americans who believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and want healthcare plans scaled back. Perhaps Brown’s win truly reflects a belief by voters that the Republican Party has had an epiphany of liberty, repented their big-government ways, and decided to do away with the interventionist economic and warmongering policies of the Bush years. Indeed, perhaps now, only one year after Obama’s decisive presidential win, Americans already feel the Republican Party has cast off its big-government spell and atoned sufficiently for its disastrous past decade in power. Maybe Americans feel the party has changed or apologized enough to deserve winning back this year’s round of “congressional musical chairs,” to say nothing of the lofty mantle of “small government patriots.”
Or, more likely, Brown’s election symbolizes voters’ continued frustration with a two-party system that amounts to picking the “least bad” candidate. Certainly, the fact that Ted Kennedy’s old seat has gone to a Republican is no Tea Party- worthy moment. For media pundits to even compare these two phenomena – or to equate the win to a “revolution” or “patriot movement” – is sadly mistaken, hilariously predictable, and an intentional slight to the true motivations of the 2009 Tea Party rallies. These first assemblies convened to protest both parties’ trampling of individual liberty, drunken spending binges, imperialist wars abroad, and socialized healthcare – two-party big government, in a nutshell. Continued…
I consider the most dangerous, destructive, maddening, and challenging personality disorder to be narcissism. Discovered from study of psychology and reinforced time and again through interactions with various employers, family members, and folks on the street – to say nothing of politicians and government employees – I now personally rank Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) as on of the primary sources of controlling and manipulative behavior, know-it-all attitudes, abuse and exploitation, and cognitive dissonance in the minds of millions of unsuspecting or helpless victims. Continued…
By Peter Schiff
Campaign for Liberty
Published 12/31/09
“In its recent look back on the first ten years of the century, Time Magazine proclaimed the period to be “the decade from hell.” The editors made their case based on what they saw as the signature events of the last ten years, notably the ravages of terrorism, failed wars, and a global financial crisis. Taken together, these factors produced an era that Time is convinced will be remembered as one of the low points in our history…”
“Under no circumstances could the past ten years be described as “the decade from hell.” In fact, in terms of economic good fortune, the period shares parallels with the Roaring Twenties. I would describe this as a decade of sin that paved the way to hell.
“Yes, we had spectacular problems like September 11th and the invasion of Iraq – which were horrific for those who were directly affected – but for most Americans, it was a time of unexpected wealth and unearned prosperity. Up to the days of the stock market crash, the economics of the decade will be remembered for cash-out refinancing for millions of homeowners, no-doc liar loans, no-money-down car purchases, eight-figure Wall Street bonuses, cheap Chinese imports, and trample-to-death holiday sales. In other words, the decade now closing gave us the biggest and most irresponsible spending orgy in U.S. history. The past decade was the party; the one ahead will be the hangover.”
The mainstream media (MSM) and certain governments around the world continue to steam past ClimateGate like it never happened. In a manner similar to how it treats most other events and issues of real significance (no offense, Tiger), the strategy of MSM is to ignore all countering viewpoints and continue with its dumbed-down propaganda-as-usual. Indeed, MSM ignores the skepticism and mounting evidence that threatens to overturn AGW, ignores leaked emails that give credence to suspicion that the AGW theory is fraudulent (or, at best, extremely irresponsible research), ignores the hypocrisy of prominent AGW advocates who reach Copenhagen in their private planes and limos, ignores the refusal by many governments to handicap their already-weakened economies with more ridiculous environmental regulation, ignores the cold temperatures currently blanketing the globe, and so forth… Instead, MSM remains resolute in its strategy: that perseverance – hammering the same stories and propaganda into the heads of its rapidly dwindling audience – will ultimately result in broad acceptance of the AGW myth.
As a bright example of the increasing resistance to the AGW scam (whose real objective appears to be worldwide socialism), this article by the UK’s Daily Express lists 100 reasons “why climate change is natural and not man-made.”
Geophysicist, economist, and financial advisor Bob Hoye explains why Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has been embraced by authoritarians around the globe as a replacement for failed socialism, and how they are using this new scam to push global wealth redistribution and achieve their goal of a New World Order.
Alarmism
By Bob Hoye
Published by Institutional Advisors
December 8, 2009
A few of Mr. Hoye’s key points are included below. Read the entire article here.
“With virtually unlimited budgets the days up to ‘Copenhagen’ have been magnificently orchestrated towards the full ambition of authoritarians – one world government…”
“Bereft of any foundation in science, convictions about AGW have become religious catechism. Even if Copenhagen delivered all that the faithful could hope for, there could be a post-mania letdown…”
“Historically, the warming mania is another example of millenarianism, which is described as “The belief by a religious, social, or political movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed, with the true believers being rewarded…”
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, “socialism could no longer be peddled by intellectuals, and control freaks moved into global warming. These forces are now dedicated to building what could be called the Copenhagen Wall at the same time as a voluntary movement of individuals in the U.S. is at last getting in the mood to tear down another political wall…”
“The Friends of Science site www.friendsofscience.org was started by a few who in a number of forms had studied earth sciences, who had had it with the nonsense of government climate change ‘science.’ It is kept going by various donations.
“Their myth/facts section provides a brief review.”
As we give thanks today for the family, friends, and fortune in our lives, and as we remember the Pilgrims who fled tyranny in Europe to begin a new life in America, we might also want to devote some additional time to think about the philosophy of liberty and what it means to each of us to be free.
In one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time, “In Defense of Liberty,” Zev Barnett discusses these matters, and highlights a key issue virtually absent from the national discussion: that the origin of today’s moral crisis lies much deeper than politics or economics – it is rooted in our philosophy. The current predicament described by Mr. Barnett has been a long time coming, and it won’t be easy to reverse, I’m afraid.
Mr. Barnett explains: “The argument that has to be made if the modern day Tea Party movement is to succeed – the only argument that offers a moral defense of freedom – is the propriety of self-interest. We must understand and defend the idea that pursuing one’s own life for one’s own sake is not something for which one should apologize. Rather, the fulfillment of personal happiness should be proudly upheld as good.”
As Rand made abundantly clear, only a free man can assess his values and how to get them. And Americans have not been truly free in at least a hundred years (after all, there are no such things as “degrees” or “shades” of freedom; there exists only the pure and absolute condition of individual liberty). The altruistic mindset so widespread and deep-seated in society today is the unsurprising outcome of more than a century of statist ideology forced down the throats and into the heads of citizens. I believe the gradual erosion of individual liberty has, over generations, actually “de-evolved” the capacity of most American citizens to think logically (consequentially). Their increasingly skewed judgment provides the optimal political condition for government to enact even more collectivist policies and regulations.
Until we as a nation of individuals are willing to square with the contradictions in our own thinking – to refuse to default to this irrationality any longer – the most these tea party events will ever achieve is a limited and very temporary rollback in the size of government. The present economic and political calamity (and the paradoxical viewpoint that government has a role in fixing it) cannot be defeated until Americans embrace a revolutionary and truly comprehensive approach towards life and individual liberty – a “renaissance in philosophy,” so to speak – that celebrates the morality of rational self-interest and respects unequivocally man’s inalienable right to his own life.
“Republic? Democracy? What’s the Difference?”
By Alexander Marriott
Capitalism Magazine
“A republic is a government in which a restricted group of citizens form a political unit, usually under the auspice of a charter, which directs them to elect representatives who will govern the state. Republics, by their very nature, tend to be free polities, not because they are elected by the citizens of the polity, but because they are bound by charters, which limit the responsibilities and powers of the state. The fact that people vote for representatives has nothing to do with making anything free. The logical consistency and rationality of the charter, as well as the willingness of the people to live by it, is what keeps people free.
“A democracy is government by the majority. There is still a restricted group of citizens in a democracy, but this group rules directly and personally runs the state. The group may delegate specific tasks to individuals, such as generalships and governorships, but there is no question that the ruling force in a democracy is not a charter (if there even is a charter), but the vote of the majority. Democracies are free only if the people know what freedom is and are consistent in their application of it. If they don’t know this, or more appropriately, if a majority of the people don’t know this, then a democracy could be just as tyrannical as the worst dictator (see Socrates’ forced suicide by the Athenian democracy.)”
By James Delingpole
Telegraph.co.uk November 20, 2009
“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I [would] start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
“When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be ‘the greatest in modern science.’”
“My Rational Reality” is a venue for my observations and analyses of issues relating to politics, economics, foreign policy, popular culture, psychology, and other topics through the lens of rationality and objectivity.
Man has the “right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness – which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.” – Ayn Rand
