Some Sunday singing

Lyrics here

False choices

Perhaps there's a bit more than just hyperbole when the Democrats call Republicans "fascists," and the Republicans call the Democrats "commies." Considering how useless and destructive all four groups are, why don't we see about starting over?

"It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of 'Freedom or dictatorship?' into 'Which kind of dictatorship?' -- thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice -- according to the proponents of that fraud -- is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism). That fraud collapsed in the 1940's, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory -- that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state -- that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders -- that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique -- that fascism is not the product of the political 'right,' but of the 'left' -- that the basic issue is not 'rich versus poor,' but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government -- which means: capitalism versus socialism."
--Philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

It's interesting to see how widely quoted Rand is these days. I have to confess, I've never read any of her work other than excerpts like the one above. From what little I know, her following had some cult-like tendencies all its own, just like the more carelessly enthusiastic of the Ron Paul supporters in last year's campaign. It isn't about the person, it's about the principle. Truth is truth, even when the messenger is flawed (as all messengers, excepting Christ, inevitably are). That's why you "never judge the -ism by the -ist."

So, how's that working for you...

But I'm SURE the trillions they want to spend on government-managed health care will get MUCH better results...



(click to enlarge)

Quote of the day

This is spot on:

Honor killings are repulsive and not a great way to attract converts. "We kill our wives and children if they don't follow our religion of fear and intimidation, won't you join us?" Ummm, no.

The immediate story that prompted that thought underscores the contradictions inherent in today's mantra of 'tolerance.' Sadly, this is not an isolated instance. The bottom line is we have allowed millions of people to migrate to the West who desire to share the material bounty, but have no desire to adhere to the system of values that made that bounty possible. No human society is perfect. But the moral equivalence so many claim to see between civilizations does a great disservice by downplaying the hard-won combination of individual freedom and responsibility that developed in the West.

There's a reason they're all 'coming to America' versus the other way around. Our abject failure to require new arrivals to do more than simply import their home society while adding cars and big screen TVs means that soon there won't be an America worth immigrating to.

Cracking me up

Compare and contrast:

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.
A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future. Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire
35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.
"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

Uniformitarian thinking leads to lots of surprises, it would seem. Remember that, the next time someone insists it took millions of years to form some geologic feature, based on today's rate of change. But one of the main obstacles to believing catastrophism is that it lines up with those pesky scriptures...

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

Yup

Bombs away...

Wile E. Coyote would be proud

Financially, the US is at the point where we've run off the cliff and are just beginning to realize it's a loooooooooong way down:

The FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund, which had $10.4 billion at the end of June, has spent so much covering bank failures over the last three months that it is now completely out of money. This means there is no capital set aside to insure the $4.8 trillion of deposits and $320 billion worth of FDIC-guaranteed debt that US banks and other financial companies have issued. The real shocker that we discovered some time ago is that the FDIC ‘funds’ were never even held in a segregated bank account – the fees collected from the banks are accounted for as a part of the government’s general revenues that go towards military spending, bailouts, interest costs and other government programs. The FDIC ‘fund’ merely consisted of IOU’s from the general revenues accounts. And now that the Deposit Insurance Fund balance as of September 30, 2009 is negative the FDIC wants the institutions to prepay their assessments for all of 2010, 2011 and 2012. In effect, the FDIC wants to borrow money from the banks it provides insurance for.

Does this not strike you as surreal?

But wait! There's more... the FDIC isn't the only program whose revenue was sucked into the general fund, the easier to be used for other purposes. More and more, it's become apparent the entire D.C. apparatus is one big bait-and-switch machine.