BEST CREDIT CARDS AVAILABLE NOWFor how long, who knows.
HE'S GOT IT RIGHTWho doesn't know liberals/progs are raging hypocrites of most subjects but especially freedom of speech
Monday, January 12, 2015
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Saturday, January 10, 2015
SO MUCH FOR CODDLING MUSLIMS:Beginning to look Europe is a goner. But, we already knew that.
STOCKS OVERVALUED?This analysis suggests yes.
STOCKS OVERVALUED?This analysis suggests yes.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Thursday, January 8, 2015
THIS BOOK SHOULD MAKE A SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION TO THE ARGUMENTThe entire blame lay with the government, its policies and employees. Case closed.
BEST GET SERIOUS ABOUT THESE 7TH CENTURY BARBARIANSIt's not going to get any better until the PC mindset is destroyed.
MORE ON DHIMMITUDELeave it to a NYT's columnist
THERE'S HOPEBut only if the socialists are kept at bay.
BEST GET SERIOUS ABOUT THESE 7TH CENTURY BARBARIANSIt's not going to get any better until the PC mindset is destroyed.
MORE ON DHIMMITUDELeave it to a NYT's columnist
THERE'S HOPEBut only if the socialists are kept at bay.
Monday, January 5, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
PRETTY MUCH COMMON SENSEIt's a shame game. Get what you can while you can.
SOUNDS LIKE RUSSIAExplains a lot about Obama. He's really just about exercising power, not much else.
IF YOU LIVED IN NYC IN THE '70'S, NO ARGUMENT HERENYC was a hellhole back then, is quite habitable now.
JIM RICHARDS IS BRILLIANTThis is worth a read,
SOUNDS LIKE RUSSIAExplains a lot about Obama. He's really just about exercising power, not much else.
IF YOU LIVED IN NYC IN THE '70'S, NO ARGUMENT HERENYC was a hellhole back then, is quite habitable now.
JIM RICHARDS IS BRILLIANTThis is worth a read,
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Sunday, January 4, 2015
It helps to remember these voters-to-be are law-breakers, here illegally.HERE'S OBAMA ANC CO. STRATEGY
TURKEY IS A COUNTRY OF CONTRADICTIONSAnd Erdogan is an erratic leader. Seems to be for free markets but opposed to civic freedoms.
IT'S COMING TO THIS: The damage this administration had done will take many moons to repair, if ever.
THERE ARE MANY FORMS OF CORPORATE CORRUPTION. THIS ONE REFLECTS POORLY ON MANAGEMENT.
TURKEY IS A COUNTRY OF CONTRADICTIONSAnd Erdogan is an erratic leader. Seems to be for free markets but opposed to civic freedoms.
IT'S COMING TO THIS: The damage this administration had done will take many moons to repair, if ever.
THERE ARE MANY FORMS OF CORPORATE CORRUPTION. THIS ONE REFLECTS POORLY ON MANAGEMENT.
Want to avoid being called a racist? Pay Al Sharpton
POSTED AT 6:31 PM ON JANUARY 4, 2015 BY JAZZ SHAW
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Have you ever wondered how Al Sharpton sorts through all of the many racial crisis management situations in the country and decides where and when the attention of his National Action Network will be focused? The New York Post has been doing some digging and found that there’s more than a little method to the madness. Whether it is cash or influence, it appears that if you have a corporation or organization looking to do business and you don’t want to be singled out and identified as a racist, you can cut a deal with Reverend Al.
Want to influence a casino bid? Polish your corporate image? Not be labeled a racist?Then you need to pay Al Sharpton.For more than a decade, corporations have shelled out thousands of dollars in donations and consulting fees to Sharpton’s National Action Network. What they get in return is the reverend’s supposed sway in the black community or, more often, his silence…“Al Sharpton has enriched himself and NAN for years by threatening companies with bad publicity if they didn’t come to terms with him. Put simply, Sharpton specializes in shakedowns,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal & Policy Center, a Virginia-based watchdog group that has produced a book on Sharpton.
This is a report well worth reading because some of it beggars the imagination. A Connecticut hedge firm group, Plainfield Asset Management, is on record as having ponied up $600,000 in two separate payments (funneled through another non-profit group) to Sharpton’s group while trying to curry favor with him during tricky government negotiations, or at least to avoid attracting fire from him. His group apparently had also been pestering General Motors for donations for many years without success. Then Al decided to protest GM in front of a dealership they were closing and suddenly the payments began. He pulled a similar move with American Honda in 2003, and also landed a $25K per year “consulting” gig with Pepsi after he threatened them with a boycott which mysteriously never happened after the checks started coming in.
One of the strangest tales in the article, however, deals with Sony Entertainment and the same woman made famous in recent stories about their leaked emails, Amy Pascal. While no money seems to have changed hands (yet), there was certainly a meeting of the minds.
Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal met with the activist preacher after leaked e-mails showed her making racially charged comments about President Obama. Pascal was under siege after a suspected North Korean cyber attack pressured the studio to cancel its release of “The Interview,” which depicts the assassination of dictator Kim Jong-un.Pascal and her team were said to be “shaking in their boots” and “afraid of the Rev,” The Post reported.No payments to NAN have been announced, but Sharpton and Pascal agreed to form a “working group” to focus on racial bias in Hollywood.
I’m not saying that any of this will come as some sort of stunning surprise to our readers, but the boldness and audacity of it is almost breathtaking. And it’s all being done pretty much right out in the open. As a devout capitalist, I sort of have to tip my hat to Sharpton here. Good work if you can get it.
Friday, January 2, 2015
Friday, January 2, 2015
MIXED BAGDems spend no matter what the tax policies.
THE REAL SKINNY ON POLICINGFor those interested in the facts, this article is for you.
INDIVIDUALISM VS COLLECTIVISM: But he forgot to mention the original "experiment" in failed socialism: the the pilgrims colony at Plymouth, Ma., in the 17th century.
But in thinking about this, it struck me that the answer goes even deeper. A hermit or someone stranded on a desert island, someone with no connection to other people, would not need the concept of individualism. There would be nothing to contrast it to. He would do things by himself and for himself because there are no other options. The concept of individualism is necessary and meaningfulonly for someone living in a society, someone who is buying and selling, someone with romantic and family relationships, someone who is engaged with the culture around him (though frankly, "consuming popular culture" is pretty optional).
It is only someone living in a society who faces the temptation or the pressure (depending on his psychology) to subordinate his own judgment to the standards of others, or to sacrifice his own interests for others. Or to put the issue in more positive terms, it is only when people live together that they have to find a way to pursue their interests in harmony, recognizing the freedom of the individual to come to his own conclusions and choose his own goals.
So in thinking about this, I wondered where the terms "individualist" and "individualism" came from. I had the sense that they are modern terms. You don't find them in Classical philosophy, or even in the great thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. America's Founding Fathers were among history's greatest advocates of individual rights, yet they never described themselves as "individualists." So my guess was that "individualism" as a term arose only in response to that other modern invention, "collectivism." Collectivist ideas have a long history--see Plato's Republic--but collectivism did not exist as a named, explicit philosophy until relatively recently.
A quick look at the etymology of "individualism" confirms this. Like "capitalism," it is a term coined by its enemies--the very same enemies, as a matter of fact. Individualism was first used by early socialists, specifically the "Owenites," followers of a utopian socialist by the name of Robert Owen, who made a fortune in the textile industry in Britain, then blew it funding a utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana. We tend to think of the 20th century as the world's great experiment with socialism, but throughout the 19th Century, Britain and the United States were dotted with voluntary experiments in socialism, usually based on a grand plan devised by some charismatic theorist. What they mostly have in common is that they collapse within a few years, usually when their wealthy patron--who made his money in the burgeoning industrial economy of capitalism--either burns through his fortune or dies. That's the tragedy of 20th-century socialism: it was a totally unnecessary experiment, since the basic concept had already failed for more than a century in repeated small-scale trials.
At any rate, it was at the time of these early 19th-century experiment, in the late 1820s and 1830s (different sources give different dates) that the word "socialism" first comes into common use. (The variant "communism" comes a little later, in the 1840s.) At that same time, "individualism" is first used, most sources say in 1827, as a pejorative term to describe what the socialists were against. The Wikipedia entry notes that one of the disillusioned Owenites (his name is now quite obscure) would go on to embrace private property and begin using "individualism" in a positive sense, setting the trend for how the term would come to be used by many, more famous champions later on.
So there, in the very origins of the word, is a refutation of the crude misconception about individualism. The very concept of individualism could not have been formed outside of society. It arose, not from a desire to avoid relationships with other people, but from the need to describe those relationship in a way that recognizes the value of the individual and his need for freedom, as opposed to a new and growing philosophy that sought to subordinate the individual to society and the state.
The fact that the term for such a valuable concept was coined by its enemies, as was also true of "capitalism," is ironic. But that's another lesson we can draw from this history: a reminder of how we will find the important concepts we need to defend freedom and civilization--even if we have to wrest those concepts away from the very people who originated them.
THE REAL SKINNY ON POLICINGFor those interested in the facts, this article is for you.
INDIVIDUALISM VS COLLECTIVISM: But he forgot to mention the original "experiment" in failed socialism: the the pilgrims colony at Plymouth, Ma., in the 17th century.
by Robert Tracinski
Editor's Note; I'll be back on Monday with some new articles, but in the meantime, I wanted to draw your attention to a few more items in my "best of" selection from the pieces I published in 2014. In the next few days, I'm going to send some of the more philosophical articles I wrote, including this short one from June about the origins of "individualism"--the word, and the idea. It opens up an under-appreciated field that I'd like to explore a little bit more in the coming year: America's pre-20-century experiments with socialism, a doctrine that ought have been exploded and exposed long ago, but which instead failed upward.There are also the last few days for our Holiday Sale, so take advantage of it while it lasts.--RWTObjectivists get used to hearing something like this every once in a while, so it didn't surprise me when I read the following in an article by a colleague:
"The number of true individualists is still relatively small.... If you buy or sell things, consume popular culture, or have anyone in your life you say 'I love you' to, you’re not a true individualist."Answering this is Objectivism 101 and by now you presumably have the proper retort already forming in the back of your mind. Individualism is not the same thing as being a hermit. Living for yourself doesn't mean living by yourself. Heck, this might even be a variant of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
But in thinking about this, it struck me that the answer goes even deeper. A hermit or someone stranded on a desert island, someone with no connection to other people, would not need the concept of individualism. There would be nothing to contrast it to. He would do things by himself and for himself because there are no other options. The concept of individualism is necessary and meaningfulonly for someone living in a society, someone who is buying and selling, someone with romantic and family relationships, someone who is engaged with the culture around him (though frankly, "consuming popular culture" is pretty optional).
It is only someone living in a society who faces the temptation or the pressure (depending on his psychology) to subordinate his own judgment to the standards of others, or to sacrifice his own interests for others. Or to put the issue in more positive terms, it is only when people live together that they have to find a way to pursue their interests in harmony, recognizing the freedom of the individual to come to his own conclusions and choose his own goals.
So in thinking about this, I wondered where the terms "individualist" and "individualism" came from. I had the sense that they are modern terms. You don't find them in Classical philosophy, or even in the great thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. America's Founding Fathers were among history's greatest advocates of individual rights, yet they never described themselves as "individualists." So my guess was that "individualism" as a term arose only in response to that other modern invention, "collectivism." Collectivist ideas have a long history--see Plato's Republic--but collectivism did not exist as a named, explicit philosophy until relatively recently.
A quick look at the etymology of "individualism" confirms this. Like "capitalism," it is a term coined by its enemies--the very same enemies, as a matter of fact. Individualism was first used by early socialists, specifically the "Owenites," followers of a utopian socialist by the name of Robert Owen, who made a fortune in the textile industry in Britain, then blew it funding a utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana. We tend to think of the 20th century as the world's great experiment with socialism, but throughout the 19th Century, Britain and the United States were dotted with voluntary experiments in socialism, usually based on a grand plan devised by some charismatic theorist. What they mostly have in common is that they collapse within a few years, usually when their wealthy patron--who made his money in the burgeoning industrial economy of capitalism--either burns through his fortune or dies. That's the tragedy of 20th-century socialism: it was a totally unnecessary experiment, since the basic concept had already failed for more than a century in repeated small-scale trials.
At any rate, it was at the time of these early 19th-century experiment, in the late 1820s and 1830s (different sources give different dates) that the word "socialism" first comes into common use. (The variant "communism" comes a little later, in the 1840s.) At that same time, "individualism" is first used, most sources say in 1827, as a pejorative term to describe what the socialists were against. The Wikipedia entry notes that one of the disillusioned Owenites (his name is now quite obscure) would go on to embrace private property and begin using "individualism" in a positive sense, setting the trend for how the term would come to be used by many, more famous champions later on.
So there, in the very origins of the word, is a refutation of the crude misconception about individualism. The very concept of individualism could not have been formed outside of society. It arose, not from a desire to avoid relationships with other people, but from the need to describe those relationship in a way that recognizes the value of the individual and his need for freedom, as opposed to a new and growing philosophy that sought to subordinate the individual to society and the state.
The fact that the term for such a valuable concept was coined by its enemies, as was also true of "capitalism," is ironic. But that's another lesson we can draw from this history: a reminder of how we will find the important concepts we need to defend freedom and civilization--even if we have to wrest those concepts away from the very people who originated them.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
THE FINAL AND BEST WORD ON THE SUBJECTThis is the conversation that we should be having bu won't. Too many people profit from black poverty.
NOTE THE DATE OF THIS ARTICLE:This is a 2005 article that ends optimistically. Clearly, based on recent events, that optimism is wildly misplaced. This problem is so discouraging largely because it is enveloped in the sickening pathologies of the left. Since black dependency is now at least a trillion dollar industry there's no reforming possible until the money pot dries up. We're probably not too far from that circumstance at this time.
THIS IS HOW IT WORKS INRUSSIA THE USA THESE DAYS:
NOTE THE DATE OF THIS ARTICLE:This is a 2005 article that ends optimistically. Clearly, based on recent events, that optimism is wildly misplaced. This problem is so discouraging largely because it is enveloped in the sickening pathologies of the left. Since black dependency is now at least a trillion dollar industry there's no reforming possible until the money pot dries up. We're probably not too far from that circumstance at this time.
THIS IS HOW IT WORKS IN
How Al Sharpton Got His Own TV Show
Al Sharpton is generally regarded as a piece of scum — a tax-dodging socialist and professional race baiter who has gotten numerous people killed in pogroms. (For those not familiar with his worst outrages against decency, Ben Shapiro provides a quick rundown.) Sharpton is not regarded by anyone as a gifted television anchor. Yet he has his own prime time show on MSNBC. The reason could have something to do with Comcast wanting to merge with NBC, which in the USSA requires the approval of bureaucrats. Fortunately for crony capitalists, these bureaucrats can be bribed. Via Washingtonian:
To rally political support for the merger, Comcast’s political-action committee handed out campaign cash, and [well-connected political fixer David] Cohen worked to head off the concerns over diversity [i.e., complaints that people were being promoted based on merit rather than for not being white]. Between 2008 and 2010, Comcast’s corporate foundation donated more than $3 million to 39 minority groups that wrote letters to federal regulators in support of the NBC deal. Comcast and NBC Universal also worked out an agreement with advocacy groups guaranteeing increased “minority participation in news and public affairs programming”—so long as the deal went through. And in 2009 and 2010, Comcast gave $155,000 to an organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who ended up endorsing the merger.
Like Jesse Jackson, Sharpton has made a fortune by putting himself it a position to determine what is and is not “racist.” Sharpton’s position in this regard is particularly lucrative due to hisexceedingly close relationship with Obama.
Western Journalism elaborates on the merger deal:
In January, 2011, Washington approved the deal. And lo and behold, Al Sharpton — who had virtually no professional broadcast experience but did have a long history of legal entanglements and ethical quandaries — landed a prime-time show on MSNBC.Not only would Reverend Al have the kind of “legitimate” pulpit from which he could pontificate with an assumed air of “credibility,” he could also enjoy a reboot of sorts — a network-sanctioned passage out of the shadow of his past troubles.And Obama’s White House could have its loyal advocate and ally in place to carry forward the narrative five nights a week.Now, no matter how deeply Sharpton inserts himself into and tries to influence raging racial controversies…no matter how much criticism is directed his way…no matter how many goofs and gaffes he racks up on his show, Sharpton seems to be a protected entity.
He can even help get police officers assassinated without damaging his career. On the contrary, his presence probably lends credibility to MSNBC in the addled minds of the moonbats who are now its exclusive audience. Everyone else has been driven away not only by the channel’s demented hard left politics, but by the ever-deteriorating level of broadcast professionalism.
Behold the ruinous effects of Affirmative Action combined with cronyism:
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