Monday, January 05, 2004

Shoveling

Well, the lake effect snow machine has finally kicked in here in West Michigan so my shovel I must wield.  And I don’t mind one bit.  For your enjoyment, until I can see the curbs of my driveway, take a look at these Wilson A. Bentley snowflake photos. They are quite enjoyable, especically if you enjoy snow, like I do.

Via Brian Micklethwait’s Brian’s Culture Blog.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/05 at 06:52 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Sunday, January 04, 2004

Shirking Responsibility

Many parents pass the care and raising of their children off to the public school system.  Instead of accepting responsibility for their children by teaching them values, respect and individual responsibility for their actions, parents pawn off their responsiblity and then piss and moan when their kids run afoul of the public school system because they don’t have a clue as to proper behavior.  Blaming the schools, the administrators, the teachers but never themselves or their kids.  Quite different from my parents who, when I was an adolescent, made me face the music for my actions.  Whether that music was a funeral dirge or a tatoo drumming me out of school.  The New York Times publishes an article today entitled “Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention." Within the article we learn about the Toledo, OH school system which is arresting kids for violating the dress code, hollering at other students or cursing at teachers.  All these offenses are violations of Toledo’s “safe school ordinance.”

The idoicy of this method of dealing with students should be self evident.  It simply highlights the continuing decline of personal responsibilty from parents on downward.  Most individuals are succumbing to flock mentality.  Most people are seemingly helpless, allowing themselves to be shorn not only of their productivity via taxation but their self respect and ability to think while the states’ crook beats upon their backs or hooks around their neck, dragging them down into a deeper moronic state, with all the rest of the half-wits who make up the political blood sucking apparatus.

The only thing that people seem to be learning nowadays is how to pass the buck rather than stopping it in its tracks. 

Posted by John Venlet on 01/04 at 09:23 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Befuddled Professor Apologists

The National Post has an article penned by Robert Fulford entitled “Communism’s true believers won’t give up." The article looks at some of the apologists’ arguments for communism, spying for communism and those who vigourously pursued the unveiling of communists.  A couple of choice quotes from Fulford’s piece.

"The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria. His views resemble those of Hiss, and he’s not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life."

And this one,

"Haynes and Klehr have written books on American communists as they appeared in the Soviet archives and in the intercepted Venona transcripts from the 1940s. But despite everything, many other historians persist in showing American communists as good-hearted, noble citizens who often sacrificed themselves for a great ideal. It’s like the romantic myth of the Old South, Haynes and Klehr argue, an attempt to cast a favourable light on a despicable cause by arguing for the nobility of those who pursued it. Haynes and Klehr also compare these historians to Holocaust deniers who invent fanciful explanations for damning evidence and ignore inconvenient testimony."

This is not a matter of degrees.  The “ideals” of communism are mere sugar coating to assist its proponents in choking down the evil they hope to foist on free individuals.  Communism is nothing more than a false utopia at the point of a gun.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/04 at 07:44 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Quirky Quarks

"That’s very disturbing." So says a physicist about quarks not behaving the way they are calculated to behave.  In recent experiments, physicists have found that quarks, which are supposed to spinning one way, are actually spinning another way and, hogging most the energy of a neutron.  The article is entitled “Topsy Turvy: In neutrons and protons, quarks take wrong turns."

Via Gene Expression.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/04 at 07:32 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Bloody Taxes Anyway

Gabriel Syme, in a posting over at Samizdata, points to a Sunday Telegraph article which informs us that Churchill, in the midst of WWII, was battling Inland Revenue, England’s version of the IRS, to limit his tax liability.  Not that’s a patriot.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/04 at 07:02 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Saturday, January 03, 2004

Flu Vaccine, Do You Really Need It?

I hate being sick with the flu.  Not that I currently am, but I know when I am sick with the flu, I hate it.  Karen De Coster has a post up that looks at the flu vaccine, whether it’s needed, or, if it’s just another quick uneeded fix to salve the consciences of government employed “health” experts which in turn profits the pharmaceutical industry.  Karen’s post links to a Mercola.com piece on this issue, which Karen comments on herself, and provides a link to an article on flu history and a link that looks at how the “health” police draw straws in the flu lottery.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/03 at 06:55 PM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Something an American Should Say

"All I ask is equal freedom.  When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow."

H.L. Mencken - first printed in The Baltimore Evening Sun, September 7, 1925

The Impossible H.L. Mencken, A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories
edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Posted by John Venlet on 01/03 at 03:18 PM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

I Can't Recommend It Enough

In the post below I pointed to Lysander Spooner’s "Vices Are Not Crimes A Vindication of Moral Liberty. I’ve read it twice online and I am now preparing to print it, read it for a third time and underline and highlight portions.  I would quote additionally from this piece if it were not for the fact the entire piece is more than quotable.  Read this piece and stand for yourself.  Don’t read it though because I recommend it, read it because you believe in yourself and your own search for knowledge.  Read it because you want to know for yourself.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/03 at 11:45 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Found - An Unknown Work of Lysander Spooner

The Mises Economics Blog, posts online, Lysander Spooner’s “Vices Are Not Crimes A Vindication of Moral Liberty" with an introduction by Murray Rothbard. According to Mises, this work of Spooner’s was unknown until Carl Watner uncovered it.

Part I to pique your interest.

"Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime - that is, the design to injure the person or property of another - is wanting.

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth."

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/03 at 09:46 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Misfiled Under Racism

Razib, posting over at Gene Expression, takes offense at an Asian-American mother stating this,

"A Taiwanese-born mother of a fourth grader spoke of differences in values, particularly education. “You probably notice there are not many Caucasians,” she said, parked outside William Faria Elementary. “Caucasians want their kids to have fun and later they’ll catch up. I think Asian parents have a lot higher expectations for their kids."

A quote which came from this article in the New York Times.

Razib cites this statement as “unseemly” and as “soft bigotry.” I think he’s wrong on both counts.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/03 at 08:06 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, January 02, 2004

TSA - Totally Self Absorbed and Green Around the Gills

According to this article the acting TSA Chief of Dulles Airport, Charles Brady, was arrested for drunk driving, while on duty.  Of course Brady disputes the time of his arrest, stating he was picked up at 2:30 A.M., one-half hour after he got off duty, rather than 1 A.M. as reported by the arresting officer.  In my desire to be impartial, I can grant Brady the arrest time dispute, but this provokes another dilemma.  How in the hell did he get drunk enough in one-half hour to be arrested for drunk driving?  Was he mainlining vodka?  Playing quarters with tumblers full of bourbon and losing every time?  What a dumb shit.

Via The Obscure Store.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/02 at 03:15 PM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

A Quote on Knowledge

I’ve been reading the H. L. Mencken collection mentioned in the left side bar.  Invariably, on almost every page, I end up underlining some paragraph or sentence, writing down a author’s name that Mencken praises or jotting a note, even if it only mentions that I laughed out loud when reading such and such.  My pen is always in my hand.  The following quote comes from a Mencken column, originally published in The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925, concerning the Scopes trial and comprehension of ideas and knowledge.

"What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera - a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.  The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only.  The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars.  In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is view with enmity.  But in the main it is not apprended at all."

H.L. Mencken, The Impossible H.L. Mencken, A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, pg. 565 Edited By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Posted by John Venlet on 01/02 at 01:06 PM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

"Anarchist Meditations"

Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory, physics, how do these scientific endeavors come to bear on social theories and mysticism?  I wonder myself, though I am no physicist.  Hakim Bey looks at this in a piece entitled “Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert’s Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics."

Via J. Orlin Grabbe.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/02 at 12:02 PM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Spam Overboard

In earlier posts, both here and in comments at other blogs, I railed on the needlessness of the government getting involved in the unsolicited email, more commonly called spam, business.  Though spam is a nuisance, if you can even call it that, all the bitching about it is mere whining.  Does everyone remember how to use their delete key?  Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., utilizing the spam meme, pens an article entitled “Why the State Is Different," which includes three short lesson plans.

"Hence Lesson One in the uniqueness of the state: the state has one tool, and one tool only, at its disposal: force."

"Lesson Two presents itself: the state is the only institution in society that can impose itself on all of society without asking the permission of anyone in particular. You can’t opt out."

"Lesson Three: the state is exempt from the laws it claims to enforce, and manages this exemption by redefining its criminality as public service."

Rockwell’s article expands on these lessons and offers other insights also.

Via Mike Tennant at Strike the Root blog.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/02 at 09:10 AM
(1) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

A Nanny State Question

The government is outlawing ephedra, for our own good of course, cough, cough.  Where will you draw the line to government interference in your life?  Damaged Justice wonders if this question is where you will draw the line.

“If a law was passed that made it illegal to eat bananas on Sunday, would you obey?"

Posted by John Venlet on 01/02 at 08:58 AM
(0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 11 of 12 pages « First  <  9 10 11 12 >