Dawkins having fun at creationists' expense

Here's a fun, short video of Richard Dawkins giving one fact a "la la la" description of creationists. (follow my blog link to play the video)

Fantastic "History of Universe" series for kids AND adults

With clever (even subtle) jabs at creationists, this series is informative, creative, entertaining and remarkable. It is a wonder to behold and, indeed, made easy in its explanation of the complex. I challenge you to watch the first one and NOT click on the second one and so on! It is addictive fun.

With friends like the U.S. Chamber chief ...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce chief, Tom Donohue, touts himself as a capitalist and has, admittedly, said some bad things about Obama Dead Eyes, but a recent column in the Wall Street Journal showed his real colors. The WSJ printed a letter from me on the column on Nov. 2. Here it is:

_____________________

With all the mealy-mouthed CEOs and politicians at large today, it was refreshing to read the spirited language of U.S. Chamber chief Tom Donohue in Kimberley Strassel’s interview. But, oh, how I wish he were a true capitalist.

Having not followed all of the Chamber’s actions closely over the last two years, I was unaware that it had backed the so-called “stimulus,” the “bailout” funds, the auto “bailouts,” and the Cash for Clunkers debacle. Moreover, Mr. Donohue says the Chamber supports cap-and-trade legislation.

Consider me horrified. As a business owner and proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, I’m frankly stunned that an organization which purportedly represents the interests of 3 million businesses across America would favor massive redistributionist schemes aimed at stealing money from individual citizens and small businesses and handing the loot over to the biggest businesses and politicians!

And then Mr. Donohue has the temerity to say, “We want to encourage and promote … the free enterprise system with free capital markets and free trade and the ability to fail and fall right on your ass and get up and do it again!” (italics added)

Uhuh. Got any ocean-front property in Kansas, Mr. Donohue?

David Elmore

Roswell, GA

The obsession with helping others

OK, you've got a busy, rational life: career, health, family, friends, hobbies, vacations, parties, chores, bills.

But there's a bum in the ghetto or a starving kid in Ethiopia or a tsunami-ravaged village in Indonesia or a hundred homeless in a nearby shelter or 26 million without health insurance or a million families under the "poverty line" or children with crippling diseases ... or ... or ... or.

Why should you care? No, honestly, why should you CARE?

You've got a life to live. You've got a full, rich, fruitful life to live. You've got things to do ALL THE TIME. There's hardly a second not filled with your pursuits. You've spent enormous amounts of time educating yourself, building your careers, finding your hobbies, cultivating friendships, nurturing your loved ones, maintaining your health, etc. Yet you are bombarded with begging, pleading, demands and protestations to "give back" -- and when these entreaties don't work, the people doing the pleading form groups that vote for people to coerce you into "giving back."

You may feel some sympathy for some of these people (especially children) who, through no honest fault of their own, live with dire circumstances, but why should you spend any portion (even one minute) of your life or penny of your wealth to help these strangers?

The answer, of course, is that you don't HAVE to. You could easily go through your life not spending one moment of time or one dime of money on such people and, instead, trying to fully enrich you life and the lives of those you care most about. To spend time and money on strangers is to NOT spend time and money on those you care most deeply for. It is (in almost all cases, which I'll explain in a moment) an affront to yourself and your intimate acquaintances to give to those you don't know and have no way of knowing the FULL circumstances of their situation. And even if you did know, you have no moral obligation to them.

The morality of "giving back" (altruism) has already been easily refuted by Ayn Rand. She called it the abysmal principle of sacrificing a greater value for a lesser value. It is the obsession with filling a personal void with an allegedly good deed. It is the hallmark of low self-esteem and selflessness. It is the obsession with OTHERS so that the irrational mind may avoid personal and rational reflection and get allegedly momentary relief from the angst and anxiety of its lack of rational integration. It is the statement: "I know I am not good, but maybe I can feel good about being "good" to others."

It is also the irrational person's moment of condescension and schadenfreude (feeling good about others' misery). The do-gooder's do-gooding allegedly allows him to feel superior to the ones he "helps." It is the statement: "I may not be good, but look how good I can be by helping that poor miserable wretch over there who is even worse off than me." It is an immersing in and obsession with the misery of others and getting a subconscious kick out of it (though this is never admitted, but you can see it on their unctuous faces).

The only time charity is morally proper is when one has fully taken care of one's own fruitful values and has a few moments or dollars to spend -- and when the one receiving the charity is living honorably and wishes to continue living honorably and is a moral reflection of your great self. In other words, when the person receiving the charity could use some help but doesn't beg for it and knows that the charity will merely expedite his lifelong goals that he is already attempting to achieve.

Even in such honorable circumstances, the charity giver has every moral right to say, "I don't think I wish to give you any money, but good luck with your life."

The current "giving back" culture of America exemplifies the wretched philosophical and psychological state to which most Americans have succumbed. Only Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational egoism can correct it. I'm seeing that philosophy's adherents grow almost exponentially -- and that, my friends, is very good news for us rational beings, and for those who may truly deserve our rational charity in the future when we are no longer robbed of our wealth.

It's almost time to "Go Galt"

For those who regularly read the Wall Street Journal, you know that the regular columnist Peggy Noonan is often incisive and always diplomatic. (She was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan.) But in today's column at the WSJ, Ms. Noonan actually called politicians stupid, and she referred to a businessman who said he's so fed up with government's confiscatory taxation that he's about ready to just quit, and he knows other businessmen who already have. I wrote the following letter to the editor at the WSJ on Ms. Noonan's column.

___________________

When the ever-polite and diplomatic Peggy Noonan calls the leaders of America stupid, we have crossed a threshold.

Ms. Noonan is right, of course – though she is, ironically, being polite again. These so-called leaders are, instead, willfully and consciously ignorant of what is right and, more important, what individual rights are.

They have high-education degrees but chose to buy into the power-lust “progressivism” and coercive altruism of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and every other leader in American politics, to some degree, in the 20^th and 21^st century. They turned their noses up at Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Locke, Aristotle, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. They think, like all skeptics of human nature such as Thomas Hobbes, that citizens and their businesses must be strictly controlled, that those who earn lots of money on merit and education must be sacrificed to those who don’t, that a government made up of humans is somehow more moral than those it monitors and suppresses.

And the result is everything Ms. Noonan alluded to: confiscatory taxation, redistribution, oppressive regulation and purposely vague legislation that puts businesses and people at the mercy of corrupt lawyers and bureaucrats. It gets to a point, as Ms. Noonan said of her businessman, where we hard workers and owners of businesses and wealth seekers do, indeed, want to quit – or “Go Galt,” in reference to the hero in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which the great thinkers and businessmen chose to “stop the motor of the world” because they tired of rapacious government.

If the citizens and leaders of this once-great country do not inform themselves soon on what is right, that day will come. And none too soon for this boy from Texas.

A remarkable creed that all journalists should live by

As my dear readers know, I commend the Wall Street Journal often for its high journalistic standards, its general objectivity and the best opinion pieces, bar none, in the world. It says something about the character of the best minds and the people with the most financial power in the world that the WSJ's subscription base is the only one in the world for the last two years to continually rise instead of drop.

The primary reason for this is the WSJ's remarkable mission statement. Here it is:

We speak for free markets and free people, the principles, if you will, marked in the watershed year of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." So over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.

How's that for an impressive creed in our modern-day slave society?! If even half of the major dailies in this country adopted this attitude, we'd see a sea change in U.S. politics. But, of course, that won't happen until millions of Americans become philosophically smarter, to learn to think philosophically, to spend some of their TV time each week on the fundamentals of philosophy.
Be that as it may, I'll just take a moment to salute the best newspaper (and its staff and progenitors) for the highest quality journalism the world has known. Salute!

Insider-trading rules run by outsiders from D.C.

In a remarkable piece of journalism, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by an eloquent man named Donald Boudreaux earlier this week on how insider trading should not be illegal and should be dictated by company policy instead. Not being an Objectivist, the writer didn't get to fundamentals, but he made a terrific argument for why outlawing so-called insider trading hurts companies, shareholders and markets. The WSJ printed my letter to the editor (below) yesterday on the article:

___________________

Mr. Boudreaux is on the money in acknowledging that corporations own their own property and can construct their own insider-trading rules. Not only is it a practical solution to the political manhandling of corporations, it is also a moral solution because it honors and acknowledges a company's right to its property and to make decisions for itself and its shareholders.

David Elmore

Roswell, GA

If I were a gorilla, I wouldn't have sinus infections

Just got done reading Richard Dawkins' fabulous new book on evolution, "The Greatest Show on Earth" (which I'll review anon), and discovered that when we hominids began walking upright our nasal passages in our cheeks couldn't drain anymore.

There are two drain holes at the top of the passages, so while we're standing, our sinuses fill up like thirsty reservoirs. Ever get that heavy head feeling during sinus season? Yep, that's why. Well, as you can imagine, the apes don't have this issue because they still get around pretty much on all fours (and it's also why liberals don't get sinus infections).

After reading this article, I got to thinking, "How can I solve this issue?" Then Eureka!

So, if you see a guy at the mall bent over 90% with a Rube Goldberg-style vision apparatus attached to his eyes and head so he can see straight ahead, that'll be me. Just don't expect me to stand up and shake hands. I might spew.

If you're a journalist, I feel sorry for you ... sort of

New circulation figures by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that in just the last six months, daily circulation at 379 U.S. snoozepapers fell an astounding 10.6%. In SIX MONTHS!

Snoozepapers are bleeding ... badly. The major snoozepaper in the city I live around, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has been hit even harder. Its daily circulation plummeted 23.4% to just 214,303 -- in a region with more than 5 million residents! It's pathetic. Part of the AJC's falling numbers are attributed to its elimination of circulation in outlying counties, but even after that, it's numbers are worse than other places around the country. Atlanta is in one of the top 10 population regions in the country, and its major snoozepaper has now dropped out of the top 25 in circulation!

In what I think is related news, CNN's viewership is now the worst of all the major snooze channels. (it's also based in Atlanta)

So, why is this happening -- not just in Atlanta, but around the country? It's complex. Well, OK, it's not. The snooze media are borrrring and Leftist. To make my point, the top newspaper (yes "news," not "snooze" in this case) is the Wall Street Journal, whose readership has been going up during the last two years while the rest of the industry free-falls. Also, Fox News has seen the same thing on an even grander scale. It is now smoking the other channels. Both of the latter media are much more objective than their counterparts, much more free-market oriented, much more interesting, and much more insightful.

I have to admit to a little schadenfreude here. I love the well-deserved misery. It's justice on a grand scale that I could not have thought possible two years ago. The newspapers have been printing the worst kind of vitriol against free markets, individual rights and businesses for years, and the businesses, like beaten puppies, continue to advertise there because it's the only monopoly game in town.

CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and the rest of their ilk have adamantly supported the Leftist agenda (and their new puppet king in the White House) for years, and now consumers are treating them like they do the latest liberal Hollywoodite "theme" film -- with a smirk and a "no thanks."

And many snoozepapers, like the AJC, are actually doing what they do best in these hard times: making horrible business decisions while instigating ludicrous price hikes. The bill for the AJC just went up considerably for me, and so I will soon end my subscription as well, and I'll simply peruse it online when I must.

I feel sorry for the very few journalists friends I have, including Dan Puckett in San Antonio. They got into journalism, I think, for the same reason I did: to bring real news, objective news, creative news to the public and to make money with the beloved written word. They are now faced with the decision to hang on and glean a little bit of satisfaction from their own professionalism in a rotten industry or to start looking elsewhere for better pastures.

I wish them luck as I hope for the ultimate demise of jaundiced journalism.

Time to get the "public" out of education

The Wall Street Journal published a story yesterday in which it asked several "experts" what is needed to get American students on par with international students in math and science. They had the usual mundane responses ranging from Obama Dead Eyes is busy with other stuff and we need to pay math and science teachers more and blah blah blah. I wrote the following letter to the editor on the article:

_____________________
The experts who commented in the “Why We’re Failing Math and Science” missed the boat on all counts.

The reason K-12 education in America is woefully behind its international counterparts is because of two things: anachronistic classes and propaganda. As many recent studies have pointed out, the information industry is leaping forward exponentially, with much of what is known and taught today expected to be outdated within 2 years (sort of Moore’s Law applied to high tech), so that math classes take students in a direction that 99% of them will never use, as opposed to more specific technology classes.

And students are being propagandized on global warming, recycling, environmentalism, welfare statism, economics, “social studies” and “giving back,” instead of learning about the original U.S. Constitution and the meaning of individual rights, as well as how to think independently with facts as their only guide to decision-making.

All of that said, the primary problem we have in America with childhood learning is that the “public” and its political representatives are in charge of what children learn, when they learn it, and how well they’ve allegedly learned it. The only solution to making America children more knowledgeable, more creative and better motivated than students in other countries is to exterminate “public education” and allow American education consumers to send their children to private trade schools with their well-honed curricula.

The result will be magnificently prepared and highly energized children becoming happy, productive individuals who can, then, read up on alleged global warming and the other issues and make their own informed decisions – that is, if they have the time to wade into such morasses while enjoying their fruitful lives.