Ah, I love stuff like this. It makes blogging so easy. From TMZ:
The season six winner of “The Bachelor”… Mary Delgado — who was arrested last year for allegedly punching her fiance, “Bachelor” Byron Velvick — was busted again on Saturday night for public intoxication, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct at Lorina’s Cantina in Del Rio, Texas.
We’re told the Cantina called the cops because Delgado refused to leave the bar, saying it was her “constitutional right” to stay as long as she wanted. [emphasis mine]
Golden.
What an utterly warped understanding of rights – that negates the property owner’s rights entirely, replacing them with a fictitious (and seemingly unconditional) set of patron rights.
From my least-favorite-2008-presidential-candidate’s brand-new book Do the Right Thing:
The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism. And it threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party.
Of course, I’d frame it inversely, that the real and most damaging threat to liberty is the Republican Party, whose alligients oh-so-casually throw around the small-government lingo but fail to deliver on anything even remotely close.
Instead, decade after decade with their paternalistic impulses, hyper-religious moralism, and corporate socialism, the association continues to bastardize the philosophical reputation of liberty.
Want to see a bunch of purported financial experts over the years deny, denounce, refuse, reject, and make fun of those who vocally stress the toxicity of our institutionalized funny-money culture (i.e. perpetual borrowing, gov. lowering the interest rates, printing more money, etc.)?
And, in case seeing ten minutes of Peter Schiff hammer the same points over and over despite the objections of the voodoo-economic pros, here’s Uncle Strooge.
Back in March I wrote a post entitled My “right” to purchase your product, critiquing Adbusters lawsuit against Canwest Global. The latter entity, a broadcast company, refused to sell airtime to the the former.
Abusters lost the case and, in realizing that you can’t simply force another into business – that it, in fact, takes the mutual consent of both parties to make a contract valid – apparently now rejects the very concept, evident by one of the latest ABTV videos.
Titled Ad-idas, the 5-minute video documents Neil Boorman’s quest “to claim due advertising fees from a brand giant”.
The brand giant in question is Adidas and the “due advertising fees”? According to Boorman, it amounts to 10,000 pounds based upon – nothing consensual, of course, but rather – the 10-15 years Boorman has voluntarily spent being a “human billboard” for the company. You know, wearing Adidas shirts, shorts and shoes out in public.
Now obviously, Mr. Boorman isn’t a true Adidas fan. He isn’t a fan of any corporation. In the same vein as Naomi Klein, he’s a hardcore anti-consumerist borderline luddite; and in the same vein as Michael Moore, the video is dishonest in strategy but authentic in message. But yes, Boorman believes this garbage. As the tagline states, “Why do we buy clothes that advertise brands? They should be paying us!”.
Yeah!
Companies should be paying consumers who choose to buy their branded products for the subsequent advertising that the aforementioned companies never asked for. The consumers deserve it. It’s just!
Yes. In fact, tomorrow I’ll be sending Adbusters an invoice for showcasing the crappy Neil Boorman video in question.
Take a look. Or don’t! It doesn’t matter really. There isn’t a contract or any criteria whatsoever I have to meet. I don’t even have to speak highly of the content. I determine what they owe me. It’s that simple!
How do you communicate with individuals that out of touch with scientific reality? How do you respond to such an irrational, hyper-emotional pysche?
Call it for what is it, I guess. Patrick Moore – Canadian ecologist and founding member of Greenpeace International – says it better than I ever could (0:18 in 2nd video):
To talk about how the tree is alive and has feelings and it hurts it when you cut it down and that sort of stuff – that’s pretty well kindergarten talk. I mean, it’s not true. Trees are plants, like carrots and cabbages.
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.
“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events”…
“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”
The rest of the article goes on to cite (non-psychiatric) climate change delusions coming from various individuals in the Australian government.
But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.
Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands”…
Rudd hopes this pain will make you switch to expensive but less gassy alternatives, and — hey presto — the world’s temperature will then fall, just like it’s actually done since the day Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth.
But you’ll have spotted already the big flaw in Rudd’s mad plan — one that confirms he and Garnaut really do have delusions.
The truth is Australia on its own emits less than 1.5 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide. Any savings we make will make no real difference, given that China (now the biggest emitter) and India (the fourth) are booming so fast that they alone will pump out 42 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases by 2030.
Indeed, so fast are the world’s emissions growing — by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants — that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That’s how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter….
So almost everything depends on China and India copying us. But the chances of that? A big, round zero.
A year ago China released its own global warming strategy — its own Garnaut report — which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions.
Same deal with India. Goodness! Why haven’t they caught the green bug?!?
Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why.
Their conclusion? They couldn’t actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming: “No firm link between the documented (climate) changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established.”
In fact, they couldn’t find much change in the climate at all.
Yes, India’s surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts and floods, or rain: “The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . .”
Whenever I hear the term “social justice”, I think of a direct and necessary absence of individual justice. It’s a sick visceral reaction to a sick erroneous concept.
On the subject, Rhode Island’s free market think tank, the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, wrote one of the best op-eds I’ve read in the last month or so. Entitled Freedom is the Cost of Social Justice, I’ll excerpt it liberally:
Ayn Rand once said that the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time. It appears that that time is now in many parts of the world. London decides who is worthy of [health] care and Canada holds its market captive like America holds the poor in public schools. Oppression sells its wares under the guise of “social justice” that demands that state’s safety net instead become society’s fabric. Once people become dependent, individual freedom is lost.
So, when Governor Caricieri announced that some of our tax dollars would be used to discourage out of wedlock childbirths and promote marriage, the reception was less than homey. Government isn’t supposed to help people make choices, it is simply supposed to write them checks.
But for those of us who truly relish freedom – this is indeed a perplexing situation. It is beyond debate that two biological parents is the preferred environment for a child. But does government have the authority to influence lifestyle, or, dare I say, “moral” choices? The governor’s response was the only logical statement anyone might accept: ‘if taxpayers must pay for other people’s lifestyle choices, we have the right to influence those choices.’
In a market driven social service world, people put their money with groups representing the values they support. Secular or not, donations were a way for people to “make the world a better place” in a manner these donors found worthy. But it’s not like that anymore, at least not in RI.
Rhode Islanders like to say they are compassionate, but that compassion isn’t voluntary. In 2005 the Catalog of Philanthropy released a report called the Generosity Index that ranked states on their “giving.” Rhode Island ranked second lowest in the nation on the amount of money donated to charity according to itemized deductions. During that same year, RI spending on public assistance programs was the third highest in the country. And this is nothing new. Our “giving rank” from 1997 to 2004 (most recent year reported) was either 49th or 50th.
So now that we have developed a system that dictates a high level of government enforced charity, whose morals will we use to administer it? Even if the proceeds are derived by coercion and government charity is given without condition, this itself is a value system that sends serious economic and moral signals. Rather than representing the absence of judgment, the evaporation of stigma within our politically-correct, amoral government welfare state is a choice of values….
Society can strike a balance between the Scarlet Letter and Murphy Brown. It is far better that this dynamic process takes place without the fear the government will pick the winner. Instead competing value systems can exist simultaneously and their successes and failures can inform one another. The best deal we can possibly hope for is for government to recede a bit, making space for private action to strengthen the fabric of society with the safety net remaining just that. But if society does continue government administered charity, you must accept a little totalitarianism. Me, I prefer freedomism.
Although it’s quite difficult to identify what she stands for – her first book, the populist No Logo, rallied against the ubiquity of advertising, and her latest, The Shock Doctrine, maligns Milton Friedman and free-market economics by association (yes, oddly enough, by association) – assuming she has some, I’m fairly certain I loathe the ideals this woman espouses.
Ordinarily, I’d dismiss her as yet another drop in the misanthropic, anti-consumerist, socialist well, but she’s a popular misanthropic, anti-consumerist socialist. Really popular. According to wikipedia:
Anyways, on my way to work today, I had my Zune on shuffle – take that Apple! – and came across a sweet bit from comedian Doug Stanhope. Totally reminded me of George Carlin sans, of course, the lefty political bent.
Some thoughts I wrote down on Sunday’s flight back from SamSphere Kansas…
The first time I ever flew on a plane I was 22. Most people would find this fact rather odd. Yes, I agree. I’ve led a fairly grounded early life…arguably insular. Part of the reason, I suppose, lies in my parents. They don’t fly. Family vacations involved our old white ‘94 Suburban, limited – of course – to the contiguous United States. I don’t think my folks had, nor continue to have, any particular aversion to the mode of travel. They just don’t fly.
I’ve flown my fair share since 22 – recently, in fact, it’s been bordering on overkill what with five or so trips in the last couple months.
In any case, every time I fly – specifically, every time the plane launches from land and, thereby, surmounts gravity – I get this subtle (and yet, at the same time, mildly overwhelming) feeling of triumph, of pride in human ingenuity, innovation and determination. Our ability to transcend our biological and environmental situation, to conquer nature’s harsher, inconvenient elements and do what we want in a comfortable, timely fashion – it’s fucking awesome. I mean, excuse the f-bomb but, seriously, no other qualification will do. Yeah, you’re with me here!
Of course, the anti-consumerist, luddite crowd rejects such sentiments. They loathe industry, lament civilization and venerate pure nature, ignorant that it is the very ability to put distance between ourselves and nature (by, hark! – industry and civilization) that allows us to enjoy nature, an environment that is – more often than not – hostile to the human endeavor.
Anyways, I’m trying to understand this philosophy….
At the recommendation of TNCM, I’m currently reading Alston Chase’s biography of America’s most notorious – and arguably most violent and intelligent – luddite, Ted Kaczynski.
Kaczynski was the most intelligent killer in modern history, and unlike every other serial murderer, he killed not for the enjoyment of it but to promote ideas. (p.39)
The season six winner of “The Bachelor”… Mary Delgado — who was arrested last year for allegedly punching her fiance, “Bachelor” Byron Velvick — was busted again on Saturday night for public intoxication, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct at Lorina’s Cantina in Del Rio, Texas.
