The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
Eureka! (I found it!) but rather,
'hmm.... that's funny...'.
Isaac Asimov
Guest Quotation of the Day
“If the poor, for example, because they are more in number, divide among themselves the property of the rich, is not this unjust? … if this is not injustice, pray what is?” ~ Aristotle (HT: Jeffrey Tucker
Chart of the Day: Blue Skies Smiling at Me, Nothing But Blue Skies Do I See
Confirmation That International Teachers/Professors and Their Students Are Retarded
From the Daily Mail:
| HEROES | VILLAINS |
|---|---|
| 1 - Albert Einstein | 1 - Adolf Hitler |
| 2 - Mother Theresa | 2 - Osama bin Laden |
| 3 - Mahatma Gandi | 3 - Saddam Hussein |
| 4 - Martin Luther King | 4 - George Bush Jr |
| 5 - Isaac Newton | 5 - Stalin |
| 6 - Jesus Christ | 6 - Mao |
| 7 - Nelson Mandela | 7 - Lenin |
| 8 - Thomas Edison | 8 - Genghis Khan |
| 9 - Abraham Lincoln | 9 - Saladin |
| 10 - Buddha | 10 - Qin Shi Huang |
Let us recall just one 4-year period under Mao (and he wasn't a choir boy before or after):
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.As for Stalin:
Medevedev's grim bookkeeping included the following tragic episodes: 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ''Great Terror'' of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various “political crimes” from 1946 to 1953. Although not everyone who was swept up in the aforementioned events died from unnatural causes, Medvedev’s 20 million non-combatant deaths estimate is likely a conservative guess.Lenin: "6 to 8 million people died under Lenin from war, famine etc. Rummel blames Lenin for a lifetime total of 4,017,000 democides. 10 million deaths from war, terror, famine and disease."
For a little bit of perspective, review this list. Whereas I know that Bush's Iraq intervention was a classic mistake of opening Pandora's box (and I have no empathy for the war criminal Saddam Hussein), he never deliberately did anything as morally outrageous as the WWII allied firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo: where exactly are FDR and Churchill on this list? "Progressive" propaganda or ideology is NOT education; regurgitating what authoritarian elitists or their mainstream media allies repeat in their warped perspective is NOT thinking for oneself . As to why Einstein, the intellectual godfather of the nuclear age, is the greatest hero, but we don't see a single listed capitalist or entrepreneur (except perhaps Edison) despite the fact that we have seen more people liberated from poverty over the past 3 decades from liberalized market reforms in China and India than any other cause in human history, a staggering, mind-boggling, "is the emperor wearing clothes" omission. The Internet alone has brought resources to the average student I couldn't even imagine when I started college with a personal typewriter and the campus library. Lincoln launched the most needless, costly, divisive war in American history (almost every other state had ended the immoral institution of slavery without a civil war) and decimated individual liberty, but in this list is considered a "hero". People, what are you thinking?
Image of the Day
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| Via Jaime Perez on FB |
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| Via Dollar Vigilante |
According to the Bangor Daily News (my edits):
The saga began after Dean was hospitalized in 2012 at the state-run Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center in Bangor. DHHS was appointed conservator in November 2012 by a probate judge to oversee Dean’s finances. At the time, DHHS argued that it needed to sell some of Dean’s assets to pay upcoming property tax bills... Dean’s property on Castlewood Lane in Owls Head was sold by DHHS to James Peter Taylor in January 2013 for $205,000, even though the town had the property assessed for $476,840. The property consisted of 1 acre with 100 feet of shore frontage and a two-story, 1,000-square-foot cottage...The July affidavit also revealed that Dean’s house in Rockland was left unheated during the 2012-2013 winter while the state was Dean’s conservator. The water was not turned off nor the pipes drained, so pipes froze, burst and flooded the residence with an estimated 27,000 gallons of water. Since the house on Broadway was closed up, a serious mold problem resulted. His cat Caterpillar was euthanized. In addition, the state’s sale of his Owls Head waterfront home has left Dean with a capital gains tax bill of more than $31,000 that was unnecessary, according to Jenny.True POTUS Leadership During a Depression: The Harding/Coolidge Administration During the Post-WWI Depression
Yes, austerity and lack of intervention in the economy DO work. Note one point: when wages were more flexible and scaled back, companies were able to be profitable at lower price points; we know from the law of supply and demand, when the price of labor falls, there's more demand for labor.
Facebook Corner
(Ben Swann). Led By Rand Paul, Senate Blocks Extension Of The Patriot Act
We need to keep our eye on the big issue which is the government's meddling in the private lives of citizens, without our knowledge or consent, using the unquestioned, misleading default justification of public security. I suspect the metadata data collection is just the tip of the iceberg. If we simply focus on the phone metadata, the security bureaucracy have have a handful of alternate programs we may not even know about involving data collections of people without probable cause or due process.
What the Rock Has Been Cooking Up
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall |
Cat Stevens, "Where Do the Children Play?"
