Dear Loyal Folowers:
I am on vacation in Florida from the frosty North. For the next week, my posts may be spotty. I apologize for this respite in my eagerly anticipated posts.
Best… The Artful Dilettante
On Vacation
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Author Archives: theartfuldilettante
Living Under the Irrationality of Dictatorship in America
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
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REPORT: CNN in talks to pay Chris Cuomo some $9 million in Hush Money to protect Zucker, Network
We have all known scum. Scum always turn on each other, in the end. Leftists are dishonest brutes; they are simply high profile scum.
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If Whoopi Goldberg quits The View, I will collapse in despair.
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So Biden accidentally kills an ISIS terrorist. Now we’re supposed to forgive election fraud, censorship, medical tyranny, runaway inflation, ugly divisiveness, and losing Afghanistan?
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Empowering and supporting your government to act like criminals is, morally, no better than being a criminal yourself.
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IF the Democrats are crushed in the 2022 and 2024 elections, will they stand down, relinquish power and reform?
My answer: NO. However, I don’t believe they consider failure in those elections an option. They will utilize subjective voting, mail-ballots, illegal alien voting and much else only a criminal or sociopath could think up in order to ensure victory of some kind. But if their tactics fail — no, they will not stand down.
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Omicron numbers down. Tyrants in a panic. “How can we scare and control people?” Evil is SO predictable.
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Wherever you pass gun control, crime stays the same, or escalates. Why? “Because not every state has gun control. We must make it national! Until every part of the country has gun control, it can’t work!”
A majority get the COVID vaccine, yet we have even MORE flu and cold viruses than before. Why? “Because not everyone got the vaccine. Until we get 100 percent compliance, the vaccine won’t work!”
See a pattern here? EVERYONE must sign on for things that don’t work. That way, you don’t have to talk about it anymore.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The Drip…Drip…Drip of Tyranny
The thing about tyranny? It’s the drip-drip-drip mentality.
They get you bit by bit. That’s how an annoying, overreaching government suddenly becomes a totalitarian dictatorship. Seemingly overnight.
For example: In my current home state of Delaware, the mask mandate was reinstated last month. No real reason was given. People assumed it was Omicron. But the numbers for Omicron are way, way down. Still no mention of getting rid of it. Most likely, the mask mandate will remain for the summer season, when people crowd into a beach resort and officials can’t be accused of letting a virus spread. What if there is no virus? “Well, there COULD be!” And it’s an election year (not that Delaware’s elections aren’t already rigged.)
When the original mask mandate was lifted back in spring of 2021, even people who supported it said, “Well, that’s that. It won’t be back. And I’d be really angry, if the mask mandate ever came back.” For the first few days when the mask mandate inexplicably returned in January 2022, a lot of people were angry. And then the anger soon converted into, “Well, hopefully by the spring or summer they’ll lift it again.” Please master. Show me some mercy. Whatever you say, master. Does anybody know when or if the mandate will be lifted again? Do the tyrants in the state capital even know? Not likely. They’re just going from whim to whim; because that’s what politics and tyranny are. They are not smart people, and they are not good people. They are simply power-driven people.
Similarly, a bill has been quietly introduced in the Delaware state legislature to make the presentation of a fake vax passport a felony. But Delaware does not have a vax passport. Nobody in the state has one. So why introduce a bill making a vax passport a felony? The legislator introducing it is a crony of Biden and the state’s unrelentingly partisan governor. There has to be a reason for introducing a bill managing a vax passport not in effect. “Well,” people say. “I don’t think they’ll go THAT far.” If they DO go that far, a lot of people will be really angry. And then they’ll get used to it, saying that maybe it won’t be permanent. Drip, drip, drip.
If a totalitarian, “show your papers, wear a mask forever” government had been presented all at once, you would have experienced outrage from probably two-thirds of the population, even in a deep blue state like Delaware. But when you present it drip by drip by drip, you hypnotize people, in a sense, to tolerating what just a year or two before would have been unthinkable and intolerable.
It’s nothing new. Dictators have done this for centuries. Dictators began in earnest in the 20th Century. Mao was brilliant at in China, instituting a Cultural Revolution to override any political opposition — precisely what’s happening in America right now. America heroically fought off those dictatorships in World War II and the Cold War only to succumb themselves, starting in earnest in 2020 and continuing undisturbed at the present time. Sure, some states are worse than others. But the governors and legislators running the deep blue states are fully in charge of the federal government, at present. Sooner or later, the federal government WILL launch attacks on the red states for not conforming to the only real Party in charge, and it will be up to those states either to fight — or submit. And, as our experience with President Trump taught us, the Deep State bureaucracy is firmly entrenched with the same people who run the deep blue states. And those entrenched fascists/Communists will be there in the unlikely event that a Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis wins the presidency in 2024 AND the Deep State allows it to happen. My guess is they will NEVER allow 2016 to happen again, especially after their huge success in 2020.
Increasingly, I see no way out of this other than secession or breaking up of some kind. The Bill of Rights is no longer in operation in the federal Imperial City. Frankly, it wasn’t in operation even when Donald Trump seemed to be in charge. We can try the Convention of States, and a principled stand would probably be practical and important. But let’s face it. We’re dealing with the worst dictators (at the very least) since the time of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. These people are ruthless, dishonest, and literally care nothing about anyone or anything other than their own power. They are also ideologically rigid, on top of it. They are the worst of all possible worlds — Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Castro’s Cuba, Mussolini’s Italy and the fall of the Roman Empire all rolled up into one unspeakably nasty, stinking hybrid of horror. Most don’t yet grasp just how evil they are.
They are immovable, in the worst sense of that term. We are already in a civil war. It’s just not obvious to most, at the moment; but before long, unless 100 percent of us roll over 100 percent, it’s going to be pretty obvious.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Destroy the Public-School Systems
A local Fox affiliate reports that last year in Baltimore’s largest high school, 77 percent of students graduated reading at an elementary-school level, and many of them at a kindergarten level. Only twelve students at the school were at grade level — that’s under 2 percent. And it was a whistleblower who came forward with this information:
A Baltimore City teacher comes forward with devastating information, showing 77 percent of students tested at one high school, are reading at an elementary school level
The teacher works at Patterson High School, one of the largest high schools in Baltimore with a 61 percent graduation rate and a nearly $12 million budget. We agreed not to identify this source who fears retribution for giving Project Baltimore the results of iReady assessments.
“Our children deserve better. They really do,” the Patterson High School teacher told Project Baltimore. “As a whole, the system has failed them.”
The teacher is a hero. It is a shame that the teacher, and not the administrators, is the one terrified about retribution. Public schools such as Patterson have a state-compelled monopoly on education that traps kids in their perpetually failing institutions. And the more funding they get, the worse they perform. Last year, the Baltimore public-school system — which functioned remotely most of the time — had a $1.4 billion budget for only 78,000 students.
From a devastating piece by Adam Andrzejewski at Forbes:
CEO Sonja Santelises ($339,028) and her chief of staff, Alison Perkins-Cohen ($198,168), collectively earned nearly $700,000 in pay, perks, pension funding, and health insurance benefits.
Santelises’ cash compensation was more than $126,000 higher than that of the U.S. Secretary of Education, a cabinet-level position.
Chief of Schools John Davis made $218,303 in base salary alone. Tina Hike Hubbard, the “Chief Communications & Community Engagement Officer” earned $194,283.
Other highly compensated employees included Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the “Chief Human Capital Officer” ($194,283); Lynette Washington, the Chief Operating Officer ($194,283); Theresa Jones, the “Chief Achievement & Accountability Officer” ($192,827); and Maryanne Cox, the Deputy Chief Financial Officer ($192,827).
In a marketplace, all these people would have lost their jobs a long time ago. It’s not the salaries that are the problem. It’s the failure of the system they oversee.
Few things have undermined minorities over the past 40 years more than inner-city public-school systems. Rich and middle-class Americans already have school choice. They can move. Neighborhoods with high-performing systems have far higher homes values, shutting poorer people out. Teachers’ unions use tax dollars, often through compelled dues, to help elect politicians who preserve the status quo — which, functionally, is the racial segregation of schools.
One of the most popular arguments against school choice is that granting parents the freedom to pick better schools would only weaken traditional ones. Well, imagine making this argument about any other area of life: “Hey, you can’t leave this supermarket because we’re going to suck even more.” No one would accept that logic. Yet they do for their kids’ education. Maybe when 77 percent of high-school graduates can’t make it through Goodnight Moon, someone will do something. We’re not that far off.
David Arsanyi
Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Liberty and Reason
version of this article was first published in 2005. Capitalism Magazine is republishing it again because its message still remains relevant today.
Born over 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual’s life on earth. She herself led a “rags to riches” life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence.
The story of Ayn Rand’s life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life: “a life more compelling than fiction.” Born February 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age 8, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child’s ideals. A year later she decided to become a writer: inspired by the hero of a children’s story, who embodied “intelligence directed to a practical purpose,” she had a “blinding picture” of people–not as they are but as they could be.
In high school and college, she discovered two figures whom she never ceased to admire: Victor Hugo, for “the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness” of his stories, and Aristotle, as “the arch-realist and the advocate of the validity of man’s mind.”
Escaping the tyranny and poverty of the U.S.S.R., she came to America in 1926, officially for a brief visit with relatives. A chance meeting with her favorite American director, Cecil B. DeMille, resulted in jobs as a movie extra and then a junior screenwriter. After periods of near-starvation, she sold her first play to Broadway and her first novel, We the Living, set in the Soviet tyranny she had escaped. With her first best-seller, The Fountainhead in 1943, she presented her ideal man, individualist architect Howard Roark. But it was, she said, “only an overture” to her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged in 1957, a mystery story about the role of the mind in man’s existence. With Atlas Shrugged her career as a fiction writer ended, but her career as a philosopher had just begun.
Her philosophy–Objectivism–upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man’s only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism–by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self). The only moral political system, she maintained, is laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to the collectivism of socialism, fascism, or the welfare state), because it recognizes the inalienable right of an individual to act on the judgment of his own mind. Your life, she held, belongs to you and not to your country, God or your neighbors.
Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,” she wrote in 1971, “but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual’s right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.
Despite being outside the cultural mainstream, her novels became best-sellers and her books sell more today than ever before–half a million copies per year. There is a reason that Atlas Shrugged placed second in a Library of Congress survey about most influential books. There is a reason that her works are considered life-altering by so many readers. She had an exalted view of man and created inspiring fictional heroes.
A sui generis philosopher, who looked at the world anew, Ayn Rand has long puzzled the intellectual establishment. Academia has usually met her views with antagonism or avoidance, unable to fathom that she was an individualist but not a subjectivist, an absolutist but not a dogmatist. And they have thus ignored her original solutions to such seemingly intractable problems as how to ground values in facts. But even in academia, her ideas are finding more acceptance, e.g., university fellowships and a subgroup within the American Philosophical Association to study Objectivism.
Ayn Rand left a legacy in defense of reason and freedom that serves as a guidepost for the American spirit–especially pertinent today when America and what it stands for are under assault.
Dr. Berliner is the senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives. He was the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute from its founding to January 2000.
Watch “How to Win in the Game of Politics | Thomas Sowell” on YouTube
Joe Rogan and Spotify
Gee, I WAS supporting Joe Rogan and Spotify’s decision to keep him. But now that I know these two [pictured] are outraged about it … well, that changes everything.
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A dishonest media does even MORE evil than state-run media. Why? Because millions believe them. Nobody believes the state-run media.
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People who do not treasure their freedom and who think tyranny is acceptable are not worth knowing.
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California Gov. Newsom has again been caught violating his own mask mandate — and then lying about it. Of course, he suffers no consequences and snickers about it. [Fox News 1-31-22]
Why do leftists keep applauding and voting for swine like Newsom? Shouldn’t his hypocrisy and insincerity anger them? It doesn’t. They will give him 10 terms. Why? Because most leftists are insincere themselves. They possess no integrity, and they inhabit hollowed out souls. They are incapable of admiring anyone, so they cannot feel betrayed or disappointed. They are just full of hatred and (at the root of it all) profound anxiety over the responsibility of freedom in a once beautiful, free country they now gleefully destroy. They’re destroying their own precious California, as they did New York City, and they do not care. They are incapable of caring because they are all about destruction for its own sake.
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On social media, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele mourned the state of American cities.
“Is there a deliberate plan to destroy the United States from within?” Bukele tweeted on Monday. “Why are the authorities and some of the media not even commenting on this things? Why are they letting their beautiful cities rot?”
Mistakes of this magnitude are NOT made innocently.
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A full 70% of Americans agree with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that COVID is here to stay, and we just need to get on with our lives.” [NEWSMAX 1-31-22]
Fine. But what if you have no life? Or, to you, “life” means a delusional sense of control, or a sociopathic (Karenesque) need to control others? That 30 percent is still in control of society and government, for the most part. Sad, bad and sick.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Watch “How Woke Policies Promote Chaos | Thomas Sowell” on YouTube
Biden’s Supreme Court Nomination is an Insult
President Biden has announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. Rather than asking, “Who is the best qualified?” he will be asking “Who has the right sex and skin color?” According to a 2019 report, only 3.4 percent of sitting judges are black women. The president is therefore limiting his search — for someone to endow with a lifetime position of great power — to just 3.4 percent of the people who are generally considered qualified. And there is good reason to doubt whether even that 3.4 percent are fully qualified.
Despite decades of recruitment and affirmative action, blacks are underrepresented in law schools: 8 percent of students vs 13.5 percent of the population. They are more likely to be in bottom-ranked law schools (16 percent of students) than in top-ranked schools (6 percent). Black first-year students are twice as likely as white first-years to drop out: 11 percent vs. 5.1 percent.
Many of the most able and ambitious law graduates go to work for law firms. In 2020, only 3.04 percent of law firm associates were black women, and only 0.8 percent of the partners were black women. Partnership in a law firm is usually a sign of ability. Why is the black-women representation on the federal bench — 3.4 percent — four times greater than their 0.8 percent share of partners? Probably because judicial appointments are political whereas partners have to be sharp lawyers who can bring in clients. Pressure to be “diverse” is already so great that a good many of the current 0.8 percent probably aren’t qualified.
A black woman justice will mean that her group is overrepresented on the court: 11 percent of justices, vs 6.7 percent of the population. This is affirmative action heaped upon affirmative action.
Public confidence in the Supreme Court has dipped below 50 percent, and has rarely been lower. Will this appointment raise confidence? The current Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, flatly rejects the idea that judges should set aside their race and sex when deciding cases: “I . . . accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.” She then famously added, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Our president apparently thinks a black woman will decide cases better than a white man. Mr. Biden already showed his hand when he promised he would appoint a woman as vice president. Sex before competence.
Presidents have a relatively free hand in choosing running mates and make blatantly political choices. Naming a supreme court justice is — or should be — different. A bad choice can’t be fired or voted out of office. Moreover, as law professor Jonathan Turley points out, in one of its first affirmative-action decisions — the 1977 Bakke case — the Supreme Court set clear limits on affirmative action: Preferring “members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake,” adding that “this is what the Constitution forbids.” The President is therefore shaping the court according to criteria the court itself has forbidden. If Mr. Biden believes that non-whites and women serve the United States better than white men, let him act on that belief: Resign today and let Kamala Harris run the country.
And what are we to think of the person who will “make history” by accepting this appointment? At her Senate hearings, someone should ask her:
How will anyone be able to respect you as a justice when you were chosen after 95 percent of all the other possible candidates weren’t even considered? Wouldn’t you want to be able to say, ‘I was the best,’ rather than ‘I was the best of just 5 percent’? Shouldn’t anyone with any self-respect refuse such an insulting nomination ?
Jared Taylor
Can’t We All Just Get Along ? Sadly, no.
You cannot have a conversation with someone who has already made up his mind about what’s true.
Imagine someone saying to you, “I know you believe one plus one equals two. But one plus one actually equals three. I will tell you why.”
You’re not going to be convinced. Your mind will shut down. That’s how leftists feel if you try to sell them on Trump, capitalism, limited government, objective truth, the fact of two genders, or anything else not leftist.
It’s the same thing if the topic is more complicated, and less obvious. If someone believes Allah is the one true God, and you believe that Jesus is the one true God, in earthly form, then you’ll never reach agreement. This point is non-negotiable, to both of you. If you’re in love with Mary and someone tells you that it’s wrong to be in love with Mary, and you should be in love with Joannie instead, you’re not going to change your mind. The person who tells you to be in love with Joannie (not Mary) is wasting his breath.
Imagine how much WORSE the situation gets if someone says to you, “You’re an idiot. Only a deranged, immoral fool would be in love with Mary.” You’re even LESS likely to be open to persuasion than you would be if someone politely told you to make a change.
That’s why America is in so much trouble. Leftists not only tell nonleftists, “You’re wrong. I’m right. That’s that.” They were saying that 10 and 20 years ago. Now they say, “You’re a deranged idiot if you hold the views I don’t hold. I shouldn’t even have to be talking to you.” Actually, it’s even worse in some cases. It has reached the point — at least according to polls — that half of these leftists actually think you should be locked up for disagreeing with them, about masks, vaccines or a whole lot of other things.
It’s one thing to say, “Let’s agree to disagree.” People can do that about Allah versus Jesus. That’s what separation of church and state is all about. People can agree to disagree about marrying Joannie versus marrying Mary. But it’s a lot harder to do this with government. Because government refers to FORCE. The leftists are saying, “I am right, and that’s that. Either you do as I say, or the police will be called.” You cannot reconcile such an attack with reasoning. Reason has long since broken down. We are far past the point of reason, the minute someone is prepared to have you silenced, unemployed or even jailed for failing to agree with them.
Some will reply, “That’s too pessimistic. We can still work it out; America will be great again.” How, exactly? The same people who call this pessimistic will admit, “Yes, that is how leftists are.” And probably some of the less strident leftists (there are a few remaining) feel the same way about people on the other side, too.
Whenever somebody holds a view that includes legitimizing the use of force in advancing that view, you’ve got civil war. If a family member tried to use physical force to make sure you marry Joannie instead of Mary, there will be trouble. If a Muslim decides to use physical force to coerce a Christian into practicing his beliefs (or vice-versa), you will have big trouble. Centuries of human history prove my point.
Today, we have a situation where most of the leftists don’t merely say, “This is my point of view, and I’d like to see it enacted; but if you don’t want it, I’ll accept that. I’ll keep trying to persuade you that government ownership of the means of production is the best, that fossil fuels must be outlawed within 8 years, and that there are multiple genders, etc.” Instead they say, without apology, “This is my point of view and you WILL accept it. Or you will pay serious consequences.” January 6! January 6! They’ll shriek incantations like this, almost like cult followers do.
Right now, those consequences for failing to conform consist of “Facebook jailing”, Twitter shadow-banning, widespread shaming, losing your job and possibly paying fines. On the same premise, we can expect a lot worse to come. Why not? Once you open the door to this kind of coercion, the rest — prisons, gulags, reeducation camps, even murder — is only a matter of time.
Because that’s how coercion works. Coercion is not reason. America is not immune to the consequences of abandoning reason.
Can’t we all get along? No, we can’t. Not when one or both parties accept coercion as the solution. The minute even one side starts using coercion, you’ve got the beginning of civil war.
Observe the results in real time.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 