Edward Cline's Blog, page 38

Republics vs. Democracies

As the last post for 2009, I reprise a perennial aggravation.

Reading a volume of Albert J. Nock's essays, The Disadvantages of Being Educated, I came upon a footnote in one article, "A Study in Manners" (1925), in which Nock echoed my own impatient frustration with the promiscuous -- indeed, slatternly -- usage of the term democracy.

I wish to complain against the common and culpable use of the term democracy as a synonym for republicanism. Time and again one hears persons who should know ...

Facts are Stubborn Things

No better justice to President Barack Hussein Obama's boast in the Washington Post of his political achievements can be done than to adapt portions of the Declaration of Independence to the subject of his accomplishments. Not all of the charges against George III in 1776 listed in Jefferson's masterpiece are applicable. This charge sheet can also be leveled at Congress. I include only those offences which can be annotated. Call it not a parody, but a serious, appropriate, and well-deserved it...

A Copenhagen Postmortem

If one ever wondered what it might have been like to be a well-read, rational, outspoken, and angry Roman before the barbarian hordes rode in to sack the city, perhaps living in the present would come closest to the trepidation.

Few of your countrymen assemble with you in the Temple of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, to discuss how best to throw back the approaching barbarians and to persuade an oblivious and indifferent Senate to stop its costly, spendthrift and foolish policy of bread and circu...

Obama's War on America

Search through any of President Barack Obama's speeches, and buried under the glittering, worthless excelsior of opaque platitudes, silicic bromides and anemic banalities, one will find a pair or more of statements that mean something. They will mean something if one parses the statements armed with a knowledge of the man and of the power of words.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10th in Oslo, Norway was an easy rummage. Of course, any one of his speeches on America's ...

The Climate "Creationists"

Global warming is a religion, not a science. The prospect of governing every action of every individual on the planet in the name of staving off "catastrophic climate change," and charging especially the U.S. a fee for impoverishing it, makes belief in global warming as tenacious and anti-reason as the literal interpretation of the Bible is to a fundamentalist or evangelical holly-roller. The fraudsters and reivers have come too close to their goal of "world governance" to concede not only er...

Objectivist Blog Round-Up #125

Welcome to the December 3rd, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay ...

The IPCC's Square Pegs and Round Holes

The mushrooming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-University of East Anglia-Climate Research Unit email scandal, dubbed "ClimateGate," invites satire first, then serious examination. We begin with an excerpt of from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. Read it and weep. There have been three other assessments, in 1990, 1995, and 2001. A fifth assessment is being prepared for 2014. What sold the IPCC on the credibility of global warming was the "hockey stick" ...

Fork-Tongued in Washington

This is in the way of a correction to my "Fork-Tongued in Shanghai" (November 21), and of a footnote about our fork-tongued Senators as they sanction the groundwork of totalitarianism in this country.

This statement is corrected:

What Obama said about Sino-American relations in Shanghai is irrelevant here. China is the largest creditor of the U.S., holding about $800 billion in U.S. government securities, perhaps only three times what a health-care bill is estimated to cost over a decade.

I s...

Fork-Tongued in Shanghai

One might be tempted to pen a dark comedy about it. Don't bother. President Barack Obama has just added this latest act to his own peculiar satire, authored by his speechwriters and scripted by professional censors.

In Shanghai, China to bolster relations between China and the U.S., he appeared in a "town hall" that was as thoroughly rigged as his press conferences and other "town hall" meetings in the U.S. He addressed a group of Chinese government-vetted students and answered eight pre-sele...

Natural Allies Against Liberty

Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his power last without the other.*

I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.**

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.***

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lent its endorsement to the 2,000+ page health care bill passed by the House las...