Edward Cline's Blog, page 39

In Congress, Ignorance is Strength

I open this commentary with the introduction to my previous commentary, "The Mainstream Smearing of Ayn Rand." The disparity in subject is not so irrelevant as one might presume, but I won't dwell on that matter.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the blinding headlight of an oncoming freight train, her expression frozen in either ignorance or fear. It has always been difficult to distinguish between the two in her. But the malice in her words was palpable.

CNSNew...

The Mainstream Smearing of Ayn Rand

More famous words from one of our wannabe Platonic guardians:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the blinding headlight of an oncoming freight train, her expression frozen in either ignorance or fear. It has always been difficult to distinguish between the two in her. But the malice in her words was palpable.

CNSNews.com: "Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?"

Pelosi...

The Oblique Smearing of Ayn Rand

Two biographies of Ayn Rand have burst upon the literary scene, both written by non-Objectivists, Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), and Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press). I have not read either book, but will in time. I have read the first chapter of the Burns book on Amazon Books. It is a literate account of Rand's early life in Russia, and contains details of her life heretofore unknown to me, but tha...

Objectivist Blog Round-Up #119

Welcome to the October 22nd, 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 Ignoble Nobel Peace Prize

One searches without success through the whole list of Nobel Peace Prize winners from 1901 to the present for a single laureate whose work measurably advanced the cause of peace. The term peace itself, as it is employed by the Nobel Committee, on the surface is wishful and ethereal. The Peace Prize has, as a rule, recognized peace efforts which have unfailingly come to naught. Why? The "peace" pined for is essentially a Kantian concept. It is disconnected from reality. Work for peace, urges t...

Philosophical Continental Drift

Two Wall Street Journal book reviews, both called "Continental Drift" but spaced over two years apart, echo the pessimism about the future of Europe in the books they discuss: one with absolute pessimism, the other with qualified pessimism. The problem the books discuss is the looming conquest by immigration and non-assimilation by Muslims.

A Daily Telegraph (London) article of August 8th, "Muslim Europe: the demographic time bomb transforming our continent," substantiates the trends and the ...

"High Noon" for the First Amendment

Most of President Barack Obama's administration cohorts have a distinctly and undeniable leftist hue, ranging from Marxist, to socialist, to "pink." Obama himself speaks in glasnostian euphemisms that stand in for socialist rhetoric. It is a form of political "cross-dressing." Most of his cabinet, staff and "czarist" appointees speak the same "language." The press, especially if it endorses Obama's agenda, while it deals in words, either cannot fathom the double-speak, or chooses not to. Clu...

Cass Sunstein: "Czar" in Wolf's Clothing

In "Reason is Forever" I commented on the phenomenon of liberals, collectivists, and fascist/socialist fellow travelers in the Obama administration endorsing the gagging of anyone who criticizes the administration and its agenda, and wishing to bestow a taxpayer-bought bullhorn on Obama's propagandists. I also discuss the incremental move to censorship in America in "Censorship by Nickels and Dimes," "Thought Crime: The Logical End of Politically Correct Speech," and "The Move Towards Freedom...

The Perilous Ambiguities in the Constitution

The rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table, and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…."*

Writing about the presumption and power of Congress to enact health-care l...

Republicans: Ready to Embrace Freedom?

Or to help Obama and the Democrats shoplift it?

Writing about the Republican Party's ambivalent attraction to the Tea Party movement, Dan Eggen and Perry Bacon Jr.'s September 12th column in The Washington Post, "GOP Sees Protest As an Opportunity," attaches more importance to today's march and protest than liberals would like to concede. What follows here is an expansion of my comments left on the Post comment page.

With tens of thousands of conservative protesters expected to gather in...