This recent Laura Ingraham interview with Nicholas Provenzo exemplifies the epitome of evasive and concrete-bound thought. The discussion revolves around Provenzo’s impressively controversial thoughts on abortion and Down Syndrome. Take a listen….

Notice how she staggers from one angle to another, never fully allowing any thread of the conversation to reach its logical conclusion.

Not surprising, Provenzo’s point has been taken completely out of context throughout both this particular discussion as well as the overall debate. His case contends there is a rationally moral case for choosing to abort a mentally or physically handicapped fetus - that there are instances where such action is morally viable. He absolutely does not prescribe or even suggest abortion as a blanket prescription for any child with disabilities. Ingraham knows he’s not the monster she depicts him as, but as one who fails to properly regard reason, her thoughts are susceptible to being, and apparently are, emotion-driven. She knows if she follows Nick’s logic attentively she’ll very quickly have no tangible premise to hide under. She’s leveraging the very tactics of those she despises on the left. In terms of objective principles they’re cut from the same evasive mold.

It seems uncomfortable for her to discuss the value of human life in objective terms.

This manner of discourse is typical of Conservatives, namely because their principles are vague and not fully supported by reason. Commanding the tempo of the discussion is essential to her survival. When her points seemed to fizzle as Provenzo calmly and articulately wades through the emotional muck underlying each, she’d diffuse the engagement by rudely interrupting, insulting or moving on to her next flimsy argument.

As someone with a somewhat conservative-minded background (read: vague, implicit tendencies for freedom and rights) I can typically find at least a small area of common ground with those on the right. Being only slightly familiar with Ingraham, I never formed strong opinions of her either way, but this interview reveals her essence and proves she’s not worthy of any further consideration.

She’s another fine example of the mystical pragmatism that occupies the Conservative mindset. Even despite her technical advantage in this engagement, Provenzo still clowned her. In a neutral forum without the luxuries of raising her voice and controlling the call button, her hollow rhetoric wouldn’t stand a chance.

And another thing… who is Ann Rined?

Send this to every productive individual you know.

I’m unfamiliar with the host or the associated website, but insofar as this video is concerned I agree. Just close your ears during his reference of “drugs for the elderly” as a supposed proper role of government.

Whatever his flaws, Ron Paul is the only politician (that I’m aware) adamantly stating the obvious folly of Government meddling in the economy.

Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to obtain a [coercive] monopoly position in the mortgage market, especially the mortgage-backed securities market, because of the advantages bestowed upon them by the federal government.

Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks.

These governmental measures, combined with the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy, led to an unsustainable housing boom. The key measure by which the Fed caused this boom was through the manipulation of interest rates, and the open market operations that accompany this lowering.

Same ole story, different scale. Controls breed controls - always have, always will.

This bill seems to be almost unanimously rejected by both sides of the pragmatic isle. Instinctively, the slightly more rational economic sense of the right invokes hesitation for support - not enough to outweigh their altruistic motives nor the temptation to seize the power-steak dangling before them.

The left, who burns with a passion to further socialize our economy, but are loathe to support Bush in such a “progressive” measure - especially one which could remedy the punishment of economic accountability for corporate executives, can’t stand not getting credit for one of their signature plays. To them, the bill isn’t quite unjust or irrational enough. They’ll compromise anything, including their own non-principles.

Damn! They’re amusing as long as you ignore the fact that they’re destroying America.

With the arrival of Fall, my favorite season, I’ve turned a new technical leaf.

My web hosting requirements have outgrown my shared environment of 6 years (who seems more concerned with marketing their carbon neutrality than offering competitive hosting value), so I started looking into options for a more performance oriented setup. After a good bit of research I decided to go with a pair of Linode 720 Virtual Private Servers (VPS). I’m now hosting several sites as well as facilitating quite a few web-based utilities on one production and another development oriented server.

Linode offers several tiers of hosting based on dedicated allotments of memory, disk space and bandwidth - ranging from $20/month for their smallest package to $160/month for a monster with 3GB of RAM and nearly 100GB of disc. In addition, they also offer an a la carte upgrade system where you can add even more memory, disk space, bandwidth or static IP’s. They offer 16 different Linux distributions to cater to those who prefer a particular variant.

The trade-off is the environments are unmanaged. They keep the power on, the net accessible and the disks from croaking - other than that, you’re on your own. The reality of assuming responsibility for security, configuration and backups can be intimidating at first, but anyone familiar with Linux and networking fundamentals can setup a fairly reliable and secure server, especially considering the wealth of online documentation and how-to information. I spent about a week migrating my sites over, setting up security, backup jobs, SSL keys/certs, Apache/MySQL/PHP configuration, DNS setup and testing.

The luxury of tweaking the LAMP stack for applications such as Drupal and Wordpress enables substantial performance gains - especially the former. My largest site, ResoNation was limping along sluggishly in the shared environment. The flexibility of custom configuration along with advanced caching optimizations cut page load times by ~75%.

I increased my monthly hosting bill by $30. For the extra money I upgraded from 4GB of disc space to 48GB, from 240GB of monthly transfer to 800GB, and I increased the performance of all sites involved significantly. Additionally, I now have a fully redundant source code repository, a development mirror of the production environment and plenty of on-site storage for media content. At the current loads I have more than enough hardware to host several additional sites.

If you’re looking to step up from the restrictions of a shared environment, you can checkout Linode’s offering with a 7 day trial. By the way, their sign up process, billing and setup processes are flawlessly executed. You can pay month to month and they prorate fees at signup. So far, this has been a completely positive experience and I highly recommend Linode VPS.

Senator, and certified collectivist mobster, Joe Biden thinks income redistribution is “patriotic.”

Biden says he and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama want to “take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.”

Under the Democrats’ economic plan, people earning more than $250,000 a year would pay more in taxes while those earning less — the vast majority of American taxpayers — would receive a tax cut.

Biden told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday that, in his words, “it’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.” [emphasis mine]

Patriotism is another word, along with selfishness, of which the meaning has been munged by and within the context of altruist-collectivist discourse. The corrupted, yet commonly accepted definition is to possess an unyielding loyalty to a nation as a whole, without any explicit stipulations. Such a vague definition enables the media and politicians to throw the term around loosely as it fits their objective. However, the term originated as a very specific representation of those who spearheaded the American Revolution - a movement destined to form a nation void of economic or religious tyranny, exactly where our word-bandits wish to take us as quickly as we’ll allow them.

Contrary to the hijacked revision, as an advocate of freedom, justice, rights and the sovereignty of the individual, and one living in a nation which was founded upon such tenets, patriotism implies maintaining a respect and dedication to preserve the revolutionary sentiments of the men who started this republic.

By this correct definition, progressive compulsory taxation is unjust, irrational and brutally immoral.

Senator Joe, on the other hand (like all four of our presidential/vice-presidential candidates), is an altruist-collectivist who holds no objection to sacrificing one man to another, especially when he can conjure a practical justification for doing such. To any individual who maintains it, and to the extent that he adheres to it, the altruist-collectivist mindset is unequivocally destructive. For an individual to force the cancer of self-sacrifice upon others is undisguisedly evil.

Self-destruction is tragic, mandating suicide on others is monumental depravity.

Twisting the philosophical currency of an honorable term into a meaningless and deceitful buzzword is intellectual fraud. The pattern of taking a concept of virtue, gutting its essence and using the label as a cloak for nonsense is very common. In the sprint to obliterate what was the greatest country, the obliteration of language proves to be a invaluable asset.

With the exception of very few talk radio hosts and a sparse littering of tolerable music - radio is dead.

I usually enjoy an audio book on the few days of the months that I commute, but occasionally I’m between books and have yet to burn a new one to disc - so I’ll delude myself into thinking I might stumble on radio content that’s digestible. This is always a mistake. I’m not really into “Fake Country,” Hip-Hop mumbling nor any of the other obtuse ramblings set to mundane chord progressions, thus it’s inevitable that I end up idling on an NPR affiliate. At least the folly of their ineptitude gets my blood flowing, which is more that I can say for music on the radio. I’m certainly “engaged” in their dialogue with the sobering realization that these dumbasses exist in very large quantities and, courtesy of a rogue government, have the collective power to rule me.

I’m not sure what’s worse, crappy music or crappy discourse.

In addition to their jolly chatter of industry nationalization (destruction of wealth) and earth worship (destruction of life), the Leftosphere is rabidly flinging as much crap on Sarah Palin as they can muster. What malicious cretins. I disagree with Palin on most things, but I do enjoy the fact that she aggravates the left so well.

This segment was understandably about her religiosity in particular, and the threat of Theocratic progression in general. The host of this segment, a collectivist drone who probably looks like Marcie, patronizingly mentions the “separation of church and state that grants us not only freedom of religion, but also freedom from religion.”

What the hell? Since when does the Constitution count for anything to the left?

Their penchant for defending the constitution when the discussion is about religious freedom is evasively absent when any other tenet of our founders, any regarding individual rights, is referenced. Just like cherry-picking bible verses that conveniently comply with one’s notions, this is pragmatic intellectual dishonesty - Marcie knows it too.

Courtesy of Titanic Deck Chairs:

by Craig Biddle - Full article here.

As the 2008 presidential election nears, and while John McCain and Barack Obama struggle to distinguish themselves from each other in terms of particular promises and goals, it is instructive to observe that these candidates are indistinguishable in terms of fundamentals.

On the domestic front, McCain promises to “take on” the drug companies, as if those who produce and market the medicines that improve and save human lives must be fought; he promises to ration energy by means of a cap-and-trade scheme, as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to dictate how much energy a company may purchase or use; he promises to “battle” big oil, as if those who produce and deliver the lifeblood of civilization need to be defeated; he promises to “reform” Wall Street, as if those who finance the businesses that produce the goods and services on which our lives depend are thereby degenerate; he seeks to uphold the ban on drilling in ANWR, as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to prevent Americans from reshaping nature to suit their needs; and so on.

Obama promises to socialize health care (under the tired euphemism of “universal health care”), as if insurance companies, doctors, and patients have no right to use or dispose of their property or to contract with one another according to their own judgment; he promises to increase the minimum wage, as if employers and employees lack those same rights; he promises to pour taxpayer money into “alternative energy,” as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to confiscate money from productive citizens in order to subsidize tilting windmills; he promises to force oil companies to fund government handouts to Americans, as if the owners of oil companies have no right to their property or profits; he promises to bail out homeowners who cannot pay their mortgages, as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to make some people pay for the financial mistakes or hardships of others; he promises to “incentivize” students to do “community service” by offering them taxpayer-funded college tuition, as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to do so; and so on.

In regard to foreign policy, McCain promises to “respect the collective will of our democratic allies,” as if America has no moral right to defend her citizens according to her own best judgment; and he promises to finish the “mission” of making Iraq “a functioning democracy” even if it takes “one hundred years,” as if the U.S. government has a moral or constitutional right to sacrifice American soldiers to spread democracy abroad.1

Obama promises to uphold the idea that “America’s larger purpose in the world is to promote the spread of freedom. . . . dignity, and opportunity,” as if we have a moral responsibility to minister to the uncivilized and the unfortunate across the globe; and he promises to negotiate with jihadists who chant “Death to America,” as if Americans will be safe from these lunatics when the lunatics give Obama their word.2

Looking past the particular programs of McCain and Obama, and viewing their goals in terms of the purpose of government presumed by these goals, we can see that both candidates hold that the purpose of government is to manage the economy, to regulate businesses, to redistribute wealth, to bring freedom or democracy to foreigners, and to defer to the will of others on matters of American security.

But this is not the proper purpose of government. Nor is it the purpose that America’s founders had in mind when they formed this great country.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a great read illustrating the intellectual decline of America. Despite his shortcomings, an “extremist” such as Goldwater would be a breath of fresh air in todays stagnant political circus.

From Goldwater’s speech:

We must assure a society here which, while never abandoning the needy or forsaking the helpless [sigh], nurtures incentives and opportunities for the creative and the productive. We must know the whole good is the product of many single contributions.

And I cherish a day when our children once again will restore as heroes the sort of men and women who, unafraid and undaunted, pursue the truth, strive to cure disease, subdue and make fruitful our natural environment and produce the inventive engines of production, science, and technology.

This Nation, whose creative people have enhanced this entire span of history, should again thrive upon the greatness of all those things which we, we as individual citizens, can and should do. And during Republican years, this again will be a nation of men and women, of families proud of their role, jealous of their responsibilities, unlimited in their aspirations — a Nation where all who can will be self-reliant.

We Republicans see in our constitutional form of government the great framework which assures the orderly but dynamic fulfillment of the whole man, and we see the whole man as the great reason for instituting orderly government in the first place.

We see — We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society. And — And beyond that, we see, in cherished diversity of ways, diversity of thoughts, of motives and accomplishments. We don’t seek to lead anyone’s life for him. We only seek — only seek to secure his rights, guarantee him opportunity — guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed. [emphasis and dismay added]

And the best part…

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. [emphasis mine]

From Myrhaf:

Tonight we watched the beginning of the end of freedom in America, brought to us by well-meaning Republicans who have not the slightest idea that their perverted hierarchy of values will lead to destruction of individual rights. They were all good people we saw on TV tonight. Good, solid Americans. Their ignorance of economics and philosophy will be the end of the country they love.

I have many friends and family who correctly detect and loath the destructively nihilist essence of the left. What they fail to see are the thorns in their own bed of roses - which are just as deadly and cloaked in a much more palatable guise. The truth is they are still cheering for a losing team, and for exactly as Rand wrote in “Conservatism: An Obituary”:

Yet capitalism is what the “conservatives” dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism . . . Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. [emphasis added]

As long as sacrifice, in any sense of the word, is part of a political platform the result will be destruction of wealth, freedom and life.