Muhammad: The "Banned" Images Blog Free Speech at Risk

The British Are Coming (I Hope)

While the Obama administration's welfare statism pushes us closer to tyranny and economic collapse, the Cameron administration in Britain is executing wholesale decontrol.

The latest is a radical plan to "make enormous cuts in the public sector" by "putting power in the hands of patients and clinicians . . ." To achieve this, the Cameron plan will cut $30 billion by laying off "tens of thousands" of bureaucrats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/world/europe/25britain.html?ref=world

A Phoenix Rises in Alexandria

In a region of the world being suffocated by the mysticism of Islam, there stands a man of reason. In this region that longs for the darkness of ignorance, there stands a champion of education and of the Enlightenment. In a world of appeasers, there stands a man of conviction and courage. His name is Ismail Serageldin. He is the director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

His mission is to make the library "a worthy successor to the Ancient Library of Alexandria. That great Library was a unique ecumenical effort of the human intellect and imagination, and remains engraved in the memories of all scientists and intellectuals to this day."

He openly embraces early Renaissance Muslims such as Ibn al-Nafis who promoted scholarly inquiry and scientific investigation -- a healthy this-worldly turn away from the supernaturalism of the Dark Ages. As the NYT puts it, "[h]is goal is to help spark the Arab world's own age of reason . . ." And he condemns Islamists and statists who, he argues, are the enemies of liberty.

Mr. Serageldin is a man of mixed philosophic premises in that he attempts to reconcile reason and faith. But it is beyond remarkable for a prominent individual, who lives where fatwas are issued like they are parking tickets, to say: "let us not be afraid of opinions and ideas."

http://www.bibalex.org/aboutus/message_en.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/world/middleeast/03egypt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=a%20voice%20in%20egypt&st=cse

Plato Lives . . .

"Our first business [as government planners] will be to supervise the making of fables and legends [i.e., of art], rejecting all which are unsatisfactory . . ." (From the _Republic_.)

. . . In Russia

A well-known museum director and a curator were both convicted "on charges of inciting religious and ethnic hatred in an exhibition called 'Forbidden Art — 2006,' which displayed works that had been banned by Russian museums."

The Platonist "prosecutors argued that the men’s activities were extremist and meant to inflame religious strife."

Supporting the censorship were "fundamentalist Russian Orthodox activists dressed in black T-shirts decorated with the Orthodox cross, skulls and crossbones and the words 'Orthodoxy or Death.'" (Anybody for a "Everybody Draw Russian Orthodox Day"?)

So much for the idea that centuries-old, abstract philosophy has nothing to do with real life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/design/13curators.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=organizers%20of%20art%20show&st=cse

Government Control Over the Means of Hair Cutting

What, in principle, is the difference between this:

"A Little Off the Top? Only if Tehran Approves" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/world/middleeast/07haircut.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=a+little+off+the+top&st=cse

And this?

In California, as in other states, one can cut hair, but only if the state approves -- with requirements that include: "Completed a course in barbering from a school approved by the board (1,500 hours). Completed an apprenticeship program in barbering approved by the board as conducted under the provisions of the Shelley-Maloney Apprentice Labor
Standards Act of 1939, Chapter 4 (commencing with Section 3070) of Division 3 of the Labor Code." http://www.barbercosmo.ca.gov/licensees/licensing_faqs.shtm

Moral Agnosticism Kills — Literally

Here is an obviously bright and experienced psychologist at the Columbia University Medical Center -- a real-life case, though on a smaller scale of destruction, of Dr. Stadler from Atlas Shrugged.

She used her clinical talents and perceptiveness to treat an inpatient at the psychiatric unit who was experiencing severe depression. After a month of treatment, she helped him become functional again -- as a contract killer.

She knew during the treatment that she was putting a killer back on the street, and the "ethicists" at the hospital advised her that she had a duty to treat him. And to quote the article: "He had no remorse: He saw these killings as 'all in a day’s work.'”

Because of her moral agnosticism -- the view that values are divorced from facts, that morality has nothing to do with life -- she and the hospital are complicit in his future crimes.

http://nymag.com/health/bestdoctors/2010/66457/

“Friend” Everyone

Without favorites, preferences, personal values, there is no "I" -- no self. And modern childhood educators know this. Their wicked desire to render a child's ego stillborn can be seen in the mania over group projects, "service" learning masquerading as education, forcing a child to bring a Valentine's Day card for all classmates, a focus on "socializing" versus developing a child's cognitive faculty.

The latest move by the modern Comprachicos is to eradicate the concept of "best friend." According to the killers of a child's spirit, such a friend "signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity . . ." According to one, "we say [Johnny] doesn't need a best friend." The ideal, according to the NYT article, is for children to "almost always socialize in a pack." If two children do become too close, then the re-educators "put them on different sports teams [or] seat them at different ends of the dining table . . ." (The antidote to this pack mentality is, of course, a Montessori education.)

Properly speaking, a friend is a reflection of one's basic values. That person is, in Aristotle's words, "another self." But if there is no self, then everyone (and, really, no one) is a friend. (See Peter Keating.) And the reverse is true. If a child is taught that it is wrong to have a best friend, what he's being told is that it is wrong to have personal values -- such as intelligence, excellence, a sense of adventure. Such a child will then repress and hide his values or kill them and join the pack. A rare few have the courage to fight for their ego. (For more on this, see Rand's essay "Art and Moral Treason" in _The Romantic Manifesto_.)

On a personal note, as the father of a six-year-old, I find this movement murderously disgusting. And as a college professor, I have seen first-hand the nearly irreparable harm it causes to otherwise bright and ambitious young people. Such students graduate still trying to "find themselves," and primed politically for this country's march toward collectivism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/fashion/17BFF.html?scp=1&sq=a%20best%20friend&st=cse

Chopping Down the Tall Hops

In what has become an all-too-familiar tragedy, an American corporation is about to be penalized for being too successful. The Boston Beer Company is a "craft brewer" that produces delicious varieties of Sam Adams beer. The federal government imposes a lower excise tax per barrel on craft brewers -- those that produce fewer than 2 million barrels per year. Because of its business acumen and artisanal expertise, Boston Beer expects to exceed that output in 2012 -- and thereby be punished by a higher tax rate.

This, of course, is based on the egalitarian idea that those who are successful are just "lucky," and that the fruits of that "luck" must be redistributed to the "unlucky." (And if redistribution of values is impossible, then the "lucky" must be chopped down.) We can see this anti-human code all over the culture -- in the journalists who like to "afflict the comfortable," in the envious who sneer at achievement, in the education budgets that spend exorbitant sums to "norm" imbeciles into classrooms, in the use of antitrust laws to penalize our best corporations.

Historically, this vicious "Tall Poppy Syndrome" was noted by Aristotle and in Livy's History of Rome: "In Livy's account, the tyrannical Roman King, Tarquin the Proud, received a messenger from his son Sextus Tarquinius asking what he should do next in Gabii, since he had become all-powerful there. Rather than answering the messenger verbally, Tarquin went into his garden, took a stick, and symbolically swept it across his garden, thus cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies that were growing there. The messenger, tired of waiting for an answer, returned to Gabii and told Sextus what he had seen. Sextus realised that his father wished him to put to death all of the most eminent people of Gabii, which he then did." (Wikipedia)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/us/09beer.html?scp=1&sq=small%20brewer&st=cse

America Is Rwanda

Not in the severity or brutality of violence, but certainly in its use of arbitrary and capricious "law" to control and punish innocent citizens.

The Rwandan government has jailed a lawyer for the "crime" of "promoting genocidal ideology," i.e., for publishing opinions that "threaten the country's security." (The American law professor is in Rwanda to support an opposition candidate. And this is an obvious ploy by the government to terrorize such opposition and to metastasize its rule.) In this case, a government is using non-objective law to create and punish "political" criminals.

In the U.S., we have cases such as the one noted below: "The Government Against Doctors (and Patients)." In that case, America's statists use the undefinable and whim-driven antitrust laws to turn innocent and productive doctors into "economic" criminals.

In both cases, innocent individuals are stuck in a perpetual state of uncertainty -- with the only absolute being a chronic fear of bureaucratic revenge. The goal in both cases is identical: the preemptive use of the government's police power to silence and punish those who oppose the government's arbitrary decrees.

"[O]nly a non-objective law can give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement, his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims." (Ayn Rand, "Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason")

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/africa/06rwanda.html?scp=1&sq=rwanda%20charges&st=cse

Liberte, egalite, fraternite (Not)

The emotionalist/altruist philosophy of Europe and Africa are systematically destroying free speech. Trampling the "rights of man" and the Renaissance dedication to reason is a worship of the feelings of those who feel insulted by speech. The latest in France is a minister who was fined for making "anti-Arab" comments. And in Zambia, an editor was sentenced to four months of hard labor for publishing an article that criticized the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world/europe/05briefs-France.html?scp=1&sq=minister%20guilty%20of%20making&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world/africa/05briefs-Zambia.html?scp=1&sq=zambia%20editor&st=cse

The Government Against Doctors (and Patients)

The essays in my book The Abolition of Antitrust amply explain why antitrust is bad economics, arbitrary and capricious, conflates economic and political power, and is unjust. And now those laws are being used as a club against productive, innocent doctors.

In order to coerce doctors into Obama's socialized medicine, and to justify the plan's cost "savings," the antitrust division of the DOJ, along with the Idaho attorney general, have forced Idaho orthopedists to accept government price controls.

In a wicked perversion of logic and of economics, the government argues that “government prices are market prices,” and that by refusing to accept government price controls, the doctors are engaged in illegal "price fixing."

Read the entire article. It should dispel any notion that the Obama administration is not bent on enslaving doctors.

(HT Peter LePort, MD)

http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/Mises-Economics-Blog/2010/0531/Justice-Department-declares-war-on-doctors