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

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

Dueling Videos

Both sides took video when the Israelis attacked the "Freedom Flotilla" (read "terrorist incursion"). And now, as the NYT reports, there's a video-fight for public opinion -- with both sides attempting to prove who the aggressor was. (Anyone who believes the terrorist video must still believe that Al Gore deserves the Nobel "Peace" Prize.)

The videos are irrelevant. The Israeli blockade of Gaza is a righteous use of force. (In fact, the blockade is a counter-measure made necessary because Gaza was ceded to a band of barbarians -- which proves, once again, the impracticality of compromising with evil.)

The Israeli blockade is just like the police in a free or semi-free country blockading a street against riotous hooligans. If the rioters attempt to breach the blockade, they deserve to be shot. That the Israelis chose to board the terrorist boats is a tactical decision. Morally, they had the right to send those boats to the bottom of the ocean.

"When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilizedmen, no matter who they are." (Ayn Rand)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02media.html?scp=1&sq=after%20sea%20raid&st=cse

Craven Capitulation

The South African paper the "Mail & Guardian" (M&G) recently published a cartoon by Zapiro that depicts Muhammad on a therapist's couch saying: "Other prophets have followers with a sense of humor!" Predictably, Muslims screamed: "blasphemy."

Rather than defending the principle of free speech, the M&G grabbed its ankles and apologized for "the sense of injury it caused many Muslims." (Can you image a newspaper apologizing for the "sense of injury" caused by a cartoon that satirizes financiers and capitalists?)

Said Nic DawesMail the Guardian editor-in-chief:  "No cartoon is as insulting to Islam as the assumption Muslims will react with violence." Except, of course, for this "assumption" -- Muslim arsonists in Pakistan: http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article462796.ece/Prophet-Mohammad-cartoon-angers-SA-Muslims

And then there are the countless "assumptions" of Islamic violence against free speech, well-documented here:  http://muhammadimages.com/mayhem.php

Oh, and then there's this "assumption": September 11, 2001.

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-05-27-mg-statement-on-prophet-muhammad-cartoon

Reject the “Nick”

The American Academy of Pediatrics has reversed itself, and decided after all that maybe it's not a good idea for doctors to engage in "just a little" female genital mutilation. (aka the "nick.")

Apparently, the Academy's bioethics panel tried to justify doctor-assisted mutilation by noting that it's ..."practiced in some countries." Bioethicists -- one of the worst of whom is Arthur Caplan at UPenn -- are typically egalitarians who destroy the best by elevating the worst. Applied to cultures, egalitarianism becomes multiculturalism -- the deathly notion that no culture (including cultural practices and norms) is any better than other cultures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/health/27brfs-DOCTORSREVER_BRF.html?scp=1&sq=doctors+reverse&st=cse