Neil deGrasse Tyson, as tendentious and as partisan a scientist as I’ve ever heard — and that’s saying a lot — recently stunned the world with the following tweet:
If you’re not sure why this tweet discloses a colossal lack of self-awareness, please read the following:
Neil Tyson: Not Off the Hook Yet
Have you heard of Isabel Paterson?
She was born January 22, 1886, Manitoulin Island, Canada, and she is unquestionably the most underrated of all American political philosophers.
An autodidact and an extraordinarily formidable intellect, Isabel Paterson wrote many essays and books, but her best and most famous work is The God of the Machine, in which she wrote, among other things:
Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end…. Seen in this light, government is so horrific – and its actual operations in the past have been so horrible at times – that there is some excuse for a failure to realize its necessity (Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943).
From Brittney Little’s excellent article:
Isabel Paterson is undoubtedly not as widely known as she deserves to be. Of course, we all know Ayn Rand but did you know that Rand admitted she owed an intellectual debt to Paterson? Well, you see, someone had to teach Rand about the wonders of the free market, and that teacher was Isabel Paterson. Paterson led a young group of writers in the late 1930s, and she would stay up all night long answering all of Rand’s and Rose Wilder Lane’s questions.
Paterson, Rand, and Lane, are considered to be the three founding mothers of libertarianism in America. So besides tutor those two ladies all night, what exactly did Paterson do? Paterson is noted for being a journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and a literary critic. According to her biographer, Stephen Cox, Paterson is the “earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today.” She wrote about free trade and opposed the major economic program of her time, known as the New Deal. Paterson was in favor of less government involvement in both economic and social issues.
Something even more amazing about Paterson is how she came to be the woman she was. Her only formal education consisted of two years in a log schoolhouse on Manitoulin Island in Canada. She moved to the United States when she was young and became a US citizen in Michigan in the year 1928. Even though she was only schooled for two years, she took her education into her own hands. She spent many nights reading classical poetry and literature, which seemingly treated her well. Many credit the lack of government schooling for Paterson’s courageous and unregulated thinking.
We can also look to her past to help understand her economic beliefs. She was raised in a very poor family and had to work at a very young age to help chip in. Her family often lived in tents, and Paterson spent most of her days as a waitress, stenographer, and even a bookkeeper.
(Link)
Around 630 AD, the Arab prophet Muhammad united the Arab people through the founding of a religion called Islam, which means “submission to God.” Muhammad forged these people into a fighting people the destiny of whom was to bring the rule of Islam to humankind.
Within a hundred years, Muhammad and his disciples had conquered all of the Middle East, much of Persia, India, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Asian Interior, Spain, and good part of France. As a matter of fact, had it not been for Charles Martel, who in 732 defeated the Arabs at Poiters, Europe may well have been an Islamic continent today — a piece of history that many in the Arab political culture have never quite been able to forget.
Which is one of the reasons that, 950 years later, much Islamic history is concentrated on the struggle — jihad means struggle — to prevent the reconquest of Muslim lands. Their longing is for a great leader, the caliph, to vindicate this great historic wrong, which prevented Islamic dominance of Europe, and to at last defeat European power. This longing, propelled by religious faith, was strong enough to bring, in 1683, the armies of the Ottoman sultan to the gates of Vienna, where the Muslim push was broken.
The subsequent decline of the Ottoman Empire was protracted and painful.
In 1798, Napoleon seized Egypt with ease.
By 1830, the British had seized control of many Arabian ports, and Algeria had become a permanent French base.
By 1870, much of Persia and virtually all of North Africa had become the possession of British, French, or Italian.
World War I saw the complete dismantling of the remaining Islamic realm. Turkey at that time became Westernized and secular, and much of the Arab world was put under European control — including Iran, which, in the 1930s, was ruled by a pro-Western family.
After fourteen centuries, Islamic dominance and political independence came to a close, thereby thrusting the Muslim world into a state of unmitigated confusion and humiliation. Quoting one Muhammad Nuwayhi, who 100 years ago was a leading Egyptian intellectual:
Anyone who reflects on the present state of the Islamic nation finds it in great calamity … The nation is tormented and resentful, plagued by inner contradictions and fragmentation, its reality is contrary to its ideals and its comportment goes against its creed. What a horrible state for a nation to live in (Muhammad Nuwayhi, Toward a Revolution of Religious Thought, 1907).
The European powers, meanwhile, proceeded to rather arbitrarily divide up the Ottoman Empire, and not long after the establishment of European protectorates (so-called), two strains of thought emerged among the Muslim Arabs to challenge “the horrible state.”
The first: Pan-Arab nationalism between Egypt’s Nasser and the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq. This party was very consciously modeled after Pan-German nationalism, and it accordingly supported Adolph Hitler’s “achievements” and even collaborated with Hitler against Britain during World War II. The Pan-Arab nationalist party explicitly sought a modern unified Arab-fascist nation.
The second strain to emerge was the Muslim Brotherhood which rapidly joined forces with other Islamic fundamentalist organizations, and which initially rejected Pan-Arab nationalism for being too pro-European and heretical. This Muslim Brotherhood organization longed mightily for a “pure Islamic regime.”
These two emergent groups differed, and yet they had a couple of significant things in common: undying hatred of the West, which had “dismembered” Islamic domination, and undying hatred of the “treacherous” Arab monarchies (including of course the Shah’s rule in Iran). Thus, after World War II, these two movements began working in precarious collaboration to dispose of all Arab monarchies and establish Muslim theocratic rule.
And, as everyone now knows, they were largely successful. The monarchies of Libya, for example, as well as Egypt and Iraq, were supplanted by militant Pan-Arabist regimes. Their goal was to dismantle all remaining Arab monarchies and add them to their own militant realm, and also to help the Soviet Union confront the West. They also very strongly believed that the “liberation of Jerusalem” was the key to stirring up ultra-nationalist sentiment against the West, and they made no secret of their willingness to use terrorism to achieve their ends.
Quoting Egyptian President (and Pan-Arab nationalist) Nassar, on the eve of the Six-Day War:
We are confronting Israel and the West as well — the West, which created Israel and despised us Arabs, and which ignored us before and after 1948 … If the Western powers disavow our rights and ridicule us, we Arabs must teach them to respect us and take us seriously.
Yasir Arafat’s PLO was born out of this Pan-Arab movement.
The PLO is essentially a nonsensical melange of Nasserist Pan-Arab fascism and neo-Marxist jargon, the stated purpose of which is to destroy “Western intrusion.”
The crucial point here: it has by now become cliche that if Israel would never have come into existence, the Muslim relationship with the West would be peaceful. And yet the absolutely irrefutable fact of the matter is that the Islamic world has been bellicose and antagonistic toward the West for millennium, since its inception, by definition: all faith must ultimately resort to force in order to persuade; because faith is the opposite of reason.
Vermont, which is an extraordinarily liberal state with at least one openly socialist senator, was at one time regarded as America’s frontrunner for single-payer healthcare. But that frontrunner status just changed.
Single-payer, a disastrous idea on dozens of different levels, means that everyone pays for everyone else’s healthcare, and Vermont has just discovered one of the reasons that single-payer is, in fact, disastrous: taxes must rise.
Quoting the liberal mag Politico:
Advocates of a “Medicare for all” approach were largely sidelined during the national Obamacare debate. The health law left a private insurance system in place and didn’t even include a weaker “public option” government plan to run alongside more traditional commercial ones.
So single-payer advocates looked instead to make a breakthrough in the states. Bills have been introduced from Hawaii to New York; former Medicare chief Don Berwick made it a key plank of his unsuccessful primary race for Massachusetts governor.
Vermont under Shumlin became the most visible trailblazer. Until Wednesday, when the governor admitted what critics had said all along: He couldn’t pay for it.
“It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.”
Vermont’s outcome is a “small speed bump,” said New York Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who’s been pushing single-payer bills for more than 20 years. But opponents says it’s the end of the road.
“If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state will,” said Jack Mozloom, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business.
“There will never be a good time for a massive tax increase on employers and consumers in Vermont, so they should abandon that silly idea now and get serious,” Mozloom added.
Might hurt the economy, Governor? I think you can bet your health on it.
Oh, yeah.
I wonder, then: Does that include Obamacare?
Does it include getting to “keep your insurance if you like your insurance”?
Does it include the IRS targeting (so-called) conservative groups?
Does it include Benghazi?
Does it include operation Fast-and-Furious and the Executive Privilege Obama granted the Department of Justice and the corrupt bureaucrat called Eric Holder?
To name but a few.
Eric Garner, the 43-year-old asthmatic black-marketeer who, for selling untaxed cigarettes, was choked to death by police, and whose death was ruled a homicide, exposes the rotten core not only of law enforcement run amok but also, just as significantly, of government laws, regulations, and taxation, and its unintended consequences.
Eric Garner was selling a (for now) perfectly legal product — cigarettes — and he was selling them as singles (or “loosies,” as they’re called). Why was he selling them?
“Because New York officials inflict on their long-suffering subjects the highest cigarette tax in the country at at $4.35 per pack, plus another $1.50 levied in the city itself. It’s not a popular tax, with smuggled smokes making up 60.9 percent of the market. So the powers that be unleash the cops to enhance revenue by tracking down shipments of smuggled cigarettes and, on occasion, putting the occasional small-time street vendor in an illegal chokehold.
Which is to say, Eric Garner was murdered for the purposes of revenue enhancement.”
(Link)
It will be fascinating to see how the Religion of Leftism, which worships at the shrine of taxation and bureaucracy, reacts to monstrous injustice.
Graphic video:
If you haven’t yet heard about the small but significant scandal concerning Neil Degrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the TV series “Cosmos,” who frequently speaks to audiences about cosmology, climate-change (as they’re calling it this week), and the shocking state of science literacy in America, you will be excused.
The scandal has not been covered by any mainstream media outlets — or, at any rate, not until recently, when the New York Times ran a weak-sauce Op-Ed about it, in which the writers, professors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, managed to miss the point entirely.
Chabris and Simons seem to think the thrust of the scandal — which they do not regard as a scandal but rather a minor memory slip — was Tyson’s repeated fabrications of a George W. Bush quote.
The New York Times also, incidentally, forgot to credit the person and the publication who broke this scandal: one Sean Davis, whom I’ve referenced here once before.
In fact, however, the fabricated George W. Bush quote was the very least of Tyson’s mendacity.
Neil Degrasse Tyson was also caught fabricating a headline that was never actually a headline.
Neil Degrasse Tyson was also caught fabricating a quote by a member of congress who, in Tyson’s phony words, had changed his mind on a certain issue.
Neil Degrasse Tyson has been repeatedly caught changing his bizarre jury-duty story.
And then, of course, there’s all the pseudo-apologies, which make no sense to me and which indict him every bit as much as his prevarications.
So. If you don’t like to see science being corrupted by partisan politics and the Religion of the Left, do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with every bit of this scandal.
Hero of the month: Tyree Landrum, a working stiff who quite nicely captures the utter stupidity of Ferguson rioters in San Diego:
Thank you, sir. I bless you, wish you life.
It was another exceptional contest. Read the best entries and find out who won.
Journal Pulp is offering a $100.00 cash prize for the following:
Best first sentence for a novel about a clever but silent twelve-year-old girl who’s an only child and who one dark night traveling with her mother and father falls asleep in the backseat of the car — and wakes to find that same car on the side of the road, not wrecked but parked and with all the doors open, her mother and father both dead on the pavement, their throats cut wide open, blood everywhere, a faint trail of footprints in the dust.
Rules and guidelines:
No outrageous run-ons. You can submit anonymously or under your real name, it doesn’t matter.
No minimum length requirement.
Submit as many separate entries as you’d like.
Leave your sentence in the comments section here.
The winner will be selected by the Journal Pulp.
The contest will be open for two weeks from today: October 17th, 2014, through October 31st, 2014, at midnight on Halloween.
If your sentence doesn’t appear in the comments after you’ve submitted, it’s almost certainly because of my (overly) aggressive SPAM filter. Please note that I check the SPAM folder carefully and regularly, and that your sentence, if it’s not SPAM, will be approved.
A reader writes:
In your last video (which I enjoyed somewhat) you said the Old-Fashioned isn’t the oldest cocktail on written record, and you are correct. The Sazerac is. When will you do a vid featuring that one, bud?
Here you go, bud — though, for the record, it’s not actually known if the Sazerac is the “oldest cocktail” on written record. Everyone says it is, but history is mute on the matter.
Thanks for watching.
Is there any cocktail that gets people as lathered up about technique as the Old-Fashioned? If there is, I don’t know about it.
Come and have a drink with the unwashed.
I made the following video in honor of District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberhg, who’s suing Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Perry was recently indicted on two charges both of which are related to District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg and her allegation that Perry attempted to force her resignation after she was arrested for drunk driving.
The grand jury charged Rick Perry with “abuse of official capacity, a first-degree felony, and with coercion of a public official.”
The maximum punishment on that first charge is five to ninety-nine years in prison. The maximum punishment on the second charge is two to ten years.
The indictments arose out of Perry’s threat to withhold $7.2 million in funding from Rosemary Lehmberg’s office unless she resigned.
Here’s the charming and litigious Ms. Lehmberg on the night of her arrest:
The Perfect Gin Martini:
This is Part 8 in our Putting-the-Cock-Back-in-Cocktail series:
Don’t forget to watch the Carpet-Licker and the Cosmo.
Barack Obama, who has been criticized by racists for his tendency to vacation during times of crisis, and who during the course of his presidency has hit the golf links 186 times (so far), once, while plugging his book, said the following:
“Uh, umm, you give me this office and in turn my, fears, doubts, insecurities, foibles, need for sleep, family life, vacations, leisure is gone. I am giving my self to you.”
This is touching: from a 2008 video that has recently resurfaced, via Weasel Zippers:
