May 21, 2016 | Culture
Watch human population grow from 1 CE to present and see projected growth in under six minutes. One dot = 1 million people.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khFjdmp9sZk
Apr 12, 2016 | Culture
A friend wrote us:I have heard many young people describe why they support Bernie Sanders, and I empathize.
They believe they are being screwed by our government, and their futures are being robbed, and that is true.
They believe that cronyism and Washington picking winners and losers, is unjust, and that is true.
They believe that an outsider, an anti-establishment candidate, someone not beholden to special interests or to corrupt political parties, is our only hope, and that is true.
They believe what’s fundamentally missing is values and integrity, that politicians are immoral thieves and power-lusters, and that is true.
Regrettably, these youth are so uneducated and ignorant that they believe a socialist—the very essence of future-robbing, cronyism, corruption, immorality and power-lusting—is their salvation. It’s really the perfection of Progressive education we are witnessing: for 50 years our children have been indoctrinated instead of educated.
This slow journey by the Left is how all “cultural revolutions”—and destruction and war, and death camps, arise from formerly civilized societies. But that’s superficial. Leftist propaganda is ineffective, so blatantly vacuous and stupid, that the only way it works is that our culture has already instilled the moral code of altruism into our youth. Conservatives and their religious values, included.
Everyone (almost) is pro-altruism and no one (almost) dares to question it. Declare you are against selfishness and for the needy, and you get a blank check to rewrite history and facts, defy logic, blame scapegoats, and commit the worst atrocities in the name of “the oppressed.”
Mar 22, 2016 | Culture
From Victims of Communism in Cuba: 73,000 (CNSNews):
As President Barack Obama currently visits Cuba, it merits noting that the Communist regime south of Florida has killed an estimated 73,000 people since the dictator Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, according to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by an act of Congress in 1993.The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which runs the Museum of Communism, is a non-profit group created “to educate this generation and future generations about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism,” reads its website. It also is building a memorial “to commemorate the more than 100 million victims of communism” worldwide.
Feb 22, 2016 | Culture
The head of NASA convinces the President that space exploration should be done by private industry, and the United States government declares, “The first person to land on Mars, live there a year, and return alive owns the whole Red Planet.” Capitalists compete to win the greatest race in history. Environmentalists plot to make them all fail.That is the premise of Ron Pisaturo’s novella, The Merchant of Mars, now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle ebook. That premise draws on a political idea by Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger.Author Pisaturo says about his story:The story’s heroes are greedy capitalists who want to exploit Mars, and the villains are environmentalist progressives who want to ‘save’ the planet—Mars, that is. The story illustrates that there is virtually no limit to what capitalists can achieve when the government recognizes and protects property rights.
The pro-capitalist perspective of the story flows naturally from deeper elements. The good guys drive the action. They don’t merely react to the diabolical plans of an evil mastermind. It is the heroes who are the masterminds, the ones with gigantic plans, the ones who build great and powerful machines; and it is the villains who react by trying to destroy those machines.The heroes are not grim loners who reluctantly become heroes only after their loved ones have been killed by the arch-villain and his all-powerful organization. The heroes don’t wait for bad things to happen. They make good things happen. The heroes are already-successful and happy individuals who risk everything—their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor—to achieve something beyond the dreams of others. Their conflicts are great because they have a lot to lose and a lot to gain, and they and their loved ones face all-or-nothing, life-and-death choices throughout their journey.It’s not easy to build a business. Many people in today’s society think that only society as a whole can do it. This story shows individuals doing it. They have to raise money, make payroll, meet deadlines, mortgage their personal property, lay off employees, fight regulations and government-subsidized competitors, turn down government subsidies that come with strings, drive competitors they admire and love out of business, or lose everything.The novella can be read in one sitting.UPDATE: You can read an excerpt at The New Romanticist.
