Even If You're An Objectivist, I Can Keep This Stuff Straight For You

"...they wish to plunge the country into economic chaos and civil anarchy chaos."

There, Ed: that's fixed, now. It was wrong, but now it's not.

I'm always happy to help.

The Whip Of The Week

"Nearly Every Human Who Has Ever Lived Denied Fundamental Human Right"

Subject header -- Warren Meyer.

The Rat-Ship Comes

"Obama is not worried that the American economy is slow to recover; he's worried that it will recover. And he is doing everything conceivable to see that it doesn't. Adding an unaffordable entitlement to already bankrupt entitlements; making energy unaffordable; raising taxes; harassing business; growing government while the economy shrinks; shrinking the economy while government grows; and most important of all, draining the wealth out of the middle class. Squeezing the last savings and remaining asset value out of them. He has the public employee unions living large in lean times, and their mission, from his point of view, is to scavenge whatever meat remains from the bones. It's not for nothing that he has his buddy Andy Stern over to the White House so often.

Even the face value meaning of his actions is missed because it cannot be grasped through the normative terms of American politics. But all of it is right there in plain sight. He is using the Presidency and the Congress to wage war against America. That is the meaning of everything that is right there in front of everyone. Of all the people I know only my friend the rogue philosopher Billy Beck understands the full meaning of government force used at this magnitude. And even he, with decades of study of Soviet totalitarianism at close hand for reference, is shocked at the pace of this war on America. "

That's Martin McPhillips.

"Shocked," he says. I, myself, am not quite sure that that's the right word, but I must say at the very least that it's an amazing thing to have a feel for history and watch the destruction of American culture right before your eyes in the very years of your own life. My most general sensation is something like: "It's finally come to this." Yeats' "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem?" type of thing. One reason why I balk at the word "shocked" is precisely that I know how bad this can get. There's a lot of dull horror left before "shocked", I think.

We are headed into the time of the petitotalists: the horde of mediocrities risen on power voted to them by imbeciles. Each holding a place in a vast machine -- from village to nation -- they all together become the implacable sieve through which all rights will be strained for the approval of the state. The thing is, of course, that the state is nothing but people who hold arbitrary power over others. There are now more of them than ever before in American history, they have never been so impudently dismissive of the very idea of "freedom", and there only promises to be more of them into the future.

I'm still not sure about some aspects of Obama. It is unquestionably true that he is wreaking bloody havoc on an unprecedented scale. What I cannot figure out is whether it really requires evil in order to commit these crimes upon the cradle of liberty. Would it not be possible for ignorance perverted by frightful deviance to sink to this?

If I am "shocked", then it is over this matter of observing the prospect of such hatred of humanity coming to pass, here. It is one thing to study un-relieved malice prevailing in places where ancient despotisms roared straight into the twentieth century without that interval of grace called the Enlightenment. It is quite another to live reversion to despotism right here where Enlightenment principles first came to earth in political practice.

This is unprecedented, and that's the thing that always holds my eye.

Obama? {spit} He's just a vessel upon which the plague arrives.

Brickflight

John Venlet e-mails about Air France 447 --

> After reading that Der Spiegel piece, once
> again, I have a question you can probably
> answer, when you have a moment or two,
> no rush. I may take a roundabout way to the
> question, so bear with me.
>
> In reading the piece, and after looking at
> some photos of the A330 cockpit, it almost
> seems as if the pilots of the plane were
> simply "riding" the plane down to its
> destruction, rather than actually manually
> attempting to "fly" the plane during its time
> of dire, alarm sounding need. I state this
> because as you read through Der Spiegel's
> article you read about the pilots trying to
> reboot the computerized flight control
> systems at least twice, which you touched
> on, but you really don't read anything
> about the pilots attempting to take manual
> flight control of the A330, unless I am not
> comprehending well what I've read.
> Additionally, the Der Spiegel piece states
> that the "pilots would have been forced to
> watch helplessly as their plane lost its lift,"
> which intimates to me that the pilots were
> simply riding the plane much as a paying
> passenger.
>
> In viewing cockpit photos of the A330 I see
> that the planes have a stick, and rudder
> pedals, but the stick is to the side of either
> seat and not what, in the past, would be
> considered a standard stick, centered
> between a pilot's legs. (I know that sentence
> seems a non sequitor, but I mention this
> because I visualize pilots struggling with
> flight control surfaces to control a plane's
> flight, i.e. in a dive or recovering from a
> dive for example).
>
> Like I said, I'm taking a roundabout way to
> the question, and I've intimated the question
> already I see. Specifically, the question is,
> were these poor bastards actually just riding
> the plane to its destruction, kind of like
> riding a Saturn V rocket so to speak, rather
> than actually utilizing any flying skills?

That's exactly what I see, mate: the former. That airplane was falling at 9000 feet a minute, flat as a pancake, while they sat there trying to re-gain flight controls.

> As a follow-up to that question, based on your
> knowledge, if the pilots would have had
> complete manual control of all flight systems
> do you think the result could have been
> averted?

No question about it, to me.

Here's the thing: some airplanes will stall and not "break" -- that is: they will not depart to unusual attitudes; the nose won't pitch up violently, they won't fall off on one wing and roll over, or otherwise tumble, etc. They'll just stop flying and fall flat, like a brick. Even a brick will eventually tumble when falling, but some airplanes' inherent design characteristics will allow them to simply fall flat, without going to unusual attitudes.

I think this was a big problem for that crew. They didn't have basic flight instruments anymore, like altitude, attitude indications, rate of descent, etc. The bigger problem, of course, was that they also did not have flight controls. (This is a big difference. Instruments tell you how you're doing. Controls are how you actually do it.)

Now, if you have controls, then you can feel the airplane. I've never flown a fly-by-wire system, and I'm not entirely sure how much useful tactile feedback makes it to the pilot's hand in a rig like that. However, at the very least, one can input a control and observe very basic changes in situation -- like observing the horizon, for instance. In zero visibility, the very least one could count on would be a difference in the feel of one's ass in the seat: throw a rudder or aileron and see if the g piles up for you, and in which directions.

These guys couldn't deflect any of their flight controls because the computer had gone tits-up, so they were fucked. They had no way to pitch the nose down and try to get air going over the wing again -- which is what you do when the airplane has stopped flying. This is basic private pilot stuff: when you're stalled, you point the nose down, so the wing can act like a wing again instead of a brick.

If I understand this right, they couldn't do that.

The computer just would not let them fly that airplane.

Barbarian Caprice

"The law is laid down so that the crime need not be proven. The process is expedited without any impertinence of defense."

(shorter People v. Bransford, 8 Cal.4th 894 (1994). See DUI Blog)

Does everyone understand why I keep calling it "Endarkenment"? It's the counter-Enlightenment, kids. Facts do not matter. Try to understand: it means that there is no reference to reality, and the power of the state gets to make it all up as they go along. If that ruins your life, then you get to suck it up and be a good little citizen in the name of whatever depravity it is that drives this sort of thing.

Try to imagine what the culture will come to as this epistemic dynamic is extended into the future. You might as well live under a fifth century barbarian king.

Is that what you want?

In Which I Briefly Explain Something To Some Simpletons Around Here

So, every now & then, a hue & cry arises in some feeblist quarters, which in general goes something like: "How can he be so unaccountably beastly?"

Ladies and gentlemen, let me only point out that the beginning of civility is abstinence from violence, and that sentimental moaning in favor of forcing me -- through the unilateral threat of violence in the law -- to pay for something that I do not value simply does not qualify.

Get those guns out of my face and I can be the sweetest person you ever met. I will always meet you on your premises.

Make up your fucking minds, and do it right now.

That is all.

Dear George

You know who you are, and so do I.

You are a stupid bastard. Now; hold still and consider that these are facts. Your name is not your own, and you cannot think. Oh? You believe that I'm wrong about that? Listen, asshole: how are your investments doing? Nevermind, because I know you're in the shitter, which is exactly where you belong, you despicable piece of shit.

And I know how you tried all your worthless adult life to kill someone else's soul. Well, guess what: you didn't get away with it. That person just keeps on gleaming and there is nothing that you can do about it now.

You lose, bitch, and I hope it chokes you to death, puking, but not before you're flat broke and your entire family knows what you are.

Make the most of that dildo, son. You're gonna need it to keep you warm from here on out.

Have an ice day. I'll see ya in the funny papers.

Obama Bullshit Bingo

Donald Luskin.

The Whip Of The Week

"List them all. Let God sort them out."

(comments@Reason)

Hey Krauthammer: Just Sit Down And Shut Up

On what to do about the Postal Service.

{sigh} You know... every time I see a goddamned conservative moaning about "tradition", I reach for my pistol. And every time you see that word, you should read, "habit". And I have another clue for that fool: I live in a "tiny hamlet" and FedEx has never failed me. The US Postal Disservice has no special or magic ability to go where others cannot, so get the fuck off it.

Finally: I don't care one whit in the world what "Article 1 Section 8 of our constitution" says. Nobody ever asked me about it, and I am not interested to pay for delivery of your perfumed letters, you asshole. So; piss off.

Have an ice day.

Bullets

• Glenn Reynolds links Bill Quick on the matter of ends and means. It really is time for everyone to seriously consider what they're after, and what they might get, instead.
  
  
• Keep William Grigg in your daily rounds. Just do it.
  
  
• Try to imagine: as you sit there now in front of your computer, you have four minutes to restart it and get a crucial set of applications up and going. If you fail, you die. It looks like that's what the pilots of Air France flight 447, lost in the Atlantic Ocean three hours out of Rio, were faced with. They died, along with all their passengers, some of whom were sliced in half by their seatbelts in the 36g impact. Spiegel Online.
  
  I don't like Airbus. (link: Rich Nikoley in e-mail)
  
  
• John Venlet sees right through AARP and declines herding around the cannibal-pot.

The Whole Damned Country Is A "Place Like This"

"Well, about 33% disagreed with the founders at the time of the Revolution, so we haven’t fallen all that far."

(Glenn Reynolds)

Oh, yeah? Well, go read that and then see this. The tag:

"If people don’t even have the guts to raise their hands in a room full of as like-minded a bunch as you’re going to find, how on earth do they expect their politicians to do anything?

I suspect California’s not the only place like this."

At this point of this disaster, there will be no voting our way out of it. The prevailing epistemology doesn't permit it: there simply are not enough people out there who know how to think. The dominant ethics of the culture won't have it: everybody wants to live at the expense of everyone else, and freedom is not a value in this country, anymore.

I say that you can count California as quite fairly representative of the United States at large, and you can take it from there.

Fuck These Assholes

No shit at all.

That'll be the day: when I respect any resolution of civility from a goddamned felon-in-waiting.

Never in this life.

Sparks File

What's happening to the police chiefs?

(found in comments, here)

To Hell With "Amanda" And Her Law

Today is the day "Amanda's Law" is supposed to be in effect all over The Vampire State, and I say that she can go fuck herself.

Oh, excuse me: she can't because she's dead. Well, I will take a moment to point out that while I'm certain that she was a perfectly sweet sixteen year-old girl, there is nothing in the world quite so guaranteed to make me want to piss on her grave than expropriation of her name in the cause of forcing people to install carbon monoxide detectors in their own homes.

Oh? You think I have an attitude on? Well, that's just tough. Get those guns out of my face and nobody will have to put up with it.

Hey, Governor Paterson: go jam it up your ass, with my compliments.