Day: August 16, 2010
Rand Fan Creates Biggest Message, Carbon Footprint
In a peculiarly apt expression of novelist Ayn Rand‘s “every man for himself and damn the weaklings who should stop sucking up our wealth and just crawl away and die” philosophy, Nick Newcomen drove 12,328 miles across the United States using a GPS logger to spell out the message “Read Ayn Rand” in what he calls “the world’s biggest writing.”
On his website Newcomen gives 10 reasons why we should read Rand, but I’ll spare you nine of them and give you the one that makes me wonder if Newcomen didn’t get a little too much carbon monoxide on his writing ride through 30 states: “Atlas Shrugged is the ‘second most influential book for Americans today’ after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club.”
Wanting to determine just how selfishly Randian Newcomen was, I did a little carbon footprint calculation. Now, I don’t know what kind of vehicle he drove, but I assumed it would be some Ayn Rand would approve of, so I selected a 2005 four-wheel-drive automatic Rover. Based on that, Newcomen’s big writing assignment added just under 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the environment.
At least he spread it out over the entire country, I guess.
So, I give Nick Newcomen a D- for penmanship and an F for environmental wastefulness and selfishness worthy of John Galt.
Crist Continues to Demonstrate His Special Brand of Leadership
I have to hand it to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (NPA), whose wardrobe choice for a recent roundtable with the president in Panama City helped him stand out. Charlie and the First Lady went with aqua, while the business owners, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and others stuck to neutrals. If you’re going to go, go bold, Crist seems to say, while sitting as far from Obama as possible without leaving the room. No doubt Crist wants to avoid more photos of himself seeming friendly with the president. The endless repetition by Republicans of a shot of Crist doing the one-armed man hug with Obama last year could have been one reason for his departure from their party as a candidate for U.S. Senate. Well that, and the fact that they are soulless jerks.
Verbatim: Lest There Be Any Doubt, Pat Buchanan Really, Really Hates Gays
When did the Creator indicate that among these rights was for homosexuals to have their unions recognized as marriages? The author of that declaration, Thomas Jefferson, equated homosexual acts with rape and wrote that male homosexuals (they used the term sodomites in that time) should be castrated and lesbians should have a hole cut into their noses.
Undeniably, homosexuals have the same constitutional rights of free speech, peaceable assembly and trial by jury. But what the judge has done is declare the life choices and lifestyles of gays and lesbians to be equal to the life choice of married men and women. This is nothing but Walker’s personal opinion.
But he is declaring it to be the only rational conclusion that can be reached. And having reached it, he has seized upon a phrase in the 14th amendment, ‘equal protection,’ distorted its meaning and dictated that this means his view and his values henceforth are the law in California, the voters be damned.
And what the judge dismisses and rejects as irrational is a conviction rooted in the history of the human race, biblical truth, natural law and basic common sense. For, in recent decades, male homosexuality has been linked to enteric diseases, hepatitis, AIDS and early death. Historically, from the late Roman Empire to Weimar, flagrant homosexuality has been associated with sick societies, decadent cultures and dying civilizations. Today would appear to be no exception.
