Reclaim Your Brain

I am not especially an Obama fan myself, but I like Hitchens and believe that he has thought through his decision to support him. At least he is not one of the blindly devoted “Obamatrons” that are so frightening and plentiful these days. This article is Worth Reading

I dare say that you at least suspect that the hope-and-optimism surplus generated by your election is in some part and to some extent your own fault. But it is also in the nature of democratic politics to generate a surplus of expectations, as it is somehow part of the essence of America to produce talk about “dreams.” But in dreams, as we also have good cause to know, begin responsibilities. And nightmares are dreams, too.

…….

On the assumption that you will be held to what you have already repeatedly stated, and on the further assumption that you fully intended to be taken seriously, there will be four very urgent claims on your time. These will be Iran, Iraq, Pakistan/Afghanistan, and Russia (if we are fortunate enough to hold it to just those four). And there will be two temptations. The first is that of relying on your charm and multicultural appeal, with its somewhat risk-averse rhetoric and its tendency to emulsify basic disagreements in favor of the invocation of “common ground,” while the second is that of staging a Kennedy-esque “rite of passage” moment, in which you seek to show how tough you are, or can be. Both of these have their—not quite equal and not quite opposite, but nonetheless similar—dangers.

Anyone who follwed my previous blog(s) knows that I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand and have read all her books as well as studied at the OAC and devoured basically all the Objectivist information that I can.

Well, I am currently interested and nearly as fervently following the works of Thomas Sowell. He is quite prolific and I have only just began actively reading and studying his work. Through Thomas Sowell I have been turned on to Walter Williams, Shelby Steele, and various other authors who speak directly to what I believe to be the truth and again a new world of study has opened up before me.

Anyone who has studied Ayn Rand and enjoyed it knows the lightening strike moment of identification of the truth. That feeling that finally the things you could not make sense out of had been made sense of for you, in just the way you would have done it if you had the capacity to express it. It is much the same in reading the works of these gentlemen.

Of course Thomas Sowell and the other authors I mentioned are not philosophers in the sense Ayn Rand was, nor do they write fiction. Instead they offer objective and rational commentary on issues such as race relations and economics, two issues which are of special interest to me and I believe probably many other individuals during this political atmosphere.

My recommendation if you are not familar with his work is to start at Real Clear Politics. They have an archive of all his short articles. Then check out Amazon for his books. I’m currently reading “The Quest for Cosmic Justice”.

Here’s an excerpt from one of his recent articles, in case you are too lazy to click over there without a teaser:

The big political crusade today is for “affordable” medical care through the government. No one believes that government is just going to be more efficient, and thereby have lower costs that will be reflected in lower prices for medications and medical treatment.

It might seem as if adding the costs of government bureaucracies to the costs of medications and medical treatment would make it impossible for the total costs to go down. But again, the impossible is no problem in politics.

Many countries around the world already have government-run medical care. People who get sick in these countries usually wait much longer to get treatment, including months on waiting lists for surgery, often paying in pain or debilitation, rather than money.

High-tech medical devices like MRIs are also far less common in these countries than in the United States. With medical care as with anything else, you can always get poorer quality at a lower price, though that is no bargain, especially when you are sick.

What you may have in mind are lower prices with no reduction in quality. While that may be impossible, don’t expect that fact to stop politicians from offering it, even if they can’t deliver.

Now, go read the rest.

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