Bill Whittle Recaps the First Three Years Under Obama

For his last Afterburner of 2011 Bill Whittle recaps Obama's first three years.

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That's quite a rcord of non-achievement for three years of what I hope will be a single four-year term.

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A Voters Guide to Rebublicans

Bill Whittle's latest Firewall video tells you all you need to know about those evil, greedy, fascist, racist Republicans.



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Words Are a Shorthand for the Things They Describe, Not the Things Themselves

Newly minted Samizdatista Rob Fisher has a great post over at Samizdata (of course) on why we should always try to think past the words we use as a kind of shorthand to describe things and be more aware of what they actually mean. For example, "property" or "tax" :

I propose that if people were in the habit of of questioning the deepest meaning of words, that statism would be much less acceptable. For example, such questioning would yield the realisation that 'property' really means what Julie from Chicago described in a recent Samizdata comment: "One's property is untouchable by others because it is the product of a portion of one's life."

Imagine there were no word for tax, or you disciplined yourself not to use it, much as Korzybski recommends listing individuals rather than using group words. You would be unable to say, "I propose an income tax." Instead, you would have to say, "I propose that for every hour you spend working to provide for your family, we are going to demand that you spend a further hour in servitude to some men you have never met, and if you refuse to do this eventually we will send some other men round to your house who will drag you away from your family and lock you in a cell." It would be a lot harder to advocate certain statist ideas.

It should be harder. Read the whole thing.

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David Harsanyi: Obama Proposes to Save The Middle Class by Enslaving It.

Over at Reason Online, David Harsanyi unbundles President Obama's speech at Osawatomie, Texas Kansas earlier this week:

In Teddy Roosevelt's era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, "some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress....But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can."

And he's right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They're called Democrats.

It just gets better from there. Read the whole thing.

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Eric Raymond: Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

The next time you hear some claim about science, say something like carbon dioxide generated by human activity is causing the climate to change, you might want to refer back to this handy list of ways to spot when you are being presented with junk science put together by Eric Raymond:

• Science by press release.
• Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic.
• Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic.
• Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole.
• Over-reliance on computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified.
• If a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been.
• Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots.
• Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection.

These are good points to rmember, especially in the wake of the latest data-dump of emails among the pedlars of the great AGW/climate change scare, dubbed Climategate 2.0.

Detailed version of the list at the link. Read the whole thing.

(via Samizdata)

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"You Can't Have Freedom Without Virtue"

Bill Whittle explains:




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