On this day:
1066: The Battle of Stamford Bridge marks the end of the Viking invasions of England.
1513
Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa reaches what would become known as the Pacific Ocean.
1906
In the presence of the king and before a great crowd, Leonardo Torres Quevedo successfully demonstrates the invention of the Telekino in the port of Bilbao, guiding a boat from the shore, in what is considered the birth of the remote control.
1957
Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, is integrated by the use of United States Army troops.
***
Socialism is "the result of an unrelenting negativity, carping spirit, and lack of appreciation for achievement and greatness." (cowan)
***
Will Rogers, the renowned American humorist, during World War I, was asked what he would do about the U-boat threat. He said that the only solution was to boil away the Atlantic Ocean, and then capture the U-boats sitting on the bottom. When asked how to do that, Rogers answered that he was responding as a policymaker, and that question must be handled by others.
Boiling away the Atlantic was a solution to the U-boat problem. Any issues created by the solution would have been ignored. Whether or not it could be done was treated as someone else’s problem.
Policymaking is easy, even if it ignores reality. Maybe easier.
(This appeared in a discussion about solving the terrorism problem by banning either guns or Muslims.)
***
A pro-America opposition appeared ready to usher in a free market and end the state’s suffocating grip on oil production. Eight months later, the White House’s deal with Maduro’s former vice president risks entrenching the people and policies that tanked the country’s economy in the first place.
It's worse. The government will hold a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, previously the second-largest private oil producer in Venezuela. The federal government will also hold “veto power over the appointment of any member of” the company’s board of directors, the White House announced.
The Trump administration has apparently decided it can solve socialism in Venezuela by…doing socialism in Venezuela.
Will Rogers, the renowned American humorist, during World War I, was asked what he would do about the U-boat threat. He said that the only solution was to boil away the Atlantic Ocean, and then capture the U-boats sitting on the bottom. When asked how to do that, Rogers answered that he was responding as a policymaker, and that question must be handled by others.
Boiling away the Atlantic was a solution to the U-boat problem. Any issues created by the solution would have been ignored. Whether or not it could be done was treated as someone else’s problem.
Policymaking is easy, even if it ignores reality. Maybe easier.
(This appeared in a discussion about solving the terrorism problem by banning either guns or Muslims.)
***
A pro-America opposition appeared ready to usher in a free market and end the state’s suffocating grip on oil production. Eight months later, the White House’s deal with Maduro’s former vice president risks entrenching the people and policies that tanked the country’s economy in the first place.
It's worse. The government will hold a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, previously the second-largest private oil producer in Venezuela. The federal government will also hold “veto power over the appointment of any member of” the company’s board of directors, the White House announced.
The Trump administration has apparently decided it can solve socialism in Venezuela by…doing socialism in Venezuela.
***
The Starbucks at 4765 Liberty Ave. in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood is closing by the end of the week.
The closing of Bloomfield's Pleasure Bar was announced earlier this week.
The Pittsburgh Airport has been named the 2027 Airport of the Year by Air Transport World, making it the first U.S. airport to win the prestigious award twice.
A Pittsburgh children's hospital doctor was stabbed to death and his wife critically injured after a man allegedly entered their home and attacked the couple as they slept early Thursday on Linden Avenue.
***
Socialism as Sects
The astonishing delegation of dignity and freedom to the individual, as written in the American Constitution, is a revolution of thought to a degree undreamed of by modern revolutionaries. The modern revolutionary's contribution to the condition of man is expropriation. He sees a field of uneven human achievement, and he mows it.
Taking what belongs to others has been around for as long as Cain. Giving people freedom and value--aside from religion- has been around for 250 years. Yet somehow, people continue to believe the envy, repression, and violence of socialism and its ilk to be innovative and optimistic. They continue to be willing to kill and die for achievement brought low.
This is from Bastiat:
"If I had to point out the characteristic that differentiates socialism from economic science, I would find it in this. Socialism encompasses a countless host of sects. Each of these has its own utopia and it can be said that they are so far from agreeing with one another that they are in bitter conflict with each other. Between the organized social workshop of Mr. Blanc and the anarchy of Mr. Proudhon, between the association of Fourier and the communism of Mr. Cabet, the difference is night and day. This being so, how do these leaders of (different) schools (of thought) band together under the common denomination of “socialists,” and what is the link that unites them against natural or Providential society? It cannot be other than this: They do not want a natural form of society. What they want is an artificial form of society that emerges fully formed from the brain of the inventor. It is true that each of them wants to be the Jupiter of this Minerva, that each nurtures his own form of artifice and dreams of his own form of social order. But there is one thing that they have in common: they do not acknowledge that the human race possesses either a driving force that impels it toward good or a curative force that delivers it from evil. They quarrel over who will knead the human clay, but agree that it is a clay that requires kneading. In their eyes, the human race is not a living and harmonious being; it is an inert material waiting for them to give it feeling and life. It is not a subject for study but a material on which to experiment."
Perhaps this sect-like quality explains the occasional new outbreaks of socialism, giving socialism a fresh appeal—and, of course, a new vulnerable, immunologically unprepared host population.
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