SelfAdoration.com

Kevin Williamson at NR:

There is some debate on the right about whether President Obama is a fundamentally well-intentioned incompetent or a more Machiavellian figure so power-hungry that he is willing to kneecap key sectors of the U.S. economy in order to advance his political agenda. My own view is that the distinguishing feature of Obama’s ideology is the utter inability of the president and his partisans to distinguish between the national interest and their own political interests. (That is one problem with electing a messiah rather than a chief administrator.) If you believe that your guy is a uniquely gifted, once-in-a-lifetime transformational figure with a mandate to save the country, and that he is opposed by uniquely wicked servants of Mammon and partisans of unreason, then it follows that your political interests are identical to the national interest, and consequently you have such grey eminences as Bill Clinton, who has managed to secure for himself a career as an elder statesman without ever having been a statesman, insisting that Republicans are “begging for America to fail” — because they oppose large parts of the president’s health-care program, which the president now opposes, too, having set aside measures that are too unworkable or punitive to act on until some more politically opportune time.

Market orders are complex and organic; political orders are relatively crude and artificial. Obamacare, to take the year’s most dramatic example, is an attempt to impose a simpleton order on a much more sophisticated order, like trying to make microchips with cookie cutters. Such attempts generally end badly, succeeding only in bringing chaos out of order. Friedrich Hayek described the process in The Road to Serfdom: The plan never pans out the way it was expected to, and the planners are obliged by political necessity to take ever more arbitrary and authoritarian steps in order to give the appearance of success to an enterprise that cannot in fact achieve its goals. Even in a democratic society — perhaps especially in such a society — the effects are corrosive, undermining the rule of law, liberal institutions, and the mutual trust that (more…)

A long read, but worth it:

Finally, manufactured intelligence is self-involved. It mistakes feeling for thinking. It deals not with how things are or even how we would like them to be, but how we feel about the way things are and what our feelings about the way things are say about what kind of people we are.

Liberal intelligence is largely concerned with the latter. It is a self-esteem project for mediocre elites, the sons and daughters of the formerly accomplished who are constantly diving into the shallow pools of their own minds to explore how their privilege and entitlement makes them view the world and how they can be good people by challenging everyone’s paradigms and how they can think outside the box by climbing into it and pulling the flaps shut behind them.

Perpetual self-involvement isn’t intelligence regardless of how many of the linguistic tricks of memoir fiction it borrows to endow its liberal self-help section with the appearance of nobility.

Liberalism isn’t really about making the world a better place. It’s about reassuring the elites that they are good people for wanting to rule over it.

Demi-billionaire Robert W. Wilson to billionaire Bill Gates:

When I talk to young people who seem destined for great success, I tell them to forget about charities and giving. Concentrate on your family and getting rich—which I found very hard work. I personally and the world at large are very glad you were more interested in computer software than the underprivileged when you were young. And don’t forget that those who don’t make money never become philanthropists.

These clowns think YOU work for THEM. You need to tell them otherwise.

“This is the mind on strike.” —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Rand was hugely right about this, as is ever more obvious with every new failure of alternative tactics. The problem, of course, is who bells the cat: The idea of a general strike of producers is appealing as a general idea, but no one wants to lose everything as a stand-alone martyr.

The solution is to have a one-day strike, a John Galt Day, once a month. If, on the first full work day of every month, everyone who is sick of being enslaved by parasites were to take the day off — producing nothing — the vampires in Washington would get the news in no time.

January 2nd is the first business day of 2014. If you want to communicate your disgust with the status quo, stay home. Watch Netflix. Play video games. Frolic like it’s your honeymoon. Just produce no new wealth for that one day. If you fly airplanes for a living, or run a power plant or — especially — if you perform surgery, so much the better. Just by doing nothing, you will communicate who needs whom.

Do the same on February 3rd and March 3rd, the first business day of every month. Post a little #JohnGaltDay note on Facebook or Twitter, just to make it plain what you are up to: “The is the strike of the producers, Mr. Obama, Mr. Boehner. This is the mind on strike.”

Nothing changes until people change, and people don’t change when they think their policies are working. We know better. We need to communicate our better knowledge in a way that makes an impact. If you want your world to change, for you and for your children, stop bearing it on your back.

If you want this to work, you have to follow through: Share this idea with everyone you know, and then DON’T SHARE the wealth of your production on John Galt Day.

Liberals and social conservatives: As you gaze in awe and horror at the inevitable collapse of every grand plan to control human behavior from the outside, this would seem to be a wonderful time to question and replace your base premises.

You cannot do what you propose to do. Here’s why, in three links:

1. You cannot possibly have the moral right to dominate other human beings.

2. Even if you insist you do have that moral right somehow, the domination of one human being by another is ontologically impossible.

3. But if you instead act upon your self, other people and the universe as these things actually are, a life of illimitable Splendor can be yours.

Knowingly to persevere in error is self-destruction in its essence. Today is a great day to start doing better.

Thomas Hawk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

How do you know when a time is right for your idea? How about when someone else comes up with something similar?: Atheist ‘mega-churches’ take root across USA, world. For the past three months, I’ve been thinking about starting a church evangelizing egoism and excluding no one, and here is the something similar. I’m reading this as a publicity stunt, but we’ll see. That’s definitely not what I’m about.

What I want is a mission devoted to the idea of doing better. Just that. The doctrine is mine, Man Alive, et very cetera, but I’m a lot more interested in praxis than dogma. If you cross a soul-enriching music performance with a mind-enflaming motivational seminar, you’re halfway to seeing what I see.

Picture a real live church service somewhere, once a week. My ideal location would be a big bar on late Saturday afternoons, to put the idea of choosing admirably in mind just when it might be needed most. That can be simulcast by Ustream or Spreecast, so the whole world can join in, one mind at a time.

But: I’m digging living on the road a lot, so I would love to take this show on the road 15 or 20 days a month, too: Full-day hotel meeting room seminars with a ton of rotating content and drawing on local talent as well. If you think about the way seminar mechanics do major-city blitzes — TV spots and infomercials leading up to the show in three or four locations on successive days — that’s the kind of road show I’d love to mount. An operation like that could produce one or two new hours of tight, professional video every day.

What does victory look like? How about an operation on the scale of the big boys, like Joyce Meyer or Joel Osteen? That may be too far to reach, but we are entering the age of Garage-Band Televangelism, so anything is possible.

The creed? On top of everything else, there are these two principles:

1. I don’t go to your church.

2. I am not arguing with you.

All I want (more…)

For freedom-seeking people to achieve their ends, the middle class — the everyday expressions of joy and excellence — must grow.

The good, the true and the beautiful – and I’ll leave ’em dancing in the aisles, I guarantee it.

I can speak at any length on just about any topic, delivering music, uplifting humor and solid, practical, useful inspiration.

I can fill a hole in your line-up, MC your event or take the keynote slot – and make you look like a genius for booking me.

The price? I’m easy. If the event is making money, I’d like to make money, too. If not? Let’s make fans together instead.

I’m interested in working any kind of event, including:

* Church services or meetings
* School assemblies or classes
* Political/Tea Party events
* Sales meetings

I can tailor my talk to your audience, and I can speak knowledgeably on a vast range of topics.

See me in action: Greg Swann – The Trailer.

My friend James Pruitt (@jamesdeantx) keeps trying to put me in front of Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz), which is the kind of quixotic ambition I deeply admire. Plus which, I’m really interested in fracking, but I don’t want to go to Minot and Williston in the winter.

Both notions would seem to be calling me to Houston for October, but I’m open to other ideas. My biggest secondary objective, right now, is to speak in front of live audiences, so that would be your best bargaining chip in calling me elsewhere.

My dates are 10/05 to 10/28, less travel time.

I need to decide soon, so if you have a proposition, propose it.

A very short book trailer for the free book Man Alive!

If you’re tired of watching your life circle the drain as demagogues rob you of every human value, this book is for you.

How do you change the world? One mind at a time. If you want to get that process started now – while there is still time – please share and embed this trailer far and wide.

A short film about why your own hypocrisy about the philosophical values you actually live by empowers the enemies of human liberty — to the peril of everything you love.

A short movie about why you should be hiring me to sell everyday human joy to your audience.

Connect the dots:

1. We need to fix the culture.

2. The way to fix it is with comedy.

The trailer above is learn-by-doing: I’m showing you how to sell joy by selling you joy. When you’re ready for a fuller demonstration, go here:

A practical demonstration in the form of a mass (a three-act comedy) about three-act comedies.

To win the culture war, our job is to sell the end-consequence of good conduct — joy…

I know how.

Hello, World! I’m your WILD girl!

Hello, Dad! Hello, Mom!

I give you Ch-Ch-Ch-Cherry Bomb!

If you got ninety bucks, you got rock ’n’ roll.