Tag Archives: Ayn Rand

Waldo Canyon concert fundraiser feted Colo. Springs self-interest & ignorance

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- All night local speakers proclaimed: “Colorado Springs knows how to look after its own.” And doesn’t it! But I’m almost positive that it used to be, if only everywhere else, the virtue was looking out for others, not just your own.
 
The Waldo Canyon fundraiser for fire victims was titled “a community rising” and was explained as a coming together, without regard for religious or political differences, I would also add, minus humility and what would be common sense if the denominator wasn’t so debased. This was so embarrassing it hurt.

So we experienced a wildfire, part of the natural cycle of western forests, which burned a neighborhood probably built too far into a canyon, made worse, and ubiquitous right now across the Southwest, by an unnatural heatwave that portends climate change. Was any of that mentioned? NOPE.

Instead victims vowed to rebuild, as they fetishized firefighter vigilance over that ever threatening beast in the hills. Headliner Michael Martin Murphy, apparently the perpetual flame of wildfire vigil keeping, owing to his “Wildfire” hit but it was about a horse, sang a lament which listed the West’s many epic fires, appending mention of “Waldo Canyon” like a latest mining disaster. We’re supposed to prevent the fires apparently, like buying pink things to fight cancer. Wildfires aren’t tragedies except to logging interests. When Smokey the Bear cried, it was over timber that didn’t get logged. Of course national park visitors have to be reminded to exercise caution, because, the US Forestry Service jobs depend on the trees. We thought it was about Bambi’s mom, but those wildlives are managed too, with bullets, lest their populations threaten the trees.

Should people who who want to live in the forest be let to deny its nature like they shrug off global warming? And much as we gush over firemen, it’s a job. More clerks are shot at 7-11s than there are fallen heros listed on the multiple “national” monuments to firefighters.

The Waldo Canyon Fire destruction was the wrath of nature, whether owed to arson or deficient firefighting, the calamitous fire season throughout the state confirms that climate change created the perfect storm, but Jesus Springs is probably not prepared to consider the flaming villainy was an Act of God.

And where does anyone need reassurance that Colorado Springs doesn’t look after its own? We’re the no-holds-barred world street-fighting champions of supporting our workforce, standing up for our war criminal enabling ways. We’re a Support the Troops, Climate Denying, Drill Baby Drill, Charter-Schooling, God Hates Fags, No Thanks We’re Racists, God Damn apologists for Ayn Rand lowbrow cultural ignorance, and flag-waving PROUD OF IT. We don’t give a damn about burning other people’s houses, the people in them included. But when it happens to us, prayers and calls for prayers spam the internets.

We look after our own, if by our own, we mean our neighbors with homes. Colorado Springs stopped pretending to care about the homeless, it’s still piling on ordinances to criminalize poverty. If you’re homeless in Colorado Springs, you get as much compassion as people who lose their houses to our fires.

Ayn Rand SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Let me first begin with how I was exposed to Ayn Rand. I am in high school and awhile back my teacher was doing a course on homelessness. In a ‘prompt’ that she gave me as to what are the causes of homelessness, I answered CAPITALISM. A week later I was astonished to get back my paper with a Zero. I showed this to many people all of whom agreed that it was in no way deserving of a zero. My dad and I took this question as to why I had gotten a zero on  my paper to the teacher. I wasn’t expecting much but even after one hour of asking my English teacher why I had gotten a zero on my paper she had no reasonable answer other than that I had not followed the ‘format’ correctly, even though I had a previous organizational sheet on which I based my writing on following her format. she ended by saying I was a horrible writer;  we gave up trying to get to through to such a numbskull.

I didn’t quite understand why she had given me a zero until a couple months later, and so began my experience with Ayn Rand. My teacher took us to get the book. As I read the summary I knew it would be some sort of method for her and d-11 to push their politics on students;  however I had no previous knowledge of who Ayn Rand was.  The next day in class she gave us a powerpoint on the background of Ayn Rand and what the book Anthem was about. It was filled with negative comments on communism including that communism supposedly takes away knowledge, individuality and free expression.   As I was assigned to read more and more of Ayn Rand I realized how horrible of a writer she was. I started to listen to Ayn Rand’s interviews. I then understood that  they were forcing me to read a writer who didn’t believe in helping anyone, because she was a racist, a nationalist and a pure evil witch. These interviews can be found on <youtube> and <bluecorncomics> among many other articles revealing Ayn Rand to be a racist.

The more and more I read into the book the more i was infuriated at the pure ridiculousness and hypocrisy of it.  In the ending chapters it is written by Ayn Rand that

“The word WE is the lime poured over me, which sets and hardens to stone, crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?”

As i read this I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, throw up, or rip the book apart . I was sickened by how when I had expressed my “free speech” I was given a ZERO; by how I had to read an author who believes being selfish is  a virtue. And by how every day, whenever I went to class instead of being taught English literature I got the teachers Right Wing, anti-communist politics thrown into my face. Each time a question on the book was asked I didn’t hear an opinion on whether the book was good or bad i only heard questions on how communism takes away individuality and how  Ayn Rand is right on what her idea of what communism is? I said the teacher was expressing personal opinion and the whole class started to yell at me to shut up. I got so alienated and depressed after they  said that communism makes robots, and brain dead people  even though I couldn’t find more brain dead robots as hard as I looked than the ones that were sitting right next to me.

I couldn’t take the class anymore as it was an insult to who I was, what I believed in, and all the people I respected were continually insulted and lied about. I started skipping the class after my dad not only talked at a school board meeting but also to my assistant principal, in both cases we were given the cold shoulder and treated horribly rude. I decided to go to the class again and deal with it. As I read the quote given above in that class and as I looked around i became terrified of being like them. I was torn between staying and swallowing my believes and to be JUST LIKE THOSE SHEEP or to get up and leave. The overwhelming fear of being lost into them made me get up and walk out of the class. Later that day the assistant principal took me out of a class and made me feel like an outsider, like a weird person that needed to be put in a psychiatric hospital. I complained that I was being pushed politics in a public school and his response was that no other students felt like I did. When I told him that the teacher had given me a zero and was now failing me out of the course, who had said I was a horrible writer; he said He didn’t believe me and that I was wrong. He told me that if I was to walk out again I would have to deal with the consequences even though he wouldn’t deal with a teacher pushing politics.   He smiled as I cried for being  looked at as being an idiot and a weirdo kid ; it took me about two hours to get with it. We continued to try to get me switched out of the class, which finally we did only to find that Ayn Rand was being taught in that course too and  in all English classes for that matter.

I realize I will probably never get them to change, to respect students, parents and INDIVIDUALITY. But this  continuing fight which is probably the hardest I’ve ever had to fight proved to me that I would stand up for myself against a herd of flesh eating zombies, that I would NEVER BE LIKE THEM . And I felt pride in knowing I stood up to being brainwashed by  anti communist right wingers.

Corporate Dictatorship over the US gives Big Business a free ride

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Corporate vandalsThe US government has released a study done by the government itself, that declares that over 2/3 of both American and foreign corporations pay no taxes here. This is truly a robbing hood society where the working poor are forced to fund the government paid welfare that most corporations in the US feed off, and the corporate dictatorship running America gives its corporate patrons a free ride PLUS with taxes on top of getting its own welfare rip off payments from The State it controls. Most Companies In US Avoid Federal Income Taxes

Of course, you will not hear any complaints about this on the ‘news’ programs and Right Wing blabber mouth programs, as all you will hear is assholes ranting against the poor and racial minorities in poorly disguised manner. Plus, you will hear constant promotion of the incessant government military and Police State apparatuses. More welfare for the rich pigs, all the time, always is the blast of crap that is so constant these days. Just today our local Pig Paper, The Gazette, was complaining once again that so many folk want to fix the mess that is the corporate Health Lack-of-Medical Care Welfare gang the Insurance companies currently run against the American people.

Everywhere one looks, it is the corporations riding rough shod over human rights, democracy, and Social Justice. Everywhere it is the corporations destroying the ecology of Planet Earth. They pay little tax to the Corporate Dictatorship government to carry out their agenda against the American people. Instead they force their own victims to pay for this atrocity.

We need to get it together, People, and stop voting for these con artists that the corporate world gives us to ‘choose’ from. You know who they are… they are the Republican and Democratic Party politicians that foul up our national political life so thoroughly at present. It’s time to finally get fed up with these gangsters and ride them out of power for good!

Tattoos and Ayn Rand Thought

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gazette.jpg ———– The Gazette editorialist got out his little Ayn Rand ‘Atlas Shrugged’ book last Monday, waved it in the air, and pronounced it a good thing that El Paso County (Big Bad Government!) was no longer going to inspect tattoo parlors in the area. This is the same nut case at the paper that is all ‘for the troops’. Well, who does he think goes to many of these tattoo parlors? Well, it is the troops, Sir.

The Gazette is run my a bunch of sad sack ideologues who are always against Big Government, except when Big, Big, BIG GOVERNMENT is destroying somebody else’s country and making Big, Big, BIG BUSINESS a killing in tax payer paid government contracts. But when it comes to protecting the troops from getting AIDS or Hepatitis at the tattoo parlor, well The Gazette is against the County checking out the sanitation there! Sick. See below…
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July 14, 2008 – 9:57PM The Gazette
SELF-POLICING TATTOO JOINTS
Don’t involve county in body art

You walk into Bob’s Tattoos seeking service. You want a bone through your nose and the Virgin Mary etched into your arm. Something’s not right. You’re struck by the stench of kitty litter and other strange smells. You’re introduced to 300-pound Bob, the parlor’s founding partner and managing artist. Bob wears a grubby muscle shirt and Dolfin shorts to show off his own tattoos. They don’t look so good, but that’s OK because Bob explains he got them in prison, and not at Bob’s Tattoos. What do you do?

A. Look for a certificate from the county that says Bob’s OK to pierce your nose and jam ink into your skin.

B. Leave, and do some research. Speak with multiple peers with good body art, and ask them which parlors do it best. Find a reputable shop, check it through the Better Business Bureau, and then personally assess the risks.

Unless you’re ultra brave, the correct answer is “B.” After all, even Bob’s Tattoos could look good on the day of a county inspection. And even a once-good tattoo business can go downhill after getting a stamp of approval from the county.

The right tattoo on the right part of the right person can be a fine thing. But good, safe results aren’t something the county can or should try to ensure. If ever there were an activity in which the buyer must beware, it’s the business of shopping for body art.

The mere fact that so-called painful cuts to El Paso County’s budget involve the elimination of tattoo parlor inspections indicates fiscal excess. The health department has no legitimate reason for spending nearly $30,000 annually to inspect tattoo parlors.

It’s not in question that dirty body art tools can lead to infection and disease. But nobody is required to commission a tattoo, and the majority of citizens never do. It’s a risk anyone can easily avoid by simply choosing against body art. Those who do seek tattoos and such ought to be responsible for assessing the risks themselves. The tattoo-free public shouldn’t be forced to subsidize needless, private, elective bodily expressions.

The county’s Board of Health plans to vote Wednesday on whether to permanently eliminate inspections, and most certainly they should. Tattoo artists are organizing to converge on the meeting, however, urging the county to maintain inspections.

The fact that responsible tattoo parlors favor county inspections isn’t surprising. An approval certificate is like a valuable reward for good, clean practices. The inspection requirement creates a layer of bureaucracy that serves as a hurdle to entry. It dissuades cheap, startup fly-by-night operators from wanting to set up shop and compete. It also eases concerns of customers who might otherwise ask lots of questions or chicken out of getting tattooed.

Tattoo artists, however, don’t need government to give them a useful stamp of approval. Reputations speak for themselves, and stamps of approval are best obtained through private associations of professionals. Free publications that sell advertising, for example, pay private auditing associations to verify circulations. Without the audit, it’s hard to compete. Lawyers join private associations, such as the American Bar Association, that enforce standards on members and offer assurances to customers. Good tattoo artists, if they wish to separate themselves from the riffraff, need to form a credible organization that sells a stamp of approval to those who qualify.

No stamp of approval, however, should weigh in too heavily when it comes to letting someone inject ink beneath your skin. Few transactions require more personal information and diligence than the purchase of a tattoo. Good, safe tattoos aren’t something the county can or should guarantee. Nothing can replace the ages old advice: Buyer beware. Besides, tattoos are free-spirited expressions of individuality. Don’t involve the county in what’s otherwise a solid act of rebellion.

Oil and Oppression

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To those that don’t read the abominable local paper, The Gazette, ‘Oil and Oppression’ was the title of their lead editorial opinion today so that’s what this commentary is responding to.

But don’t think that The Gazette was writing about Iraq under this heading, since they were writing about Hugo Chavez instead. They say Chavez is a ‘dictator in the making’! Not to worry about Dubya though, I guess?

Think God that we don’t have to worry about dictators in the making here in the USA, right? Our political system is run by a two headed dog instead, so just what are the concerns of Colorado’s finest, as they write from the editorial offices of our favorite local comic book? Well, The Gazette is concerned that Venezuelan democracy is being crushed because the US government is being prohibited from channeling money into Venezuelan politics! How dare this dictator Chavez stop these funds!?

It’s bad news, but our brilliant theoreticians at The Gazette tell us Colorado residents to not be too concerned about ‘his childish fulminations’. That’s a big word there, Guys. A ‘fulmination’ can’t hurt us, but sticks and stones can. So how does The Gazette plan to ward off sticks and stones from The Evil Dictator, Hugo Chavez? The Evil One has oil, you see?

Reading from their Ayn Rand liberry, they say that the correct manner of warding off evil is just to let The System do its work. Translated, that means that we should just let the CIA work to a more successful coup attempt than the one they attempted in the recent past. Meanwhile, at the editorial offices of The Gazette, Atlas Shrugs, basking in the knowledge that ‘liberty’ will prevail. Oil be damned. For more info about the threat from The Evil One, see Mark Weisbrot’s A Bank of Their Own: Latin America Casting off Washington’s Shackles

Pornology- is it available at Poor Richards?

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I just learned about this book, Pornology, over at alternet where they had an article about it. So I’m wondering whether I should go over to Poor Richard’s and get a copy?

You see, like so many sad individuals of my sex, I have a porn addiction. I wrestle with this devil (sometimes day and night!) for weeks at a time. I am hoping that the female author, named Ayn (wonder if her parents gave her this name due to their studious readings in Ayn Rand Thought?) Carrillo-Gailey, of this work can give me insight to help cure me of this nasty affliction? Wonder if New Life Church could help?

I’m wondering, also, if I could go insane as so many have done through the ages due to their inability to focus on realities while under the curse of obsession with their affliction of onanism? Luckily, District 11 has a middle school course in endocrinology and abstinence that will probably inoculate our children from becoming addicted to this vice. I just wish that they had had this course back in the ’50s and ’60s when I was a kid. Plus, I was altered by not having alternet to alert me to finding fine books on this delicate subject such as Pornology seems to be.

Please Poor Richard have a copy available for me when I get to your store. This definitely looks to be good writing!

The Gazette defends the minimum wage earner yet again

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OK, the title to this commentary is so ridiculous that it invites scorn from the word GO. And yet?… this is exactly the refrain that The Gazette seems to constantly revel in.

They like to preposterously present themselves and others in the most reactionary portions of the US business community as defenders of the low income population of our nation. And their absurd thesis is always that we should oppose an increase in the minimum wage because that increase would hurt those it the new legislation would intend to help!

It is such a comical argument and one that nobody with a low income will ever buy. Do they take this sector of the population to be as stupid as the business community is? They are not. So the argument is really intended to persuade the well-to-do themselves that they really are being noble by being the selfish and backward thugs they actually truly are.

The argument really is, that the rich by opposing the increase in minimum wage are not just hoods robbing the poor, but are actually wonderful and decent people trying to help the poor out instead. Don’t laugh, that’s truly how they try to convince themselves to see it! But it makes us in the ordinary population of wage earners roll over laughing in response to the self image that the well-off have of themselves. What a bunch of charlatan clowns, are they not? Taking from the bottom to give to the top is noble endeavor! It’s truly celebrating their supposed virtue in being selfish as their ideologue Queen, Ayn Rand, once proposed in her writings as being the psychological key to supposed capitalist liberty making.

The argument that no minimum wage is freedom for the poor is once again raised as mantra in The Gazette on page 2 of the Business section of the Sunday paper in an article by Fred Crowley, a brainless professor over at the UCCS. He has a young, intense, and portly photo of himself there, too. No doubt that he is fully convinced of his arguments as week as silly as they actually are. No doubt that he also intensely and fully opposes the approach that Hugo Chavez is taking now in Venezuela in regards to increasing the minimum wage there. It just got increased 20%. Oh the horrors, he must be lamenting!

Yes, Dear Professor, the raise of the Venezuelan minimum wage violates all the supposed laws of economics that you and The Gazette preach so without end. How can Hugo Chavez not see that the economy must give profits to the rich and not to the poor? I guess such a nut deserves to be executed, does he not, Professor? He is a totalitarian trying to take liberty away!
Oh the humanity!

Instead of wishing well to Chavez and the poor of Venezuela, we should be listening to the concerns of The Gazette and Professor Crowley here at home. They just want to help the working poor out, by freezing their wages.

It’s nice to know that America is led by such an army of clowns like the editorial staff at The Gazette and the Economics Dept at UCCS when it comes to economic philosophy and economic planning. We should collect them all and shoot them out a giant cannon into areas where ‘The Terrorists’ are hiding! They would then roll over and die laughing. And then we could be nationally secure.