Patten, Britain's Establishment and MPs Pay

I offered two paasages from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to readers of this blog on New Year's Day 2011. I repeat them today, the first on the rotten oak tree as it seems so apt on thinking of the British Establishment in 2013 so dreadfully epitomised by ex-EU Commissioner Patten; the second because so many of our MPs whose proposed 11% pay rise will be discussed in the House of Commons today, seem so far away from having any grasp of what is right!

The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggert estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers stuck into the soil, and he thought if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

   One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside - just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape of it left had not been able to stand without it.

***

  Eddie Willers smiled. He had said " Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't.

NHS to become centre of US battle of Collectivism vs. Individualism?

Just as I suggested last Saturday, Paul Ryan's nomination as running mate for the Republican Party, in the coming Presidential Elections, is likely to propel Obama into the White House for a second term thus creating complete economic collapse in the USA under the massive extra debt that will inevitably arise. Voters in the USA seem unlikely to voluntarily opt for reality.

President Obama yesterday, as reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning, could mishandle this scenario by focusing the public's attention on the true awfulness of socialised medecine by offering the Republicans the opportunity to use the example of the widely known failings of the NHS in their campaign. Note this passage from the linked report:

Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, Mr Ryan said that universal healthcare made citizens "dependent" on the state and unwilling to back necessary cuts to government spending.

"We need only look to Great Britain and elsewhere to see the effects of socialized health care on the broader economy. Once a large number of citizens get their health care from the state, it dramatically alters their attachment to government," he said.

As the further evidence of the state of Britain's socialism inspired failings develop over the coming months, the rail fare rise this morning being but one example, it is possible that this could be a sufficiently stark warning for US voters that the Republican Presidential team could win through, particulalrly if that same socialism finally brings the euro to break-up before polling day, as now seems evermore likely!

The Looters and Moochers (as defined by Ayn Rand,) are rampant and run everything in Britain, further evidence of which was adequately provided in the State Controlled Displays in the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, what a terrifying prospect for any typical free-thinking US elector!

The Slog report on a possible halt to building work on the new ECB HQ in Frankfurt, giving one further straw in that wind this morning.

A turning point for the West - Paul Ryan's selection as VP on Romney's ticket!

I have been re-tweeting quotes from Ayn Rand Bot for some months and generally trying through this blog and other tweets to bring the lessons of the novel Atlas Shrugged to a wider audience, particularly in the UK where it is practically unknown or shunned.

Frankly I saw that task as pretty hopeless within my lifetime.

I could never have imagined that an American Presidential candidate from one of the two main parties would have the courage to select a running mate who had openly warned of the real dangers contained in Ayn Rand's writings. One article on Paul Ryan is linked here. Representative Ryan has embraced and promoted Rand's writings and anti-collectivist philosophy, see my tweets of yesterday.

The crisis in the Romney campaign, and in the US economy as a whole, must be even graver than I was thinking, which means it must be very, very grave indeed.

The writings of Rand lead to shattering conclusions touching almost all aspects of everyone's daily lives and presumptions - I therefore expect that Obama will now certainly be re-elected.

The West will then face the centennial anniversaries of all the grisly battle dates and events of World War One whilst experiencing financial collapse. It makes the dilemmas set out in John Redwood's posting of this morning requiring ever more urgent attention and correction!

My Ayn Rand quote for Good Friday

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. "

Visit the site of Euro-trashed.com to learn the truth of your own individual destruction!

Update! A long weekend could be a good time to get stuck in to the novel "Atlas Shrugged", it uncannily describes our present world although written decades ago.

This brief description I found here:

Atlas Shrugged is not primarily a political novel. It is a novel about what happens to a world that denounces its best minds as greedy and immoral. It’s a novel about what happens when, instead of thanking and rewarding the brightest and most successful, a nation denounces, despises, and shackles them. It’s a novel about what happens when the best minds stop allowing that to happen. Whether this last aspect of the plot will play out in real life is yet to be seen, but the parallels to date are remarkable.

An Ayn Rand quote for the weekend.

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. Ayn Rand

Was Ayn Rand first to state Tea Party Aims?

An interesting op-ed from Bloomberg that is linked here.

Good news for fans of Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand, it being reported that the second part of the movie has been given the go ahead!

The EU is entirely made up of Moochers & Looters - PROTEST 18/2/12

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution?
If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen . . .
Every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.. . . Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 44

In considering the above statement from today's perspective, given that the above was written in 1944 and all that has passed in between, particularly across Europe, it is very important to remember that large corporations and banks, in cosying up to the politicians, bureaucrats and the eurocrats to become corpotists, collectivists and therefore part of the non-democratic EU system, they themselves have become the same looters and moochers, namely parasites who feed off the hard work of ordinary men, women and especially those who run small businesses.

If Europe is to return to growth and prosperity, we must remove the suffocating grip that the EU has been given in now controlling the daily lives of around 500 million people. The visit undertaken this week by EU Presidents Van Rompuy and Barroso to Red China, which holds absolute power over its swarming peoples, should be taken as an ominous warning on what they presently apparently have in mind!

Allowing the EU to continue to grind the people of Greece into the ground, without making a protest against their actions this weekend, would be to condone what they are about! 

Greeks for the moment have become the EU's persecuted minority as described above, but who may be next?

Ayn Rand's Birthday - The Great Oak Tree

I have posted this passage without the final paragraph on this blog before. I repeat on Ayn Rand's birthday which falls today:

  The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggert estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers stuck into the soil, and he thought if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

   One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside - just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape of it left had not been able to stand without it.

***

  “It was an immense betrayal – the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed.  It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else.  He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house.  He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.”

Ayn Rand 1979 interview.

Watch the entire interview, in several parts, with summaries and the chance to comment, from here.

"We are seeing the destruction of money" - an evil disguised.

"We are seeing the destruction of money," is effectively the crux of what this blog has been warning of over many years, but this time it is a quote from Tim Congdon of International Monetary Research, referring to the shrinking money supply figures supplied by the ECB, as reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning and linked from here.

Concurrently we are informed of the death of Stalin's daughter, a last link severed with three of the most evil dictators of all time, who emerged in the twentieth century; Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, a timely prod that evil can appear in different guises at different times - somehow the EU's achievement in destroying 27 sovereign democracies and now potentially the entire Western economic system appears an awesome horror also somehow in a league of its own!

Did Ayn Rand foresee our future in Atlas Shrugged?

Any casual read of Ayn Rand's masterpiece "Atlas Shrugged" must leave the reader with an uncanny sense that she had foressen our present age back in the nineteen-fifties when the almost 1200 paged novel was first written.

A closer study of all the striking similarities between the book and the world created by our present crooked political leaders and their armies of moochers and looters, who depend on the maintenance of this corrupt rule, might turn such suspicions into racing certainties.

I spent my own working life in the international oil industry and therefore have an absolutely clear idea on what petroleum geologists thought of the prospects for shale oil as a future energy source, back in those days. I therefore consider this passage from the book as clear enough evidence for me of Ayn Rand's ability to discern the likely course of events. This passage appears on page 720 of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Atlas Shrugged,  ISBN 978-0-141-18893-5, and was as follows:

"It was oil that ran in a glittering curve from the mouth of a pipe into a tank at the foot of the wall, as the only confession of the secret struggle inside the stone, as the unobtrusive purpose of all the intricate machinery - but the machinery did not resemble the installations of an oil derrick, and she knew that she was looking at the secret of the Buena Esperanza Pass, she knew that this was oil drawn out of shale by some method men had considered impossible."

A modern description of oil shale is here.

The movie of the beginning of the novel is released in two weeks time. It clearly must not be missed, especially given the attempts to block its distribution and its limited production budget, both no doubt caused by the fears of the fabulously wealthy, in terms of digital money, who have created our present nightmarish world.

The rotten oak tree from Atlas Shrugged

At the start of 2011 I offer these two short passages, both from the very first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand to provide thought for the New Year which I trust will be happy and secure for all my readers!

   The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggert estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers stuck into the soil, and he thought if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

   One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside - just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape of it left had not been able to stand without it.

***

  Eddie Willers smiled. He had said " Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't.

Who is John Galt?