Related Story (lifted from: http://allaboutfrogs.org/stories/scorpion.html)

One day, a scorpion looked around at the mountain where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through the forests and hills. He climbed over rocks and under vines and kept going until he reached a river.

The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider the situation. He couldn’t see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back.

Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream.

“Hellooo Mr. Frog!” called the scorpion across the water, “Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?”

“Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?” asked the frog hesitantly.

“Because,” the scorpion replied, “If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!”

Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. “What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!”

“This is true,” agreed the scorpion, “But then I wouldn’t be able to get to the other side of the river!”

“Alright then…how do I know you wont just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?” said the frog.

“Ahh…,” crooned the scorpion, “Because you see, once you’ve taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!”

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog’s back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog’s soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog’s back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

“You fool!” croaked the frog, “Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?”

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog’s back.

“I could not help myself. It is my nature.”

Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.

The libs always vote with their feelings. Some of them have some Thoughts periodically that flare up and point out to their Feelings that ‘this’ just isn’t working.

That’s when they have to call their Thinking Party relatives to help them out.

Proper grammar saves lives.

Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

I have a lot of “modern lib” friends (just got out of college a bit ago…so big heaping surprise) who try to engage me in debate by asking question #1….then pull the bait and switch. It takes about 10 minutes for the situation to go from “reasonable debate” to “somebody please save me from this rabid harpy”.

It’s a crappy thing to say…but I think that with most liberals, this is their nature. Not only do they have no idea what they stand for, but in order to hide this fact, they try to distract from the point at hand by questioning the accepted fundamental concepts from the original conversation.

Actually, this is more along the lines of what Liberals beleive

1) There is no such thing as deserved wealth. Anyone who is rich either stole it or inherited it. Government therefore has a responsibility to ensure that this wealth is taken away in the interest of fairness. This is why we need “progressive” income taxes. This rule does not apply to senators from Massachusetts, since there’s apparently no link between income and wealth in that state.
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2) There is no such thing as deserved poverty. Poor people are poor because there is some sort of clandestine system in place that ensures that the wealthy stay wealthy, and not due to any life-decisions they might have made. This cabal runs all politics outside the Democratic party (and the Unions). Only by turning over all decision-making authority to the Democratic party can we achieve anything like “justice”.

3) Profit is fundamentally immoral, because it’s based on the principal of the job creator paying the worker less than the value of his/her work and pocketing the difference. Anyone who makes a profit can only be assumed to be working in his/her own best interest. This immorality taints all things in the private sector.

4) Religion is fundamentally undemocratic, because it attempts to impose rules on individuals, based solely on “superstition”. All religions have an implicit goal of imposing of their primitive rules on other people (Islam being the only exception). The only acceptable religions are the new age superstitions, which allow people to make up the rules as they go.

5) All moral authority therefore resides in the government, through the agency of unelected bureaucrats who, fortunately, know more than you and therefore can be trusted to make all decisions in your best interest. These government bureaucrats are the only ones who can be counted on to not be working in their own best interest. This rule does not apply if there is a Republican in the white house. The highest form of moral authority is the UN, which has NO elected officials and is therefore is clearly above operating in its own best interest.

6) There can be no freedom without health and safety. Anything that might cause the most minute health or safety hazard must therefore be regulated and controlled by people we can be assured aren’t operating in their own best interests (i.e., government bureaucrats). Even those things that don’t actually cause physical harm must be controlled, as they might, in the future, be found to cause health or safety problems, or could cause mental or emotional distress. The logical conclusion is that the only way we can be free is by turning over all decision making authority to the government.

7) If the planet isn’t healthy, none of us are free. Therefore anything that might effect the planet or the climate (like exhaling) must be regulated by the government is any of us are to be free.

All white people must bear and accept the responsibility for all of the bad things that have happened to people of color, everywhere. This is much like the concept of original sin – there is no time limit on this and there is no redemption. Guilt has a long memory, and nothing has really changed since 1960. However, it’s in poor taste to blame the Democratic party for generations of support of slavery, establishment and enthusiastic enforcement of Jim Crow laws, the use of the Klan as its military arm, its opposition to civil rights legislation, and its continuing cynical practice of race-baiting; those things were all in the past and must be forgotten.

9) No individual has the right to the work of another human being. However, everyone has the right to health care, and the poor have a right to housing, food stamps, child care, and an education. That’s because those things are provided by the government and not by people.

Those are the jobs that really create wealth. You can’t have manufacturing performed in Bangalore and skim the profits off to be repatriated to the US because then a local competitor from Bangalore will hire your trainees, cut your margin, and eat your lunch. We have hollowed out our economy. We outsource every wealth creating job and keep the overhead jobs here. That is a recipe for economic stagnation and bad investments like paying too much for houses, oil, stocks, etc.

“A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” –Alexander Hamilton

Study at Redstate University

It’s actually a bit bigger than that. It isn’t simply that government doesn’t respond to the needs of the people the same way a free market does, it is that government can’t respond to people’s needs the way a free market done. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t understand all the technical parts of the proof, but Hayek demonstrated in his work that government can never begin to collect sufficient data for a committee to analyze to make decisions that grant the same degree of choice and precision of want/need fulfillment that the free market does. You literally need to have the free market through it’s pricing mechanism determining how and what to produce. You can interfere with that mechanism, but to whatever extent you interfere with the mechanism, you also interfere with market efficiency.

We are in the current situation precisely because the government interfered with the pricing mechanisms of the housing and credit markets. More government interference will not clear them.

I am still in a state of confusion over this. it’s depressing that someone who is intelligent would be so duped by the hope and change.

But serially, I have seen exactly what you describe in several of my colleagues and peers. One unfortunate result of lack of real world exposure is that the person so situated never learns the difference between what they can do as a lawyer and what they should do. One particular example was a former supervisor who insisted that I charge a case in order to force the defendant to “roll over” on her son (the mother had an airtight alibi). I refused and so did the next deputy it was assigned to. Sadly, that former supervisor is now a Superior Court Judge – - talk about insulated. Oh well.

daily reality to the stepping from one environment of sameness to the next.

This person is my uncle and he is 64 and from what I have been told he literally never worked at any job till he clerked right out of law school. And not just any clerkship but for a federal appellate court. And then right into big law for 40 years.

Disconnect is alive and well in those folks.

If anything can come of this is that he now reads redstate and has said, just today (tues) that it’s criminal what Obama is doing to AIG over the bonuses. It’s a start.

To read Ayn Rand you should read her books chronologically, to see her thought process evolve.

It’s not a rule, but it really helps to understand John Galt’s final speech.