I just strolled outside and picked up my edition of todays WJS and read this headline:

“GM Offers US a Majority Stake: Bondholders Rebel at proposal; UAW would wind up with 39% Ownership”

According to this link, a deal for ownership has been struck with the UAW regarding Chrysler as well

To anyone who listens to Rush, you know he called this.  He has been saying it for a long time that the end result of all this auto industry mess would be that the Union would have a seat on the board, or own the companies in part or whole.  Well hes right again, will that move his accuracy rating up .0000001%?

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Just saw on fox news that the crew of the ship taken over by pirates has freed themselves.  Apparently the crew fought the pirates are regained control of the ship.  The owner of the ship is going to have a press conference soon.  No need for obama to do anything good ole American ballsyness solves the problem.  WAY TO GO GUYS!!

I was reading news like I tend to do and found this story.  It is a NY times piece about a computer with artificial intelligence.  It’s pretty neat; it can create a hypothesis, test it, and replicate the results.  This is a big step forward. According to the story this computer can do the following:

Using artificial intelligence, it came up with a hypothesis about genes in baker’s yeast and the enzymes produced by the genes. It then designed and ran experiments to test its hypothesis. Using the results, it revised its hypothesis and ran more experiments before arriving at its conclusions.

Face it folks that’s pretty wild and wacky stuff.

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Much fanfare was made by loony lefties over the weekend about the Earth Hour or whatever the hell they called the attempted manmade blackout. Other noise was being made on the right, and it was just as ridiculous.  Rush Limbaugh is the perfect example of this.  In response to the earth hour event, Rush encouraged people to turn on ALL of their lights inside and out.  This would serve the purpose of essentially saying “look it doesn’t matter who has their lights on off or dimmed the world is gonna be just fine”.  Now I would have no problem at all if anyone encouraged others to do this, or did it themselves, but my question to those who followed Rush’s suggestion is, what was the point?  

Those of conservative/libertarian leaning pride themselves on being rational and logical, not letting emotions determine their actions.  That being said, turning on all your lights to make a point to enviro-nuts is worthless for several reasons.

1.       Thankfully most people don’t buy into this BS. So with all of your lights on at night you might just look like any other house on the block or apartment in the building.  Maybe you’re just extra concerned with security, and never really turn many of your lights off.  Driving down a block of lit and unlit houses one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the enviro-nuts, the liberal who is to cowardly to go totally dark at to earn his green peace street cred, the deadbeat who hasn’t paid the electric company, or the conservative whose on vacation and is therefore only using a few lights on timers to give the effect of being home (yea we’re smart like that).

2.       Letting the actions of crazies determine what you do is never a good idea. Just because the whackos want you to turn your lights off during a certain hour, doesn’t mean you should keep them on in that hour.  During Earth Hour many of my lights were off, the outside lights were off, the inside was dark because I was watching a movie, but this was because I wanted them to be.  Also I have this funny habit of turning lights off that I don’t need to be ON, this tends to save me money on light bulbs and makes the number lower on my electric bill.  I keep my house mostly dark, most of the time, because that’s what makes sense.  I don’t do this because it makes Al Gore get a thrill up his leg, I do it because it saves me MONEY (Money is the root of all environmentalism?).

3.       It makes you look dumb.  I am sorry, but it does. For your response to Earth Hour to be jumping up and down and saying, “Well I’ll turn all my lights ON” is akin to holding your breath until mom gets you the Twix at the checkout line  (And on top of the appearance of immaturity/irrationality no one will know you’re doing it, see point 1).

This is by no means an attack on Rush, there is no way I could reiterate that enough, I have been a paying member of his 24/7 service to get his podcast for going on 3 years, I believe.  What this is, however, is an appeal to rationality.  This event gives everyone a perfect chance to explain why environmentalism doesn’t need to be based in insanity.  You can wipe with as much TP you want, use what kind of light bulbs you want, turn on and off the lights when you want, and still be doing your part at helping maintain the planet.  Many things that your grandfather would have told you to do to save money are things enviro-Nazis will tell you to do to save mother Gaia

In this new age of Obama the words of Atlas Shrugged seem a little too accurate for comfort.  People could always make the argument that the government had too many regulations, was strangling business, and hampering the overall good of society as a result.  But there weren’t people who were “going Galt.” That is, the men of the mind never retreated never ran away.  They continued to persist, just shouldering additional government intrusion as a necessary part of doing business.  I very well may be wrong about this. For all I know there could have been all sorts of people “going Galt” in the past. Perhaps during Jimmy Carters reign?  But I don’t know about that. So, for this essay it is irrelevant.

In the past week or so, however, there have been two examples of “going Galt,” which were made strikingly clear in the news media.  First was the public resignation of an AIG exec, who was fed up with receiving nothing but ridicule and abuse in return for working 12 hour days for $1 a year. And this was simply to attempt to safely wind down a company, which in the case of collapse, would the pretty much be the end of the world (This is what everyone was told at least).  Rather than thanking this man for serving his company, and realistically his country well, he is essentially held up as an example of true evil in our time.   So he said enough is enough. He donated his retention bonus to charity, rather than giving the money back, because he realized it would be wasted by the government or AIG, although they are essentially one in the same now. 

The second example of going Galt was the threatened cancellation of an order of Boeing jets by Fed Ex.  Fed Ex essentially came out and said we cannot guarantee we will take those planes, because if card check legislation is passed it will greatly impact how we do business.  The law in questions has not even been passed yet and already a shrewd company is hedging its bets.  How many tools will go unused because of a cancelled order?  How many workers will not get pay check? How many children will go to sleep hungry because Congress might pass a patently un-American law? (That last part is a good example of typical liberal hyperbole turned back on them, WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THAT!?!?!)

Any way, you may read this and decide I am simply drawing conclusions based off of anecdotal events, and that may very well be the case.  But there have been other stories of people talking about paring down their business so they are under the 250k mark to avoid taxes. If this is not curbing ones productivity because of the government, then I don’t know what is?  Feel free to comment, especially if you know of other examples of people “going Galt”. I would like to see how many other examples are out there so forward this likes it’s hot.

I am about 100 pages away from being done with Shrugged, and this post may very well be the results of being simply engrossed in the text.  I may be seeing the world through Rand-Colored glasses, but I think we will begin to see more people “going Galt.”