Capitalismo vs Trabantismo

Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport

The first Veyron is an engineering marvel. That's the one with the massively reinforced roof .... It stands as one of the greatest achievements of the petroleum age. It required the intellectual might of one of the largest and arguably smartest car companies in the world to birth a car that was not only faster than anything on the road, but easy enough to pilot that anyone could drive it.

To make the Grand Sport, Bugatti's engineers had to do the same thing, only with a giant hole in the middle .... The result is the most structurally rigid convertible in the world, which, miraculously, weighs no more and goes no slower than the coupe on which it is based.

In the Grand Sport it [60 mph] takes a hair under 2.5 [seconds]. How does it feel to command that pace? Godlike.

We're at the end of the petroleum era, the end of a golden age of supercars where speed can be sought regardless of consequence. It's highly unlikely that a major automaker will ever be able to justify spending the time and money to develop a fossil-fuel-powered car that can top the Veyron's combination of power, speed, handling, driveability and flat-out luxury ... the last king of the gas-guzzlers, forever the greatest. All hail.

Happy 4th July

Ron Paul: Happy Fourth of July!

Tortura (4)

Carlos Guimarães Pinto n'O Insurgente:

Maria João Pires tem um projecto pessoal que muitos consideram meritório. Podia ter financiado o projecto recorrendo às suas poupanças pessoais, receitas de vendas de discos e concertos, a doações voluntárias de todos aqueles que consideram o projecto meritório, organizando rifas, prostituindo-se ou mendigando. Acabou por optar pela forma menos digna, embora mais usual entre os seus colegas de profissão, de se financiar: extorquindo dinheiro aos restantes contribuintes.

Tortura (3)

Há três anos, escrevi aqui:

Maria João Pires lanzarotou-se: abalou para o Brasil, agastada com a "tortura" que sofreu em Portugal. Por outras palavras, todas as fibras do seu ser foram brutalizadas pela falta de reconhecimento monetário do Estado português pela sua incontestável grandeza artística. A artista disse "basta". E foi para a terra de Heitor Villa-Lobos.

Hoje finalmente as boas notícias: Maria João Pires renuncia à nacionalidade portuguesa. Good riddance! Que se vão todos os parasitas subsídio-dependentes. Não há pachorra para estes novos-imortais, arrogantemente acima das materialidades mundanas, desavergonhadamente dependentes da mesada do Estado. Que levem o seu direito divino ao reconhecimento da pátria para bem longe. Estes insolentes são os primeiros na fila de espera para exigir um tributo automático que é tão natural — e tão inquestionável —, que só não aparece porque a pátria é ingrata. Pois reduzam-se à sua insignificância. Longe.

Corninhos

Não foi o respeito pelo parlamento que colocou Manuel Pinho na rua. Foram os resultados das eleições europeias. Se tivesse sido pelo respeito, parte do Governo já tinha ido parar à rua, a começar pelo Ministro que por lá se senta todos os dias.

Citação do Dia

Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.

Papa João Paulo II

Presente do Dia

Zaha Hadid designs new music hall in sync with J S Bach

É pá antes que me esqueça

Cinco anos de A Arte da Fuga. Parabéns Adolfo!

globalização

De um amigo meu, há pouco no Facebook:

◊◊◊◊◊◊ ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ is breaking his head over tax and residency papers... Spanish company, Singapore citizen, British contract, work in Turkey, permanent-ish address in India, no residency... WTF :S :(

No fim de contas, é uma pessoa a tentar fazer um trabalho honesto.
Para a burocracia iluminada, um quebra-cabeças.

o socialismo abrindo caminho para um Estado corporativo

Et Tu, Big Business? por Jonah Goldberg:

Everywhere we look we see the great and once-great beneficiaries of free markets running to the state for protection from the cruel bullying of competition.

General Motors and Chrysler have gone .... pimped-out prostitutes of the state .... eager to do the bidding of the president and the UAW.

Once-proud companies like GE have become seduced by global-warming schemes because they recognize that there’s more money to be made selling white elephants to Uncle Sam than there is selling competitive products consumers want.

This week, Philip Morris, the biggest of the big tobacco companies, supported and won passage of an “anti-tobacco” bill that will make it easier for Philip Morris to sell cigarettes by making it harder for smaller, more innovative firms to compete.

.... big companies will understand the surest way to attain immortality is to become too big to fail. Once they’ve achieved that privileged status, these companies will become de facto wards of the state, insured for life at taxpayer expense.

Real freedom means the freedom to fail as well as succeed. Big business wants to be protected from the former and deny competitors the latter. And their betrayal, more than anything, disheartens those who would defend both freedoms.

Plataforma Resistência Nacional

Via O Insurgente, Plataforma Resistência Nacional:

E temos um sonho. O sonho de que Portugal vai merecer um Dia diferente. O Dia em que:

- os deputados não se arvorem em doutrinadores-educadores das crianças alheias.

Ideologias como sistemas de gestão de fazendas

Muito exagerado, mas algumas analogias boas:


True News 13: Statism is Dead - Part 3 - The Matrix

O racismo do socialista egalitário

“Whatever the City’s ultimate aim—however well intentioned or benevolent it might have seemed—the City made its employment decision because of race.” de Damon W. Root na Reason:

That's from Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Ricci v. Destefano. As I anticipated, Kennedy contributed the crucial swing vote, overturning the 2nd Circuit ruling joined by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

From today's decision:

All the evidence demonstrates that .... the City rejected the test results because "too many whites and not enough minorities would be promoted were the lists to be certified."... Without some other justification .... employers cannot take adverse employment actions because of an individual's race.

.... the City made its employment decision because of race.

O progressismo pretende eliminar casos presumidos de discriminação baseada na raça. O objectivo nunca foi 'proteger' os sentimentos das pessoas protegidas. Sempre foi construir uma sociedade artificial que deva a sua génese e a sua perpetuação ao Estado. Para chegar lá, o Estado precisa de ser racista. Mesmo que isso custe vidas.

’it takes a village’ - as crianças como bem público

The missed-conceptions of the welfare state por Philip Booth no blog do IEA:

In countries with a welfare state, however, children become “public goods”. My children will pay your pension and your children will pay my pension. The usual public good condition of “non-excludability” has been artificially created.

Nobody has any direct incentive to either save (because we get retirement provision from the state) or to have children (because in the state pay-as-you-go system, as opposed to the family one, we can all rely on everybody else to have children - so nobody does!).

A Roma Antiga e lições contra o socialismo contemporâneo

Via The economic way of thinking — e altamente recomendada —, a história da Road to Serfdom no Império Romano, por efeito da política fiscal e monetária dos imperadores romanos; e uma master-class sobre os princípios de uma sociedade livre:

Here's the Foundation for Economic Education's president, Larry Reed, giving a talk at Northwood University titled "Lessons from History We Dare Not Ignore." The talk draws lessons from the history of ancient Rome, and it's far better television than most other Sunday morning alternatives.

The Great Depression and the Current Financial Crisis

Que não haja dúvidas

Estado y delegación de decisiones por Francisco Capella no Instituto Juan de Mariana:

Algunas personas defienden la existencia del Estado porque desean que tome decisiones en su nombre en ciertos ámbitos: les gusta que el Gobierno decida por ellos y creen que les soluciona muchos problemas ("te lo da todo hecho"), ni siquiera lo ven como un mal menor.

Quienes delegan sus elecciones en el Estado tal vez no han pensado en cómo violan la libertad ajena. O quizás sí: es posible que consigan exactamente lo que quieren, imponer sus decisiones sobre todos .... que no haya diferencias, que no se pueda elegir y se imponga el mismo menú a todos.

Las personas intolerantes no se contentan con vivir sus propias vidas respetando las de los demás. Sienten miedo o repugnancia por la libertad ajena, y son capaces de aceptar restricciones sobre sí mismos con tal de que también se las impongan a los demás: el Estado es su herramienta uniformizadora favorita.

Dúvida liberal-existencial

Usucapio libertatis por Antonio España:

La secuencia lógica es la siguiente:

(1) el Estado -que disfruta del monopolio de la coacción y la violencia legal- está conformado por una minoría de hombres, (2) los hombres, generalizando la definición que Mises aplicabla a los consumidores, somos como jerarcas egoístas, implacables, caprichosos y volubles, difíciles de contentar, (3) ergo el Estado, que no es una institución divina (como creían los Egipcios) ni suprahumana o metafísica (como pensaba la estatolatría prusiana del s. XIX), sino una institución netamente humana, se ve necesariamente aquejado por los mismos males que los hombres que lo conforman.

Como corolario dos preguntas: (a) ¿queremos darle poderes ilimitados a una institución que de antemano sabemos que es imperfecta? (b) ¿No preferiremos limitar el poder para así, limitar el daño que puedan hacer?

¿Por qué preferimos una respuesta afirmativa a (a) que a (b)?

crises comparadas

Via Reason Hit&Run,

O debate não acabou, apesar da censura política (3)

Via O Insurgente, After Global Warming por Larrey Anderson no American Thinker:

Science and ideology don't mix. They never have and they never will. The house of cards that is the science behind "climate change" is collapsing at exactly the same time it is being imposed by the Obama administration and Congress as an ideological "truth." America is facing the perfect storm of an imploding scientific theory that will be enforced by the rule of law.

Make no mistake: the big bad wolf of truth is about to blow the straw house of global warming to bits. This is why there was a sudden shift, in the last nine months, from the use of "man made global warming" to "climate change" by the proponents of the theory.

###

The predictions of impending doom are nothing new. Business and Media Institute published an article titled "Fire and Ice" that details the media's historical treatment of the debate. The article includes these two charts of historical time lines that say it all:

O debate não acabou, apesar da censura política (2)

The Climate Change Climate Change The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere por Kimberley Strassel no Wall Street Journal:

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

The extreme Right worthy of its name

SA@Takimag - The Extreme Right
We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here

Live free or die

Via Walter Williams, a palestra "Live Free or Die" de Mark Steyn (PDF, leitura recomendada) no Hillsdale College:

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct.

A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values,” the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly.”

Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of “family friendly” policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. America’s fertility rate is more or less at replacement level — 2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility — 1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered .... the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families.

When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence — the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

O debate não acabou, apesar da censura política

“Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)” (PDF) present(s) an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The scholarship in this book demonstrates overwhelming scientific support for the position that the warming of the twentieth century was moderate and not unprecedented, that its impact on human health and wildlife was positive, and that carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change.

The authors cite thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books that were ignored by the IPCC.

Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), was released on Tuesday, June 2, at a press conference at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Climate Change.