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The principles that rule this blog

Principles that will govern my thoughts as I express them here (from my opening statement):


  • Freedom of the individual should be as total as possible, limited only by the fact that nobody should be free to cause physical injury to another, or to deprive another person of his freedoms.
  • Government is necessary primarily to provide those services that private enterprise won't, or won't at a price that people can afford.
  • No person has a right to have his own beliefs on religious, moral, political, or other controversial issues imposed on others who do not share those beliefs.

I believe that Abraham Lincoln expressed it very well:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot
so well do, for themselves — in their separate, individual capacities.”


Comments will be invited, and I will attempt to reply to any comments that are offered in a serious and non-abusive manner. However, I will not tolerate abusive or profane language (my reasoning is that this is my blog, and so I can control it; I wouldn't interfere with your using such language on your own!)

If anyone finds an opinion that I express to be contrary to my principles, they are welcome to point this out. I hope that I can make a rational case for my comments. Because, in fact, one label I'll happily accept is rationalist.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

“Obama 2016” — the movie to see

Yesterday my wife and I saw the movie “Obama 2016,” which is getting an amazing degree of box-office success for a “documentary.” Our reactions were a little different — it may finally make her decide once and for all to vote for Mitt Romney, whereas for me it seemed to say a lot that I already knew — but the only reason for the difference is that I had been aware of so much that was in the movie, which was in fact based on two books by Dinesh D'Souza. She has discounted some of the information I've given her in the past because it came from me, and she is aware of what I think of President Obama, but the point I made after the movie was that a lot of the reason I oppose the President is because I already knew some of what she learned in the movie.

There are things that even I learned about President Obama: that one of the professors whose classes Obama attended at Columbia University in New York City was Edward Said, the virulently anti-Israel writer (though the movie makes it clear that the anti-colonial point of view Obama inherited from his father is strongly anti-Israel to begin with), that his maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was the one who introduced Barack to the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who became Obama's earliest mentor, which implies that that side of the family (with which he had much more contact than his father's side), must have been pretty left-wing, and that the reason his mother divorced his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was that Soetoro was becoming less enchanted with left-wing politics and actually interested in getting “in” with the business community — which is even more evidence of how left-wing his mother's side of the family was.

While the movie probably made my wife more likely to vote for Mitt Romney — her remark afterward was that this (Obama) is not the kind of person she believes should be running this country — it only was a confirmation of what I was already thinking for me. So a lot will depend on what you already know. Which is why one reporter said you don't need to see it. But if there is any doubt in your mind that Barack Obama is actually anti-American, pro-extreme-left-wing, and opposed to the ideas that made this country great, you must see the movie. I haven't seen a movie in a decade — even with a senior-citizen discount, it cost me $8 (when I was a kid, adults got to see movies for 40¢, and you saw 2 movies for that price! Nothing else costs 40 times what it did then — for most things it's about 10.) so movies are much too expensive to see very often. But this one is worth seeing.

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