The Rational Mind

I’ve updated my art gallery with several new artists, including a new pin-up section and a number of artists from Quent Cordair fine art, who kindly allowed me to feature them. I made the gallery from my collection of 1600 paintings and drawings, the bulk of which come from the Art Renewal Center. (More art links.) You can also browse my photo album and the originals.

Cox and Forkum has a great cartoon about the Wright brothers, celebrating their tremendous achievement, and lamenting the lack of innovation in the aviation industry today.

As Heike Berthold explains, there has not been a radically new civilian aircraft design in 50 years. While technology has surged ahead in every field, today’s jetliners and private aircraft are virtually the same as those of 40 or 50 years ago.

While FAA bureaucrats engage in constant “restructuring,” the weight of government regulation and leftist judges have made it prohibitively expensive to release a new aircraft design and has restricted private flying to a hobby for wealthy individuals who can afford to spend thousands of hours getting the proper certifications. Because the government has made selling aircraft commercially so expensive, more people build their own experimental planes than buy them today, and most U.S. small aircraft are now at least 25 years old. Imagine how difficult the government would have to make selling a new car to force most people to build their own or own a 25 to 50 year-old model. Not surprisingly, the kits being assembled today are often more advanced (using advanced composites and avionics) than the new pre-assembled airplanes being sold today. (And the same kind of attitude pervades space flight.) The technology is here. It is our philosophy that America needs to rediscover.

A great story from Radley Balko @ Fox News: “Greed Makes the World Go ‘Round.”

China’s Communist authorities recently shut down shut down a sex museum and sentenced several people to life for organizing an orgy. The Communist Party quips: “Sex Still a Dirty Word in China.” (More here and here.) While underground porn and prostitution is widespread and tolerated in China’s large urban areas, any attempt to legitimize sexuality is strictly banned. Why?
The short answer is that sex is a strictly selfish action. Romantic love is a profoundly self-interested pursuit of one’s personal happiness. To quote Ayn Rand,

Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut.

In accordance with its collectivist/altruist philosophy, the Communist Party accepts two views of sex: as a somber marital duty, and (more commonly) as a lower animal instinct to be suppressed and hidden. The liberalization of China’s urban youth and the rediscovery of China’s rich sexual history is a threat to the collectivist idea that servitude to the State is the only acceptable function of life. The threat posed by the selfish pursuit of one’s happiness is the driving motivation for authoritarian regimes of all kinds to have joined organized religion in fiercely opposing public acceptance of sexuality as a natural and moral activity.

From Cox and Forkum

Jerusalem Post:

Fathi Salman, 50, a taxi driver, described the arrest of Saddam as a “black day” for the Palestinians. “This is a black day for all the Palestinians and all the Arabs and Muslims,” he said. “I still can’t believe that President Saddam has been captured by the Americans. Saddam was the only Arab leader who cared about us. He supported the Palestinian cause from the beginning. His arrest is a major setback for the Palestinians. It’s a pity that he didn’t fight.”

Khairiyeh Said, 43, a high-school teacher, said she wept when she watched Saddam in captivity. “I was sitting with my friends when we heard the bad news,” she added. “We all started crying because we love Saddam and we hate [US President George W.] Bush and [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon. This is a big victory for Bush and Sharon and all the enemies of the Palestinian people. We hope the Iraqi resistance will now teach the American dogs a good lesson.”
…
During the past three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, Saddam sent millions of dollars to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including US$25,000 for the family of each suicide bomber and US$10,000 for each Palestinian killed in fighting with Israelis.

“I love him so much, I can’t stand watching it while he’s in custody,” Raafat Logman, 23, said as he was shooting pool. “We are surprised. We are so sad,” said Sameh Aloul, 22.

“It’s true,” said a U.S. intelligence official in Baghdad about the arrest of the former dictator. The official wouldn’t give any more details except to confirm that the former dictator had been detained the night before…
Celebratory gunfire erupted across Baghdad as the news of the fallen Iraqi president’s arrest spread across the town. Iraqis showed their joy that the brutal leader had been detained by firing bursts of automatic weapons fire into the air.

My, how the mighty have fallen:

Update:
Not surprisingly, liberals are distraught over Saddam’s capture. One remarks “Sigh. All I can think about is the effect of Saddam’s capture on the Dean campaign! … Somebody cheer me up, please!”
Leftists everywhere are secretly (and sometimes openly) hoping for more casualties. The media is doing their part too: not more than a few minutes after the story broke, (yes, I was up) I saw headlines on CNN and MSNBC proclaiming “Saddam’s capture could lead to more violence.” The headlines seem to have disappeared after Iraqis everywhere decided to celebrate rather than vow revenge. Anyway, I have to go work on my data mining project, so read up on the story at Hootinan and the Command Post.

“The Edge,” a slick and glossy publication produced by the TAMU Business Council is one of the most anti-business magazines I’ve ever read. Whether bashing McDonalds or the “moral depravity” of Martha Stewart, some of the editorials beat Pravda in their distate for capitalism. The only jobs I’ve seen praised are for non-business groups like the military and the CIA. And that’s the truth.

I’m embarrassed to admit that “Free Willy” was my favorite movie when it first came out (back when I was an enviro-freak.) So I found this interesting:

Keiko, the killer whale made famous by the “Free Willy” movies, has died in Norwegian coastal waters where he remained after millions of dollars and a decade of work failed to coax him back to the open sea, his caretakers said early Saturday…. The project — to reintegrate Keiko with a pod of wild killer whales — cost more than $20 million and stirred interest and ire worldwide.

Apparently orcas are smart enough to know that living “close to nature” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. $20 million and all the environmentalists in the world couldn’t convince Keiko to leave human civilization. If only the environmentalists were so smart…

Check out “The Racism of ‘Diversity'” a great editorial by Peter Schwartz starring Texas A&M’s president Robert Gates. Gates sent out a university-wide email announcing that
race will not be used as a factor in admissions. I applaud the announcement, but wonder why he promoties other racist policies, such as hiring a new diversity czar. The contradiction becomes readily apparent at Texas A&M’s “community plan,” where the administration’s goals are plainly visible: