Shaun Kenney

Brandon Bell has a point, and it’s not going away:

When this story involving Everquest first broke earlier in the year, I posted that it caused me great concern for our potential US Senate nominee. It was apparent from my research that there may be a “purp walk” for those involved in the Everquest scheme. Everquest was, if you don’t remember, a company set up to offload non performing sub prime mortgage investments from Bear Stearn’s hedge funds. The company tried to go public in the summer of 2007 but failed when it became apparent what the purpose of the company was. The problem for Gov. Gilmore was, and is, he was the Chairman of the Board of Everquest Financial. It was his responsibility for hiring Ralph Cioffi as CEO. I noted when the Gilmore campaign issued a press release when the story first broke that it was filled with holes. It seemed to be written by someone with no true knowledge of the situation or someone with something to hide.

Fair point… and given the most recent 27point deficit Gilmore is running, things don’t look good for the home team.

The Vatican has banned Dan Brown film Angels and Demons from being filmed in Rome’s Catholic parishes:

Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, head of the Vatican’s Prefecture for Economic Affairs, said that the author had “turned the Gospels upside down to poison the faith. It would be unacceptable to transform churches into film sets so that his blasphemous novels can be made into mendacious films in the name of business.”

One only wishes our bishops would be so firm on other, more important items.

I’ve always wondered whether or not the good old-fashioned interdict would hurt or help:

The stories over the weekend were bad enough – the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submisisons. Drudge Report is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor.

After heavy criticism over the last few days, the A.P. is in damage control mode, says the NYTimes, and retreating from their earlier position. But from what I read, they’re just pushing their case further.

…

So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

A hypothetical: What if Americans divided their news between several competing columnar sources? One American reads only the left-leaning news, another the right-leaning news, one reads only sources such as the AP, and yet another reads exclusively open-sourced media.

How do they converse?

James Young notices that the Democratic candidate in the 6th District running against Congressman Goodlatte claims to have visited Palestine, to which the lunatic fringe responds:

What do I care about the opinion of someone who thinks it’s cute and funny to use a McCarthyite political slur like, “Democrat Party”?

Not exactly the most erudite response, but a worthwhile reflection of the Democrat(ic?) he is supporting.

Charlie Fugate returns to the Virginia Blogosphere , this time with an announcement.

Soren Dayton gives an intensive look at the failings of liberaltarianism. His criticisms are remarkably similar to those leveled by many conservatives against The Daily Kos’ nemesis par excellence, one President George Bush:

(T)o really win, we are going to have to develop a serious anti-government and anti-big business critique. Only when people see that the Democrats have (and indeed already are) whored themselves out to business will we be able to credibly get the majority back.. But we aren’t going to win by advocating for our own crony capitalism. We are going to need a reform agenda that attacks precisely this problem. And it is going to have to be relevant to the information ecomony that we are increasingly moving towards.

Excellent post.

Rep. Eric Cantor takes a crack at the the Drill Nothing Congress

:

Congress should act to pass a bill prior to July 4 that would allow for the exploration of oil and gas in the deep ocean floor, as well in ANWR and other parts of the United States. We should streamline the regulatory process for the construction of nuclear power plants as well as refineries. A bill like this would send a serious signal that America intends to address the current supply crunch. In turn, global markets would likely respond and downward price pressure could set in.

But instead, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid in the Senate cling to their beliefs that somehow higher gas prices are acceptable and we should do nothing. This is wrong, and the American people know this is wrong.

Amen to that.

Not to stir the pot or anything, but an argument could be made that the Democrats want higher gas prices, for two reasons: (1) the environmentalist faction of the Democratic Party truly and honestly revels in the proverbial car wreck, and (2) high energy prices are — like all things in the Democratic Weltschauung — the fault of President Bush.

Survey says… yes, and in huge ways.

download bandits dvd

Not bad.

It’s an Epicurean poem, of sorts. One of the consolations of philosophy, reading as follows:

There is nothing to fear from God,
There is nothing to feel from death.
Good things can be acquired,
Bad things can be endured.

Truth be told, I have never read much of Epicurus. Yet as a response to the first century Roman Empire’s love of all things cynical and cruel, it was a remarkable intellectual response to the material excesses of the day.

I stumbled upon the tetrapharmakon while reading another book from my grandfather’s library about the moral values of the ancient world. The author touched on a number of subjects, but one that he specifically mentions is that of autarxia, or self-sufficiency as the highest good in the eyes of the Greeks — specifically as a reaction to hedonism and excess.

In the end, the author is particularly critical of Aristotle for being of two minds on the subject. Aristotle, while he praises self-sufficiency, does not go so far as to say human beings should be so independent that they shun social contact. Seeing a contradiction, the author pushes further in saying that the Greeks (and the Romans as their inheritors) both shunned the concept of pity as a sin against self-sufficency, namely because pity imposed a certain feeling that the misfortune of others required an act on those who displayed high levels of autarxia, and therefore was a vice.

Christianity would be the salve that would heal such a wound, as it preached the virtues of mercy in a world which thought little of the mass slaughter of human beings — whether in war or by the entertainment of the Colosseum.

In our modern age, one day there will be a temptation to withdraw from the excesses of commercialism, luxury, and hedonism. The ancient philosophers took these to extremes themselves in order to demonstrate the virtuous nature of their cause, living in caves or disposing of every possession possible.

Does this necessarily mean that the self-sufficent must lack in pity in order to be logically consistent? Jefferson certainly did not believe so, and in fact one might argue that self-sufficiency is the prerequisite for any true sense of altruistic pity, otherwise how could one give that which is not yours?

Otherwise, the objectivists such as Ayn Rand are totally correct by saying altruism is the greatest sin one could commit. I’ve certainly disagreed with this sentiment before, and proscribed the antidote for such intellectual mayhem: That altrusim communicates trust, and that without trust there is no free market — which is probably the single best basis for self-sufficient individuals to interact with one another and resolves neatly the problem of social interaction (and incidentally, saves Aristotle from the critics).