a funny story: I work with a guy who idolizes fidel castro and he said that Collins was the only Republican he had ever voted for LOL…..

The rural people who are actually from maine and have been for generations, actually tend to be more conservative. (they are also slandered as trash hicks). Unfortunately they also tend to be of the “don’t rock the boat” type.

Susan Collins represents mainly Northern Maine which is more conservative than Southern Maine. If you look at presidential elections broken down by county, you see that the sparsely populated northern counties tend to go red.

Not that this explains everything but demographics of the constituency do matter sometimes.

is it any wonder that she and i are much of the same mind?

Alissa’s early life mirrored the experience of her most devoted readers. A bright but socially awkward woman, she harbored the suspicion early on that her intellectual gifts caused classmates to shun her. She was born Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg. Her Russian-Jewish family faced severe state discrimination, first for being Jewish under the czars, and then for being wealthy merchants under the Bolsheviks, who stole her family’s home and business for the alleged benefit of the people.
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Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum’s mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that “this may have been Rand’s first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ ”

Rosenbaum dreamed of fame as a novelist and a scriptwriter, and fled to the United States in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. There she adopted her new name, for reasons that remain unclear.

Rosenbaums of the world unite…

[and if your dyslexic.. Disflexics of the world untie!]

Rosenbaum’s political philosophy remained amorphous in her early years. Aside from a revulsion at communism, her primary influence was Nietzsche, whose exaltation of the superior individual spoke to her personally. She wrote of one of the protagonists of her stories that “he does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people”; and she meant this as praise. Her political worldview began to crystallize during the New Deal, which she immediately interpreted as a straight imitation of Bolshevism. Rosenbaum threw herself into advocacy for Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, and after Wilkie’s defeat she bitterly predicted;

Her campaign work brought her into closer contact with conservative intellectuals and pro-business organizations, and helped to refine her generalized anti-communist and crudely Nietzschean worldview into a moral defense of the individual will and unrestrained capitalism.

I am going Galt…

I wish my future to be in Meliflora..

[a marxist talking]
Rand expressed her philosophy primarily through two massive novels: The Fountainhead, which appeared in 1943, and Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in 1957. Both tomes, each a runaway best-seller, portrayed the struggle of a brilliant and ferociously individualistic man punished for his virtues by the weak-minded masses. It was Atlas Shrugged that Rand deemed the apogee of her life’s work and the definitive statement of her philosophy. She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships–that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of “looters and moochers” stealing from society’s productive elements.

“it’s time we realize–as the Reds do–that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.”-ayn rand

i have tried to bring my work forward for years and decades. disenfranchised much like certain students today are being disenfranchised.

so i am going galt.

the mellifera call to me… 🙂

screw the rest of it all…
my parents are dying, and my son is grown
my designs are still in the draw
my artwork not perverse enough
my economics is not enough for a new child as my wife and i want
and i cant get anywhere with the technology i ahve invented and designed (in genomics, and other areas where i actually work).

now i dream of just enough to leave and to stay far enough away to fritter away in peace.

will send fashion week images tonight if i am not too tired… my last time in the tents. I will miss everything, but i cant aford to participate any more.

That annual march attracts hundreds of thousands of peaceful, solid citizens, many of whom arrive on Catholic parish buses. There are thousands of college students, including sizable representation from elite secular universities such as Princeton. There are families with strollers. The march stretches for miles along the route to the Supreme Court building.

This annual march is rarely covered by the MSM, and when it is the articles tend to focus on the very few participants who are holding signs with pictures of bloody fetuses (these are very few and far between, and on the last march I don’t recall seeing any “controversial” images at all. I’m always amazed at the size of the march for life, then go home and look in the newspaper for accurate coverage of the scope and tone of the event. There’s usually nothing, because that would undermine the image of pro-life marchers as members of a small lunatic fringe.

There were a million signs it seems, mostly hand made and pressing individual viewpoints on almost every conceivable issue–some funny, some very artistic–I loved two signs on polls I saw ahead of me in the march up Pennsylvania Ave. that had two fat little piglets dangling from them, a few signs with hammer and sickles here and there, but no references to Hitler that I saw, and certainly nothing that I would consider racist.

The overarching general message I took away was that, ordinary citizens were tired of and frightened of the intrusion of big government into every aspect of their lives, its ruinous overspending, and its arrogant, puffed up, dictatorial, overreaching and unresponsiveness. As Glenn Beck diagnosed, its widespread corruption.

This was about as “salt of the earth” a crowd as you can imagine, with all races and socio/economic groups represented. I did note that there were a few, mostly black “entrepreneurs,” circulating selling buttons with “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flags on them and sumilar things but, again noting particularly harsh. Being a crowd of more than a million–and I do think there were more than a million–the case has been made that it was possibly two million there–I’m sure there were a few idiots with nasty attitudes or signs somewhere in the crowd but, if there were, I didn’t see them. On the Capitol lawn, lots of lawn chairs and ground sheets and groups sitting together–getting more and more crowded–but a lot of interchanges between people too. Speeches–thank God–tended to be very short, with bloviators cut off by the band when their few minutes were up.

I remember standing in line to use the men’s bathroom at the National Arboretum, at the bottom of Capitol Hill–as usual, a short line for men, a loooong line for women–perhaps 100 or more women waiting, and the middle aged woman dressed as a colonial Minuteman who got in line behind me and said, “I’m going to use the men’s bathroom, “hey, I’m a nurse, I’ve seen everything.” And she did; most of the men in the bathroom–an older crowd, me included–hardly batted an eye.

It was a happy crowd, this time.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that liberals must believe that what they are proposing, across the board, will not affect them in the negative at all. I just don’t see how they can even entertain that thought process.