Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Sunday, January 15, 2012

No 'Play Dates' with the PM -Iron Lady Falls to Anna Quindlen Doctrine:

Finally a review of "Iron Lady" that can be trusted. It goes beyond tiptoeing about the female "King Lear" allusion.
This review gets to the chronic allegory that is too easily extruded from Hollywood and especially from the "Alar Expert" Streep.
Great mimicry and make-up make for an interesting spectacle, but not great acting and certainly not a great film. I'll pass on this one and wait to see it on a smaller screen.
Margaret Thatcher transcended sexism. She was an inspiring figure and speaker for both the British and Americans. She was the steadying hand on the helm of Ronald Reagan's ship of state when it needed course correction during the Cold War. She was human, and much more, and in no way deserves to be trivialized.
I hope to see a review by Claire Berlinski.

Iron Lady Falls to Anna Quindlen Doctrine: Virginia Postrel - Bloomberg
....

Contrary to the critics, framing Thatcher’s story with her current dementia, which her daughter has written about, is not intrinsically disrespectful. Nor does it necessarily undercut her accomplishments.

The problem, rather, is that grafted on to what could be an affecting story of greatness and decline is an invidious, and gratuitous, moral. Call it the Gospel According to Anna Quindlen, the writer and columnist who enshrined its maxims in a commencement speech she wrote in 1999 and eventually turned into the best-selling book “A Short Guide to a Happy Life.” “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office,” she instructed. “Don’t ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: ‘If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’”

Karmic Payback

The film presents Thatcher as just such a rat -- a woman who too zealously pursued public achievement and spent way too much time at the office. Rather than universal loss, the loneliness of her old age represents a kind of karmic payback for her hubris in seeking to leave something more to history than her genes.

We get the first hint of this message as the elderly Thatcher wistfully watches home movies of her young family playing at the seashore. “You can rewind it, but you can’t change it,” Denis counsels. (Long dead, he’s a figment of her imagination who serves, as former Thatcher speechwriter John O’Sullivan observes, as the film’s version of a Greek chorus.) What exactly would she want to change? ....

-Read on at link-

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