This Texas Rambler is preparing her own Anthem

I usually refrain from posting about anything personal, save my convictions. I just don't feel I am as witty as those who make even their lunch seem interesting. Okay, here ya go: I enjoyed pork chops served with southern side dishes, followed by Panamanian coffee given by a well-traveled friend, and a barrage of annoying solicitors, who descend on new houses like a plague. Maybe a little lamb blood on the front posts and above the front door will make them passover my house and keep them from waking my napping first born.

I feel like rambling, so ramble I will.

I just finished reading Anthem by Ayn Rand and I liked it alright, except it reminded me a little of the creative paper I wrote in 6th grade about the mothballing of nuclear weapons, a stock market crash, and communist invasion ("Red Dawn" was a little influencial, I suppose). I enjoy Ayn Rand's thought provoking work, but I have disdain for those neo-lib/neo-con Ph.D. hacks, who spin her work and pen sentences beginning with "But." When did environmentalists vote to want to destroy mankind and return to loin cloths... oh yea, in the name of transforming our planet into the garden of Eden? I must have missed that newsletter. Great. I would be cast out of Eden like Lilith anyway. Perhaps polluting is "sacrificing others to himself" and is contrary to Rand's teachings. I drive a car, I enjoy the fruits of capitalism, and yet I possess a love of clean air, water, and the aesthetic beauty of the natural world. You wanna live in a filthy polluted hell... then by all means move to Galveston County and enjoy. Rand is quoted as defending the right to abortion and she blasts religion and mysticism, so I wish neo-cons would stop aligning themselves with her writings. Neo-asses love her views on laissez faire capitalism, but fail to acknowledge "[man] must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. "Ayn Rand believed in order to be an objectivist, a follower of her philosophy, one must agree with all tenents of Objectivism. Do I consider myself an objectivist? I guess not. I do not believe laissez faire capitalism works, despite being an impressive ideal. Laissez faire would be an easier sell if workers would not need to organize, governments would not need to regulate, and taxes would not be necessary to raise the standards of a society. In a perfect world, those at the bottom would refuse to consume products and services offered by irresponsible businessmen at the top and businessmen would refuse to be irresponsible. I think too many people are ignorant, irresponsible, and greedy for capitalism to be completely unregulated. I guess I like knowing what food has in it (thanks to government required labeling), knowing that (supposedly) companies are not allowed to pollute my drinking water, and that workers are allowed the luxury of not being slaves to feudal lords. I vote with my dollar, but does anyone else? If we all did, we would find we have more power than we thought... more power than all the unheeded regulations in the world. "Let them do" as long as it is ethical, honorable, and for the good of all, but naturally not at the expense of one.

Oh yea... and an objectivist probably can't read their horoscope.

"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"

-Thomas Jefferson