As GraniteGrok is, in part, named from a word from Heinlein best seller “Stranger in a Strange Land” – grok), this is appropriate. From Instapundit:
THE ITALIAN JUSTICE SYSTEM HAS NOT BEEN COVERING ITSELF WITH GLORY LATELY: Italian scientists convicted over earthquake warning.
This calls into mind Robert Heinlein:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
This has created a lot of incentives for scientists to leave Italy and to avoid giving any sort of earthquake advice to the Italian government. I predict a run of bad luck.
This can ALSO certainly be applied to how Obama has governed (ruled?) these last 4 years: railing against the successful – those that have the bright ideas that have led to innovations that drive the productivity that leads to profits that leads to the wealth for individuals.
It is that word, individual, that so assaults the sensitivities of our Collectivist-in-Chief. Only by making the successful “The Other” can he sugar-coat a most abysmal philosophy – that a forced communitarianism that leaves little individual choice is better for us all, that rulings & regulations from a select few can successfully manage an economy of hundreds of millions (F.A. Hayek’s hubris of knowledge).
This has been tried – and it has failed (e.g., Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, other Soviet dominated nations, China, Viet Nam). As you listen to the debate, keep an ear out for those hints of collectivism that will drop from Obama’s tongue.
