RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 12
BLOGS 11
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
| Clinton Gender Card Threepeat | Liberal Fascism Over the Rainbow |
The World's Cheapest Car: Tata Nano
by Christopher Chantrill
January 10, 2008 at 3:50 am
SOME THINGS are more important than politics, as we all know. The children, for example.
Also personal transportation. And today there was a milestone in personal transportation.
You can get a measure of the excitement from Richard S. Chang of the New York Times reporting from India.
Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.
And now it is here, the 4-passenger Tata Nano, available for a price of 1 lakh rupees later this year.
The Indian media is naturally very proud. The Hindustan Times reports:
Nano, Tata Motors’ Rs 1,00,000 "people’s car" unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi on Thursday will help the common man shift from two-wheelers to four-wheelers, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said.
“This is a proud moment for India,” he said.
Unfamiliar with rupees and lakhs? Oh, fie, what kind of a multiculturalist are you?
A “lakh” is 100,000. The Indians also have another important number, the “crore.” The crore is 100 lakh, or 10 million. You can check out the Indian number system here. One interesting aspect of this is that a crore is written as 1,00,00,000. What do you think of that?
The confusion is that we have a mixture of Greek in “nano” and Indian in “lakh.” Are you still with me?
OK, I’ll stop with the multi-culti stuff. The Tata Nano comes in at $2,500. Which is some kind of a price.
Some people are upset about this. They are worried about saving the planet. Imagine tens of crores of Indians driving around in these little Nanos! It will kill the planet and cause glaciers in Greenland to melt.
But I am thinking of something more prosaic. Right now, people of modest income in the developing world tend to ride around on 125ml Honda motorcycles. Sometimes the whole family is draped across the bike. This is not safe. Now families can ride in their four-wheeled Tata Nano with its 2-cylinder 33 hp 660ml engine. It will be much safer.
Other people are worried about “chaos” on the pot-holed rural roads of India.
There’s solution to that, of course. Build more roads! Most of the populated areas of India are dead flat, so it shouldn’t be too expensive.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
mysql close 0