Myrhaf

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Since Jimmy Carter said, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” a remark he has since backed away from (but not retracted), calling it “careless,” there has been some opining among the right that Carter is in fact the worst president in history. Carter was not the worst president in history, not even close. Being a typical Democrat, he was just incompetent, and mere incompetence cannot get really bad things done. For real, competent evil, one must turn to the Republicans. The worst president in history is Richard Nixon. I’m not referring to his most famous failure, Watergate, which was just your average political dirty trick blown out of proportion by the left. Watergate is significant only as the high water mark of the liberal media. The media destroyed a Republican president and for the last three decades aging liberal baby boomers have been desperately trying to repeat the great victory of their youth without success. It has not happened again and with the growth of alternative media, it will never happen again. A comprehensive account of Nixon’s failings would require a book, not a blog post. Here are just a few of his worst moments. What liberals count as Nixon’s best moment, his going to China, was a terrible sell-out of communism’s victims. Nixon spat on the tens of millions of Mao’s victims by treating Mao as morally worthy of meeting instead of as the monster he was. At home Nixon imposed wage and price controls, a purely socialistic intervention in the economy that bumbling Jimmy Carter never could have attempted. He created the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Health and Safety Administration, two assaults on liberty that to this day create anti-capitalist regulations that violate rights and hamper the economy. He expanded the welfare state, creating Supplemental Security Income and indexing Social Security to inflation. He created the Drug Enforcement Agency, probably the biggest move in America’s idiotic war on drugs. But none of these evils is Nixon’s worst moment. He is responsible for the single most destructive act in the history of the American presidency, an act that has destroyed more wealth and worsened more lives than anything before or since. In 1971, as Wikipedia puts it, he “eradicated the last remnants of the gold standard.” This created the inflation crises of the 1970’s and affects us with “moderate” inflation to this day. The high interest rates that Republicans blame Carter for are actually the result of Nixon’s policies. Henry Hazlitt explained inflation thus: …inflation is nothing but a great swindle…. This swindle erodes the purchasing power of everybody's income and the purchasing power of everybody's savings. It is a concealed tax, and the most vicious of all taxes. It taxes the incomes and savings of the poor by the same percentage as the incomes and savings of the rich. It falls with greatest force precisely on the thrifty, on the aged, on those who cannot protect themselves by speculation or by demanding and getting higher money incomes to compensate for the depreciation of the monetary unit. Why does this swindle go on? It goes on because governrnents wish to spend, partly for armaments and in most cases preponderantly for subsidies and handouts to various pressure groups, but lack the courage to tax as much as they spend. It goes on, in other words, because governments wish to buy the votes of some of us while concealing from the rest of us that those votes are being bought with our own money. It goes on because politicians (partly through the second- or third-hand influence of the theories of the late Lord Keynes) think that this is the way, and the only way, to maintain "full employment," the present-day fetish of the self-styled progressives. It goes on because the international gold standard has been abandoned, because the world's currencies are essentially paper currencies, adrift without an anchor, blown about by every political wind, and at the mercy of every bureaucratic caprice. And the very governments that are inflating profess solemnly to be "fighting" inflation. Through cheap-money policies, or the printing press, or both, they increase the supply of money and credit and affect to deplore the inevitable result. Watergate was a misdemeanor compared to this enormity. By taking the final step of detaching the dollar from gold, Richard Nixon made the great swindle possible. Government spending will continue to grow as long as politicians know they can get away with this hidden tax while at the same time lecturing petroleum companies and other corporations about rising prices -- and then using the high prices that the state caused with inflation to further expand the power of the state! Jimmy Carter is a street corner hoodlum compared to Nixon, the Al Capone of American presidents. </img> </img> </img> View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Since Jimmy Carter said, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” a remark he has since backed away from (but not retracted), calling it “careless,” there has been some opining among the right that Carter is in fact the worst president in history. Carter was not the worst president in history, not even close. Being a typical Democrat, he was just incompetent, and mere incompetence cannot get really bad things done. For real, competent evil, one must turn to the Republicans. The worst president in history is Richard Nixon. I’m not referring to his most famous failure, Watergate, which was just your average political dirty trick blown out of proportion by the left. Watergate is significant only as the high water mark of the liberal media. The media destroyed a Republican president and for the last three decades aging liberal baby boomers have been desperately trying to repeat the great victory of their youth without success. It has not happened again and with the growth of alternative media, it will never happen again. A comprehensive account of Nixon’s failings would require a book, not a blog post. Here are just a few of his worst moments. What liberals count as Nixon’s best moment, his going to China, was a terrible sell-out of communism’s victims. Nixon spat on the tens of millions of Mao’s victims by treating Mao as morally worthy of meeting instead of as the monster he was. At home Nixon imposed wage and price controls, a purely socialistic intervention in the economy that bumbling Jimmy Carter never could have attempted. He created the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Health and Safety Administration, two assaults on liberty that to this day create anti-capitalist regulations that violate rights and hamper the economy. He expanded the welfare state, creating Supplemental Security Income and indexing Social Security to inflation. He created the Drug Enforcement Agency, probably the biggest move in America’s idiotic war on drugs. But none of these evils is Nixon’s worst moment. He is responsible for the single most destructive act in the history of the American presidency, an act that has destroyed more wealth and worsened more lives than anything before or since. In 1971, as Wikipedia puts it, he “eradicated the last remnants of the gold standard.” This created the inflation crises of the 1970’s and affects us with “moderate” inflation to this day. The high interest rates that Republicans blame Carter for are actually the result of Nixon’s policies. Henry Hazlitt explained inflation thus: …inflation is nothing but a great swindle…. This swindle erodes the purchasing power of everybody's income and the purchasing power of everybody's savings. It is a concealed tax, and the most vicious of all taxes. It taxes the incomes and savings of the poor by the same percentage as the incomes and savings of the rich. It falls with greatest force precisely on the thrifty, on the aged, on those who cannot protect themselves by speculation or by demanding and getting higher money incomes to compensate for the depreciation of the monetary unit. Why does this swindle go on? It goes on because governrnents wish to spend, partly for armaments and in most cases preponderantly for subsidies and handouts to various pressure groups, but lack the courage to tax as much as they spend. It goes on, in other words, because governments wish to buy the votes of some of us while concealing from the rest of us that those votes are being bought with our own money. It goes on because politicians (partly through the second- or third-hand influence of the theories of the late Lord Keynes) think that this is the way, and the only way, to maintain "full employment," the present-day fetish of the self-styled progressives. It goes on because the international gold standard has been abandoned, because the world's currencies are essentially paper currencies, adrift without an anchor, blown about by every political wind, and at the mercy of every bureaucratic caprice. And the very governments that are inflating profess solemnly to be "fighting" inflation. Through cheap-money policies, or the printing press, or both, they increase the supply of money and credit and affect to deplore the inevitable result. Watergate was a misdemeanor compared to this enormity. By taking the final step of detaching the dollar from gold, Richard Nixon made the great swindle possible. Government spending will continue to grow as long as politicians know they can get away with this hidden tax while at the same time lecturing petroleum companies and other corporations about rising prices -- and then using the high prices that the state caused with inflation to further expand the power of the state! Jimmy Carter is a street corner hoodlum compared to Nixon, the Al Capone of American presidents. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Instapundit posts on the health dangers of a vegan diet. Bill Quick responds: Vegans are whackjobs. Humans evolved as meat-eaters. Our guts are almost indistinguishable from those of pure carnivores. Modern vegans (who aren’t very smart to begin with - probably because of calorie shortfall) have problems with understanding that the ripe, juicy strawberries, the huge, sweet apples, the mountains of fluffy bread, the savory carrots and the fat potatoes they love so much didn’t exist while man was evolving as a meat-eating animal. Hunter-gathers hunted almost exclusively. What little gathering went on might have, on rare occasions, contributed as much as 200 calories per capita of shriveled roots or sour, shrunken berries to the foodstocks of the family or tribe. Fat is a much more efficient storehouse of energy., and for humans living in the wild, a high calorie intake was a necessity - a necessity that could not even remotely be met by a vegan lifestyle, which was impossible anyway. A human living on a meat-only diet will survive just fine. A human living on a vegan diet will sicken and die. The one tiny bit of logic possessed by vegans is their purported desire to leave a “light footprint” on the face of the earth. And pure, unsupplemented vegans will leave the lightest footprints of all - as premature corpses. Veganism, animal rights and environmentalism are movements that result from the decline of reason in our culture meeting the moral imperatives of altruism. New Age types think in unfocused emotions, not logic. They see humans eating animals, a practice that is without question selfish, and in their inability to distinguish between rational and non-rational animals, conclude it is immoral. Or perhaps they don’t think rigorously enough to denounce it as immoral, they just get a vague emotional reaction that meat eating is wrong. Vegans, like environmentalists, are not driven primarily by any practical purpose, but by the moral purpose of sacrifice. Unfortunately, they are not just a danger to themselves. If animals have equal rights to humans, then humans are no better than animals. Animals have nothing but force to use against other animals. The more consistent New Agers, not understanding man’s nature as a rational animal, will end up advocating violence to men if such is justified by an altruist-collectivist end. Consistent environmentalists have already come to this in their yearning for the “right virus” to wipe out billions of humans. </img> </img> </img> View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Rev. Jerry Falwell died on Tuesday after being discovered unconscious sometime in the 1980's. Sorry, couldn't resist. As far as I'm concerned nothing good came from the man. Making religion a pressure group that has enormous power on the Republican Party is the worst thing that ever happened to the party. He did not stand for freedom and individual rights but for using government to restrict freedom in the name of religion. He was at least as bad for America as the SDS and the New Left he loathed. Some of the Reverend's greatest hits: "Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions." (re: 9/11 attacks) "...throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."" "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters." "The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc." "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals." "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." "There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution." Here's a quiz that asks you to tell which statements were made be Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or Osama bin Laden. </img> </img> </img> View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Rev. Jerry Falwell died on Tuesday after being discovered unconscious sometime in the 1980's. Sorry, couldn't resist. As far as I'm concerned nothing good came from the man. Making religion a pressure group that has enormous power on the Republican Party is the worst thing that ever happened to the party. He did not stand for freedom and individual rights but for using government to restrict freedom in the name of religion. He was at least as bad for America as the SDS and the New Left he loathed. Some of the Reverend's greatest hits: "Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions." (re: 9/11 attacks) "...throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."" "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters." "The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc." "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals." "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." "There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution." Here's a quiz that asks you to tell which statements were made be Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or Osama bin Laden. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Trey Givens has posted a video of a high school class walking out of a performance by a monologuist, Mike Daisey, who uses adult language. One of the people walking out poured water on Mr. Daisey’s notes, which is destruction of private property and wrong. (The man later apologized.) According to Playgoer, Mike Daisey wrote in an email, "it's a sobering reminder that speech is never free unless it is defended ardently." This has nothing to do with free speech. Unlike leftists on college campuses, the audience members who walked out of Mr. Daisey’s show did not try to shut him up. Aside from the fool who dumped water on the notes, the Christians were quiet and orderly as they left the theatre. Any audience member has a right to walk out of a show. Personally, I thought the part of his act on the video clip was funny. Profanity in humor doesn’t bother me much unless it becomes overbearing and an end in itself. Mike Daisey strikes me as a likable, liberal performer. In Mike Daisey’s blog account of the event, however, he comes off as a leftist subjectivist. What really bothers him is that the Christians passed judgment on him, which he (rightly) notes is a contradiction of Christ’s character. I doubt I will ever forget the look in his face as he defaced the only original of the handwritten show outline--it was a look of hatred, and disgust, and utter and consuming pride. It is a face I have seen in Riefenstahl's work, and in my dreams, but never on another human face, never an arm's length from me--never directed at me, hating me, hating my words and the story that I've chosen to tell. That face is not Christian, by any definition Christ would be proud to call his own--its naked righteousness and contempt have nothing to do with the godhead, and everything to do with pathetic human pride at its very worst. And, But they are not simply fools and idiots--I saw them. They are young and old, they are teachers and students, they are each and every one of us. We are the same family, even if it hurts. The hard truth is that you reap what you sow, and I will not sow hatred and discontent--I refuse. I will not forget what that man, older than I am today, did to my work. I will not forget the cowed silence of those who left. I will not forget their judgment and their arrogance--but I will not hate. He is making Evan Sayet’s point: to the modern left passing judgment is the root of all evil. And note that his reason for not judging them in return is collectivism, “We are the same family….” I read that this video has had over 70,000 hits on YouTube. I suspect that most people are like me and had never heard of Mike Daisey before. Those Christians walking out of his show will probably be the best thing that ever happened to his career. Since I used the term "Culture Wars," the reader might ask, "Which side of the war are you on, Myrhaf?" I have some sympathy with both sides. I bemoan the loss of standards in our culture that has come about with the New Left's cultural revolution. At the same time, I recognize that some traditional values were bad and I'm happy to see them gone. Capitalism and the Enlightenment, after all, were the original destroyers of such traditional values as feudalism, church power and "the divine right of Kings." Capitalism's first enemies were religious conservatives. But ultimately, I cannot profess allegiance to either side today, any more than I could accept the philosophies of intrincism or subjectivism. I would like to see a culture of reason and artistic romanticism develop, which is still, as Ayn Rand called capitalism, the unknown ideal. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Have you heard of this Fred Phelps character? Being neither homosexual nor religious, I had not paid attention to these people before. His motto is "God hates fags," which he considers profound. I guess it's so profound that the profundity eludes my simple mind. Phelps says that God controls the destiny of every human. If that is so, then didn't God create fags? Does God hate what He Himself is responsible for? (A form of the problem of evil.) Doesn't Jesus talk about loving sinners and not passing judgment? How do these people justify the contradiction? One of their signs says, "God Sent the IED's." They're saying that God sent terrorists to kill Americans because of homosexuality. Like Dinesh D'Souza, they are apologists for terrorism because they have a problem with America. If Phelps wants something really profound to read, he should try Leonard Peikoff's essay, "Religion vs. America." These people are the best evidence yet that God does not exist. I mean, would an all-powerful God let these fools claim to speak for Him? Not only them, but also the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504, not to mention terrorists killing innocent people in His name. If there were a God, then there would be a lot of people out there making Him look bad. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Greg Mankiw gives us this snatch of a C-SPAN transcript of an interview with Hillary Clinton: LAMB: There's a quote here. I want to ask you if you agree with this. This is from Alan Arenhault, author of "The Lost City" -- you put it in your book. "The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation." CLINTON: I believe that. That's why I put it in the book. Mankiw provides a quote from Milton Friedman: "What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself." -- Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1961 That’s Senator Clinton all over. She feels that she knows better than the common man what is good for him. She feels this because her intentions are altruistic. Wanting to do good for the collective is the ultimate proof that one is moral and right. But the will of America’s welfare state philosopher-kings has been thwarted by profit-seeking businessmen. These businessmen have worked with Republicans, who are morally inferior because they do not want to do good for the collective. The result is “the most radically disruptive force in American life for the last generation” -- the unenlightened spending their own wealth, unregulated and uncontrolled by those such as Senator Clinton, who have goodness in their souls. I’ve said it before: the woman is a nightmare. She could be the next President -- and I very well might vote for her! View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Matt Stoller is a liberal who is proud to pay his taxes. He argues that right wingers are unpatriotic because they don’t want to pay taxes. Let’s look at his piece, “Paying For America.” I just paid my taxes, and I have to say, I always take pride when I do so. I don't like having less money to spend, of course, and the complexity of the process is really upsetting. But I am proud to pay for democracy, and I feel when I do send money to the DC Treasurer and the US Treasury that that is what I am doing. The right-wing likes to pretend as if taxes are a burden instead of the price of democracy. And I suppose, if you hate democracy, as the right-wing does, then taxes are the price for paying for something you really don't want. Not to make too fine a point of it, but the USA is republic, not a democracy. I assume by democracy you mean something like “representative government with free elections.” But America didn’t even have an income tax until the 20th century and it was a free country with free elections in the 19th century. Indeed, it was a much more free country then, and taxes were much lower. Taxes are not the price of freedom or democracy, but the welfare-regulatory state or mixed economy. Your inference the the right-wing hates democracy because it hates taxes is wrong. The right hates the welfare state, which makes taxes “paying for something you really don’t want.” Personally, I find banking fees, high cable and internet charges, health care costs, and credit card hidden charges much more abrasive than taxes, because with those I'm just being ripped off to pay for someone's summer home. This is economic ignorance. You think rich people arbitrarily raise prices in order to purchase summer homes. If that really happened, then competitors would do without summer homes in order to charge less and win market share from the guys with summer homes. In this list of services that you resent paying for is health care costs. These are high because of decades of government intervention and regulation of health care. If we had a free market in health care, prices would be a fraction of what they are and the product would be superior. Patriotism is about recognizing that we are all connected in a fundamental moral and physical sense, that the war in Iraq is our war, that poverty in New Orleans is our poverty, that public funding to cure cancer comes from each of us and not just the scientists who have made it theirs. Patriotism is not collectivism. My patriotism is based on the fact that America was founded as a nation of individual rights. FDR brought in a foreign idea, the welfare state, which originated in Bismark’s Germany. The tax burden we face is a very small price to pay for the privilege of taking responsibility for our own freedom and our own society. And the hatred of taxes on the right comes from a hatred for this responsibility. It's childish and immoral and unAmerican. As I noted above, America had more freedom when taxes were lower. Today’s tax burden is necessary only to pay for the welfare state, a foreign idea that FDR got from Bismark’s Germany. Since America was founded on the principle of individual rights, the collectivist welfare state is truly un-American. It is not childish and immoral to oppose the welfare state, but it is childish and immoral to attempt to paint opponents of taxation as unpatriotic. Our Founding Fathers waged the Revolutionary War because they didn’t want to pay certain taxes. Now, what is a problem is the complexity of our tax system. Right. So why do liberals oppose a flat tax? Complexity is a tool that powerful elites can and do use to intimidate and control people without access to capital and connections. So why do liberals oppose a flat tax, again? With modern technology, there is just no reason for this complexity anymore except the business coalitions that push for specific tax breaks and the politicians who love them. This complexity not only upsets and disempowers people like us, it empowers the powerful to skip out on their tax burden. If we got the government out of the economy, taxes would be lower and simpler. Complexity is a result of our increasingly fascist system, in which the state dictates the economy. Fascism is a type of socialism. It's not a coincidence that Grover Norquist, the architect of the right-wing ascension to power, runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform. People like Norquist, who are charlatans at heart and deeply unpatriotic and immoral, use the complexity in the tax code that they help to create to persuade Americans that taxes are bad. This is also true in states all over the country, where it is the unpredictability of property tax burdens and not the amount that causes schools to go wanting for funding. If our tax code is a conspiracy of powerful elites and unpatriotic, immoral conservatives, why do liberal politicians support it? Our tax code is the DNA of our nation's moral compass. This is a mixed metaphor. Compasses are man-made devices and do not have DNA. It would be better to call our tax code the north pole of our nation’s moral compass. Actually, it would be better not to use high-flying rhetoric that is meaningless. I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen. If America were a laissez-faire capitalist nation, you could call yourself an American citizen for free. The old expression 'you get what you pay for' is apt for all sorts of situations. Yes, but money taken from people at the point of a gun is not money paid for anything, it is money stolen. People tend to express what they value in how much they are willing to pay for it. I am willing and feel privileged for the right to pay for my country. The right-wing is embittered to do so, if they do so at all. And that, more than anything, says something about how much they value this experiment called America. You’re happy to pay for the welfare state. Those who oppose taxation value America, but not the welfare state. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I watched the first season of HBO’s Rome on DVD. It is a mixture of good and bad. Depending on taste, the bad might be too repulsive to make the series enjoyable. It has explicit sex and violence and much brutal naturalism. Typical of the modern approach, the filmmakers take great pride in showing naturalistic touches of ancient Rome that have been left out of more romanticized movies. “Hey, look – ancient Rome had shit and piss and graffiti and garbage!” Well, hallelujah. The historical naturalism does have a certain value, as do Japanese movies or science fiction, because it’s not the city next door, it’s an exotic, different world. This can go a long way toward making a TV show visually interesting and fascinating, but it cannot replace the requirements of literature. HBO’s Rome is a world of gangsters, a world where might makes right. As such, there are no heroes in this story, just people clawing at one another in the pursuit of power. Rome was indeed a brutal culture, but it also had a certain nobility as the plays of Shakespeare and Corneille show us. Today’s filmmakers are incapable of understanding or portraying nobility and heroism. The best thing about the series is that it tells adventure stories about two legionnaires, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. These stories have moments of swashbuckling fun, like Conan the Barbarian. Such historical adventure stories are the last fading glow of the 19th century romantic novels of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas. Their stories are unfortunately dragged down by a lot of naturalistic drama concerning Vorenus’s family. Neither man is terribly admirable. The worst thing about the series is Brutus. It just made me cringe how they made Brutus a sniveling neurotic with an Oedipus complex. I can see making him tragically conflicted, as Shakespeare did, but HBO’s modern approach robs him of all dignity and stature and makes him a laughable, whining boy manipulated by a domineering mother. And it's such a cliche; if you wanted to satirize modern drama, you couldn't beat this Brutus. No famous character is allowed much nobility or dignity in this series. Cato is a crotchety old man, Cicero a second rate grumbler, Marc Antony a cynical gangster, Cleopatra a power-seeking slut and so on. All in all, Rome is about what you’d expect from historical drama today. Asking for tightened plots, elevated characters and even, ye gods, a theme nobler than “Rome was a dog eat dog world” is asking far too much from today’s filmmakers. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog The Ayn Rand Institute gave me permission to post their latest press release: The U.N. Human Rights Council's War on Human Rights Wednesday, April 11, 2007 IRVINE, Calif.--The U.N. Human Rights Council recently passed a resolution urging nations to pass laws prohibiting the dissemination of ideas that "defame religion." It appears that the resolution was partly a response to last year's Danish cartoon crisis, where hordes of angry Muslims rioted in violent protest of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. "The advocates of this resolution perversely equate those who drew the Danish cartoons with those who rioted and threatened to murder the cartoonists," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "Both, they say, are guilty of a crime and should be restrained and punished by the government -- with the unstated caveat that the cartoonists are guiltier, since they allegedly incited the violent mobs by defaming Islam. "To morally equate the Danish cartoonists with the Muslim rioters is to wipe out the distinction between speech and force. It is to declare there is no essential difference between the filmmaker Theo van Gogh,and the Muslim who murdered him for producing a film that 'defamed Islam.' "Freedom of speech means that individuals have the right to advocate any idea, without the threat of government censorship, regardless of how many people that idea may offend. To silence individuals in order to protect the sensibilities of mullahs and mobs is to wipe out this crucial right -- and it is to whitewash the blood-stained hands of killers by declaring that they are no worse than those who peacefully criticize them. "Yet this disgraceful moral equivalence is a symptom of the larger moral equivalence that pervades the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is based on the gross pretense that its members -- including belligerent regimes such as Iran and Syria, and oppressive dictatorships such as China and Cuba -- are champions of peace and individual rights. As a result, its main function is to provide a forum for thugs and dictators to criticize free nations such as the United States and Israel, while pushing their anti-freedom agendas. "The United States should condemn this resolution -- and the morally corrupt organization that produced it." Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved. Evan Sayet recently spoke about how being indiscriminate leads the left to opposing freedom. We can see that on display in the U.N., which is a sort of egalitarianism of nations. When they do not discriminate between free nations such as America and Israel and dictatorships, they end up adopting the standards of unfree nations such as Cuba and Iran. In light of the recent Imus firing, we now have the U.N. advocating gross violation of freedom of speech. I regard this as another assault from the left on a critical right, free speech. If rights could be separated and arranged in order of importance, then the freedom of speech would have to be the number one, most important right we have today. Changing the world for the better -- advancing the cause of freedom and individual rights -- depends on changing our culture’s philosophy. It means persuading people with ideas, and this can only be done in a nation with freedom of speech. Like the religious right, the nihilist left begins by attacking the least defensible speech. The right attacks pornography; the left attacks racism, hate speech, and politically incorrect speech -- speech that I identify as inegalitarian. That is why I defend Imus, even though his speech is wrong. Ideas that “defame religion” are, by the standards of conventional morality and religion, among the least defensible. In olden times such ideas were called “blasphemy” and “heresy.” This move by the U.N. might actually appeal to the right as well as the left -- to Dinesh D’Souza and Jerry Falwell as well as multiculturalist professors. Who knows, this could be the beginning of a bipartisan assault on our freedoms! View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog The story of Elizabeth Edwards’s distrust of her neighbor is revealing of the statist mindset. RALEIGH -- Elizabeth Edwards says she is scared of the "rabid, rabid Republican" who owns property across the street from her Orange County home -- and she doesn't want her kids going near the gun-toting neighbor. And, Edwards views Johnson as a "rabid, rabid Republican" who refuses to clean up his "slummy" property just to spite her family, whose lavish 28,000-square-foot estate is nearby on 102 wooded acres. Johnson, 55, acknowledges his Republican roots. But he takes offense to the suggestion he has purposefully left his property, including an old garage he leases for use as a car shop, in dilapidated condition. Johnson said he has lived his entire life on the property, which he said his family purchased before the Great Depression. He said he's spent a lot of money to try and fix up the 42-acre tract. "I have to budget. I have to live within my means," Johnson said. "I don't have millions of dollars to fix the place." Her attitude is typical of how rich people are supposed to scorn the poor – and yet her husband has made his political career as a defender of the poor! Although collectivist-statists are egalitarian, in reality their policies create and strengthen class differences. Government intervention in the economy results in a privileged political class and then the rest of us. The Soviet Union, based on a radical egalitarianism, had a Nomenklatura ruling class and the masses that were, in reality, their slaves. Most societies throughout history have had small ruling classes and masses of peasants. Capitalism was the revolution that saw the growth of the great middle class, what the Marxists sneer at as the “bourgeosie.” America has always been and still is a nation of a vast middle class; as such, it is the least class conscious nation in history. The middle class is a product of freedom. There are rich people in America, and some "old money" types have been snobbish toward the poor, but many wealthy people began poor or middle class and never stop thinking of themselves as such. Andrew Carnegie started poor, but became fabulously wealthy and he was always on the lookout for competent young men to promote in his steel business, regardless of their class origins. Charles Schwab, for instance, ...started as a stake driver in Andrew Carnegie's steelworks and in 1897 rose to become president of the Carnegie Steel Company at the age of 35. In 1901, he negotiated the secret buyout of Carnegie Steel by a group of New York-based financiers led by J.P. Morgan. After the buyout, Schwab became the first president of the U.S. Steel Corporation, the company formed out of Carnegie's former holdings. Andrew Carnegie is a classic example of a rich man's attitude toward the poor in a free country. All that mattered to him was competence and character. With the growth of the state, we are seeing the beginnings of new class consciousness in America. Our rulers in Washington think they are different from the unwashed masses. Elizabeth Edwards offers a glimpse into the thinking of our nascent ruling class. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Lines are due today, so I’ve been working hard on them. The best way to learn lines is to work on them every day over the course of weeks or even a month. When you work on lines, then sleep on them and then go back to them the next day, you really cement them in the subconscious mind. The worst way is to do what college students do and wait until the last minute and cram. But even if you work over the course of weeks, there will be some cramming come the last moment, especially on the scenes at the end of the play that you have not gotten to in your previous study sessions. I have a big role in Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff; he is the central character in the story and he has a LOT of lines. I don’t know if I have ever played a role that gives me so much opportunity to clown around and do funny things. Falstaff is a character of seemingly infinite comic freedom. I also have a small role in Julius Caesar, Titinius; he has one big scene at the end of the play. I did not anticipate getting too excited over Titinius, but as I work on these lines, I am discovering a fabulous part. If you want to know what I mean, get out your Shakespeare – you have a Shakespeare, right? – and look at Act V, sc. iii of Julius Caesar. For example, on discovering Cassius’s dead body, one of Titinius’s lines is “Mistrust of my success hath done this deed.” In other words, he is saying, “Cassius killed himself because he thought I would screw up.” The line has guilt, grief and vulnerability. Any actor would kill to say this line – and I get to say it! **** Shakespeare was not a writer to agree with Nietzsche’s line, "It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book." No, when his pen started moving, it seems he had to fight to stop it. Ben Jonson commented on Shakespeare’s speed and ease of composition: I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. He continues, Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter: as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, "Caesar, thou dost me wrong," he replied "Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause," and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned. Shakespeare was an artist of abundance, but not, perhaps, the best editor of himself. Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. It would take a whole essay to analyze his provocative thoughts fairly. Some of his points might be valid, but they must be disentangled from his mysticism. Essentially, Tolstoy thought Shakespeare had nothing to say: All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearean pretentious and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in which no living man ever has spoken or does speak.... From his first words, exaggeration is seen: the exaggeration of events, the exaggeration of emotion, and the exaggeration of effects. One sees at once he does not believe in what he says, that it is of no necessity to him, that he invents the events he describes and is indifferent to his characters -- that he has conceived them only for the stage and therefore makes them do and say only what may strike his public, and so we do not believe either in the events or in the actions or in the sufferings of the characters. He alone can write a drama who has got something to say to men, and that something of the greatest importance for them: about man's relation to God, to the Universe, to the All, the Eternal, the Infinite. But when, thanks to the German theories about objective art, the idea was established that for the drama this was quite unnecessary, then it became obvious how a writer like Shakespeare -- who had not got developed in his mind the religious convictions proper to his time, who, in fact, had no convictions at all, but heaped up in his drama all possible events, horrors, fooleries, discussions, and effects -- could appear to be a dramatic writer of the greatest genius. But these are all external reasons. The fundamental inner cause of Shakespeare's fame was and is this that his dramas corresponded to the irreligious and immoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his time and ours. It is fascinating that Tolstoy attributes Shakespeare’s popularity to German philosophy. One wonders – if modern philosophy gave way to a more rational philosophy, would Shakespeare’s popularity wane? But then, how do we explain Shakespeare’s popularity during the Enlightenment, before modern philosophy? Philosophy aside, I think Tolstoy shows an inadequate appreciation of poetry and theatricality. Shakespeare was a first-rate poet and a first-rate theatre professional, and the combination makes for powerful playwriting, even if he had nothing to say. George Orwell responded to Tolsoy’s attack. The most interesting thing in his essay to me is how much he concedes to Tolstoy: Shakespeare is not a thinker, and the critics who claimed that he was one of the great philosophers of the world were talking nonsense. His thoughts are simply a jumble, a rag-bag. He was like most Englishmen in having a code of conduct but no world-view, no philosophical faculty. Again, it is quite true that Shakespeare cares very little about probability and seldom bothers to make his characters coherent. As we know, he usually stole his plots from other people and hastily made them up into plays, often introducing absurdities and inconsistencies that were not present in the original. Now and again, when he happens to have got hold of a foolproof plot — Macbeth, for instance — his characters are reasonably consistent, but in many cases they are forced into actions which are completely incredible by any ordinary standard. Many of his plays have not even the sort of credibility that belongs to a fairy story. In any case we have no evidence that he himself took them seriously, except as a means of livelihood. In his sonnets he never even refers to his plays as part of his literary achievement, and only once men-tions in a rather shamefaced way that he has been an actor. So far Tolstoy is justified. The claim that Shakespeare was a profound thinker, setting forth a coherent philosophy in plays that were technically perfect and full of subtle psychological observation, is ridiculous. George Bernard Shaw, who coined the term “Bardolotry,” was another Shakespeare hater. I believe he called Shakespeare a coward, afraid to take a stand, but I can’t find the passages online. I suppose I’ll have to read his book on Shakespeare and report back later. Aside from poetry, I think Shakespeare’s greatest genius was in his observation of human character. I would disagree with Orwell: Shakespeare's plays are full of subtle psychological observation. As an actor, I am astonished time and again by little moments in his lines that show acute psychological insight. Characters say the exact thing one would say in a situation. I suspect, although I cannot prove, that his genius is something particularly British. As Orwell wrote above, "He was like most Englishmen in having a code of conduct but no world-view, no philosophical faculty." Britain has a long philosophic tradition of empiricism stretching back at least as far as William of Ockham. Having “nothing to say,” as Tolstoy held, fits the empiricist mind. Shakespeare could depict characters in specific situations and could show all sides, but he did it without ideology. Modern critics, in our age of naturalism, think this is a virtue. I don’t know if I would go as far as Tolstoy and Shaw, but something central in Shakespeare does seem to be missing. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Stephen Speicher died in the hospital after recently suffering a heart attack. I send my condolences to Betsy Speicher and all of Stephen's family and friends. When I first got on the internet in 1996 I found my way to the usenet forums, alt.philosophy.objectivism and then humanities. philosophy.objectivism. I discovered a lot of libertarian types there who made the forums exasperating and unpleasant, but there were also some Objectivists arguing their side. Among the Objectivists there was none so doughty and courageous as Stephen Speicher. He would fight back against any irrational opinion, any smear of Ayn Rand or other prominent Objectivists, or any distortion of the philosophy. He single-handedly made hpo interesting and kept me reading it as long as I did. Stephen called hpo a "cesspool," which it certainly was, and eventually left it with Betsy to create a happier, more rational place for Objectivists to exchange opinions on the internet, the Forum for Ayn Rand Fans. We communicated via email about an interest we share -- or I guess I should now write shared -- the Aristotelians of Renaissance Padua, Pomponazzi and Zabarella. Very little has been written about Renaissance Aristotelians in English, and I mentioned how frustrated I was because I could not find William F. Edwards's dissertation, The Logic of Iacopo Zabarella on the internet. Stephen got it for me through a service for academics. I never met the man. I hoped I would meet him and his wife at an ARI speech in Southern California someday, and I planned to introduce myself and thank him in person for sending Edwards's dissertation. I did not get around to it and now it will never happen. It would be inaccurate, perhaps, to say that a man I never met was a friend, but I feel as though I have lost a friend. You can learn a lot about people just by reading their words. He was an internet friend, you could say. Stephen Speicher's death is a great loss to internet Objectivism. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Imagine this rich fat guy. Let’s call him Diamond Jim. Diamond Jim knows you only live once and he wants to live in style. He is very particular in his demands and he only wants the best. When he goes to his favorite restaurant, he expects the valet to park his Cadillac in a special spot and to keep an eye on it. He expects the maitre d’ to seat him at his favorite table by the window. He makes special demands on the waiters. The grubby socialist who sits at the dark corner table glowers at Diamond Jim in resentment. Why can’t he accept the normal service everyone gets? What makes him special? After dinner Diamond Jim likes a waiter to serve him a cigar on the patio and even to light his cigar. Furthermore, Diamond Jim expects the waiter to stay with him to engage in conversation, and he demands that the waiter be a Christian-socialist-environmentalist because he likes to argue with fools as he smokes. Do the valet, maitre d’ and waiters hate Diamond Jim? Quite the contrary, they love him; they even arrange their schedules to be working when Diamond Jim shows up. They do this because Diamond Jim tips like Frank Sinatra on New Year’s Eve. You see, Diamond Jim lives by the Spanish proverb: take what you want and pay for it. He pays for it. Now, imagine the Senate has passed the Inspector-Van Horn Act, which outlaws tipping. Inspector and Van Horn, the Senate’s two most notorious communists, resent tipping because they think everyone should be paid the same for the same work. Tipping forces individuals to think about how much they should tip, which causes “fears.” So what do the restaurant workers think of Diamond Jim now? They loathe him because he expects more work from them than the other customers, but they do not get any more money for it. Diamond Jim’s quality of life disappears because he cannot tip. The grubby socialist at the dark corner table cackles with glee because Diamond Jim has been brought down to level of everyone else. **** This story, like all satire, exaggerates to make a point. Inspector and Gus Van Horn, I am fairly certain, would not advocate a law against tipping. However, they want restaurants to voluntarily do away with the practice. An individualist, capitalist society is a horn of plenty, offering each individual many choices in every aspect of life. Each individual has the option of choosing his own values, no matter how different or fancy, as long as he can pay for it. If 90% of the people like blue towels, the other 10% is not forced to buy blue towels just because it is the collective norm. Red towels or yellow towels or checkered towels might cost more, but if someone is willing to pay for them, chances are they will be produced. Tipping is a force for individualism. Doing away with tips, like all egalitarian actions, penalizes those who want more than the average guy. It forces people with higher standards to accept the service that the statistical average are content with. Those who have average standards would not be affected by being unable to tip. Collectivists would be delighted because everyone is treated the same. Only the passionate valuers -- people who think about what they want and then go after it in every aspect of life -- only those people would suffer. Of course, egalitarians don’t care about those people. Life without the ability to pay for individualized service would be a bit grayer than it is today. It would be one more step in the value-deprivation that is suffocating modern culture. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Thomas Sowell makes some good points on the Democrats and the war. They have taken over Congress by a very clever and very disciplined strategy of constantly criticizing the Republicans, without taking the risk of presenting an alternative for whose results they can be held responsible. And, It has been painfully clear that Speaker Pelosi was serious only about scoring political points. Her big grin when she won a narrow vote for a non-binding resolution was grotesque against the background of a life-and-death issue. You don't grin over a political ploy that you have pulled when men's lives are at stake. And, Only an American defeat in Iraq can ensure the Democrats' political victory next year. Their only strategy is to sabotage the chances for a military victory in Iraq without being held responsible for a defeat. That is the corner that they have painted themselves into with their demagoguery that even their own supporters see through. Why do the Democrats lack seriousness on the war? Is it because they are cynical and will manipulate any issue to gain power? I think their lack of seriousness comes from their inability to understand that we are at war. Part of the reason we are in this mess is because many in Washington for decades refused to consider terrorism as a matter of war. Instead they thought of it as a criminal justice matter. John Kerry voiced that opinion in the last presidential election, three years after the World Trade Center attacks. A nation does not go to war against another nation in response to individual criminals. Nancy Pelosi’s grin and the Democrats’ games show that they still do not really believe we are at war. They still believe that if we just sit down and talk with Iran and the rest of the totalitarian Islamists -- and if we buy them off with enough foreign aid -- then we can fly on by the seat of our pants as we have for decades. In the sophisticated enclaves of Manhattan and Aspen and Napa Valley, the idea of war must seem like an overreaction of the great unwashed masses -- all those jingoist fools who lose their reason in presence of the American flag. Meanwhile, the enemy is still alive and planning the next attack. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog Lately I’ve been reading two books of science fiction short stories from the 1950’s, In the Beginning by Robert Silverberg and The Masque of Manana by Robert Sheckley. I’ve been struck by how unrealistic the science is. In every other story characters hop on a spaceship and zip off to Fomalhaut IV or Betelgeuse III (as if people would give a planet a number according to its order from the star instead of a name). Really, the science is sheer fantasy. Three of the most common tropes from Golden Age science fiction are fantasy: faster than light travel, time travel (going back in time) and telepathy. If you took away those three ideas, you would wipe out most 20th century science fiction, and all three are impossible. What we think of as classic science fiction is for the most part as fantastic as elves, magic and unicorns, but because it uses scientific concepts it has a veneer of plausibility – until you think about the science. Science fiction today is much more believable. Serious SF does not glibly zip characters off to Aldebaran V, unless the author is making some self-conscious, postmodern homage to the old stuff. The purest expression of the contemporary naturalism in science fiction is a movement called Mundane SF. If the science is far-fetched, then it’s out. Much of today’s SF is believable and naturalistic. It is also bad. It is often mind-numbingly boring, anti-heroic and plotless. It has all the traits of mainstream modern literature that intellectuals love, or pretend to love, and readers hate. In such magazines as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s we are watching the slow suicide of SF by naturalism. The process started in the 1960’s with the New Wave and the wave continues to this day. The New Wave brought modern literature to science fiction, making it naturalistic and conscious of style. Since then it has been increasingly difficult to take the tropes of Golden Age SF seriously. This suicide by naturalism is ironic as SF has taken over movies, TV and video games. Visual media love whooshing spaceships, ray guns, aliens and all those giddy concepts from the Golden Age. The science in Star Wars is comparable to 1930’s written SF. Since the late 1970’s readers have been abandoning science fiction for what used to be its neglected little sister, fantasy. Readers don’t want plotless non-stories about a neurotic scientist suffering a mid-life crisis as he discovers some form of pollution that will destroy mankind. They don’t care if the science is realistic, they want an interesting story about heroes who are fascinating to contemplate. They want romanticism. Today they know they’re more likely to find it in a paperback with a sorcerer on the cover than one with a spaceship or a cover with some modern smears of color on it. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I read my first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia." It is brilliantly written with an excellent plot and it shows Holmes as a repressed valuer. (To be accurate, I read a Sherlock Holmes story when I was young, but have forgotten it.) My only problems are with Holmes's character. I have a hard time believing that someone who spends his off-time in a cocaine-induced daze could be so brilliant. The cocaine users I have known have not exactly been Sherlock Holmeses. This is, well, elementary. Holmes's epistemology is unrealistic. His remarkable power of observation provides the stories with much of their delight, but in reality observation must serve purpose. Holmes knows how many stairs lead to his apartment, but what purpose does this serve? Someone who went around noticing these things every day would have a strange mind cluttered with unimportant facts, like an autistic savant. Another problem is his reason-emotion dichotomy. Watson the narrator says, It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer - excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. In reality emotions can be tools to help one know what is important if one contemplates their meaning. Emotions are psychosomatic responses to values; a threat to values causes fear, injustice causes anger, etc. Emotions are essential to evaluating reality. Someone like Holmes would have a hard time functioning successfully because he would not have his own emotions to use as clues for understanding. He would be a detective cut off from some of the most important clues humans can use! Setting aside psychological realism, or lack thereof, Holmes's epistemology does provide tremendous drama for the stories. Falling in love would be the most disastrous thing that could happen to him; this sets up a value-conflict between love and crime-fighting, and value-conflict is the stuff of drama. (I would expect to see Miss Irene Adler return in other stories, but I don't know.) With the value-conflict and the plot, "A Scandal in Bohemia" is superb romantic fiction. We'll see if the other stories are this good. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog One brave Muslim has spoken up, and that is always good, but it does not give me hope for his religion. Frankly, I think Islam is hopeless. Totalitarian politics is too much a part of the religion for it to reform itself. It must be utterly defeated and then Islamic countries must have individual rights imposed upon them as we did to Japan after WWII. The most important question is: do we have the will to do what is necessary or has multiculturalism crippled the west? I asked myself this question in the days following September 11, 2001 and I concluded that we do not have what it takes to win. I still see no cause for hoping that we can impose our way of life on Islam, not with the New Left’s stranglehold on our culture. I see a long, drawn out war of half measures looming before us, punctuated by Islamic atrocities on American soil to which we respond with a burst of force then lapse back into our self-induced helplessness. Our half measures will only reinforce radical Islam’s conviction that morality is on their side. The worst scenario: Islam provokes us so greatly and our outrage is so intense that... who knows what might happen. Multiculturalism fosters a "my gang vs. your gang" mentality because, although it pretends to be about tolerance, it encourages people to think of themselves as members of a collective, not as individuals. Multiculturalism can lead to rivers of blood, but not to liberty. Multiculturalism will stop us from imposing capitalism and individual rights on Islam, but our desire for justice will drive us to kill the enemy. Woe unto Islam if it comes to this. Whatever happens, I believe things will get much worse before they get better. UPDATE: Slight revision. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog George Reisman looks at a new rule being considered in New York City. From the New York Times: Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent. Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements. Dr. Reisman goes beyond politics and ethics to examine the epistemological meaning of this law. Among the points he makes: What is present in the rule being considered by New York City’s Board of Health is an attempt to forcibly impose the fantasy of some people on everyone else. It is an attempt to elevate fantasy to the level of actual reality and to compel everyone else to accept it as though it were reality. In this rule New York City will force people to recognize A as non-A. This is the logical end of the premise of egalitarianism. Fantasy is inherent in egalitarianism, which wipes out distinctions and treats all people as if they were metaphysically equal. If a man wants to call himself a woman, who are we to deny him that right? Who are we to say, “No, that is false”? A generation ago this ruling would have been a reductio ad absurdum argument against egalitarianism and multiculturalism. People would have responded, “Oh, come on -- the New Left will never take it to that extreme.” Yesterday’s absurdities are becoming today’s laws in New York City. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I listened to the first hour of Sandra Shaw’s course, Art History I, which is available online for free. This hour is on prehistoric art. I was surprised by how interesting it was. Sandra Shaw makes some essential identifications on Cro-Magnon art and culture, explains how it is superior to other stone-age art and even suggests a connection with Western Civilization. It is a breathtaking synthesis, although the connection with later European culture, which she makes only in one brief sentence, remains speculative and maybe I misunderstood her point on one listening. I will pay to hear the rest of the course. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog 11. Chuck Berry. Bill Haley was fast, but his sound is a little pre-rock. With Berry, you hear where it started. Instead of Haley’s clean scale-type riffs, Berry would play two strings at once, putting some texture and crunch into his lead. Big influence on Keith Richards. And everyone else. 10. Tony Iommi. An interesting figure because he is Classic Rock but also the Godfather of Heavy Metal. But if you listen to those early Black Sabbath songs, they are quite different from today’s metal. They have a horror-movie moodiness and tremendous imagination. Unlike today’s metal, Iommi was firmly connected to the blues. 9. Richie Blackmore. I call Blackmore the architect. By that I mean that no one structures a lead more intelligently. Exhibit A: “Highway Star.” Blackmore is all rationality and planning – and he had a great Strat sound. 8. David Gilmour. Epic sound, which is exactly what Pink Floyd needed. (Chicken and egg question: Was it because he was in Pink Floyd that he developed an epic sound?) Listen to the long, soaring notes in “Time.” It’s like Lord of the Rings in a rock lead guitar. 7. Duane Allman. To me, Allman defines the Gibson sound. Those Humbucker pick-ups have a kind of horn-like sound to my ears that can sound cheesy when played by your average guitarist. Using his slide he could be graceful and energetic at the same time. Too bad he ate a peach. UPDATE: According to Wikipedia, I fell for an urban legend. There is a widely believed urban legend that Eat a Peach was a reference to the type of truck that killed Duane, however that is not true; though the cover art of the album does a depict a truck underneath a giant peach, and whether or not it is a reference to Duane's accident or not is unknown. 6. Johnny Winter. He smokes. Listen to “Be Careful With A Fool.” He is unbelievably fast. And the great thing is that, unlike the post-new wave/punk/metal revolution guitarists, Winter never loses the emotion. He never sounds mechanical and alienating. 5. Jeff Beck. I can’t play as well as anyone on this list, but I can understand what most of the others are doing. I mean, they sound rational. With Beck, I think, “What th… WHAT DID HE JUST DO?!” He is the most imaginative lead guitarist. He does things with his whammy bar most people would never dream of. 4. Neil Young. No, really – he’s good. I’ve heard guitarists laugh at him because in some of his leads he plays one note over and over. Yes, but what a note! Nobody else sounds like Young. I get the impression that he never copied anyone else, he just sat down and worked to make the sounds in his head reality. The result is quirky, sometimes naïve and straight from the heart. 3. Alvin Lee. Fluid. No one comes close to his fluidity. He moves his fingers over a fretboard with astonishing ease. He gets from note to note the way Muhammad Ali moved in a ring, the way Fred Astaire danced. I think the new wave/punk/metal revolution of the late ‘70s was particularly hard on him and Winter, both blues rockers, whose careers went into decline after the deluge. 2. Jimmy Page. Defined hard rock lead guitar. He puts a bite into every note that energizes his leads. His style is the opposite of Alvin Lee’s because every note is distinct, like he had to work for it, but he’s also fast. There is one amazing moment in the lead of “Dazed and Confused,” where his lead is working and working, building to a frenzy, and then he hits a pick squeal – a mistake or was it planned? I don’t know, but it is the perfect variation from the flurry of notes that makes the lead both exciting and moving, and then it climaxes in power chords with Bonham wailing on his drums. 1. Jimi Hendrix. The sorcerer. Before him rock leads were black and white; he showed us color. Before him, Newton; he was Einstein. The opposite of Blackmore, in that I don’t think he really planned it out, but was all improvisation of the moment. At his worst he is unfocused and dull (read: stoned out of his gourd); at his best he is the best. “Voodoo Child” walks the edge of anarchy and chaos, exploring how far one can go with an electric guitar, but never quite falls over the edge. Like all of hard rock, I can only take him in small doses (I listen to classical music more now), but when I was a child, he was the man. Why 11 instead of 10? Hey, haven’t you seen Spinal Tap? (My thanks to Billy Beck of Two-Four for his insights that sparked my thinking on rock guitarists.) UPDATE: Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists list puts Neil Young at 83, after such guitarists as Joni Mitchell, Steven Stills, Johnny Ramone, Jack White and Lou Reed. Please. That is just idiotic. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog I enjoyed Casino Royale immensely. The Bond franchise lost its confidence during the Roger Moore era due to what Ayn Rand called “bootleg romanticism.” The filmmakers didn’t take the series seriously and as a result the movies became campy and utterly unrealistic. Some things such as the opening sequences were there just because people expect a Bond film to follow a certain formula, and these sequences became outrageously over the top and unintegrated with a coherent plot. The new Bond takes itself seriously. Every action sequence is integrated into the plot. The movie has an excellent script; it is thrilling and romantic, with some first-rate plot twists. I would say Daniel Craig's Bond is second only to Sean Connery. He is a more naturalistic Bond who gets cut up and bleeds and he is quite intense. He has a little Mike Hammer in him; he seems to be on a moral mission and, with his license to kill, willing to be judge, jury and hangman. SPOILER IN THIS PARAGRAPH. The story even has a theme -- when was the last time you could say that about a Bond film? The theme is tragic: one must lose one's humanity and any chance at a normal, happy life to become a 00 agent. I believe the tragedy comes with taking a story seriously these days. Today's filmmakers cannot put happiness and seriousness together. Unalloyed value-achievement leads them to the campiness and comedy. Unlike some, I thought the Bond girl, Eva Green, was fine. Granted, she is not an exotic type and not a supermodel, but, as a friend of mine used to say, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers. She can act. You can’t say that about all the Bond girls over the decades. View the full article

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman said this in a speech: Any government that is as big as ours, as powerful as ours, that controls so much of our lives, will always be susceptible to corruption. Because power does corrupt. But we can reduce the temptation by taking power out of Washington and putting it back into the hands of the American people. It has to be us. It has to be our Party. Because the Democrat Party sure won't do it. They're the party of government. They believe it has the answer to every question, the solution to every problem. We Republicans don't believe that . . . but sometimes, over the last few years, we've behaved as if we do. Sometimes over the last few years? As Neal Boortz writes: In the 12 years since Republicans took over the House of Representatives, the size of the federal government has doubled. That's right...it's now twice the size of what it was in January of 1995. And it's not hard to see why. Look at all of the new agencies that have been created and/or expanded. The Department of Homeland Security? That was a Republican idea. No Child Left Behind? So much for getting rid of the Education Department...the Republicans expanded it. Prescription drug coverage for Medicare...that's another one. The list goes on and on. Then there were the endless pork projects the GOP was pushing...the bridge to nowhere among them. There is no question that the Republican Party became the party of big government. The only difference between them and the Democrats is they like to borrow money instead of raise it through taxation. You know what Alcoholics Anonymous teaches. You must admit you have a problem before you begin to treat it. Repeat after me, Ken, “I am a Republican. I am a big spender. Like the Democrat Party, my party is a party of big government.” And what about this line from Chairman Mehlman's speech? I'm talking about expanding the role of faith in the public square for people who need not just a hot meal, but sustenance for the soul. What th…? Government should be providing people sustenance for the soul? Is that what the Republican Party stands for now? Sustenance for the soul comes from ideas, values and art. I don’t want the government deciding what ideas, values and art my soul should be fed. That’s what totalitarian states do. That’s what the Inquisition did. Smug fools like Ken Mehlman will march this country to hell, preening every step of the way about how they’re not as bad as the Democrats. View the full article

I've read all of Shakespeare's plays but Henry VIII, which I really must read so I can say I've read all the plays, and I've acted in many of the plays. I just got cast as Capulet in Romeo and Juliet; I'm excited to be tackling a great part. As an actor, I find Shakespeare unequaled in the history of drama. He is a first rate dramatist and a first rate poet, a combination that gives the lines remarkable power and beauty. Other dramatists, such as Sophocles and Corneille, might equal Shakespeare, but I only know them in translation and not in the original language. Figuring out what Shakespeare believes is notoriously difficult. Harold C. Goddard's The Meaning of Shakespeare argues that he hid his meaning in irony. For instance, most people read Henry V as Shakespeare's portrait of the ideal king, but Goddard makes a persuasive case that Henry V is a hypocritical strongman. Shakespeare does not glorify war, but does glorify imagination and love. His women are always wiser than his men. It seems to me that Shakespeare is an empiricist who is skeptical of rationalism. When characters such as Brutus are guided by philosophy, giving sophisticated arguments for their action, they inevitably end up tragically misguided by their reason.