BOOK NOTE: “Superwealth” by Max Borders (plus the Man of Steel and a dash of punk)

For all its simplicity and flashiness, I for one loved Man of Steel and felt as if it resembled the 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons in its unapologetic emphasis on the visual and the large-scale (very operatic).  It’s really the only major film I’ve so far seen that made me glad I paid for IMAX and 3D.  And it’s not without emotional or moral gravitas: You will FEEL before Zod.  And if you’re a libertarian, you’ll like a couple timely surveillance jokes, too.

If you’re a libertarian who likes Superman-ish metaphors and wrote a book defending super-wealthy entrepreneurs, you might well be my friend Max Borders, whose Superwealth has a superheroic-looking figure sporting a dollar sign on its cover, sure to delight Ayn Rand fans. 

But Max is a down-to-earth, humane fellow not just interested in defending the tough-as-nails qualities of mega-CEOs.  He jumps back and forth between examining a few of those and a few likable, ordinary mortals such as his own great-grandmother, who eked out a living during the Depression in North Carolina (a state full of interesting characters) and lived to be 104, showing in the process that the psychological traits leading to success are recognizable, distinct, and valuable regardless of one’s initial economic circumstances.

We aren’t afraid to say athletes might start with some natural (or early-developmental) differences that set them apart from the rest of us, but it’s unfashionable to call adept entrepreneurs natural talents – or even to admit how hard they drive themselves – since that risks undermining envious, egalitarian, and compassionate narratives alike. 

Yet even arch-capitalist Adam Smith – with what to me seems like a very appropriate and very modern mixture of awe, thanks, worry, and pity – wrote in Theory of Moral Sentiments that there’s something a bit miserly and abnormal about the way the very rich drive themselves to achieve profit – with the rest of us largely benefiting from their heroic mania.  (Maybe leftists would find it easier to view money-making as a weird yet creative activity if they read this article, pointed out by Emily Richards, about rich punk musicians.)

In much the same way that I’ve occasionally noted my own still-living grandmother as a neat yardstick of how much things can change in a lifetime, Max notes that despite all the despairing and declinist talk you hear, his great-grandmother saw the proliferation of everything from tractors and electric milkers to refrigerators, indoor plumbing, and colonoscopies during her lifetime, all the while hearing that “the poor get poorer.” 

Mama Borders lived a noble, hard-working, and non-famous life while professional whiners like Barbara Ehrenreich explain how we’re all economically doomed because she didn’t fully enjoy the menial jobs she took on a journalistic whim. 

There are some basic attitudes toward wealth-creation that people on both right and left seem to share: Max notes how many creative companies seem to share the view that every employee should function with some degree of autonomy and be rewarded as an individual for innovation. 

By contrast, when it comes to the big-picture economic models, leftists keep saying things that suggest they see wealth as something that happens automatically and effortlessly, making the rich and entrepreneurs creatures easy to, well, milk.  Max quotes Obama advisor Jared Bernstein saying “there’s no reason to expect people to respond to higher tax rates by working less.  That is, they could just as easily decide to work harder to make up the loss in their after-tax income.” 

So, hey, stick it to ’em some more.  (Adding to the

BOOK NOTE: Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars” and Critical Review

I blogged yesterday about the beautiful graphic novel Strange Attractors, with its meditations on complex, barely-predictable systems.  The journal Critical Review (vol. 24, issue 3) deals in its latest issue with similar questions, featuring essays reacting to the late-90s increase in interest in “systems analysis,” the attempt (initially in foreign policy) to acknowledge that prediction gets far more difficult when there are overlapping simultaneous forces in play and you aren’t really sure which ones matter most. 

That may seem intuitively obvious to most people, but the academics (and ideologues) who normally study such things -- trying to predict wars and coups and the like -- love the illusions of control, predictability, and simplicity that seem to give them at least a fighting chance of making useful models of the world. 

Of course, we don’t want to just throw our hands up and despair, either.  So, it’s unclear quite how to proceed.  As in the hard sciences, the answer might be forthrightly making more testable predictions (analogous to holding pundits accountable for their errors, which rarely happens).

While the political science professors wrestle with all those abstractions, though, I would suggest seeing leftist war reporter Jeremy Scahill’s ominous, dramatic documentary Dirty Wars (spun off of his recent book and articles on the topic, but that link takes you to the film trailer) as a simple, concrete, real-world illustration of how complexity leads to greater tension between desperation for control and the inevitability of tragic error.  Scahill just went and talked to the villagers and survivors who the mainstream press never dared trek over the hills to locate.  The result is very eye-opening.

Seeing the film might be a good way for some of my more neoconservative acquaintances here in New York City to spend Flag Day, in fact, since it’s a reminder how many variables are at play when you start down the road of running covert ops in numerous nations (without declaring war) -- much messier than just settling the simplified two-second debate about whether America is good and its major foes bad. 

In New York City, you can see it at IFC and Lincoln Plaza, and its glimpse of the survivors of U.S. raids overseas -- and a visit with a warlord in Somalia who we’re paying to do our dirty work -- might just change your whole worldview, whether you’re a conservative hawk or a loyal Obama Democrat.  But then, I’ve grown anarcho-capitalist enough to think even minarchism, with its (over)emphasis on the state’s “legitimate” role in policing and military matters, might be granting far too much to the state.

Lest I sound all lefty, though, let me emphasize the capitalist part in that anarcho-capitalist formulation by blogging about Max Borders’ book Superwealth in my next entry.

BOOK NOTE: “Strange Attractors” by Charles Soule and Greg Scott

Just the other night, I saw my mathematician friend Charles Blake talk about the impossibility of time travel as part of a panel at the Empiricist League -- and recruited decreasingly-Marxist activist Sander Hicks to be one of the Dionysium’s speakers on the topic of Bitcoin on August 12 -- so I was in the perfect mood to read a strange story about math.

The graphic novel Strange Attractors by Charles Soule and Greg Scott is perfectly timed: It depicts secretive mathematicians who can predict human behavior with such reliability that they take it upon themselves to save complex systems such as New York City itself from chaos, including bomb-making terrorists.

These mathematicians aren’t creepy government agents, though.

(And I type that while hearing, for a few weeks now, the steady, very quiet thrum of what are likely, a friend in the military agrees, permanent drones over the Upper East Side -- which I’m relieved to say I’m not the only New Yorker to have noticed in the wake of the Boston bombing, though I may have been one of the lucky few to notice the night of their deployment, or at least to have seen a larger, more conventional helicopter flying around here, oddly low, at about 4am one night several weeks ago, after which a much quieter rotor noise has never fully stopped, impossible though it is to hear when there’s substantial street noise.  All this was just a few months after a couple speeches by Bloomberg saying drones would soon be adding to our safety in the way street cameras do, though I thought little of his comments at the time.) 

The mathematician main characters are instead Columbia academics, an elderly mentor and a young acolyte, the latter a Gen X alternative rock fan after my own heart, proud of his Talking Heads collection and familiarity with some rising Brooklyn bands. 

Despite the presumptuous main conceit of the comic -- that these eccentric professors can save the City from disaster with tiny, random-seeming acts such as musical performances and strategic graffiti -- Soule does a great, dare I say it Hayekian, job of capturing how complex the City is and how hopeless would be the task of any real-world central planner trying to coordinate it all (but how exhilarating it is to be a part of it all nonetheless). 

Our mathematician heroes function less like Asimov’s planner Harry Seldon (one of Paul Krugman’s favorite characters) and more like unwitting chaos-theory butterflies, occasionally nudging things in a better direction but barely understanding how.  Soule has also written the ecology-themed Swamp Thing for DC Comics -- and, after all, one can appreciate the fragile complexity of both markets and ecosystems, though they so rarely get spoken of in the same breath.  There’s nothing wrong with Superman and his ilk -- I’ll see the Sunday 6:45pm show of Man of Steel -- but do check out Strange Attractors for something a bit more grown-up and artful. 

Zack Snyder directing Man of Steel reportedly meant Darren Aronofsky not directing it -- just as Aronofsky’s decision to direct Black Swan stopped him from directing the impending RoboCop remake, for good or ill.  But those hankering to see something sci-fi-ish from Aronofsky can take heart that the fifteenth-anniversary edition of his film Pi is out -- and the film probably had more than a little influence on Strange Attractors, so maybe you could get them as companion pieces.  (Oddly enough, come to think of it, if they ever made a movie out of Nassim Taleb’s totally unrelated, math-inspired book Black Swan, Aronofsky might still be the man for the job.)

•••

It’s often been remarked, amidst the recent overlapping controversies over spying and data-mining, that one reason there isn’t even more outrage over

Top 10 Obama Scandals to Discuss at Tonight’s Debate

I tend to indict the system rather than the man (in keeping with this blog’s “Month of Systems”), but here are ten current Obama scandals we should touch on at tonight’s 9:30 DIONYSIUM debate at Muchmore’s about whether to impeach him, with emphasis on what are arguably the victims:

10. The man got a Nobel Peace Prize before presiding over another five years of the war in Afghanistan.

9. It’s unclear we were told the truth about events during the al Qaeda attacks in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and others (as Rand Paul may end up reminding Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, in the ultimate semi-libertarian vs. semi-Progressive showdown).

8. The Associated Press, Antiwar.com, and others have found themselves spied on thanks to the Department of Justice, while Fox News’s James Rosen was snooped on by the FBI (all of it suggesting to Sen. Ted Cruz that Obama dislikes the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, despite being a constitutional law professor).

7. Bradley Manning is now on trial years after first being arrested for spilling Department of Defense secrets about collateral deaths to WikiLeaks.

6. Tea Party groups have gotten special scrutiny from the IRS.

5. As Nation-affiliated reporter and Dirty Wars author/screenwriter Jeremy Scahill has documented, the U.S. government kills many innocents and maybe-innocents caught in its drone strikes.

4. Obama has doubled the combined number from all prior administrations of lawsuits against whistleblowers.

3. If CIA whistleblower Eric Snowden is correct, we’re all being spied on every time we use phones, e-mail, or website, in an unprecedented government data-mining operation including the program called Prism.

2. Gitmo still being open over four years after Obama’s election, and wracked by a massive hunger strike, must frustrate some Democrat voters, I’d think (though I’ve always said it’s only 160 or so guys, for now).

1. More troubling is the fact that despite a decade of al Qaeda being the great menace on the horizon, we appear now to be allied with it in Syria.  Anyone but Russia, basically -- not that I dismiss realpolitik. 

And I will remain neutral as I moderate tonight’s debate (please join us), recognizing the very real tensions between transparency and the need for secrecy, government overreach and real terrorist dangers, American safety and the risk of imperialism, tradition and change, heroism and martyr complexes, honor and rebellion, uncertainty and inquiry, proper procedure and subversion, defense and anarchy.

Dionysium, Tue. 6/11: Should Obama be impeached?

Manning on trial...Rice in confirmations...Holder on the hot seat...Snowden revealing massive government snooping...but perhaps the big question is:

"Should Obama Be Impeached?" 

That's the question debated by human rights lawyer Howard Yourow ("Yes") and consultant James Kaplan ("No"), with implacably neutral moderator Todd Seavey, at the next Dionysium ( https://www.facebook.com/events/114132925428556/ ). 

Tuesday (not Monday!), June 11th, 9:30pm in the Muchmore's performance space, with abundant beer for sale (and sofas) for facilitating thorough audience Q&A on this very open-ended topic, at a pivotal time when people at varied points on the political spectrum see government credibility faltering.  

Easily-visited Muchmore's is at 2 Havemeyer St. (on the corner of North 9th St.), a mere three blocks east of happening Bedford Ave., which is the very first L subway stop after Manhattan.  

P.S. The 9:30 debate at Muchmore's kicks off a trilogy of big topics climaxing one year of the Dionysium in Williamsburg: power (Obama et al) on 6/11, sex (evolutionary psychology) on 7/9, and money (Bitcoin) on 8/12, so join us for all three. 

P.P.S. On 6/11, you may well be considering making a full night of it by checking out the latest science-themed talks by the Empiricist League at nearby Public Assembly (70 N. 6th), that same night at 7pm (my friend Charles Blake will be amongst those discussing what scientists, as opposed to Doctor Who writers, really say about the nature of the timestream, a once in a lifetime event...or is it???).  

P.P.P.S. And regardless of what side of the political fence you're on, by the way, if you want to buy, sell, or rent a place, mention my name to Atlas Real Estate New York via the following e-address and you can get a "politically aware discount" from my friend Lauren Weiner there, who has ten years experience in this sort of thing: apts@atlas-ny.com

DIONYSIUM 5/13: Is America Over-Medicated?

Better living through chemistry?  Back to nature?  Mind over matter?  Join us to sort it all out.

A Dionysium debate plus two additional presentations, moderated by Todd Seavey: 

"Is America Over-Medicated?" 

Monday, May 13, 8pm

featuring: 

•YES: Marilynn Larkin: science writer/editor, fitness trainer, dancer

•NO: Dr. Gilbert Ross, medical/executive director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org)

plus: 

•Rachel May Adams, physician, internist, and palliative care fellow at Mount Sinai Hospital, explaining why pain relief isn't just for the dying anymore 

•Elizabeth Cochran, fashion exec and Christian Science adherent, explaining what that's all about

and plenty of audience Q&A.  Be heard.  And drink.  In either order.  At: 

The Muchmore's performance space, 2 Havemeyer St. at the corner of N. 9th St. in Williamsburg (just an easy three-block walk east of the very first L stop after Manhattan, the Bedford Ave. stop).  Remember, visiting Williamsburg makes you hipper). 

Public Enemy, Cops, Cars, and the Matrix

I have no idea why a black police helicopter hovered over my neighborhood for three hours early this morning, but let’s use it as an opportunity for a paranoid round-up of the world’s weirdness.

1. You can’t count on cops to show up promptly every time a guy enters your house, plays with a toy helicopter, masturbates, and eats salad.

2. Yet the police in even the most quiet, rural, crime-free areas increasingly get to have tanks, troop transports, and machine guns.

3. By contrast, you aren’t even allowed by law to give strangers a ride in your car.

4. Next thing you know, it drives people so nuts that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones interviews fellow conspiracy theorist Public Enemy’s Prof. Griff (maybe we would be better off if Rand Paul handled the libertarian outreach to black people).

5. Whereas, far from fearing we live in a matrix of lies, this mom doesn't even quite get the movie Matrix.

And I go on living in a city so left-wing that my friend Rew Asterik got dropped from a music teacher gig for singing the Pete Seeger song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” because it contains the line “Where have all the husbands gone?” which might upset fatherless children.  Where has all the sanity gone?

This Earth Day Is Conspiracy Day (UFOs, al Qaeda, a real CIA director in a gorilla suit on a motorcycle, etc.)

•On Earth Day, J.P. Freire posts a reminder that the host of the first Earth Day (in 1970), Ira Einhorn, went on to murder -- and compost! -- his girlfriend (but fled to Europe after getting out on bail with the help of then-lawyer Arlen Specter). 

•Twenty years later, a Brown University college communist told me he was delighted that Earth Day 1990 seemed to be making environmentalism mainstream (he was right) and that thus, so soon after the seeming implosion of communism, “capitalism would end not to the sound of marching Soviet boots but to the sound of falling trees.” 

(Can you blame me being inclined to believe the worst when it was thought by many people for a few hours last week that a missing Brown student might be the culprit in the Boston bombings?) 

•This year’s Earth Day brings, among other things, the premiere (in L.A.) of that documentary Sirius that alleges the government possesses UFO technology that could save the environment (the film also shows a surprisingly convincing-looking six-inch humanoid corpse that purportedly has non-human DNA -- my bet would still be deformed human-fetus mummy, since mummies are common in the part of Latin America where it was found, but who the hell knows). 

Sirius will be followed next week by a week-long National Press Club conference on UFOs headed by six former Congress members -- and the film itself will be shown again in Charlottesville in early May.  I think Reason’s Ron Bailey should attend and tell us how it goes.  He likes energy issues and biotech.

•What with next week also bringing the Toronto premiere of the much-touted, evidence-or-bust, we-mean-it-this-time, we’ll-shut-our-websites-down-if-it-ain’t-real documentary Shooting Bigfoot...

•and with reckless conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones pushing the idea that Craft International mercenaries were not merely running a drill but were in fact the real perps in Boston (those fellows in tan pants who were in a front-page photo on the Times this Sunday with no explanatory caption at all and were formerly run by recently-murdered sniper Chris Kyle)...

•not to mention Vice President Biden (like George H.W. Bush before him) using the phrase “New World Order” in a speech without seeming to notice that’s like waving a red cape in front of conspiracy theorists...

...April has been an incredibly bountiful month for people who allege cover-ups.  I am less paranoid, prone to see a world of screw-ups and disasters rather than conspiracies and extraterrestrials. 

However, reality has a tendency to get almost as weird as the conspiracy theories if you look at it closely enough, and it is with that in mind, post-Boston, that I find myself marveling again at one nice, cleanly-written paragraph from the 1996 memoir From the Shadows (p. 349) by CIA man turned Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which I blogged about last month.  The book was written five years before 9/11/01, and I think it’s safe to say that this is the haunting paragraph where al Qaeda happens, with all the same ambiguity about the degree of U.S. negligence in its formation that people still bicker about a decade after 9/11:

Farewell to Two Cold Warriors

Kudos to Johnny Rotten for denouncing the people exulting about Thatcher’s death last week.

Similarly, the Saturday Live Sketch about a punk who alienated his bandmates by liking Thatcher touched on one of my favorite topics: the tragic (and ultimately unnecessary) divide between people who love freedom for essentially left-anarchist reasons and people who love free markets.  Not that their differences aren’t real or important, but consider, for example, that the most notorious anti-Thatcher riots back in the day were still (long story short) riots against taxes.  (By the way, a free-marketeer must respect SNL’s right to ban troublemaking performers, but an anti-authoritarian might still find some amusement in how prestigious the list is.)

I wrote in the anthology Proud to Be Right about bridging the punk/conservative gap in my own youthful, Reagan-era mind.  But I haven’t harped on that specific theme too much since then, mainly because I increasingly think that if I take the idea to its logical (and in some ways far less fun) conclusion, I need to go far beyond stitching together a few ironically-compatible elements of the culture – and far beyond the tradition-plus-markets “fusionism” those on the right often laud. 

I need to tackle the much more daunting task of figuring out how to “reconcile” the whole culture to itself, so to speak, patiently and diplomatically finding ways to draw upon the best elements of every major political tradition without simply denigrating them or combating them. 

(By contrast, Proud to Be Right may well end up being remembered most for combat, namely the C-SPAN2 panel on which I condemned fellow PBR contributor Helen Rittelmeyer for being a closet nihilist – but she’s settled down, moved to Australia while still blogging wittily for First Things, and gotten engaged, and I wish them both well.  I honestly don’t like to fight.)

So much of human life is about performative ruts: People’s brains aren’t just making arguments, they’re constantly asking, “Should I be in aggrieved-party mode now?” and “Is this a right/left argument...is this turning into a city/rural argument...do I need to defend my favorite sports team now?” etc.  As Jonathan Haidt’s psychology-of-conflict book Righteous Mind suggests, needlessly escalating clashes may be more than just a troubling footnote to politics, it might be the main story, and not one we should be proud of endlessly retelling.

And that story probably won’t change much as long as politics resembles Crossfire and, perhaps worse, the short sniping of Twitter, Facebook, and online comments threads (which so quickly seem to turn everything into cycles of abuse that sound very much like two-party politics).  Now, I could try just mastering the quick-insult art form – I think you know I could – but I basically vowed back when the troubling show Politically Incorrect first became popular that I didn’t really want to go that route.  I have tried not to, but conflict is pervasive...and instinctually satisfying.  But no matter how risky it is to abandon that familiar game, I have to say no to it. 

Coincidentally, the same week various punks, anarchists, and even comic book creators in the UK were playing their assigned roles by celebrating Thatcher’s death (probably feeling a bit nasty about themselves, not just her, in the process), a study reportedly suggested that social media is tending to make us still nastier – and more shallow. 

I’ll soon try other approaches, then, reflected in the near future in a few projects that’ll take me away from Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger most of the time (really – reach me via e-mail if you need me).  I know I recently tried to exit a few times before, but the timing wasn’t quite right for both exiting and explaining myself.  The near future, though, should bring, among other things, (A) essays about reconciling political factions, (B) a site for libertarian pop culture (more decisively entertaining rather than argumentative), (C) an article about gold, (D) the moderating of ever-civil Dionysium debates, (E) possibly the moderating of much larger debates, and (F) various bits of ghostwriting (for you too, if you like).  More about all that as warranted.

The combat model of politics was well-suited to the Cold War era and is perhaps well-suited to a two-party system, but it’s healthy to take a step back and ask whether it’d look ridiculous in, say, a healthy system of twenty parties in a world with minimal threat of violence.  If it’d seem jarring in that world, wouldn’t it be nice, and probably quite productive, to behave right now more like a citizen of that imagined world than like one forged by the tragic conflicts of the twentieth century that molded minds from mine to Thatcher’s?  (Even punk has by now been tamed, after all – and I’m definitely going to see that museum exhibit, without shame or griping about lost “authenticity.”)

Of course, different mindsets are appropriate to different eras:

Moynihan on Murderers in Academia

How could I not love academia and the left?  Well, Michael C. Moynihan reminds us that academia is full of convicted left-wing murderers.  Don’t tell yourself this says nothing about how the Establishment thinks (or fails to, despite the PhDs).

Gay Marriage Debate Tonight (in a World Without Thatcher)

It is probably for the best that Cy Curnin of the Fixx did not know when I saw the band perform last night that Margaret Thatcher would die today. 

Like all too many of my favorite British creative folk of recent decades, he’s very left-leaning and probably thinks of Thatcher as almost a Satan-figure (though I have no reason to believe he will say anything inappropriate today).  She and Reagan tend to be the implied sources of madness in the West balancing the madness among the Soviets in New Wave-era songs like “Stand or Fall,” though I love all that music anyway.

And the juxtaposition of last night’s New Wave concert and tonight’s Dionysium debate on gay marriage (Dorian Davis vs. Mike Woods, moderated by me, 8pm at Muchmore’s, 2 Havemeyer St. near the Bedford Ave. L stop in Williamsburg) has me thinking that the Iron Lady will surely be remembered as doing more to alter perceptions of women in the British Isles than all those fey rockers, much as I admire both.  There was really never reason for them to quarrel. 

At the very least, no matter how fey the audience turns out to be – gay, hipster, nerd, what have you – tonight, let there be at least a toast to Thatcher’s memory.  I vow to lead one.  During the audience discussion, thoughts on Thatcher will be as welcome as thoughts on the gay marriage debate. 

But tonight’s proceedings need not be funereal.  Here are a few funny items to keep you in good spirits until this evening:

•Brian the dog on Family Guy manages to be endearing even when being homophobic (here reacting to Stewie’s gay-seeming documentary narration).

•Apparently, Brown University soon may literally be stealing our dreams, with their crazy brain-science-machines.

•Here’s a funny yet rational retort to all-too-common online conspiracy-theory videos (yet this video, last I checked, has more “dislikes” than “likes,” whereas almost any pro-conspiracy-theory nut seems to be rewarded with likes, a disturbing imbalance).  This one specifically mocks people who think an earlier video reveals an alien shapeshifter in Obama’s entourage, part of a larger “reptilian” or extraterrestrial invasion.

•Here’s one mocking equally-common videos purporting to spot life-on-Mars evidence in real NASA footage.

The real world is more than fascinating (and confusing) enough without deluding ourselves.  And, though certainly no politician is all good, that world is likely a bit freer for Margaret Thatcher having lived in it.

DIONYSIUM 4/8: Should There Be Gay Marriage?

Before the Supreme Court decides, the organization from which the Court traditionally takes its cues shall do so: 

"Should There Be Gay Marriage?"

A DIONYSIUM debate, with ample discussion, hosted by TODD SEAVEY 

Mon., April 8 at 8pm 

YES: DORIAN DAVIS, libertarian writer and adjunct journalism professor at Marymount Manhattan College

NO: MIKE WOODS, derivatives trader, libertarian, and Catholic

At the MUCHMORE'S performance space

(free admission, cash/credit bar -- at 2 Havemeyer St. on the corner of N. 9th St., a mere three blocks east of the very first L subway stop into Brooklyn from Manhattan, the Bedford Ave. stop)

Going Mostly-Offline for Real (plus the Fixx, Bigfoot, and superheroes)

April Fool’s Day or not, I’m really going to kick the Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and e-mail addictions – in part to give me more time for things like editing the comics section of the soon-to-launch LibertyIslandMag.com, writing a series of more serious political essays, ghostwriting, and more (including stuff for you, perhaps, if you want me to add your project in these areas or TV production or radio commentary or such to the schedule). 

My friend Kyle Smith here summarizes some great reasons to spend less time online.  Read it if you still have a sufficient attention span (h/t fellow crypto-semi-Luddite Kevin Walsh).  By contrast, ignore Kyle’s kind words about G.I. Joe Retaliation.

But there are entertaining moments coming up in April to keep you occupied while I’m mostly-silent (really, despite me posting this on April Fool’s Day):

•April 7: If you know me and want to join me for the Fixx, let me know before someone else claims the second ticket I have – and here’s a fan’s video for their song “Saved by Zero” using footage from Tron Legacy (I think this marks exactly 40 times I’ve mentioned that band online, by the way – fitting for one of the coolest acts ever to grace the Top 40).

•April 8: I think our Dionysium topic on Monday the 8th (8pm at Muchmore’s) may be the timely one of gay marriage – but contact me one week prior if you want to volunteer to debate that or a different topic.  

Announcing (not to mention planning) the Dionysium events farther in advance is one of the few things I’ll keep using Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail for – but I’ll provide links here to other big impending projects as well. 

•April 13: The conspiracy theorists I’ve so often mocked despite their vigilant, paranoid resistance to the powers that be (including in my “Conspiracy Week” of entries just ended) might want to note that the 13th will mark exactly 6 decades, 6 months, and 6 days since the barcode was patented.  Plan accordingly.  Then pay your taxes.

•April 24: The best-organized group of purported UFO witnesses, the ones behind the so-called Disclosure Project that has held attention-getting press conferences of ex-military people and the like at the National Press Club, will take their best shot at convincing the world we are not alone – and that the government possesses alien technology – when they release the new documentary Sirius. 

If that doesn’t contain proof, I never want to hear from the extraterrestrial-believers again.

•April 30: Coincidentally, one of the most-hyped Bigfoot documentaries, Shooting Bigfoot, will be released six days after the UFO one, at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.  The site Facebook.com/FindBigfoot has vowed to shut down if this documentary doesn’t contain persuasive footage of a Bigfoot eating and then being shot and preserved (in Las Vegas) for study (by a guy who admits he’s previously faked a dead Bigfoot). 

If that doesn’t contain proof, I never want to hear from the Bigfoot-believers again.

[NOTE: That report of an Avengers/X-Men movie crossover was an April Fool’s story.]

Time of Renewal

I attended a very nice, non-threatening, quasi-Easter, Unitarian service with a very lovely Unitarian (the symbol behind the altar is almost a cross; the detailed sermon tale about literally-underground Jews in Ukraine hiding from the Nazis was almost a Passover story; and the tale of the empty tomb – much like Jesus Christ Superstar – almost ended with a resurrection).

I feel almost like I'm back in my native mellow New England (birthplace of transcendentalism, whatever exactly that is) instead of here on the Upper East Side.

But now, at this traditional time of renewal, I very rapidly do the apartment's long-overdue spring cleaning to prepare for the arrival of one of the multiple(?!) converts to Catholicism I know. And tomorrow, the day that to many trolls really best symbolizes changed perspectives and the embrace of new truths, April Fool's Day, I swear I kick the Blogger/Facebook/Twitter/e-mail addiction and get a bunch of other long-overdue work done, hoping you forgive my delays as I forgive yours.

P.S. Also, two nights ago I saw an Upper East Side yuppie couple taking a photograph of their dog's poop on the sidewalk. Yea, and so we are reminded that there is beauty in even the lowest parts of our universe, due to the bounty provided by Nature or whatever or Whoever or the dog or such or what have you.

Conspiracy Week: SPECTOR, LANNISTER, RAPE, JOE

TRIGGER WARNING, but I mean literally in this case: Phil Spector killed a woman with a gun, and this past Sunday there was an HBO movie about it written by (notoriously manly) David Mamet, with Al Pacino, Helen Mirren, and Jeffrey Tambor in it.  The case was sufficiently disturbing that we should not allow Spector’s historic musical achievements to cause us to forget (he waved a gun around the Ramones as well, apparently, and even punk has its limits). 

While it’s true that we should not imagine that everyone who commits violence against women will be as eccentric and easy to spot as Spector, I think (as an individualist might) that there’s also a real danger in the suddenly-popular approach of condemning most of society as “rape culture” – not because the issue is unimportant (and certainly not because any decent person condones rape) but because, much as it pains egalitarians to do this, you have to make clear distinctions between those who commit violence and those who do not (this goes for the recent guns debate as well). 

When you tell every male who likes high heels or whistles at strippers that he’s part of “rape culture,” you’re also telling the handful of actual rapists: Hey, you’re just like everybody else (except a handful of feminists, of course). 

That’s dangerous in much the same way as those creepy instances of (no doubt warmhearted) folk saying, Both the assailant and the person he shot were victims here.  Well, sort of, maybe, in some complicated Hegelian sense, but in a far more important way: no, not if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of a moral order and legal system.  With that in mind, maybe we can safely indulge in a...

SEXIST SIDENOTE: Twenty years ago, I was privileged to be present (until I quietly drifted away because I’m polite and unobtrusive like that) at a somewhat flirty conversation between writer David Lodge and the aforementioned Helen Mirren, who I contend is still hot, was even hotter then, and was a freaking curvaceous bombshell back when she was **walking around completely naked at age twenty-seven in the 1972 film Savage Messiah.**

...if perchance that sounds like something you might want to rent.  Y’know, I mean, like, for Easter.  I mean because it has “Messiah” in the title and all.  (She played Ayn Rand once, too, you know, allowing her to vent about as passionately as the real Ayn does here.  And the recent RED movies are based on comic books.  And she uses machine guns in them.)

BUT ADMITTEDLY BOOBIES AND RELIGION/CULTURE OFTEN CLASH, as in the case of threats against Tunisian activist Amina Tyler.

On the bright side, though, back here in the benighted U.S., National Victimization Survey stats suggest that just in the past three decades alone rape rates in the U.S. have fallen by 85%(!) – even as crude jokes on TV and porn everywhere have increased (with high-profile spats over such forms of crudeness causing people like vlogger AmazingAtheist to spring to their defense). 

Yet rage at purportedly omnipresent, conspiracy-like “rape culture” seems to be growing exponentially, to the extent that one isn’t quite sure any of us, no matter how innocent, can hope to escape the boiling fury now.  We are all still guilty, guilty, guilty participants in patriarchy no matter how peaceful things get and how spotless our own criminal records are. 

(And, in a comparatively trivial footnote, I suspect all that mounting rage, no pun intended, is somehow going to be channeled, in a massive non sequitur, into zealous support for a 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign – just you watch.  Several of the angriest feminist bloggers are of course also ardent socialist Democrats, a few right here in NYC.  They are always fighting what they perceive as the “War Against Women” on two fronts, hating Wall Street as much as they hate rapists – and somehow seeing the two as related.  And at some point in 2016 they may find themselves compelled to revisit the night of Rand Paul’s infamous “Aqua Buddha” college prank.  Don’t think it can’t happen... I’m warning you... People should listen to me...)

BUT WHAT DID LOUIS C.K. DO in between Lucky Louie on HBO and Louie on FX, you ask?  Apparently, he got his own lesson in how economic and sexual exploitation can intermingle.

AND CONTINUING THE HBO AND NUDITY THEMES: Game of Thrones season 3 starts on HBO this coming Sunday (though I’ll be watching it one week from tonight) and should be nicely Machiavellian.  (In addition to breasts and political intrigue, the show sometimes depicts the promise and peril of mixed-faith marriages, as does Naomi Schaefer Riley’s new book at an apt time.)

Breasts and violence notwithstanding, though, I think the two things the series does right that set it apart from other fantasy and sci-fi are using the supernatural elements vary sparingly at first and using morality almost not at all.  I’m not knocking morality, of course, but the usual practice in fantasy of having clans of aristocrats line up neatly into good and evil camps is, well, not convincing given actual human history. 

BUT FIRST, I'll be seeing G.I. Joe: Retaliation, no doubt far more morally-dualistic.  And I know it'll be goofy.  And I have no intention of seeing the first film.  But (to return to this blog’s “Conspiracy Week” and “Month of Geopolitics” themes), those people who fear reptilian shape-shifters have secretly taken over the government will surely rush to see a film about a Cobra operative disguising himself as the President in order to conquer America.  It’s like this movie was made for them.  They probably think it’s part of the conspiracy. 

IF ONLY real-world politics were that simple.  Instead, it involves subtler evils, like the quiet death of contrarianism over at once-eclectic, sometimes-hawkish New Republic and its replacement by a new, authoritarian, Progressive sycophancy from the likes of young Ezra Klein. 

(My only tiny complaint about that great Matt Welch piece is that the second-to-last paragraph notes liberals bringing the charge of “epistemic closure” against closed-minded conservatives three years ago – but Matt might’ve mentioned that, for good or ill, it was Reason’s own Julian Sanchez who started that lament.  And so the snake consumes its tail, and the ritual is completed.)

ON THAT NOTE, we conclude this “Month of Geopolitics” – and after Easter/April Fool’s, I'll really, truly take that break from cyberspace I’ve threatened for ages...at least on this site.