DC Comics’ New 52 and Rebirth: A Corporate Theory

For what it's worth, one disturbingly simple way to explain half the strange DC Comics Universe events of the past five years might be to assume that harried comics writer Geoff Johns was told by a studio exec, "We want to have a Wonder Woman reveal in the movie, prefigured in the comics, about one of her relatives being evil. Just make it so that her father is an evil god or the evil New God or one of the evil New Gods or that she has an evil sister or an evil duplicate from Themyscira or an evil duplicate from another universe or an evil daughter from another universe or an evil brother or her duplicate from the other universe has an evil son or her duplicate from Themyscira has an evil son or the son is the evil New God or the son is Luthor's child or is a duplicate of Luthor."

To which Johns said, "Uhhh."

And the executive said, "You have to do all that."

And they did. They actually, literally did. All of it. All the rest may be mere side effects.

And then Johns went insane, like Chinese scholars asked to adhere to contradictory edicts during the Cultural Revolution. And later, when there was a tiny shift in the corporate power structure, he decided to kill several characters and depict two of director Zack Snyder's favorite characters as cruel gods toying with the cosmos.

“Essential Hayek” and “Taking a Stand”

•Careful observers will have noticed I have four favorite topics on this blog, basically sci-fi, music, science, and politics.

But having recently watched both Marvel and DC abandon having a coherent fictional universe, stopped hosting events in youthful and indie-rockin’ Williamsburg, begun to suspect that science idolatry could cause people to overlook strange-but-perhaps-real things with which skeptics ought to wrestle or cause them to accept as final some verdicts merely gussied up in the acceptable scientific lingo, and despaired of virtually any mainstream political current leading anywhere good, I need to retool. Online, I will focus on plugging a couple crucial, radical libertarian projects.

•But for a taste, instead, of the economist who is probably the most respectable and mainstream manifestation of libertarianism so far, you might check out Don Boudreaux’s look at Essential Hayek with explanatory videos at that link to augment the print material.

The basic free-market case is needed now, with socialist Bernie Sanders rallying a crowd of nearly 10,000 in Madison, Hillary Clinton pretty openly working for authoritarian foreign governments and no one caring, politicians of both parties serving the Saudis in similar fashion, and a Vox piece (h/t Sonny Bunch) saying the American Revolution was a mistake (in part because we’d have a more redistributive government if we hadn’t left England).

And calling these things bad signs would be considered hilariously unhip these days in some quarters, like being pro-McCarthy a half-century ago. Get with the socialist program, dude! Everyone knows it works great! Look at the cool people running Greece!

•Since I don’t think all that is cool, I’m going to start writing libertarian columns daily for SpliceToday.com on Monday -- and a few months later unveil the book I’m writing, Libertarianism for Beginners.

•What better time to dig deeper and teach the world the whole conventional political spectrum is wrong than now, with the prospect of another Clinton-vs.-Bush election upon us next year? A lot could happen before November 2016, but Clinton’s still safely ahead of Sanders, and all the Republican candidates (if we assume the small Trump launch bump is temporary) are down in the single digits in surveys of Republican voters except Jeb Bush, who is at an anemic but perhaps sufficient 19% or so. We can do better, but only with a change in philosophy.

•You know if I had my way, the paleolibertarian + crunchy con + antiwar candidate to emerge from the Republican primary would be Rand Paul, author of Taking a Stand. While conservatives and libertarians fight over whether he really belongs in the other camp, Paul to his credit is busy reaching out beyond both Republican factions, already building bridges to Democrats and, yes, alienated black voters. He could win the general that way, I think. And he could change world history. Everyone ought to regard him as a sign of real hope.

Incidentally, though he comes from the faction of libertarianism more fond of Mises than Hayek, a faction with more right-wing baggage, he expressed support for South Carolina taking down the Confederate Flag, and his call for privatizing marriage is the correct libertarian response to cultural wrangles like the one that I hope just ended last week. I also respect his silence on the topic as it was being resolved. Politicians should often be silent. Paul is a Christian but knows it’s more important how deep in debt the federal government is than how deeply disturbing some people think certain sexual relationships are.

But principles are more important than individual politicians, whether Rand Paul or Gary Johnson or anyone else, and starting tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, I’ll stick to using the Net to reaffirm those basic principles and steer clear of some of the crazier, pettier wrangles the Net’s gotten so good at fomenting.

“Men of War” and “Terminator Genisys”

•Alex Rose’s book Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima is out this month, and it should appeal not just to history and military buffs but to the increasingly prevalent gamer mind (I suspect the future will not understand how we could have thought these were all separate disciplines).

With conservative respect for fighting men but anarchic awareness that tidy master-narratives are usually baloney, Rose sets out to document not just the heroic high points but the chaos and confusion of battle, the feeling of being on the ground and in many cases not having the slightest idea who’s winning, who’s losing, who’s in charge, who’s over the next hill, or even who’s twenty feet to your left.

I think it’s still legal to sympathize even with hapless Confederate soldiers caught in the fog of war, but you’ve got multiple armies to study and learn from here, even if you come away convinced combat is more about happenstance than honor.

•Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies, on which the AMC series Turn is based and has just announced he’ll soon be the author as well of Twilight of the Gods, about men linked to the Hindenburg disaster and the decline of German aviation dominance. I told him it’s good timing that Marvel is releasing Thor: Ragnarok in a couple years. I make intellectual contributions like that.

•Men do not always fight other men, of course. Take for example the harrowing, or at least embarrassing, “Emu War” fought in Australia between man and bird, with machine guns and everything (h/t Matt Yeackel).

•Maybe Terminator Genisys, out yesterday, is a glimpse of what our final war will look like, much as we might wish Facebook, the military, or whoever else is playing with A.I. fire out there knew what they were doing. Of course, in the Terminator movies, if you destroy the world, you get a do-over (and yet another sequel) thanks to time travel, which makes it unfortunate I didn’t quite get this week’s blog entries written during my official “Month of Revisionism” in June.

Oh, well. As Sonny Bunch rightly notes, this fifth installment in the Terminator franchise does less to advance our understanding of time travel and robotics than to give the female co-writer (who has also been a Bionic Woman producer and union website editor) a chance to throw a feminist/pro-choice revision into what most of us thought was already a pretty badass mama-bear sort of story. Now we know that if only Sarah Connor had been taught to fight earlier on, she not only would have fared better against SkyNet, she wouldn’t even really need to have a legendary son. She’d have “choice.”

Alas, despite the fighting spirit of people like one or more Connors, the real end of the world may still be sparked by something as dumb as these chatbots (hilariously) learning from each other’s conversation (h/t Jim Melloan).

•If we must celebrate any element of war this weekend, though, let it be the Declaration of Independence, which turns 239 on Saturday. I have big declarations of my own to make in the next couple days as well.

“I, Liar” and “X-Files”

•Janice Erlbaum gets inside the head of a despicable person in her novel I, Liar, showing us convincingly the process of character formation that might lead an almost-ordinary-seeming woman to become a chronic victimizer. Enough slights from Mom, enough lousy living situations in need of escaping, and perhaps you too might have ended up finding comfort in duping playmates, fellow students, and co-workers. Where will it end?

•Some free-marketeers I know are as guilty as communists of seeing lying as morally unlike contract fraud (though the free-marketeers tend to take the formal business contracts more seriously and the communists tend to take them less seriously). You’re always making the presumption if you lie, though, whether in writing or in casual conversation, that your judgment of how the person you’re talking to should deploy his resources and life energies trumps how he would want to use them if he knew the truth. Not cool. Never do it (except, as with punching or any other aggression, as a defense against outright coercion, such as lying to Nazis at the door).

The case wouldn’t have to be spelled out this rationalistically, of course, if people would show some damn empathy. Lying, rooted in the arrogant belief one knows best, inevitably undermines that.

•Speaking of low-empathy cases, I notice at least one person thanked in the acknowledgements of the aforementioned novel who is among that 5% of Facebook friends who’ve ended up unfriending me, not such a bad ratio given that my whole m.o. is violating that (purported) party etiquette rule against discussing religion or politics.

I can’t help noticing, though, that you can pretty much say there’s no God on a regular basis without losing any Christians, but disagree with one line or narrow, specific policy implication of a recent Salon piece and you run a good chance of someone, usually a young, white, female, East-Coast, feminist liberal who ostensibly hates narrow-mindedness and intolerance, vanishing. The most “privileged” and coddled adult population on Earth -- sought as either solidarity sisters or sex partners by nearly everyone they encounter in a place like NYC -- they have decided they are the vanguard in teaching the rest of us what constitutes ethical discourse and acceptable political thinking. They are jerks. One advantage of aging is being able to say so without fear of relevant social consequences.

I will shortly endeavor to absent myself from increasingly rapid and vicious culture clashes (flags, gays, what have you) in favor of the more serious business of teaching the world some basic economics, though. If I can do so in a world with no Ex-Im Bank and less of an EU, so much the better! More soon.

•Today marks the final issue of a two-year, twenty-five-issue X-Files: Season Ten sequel series that was begun before any of us knew the TV series itself would be coming back (as a miniseries, next year). It’s purportedly canonical, but I suppose few will worry about whether its resurrection of Cancer Man and the Lone Gunmen jibes with the semi-retired status of Mulder in the lame second X-Files movie.

And I say just chalk up the lack of a 2012 invasion to magnetite in all those “chemtrails.” So simple. Gotta clear the decks of old plot threads once in a while, in all nerd media.

•It is fitting that Clickhole has concocted a masterful conspiracy theory about the true meaning of Alex Trebek’s actions on Jeopardy (h/t Glen Whitman), given that Trebek played one of the mysterious Men in Black (alongside Jesse Ventura) in my favorite X-Files episode. It was arguably the funniest episode and the one that taught us the most up to that point about what the conspiracy was really up to.

10 Impressions Made by “Fingerprints of the Gods”

Ten thoughts on weird revisionist history -- inspired by a book that claims Antarctica was mapped by ancient civilizations before it was covered by ice:

1. Why read the occasional book by a seeming crackpot, you ask? Well, much as I value epistemological caution and having hard scientific evidence before making claims, there is something to be said for limbering up our dogmatic, narrative-preserving brains by hearing out a truly fringey view once in a while -- and at least getting a feel for how internally coherent and plausible-sounding it might be.

After all, I already think we live in a world in which people mistakenly believe religion, government, and most health reporting are helpful (the evidence that eating lots of vegetables is good for you isn’t even all that strong, yet in nutrition science, that’s roughly the pinnacle of trusted, evidence-based advice).

People recognize the past is filled with silly beliefs, but so few really take to heart the idea that their own favorite present-day beliefs might be wrong -- yes, even the ones you thought made you so goddam intellectually superior to everyone else. Just how different might the real world be if some of the fringe folk turn out to be right? Do you dare to wonder?

2. This exploratory attitude need not cause us to dismiss all we think we know about the past. Some things seem nearly certain and solid: Seasons end on Game of Thrones, and Magna Carta, arguably the first document to limit the power of government, turns 800 today.

3. By contrast, it is only the twentieth anniversary of British author Graham Hancock’s highly speculative book Fingerprints of the Gods, recommended to me by a fellow performer at one of those Electoral Dysfunction onstage political panels (which I’ll appear in again on Saturday, July 18, 7pm at the PIT in NYC).

You might not think there’d be much to learn from a book making the bizarre argument that the Earth’s surface periodically comes loose from its interior and slips around a bit, like a loose orange peel, causing Antarctica, for instance, to relocate from balmy to freezing climes as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago.

But just as one can learn a great deal about how truly weird some lights in the sky are from UFO buffs -- even if it turns out those lights are meteorological/plasmoid or military rather than Martian -- one can learn things from Hancock’s thesis that leave unavoidably weird questions, even if one doesn’t adopt his whole worldview.

It appears pretty convincingly to be the case, for instance, that centuries-ago mapmakers inherited even older maps that depict the mountains and valleys of Antarctica accurately -- even though modern European culture only began exploring Antarctica 200 years ago, believe it or not, and even though as long as our society has been aware of Antarctica, its mountains and valleys have been hidden to all but the best-equipped scientists by thick ice sheets.

Are the ancient maps just lucky guesses? Were there mapmakers many tens of thousands of years ago, suggesting civilization rises and falls more spectacularly and over longer spans of time than we normally assume? Or was Antarctica somehow located in a warmer spot 10,000 years ago?

4. Before we assume trustworthy scientists and historians have all that worked out already, keep in mind that ABC News was no doubt relying on real, credentialed scientists eight years ago when it predicted New York City would be underwater by June 2015 due to global warming (for out of towners wondering: it is not). Humanity can be very wrong about some very big-picture facts.

5. I say the science-oriented skeptic must keep an open mind but am not for a moment saying this should cause us to abandon science for even less-scientific pictures of the world, such as the Muslim/animist views that inspired Malaysians to arrest tourists there recently for bearing their breasts on a sacred mountain and thus being blamed by locals for an earthquake. We should not punish breasts or blame them for earthquakes.

6. Nor do I think we should willy-nilly accept on an equal footing with science every oddball theory such as the claim by great DC Comics artist Neal Adams that the Earth -- not the universe but the Earth all by itself -- is gradually expanding, and adding mass to boot, in a process covered up by dogmatic mainstream geologists.

7. Indeed, as a DC Comics fan, I have to question whether we should even accept the revisionist claim being made in current issues of Justice League that the Anti-Monitor was once an “anti-god” known as Mobius. That’s not how I remember it! Does the goddess Pandora know about any of this?

8. Since they’ve discovered a tomb in Mexico known as the “abode of the gods” filled with decorative mercury, maybe we should be worried that the real ancient gods were time-traveling liquid-metal Terminators -- but I suppose all that will be sorted out in Terminator 5 in a few weeks, probably with results as damaging for the timestream as current issues of Justice League.

9. If you want some real history in your comics and have wearied of all the endless revisions of the timestream in superhero and sci-fi stories, you might want to check out Alan Moore’s current comics miniseries Providence, telling the (grim) life story of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. He would’ve appreciated bizarre, pseudo-scientific claims about Antarctica.

10. But to get back to the Fingerprints of the Gods hypothesis: it strikes me that if Hancock has been driven to strange speculations, it might be in part because he is unwilling to abandon a powerful dogma of our own day. Maybe climate naturally varies more drastically than we realize and Antarctica really did see some warm, iceless days within written memory. I don’t know. And I’m certainly not saying that in order to boost oil company profits or anything that fussily mainstream. On the contrary, I’m saying it because the occasional anomaly like those iceless maps won’t go away.

Of course, all the water frozen in Antarctica wouldn’t just go away if melted either, so if Hancock were right we’d still have to ask why the oceans weren’t all fifty or so feet deeper everywhere else on those maps. So maybe their depiction of Antarctica was just luck. But I don’t know. I don’t know. 

7 Habits of the “Too Big to Fail” (and a Lloyd Cole invite)

It’s good to commemorate the past, as people are doing today, but the future matters as well. Time and again, people assume big, old institutions, ostensibly “too big to fail,” will always be around, until they suddenly aren’t. If you want to avoid being startled by history, don’t do these seven things disastrous things:

1. Don’t assume current media-consumption patterns can’t change.

There are more than three TV networks these days. Thus, I was part of a three-week experiment in recording political discussion panels called The Run at BENnetwork.com, and I have no idea what the fully-realized site will look like, but at least at 1 minute into this promo clip, you get to hear a couple seconds of me explaining how humble the ambitions of anti-federal-government activists really are these days.

Now that Letterman’s gone, someone should probably hire me to be the stiff-yet-funny voice of America, like a Conan O’Brien but with politics. Or at least join me and other political nerds in seeing Rand Paul tomorrow (Tuesday, May 26, doors 7pm) at the Strand (third floor, rare books room, admission with purchase of his book Taking a Stand).

2. Don’t assume that familiar financial institutions will -- or should -- always be there.

If Rand Paul succeeds in his heroic almost-one-man effort to alter the PATRIOT ACT and stop the NSA from listening in on everyone, we will still have to explain how Andrew Ross Sorkin was able to transcribe so many verbatim comments from financial bigwigs during the initial financial crisis.

Maybe we should just grant him some poetic license, but in any case he presents what is purportedly a detailed, surprisingly intimate, and accurate picture of what the major players were doing, saying, sweating, and thinking during the 2008 meltdown on Wall Street in his hefty tome (some might call it “too big to read” -- ha ha!) Too Big to Fail, written just a couple years later (h/t Malinda Boothe).

The main lesson I draw is that what was regarded as the most apocalyptic outcome by the financial bigwigs -- and by politicians of both parties, and by most pundits and activists -- is the outcome that should have been allowed to happen, namely all of these giant, entitled, government-subsidized, bailed-out, cozy, crony, Federal-Reserve-watching, legalese-enshrouded, and, yes, regulated institutions being allowed to crash and die so that better ones might flourish.

That option would have meant intense short-term pain, and the other option was the protracted pain you’re still feeling seven years later and will probably feel more intensely in the near future thanks to the same rich imbeciles. Welcome to Plan B. On a related note...

3. Don’t just applaud “success” regardless of how that success came about.

Winning isn’t everything, no, not even in meritocratic America, and winning in the wrong way can create a bad precedent for future action. Honor soldiers but don’t excuse war crimes. Applaud CIA cleverness but don’t endorse their torture and terror tactics, not to mention their stealthy subversion of the democracy that pays their bills. You have to wonder what the elites are up to when we aren’t looking.

Admit it, even if you’re a gay leftist, wouldn't you have been a little creeped out back when Robert Gates was CIA director for Bush the Elder if I told you that someday he’d not only be Secretary of Defense for both Bush the Younger and Obama but would then go on to run the Boy Scouts and make nearly his first move the allowing, at long last, of gay Scoutmasters? Admit it, you would. (I say this as a Bowie-idolizing atheist who lives in NYC, you understand.)

And you’d fear Hillary Clinton’s Libya and lucrative foundation-donation shenanigans if she were a Republican, too. Well, at least if she makes it to the White House, I can probably look forward to her being under perpetual indictment while she’s ruling us. (Better to ditch the entire military/intelligence/police complex and do the inexpensive and more limited job of self-defense yourself, though, I suspect.)

4. Don’t assume the project they gave you is the one that matters in the long run.

It appears my friend Joann’s brother, Joseph Kahn, is a director who wants to do big sci-fi or superhero movies at some point (and nearly directed a movie version of Neuromancer, a cyberpunk project which seems somehow apt for a high-tech Texan nerd descended from Korean immigrants). He has already given the world a popular unauthorized Power Rangers short and an indie time-travel comedy.

But just because “the man” says Kahn’s real job is directing cool rock videos like the one for U2’s “Elevation” or odd, heavily studio-managed projects like the motorcycle adventure Torque doesn’t mean he can’t sneak in (awesome) comics/sci-fi material in surprising places, possibly laying groundwork for the future. Thus that striking new Taylor Swift video he directed.

The more years I spend in NYC, the more convinced I am that the future is often built by people who, say, find a way to convince the higher-ups that an elaborate puppet musical was just what they always wanted for their new ad campaign (because it is the thing the underling has been dying to pour his heart into since childhood, and it’s finally actually going to work out this time).

5. Never assume any current trend will continue, be it crime, sex, culture, temperatures, or anything else.

Speaking of rock videos, I have a zillion opinions about 80s rock videos and several about 00s rock videos, as you know, but now that I’m unyoung, my main reaction to 90s rock videos is that they were the most disturbing ones, and I’m not sure why. I mean, it can’t simply be that things always keep getting grosser and more perverse because, I’m telling you, things look tamer now than they did twenty years ago in that area.

Here’s “Push It” by Garbage, which I never saw back in the day but is fairly typical. But there was a lot of similarly twisted stuff from Bowie, Nirvana, and almost everyone else then. Every video would be a Satanic mass-child-sacrifice by now if aesthetics really just kept moving in one direction (not that I’m knocking Garbage, and I wouldn’t want to piss off the lead singer, who is of course a liquid-metal Terminator to boot).

6. Don’t forget about death.

B.B. King, R.I.P.

7. Don’t forget that time flies.

Approximately yesterday, I started setting the VCR to tape Letterman’s new show, Late Night, on NBC so I could watch it in the morning before discussing it with smart nerdy humorous friends at school who are doing the same thing. And then suddenly it’s fucking 2015. What the hell happened?

I remember complaining that it was getting a bit stale around the time of the “Late Night ’87” jokes, and I was worried, seemingly moments ago, that the CBS transition made him a bit more “Vegas” and arrogant, but then somehow three decades had gone by while I was still adjusting to it all and now he’s retired. Blink of an eye, man. Treasure things while you’ve got them and don’t let people shame you for the indulgence.

And if you missed the final minutes of his finale because the show ran long, here’s the amazing closing montage to the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” (h/t Jeffrey Wendt).

Since time flies, I have also of course neglected to find a companion to see Lloyd Cole in concert this Saturday (May 30, 7pm) at Brooklyn’s Bell House. So let me know if you want to be my guest. It could be your last chance to see a human perform rock before the cyborgs get all the gigs. Seriously. Assume nothing. 

“The Problem of Political Authority”: a dozen anarchist thoughts (Huemer me)

1. Camilo Gomez informs me there’s a dinky Democratic Freedom Caucus within the Democratic Party (including one member of the St. Louis County Council). That’s odd enough, but the weirdest part may be that (according to Wikipedia) the group is partly Georgist, not just libertarian, aiming to move toward taxing only land.

That’s not a totally crazy idea, since industrious latecomers have almost no way of producing new land, and retention of land across generations has been the root of much of the inequity in history, but the idea has been marginal since its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century.

2. Jacob Levy doesn’t frame himself as an anarchist, but, as I blogged earlier, I think he made a valuable contribution to debates about anarcho-capitalism in his book Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom by observing that (despite some self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists still managing to favor immigration restrictions), an-caps should be the last people to accept such restrictions -- not merely because they are usually (though not always) enforced by government but because, even in a world without government, it would be frightening if (nearly) an-cap communities couldn’t be escaped if you hated the one you were in and the neighbors didn’t like you.

The old dorm-room-philosophy nightmare scenario of someone buying all the land around you and then just letting you starve, not something that I think a libertarian normally need worry is terribly likely, takes at least a small leap closer to reality if you have no option for egress.

And the Georgists may give us other reasons not to be quite as hardcore about land as we might be about all other physical objects. I’m happy to err on the an-cap side until a nightmare scenario arises and then just refuse to prosecute people for trespassing, though (long story short, sorry).

(Of course, the border-protecting variety of an-cap -- many of them fans of Ron Paul -- might argue that societies are more obliged to let people emigrate than to immigrate, but I take the open-borders position anyway, largely just because I don’t like any precedent for giving government more power as a reward for its prior failings. If you’re a state, you don’t get border-enforcement powers as a reward for having welfare powers, and so on, just as you don’t get the right to wage a drug war or regulate people’s diets just because you were stupid enough to federally subsidize healthcare for addicts, etc.)

3. If all that sounds insane, you really ought to read Michael Huemer’s anarcho-capitalist philosophy book The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (the first chapter of which can be read here). I may not agree with him on every detail, but anarcho-capitalist books are so rare, it’s a minor miracle by my standards to see a new tome on the topic enter the canon (and it seems to be popular, by political-philosophy standards!).

He cuts through all the messy, ornate current policy debates and gets back to the basic question, for starters, of how you react to someone showing up at your door and giving you orders.

4. As if my allies aren’t few enough, I incorrectly called Bryan Caplan, a fellow open-borders anarcho-capitalist, an economic Austrian once, when he objected to my condemnation of smoking (back when I worked at ACSH, the science group that recently sparred with the quacky Dr. Oz). He explains why he isn’t one at length here.

5. I know at least one Ayn Rand-style egoist who dismisses Huemer for not being an egoist, so it’s hard to keep everyone from fighting even within the tiny an-cap faction.

6. Venture beyond the anarcho-capitalist circle into the broader libertarian movement, though, and everything starts going to hell pretty quickly, especially these days, when you get mushiness like the BleedingHeartLibertarians site sticking up for hip young singer Dorian Electra despite her appearing to have become a socialist or something.

Heaven forbid I should criticize her intellectual explorations. Not like government’s expanding while people yack about philosophy and pooh-pooh property rights or anything.

7. But musically, the Feelies are more my speed -- so let me know if you wanna be my guest at this Saturday’s Brooklyn performance by the band.

8. It’s not all about philosophy, and I have also recently enjoyed two mystery-story-filled issues of Thuglit, which I discovered simply because I wandered into Shade Bar to say hello to my favorite goth bartender, but it was a Sunday night, when the mystery story readings occur.

9. For even greater violence and “anarchy” in the most negative (and perhaps naïve) sense, my money’s on this Friday’s Mad Max: Fury Road, though. Amidst superhero- and wookiee-filled hoopla, I humbly predict it will be the best movie of the year.

10. For real-world violence and fear, it’s not anarchism you look to these days but government, and you’ll find plenty of it on May 24 if you join Gloria Steinem, who will lead a women’s march across the DMZ from North Korea. I assume there will be no North Korean women with the option of staying in the South. (But read more on the North’s vision of itself in Michael Malice’s Dear Reader.)

11. You can find out whether our own country takes a step back from statism on June 1, when Congress is due to renew the PATRIOT ACT despite part of it being found unconstitutional by a federal court.

12. And remember, these are the sorts of things you can hear me talk about this Thursday between 6 and 8pm Eastern at this RadioFreeBrooklyn link (by clicking Listen Live) on Jim Melloan’s Truth & Freedom show.

(It’ll be more relaxed and Todd-focused than my daily BENnetwork.com appearances on The Run, but watch those, too.)

10 Items for Mother’s Day (and Todd’s Broadcasts)

1. If you want to be a good mom like mine, you don’t necessarily want to follow the example of Hillary Clinton, who has reportedly lied about things like Chelsea being in danger during 9/11 in order to boost political sympathy for both of them. (Can you say “sociopath,” America?)

2. A better model might be the imminent children’s book Azalea, Unschooled written by Liza Kleinman, who I knew a couple decades ago, when we were both doing things like writing material for the Kaplan test prep company.

You see, like maternal instincts, that sort of gig can lead to sympathy for homeschooling and unschooling -- yes, even among people who aren’t kooky libertarians like me or devout religious believers like some of my cousins.

Monopoly systems get lazy -- or fail to meet certain special or tailored needs -- and having additional options is good for everyone, as some left-liberals are beginning to agree as well.

3. There isn’t even a monopoly on the name Azalea, by the way, so don’t assume the child in the Kleinman book is either the American rapper by that name or the Australian rapper by that name with whom the American rapper has been feuding.

4. For novels of a more overtly political and libertarian bent, remember, you can always check out offerings at LibertyIslandMag.com.

5. If you like your pictures without words, there’s a book signing at ICP (1114 6th Ave. at 43rd) at 6pm this Tuesday (May 12) for the photography book Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan, by William Meyers, parent (though not mom) of another friend of mine.

6. I’m so forgiving and pro-science that I’ll plug the Ayn Rand Institute’s event the next day (Wed., May 13, 7:30 at the CUNY Grad Center) defending genetically-modified foods even though a former ARI head just wrote a boneheaded piece calling libertarians (non-Randian libertarians, that is) enemies of liberty.

My promotion of the ARI event will help compensate for (A) my failure to attend last week’s Empiricist League talks on GMOs and other foods, (B) my failure to attend this event itself, since I’ll be outta town Wednesday, and (C) my science-loving utter failure to prevent A.I. running amok like errant children, as in the films Avengers: Age of Ultron and the far more nuanced Ex Machina, which has this cool song over its end credits.

7. And the day after ARI, speaking of science and liberty, remember to listen to me (for something like two whole riveting hours, I think) on Jim Melloan’s new Truth & Freedom radio show, right at that link from 6-8pm on Thursday, May 14.

8. Continue to catch me every day at your leisure as one of the panelists on The Run at BENnetwork.com.

9. Or you can read Koli Mitra (despite her sharing a bit of my sick fascination with conspiracy theories) on such serious topics as language, sex, microfinance, fashion, and democracy -- and then maybe hire her if you’re looking for a cosmopolitan writer/sometime-lawyer.

10. With the S.H.I.E.L.D. season finale coming up Tuesday, I’m sure many of you are thinking about the creation of Marvel’s superpowered Inhumans characters by space aliens. Fewer of you were probably dumb enough to spend last Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo, drinking tequila and watching the fairly disappointing Mexico City press conference that was supposed to unveil unprecedentedly convincing Roswell alien photos (meh, could be mummified human fetuses again).

Of course, given the bizarre level of interest governments have shown in this topic over the decades -- and the genuine weirdness of even some of the best-documented sightings (albeit usually relatively simple ones involving oddly-moving shapes in the sky) -- I’m still not ruling out the possibility that we live on a planet with both highly gullible people making preposterous claims and visiting space aliens. (I may even still be writing about it for a familiar magazine, but I’ll have to get back to you on that one.)

P.S. While I am wary of telling people how to handle their parental authority (and have no intention of ever trying it myself), I will blog next time about The Problem of Political Authority, a topic on which I feel I can get a more rational handle.

Then again, punk-influenced music (even the relatively mellow kind) can make the anti-authoritarian point quite effectively too, so let me know if you want to be my +1 at a Feelies concert in Brooklyn this coming Saturday.