“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.

“In an Antique Land” and “Outer Boroughs”

I failed to blog about a book last week, but let’s try making up for it this week by blogging about two texts per day in this final week of my “Month of Revisionism” (and final week before retooling my Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter pages for a grander mission). Each day will be five quick bullet points, like these:

•Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (big h/t to Koli Mitra) is a nifty lesson in cultural, geographic, and historical layers, a memoir of the (Indian, England-educated, Brooklyn-dwelling) author coping with being the oddball in an Egyptian community three decades ago as he tracked down historical information about a traveling Jewish trader, and the slave he adored, in the area a millennium earlier. And you thought your life was complicated.

•Amidst an exhibit of Frederic Brenner’s photographs of Jewish communities in various locations, I got my autographed copy of William Meyers’ more local and ecumenical photo book Outer Boroughs, a book based on the radical premise, still controversial in some quarters, that there are lands within New York City but beyond Manhattan. As with Ghosh’s research, that will be for historians to decide.

•Modernity brings complications like Syria, France, Tunisia, and Kuwait suffering simultaneous attacks by radical Muslims, and things are only going to get more complex, mostly for good and sometimes for ill, if the whole planet goes the way of the U.S. lately, encouraging people to redefine their identities so completely that the white women may choose to be black and blacks fond of the Confederate Flag may be deemed white supremacists. When in doubt, I wish everyone would chill.

•Somewhere out there must be at least one raisin-farming, sick, black, gay felon who plans to increase his factory emissions and then run for office in a new district in order to execute murderers, who sees the past week's Supreme Court decisions as a clean sweep. He might also have an opinion on Arizona checking citizenship status or Germany’s supreme court ordering its legislature to prepare a UFO report, but expecting a single human being to embody those things as well would plainly be absurd.

•On a more serious note, speaking of UFOs, remember that tomorrow is Asteroid [Awareness] Day, and they’ve just declared Queen’s “We Will Rock You” its official anthem. See, that’s a fear I think is relatively rational, maybe even worth spending money on, though ideally only voluntary contributions, of course.

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. 

Who Watches the “Shmexperts”?

Professors are often idiots (never mind that obscure faux-black professor in the news today: prestigious universities used to give awards to actual Zimbabwean ruler Mugabe, and now it takes literally 35 quadrillion of his regime’s dollars to buy one of ours). And scientists are routinely wrong. And people who claim to know comedy may have no discernible sense of humor.

Yet our world is largely run by those who get anointed “experts” through one bullshit credentialing process or another, such as getting a Ph.D. or writing for the Huffington Post. What is to be done? Below, a helpful book recommendation and a dozen reminders how full-of-it these people are.

1. The increasingly obvious “intellectual gridlock” between dueling right and left pundits is as good a reminder as any that it's time to set aside the old right/left spats and, embarrassing as it may be, fight the hybrid globalist-corporatist-fascist-socialist takeover -- as fellow anarchists.

Look, I know how that sounds to most people. I mean, just stating the basic facts makes one sound like a sci-fi conspiracy theorist, but, yeah, we actually now live in a world where within about a day (literally) of Sen. Rand Paul singlehandedly putting the brakes on NSA snooping, we found out (A) Obama’s simply ordering the snooping expanded via other routes, especially “near” the border, (B) that for-now-stymied big international trade agreement violates privacy and encourages international data-sharing in various ways, (C) the FBI operates a fleet of small surveillance aircraft perpetually cruising over major cities (do they operate the massive, silent, hovering triangular craft people keep seeing, I wonder?), and (D) China just stole all the U.S. government employees’ data.

As if it weren’t bad enough that the libertarians of New Hampshire were used as a weak argument by local cops for Homeland Security-subsidized armaments, now Reason magazine is being subpoenaed by the Justice Department for (plainly hyperbolic) comments by its online readers in threads on the magazine’s site and in Austria libertarian reporters are literally being watched by Cobra special police operatives at the big annual Bilderberg conference (they’re actually called Cobra).

It’s not my fault reality sounds like paranoia. Who has time to fight all these battles one at a time anymore? Time to reject it all in one fell swoop, I say.

2. On the bright side, paranoia can be entertaining, and I recommend the new USA Network series Mr. Robot, based on the premiere episode they briefly put online. The show airs regularly starting Wednesday, June 24 and depicts an impressively antisocial, spooky, alienated young hacker (instead of the usual charismatic TV-being) being recruited into a left-anarchist cabal that hates society as much as he does but plans to do things about it that he’s not sure he should be part of. I think it’ll be good, and fairly smart.

3. If that’s not punk-rock enough, see the band Mission of Burma with me two weeks from tonight (on June 26) at the Bell House in Brooklyn. These last-minute sloppy appeals for a concert buddy have been working out nicely so far.

4. For a more detailed, book-length sticking of it to “the Man” and all the experts who work for that Man, check out Marc Fitch's Shmexperts when it hits bookstores in November because I’ve been waiting for a book all my adult life that comes right out and says that our high regard for experts, even the ones with actual science degrees and the like, is fundamentally misplaced.

Fitch makes the case, with great humor, that our trust in today’s experts, even when their data is weak and their conclusions wildly overblown, is just another manifestation of that more ancient guide faith, which I’d add is also unreliable. Sometimes everyone is wrong, but no one likes to admit that. And so tomorrow’s papers will likely tell you the “secret to longevity” or (as numerous recent pieces did after some science study or other) the “code for happiness” or some other weakly-supported but eagerly-consumed nonsense.

Fitch sides with the “Average Joe” who suspects the experts are ignorant bigmouths. If enough people read his book, maybe even college graduates will find the courage possessed now only by uneducated bar stool drunks -- to say it’s all bunk. 

5. As noted in my previous blog entry, if all it takes to be regarded as soothsayer is getting a few predictions right, we should all really be getting our futurist insights from Seth MacFarlane, whose show Family Guy, in its complete randomness, seems to keep presaging world events. Maybe everyone should see Ted 2 in a few weeks to help them cope with the increasingly frequent debates over how to define who’s human, female, black, etc.

6. Things are getting postmodern enough to seem as if it all has to fly apart and end soon, so maybe fictional experts at the Onion put it best (h/t Will Pangman).

7. Seriously, though, the problem here is that people are unwilling to admit the good and the bad come packaged together, so they assume someone with one decent insight is brilliant on all subjects. It makes it hard for people to see, for instance, that Elon Musk might be both visionary and a mooch.

8. If the geniuses negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement come up empty thanks to the U.S. Congress, Greece bails on its EU financial obligations, and the bond market falls apart all around the same time, it will be interesting to see who gets blamed for what.

9. It is tempting to think that science is above the fray and offers an escape from all that politicking, but does it really? Witness this litany of distractions and tangents as a columnist attempts to defend abortion without making any real arguments -- particularly that almost dreamlike and irrelevant bit about the kids caring for animals.

And if we’re convinced looking at concrete reality absent ideology yields the “real” answers on such contentious topics, try the clarity and physical specificity of this pro-life tale on for size (just for contrast, mind you -- I’m pretty moderate on the whole topic).

10. The inordinate praise recently heaped on the Faulkner play The Sound and the Fury here in NYC by the Times and Entertainment Weekly is enough to remind us that the intelligentsia actually love being confused, much like cult members, so long as they are tantalized by the suspicion there’s profundity in there somewhere amidst all the crap and distraction, and that it’s profundity with a message they’d still end up agreeing with if they could spot it.

That’s twentieth-century literature in a nutshell.

11. A new Florence + the Machine album came out on June 2, and at least she reaches all the way back to the Middle Ages at times for her chaos and confusion, making it seem a bit more timeless and grand. This number from a prior album makes it pretty blatant.

12. But uncertainty can be managed even if it cannot be fully escaped, and so I am off now to party with Bayesians -- and back next week to muse about whether the ancients mapped an iceless Antarctica, even if the experts understandably ask where all the water would have been at the time.