Ten Nerd Things to Look Forward To, Half from Marvel (via Newsarama)

1. The Avengers Forever hardcover, collecting one of the best mainstream superhero comics miniseries I’ve ever read, is out August 5. Janice Erlbaum’s boyfriend Bill, of all people, bonded with me at one of her readings over our shared love of this miniseries, which pits futuristic Kang the Conqueror (like Ming the Merciless, no doubt influenced by Buck Rogers’ foe Killer Kane) against the team including Iron Man, Captain America, and other Marvel heroes. It’s by Kurt Busiek and in some ways is the Marvel analogue of the Trinity series he’s doing at DC Comics right now about the time-villain Krona.

2. Marvel Comics is putting out a little encyclopedia of their religion- and myth-derived characters in July, amusingly advertised as covering characters “from Aztec to Zoroastrian.” (Side note: When comics writer/artist John Byrne did a big DC Comics miniseries featuring multiple pantheons of gods, he left out the Hindu pantheon — fun though it is — because it is still worshiped, and he didn’t want to be disrespectful.)

3. On the goofier side, four old Marvel monsters (including Electro the Robot now wearing the costume of Electro the human foe of Spider-Man — and the space dragon Fin Fang Foom) have now banded together as: the Fin Fang Four.

4. To the Hulk, a son (named Skaar) — who looks a bit more like Conan’s son. Skaar is seen here commandeering Silver Surfer’s flying surfboard.

5. To Wolverine, some very odd numbering (and comics have seen some odd numbering: zero issues, countdowns, etc.): issue #73 of his comic is coming out before issue #72.

NON-MARVEL STUFF:

6. As Ali Kokmen points out to me, Reason’s house cartoonist Pete Bagge has an anthology of his work for that magazine coming out, delightfully titled Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me — excerpts of which can be seen in this slideshow and on these preview pages.

7. For good or ill, a Barack the Barbarian comic, pitting him against a scantily-clad, villainous Palin, is on the way.

8. I’m more excited about what will surely be the best movie of April 2010 and possibly the greatest film of all time: Sylvester Stalone’s mercenary adventure The Expendables, featuring a merc team played by him, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Mickey Rourke, Charisma Carpenter, and more — with a cameo by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as himself. I want to see it again already. Note: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles also cleverly used Arnold, albeit off-camera, as a character by metafictionally having a Terminator target “the governor of California” for termination. (In the future, all movies will be awesome, though, for the simple reason that we now possess 3D that works without glasses — or at least, that was one of DarkHorizons’ cooler April Fool’s stories.)

9. Both films depicting The Hobbit are reportedly due in 2011/2012, produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Guillermo Del Toro — with added material from the main Lord of the Rings books’ appendices, about Gandalf’s rising tensions with the White Council of wizards as they dither about facing Sauron in the land of Dol Guldur (not to be confused with the forbidden land of Doan Godair Girl’fren). It’s bound to be a more faithful adaptation than the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the film Pride and Predator, the former pointed out to me by Ali, the latter pointed out to me by Gerard Perry.

10. Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker, out this month, is exactly the sort of thing that I always thought cyberpunk should eventually try to envision and prepare us for — not an alien invasion but a world so media-saturated as to approximate telepathy and thus the end of all privacy.

“Panopticon” doesn’t quite do it justice, since that old notion suggests a few spectators and numerous spied-upon people, whereas we’re more likely approaching a world where everyone can watch all the time but only a subset of the population (an increasingly large one far beyond anything dreamed of by Hollywood but still a small subset) is deemed worth watching.

I gave nearly all my Rucker novels as a birthday gift to a friend who hadn’t liked the Narnia novels I’d earlier tried giving him — and who turned out not to like the Rucker ones either. Probably should have kept them all.

Free Comic Book Day, Blackest Night (and Cutest Couples)

After seeing Helen Rittelmeyer off on a 7am bus to her summer gig in Washington, DC, I lost no time before sinking deeply into escapist fantasy to numb the pain of her absence: finishing reading Thomas More’s Utopia in Starbucks (more on that in my October Book Selections entry), getting tickets to an 11:45am show of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which was fine for fans, pointless for normal people, I think), getting a haircut short enough to make me appear ritually born again as my childhood hero Tom Swift, and stopping by Jim Hanley’s Universe (though I usually go to Midtown Comics, with its 20% discount deal) for “Free Comic Book Day,” which is exactly what it sounds like (and still going on as I type this, so run to your nearest comics shop).

Hanley’s policy is five free comics to customers on this exalted annual occasion, so I picked up Avengers, Love & Rockets, Savage Dragon, Simpsons, and — most important — Blackest Night issue #0 (yes, zero) from DC Comics, the prelude to the long-dreaded “blackest night” event prophecied in the decades-old Green Lantern vow about remaining vigilant against evil “in brightest day, in blackest night.”

One year ago, I convinced the lovely and unsuspecting couple seen in the photo above, Nicole (nee Beaver) and Sandy Partowidjojo, to put that phrase in their marriage vows, which they did, and that helps me feel as if I was in Bali for their wedding instead of perhaps foolishly deciding I was too busy to attend. The free comic is really for them — and I genuinely intend to give it to them as a first-anniversary gift later this month.

But what exactly is this “Blackest Night,” you ask? In a word: zombies. And despite all my efforts, I am inevitably reminded of Helen, who has a soft spot for the undead and recently told me about an acquaintance of hers, Dave Kasten, realizing there is a rock-paper-scissors paradox involving zombies, since zombies could obviously defeat ninjas, ninjas probably beat pirates (though each have their partisans, obviously), and (here’s the paradox) pirates can demonstrably defeat zombies, as demonstrated in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. If anyone in Washington is hiring, incidentally, I think the guy who came up with that needs a job, which may not surprise you.

The thing that makes the Blackest Night zombies (or Black Lantern Corps, as they are more properly called) special, though, is that they are zombies of familiar dead superheroes and supervillains. At first, I thought, How many dead superheroes can there be, given that they’re constantly being resurrected on the rare occasions when they fail to dodge bullets with implausible luck? But by my Wikipedia-assisted count, the Justice League alone has thirty-seven dead members, listed below for your moment-of-silence perusal:

Superman (original Earth-Two version, anyway)

Batman (for now)

Aquaman

Martian Manhunter

Elongated Man (and wife)

Hawkman? (both of them? sort of?)

Hawkgirl? (both of them? sort of?)

Amazing Man II

Firestorm I

Crimson Fox I

Crimson Fox II

Blue Devil

Vibe

Steel I

Blue Beetle

Doctor Fate(s)

Mister Miracle

Rocket Red 4

Lightray

Orion

Big Barda

General Glory

Black Condor

Agent Liberty

Silver Sorceress

Triumph

Mystek

Aztek

Antaeus

Manitou Raven

Maxima

Super-Chief

Sargon

Sandman

Retro

Jade

Maxwell Lord

Yazz

That’s a lot of very powerful zombies. Let me add that I’d love to see them bring back Grant Morrison’s version of Frankenstein, who’s sort of a zombie, amidst all this. But I’m not actually going to read it.

Wolverine Kicks Off "Month of the Nerd II"

What more fitting time for my girlfriend, the uncanny Helen Rittelmeyer, to sublet an apartment to start a summer internship in Washington, DC with American Spectator magazine than May 1? Today is, after all, May Day — the socialist holiday — and I blame the century-long march of socialism for drawing Helen and the rest of us toward centers of political power such as DC.

Even more fittingly, today is the start of my second annual “Month of the Nerd,” and it hardly seems right for a man to have his hot girlfriend around while he’s claiming to be hopelessly enmeshed in nerd culture. Sure, there are more women in comic book stores these days than there used to be, thanks in part to a decade or so of solid manga sales, but nerdcult at its heart still belongs to the loner-geek, and I would not want to look like a complete poseur.

To entertain myself until my first DC visit of the season, then, I’ll be doing things like going to see a film out today about another victim of government power: the mutant drifter and espionage expert turned government experiment, living weapon, and eventual member of the X-Men, Wolverine. In the three X-Men films, Wolverine had only hazy memories of his past, but now we’ll see that past laid out in some detail (and he has women troubles himself — by my count, at least four of Wolverine’s lovers have come to violent ends, at least in the comics).

Wolverine’s memory problems make him just a bit like the characters in the show Dollhouse, which, as it happens, ends one week from tonight and is written/produced by Joss Whedon, who wrote X-Men comics for a few years recently. I’m actually a bit worried that we’ll learn too much about Wolverine’s past in the film, by which I mean not that the mystery will be ruined (that’s gone on long enough) but that there’ll be too many characters and phases of his life crammed into two short hours. The film focuses on a solo character, but it reportedly features over a dozen familiar secondary characters from the X-Men comics (including Sabretooth, Gambit, Stryker, and many more). In some sense it’s as much an ensemble story as the prior three films, and that could get a tad ungainly in the course of a plot that presumably stretches over several decades.

•••

Wolverine was arguably the single most influential comic book character post-1970, the first dark antihero of the epoch that would spawn The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and vicious absurdities like the characters Spawn and Venom (the latter reportedly slated to appear in a solo film himself, which I cannot imagine being good). In the “Bronze Age” 70s, Wolverine was fairly unique and thus (back when I first started reading comics) totally awesome. By the early 1990s, well into comics’ “Dark Age,” it seemed as though every character wanted to be as badass as Wolverine and be the scariest guy on the team, and that just doesn’t work. We can’t all be Han Solo.

My biggest aesthetic gripe about Wolverine’s complex past, though? He was part of the covert ops group called “Team X,” the cybernetic experiment called “Weapon X” (ostensibly meaning “10,” not a letter), and the famous mutant team led by “Prof. X” — all three of these things ostensibly having no causal tie in their names (and I’m generously ignoring prior machinations by a man named Essex and assuming the “x-factor” gene is named after Prof. X, otherwise we get even more coincidental significant Xs, by which I don’t mean those dead lovers).

If comics characters are around for long enough, certain tropes tend to get repeated for no adequately-explained (in-story) reason, just because they resonate with fans. If this movie manages to tie it all together neatly — without creating something as dense as Watchmen but only a quarter as smart — I’ll be pleased. At the very least, I’m sure Wolverine will kick some ass. After all, he’s the best there is at what he does, though what he does isn’t very nice.

Watchmen vs. Wolverine

Dan Raspler, the victor in our Lolita Bar debate before last, about sci-fi, forwards this combo-parody of the Mac/PC ads, Rorschach, and Wolverine.

That in turn reminds me that even an animalistic, deadly, “berserker rage”-prone fellow like Wolverine is depicted in the comics as feeling a certain reverence towards other species, once explaining to his teammate Storm that he tracks but does not kill deer in the woods, a neat way of displaying skill without killing that I could actually imagine catching on. More on animal welfare at Lolita Bar on Wednesday (8pm) next week, of course. And much more on Wolverine tomorrow, as this blog begins “Month of the Nerd II.”

As for Watchmen: I’m saddened some people didn’t like it as much as I did. Even Reason, whose website ran my positive article about seeing the film, featured subsequent negative comments about the film from Peter Suderman and Jesse Walker. Film critics A.O. Scott and Anthony Lane were extremely harsh. At least one DC Comics staffer I know wasn’t that crazy about it. And one of my girlfriend Helen’s favorite bloggers, Eve Tushnet, sounded very disappointed by it, but I give her some bonus points for combining nerd-fiction analysis, placement in a conservative publication, and a headline derived from an alternative rock song (by the Smiths) — that being the crucial trifecta in my eyes, obviously.

Oh, and my friend Christine Caldwell Ames didn’t like the movie, either. One thing she, some of our May 6 crowd, and the Watchmen-hating figure depicted in this video all have in common, by the way: vegetarians. Coincidence?

DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: "Should Humans Radically Decrease Their Exploitation of Animals?" (with ten related thoughts)

ONE WEEK FROM TONIGHT, the species-spanning battle of the century:

Wed., May 6 (8pm).

Law professor and lawyer with the State of New York Mariann Sullivan arguing yes.

Freelance writer Justin Shubow (Master’s in Philosophy from U. Michigan, J.D. from Yale) arguing no.

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar. Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

I. INTERESTING DEBATE-RELATED TRIVIA (AND POETRY):

The Debates at Lolita Bar grew out of the debate series founded by Lefty Leibowitz — himself a model of self-discipline who is vegetarian — and L.B. Deyo, a carnivore who nonetheless composed this moving work:

“Ode to the Kingdom of Animals and Beasts”

Monkey, art thou in thy tree?
Leaping ’long so gleefully
Your screams do much admire my heart
I thrill to see your mischievous art

O doggy, doggy on your chain
Whose yelps and barks do soothe my brain
How happily thou romps and plays!
(Though chasing cats might end your days.)

The lion is of the proudest mane
Pursuant of antelopes he is fain
No cowardly cat that laps at milk
The lion is of the noble ilk

Sir polar bear, do not be chilled
By windy nights, Antarctic hills
For thine is fur of downy white
To warm me through the bitter night

Hippo, with thine ivory tooth
The little sparrows clean, forsooth
Thy name is writ and spoken thus:
“The noble Hippopotamus.”

At last the frog we now regard
Whose life is slimy, short, and hard
From lily pad to pad you leap
Or plunge into the murky deep
O Frog! Beloved beast thou art!
Who warms again my heavy heart.

II. ASS COFFEE: ANIMAL-EXPLOITATION FOUNDATION OF THE WEST

As I noted in a controversial Book Selection(s) blog entry a year and a half ago, the entire American economy is arguably built on one particularly odd centuries-ago bit of animal exploitation. As I wrote:

I learned from [Amy Chua's book Day of Empire] that Holland’s financial success circa the seventeenth century was built in large part on the popularity of civet cats, raccoon-like animals whose anal glands can be squeezed to yield a very popular perfume scent — animals that to this day are valued for their ability to confer an extra aromatic quality to coffee beans that pass through their digestive systems. So, since the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England transferred much of Holland’s monarchical and mercantile might to England, and since we in the U.S. are in turn the heirs of England’s common law and political traditions, there is a very real sense in which American liberty was founded on ass-coffee. (Civets were also the likely source of SARS, so they have their good points and bad points.)

III. I AM BECOME SHIVA, DESTROYER OF MICE

Well, nearly. Creepy as it sounds, while planning this debate — having never once seen a rodent in my apartment — I think I heard one scratching repeatedly against the underside of my tub. I called for an exterminator, he forgot to show, the scratching never returned, and I thus remain neutral enough a non-combatant to host the debate in good conscience.

IV. LARD INTERLUDE

Michelle Kung wrote an article for Wall Street Journal last month about the recent resurgence in the popularity of lard, which included this brief lard timeline:

A History of Lard

•1911 Procter & Gamble introduces Crisco, a shortening that would help displace lard
•1940 Americans consume a record 14.4 pounds of lard per capita
•1992 Artist Janine Antoni’s breakthrough work, “Gnaw,” showcases a 600-pound block of lard she has gnawed at with her teeth
•1995 The mock-horror book “Ocean of Lard” appears
•1997 Americans consume 2.9 pounds of lard per capita, a low
•2003 Celebrity chef Mario Batali opens a new New York restaurant, Otto, featuring lardo pizza; TV show “Fear Factor” forces contestants to crawl through a tunnel filled with 4,000 pounds of lard
•2007 Gourmet market Prather Ranch Meat Co. starts selling lard at San Francisco’s Ferry Terminal

V. ANIMALS ADD TO THE ECONOMY

A dog in North Carolina — which happens to be the state from which both my parents’ dog Jaycie and my girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer hail — was recently pooping $100 bills.

VI. A VIDEO ITEM FROM THE ONION…

…related to animal welfare (and science).

VII. A WEBSITE VEGANS SHOULDN’T LOOK AT

Once more: ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com (especially the “Meat Ship”).

VIII. CAT/BRAIN EFFECT

In a cartoon pointed out to me by vegan Diana Fleischman (whose name, as it happens, means “Huntress Meatman,” I believe).

IX. HOW THIS DEBATE FITS INTO MY USUAL POLITICAL OBSESSIONS

Think of it as prep for reading the animal-rights-friendly writings of Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein.

IX. …OR INTO “MONTH OF THE NERD II”

…or as prep for seeing animalistic Wolverine, vegetarian Mr. Spock, and species-exterminating Terminators in theatres in May. In any case, please join us.

Enter World, Pursued by a Bear

My friends Scott Shannon and Liz Braswell recently celebrated the impending birth of their second child — by watching Aliens (having viewed Alien last time around, inspired, I believe, by a joke I made back when Liz and I were in college about childbirth being like something out of those films — a joke repeated in the Kyle Smith novel Love Monkey, though he and wife Sara decided to reproduce anyway).

Frightening as that may sound, Liz’s experience will no doubt be smoother than that of another mother-to-be I happen to have just heard about in the news — one who found her very pregnant self being followed by a bear, causing her to race in front of and be struck by a car, a combination experts now say pregnant women should avoid.

The bear ended up being euthanized, but the ethics of that, needless to say, we can discuss at  next week’s Debate at Lolita Bar.

Are the Anti-Meat Folks Just Neurotic?

From a recent article about scientists studying people who are meat-averse (not that this makes them all crazy, of course):

Robinson-O’Brien and her team, who reported the findings in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, said about 20-25% of current and former vegetarians in the study displayed unhealthy weight-control behaviors such as taking diet pills, vomiting, using laxatives and diuretics, and binge eating.

Might a lot of people — especially women — be adopting vegetarian and vegan philosophies as a means of rationalizing deeper problems, making a system of virtue of (what they imagine to be) necessity, as it were?  It is not without reason that so many meat ads (from Manwich to the Burger King meat-eater-rallies spots) cater directly to males, who are more prone to enjoy the carnivorous life.

Of course, noting a gender imbalance — or even associated emotional problems — no more settles or explains away the moral issue of veganism than gender imbalances and emotional problems among prostitutes truly settled the question at last week’s Intelligence Squared U.S. debate of whether it’s wrong to pay for sex.  But at next week’s Debate at Lolita Bar, of course, we’ll delve into all sorts of animal welfare conundrums and get to the bottom of all this.

4/15 Tea, R.I.P. Bea, 911 Shrimp

My parents, fairly ordinary, decent Americans, did not go to an “End the Fed” protest yesterday, but they did go to one of the four Connecticut Tea Party protests that occurred a week and a half ago.  Good for them.

Note that my parents were not moved to rally against the government and in favor of keeping their money (for example) the last seventeen times Cass Sunstein wrote that he feels a vague, roundabout sympathy for market-like mechanisms, nor when Al Gore claimed back in the 90s that he wanted to “reinvent” government.  The right-wing-sounding Tea Parties, by contrast, did cause them (and independents and lots of apolitical normal folk) to rally against the government.  Any remaining “liberaltarians” might like to keep that in mind, if they even (sincerely) still see resistance to government as the purpose of their movement — and give a damn about making any popular progress.

Incidentally, I’ve long thought that tapping into the American Revolution vibe would be a great way to enlist history-conscious but blue-leaning New England to libertarian causes, and perhaps the several Tea Party rallies there are evidence the blood of minutemen has not yet been thinned completely.

•••

A big theme of the Tea Party protests was government’s unresponsiveness to the pain of taxpayers — but I will admit government is often too responsive, as in this story (relevant to the carnivore/vegan conflict alluded to in several of my recent blog entries and likely to be discussed again at our big May 6 debate): a report of a person who called 911 (and apparently got a response) over not getting enough shrimp in her fried rice at a restaurant.

And speaking of the struggle between humans and their prey, let’s observe a moment of silence and take another look at that painting I recently linked to of Bea Arthur (who has just passed away) wrestling velociraptors.

Fido, Fed

Dogs have likely evolved to look cute to humans — the ugly breeds tending not to be treated as well — and there are certain objective (or at least biologically-rooted) criteria for “cute,” partly rooted in “neotony,” or possession of child-like qualities (sometimes recognized instinctively even between different mammal species) that evoke protective impulses, as explained in this article pointed out to me by Diana Fleischman, who is both an evolutionary psychology expert and a vegan.  By contrast, girlfriend Helen, a carnivore like me, has occasionally claimed to be “immune” to the appeal of cuteness and was, after all, a teenage taxidermist at a science museum, back when she was even more neotonous than she is now.

I also once read a rather plausible-sounding National Geographic article about the idea that the key to dogs branching off evolutionarily from proto-wolves may have been that the cuter (more neotonous and thus tamer) among them were more tolerated by humans as the self-serving creatures trailed human hunting parties, hoping to be thrown scraps.  Thus, doggie consciousness may have been born in a quintuple-whammy of begging, fetching, whining, cuteness, and friendliness with humans, which sounds about right (but is not necessarily therefore true, something we should always keep in mind to avoid fabricating just-so stories and myths).

If you prefer economic analyses of humans being manipulated, though — and if you had fun at a Tea Party protest last week but need more — today the nation will see a series of protests with a more specific (and likely far less popular and respected but undeniably timely) message: End the Fed.  Still a fringe issue, perhaps, but ultimately a good idea — and I have to admit it seems a lot more relevant now than I ever would have predicted a year ago when it was only a rallying cry at Ron Paul events.

Jackie Chan vs. LOLCats

Like a lot of people, I was disappointed to hear about Jackie Chan — one of humanity’s most physically adept specimens — sucking up to Beijing by complaining that Taiwan and Hong Kong are displaying too much “chaotic” freedom (though it shouldn’t surprise me — most people hate freedom, really, even those who most clearly should know better). I first learned of Jackie Chan around the same time that Hong Kong was in the news for its transition from British to Beijing control in 1997 (at which time I visited the place) and at the time had high hopes for both. I don’t know anymore.

On the bright side, though, as our May 6 debate crowd may be keenly aware, there is another species, namely the cat, with kung fu skills as impressive as Jackie’s — witness this clip recently noted on ICanHasCheezburger. However, Scott Nybakken, who wrote the New York Press article “Jackie Chan: Must Fight!” back in the day, counters that this ambush cat vs. flippy instant-reverso cat clip from the same site is even more impressive. At least all such creatures remain blissfully unaware of the power-hungry beasts in Beijing (who are so stupid they think you shouldn’t be allowed to call them things like that, lest it threaten their power, which they imagine to be synonymous with social harmony).

"Liberty and Tyranny" (and me); plus Sprite and Bo

Today marks one year since the last time there was a post on the wacky-links aggregator site Memepool (which over the preceding ten years had been sort of the PiecesofFlair of the late 90s and early 00s). Over the past year, the founder of Memepool has apparently gone from working at Yahoo to working at Google, perhaps a busier environment (a few other people I know are at Google — perhaps we all will be someday).

To compensate for the lack of Memepool, and to make up for me mostly blogging about animals, nerd culture, and rock music for the next couple months, here are some mighty entertaining and libertarian links:

•Mark Levin’s #1 New York Times bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, I have just discovered, cites me as an endnote in Chapter 8, in my capacity as an ACSH guy condemning the ban on DDT, an effective insecticide without which over a million people die unnecessarily each year — at the hands of sanctimonious, chemical-banning greens like the ones celebrating Earth Day today and pretending to be the good guys. (Liberty and Tyranny also happens to use in its title two of the “nouns” mentioned dismissively by that New York Times columnist I recently responded to.)

•On a related note, remember that you can see me defend the Tea Parties in this April 15 clip from PJTV — just sign in — and in this clip from back on New Year’s Eve can see Will Wilkinson and me making libertarian predictions for 2009.

•Mark Levin previously hit the bestseller list with yet another one of those books about the author’s dog, Rescuing Sprite — and I’m sure we’ll soon see a book about the Obamas’ controversial not-so-rescue dog, but as long as people continue using the cool epithet “the Obamadog” (which sounds a bit like Uberhund) to describe Bo, as some headlines did, that’s OK with me.

•You may have seen this awesome site advertised atop Drudge — putting human faces on the countless stories of businesses harried or destroyed (with poverty increasing as a result) by ludicrous regulations (this may be a Chamber of Commerce project, not sure — more power to them for displaying some rare backbone if it is). The Americans with Disabilities Act, for instance, mandates that businesses can be sued for having their bathroom mirrors hanging two inches too high. (A basic econ rule to keep in mind that helps illuminate the issue: If you like regulation, you’re an asshole.)

•The left has Tom Tomorrow, combining clip-art-like cartooning with political lectures to the masses. The rest of us, thank goodness, now have OpToons, so check it out — and it’s nice to see mine isn’t the only site complaining about Janeane Garofalo.

•Meanwhile, in Arkansas: State Rep. Dan Greenberg spoke at the Tea Party rally there one week ago, and today you can find him on the Cato Institute’s Cato-Unbound site doing something libertarians rarely do: defending the wisdom of running for elected office.

I agree. If all libertarians became legislators and lawyers and policy analysts — and the leftists all became jazz musicians or painters — the country would be in much, much better shape.

Prostitution Debate, Marilyn Chambers Departure

Intelligence Squared U.S. is hosting a debate tonight at 6:45 at the Rockefeller University right here on York Ave. on whether it is morally wrong to exchange money for sex.

This, it seems to me, is a much more tricky question than whether prostitution ought to be legal.  Presumably, if a law code (to remain minimal and generally utility-enhancing) must hew to the underlying principle that people can do what they want with their own bodies and property (so long as they don’t use without permission others’ bodies or property), then prostitution must be legal.

One could consider the activity legally permissible and still think it a terrible way of life, though, even if only because it is something that arguably makes already-shallow people even more callous.  On the other hand, there may be a lot of otherwise lonely men out there who would’ve committed suicide or ended up on antidepressants by now absent hired female companionship.

Arguing (perhaps along completely different lines than I have) in favor of the moral acceptability of prostitution — the “pro-ho” side, if you will — will be famous madam Sydney Barrows, anthropologist Lionel Tiger, and libertarian economist Tyler Cowen.

Arguing against prostitution — the “no-ho” side — will be authoritarian feminist (but then, “authoritarian feminist” is a bit redundant) legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, psychologist Melissa Farley, and Wendy Shalit (a self-appointed expert at a young age on matters of modesty and proper sexual behavior but also an eccentric and a deadbeat when it comes to completing writing assignments she’s been partially paid for, apparently — that, though, is a story for another time, despite the temptation to ask up front why we think she’s qualified to give moral advice).

Combining the moral and legal defenses of (a different kind of) sex work, the recently-deceased porn actress Marilyn Chambers ran for Vice President on the Personal Choice Party ticket, sounding almost libertarian (like a lot of Playboy types, I suspect) — and she was interviewed about it by J.R. Taylor (who’ll soon be shutting down his great blog RightWingTrash and likely replacing it with a more all-purpose one).

Punks Deferred, Conflicts Defused, Circles Squared

My main political focus my entire adult life has been on economics.  I’m sure I’m as guilty as countless other writers, though, of acting as though my positions are self-explanatory when they are in fact baffling even to some intelligent, well-meaning people.

In an effort to make things a bit clearer, below is a super-quick walk-through of the connections/phases in my basic thinking — and then let’s try to leave some of this behind as if starting fresh.

(I may refer people back to this post henceforth to avoid refighting some older battles.  I will spend the next couple weeks preparing for our May 6 animal welfare debate and mulling topics of that sort, then May blogging about nerds and June blogging about rock.  I’ll round out the summer with the completion of a more purely fun/creative non-blog project and perhaps a return to working on the long-delayed Conservatism for Punks manuscript, though I almost wish it’d just be rendered irrelevant and unnecessary by a Second American Revolution inspired by the Tea Parties.  And surely a comment like that mandates some explanation of where I’m coming from.)

•Happiness is good, suffering bad, as we know from direct experience and as is implicit in virtually all human effort, from getting out of bed to dreams of utopias, paradises, or simply better lunches.

•Basic economic reasoning suggests a close tie between utility and markets, since markets maximize the scope for voluntary transactions — doing with resources and one’s own energy what one prefers (instead of what one is forced to do against one’s wishes, which is by definition a diminution of utility, in the form of squelched preferences).

•For this reason, despite countless largely-imaginary metaphysical constructs — from dialectics to rights to gods to egalitarian ideals — that people use to shape seemingly-important political narratives in their heads, ostensible friends of the market (and property rights) always deserve an initially more-sympathetic hearing than avowed market foes (no matter how pure of heart and “well-meaning” the foes are and no matter what metaphysical claims they deploy to justify their predation on the energy and wealth of others).

•Thus conservatives’ defects have arguably been more tolerable — so long as at least some subset of conservatives were ostensibly aiming to shrink government and promote markets — than the defects of the left, who admittedly may at times do no more damage than the right but aim, however gradually, to build a non-market-based or substantially less market-based world (and are thus with almost all their domestic policy decisions threatening, long-term, to undermine civilization by undermining the market basis that makes it prosperous and happy).

•Conservatives failed to shrink government over the past three decades, for which they may deserve to be abandoned as useless, but this is no defense of modern liberals, who didn’t even try.  It is at least logically possible to abandon conservatism, liberalism, moderation, anarchism, and even libertarianism as ineffectual without committing any contradiction, something worth keeping in mind, lest we become complacent.

•Current stimulus spending to the tune of some $2 trillion, shoveled overwhelmingly to the already rich and well-connected (or the merely irresponsible), removes any remaining need to give the benefit of the doubt to liberal rhetoric about helping the deserving poor, changing the debate from the “business vs. workers” dynamic of past century or two to, at long last, “redistribution by self-serving government and government-tied elites vs. the simple moral/pragmatic discipline of allowing-to-fail.”

•This is such a night-and-day battle that most prior quibbling (including “cultural” questions across the spectrum, from the existence of God or the importance of sex and gender to the best forms of art and community) must, at least within the realm of policy debate, be deemed distractions.  Stop government spending.  Deregulate our economies.  Not just in America but around the world.  Civilization’s time is running out.

I have not forgotten my own opinions regarding countless other battles over religion, feminism, the political spectrum itself, foreign policy, and so forth, but these things look more and more petty — like doing art criticism in a burning museum — by contrast with the Obama-led final annihilation of markets now taking place.

Nonetheless, life is full of variety and one hates to become boring and single-minded, so tomorrow I’m attending a debate about prostitution.  Please forgive the distraction, about which I’ll write more tomorrow.

Tea Parties and Trade Center Towers

An impressive urban skyline — made possible by commerce — is probably the most emphatic rebuke that can be delivered to people overly in love with nature, government projects, or imagined spiritual realms. Of course, you can argue about dialectics or metaphysics until the cows come home (presumably to a rural area like the ones that existed in the middle of Manhattan a mere century and a half ago — unless you’re opposed to cow-raising altogether, but we’ll argue about that at Lolita Bar on May 6). There’s little you can say, though, to rationalize away the difference between jet-black, impoverished North Korea at night and the glittering, ultramodern lights of South Korea nearby.

Just look at the photo survey of the world’s most impressive skylines that ForbesTraveler.com recently posted — most of them, unsurprisingly, in (relative) free-market bastions, in a world where anti-capitalism and thus poverty are still the norm, especially in the southern hemisphere.

And as one of the many intelligent speakers at the (sadly but predictably maligned) New York City Tea Party this past Wednesday said, NYC should be the ultimate testament to capitalism, not a place burdened by mounting taxes and public mismanagement. The Tea Party sprawled for blocks but was focused on the park to the south of City Hall, a tiny, roughly triangular area on the southern tip of Manhattan that sits between government (City Hall), commerce (in the form of Wall Street), and what should be a locus of even-more-global commerce (the World Trade Center site) but is now reportedly scheduled not to be completely built up again until 2030.

That’s disgraceful — though it’s not solely the infamous bureaucracy of the site’s complex public-private partnership that is causing the new, more long-term delay, supposedly, but also the expected time necessary for the real estate market (and thus rental prices at the site) to bounce back from the financial crisis, which is also pathetic and sad, albeit in a slightly more complex way.

I said a few years ago in Reason that I wish the site were already restored, privately, perhaps with a jaunty neo-Art Deco flair instead of a mournful or overly modern look, not that I’m picky. I would just prefer not to have to say the terrorists damaged the world’s best skyline and kept it that way for a third of a century. (Nonetheless, I’ll entertain myself by seeing New York get blown up in Watchmen a fourth time tonight at the 7:10 Union Square show.)

Tea Party vs. Gov't, Garofalo, and Andrew Sullivan (plus: Bruno vs. Ron Paul)

There’s another Tea Party occurring, in western New York State, today at 1pm, so I say go be part of history if you’re in that area.  Regardless of what your ostensible political philosophy is, it probably rests upon some vision of the world as it ought to be — and in the meantime, in the real world, government is an engine of predation and reckless wealth reallocation, and you should encourage the rebellious new effort to say no to it.

That’s true whether you called yourself conservative, liberal, green, communitarian, or something else as recently as last year, before the elite-aiding, deadbeat-encouraging pilfering became quite as obvious to one and all as it is now.  Stop this crazy thing, please.  It no more instantiates your vision of an ideal world (poverty-free? Christian? animal-friendly? what have you) than a corrupt church demanding tithes rids the world of sin, much as both institutions might point to the continued existence of problems in the world as reason you must submit.

•••

Of course, as you might have seen among the Drudge-linked stories on the Tea Parties, Janeane Garofalo has determined that the whole ostensible protest against taxing and spending is just “straight-up racism” — a mere pretext for objecting to a black president.

Well, two black men were among the half-dozen or so conservatives co-hosting the reportedly 12,000-strong Tea Party gathering I attended Wednesday night in downtown Manhattan (mentioned only in passing in two sentences in the Times, which implied turnout was light and disappointing across the country, without noting the immense roaring throng in their own strongly-Democrat hometown).  And I don’t recall the crowd cheering for the black co-hosts with any less enthusiasm than for the white ones.

I think it’s very, very important to remember (with help from comments like Garofalo’s) just how stupid the media really are the next time they criticize capitalism or conservatism.  Circumstances will no doubt afford them many opportunities to do so — but the right’s screw-ups do not somehow vindicate the left’s and the media’s own vapid views.

Saying “Bush is an idiot” in 2006 did not make you intelligent — even if you spoke the truth.  Mocking us Tea Party protesters doesn’t make you smart (or tolerant) either — nor does it make ex-comediennes funny again, which is the real tragedy.  If people sound like idiots when they disagree with you, it’s very important — albeit sometimes difficult — to keep in mind that they’re still idiots when they say things you agree with.

•••

On a closely related note, Andrew Sullivan — long a bizarre and embarrassing study in arrogantly condemning one’s own former positions (and those who hold them) as moronic without, somehow, developing a hint of humility about one’s own fallibility — has to my mind finally, conclusively proven that libertarians ought to consider him an asshole.

Enraptured by Obama, Sullivan dismissed the Tea Parties as “tantrums” — despite the version of Sullivan from the day before yesterday supposedly thinking (as I do) that a turn toward economics and away from religious and military causes is just what the right needs.

Sullivan asks where these protesters were in 2003 when Bush was big-spending and flouting the Constitution.  I’m going to guess many of the well-meaning folk were reading Andrew Sullivan’s radically pro-Bush blog back then.  What a fucking moron.  And I don’t care how widely-read or famous he is — so’s Shirley MacLaine.

As it happens, Sullivan also decided yesterday to start attacking Abe Greenwald, occasional attender of our Manhattan Project gatherings and past debater at Lolita Bar.  But you see, so cold-bloodedly objective am I, that I am bothered more by Sullivan’s betrayal of the Tea Parties than by his horror at Abe’s pro-torture jokes.  That’s why you can trust me.  And Abe can take care of himself.  He’s a lot funnier than Sullivan, for starters.

•••

I know we can’t trust Sullivan, but like a lot of people, I can’t quite decide whether to trust Sullivan’s Atlantic colleague turned Times columnist Ross Douthat.  In any case, despite him also sounding a bit condescending toward the Tea Parties, he makes up for it with a striking final paragraph and graph that remind us government is far more insane than anything the Tea Party zealots can dish out.

Speaking of trust, Ron Paul should not have trusted Sacha Baron Cohen in his “Bruno” prankster-interviewer guise.  But then, proving Paul doesn’t recognize Bruno is not all that impressive, given that the seventy-four year-old Paul admits to not being in touch with pop culture — and probably hadn’t even heard of the Sex Pistols before appearing on Leno with them.

By the way, Jen Dziura, who pointed out the Ron Paul/Bruno conflict to me, also recently noted a baffling example of New York’s purportedly cash-strapped transportation system seeming to waste money on a sign that serves no easily-comprehensible purpose.  (And still they call people who don’t want government to get our money the crazy ones?)

•••

This article on CBS News’s site does a far better job than the Times of capturing the tone — and even the transpartisan nature — of the New York City Tea Party.  On a more anecdotal level, I keep hearing New York liberal/media types saying encouraging things like, “I’ve always supported the Democrats, but I’m really worried about what they’re doing now” — and that’s step one on the road to a clue.

This, at long last, is the beginning of focused ire against government spending, I think — the beginning that should have happened in 1964, 1980, 1989, and 1994.

If Establishment-flattering, servile people like Andrew Sullivan want to stand on the sidelines, assuring us they’re superior and repelled by the grubby masses, they’re welcome to do so.  Speaking as part of those grubby masses, I think there’s something more positive going on here than I’ve seen in American politics in my lifetime.

And before the media begin their no doubt anti-gun reminiscences about the Columbine massacre on Monday’s tenth anniversary, do take a moment to remember that tomorrow is the 234th anniversary of the Shot Heard Round the World that started the American Revolution, which I hope we still consider an even more important event.  Right?