DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR: Should We Abolish NASA?

This Wed., Dec. 2 (at 8pm) join us (at 266 Broome St. at Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south of the Delancey St. subway stop) for a debate on whether to get rid of our government-run space program:

•Greg Rehmke, lecturer and program director with the Economic Thinking project, argues yes.

•Ken Silber, writer, blogger, and Research editor — and very bitter survivor of Lou Dobbs’ Space.com — argues no.

•Michel Evanchik moderates and Todd Seavey hosts.

In addition to explaining the vast social and scientific ramifications of maintaining or discarding governmental space exploration, perhaps our speakers will also find time to address the pressing question of whether space exploration has moral implications due to the increased likelihood of contact between humanity and Planet Unicorn.  Join us and find out.

P.S. Or if space isn’t your bag, Phil Kiracofe may be organizing a Chamber of Commerce discussion on “transparency” for that same night, for which he may still need an anti-transparency, pro-privacy expert volunteer, who can reach Phil at: pkiracofe[at]yahoo.com.

Our Broken Food System Works Fine (but Blogging Is Tricky)

About the time you read this, I should be reaching Norwich, CT on the astonishingly convenient NY-to-Foxwoods Casino Greyhound shuttle bus.  A good cheap shuttle bus is as satisfying as teleportation, really.  Thanksgiving dinner should also be satisfying.

I worry, though, about those who will not be feeling joy this holiday — I don’t mean because they’re homeless or anything, I mean because they’re leftists and greens who’ve become so paranoid about “sustainability” and imaginary health threats from chemicals and additives that they see food as a new locus of oppression instead of something enjoyable.  The phrase “our broken food system” has become popular with the left, meant to evoke the phrase “our broken healthcare system” — but even more ridiculous in its assumption that there is a single, central mechanism behind the system in question, as if there were a Central Restaurant Ministry (and tied in to a sort of feeble, paranoid view of the world that almost makes it seem as if the left is becoming one big eating disorder).  Precisely because there isn’t a central food command system — because food production is decentralized and competitive — we enjoy today’s bounty.

Less bountiful, at least in December, will be my blog entries.  I’m going weekly just for a month, in order to free up time to work on a chapter-length version of that book idea that I’ve been contemplating for over a decade (and using as this blog’s slogan).  If I really find myself with spare time, I roll right on to the full-length book proposal — and comic book script for which, it occurs to me, I really ought to do a lot of background research on the nineteenth century.  More as the situation develops.

Things for Which I'm Not Grateful Because They Are Bad

The things for which we’re thankful — like my superhuman girlfriend, Helen Rittelmeyer — help us deal with the things for which we’re not thankful, so let’s address some of those today.

First, let me note that director David Lynch is very grateful for something fairly stupid that he probably shouldn’t be grateful for: Transcendental Meditation, created by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the crackpot Beatles advisor who claimed to be able to make people levitate (in fact, his followers just sort of hop in the lotus position). Lynch is even making a documentary about the Maharishi. Lynch, who seemed a lot dumber when I saw him speak at a Barnes & Noble a couple years ago than I’d ever imagined him to be back when I was a Twin Peaks fan, credits Transcendental Meditation with producing some of his film ideas.

I only wish there were some meditation technique that would help me overcome the tension I feel every time I think about his unbelievably awful three-hour film Inland Empire, one of the most excruciating, tedious, and pointless experiences I’ve ever had in a theatre. Inland Empire is on the list of those things for which I am least thankful — though it also made a Village Voice list of best films for that year. From that, I conclude…that I am entirely correct, and it was simply awful.

A few other things I’m not grateful for (and promise not to dwell on tomorrow):

•slow-moving pedestrians
•fat, slow-moving pedestrians
•people asking me to remind them of something instead of simply reminding themselves (though some of my favorite people have this habit)
•people who answer a question you didn’t ask instead of saying “I don’t know” so that you have to ask three more, narrowly-structured questions before you can safely conclude they don’t know

I am also increasingly convinced that part of our problem in this world is people’s tendency to feel they must “choose sides” when it may well be the case that everything is stupid and all sides should be rejected in virtually all popular disputes.

On a more focused skeptical note, I am grateful for James Randi, who e-mailed me the other day to point out that the “coma guy” who’s been all over the news for supposedly suddenly snapping out of it after twenty-three years can only “communicate” through the deft typing of one special “facilitator” — who seems to be the only person who can detect the patient’s finger movements and sudden burst of potentially-lucrative memoir-writing.

In others words, just as teen Satanists everywhere dupe themselves into thinking a Ouija board moves toward letters of its own accord and just as Koko the “sign language” Gorilla seems to have one main trainer who thinks Koko’s near-random word strings are in fact sentences about the plight of the environment, etc., so too does coma guy seem to have become the vegetative tool of someone engaged in con artistry or wishful thinking. Such is human existence.

Subletting Utopia

 
Interested in subletting an Upper East Side studio apartment that feels like a one-bedroom (nicely shaped) available from Dec. 24-Apr. 30 while its owner is out of town on an assignment?

(The fact that I’m asking is a reminder how far removed our real lives nowadays seem from the Utopia schemes I blogged about all last month.  Utopias, no matter how much they are meant as models for the future, tend to be old-fashioned in this respect: They are usually static and rooted in one spot.  Our age is increasingly fluid, and as Richard Sennett, a Marxist but no dope, has lamented — not without cause — people’s very personalities are being changed by the incentives of an era in which happiness requires a willingness to switch jobs, locations, and even circles of friends without much feeling the resulting dislocations.  The person comfortable with rootlessness is rewarded, perhaps even to the point of encouraging callousness — but there are rewards and efficiencies and new possibilities in the process as well, of course.)

In any case, contact the very nice Federman.Sarah[at]gmail.com to handle the details if you’re interested in the following (and I don’t plan to do any more announcements of this sort here, so don’t ask), and I can attest it’s a very nice place:

About $1900/mo. Available December 24th-April 30th.  A fully furnished alcove studio, spacious with lots of light, closet space, and very quiet. Exposed brick wall, Spanish tile in the kitchen, and easy access to subway, supermarkets, bars, gyms, restaurants, museums, Central Park, and the East River. In January, you might be able to rent it directly from the agent. This is a very special little haven, located in a great neighborhood.  Even brighter and more spacious than photos suggest.

Book Selection of the Month: "Lensmen" by E.E. "Doc" Smith

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (November 2009): Chronicles of the Lensmen, Vol. I by E.E. “Doc” Smith

Having recently abandoned comics and TV reception, the next step is to abandon sci-fi and fantasy novels (simply because life is short and there are other things in need of doing). I have arguably saved the goofiest for last in the sci-fi department with E.E. “Doc” Smith’s groundbreaking but relentlessly dopey 1930s/1940s space opera, the Lensmen series. (With fantasy, next month, I’ll exit on a classier note, looking at some very mature early twentieth-century novels, including one by one of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings.)

When I call Lensmen dopey, I don’t for one minute mean to sound like an ingrate — either to the author or to blogger X. Trapnel, who let me nab his copy (along with his Aristotle and his David Friedman) before he headed off to Germany for a semester or two. Lensmen was a highly influential sci-fi saga spanning numerous short stories collected as several epic novels, in which two warring races of cosmic beings use humans and other lesser races as their footsoldiers, leading a brain in a vat named Mentor to bestow telepathy-boosting wrist-worn “lenses” on a select few humans and others deemed worthy of these mighty weapons (after centuries of covert eugenic manipulation of numerous worlds). These warriors will in time form a Galactic Patrol, one so effective that it even displaces government, to the frustration of politicians on more than one world.

Incidentally, there are no female lens-wearers (well, one), because their tumultuous minds are not suitable to controlling the lens.

Silly as it all is, I must be grateful to Smith (in this week of gratitude), because his work was an acknowledged influence on the creators of the Jedi, the Green Lantern Corps (the comics characters bequeathed power rings by the Guardians of the Universe), possibly Star Trek (the offhand references to worlds such as Rigel Four seem likely to have been noticed by Gene Roddenberry), and the Legion of Super-Heroes (which has a member named Tellus, the future name of Earth in the Lensmen stories). Even something as far afield as Barbarella likely owes some of his intergalactic police-force backstory to Smith.

And I can’t help wondering whether Seth MacFarlane, before creating American Dad’s finest character, noticed that the grey alien mastermind in the Lensmen prequel, Triplanetary, is known simply and rather oddly as…Roger. (He pilots a vast artificial planetoid not unlike the Death Star and is secretly a disguised tentacled being from an alternate dimension, who ends up at war with a race of fish-men who desperately comb the stars seeking other races’ ships to melt down because they need iron.)

Lensmen is written with such trashy, outsider-art naivete that at times Smith even spells out sound effects, like: “W-H-A-M-!!” With a goofiness bordering on Hitchhiker’s-like parody, he happily depicts even the tentacled, extra-dimensional villains tossing off colloquialisms such as “On the one hand…” The text is replete with phrases almost lurid enough to appear on sideshow marquees, such as: “Fish with brains, waging war!” One chapter title, sounding like it might be an essay by Milton Friedman’s seasteading grandson Patri, is “Worm, Submarine, and Freedom.” One alien Lensman introduces himself with a proud “I, Rularion of North Polar Jupiter, say so.”

Amidst it all, passions flare, death is dispatched with manly callousness, and sleazy political operatives with names like Herkimer Herkimer III try to romantically seduce our heroine, though we know who she is destined to end up with — indeed, superhuman intelligences have assured us that the destiny of galaxies depends upon it. And superhuman intelligences like the mighty Arisians who created the Lensmen are no pikers when it comes to long-term planning: An oddly extended, self-parodic passage features Mentor proving his chessplayer-like ability to predict the future by telling the First Lensman in great detail about the haircut the Lensman will receive at a barbershop in Spokane, WA exactly five years hence. The confident brain in a vat even takes time to note that the shop’s resident cat, Thomas, is actually a female.

E.E. “Doc” Smith clearly knew he was doing something ridiculous, and he did it anyway. More power to him.

GQ Dec. in Hardcopy: Men of the Year (and Ayn Rand and me)

The GQ article that quotes me (and fellow libertarians Michael Malice and Nick Gillespie) on the topic of Ayn Rand is now on newsstands, in their December issue — which happens to be a special Men of the Year edition with multiple covers.  I have a copy of the Chris Pine version, and I figure I’ll give my parents the one that proclaims Clint Eastwood “Badass of the Year.”  You should collect every version, if you’re a Todd Seavey completist.

This Andrew Corsello-penned article is something to be thankful for, in this week of gratitude, even if one doesn’t agree with his every word.  Similarly, tomorrow I will explain, in my Book of the Month Selection, why we should all be grateful to the trashy sci-fi series called the Lensmen Chronicles, even if we roll our eyes at E.E. “Doc” Smith’s hyperbolic writing.  Without Lensmen, who knows if we would even have had Star Trek and thus the Chris Pine version of the GQ I’m in?

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Past and Future: Upper Crust, Star Trek

Last night’s Upper Crust performance opened — as I predicted — with lead singer Lord Ben Dover greeting us as “Colonial” Williamsburg and soon progressed to a near bout of fisticuffs, since some cretin in the audience beaned Lord Ben Dover with a beverage container. The amazing thing is that even though the singer demanded (in vain) that the culprit reveal himself and accept a thrashing, he managed to stay in character while enraged. And frankly, this is probably a good fight strategy: Insanity is frightening because of its unpredictability, and what is more insane than someone continuing to portray an eighteenth-century fop while vocally threatening to kill you? Well played, sir.

The rest of the performance was, of course, fraught with class issues, not only because of such memorable numbers as “Class Up the Ass,” “She Speaks the Vulgar Tongue,” “Rickshaw Boy,” “Finished with Finishing School,” “Let Them Eat Rock,” and (Nybakken’s request) “Rock n’ Roll Butler,” but because the drummer, apparently an actual milkman back in Boston (whereas Dover is an economist), is not allowed to attempt eighteenth-century patter, as he lacks the proper elite inflections.

Unbeknownst to me, Upper Crust was not the only old-fashioned force descending on NYC, as this weekend is apparently (coincidentally or not) the Dances of Vice festival for people enamored of past centuries’ costumery — or of neo-Victorian cartoonist/performance artist Dame Darcy’s presentation about sea shanties.

In a curious mixing of eras, at the Upper Crust concert I for the second time in the past few months bumped unexpectedly into 60s-rock DJ Kittybeat at the event, she having formerly co-hosted events with Dawn Eden, when rock rather than chastity was Dawn’s thing.

•••

Meanwhile, in the future: Newsarama interviewed Star Trek movie writer Robert Orci, and he mentions

that R2D2 is briefly visible in rubble near the planet Vulcan. (Nabbing an image from Star Wars is only fair, since E.T. is briefly visible in the Republican Senate in one of the Star Wars prequels.) Here is the most musically-significant passage of the interview, though:

Orci: What else do we have…I want to get Spock’s harp in there. Don’t you want to see him playing the harp? And he could play, like…he could do Nirvana on the harp. Wouldn’t that be good?

Newsarama: That would be amazing.

Orci: [to publicist] Would you write that down? Nirvana on the harp? [laughs]

“Heart-Shaped Box” would work very well, I think. The reason this pleases me, though, is that I said years ago that Nirvana would have sounded good doing an acoustic cover of the “heading off to Eden, hey, brother” song that one of the naive space-hippies sings in the rather conservative episode of the 1960s Trek series in which the fruit of the edenic planet turns out to be poisonous. Angry it up a little and it could almost be the b-side of “About a Girl.”

More disturbing, though, I think Trek producer Damon Lindelof, here (in another Newsarama interview) reacting to an interview question about his use of non-linear narrative in Lost and potentially in the next Trek movie, is describing a very different Bourne Supremacy (or possibly even Bourne Identity?!?) than the one I saw. Did I miss something?

I remember for me, how exciting it was to see the first Bourne movie and go, oh my god, like the first half of this movie actually took place between a few of the scenes in the last movie, and now the entire context of him being across the street from Joan Allen take on…but if they had told me that before I went and saw the movie, oh this actually takes place between the cracks of the last movie, it would have made that discovery less organic. So I think what we like to do as storytellers is drop you in the middle of something and the question you ask yourself is, ‘Where am I in relation to the last time I left these guys? Could this be something, perhaps, something that pre-dated the adventures that they had in the last movie? Does it happen five years later? Is it happening two seconds later?’ Who knows? We’re not going to tell you.

Has working on Lost and Star Trek caused him to become unmoored in the timestream? Was this a special edition of The Bourne Hallucination that I missed?

In other Trek news, tomorrow I’ll remind you why you should race out and buy the December issue of GQ with the new Captain Kirk, Chris Pine, on it — or one of the other variant covers of this issue — in case you’ve forgotten to do so (hint: me, Rand — not the yeoman).

•••

P.S. The most exciting strange lifeform I’ve seen in the past few days was a raccoon, way the heck over here on the Upper East Side, down at basement level in front of an apartment building on my block, probably wandered over from Central Park or Carl Schurz Park just north of me. An older immigrant woman, watching the beast along with her admirably calm golden retriever (who she also assured me likes cats), said she threw the raccoon cookies, and a little French girl called 311 on her cell phone to suggest they return him to a more wooded area (after expressing, only for a moment, hesitation about making the call because “I am French,” which almost caused me to start saying “Trois, un, un” before I realized she just meant she was nervous about explaining a weird situation to English-speaking authorities, but she proceeded to dial, and I headed home to avoid waiting a half hour for raccoon wranglers).

This marked only the sixth occasion on which I’ve seen a raccoon in Manhattan, all in or near Central Park: this Upper East Side wanderer, one sitting in a garbage can in back of Megan McArdle’s apartment back when she lived on the Upper West Side, one looking scruffy and possibly rabid near 72nd St. Central Park restrooms at night, one pitifully poking at another who appeared to have died from falling out of a tree, and twice whole families of them emerging at sundown from beneath the Central Park Boathouse, one of those scaring the willies out of me by pawing at food perilously close to an immense snapping turtle that apparently lives near the Boathouse — something to keep in mind before any crazed yuppie skinny-dipping adventure, for you urban-raised folk who don’t know that snapping turtles can break pool cues with a bite.

D&D vs. Socialized Medicine, You vs. NASA

It’s nice to see the Onion-like site Op-Toons using Dungeons & Dragons to criticize socialized medicine, which may well be inflicted upon this already financially-collapsing nation as early as tomorrow.  The Op-Toons spot is a reminder that more and more I find myself thinking that it’s neither philosophy nor policy that I need to master but psychology.

Why do people intuit the way they do, and how does one get them to incorporate basic economic insights into their thinking, so that nothing like the Obama administration — or any party’s “stimulus” or “job creation” plans — ever happens again?  I don’t know, but that is surely the major obstacle to human wellbeing, not failure to acquire more stats or to craft a sufficiently lovely metaphysical picture of humanity involving the word “normative.”  And the problem is a broadly human one, not just a liberal one: You can’t read conservative lamentations about culture being reduced to materialism without recognizing some of the same resentment of economic reasoning found in liberal lamentations about “putting profits before people” and other incoherent slogans.

If you share my frustration with government, why not take it out on NASA by debating in public on Dec. 2 that it should be abolished?  (E-mail my Earthlink address discernible from my right margin to volunteer.)  And just to prove I am not aesthetically opposed to spacefaring in general, tomorrow a look at some news about Star Trek.

Music-Filled November

It’ll have been a music-filled couple of weeks, since (1) Helen and I saw the fine country band the Doc Marshalls, led by our friend Nick Beaudoing, down in Arlington a week ago Friday, (2) I saw Neko Case perform in NYC on Monday, (3) I’m seeing the Upper Crust tomorrow at 10pm at Public Assembly in Williamsburg for a mere ten bucks and so should you, (4) Nybakken and I are seeing the Pixies on Tuesday (having just seen the spin-off band the Breeders a couple months ago — and it only now occurs to me one of those band names sounds gay and the other straight, perhaps not coincidentally), and (5) I should see Pirate Radio at some point, ahistorical whitewashing of the censorious leftist politicians notwithstanding.

Well, that’s accomplishment enough for one month.  I’m going to bed.

Meet the Newt Boss

I still think Newt Gingrich is preferable to 99% of American politicians, and I’d be delighted to see the strategy he recommends here deployed, but nonetheless note his creepy, vague, focus-group-like use of the seemingly noble phrase “first principles” in these comments about RNC leader Michael Steele (noted by C-SPAN, SwampPolitics, and Drudge):

He is developing a first principles model that I think is a very exciting, positive step in the right direction…By September, it might be very, very good for the Republicans in the House and Senate to have a common ground on which to campaign, whether they call it a Contract for America or some other device…Having a positive set of things that say, “if you elect us, these are the positive steps we will take”…may well be the key building block to really become the alternative party, not the opposition party…We didn’t do the Contract [with America in the 1994 congressional campaign] until very late in the campaign…You could begin to put together a set of first principles around which 80 percent of the country would rally… and then come Labor Day, you could begin to look a what are the five or ten biggest things that the Republicans could offer as their contract for America.

Like David Frum’s survey-filled political strategy book Comeback! these sound like the words of someone who doesn’t really have very clear first principles.  But perhaps we can discuss that tonight at Manhattan Project (per my right-hand margin), if you’re interested.

U.S.A. Against Africa

My real job consists of trying to disabuse people of unscientific beliefs, but as the hostess of the New York City Skeptics event I attended this past Saturday noted, the broader purpose of the skeptical movement is to encourage critical thinking in general, rather than just dividing the world into establishment science voices (including many government agencies one shouldn’t always trust) and blatantly nonsensical voices, such as people claiming to “channel” unseen space aliens who give tips on world peace and business success.

There’s nothing I would love more than to teach people to apply reason and basic standards of evidence across the board, instead of just touting a favored checklist of legitimate claims.  Unfortunately, I constantly butt heads with people who can’t be expected to be consistent and intellectually rigorous about this because they don’t really think that holding groundless, superstitious beliefs is a harmful habit (as though we can just flip a light switch and restore people’s rationality the moment they “go too far” and do something blatantly harmful based on faith or fancy, such as abandoning cancer care, even after they’ve been trained their whole lives to adhere to unproven beliefs, indeed to love such beliefs).  I also encounter people, usually more left-leaning, who think that so-called Western forms of rationality (science, mainstream medicine, economics, etc.) ought not to be touted above rival modes of thought from around the developing world, as that would be narrow-minded, chauvinistic, and imperialist.

But every time I encounter people in either of these camps, I remember what a horrible, nightmarish, superstitious continent Africa remains.

I recommend all the people described above who take scientific thinking and rationalism for granted — whether right-leaning faith-fans, left-leaning cultural relativists, or just New Age paranormal I-wanna-believe types who think groundless beliefs are all in good fun — read carefully this article about a woman in Tanzania listening as her daughter’s legs were hacked off because the girl was an albino, and witch doctors to this day love to make good luck potions out of albinos on the otherwise dark continent.

Even a few of the more left-leaning libertarians I know, who ought to be hypersensitive to instances of murder and assault, have half-defended some of today’s more barbarous cultures in private e-mails to me, pointing out, for instance, that the West burned witches centuries ago, just as some parts of Africa occasionally do today.  There is a difference, though: about four hundred years of scientific progress.  Failure to celebrate that difference does not in any way honor our culture’s greatest achievements or aid the victims of other culture’s ongoing shortcomings, which we can only hope will not long endure.

Crisis Clinic, Horney Clinic

This disaster-movie weekend just ended, with the world coming to an end in 2012, reminded me of my favorite Far Side cartoon, namely the one depicting the travails of a Crisis Clinic.

That in turn reminds me of an unfortunately-named institution just around the corner from the bar/restaurant where I host the monthly Manhattan Project social gatherings for people interested in politics (the next one being this Wed., Nov. 18, from 6:30pm-on if you care to join us — back of the second floor of Merchants NY East, at 62nd and First).  A block west of us on 62nd is, yes, the Horney Clinic, as I can’t help noticing each time I walk to the Manhattan Project gatherings (the Karen Horney Clinic, to be precise).

And, yes, the Horney Clinic specializes — quite nobly, no doubt — in helping victims of incest and sexual abuse, as well as in managing general foster care.  You just know some of those kids are going to grow up making a certain crucial spelling error over and over again, but I suppose that’s the least of their problems, and I wish them well.

2012 Survivors and We the Living (surviving on DVD)

Having now seen 2012, which was everything I’d anticipated (stupid and spectacular), I’m reminded that a lot of us probably had the very same cultural artifact spring to mind the first time we heard stupid mystical predictions about the world ending in 2012: the Rush album 2112.

The Rush album, however, was not inspired by doomsday prophecies of the pseudo-Mayan sort. It was inspired by the novel Anthem by Ayn Rand (in hers, a man living in a statist future rediscovers the lightbulb, though, not the guitar).

You could see some of Rand’s works as tales of people surviving disasters, though. The economy of a future U.S. collapses in Atlas Shrugged, and a handful of people escape to Galt’s Gulch. In perhaps her most human and conventional (and slightly autobiographical) story, We the Living, a woman struggles to escape the politicized culture of the Soviet Union (in which Rand grew up).

I will believe the Atlas Shrugged miniseries is happening when I perceive the objective fact of its existence on my TV screen. We the Living, by contrast, has been issued on DVD at long last by Duncan Scott in association with Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, with forty-five minutes of deleted scenes, documentary material, and an explanation of Rand’s alternate ending.

My free copy is also a weapon against both Communism and Fascism, since Italian censors notoriously failed to realize at first, when this unauthorized film was created in that country, that the fanatical and bald Communist bureaucrat depicted in the film bore just a bit too much resemblance to a certain bald then-leader of Italy prone to fulminating on balconies. It’s freedom and morality vs. slavery and violence throughout human history, whatever the political labels used in an attempt to excuse the latter pair, and most people instinctively flee toward freedom, as refugee and migration patterns attest time and again, whenever they are given the chance, as surely as John Cusack flees a big fireball when Yellowstone erupts.

Newsmax, Media Tidbits, Dogs, and Muppets

The first of my Newsmax columns on political media is up (from their November issue), and the second, I think, will be in the December issue on stands within the next couple weeks.  Below, though, are seven items that didn’t make it into that short first column (and I really ought to start making my blog entries as short as these snippets, since you all have things to do — except the blog entries should have punk and sci-fi references):

•Reporter John Stossel gave a typically libertarian explanation for his move from ABC News to Fox News: “It means more freedom.”  A producer at ABC said that network has been more and more reluctant to criticize government since Obama took office.

•Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the well-known, cartoon-like “HOPE” poster of Obama’s face (and a popular poster of wrestler Andre the Giant) defends Yosi Sergant, the National Endowment for the Arts staffer who resigned after revelations he’d been encouraging pro-Obama art.  Fairey’s site called Sergant a victim of “the right wing hate machine.”

•Michael Moore’s documentary Capitalism: A Love Story concluded by calling capitalism an “evil” that must be “eliminated.”  That didn’t stop Esquire magazine from hosting a Lincoln Center screening of the film, followed by friendly Q&A with Moore conducted by Daily Beast editor Tina Brown.  When New York Post’s Kyle Smith tried to ask Moore if he endorses communism, Smith’s microphone was cut off.

•The New York Post was the victim the same day of a large-scale prank underwritten by the left-wing documentarians called the Yes Men.  During a climate-change conference at the U.N., at least a dozen young leftists handed out thousands of fake issues of the Post, filled with global warming articles.

•During the same climate conference, the libertarian documentarians behind the film Not Evil, Just Wrong cornered several celebrities, including X-Files star Gillian Anderson, getting them to admit they flew carbon-emitting jets, some private, to the conference.

•New York City’s Channel 5 news anchor Ernie Anastos created a sensation — and an instant catch phrase — recently by (presumably accidentally) using an expletive.  He told a meteorologist, during on-air banter, to “Keep fucking that chicken,” shortly after making a Frank Perdue joke.

•And that leads us to the Segway, or rather to inventor Dean Kamen, creator of the Segway and other motion-assisting devices.  In his speech after receiving this year’s Popular Mechanics Leadership Award for a lifetime of inspiring technological achievements, Kamen said that America is doomed as a world leader unless we make science and technology as exciting to kids as we now do athletes and movie stars, and he said it’s more about culture than about spending more on public schools: “Someone has to inspire kids to do things that matter.”

P.S. One thing that might help with Kamen’s pro-science mission is the set of talks being given under the auspices of NYC Skeptics today from 1-4pm at Pace University’s downtown Manhattan location, 1 Pace Plaza, in Lecture Hall South — where you’ll find me listening to two ACSH Advisors and others talk about health myths.

P.P.S. Never a candidate for inclusion in Newsmax was this invention that was not created by Dean Kamen: decorative dog armor.  This outfit would be useful to the members of an obscure old DC Comics hero team I only just learned about recently: the Space Canine Patrol Agents, including such members as Tail Terrier, whose tail stretches and can capture villains, and Drooly, who makes lassoes and such out of drool.  Seeing some of the members described online as having died in the line of duty is strange.

And since all that puts one in a Muppet-like mood, here are clips from Steven Schub, L.A.’s premier libertarian ska band leader, of his childhood appearances on Sesame Street.  Good thing he and his bandmates in the Fenwicks weren’t psychologically damaged by his youthful experiences.

2012 vs. Pandorum vs. Avatar

With 2012 out today, it might be a good time to read about changes in the tone of apocalypse tales over the past century, per this article from io9 pointed out to me by Charis Warchal.

And while we’re making charts of doomsday stories’ differences, feel free to use the short list below, which I’ve whipped up so you can keep track of the ominous slogans from this season’s sci-fi films:

Pandorum:

Don’t fear the end of the world — fear what happens next.  (9/25/09)

2012:

The end of the world is just the beginning.  (11/13/09)

Avatar:

Welcome to Pandora.  (12/18/09)