Florence and the Machine

Mayor John Lindsay gave The Brady Bunch’s Florence Henderson crabs in a one-night stand.  So she says in her upcoming memoir, reports the Daily News (as pointed out to me by Dimitri Cavalli).  Henceforth, in my mind Lindsay will always be associated with sexual decadence and venereal disease.

What clearer evidence could you ask for, as this blog’s “Month of Political Conflict” begins, that politicians are the enemy of culture, not its leaders and protectors?  Today is Canada Day, but we will revisit this topic in earnest three days from now, on Independence Day, with a look at the book Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea by C. Bradley Thompson.

In the meantime: tomorrow let us examine an even more scandal-prone “Lindsay.”

Your Mama, Your Company, and Your Fighting Kitten

A warning to protectors of gene pools everywhere as our “Month of Eugenics” finale: Kennedy (not the presidential one, nor the cute ex-VJ one), doing “Your Mama.”

Markets, like biological evolution (and philosophy, science, tradition, journalistic fact-checking...) are a constant weeding-out process, and it’s important to reaffirm once in a while that we free-marketeers are not giving our blessing to everything done by any and every existing company.  On the contrary, we look forward to the day when every single one of them will be a thing of the past, succeeded by even better companies.

I was particularly happy to hear about a thieving store called Computer World in the East 20s going out of business years ago, and similar con artistry, disturbingly, was the order of the day at a more-established CompUSA outlet in Manhattan.  I am also pleased to see Consumer Research (more market-savvy than the lefty Cosumer Reports) slam the crappy-printer-selling HP.

The piece also informs me I could have gotten a $25 check for my very similar (known, built-in, ignored) problem with a piece-of-shit Epson Stylus C86 printer had I made my claim by 2006 (I was receiving unsolicited occasional notices in the mail about the progress of that class action suit – up until about the time the rules for the settlement were decided upon, at which point I stopped receiving information, alas).  For a while, it appeared the resolution would be a coupon for additional products from Epson, which is not encouraging, needless to say.

Lest people ever make the mistake of thinking that my belief in markets means a servility to particular existing companies, rest assured I’d be happy to see people at companies who knowingly defraud customers go to jail instead of just paying fines and lawyer fees and moving on to the next project.  Government isn’t the only institution that steals, just the only one that does nothing else. 

But perhaps one last note on biological evolution is in order before moving on to my “Month of Political Conflict” starting tomorrow: I think this kitten has discovered a surprisingly effective new fighting style.  

Transformers: Dark of the Moon -- The Greatest Film Ever Made

I saw something beautiful in IMAX 3D, and it was Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  I felt as dirty and stupid after the previous two Transformers as any intellectual should, don’t get me wrong – but Michael Bay has perfected his unique craft. 

And there are wingsuits, the real-life man-as-flying-squirrel outfits that I praised in one of the parts no one remembers from my appearance on that ninety-minute C-SPAN2 broadcast last year.  In IMAX 3D.  The Transformers, I mean, not the C-SPAN2 thing, though I trust with better lighting on everyone, the latter would also have been fit for IMAX 3D. 

Futhermore: The robots are no longer too visually complicated to follow.  The human dialogue is kept to a minimum, aside from yelling about action stuff.  Military-vehicle porn has been traded for Chicago-architecture porn (closer to my heart).  But fear not, neocons – those wingsuits are not exactly being worn by pacifists, the American flag flies majestically, and, yes, there is even an Autobot raid on a Middle Eastern nuclear facility.  Optimus Prime has merely traded his gung-ho talk for more-explicit freedom talk – and placed this film in an explicit debate with Star Trek in the process.  The tide may indeed be turning.  

Don’t tell executive producer Spielberg what it all really means (then again, if even John Lennon was becoming a conservative toward the end, maybe there’s hope for Spielberg – and maybe it’s time conspiracy theorists shift tactics and start asking whether that’s why they took Lennon out; no, don’t). 

Thank goodness the final Harry Potter (itself pretty cool-looking from the trailers) doesn’t come out for another two and a half weeks, giving America ample time to transfer the GDP to a deserving Michael Bay. 

•••

Related bonus news:

•The trailer for Real Steel, about a washed-up boxer played by Hugh Jackman training an old robot to fight, made clear that they should at least have considered marketing it as Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots: The Motion Picture.  In any case, it is another reminder we shall “evolve” into the robots in the end, and robot butlers will at last quietly vanquish monkey butlers – but may the robots never forget their primate roots.

•If the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol looks superior to the previous three M:I movies, it may be because the director is Brad Bird of The Incredibles and the tragically-overlooked robot tale Iron Giant, now permitted to play with real people (and Tom Cruise). 

•Here’s a PSA from a couple years ago, though, reminding you not to take robots lightly. 

•In other animation news, the whole Monty Python gang – yes, even the late Graham Chapman – is getting together to do the voice roles in a new movie.  This is good.  If ever there were an honorable way to use a dead actor in a movie, this is it. 

•••

Added joy from the new Transformers: relishing the absence – and Hitler-related downfall – of the “dumb as rocks” Megan Fox.

Let the record show that despite her physical beauty, I always

Scarry Women and a Giant Spaceman in Europe

I’m not sure if they’re products of eugenics, but behold Fiona and Olympia Scarry – the Austrian/French/Italian/New York/London-dwelling granddaughters of beloved children’s illustrator Richard Scarry (had I known what I was helping to create when asking my parents to buy the book Busytown...).

Olympia (left in the linked photo) tells interviewers she was long a spiked-collar-wearing goth unable to truly love, after her teenage years in New York City – but has since studied both psychology and art and gained a broader social network, after her art opening in Milan, which dealt in part with the oppression of women by the fashion industry and employed bra and panty imagery.

On her Twitter feed, she notes that she is “the most outrageous woman ever” and that she “hates retarded man,” who I believe is a Viennese superhero. 

I would sacrifice both women to Odin if I thought it would resurrect Grandpa.

And speaking of characters appearing in Marvel Comics, you might be pleased to learn that in current Marvel canon, SHIELD is not just a spy organization headed by Samuel L. Jackson but in fact a Da Vinci Code-like brotherhood that existed long before its U.S.-government incarnation, founded by ancient Egyptian chancellor Imhotep with help from the original, ancient Moon Knight and the first mutant, Apocalypse – and with later members including Da Vinci (who had operational ornithopters and the ability to time-travel to the present) and Galileo, who apparently once battled the planet-eating giant named Galactus.

I hope all that somehow makes it into the Captain America movie next month.

Manhattans, a Roast, Some Veggies

•You can read an article on Egypt, Tunisia, and political change by tonight’s Manhattans Project guest of honor, Saif Ammous, if you have a Financial Times subscription.  (Or catch him – and the rest of us – in person at Langan’s tonight, 7-10pm, way in the back room, 47th just east of 7th.)

•Remember, next month, you can also see me “roasted” down at Lolita Bar at the Bastille Day (Thur., July 14, 7:30pm) event called That Which Roasts Todd Seavey Makes Him Stronger, featuring speakers such as Berin Szoka of TechFreedom, a group that just published the forward-looking book The Next Digital Decade.

•Another of the speakers appearing at that Bastille Day roast, Diana Fleischman, e-mailed to report that she saw my friend Tibbie X getting tattooed on the new show NY Ink – and to remind me that I live in a tough city where even pad Thai can cause fights, involving an opera singer no less (who was later acquitted).  New York has its moments, but they’re nothing compared to L.A., where it’s gettin’ real in the Whole Foods parking lot, as a vegan like Diana should be forewarned.

Russia Destroy You from Space!

Watch this clip (noted by Gerard Perry) of an opposition party leader in Russia (referred to as “Mad Bad Vlad” by Russian-speaking Eugene Volokh) threatening to destroy the world with secret space weapons over trade disputes – while a news anchor appears to be having a hard time keeping a straight face (3 min.).  She’d look sadder, I think, if it occurred to her how close this is to the plot of Phantom Menace.

We can discuss the geopolitical implications of all this if we run out of things to say about the Middle East tomorrow night at Langan’s (7-10pm, in the far-back room, with Saif Ammous as guest of honor and suspected protocol droid). 

Politically-Divided Families, Including Libertarian Factions

A good sign of whether people are wrong is whether they want to limit and squelch debate itself (says the known debate-organizer).  A corollary is that I keep finding that my favorite people tend to come from politically- or philosophically-mixed families, or at least from a background that meant (whether at home, school, or work) they often had to cope with being told they were wrong. 

To put it a bit more cruelly, in cases where open-mindedness has not resulted, I at least love it when, say, very-left-wing New York-dwellers (almost invariably relatively-fun ones even if they’re angry and nuts, as opposed to staid establishment types) at some point tell me they have ornery conservative parents – especially if they hail from a rural region, because then you know damn well they have to just put up with it sometimes (family reunions, childhood, Grandma’s Baptist funeral, etc.).

I say this out of a desire to facilitate healthy dialogue, you understand – and I say as I head off to visit my own parents, aunt, grandmother, and parents’ relatively-new dog Mac (a Scottie) in New England this weekend.

I also say this just after two reminders reach me of how many disagreements there are just within my own “political family,” namely the libertarian movement:

1. The Times noted the long, argumentative comment thread that resulted from an attempt to define libertarianism – and, oddly enough, one of the few resources to which the Times directed people at the end of the article was a mostly-humorous piece by Andrew Corsello from GQ about Ayn Rand’s influence that quoted me, Michael Malice, and Nick Gillespie among others (and for more Rand, run quickly to the one or two remaining performances at Brick Theater in Williamsburg of the comic-book-based play Action Philosophers, which contains a lengthy and funny Rand bio segment).

2. When a friend newly interested in libertarianism asked for explanation of the surprising factionalism he encountered (in a still-small movement), I dashed off the following taxonomy, which I admit is quick and hasty (and here edited to be even shorter) but fairly accurate, I dare say:

10 TV and Rock n’ Roll Notes: Ron Paul, Weird Al, Jackass, Lady Gaga, and More

Before another increasingly-frequent Williamsburg visit this evening (more on that neighborhood in the months ahead) – and a visit to the parents, grandmother, aunt, and parents’ relatively-new Scottie named Mac this weekend – a few TV and rock notes:

•It was nice to see Ron Paul loosen up and laugh like a regular Joe at Colbert’s golden calf question the other night.  He should do that more often, preferably from the Oval Office. 

•Weird Al has released his Lady Gaga parody video, which may be more disturbing than an actual Gaga video – but pretty much captures how I feel about the fast-fading faux-freak.  My favorite rhyme in it is probably “I might be wearing Swiss cheese/ Or maybe covered with bees.”  I didn’t claim Weird Al is deep.  Just better than Lady Gaga. 

•Gaga’s frenetic prop-deployment reminds me a bit of the slight embarrassment I felt upon realizing that I had been talking to one of America’s most-traditionalist writers once when I was half-jokingly praising the aggressively trashy, postmodernist-montage cable access TV show Concrete TV – which consisted mostly of rapidly-intercut clips of old kung fu fights, wrestling, explosions, car crashes, and vintage stripper reels – in short, the good stuff with no waiting (or need for virtues such as patience). 

•But Concrete TV is still awesome, and now you can find it online, though it looks a bit less shocking than it did when a patient but no doubt saddened Kalb had that conversation with a young recent college grad back in the 90s.  Then it was futurist (in the art movement sense), now we just live in that future. 

•Jim Kalb’s occasional bar gatherings back in the day (called Tuesday Night Traditonalists, not at all to be confused with Gersh Kuntzman’s Tuesday Night Tradition bar gatherings of that same era, except in the sense that you might have found me at either, as is my wont) would sometimes draw folk such as a then-young paleoconservative named Tom Woods, not to be confused...

•...with libertarian Tom Walls (though I’m sure it happens), who recommends a cover song by the Dutch band the Madd.  Here’s the original by Los Shakers for comparison – so in some sense the Shakers had offspring.  And Dawn Eden notes that the Madd reached the Top 20 backing a rapper at one point. 

•In other rock news, I just want to note that a guy from Decemberists and Robert Pollard from Guided by Voices are now the core of a band called Boston Spaceships (located in Ohio).  Maybe it’s safe now to confess my feeling that Guided by Voices sounded to me like incomplete sketches of songs – a feeling that seems borne out by the stats, which show that Pollard has written 1,300 “songs.”  He’s talented, but that sort of number has to be viewed with the same suspicion as a claim to have written 1,300 good sci-fi novels.

•It also occurs to me that Buzzcocks, Guided by Voices, the Wedding Present, and Sebadoh all sound slightly similar at times, which is not a knock against any of them

•I was like totally trapped inside a building by cops at a Buzzcocks concert once, man – although, uh, it was because the police were examining a suspected bomb outside at a time of heightened terrorism worry, so it’s not as punk rock as it sounds.

•Speaking of car crashes – here’s a defense of Ebert, who called the drunk-driving recently-deceased Jackass cast member a jackass.  I suspect there are a lot of millennials, overly influenced by Jackass and Fight Club at a formative age, who are still having a hard time processing the fact that bad behavior can actually kill you rather than just impress some of your less intelligent peers.

It’s Darwin in action, in keeping with this blog’s “Month of Eugenics” theme, and even if a few of those taken out are ostensibly hip and talented, we’ll somehow move on without them, much as I wish everyone could have been spared the pain of the incident.

Bachmannia, the Future, and Philosophy

Even if she turns out to be nuts, Bachmann suddenly leaping from nowhere to 24% in GOP voter polls – and seemingly-inevitable Romney dropping to 15, tied with Cain (with Paul behind them at 10 and the others in single digits) – pleased me, not just because she’s the head of the House Tea Party Caucus (with a libertarian co-writing her book) or because she genuinely seemed more alert than everyone else during the second GOP candidates debate but also just because it’s nice to know things are still unpredictable. 

And indeed, the future is often more fluid than we realize.  To wit:

•My philosopher/physicist/entrepreneur pal Bob Doyle from last December’s American Philosophical Association gathering in Boston (the first thing I ever tweeted about) would even argue that certain things – namely people – are radically unpredictable and has written a book defending the concept of free will (though I am a determinist, to the horror of some libertarians, not to mention, most likely, Bob).

•Here’s a visual reminder of the difference between L.A. today and a videogame depicting L.A. in 1947, in the form of a simultaneous walk through both (noted by Brett Ruiz), which should keep you humble about predicting what, say, New York City 2075 will look like.

•Critical Review Vol. 22 No. 4 is entirely devoted to the issue of whether “experts” – even in principle – are likely to make better-than-random predictions about the political and social future, and it’s not so clear that they are, which is the sort of taboo, elite-smashing, narrative-complicating point that I think we as a civilization may need to get more brazen about making (I’m looking at you, academia and government and media and priesthood and...).

•Iceland did not see the anarchist/punk Best Party coming, but they’re still governing Reykjavik. 

•I feel a bit guilty picking on this philosophy writer, but the sheer banality of the opening paragraphs is a reminder how opaque the future is.

And speaking of philosophy, now I must dash to Williamsburg (I could get used to that place) to see the 7pm performance of the play Action Philosophers at Brick Theater, along with Bachmann’s eminently sane fellow Minnesotan Ali Kokmen.  He’s pals with the guy who wrote the original comic book, you know.  

Foreskins, Eugenics, and Buck Rogers

•The future clearly lies in ever-easier cultural mixing-and-matching – and no idiot paleos on the right or anti-globalization activists on the left can do a damn thing to stop it.  I just saw a cool photo of two friends’ heads painted into a Bollywood action film poster, a wedding gift from New Yorkers Lefty Leibowitz and Emily Fromm depicting Texas newlyweds L.B. Deyo and Ellie Hanlon, handpainted in Mumbai.  Do you think the future will bring more things like that or fewer?  (Do you think higher tariffs and stricter international labor laws would or should prevent it?)

•But there are undeniably interesting cases where it’s unclear how much deference to give to the locals/traditionalists vs. ostensibly more-universal standards.  Conservative rabbi Shmuley Boteach is now up in arms over anti-circumcision activists using comic books full of evil mohels as propaganda for their cause.  Boteach calls it flat-out anti-Semitism, although (A) I’m (of course) inclined to give cartoonists a fair amount of leeway (how does one depict evil mohels without mocking Judaism?) and (B) I’m sympathetic to the anti-circumcision argument that the decision to have a significant portion of your body removed probably ought to be made by you (as an adult) when possible instead of by others (when you’re a defenseless baby). 

Boteach notes that science is on his side in that foreskins make contracting AIDS more likely, but that’s an argument that can be made to an adult years later, of course.  And I can’t help wondering how many conservatives who invoke that bit of science as sufficient reason to hack off part of the penis are the same people who recoil in horror and offense at the suggestion that their kids get anti-HPV vaccination shots now to reduce the risk of STDs years hence.  Even stronger scientific argument, far less intrusive procedure. 

On this as on so many things, though, I think Boteach needs a thicker skin.

•The name Boteach reminds me of one of my favorite items from the site OverheardinNewYork, co-founded by my fellow atheist-anarchist Michael Malice.  A kid on the subway reportedly told his friends that a nearby poster for a college said you could learn about “bee-otch” there, to which one of his friends said: That’s biotech, stupid. 

And that brings us back to eugenics, the ostensible theme of the month on this blog.  Genetic and physical enhancement is not a bad thing, though it’s also worth keeping in mind humanity’s terrible track record at deciding what (or who) is unworthy.  I have only just learned, in looking into this topic, that the Pioneer Fund, the premier organization for funding sometimes-crazy, sometimes-legit research into human genetic diversity – including the controversial book The Bell Curve – is in my neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (who knew?). 

Called white supremacists and a “hate group” by the

10 Thoughts About SUPER-WEAPONS

1. Green Lantern was lame.  In spite of the limitless possibilities of a ring that can reshape reality, it wasn’t even lame in an interesting way.  Indeed, DC Comics now has its Daredevil, so to speak. 

It’s not even dumbed-down 50s comics, it’s dumbed-down Geoff Johns-written stuff from the past six years – dumbed down by co-producer Johns himself, presumably: the planet Ryut, the potential creation of a Sinestro Corps, etc.  It’s all there – but still uninteresting. 

The fact that recent depictions in the comics of the Green Lantern villain I once loved, Krona, have clearly been a scramble to make the tone of the comics jibe better with the film only makes me feel as though the cancer of the movie’s badness has been spreading for some time – and to no real purpose, since both the bad film and the current version of DC Comics reality will be forgotten by summer’s end. 

There’s a funny Onion News piece about how little anyone cares about Green Lantern that faux-quotes star Ryan Reynolds saying he’s been a Green Lantern fan ever since he learned he’d be starring as Green Lantern.

More troubling – at the risk of me sounding yellow – is a real New York Times quote from Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the film’s villain and is apparently Catholic: “I like the death-cult aspect of Catholicism.  Every religion is interested in death, but Catholicism takes it to a particularly high level...Seriously, in Catholicism, you’re supposed to love your enemy.  That really impressed me as a kid, and it has helped me as an actor...The way that I view the characters I play is part of my religious upbringing.  To abandon curiosity in all personalities, good or bad, is to give up hope in humanity.” 

Combined with the fact that he dated burlesque model Dita von Teese, this makes me fear he’s one of those darkness-excusing bad Catholics of whom I’ve become more conscious in the past couple years (despite the Pope’s efforts to convince you that we utilitarian pro-science types are the source of moral nihilism in the world).  Maybe Parallax hasn’t been banished. 

(One more DC Comics thought: since Superman has been walking across America in recent months and is apparently single again in the new DC Comics universe, maybe instead of just having his marital status be altered by the change in the cosmos, they should end his current comic with him walking back to Metropolis and saying, “Lois, I’ve been walking – and I’ve been thinking...”)

2. I derived far more pleasure from the brief intro animation sequence from the new videogame Star Wars: The Old Republic than from the entire Green Lantern movie.  Really, check it out.  And I’m not even a gamer. 

Once again, there are those drawn to the Dark Side, though, as we are reminded by this hilarious thirty-five-second clip of a live Star Wars amusement park event in which a little girl doesn’t quite follow the script.

3. The picture above from next month’s Captain America movie – of villain the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) holding the reality-altering Cosmic Cube – makes me think

Independents, Libertarians, Philosophers, and Pomplamoose

The last time Gerry Ohrstrom organized a book-launch party in NYC, it was for Incognito by David Eagleman, which delves into the countless impressive, even disturbing things that the brain does unconsciously.  At the event, I talked to another prominent science writer who’s studying personality types – and that led me to a misanthropic thought, not that it takes much.

With a country of religious people, left-liberal big-government fans, moderates, greens, and capitalists, I think you’re basically looking at a population made up of – respectively – the delusional, the destructive, the unthinking, the anti-human, and the shallow.  Given those five horrible choices, I side with shallow, and you should too, even if I don’t necessarily want to hang around with some of them. 

(This thought does not qualify as my foray into neuroscience, the subject area into which so many political writers seem to be moving lately, from David Brooks and Will Wilkinson to Ryan Sager and Ken Silber.  It’s a neural pattern – ha!  I just hope that if the statist Brooks develops telepathic powers as a result of his research, the libertarianish other three will join forces to combat him.)

Gerry’s latest event is for the co-authors of a volume arguing that the moderates aren’t as confused and clueless as I have made them out to be above, though.  My fellow libertarians Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch argue in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America that a growing number of self-declared independents are people who are not just apathetic but rightly fed up with the Republican/Democrat Punch and Judy show (and the right/left spectrum imported from Europe to justify those parties’ loosely-held principles).  A fine article adapted from the book appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and the book itself hits shelves Tuesday next week. 

This week is shaping up to be a perfect Seavey tetralogy, actually – that always requiring doses, roughly speaking, of politics, fantasy, skepticism, and music.  Well:

•in addition to the aforementioned political event,

•I’m seeing the extended version of the second Lord of the Rings movie tomorrow (Kip’s Bay 7pm),

•a Brick Theater stage version of the historical comic book Action Philosophers on Thursday (original art from which I was given by Nybakken and Malice, by the way),

•and the band Pomplamoose on Friday (making it two nights in Williamsburg in a row).

And just so I don’t leave out science (which I tend to lump under “skepticism” in my brain), let me put in a word for biotech, which idiot Luddites in Belgium have been impeding by destroying genetically-modified plants (as Chuck Blake pointed out to me).  People in Belgium apparently hate plants being different as much as the British hate visiting magicians such as David Blaine making spectacles of themselves.  In England, they cruelly taunted and heckled Blaine during one of his stunts simply because they thought he was being pretentious.  Here, we’d applaud him, strive to outdo him, or ignore him.  Outside of politics, we don’t always demand that extreme behavior be moderated.  

Father’s Day Thoughts on Politics

Romney's still way in the lead among GOP candidates – about 33% among GOP voters – but the biggest upward leap after the second candidates debate was for Bachmann, who’s now at about 19, with every other declared GOP candidate in single digits or so. 

It may have been shallow things like her mention of her numerous children or her confident tone of voice that caused the bump – or just the fact that she isn’t Sarah Palin (whose wearing of a Star of David necklace when she visited NYC recently may have partly made up for what some saw as her clumsy use of a “blood libel” metaphor but still left her seeming clearly a shiksa).  Regardless, it wouldn’t be such bad timing to have the official head of the House’s Tea Party Caucus as the Republican nomine, or v.p. candidate.  Bachmann really sounded noticeably more alert than most of the others, I gotta say, though that doesn’t necessarily mean she – or any of them – are fully sane.  She mentioned libertarians in a positive way and said the ’12 race should be about econ instead of culture, which helps, even if it’s not quite as reassuring as Mitch Daniels’ “truce” talk.

(I mean, I’d prefer Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, don’t get me wrong, but they’re both down in the single digits with almost all the others, so it seems like it’ll be Romney, Bachmann, or someone not yet officially in the race, such as Perry, Palin, or Christie.)

We could do worse than having a president who thinks his or her numerous grandkids need spending cuts and deregulation to assure their futures rather than more spending and scheming by the likes of Obama.

•••

One man who is not impressed by children, though – and likely would not be impressed by their attempts to draw their own Father’s Day cards – is the comedic pro-male writer Maddox, who sets out in his new book and website to demonstrate that his artwork is better than that of your children, or as he puts it, I Am Better Than Your Kids.

In North Carolina years ago, the solution to your lame kids might well have been eugenics, as Diana Fleischman points out to me.  No one will deny that troubled state needs particular help, and Diana herself is fleeing from it to England – but not without stopping in NYC on Bastille Day (7:30pm, Lolita Bar) to speak at the event called That Which Roasts Todd Seavey Makes Him Stronger.  Join us.

Women, Vegetables, Apes, DC Comics, and Star Trek

Diana Fleischman pointed out to me that while Americans are somewhat-predictably divided along right/left lines about “social” issues like gay marriage, the genders are not that divided on such issues – not even abortion (except in so far as men are slightly more pro-choice, contrary to 80% of feminist rhetoric) – except when it comes to animal-related issues, on which, to put it crudely, women are about twice as likely to care.  That’s huge compared to the small gender gaps on other issues. 

Whether the women are right or wrong (and I suspect in the super-long-run humans probably will make less use of other species, largely due to artificial substitutes getting cheaper), I suspect women are drawn to those issues by maternal instincts – just as they are apparently slightly more opposed to aborting fetuses and (as Diana’s own research has explored) significantly more likely to be disgusted by meat, which can contain fetus-harming microbes. 

Female vegetarians are about three times more numerous than male vegetarians, and as far as I know, this is not because vegetables actually transform male genitalia into female genitalia (and if they did, I have no idea how that would affect the mermen and mermaids in today’s annual Mermaid Day Parade at Coney Island, which cartoonist Dame Darcy and countless other oddballs will be celebrating). 

Diana also notes that the director of the impending August reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes was keen not only to raise animal welfare issues with the movie but to avoid using real apes in the film (check out the latest version of the trailer in that article), points out a serious documentary about humans raising a chimp (Project Nim), and for good measures notes this conversation with a philosopher who argues we’d all be better off if we’d never been born anyway.

•••

Speaking of nerd reboots like the Apes movie, which are the truly

Urban Planners vs. Green Lantern, John Galt, and U2

If you are a Green Lantern, you build things out of green energy using sheer willpower, possibly including box office receipts if necessary. 

If you are Edge from lefty-evangelical band U2, you get a taste of green-inspired red tape when you try to build in Malibu, and one official tells you “In thirty-eight years of this commission’s existence, this is one of the three worst projects I’ve seen in terms of environmental devastation.” 

(Katherine Taylor gets credit for pointing that item out to me and – along with ex-VJ Kennedy who has twice now tweeted at me urging me to speak in California – gets credit for convincing me I need to make a trip to L.A. in the fall or in 2012.  Venue suggestions welcome.  Ditto invites to be on your radio show.)

If you are the government, of course, you build things out of money you have taken from people by threatening to put them in jail at gunpoint, and you often build on land you have taken from them by force as well.  That’s why your time might be better spent this weekend seeing the documentary The Battle for Brooklyn, about the government’s seizure of property for the Atlantic Yards project, if Green Lantern seems a bit too fanciful. 

If you are John Galt or Howard Roark, you build without consulting government, but if you are John Aglialoro, the producer of the mediocre Atlas Shrugged movie, you hesitate before building another money-losing Rand-based movie and, according to one interview, are considering producing a script called Poker Room inspired by your experiences as a poker player instead.  You know when to gamble and when to fold, it seems.  

(Speaking of Rand, you just know some cold-hearted monster is going to try to make this poor man sound like a metaphor for the welfare state – and the parasitic mindset it encourages.  A true eugenicist might be less than alarmed by the man’s threat to commit suicide.)

If you are Weiner, you erect a promising political career and then destroy it with lust and Twitter. 

If you are Camille Wainer, by contrast, you make a documentary of a different sort about Brooklyn, namely Thou Art: Williamsburg, about multiple artists living there.  And you seek distribution advice for the project, by the way.