NJ Gas Rationing Plan Manifestly Insane

A big storm requires stupid government.  

Gawker notes that NYTimes reports that NJ announced that to deal with post-Sandy (price controls-induced) gas shortages, people with license plates ending in a letter can fill up on odd-numbered calendar days, whereas people with license plates ending in a number can fill up on even-numbered days.  

But all NJ license plates (aside from vanity plates and other rare exceptions) end in letters.  So now, every other day everyone in the beleaguered state will attempt to get gas.  The next day, no one will.  And so on, until the plan is inevitably abandoned as insane.

UPDATE: Or is it merely the Times that's confused?  One NJ driver says the plan hinges on the final number on your license plate, no matter how your license number ends.  Well, I'm staying in NY until things are back to normal, and then some.

The Case Against Government (in Less Than 400 Words)

The simplest way to put it – a brief sketch that admittedly cannot begin to capture every subsidiary issue – may be this.

There are 7 billion people on the planet.  They each have a different set of preferences.  Indeed, even the preferences of a given individual may change from moment to moment.  You can either construct moral and legal rules that respect that diversity by allowing each individual to act without awaiting the permission – or fearing the violence – of all the others, or you can pretend that this incredible diversity does not exist and thus attempt to yoke all of these people into one plan (or a handful of plans), whether decreed by a fleeting majority coalition or simply a king, putting dissenters in jail.

Government, whether nominally left-wing, right-wing, authoritarian, social democratic, Islamist, or otherwise, is by definition the second option.  Governing each other is as wrong as taking a teeming bazaar full of people pursuing their varied interests, shackling them into a chain gang, and then claiming you have given them a “collective voice.”

Government is completely wrong.  It makes no sense.  Respecting people’s right to use their bodies and property (without which they are beholden to the mob any time they want to turn ideas into actions in the physical world), letting them act without being enslaved to their neighbors’ violent whims, does make sense. 

Don’t vote for collectivism, don’t protest in favor of collectivism, don’t sing songs of “unity” and “solidarity” that imply we are better off when forced to submit to the will of the mob instead of being free to interact voluntarily as we choose. 

If you’ve devoted your life to the collectivist cause, no doubt you’ve made well-meaning friends, faced some genuinely awful foes, and occasionally accomplished something good or at least relatively harmless.  But you were fundamentally wrong in your understanding of social reality, and you need to stop now before you destroy the world.  Rethink your life, rebuild your philosophy – from the ground up, as it were. 

And consider the individual.  To do otherwise is simply to give in to the bullying, sadistic impulse to force the will of the majority on those they outnumber.  You can call it democracy and congratulate yourself for being (for now) on the winning side of history.  But you’re wrong.  And I still believe you can change.

A trilogy of second thoughts: Romney vs. Muppets, Star Wars, and YOU on a post-election panel

I’m gathering people for a Monday, Nov. 12 (9:30pm) Dionysium in Williamsburg at which we’ll hear a panel of politically-engaged folk’s reactions to the election, come what may – and I’d particularly like to hear from leftists and Obama supporters willing to reflect upon the past four years. 

I will moderate in evenhanded fashion and would love to hear from you now if you can be there then.

•••

Most of the professional libertarians I’ve seen surveyed appear to be voting for Gary Johnson (as am I), but the libertarian masses (small as they are) appear to be going for Romney at a rate of about 70%.  Before the ostensibly-purer libertarians condemn them for doing so, I suppose there is one last, terrifying qualm worth mentioning (and I admit it’s terrifying): What if we look back decades from now and say that Romney, utterly lame as he is, was the best candidate free market advocates ever had a chance of electing president in this century? 

A horrible fate to be sure, but if he loses and is succeeded by, say, Huckabee or Santorum, we may well miss him.  That doesn’t make him great.  That doesn’t mean I’m voting for him (I vowed not to way back when he was condemning Rick Perry for criticizing Social Security).  It does mean that we potential spoilers have to weigh potentially high stakes.  I’m still voting for Johnson, though (along with about 14% of libertarians, at last count, taking a paltry 7% of the libertarian vote from each major-party candidate).  We could yet make history, of some sort. 

But mark my words, GOP, if Romney loses and you draw (or pretend to draw) the foolish lesson that Romney was simply too econ-oriented – and then someone like Gary Johnson runs again on the LP ticket while a true statist like Santorum or Huckabee or McCain or Bush runs on the GOP ticket, you’ll lose far more libertarians than you did this time (they really are getting impatient).  And thus you’ll risk losing the election again.

•••

One of many issues Romney hasn’t quite handled right is the whole “Big Bird” flap.  He could so easily have said that Big Bird would flourish in the wild without government subsidies, but instead he made it sound like no subsidies means no Sesame Street, reinforcing the socialist view of it all (which he likely half-shares, despite attempts to paint him as a laissez-faire radical). 

But the resultant Million Muppet March slated for this Saturday in retaliation has already suffered one setback: The Muppets, like Star Wars, are owned by Disney and neither Disney nor ostensibly-neutral public broadcasting are interested in being dragged into the presidential campaign.  And so, though you may not have heard, the Million Muppet March has quietly (and lamely) been renamed the Million Puppet March.  It just won’t be the same, which is just as well. 

As for Star Wars: here’s my reasoning for why they should set the (quite possibly lame yet again) new trilogy decades after the previous films:

Spinoff comics and novels have covered events through about 134 years after Return of the Jedi.  I’d say add another fifty years or so to the setting of the new films to avoid messing with all the characters from the existing Expanded Universe material (while still allowing the possibility of a superannuated Luke and Leia having cameos).  I’d also change the opening tagline to reflect the new time setting: Make it “Right now, in a galaxy far, far away...” 

And I’d depict a galaxy that, while still very much the stuff of fantasy rather than hard sf, does not merely have characters who occupy similar slots to the irreplaceable icons of the older films but instead extrapolates from the world(s) in which those earlier characters lived to create a new mix-and-match period in fictional history. 

•Perhaps the Jedi have blended into the general population, for instance, so that everyone now has some measure of telekinetic or clairvoyant power. 

•Perhaps droids and humanoids have blended so that much of the population is cyborgs.  Perhaps – more ominously – artificial worlds resembling the Death Star are now commonplace. 

•Perhaps hyperspace technology has advanced to the point that travel between the stars is as easy and fast as transporting to a planet's surface in Star Trek. 

•Perhaps contact with galaxies beyond the Alliance's home is now common. 

And perhaps decades of peace have made the people of the Alliance comfortable with letting multiple political entities exist within that home galaxy (it is quite large, after all, and there are philosophical and political differences among the characters).  There might even be a purely-ceremonial Emperor after all this time.  Or is he purely ceremonial?  And let's see the Jawas trading on multiple worlds.  They've earned their slice of the pie, as surely as Lucas.

Thrones, Rings, Clouds, Skyfall, and Mutants (plus Conservatives)

 

My “Month of Media” ends with a bang, with the biggest possible media announcement – not the presidential election, hurricane, or formation of hybrid publishing company RandomPenguin(!).  I mean, rather, a new Star Wars trilogy (in 2015, 2017, and 2019).  This brings both post-Lucas hope and pre-Disney fear (and the news hits right after I announced my #WheDONT boycott of Whedon-overseen Avengers movies, which are also from Disney; the boycott still allows me to enjoy this photo of an actual hedgehog dressed as Thor, though). 

But let’s check out news from five other major fantasy franchises – and five thematically-appropriate accompanying storm photos Todd took – shall we? 

•The floodwaters seen (darkly) lapping at the intersection just east of me Monday night, which completely covered the FDR, caused a small transformer fire that led to me briefly taking shelter at Dan Raspler’s apartment a few blocks away, where I saw Game of Thrones for the first time and liked what little I saw (and by little, I mean Peter Dinklage).  I am also indebted to him for the joke Disney-buys-Star Wars pics above. 

•In a month and a half, of course, we won’t need these derivative fantasy franchises because the first of three annual Hobbit movies will be on the big screen (featuring creatures as oddly squat as one dog hanging around along with the temporarily-ousted building occupants the other night).  The way Tolkien’s almost nineteenth-century-style Tory Catholic agrarianism ended up appealing greatly to hippies is only one of many forgotten ways that the left and right have cross-pollinated over the past two centuries, despite our pretense come election time that they are eternal, immutable opposites.

(I often wonder just how different historical political outcomes that seem necessary and logical to shallower thinkers today might in fact have been – as, for example, with the animosity between the right and gays, which might have worked out very differently if the first prominent lesbian writer, Radclyffe Hall, a self-consciously conservative and aristocratically-garbed woman, had not eventually been driven into the arms of the left.)

Margaret Thatcher, at least, has one fan among the celebrities most associated with Tolkien: John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gimli in Lord of the Rings, and the voice of General Grievous in Revenge of the Sith, is described in part thusly on Wikipedia:

Rhys-Davies holds politically conservative views.  As a university student in the 1960s, he had been a radical leftist, but changed his views when he went to heckle a young local member of parliament, Margaret Thatcher.  Rhys-Davies says that "she shot down the first two hecklers in such brilliant fashion that I decided I ought for once to shut up and listen."

He learned not to be a Douche-o Baggins his whole life, and you can, too.  You have the power within you.

•Kyle Smith and Daniel Radosh disagreed online about whether Cloud Atlas is good – I’m still planning to see it and remain cautiously optimistic – but it has not been well-received enough to get transformed into a franchise or anything (it depicts people leading multiple lives across centuries – in much the same way that the neurotic Parker Posey character from Best in Show seemed to live again in the form of a temporarily-displaced yuppie chick saying of her bulldog the other night “He’s freaking out!” – see her leg and dog nearby).  Luckily, the industrious Wachowskis reportedly have a potential sci-fi franchise in the works called Jupiter Rising.  I continue to give them the benefit of the doubt.  Even when they fail me, they do so in more interesting ways than other directors and producers.  And I liked Speed Racer enough to buy the DVD.

•The biggest driving challenge on the Upper East Side right now, though, is maneuvering around fallen branches.  Call them Skyfall, if you will – and you can call the one November film release about which I care that as well.

This Best Bond Themes ranking by DarkHorizons.com seems about right to me – and even the quirky-but-interesting effort to elevate the “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Theme” to the top tier makes sense (indeed, I’ve found myself humming that without knowing which of the films first used it). 

But enjoy the glamorous, sexy version of spying while you can because December 19 brings Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s film on bin Laden’s death.  That weekend will not bring a Mayan apocalypse, but her film would be an apt time to bring all the international conspiracies to a head. 

•The X-Men film franchise (which does not fall under my Whedon-Avengers boycott, please note) reaches its climax in 2014 with the First Class cast meeting the Patrick Stewart cast – and giant mutant-hunting robots called Sentinels – via time travel in X-Men: Days of Future Past, which will be directed by Bryan Singer rather than Matthew Vaughn, it has just been reported.  Probably just as well. 

With a magnetized “magic” bullet at the JFK assassination substituting for the Sen. Robert Kelly assassination in the original comic book plot – and our own drone-filled present substituting for the Terminator-inspiring dark future in that story – this film could be a new high point for geek-child-wish-fulfillment on screen. 

But my fondest wish right now is just that friends like leftist cartoonist Danny Hellman and my anarcho-capitalist pals, the perhaps-most-radical of whom was sparring with Hellman online this week, will live to see calmer days after the imminent election.  I think I’ll take a really big break then from online scuffling – and online activity in general – myself.  Here’s hoping we don’t all end up in government-run internment camps like the mutants in the “Days of Future Past” story – or like Japanese-Americans under the tyrannical FDR, after whom was named the east-side highway seen above sporting an unusual lack of cars.

However the election turns out, my left-wing friends, if they can remain calm for a moment, probably should take heart from the fact that Romney really is (admit it) pretty moderate, to the frustration of Gary Johnson-voting libertarians like me.  You know, there were more writers expressing their intention to vote for Obama among the contributors to American Conservative magazine this year than there were among the contributors to a comparable Reason magazine forum.  Conservatives are very unreliable at this late stage and history and probably shouldn’t scare anyone much.  They’re faded ghosts now.  

BOOK/FILM NOTE: 7 scary things for Halloween (including Sandy)

•As noted yesterday, I’m boycotting Joss Whedon and the films he oversees.  However, I’m not losing my love for all Marvel projects, including the swell Frankenstein image nearby [MAJOR UPDATE: Luckily, I'm also not boycotting all Disney projects, since Disney, which also owns Marvel, has acquired LucasFilm and plans to make Star Wars: Episode VII in 2015 -- h/t Chuck Blake, and more on Lucas himself below]. 

It’s only one of countless variations on Mary Shelley’s idea, of course: Here in its entirety is Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein – a century-old movie adapting a novel from a century earlier.  Yet the film is far stranger than the novel, really.  In Edison’s film, the monster simply ceases to exist at the end, fading into a mirror because Victor refuses to love him and instead bonds with Victor’s new bride.

•My boycott of today consists of me urging people to stop subscribing to the New York Times after their opportunistic board editorial opining that a “Big Storm Requires Big Government.”  Does anyone think the reasoning behind the Times’ opinions is more sophisticated than an eight year-old’s?  FEMA shouldn’t be privatized in the middle of a storm, but everything can be privatized.  Yes, everything.

At least Mayor Bloomberg declined to muse about whether one hurricane constitutes evidence of manmade climate change.  Gov. Cuomo was not so cautious.  Ironically, though, two of the people I’ve personally encountered here most worried about climate change are spouses of two of my fellow former John Stossel producers. 

One of the climate-worriers in question is John Hockenberry, himself also a TV producer, and the Frontline episode he did attacking climate change skeptics itself comes in for skepticism in this column, which debunks the oft-repeated claim that 97% of active climate researchers believe humans are a significant cause of global warming.

The column is a neat window into what a statistician friend of mine says is a pattern of climate alarmists abusing statistics.  Make the numbers fuzzy enough and you can produce an apparent consensus on almost anything – then spin it as if you got everyone to agree on the worst-case scenario instead of the basics: not merely that, yes, there is such a thing as a basic greenhouse effect but that doomsday is imminent. 

Statistics abuse is the great, rarely-noted Achilles heel of the climate fear-mongers. 

•A greater danger than rising oceans is of course aging, as revealed in a comedy clip of people playing Existential Crisis & Dragons.

•Also funny – and also true – is comedic confirmation that George Lucas is not merely inept but actually evil.

•Oddly enough, David Lynch passed up the chance to direct Return of the Jedi.  We will never know what that might have looked like – perhaps a bit too much like Dune.  But we do have a short Lynch film from 1970 (over forty years ago, and seven years prior to Eraserhead).  It’s definitely Lynch – and with a hint of Terry Gilliam influence, I’d say.

•Lynch does “vague but ominous” in a fashion worthy of H.P. Lovecraft, though Lovecraft’s clearest influence on film in general may be the plethora of storylines out there which, like Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, involve ancient alien evils being unearthed in Antarctica (including the first X-Files movie, Alien vs. Predator, and more, arguably including Lovecraft fan John Carpenter’s take on the John Campbell-based Thing). 

•I also associate Lovecraft with the more familiar environs of Providence, RI, where he lived (when not living in NYC) and where I went to college.  My fellow Brown alum Dan Greenberg notes a map of Lovecraft’s Providence-like fictional town of Arkham.  Since Providence has a Euclid Avenue, I only wish Lovecraft’s map had included a Non-Euclid Avenue.  Ha!

•I also read the Stephen King short story “Fair Extension,” about a man who makes a deal with the Devil – and doesn’t really regret the devastation it wreaks on the life of his best friend.  It’s a great, disturbing little portrait of jealousy. 

I read it along with the non-fiction King book Danse Macabre, his 1981 tome about his overall “Dionysian” philosophy of horror, recommended by Gerard Perry.  I’m not a King fanatic, but I can understand why so many people are.  He’s easygoing and easily digestible but manages to come up with at least one clever or funny idea per page. 

This book includes King’s observations on such important topics as

I'm Boycotting All Future Avengers Films (to Punish Joss Whedon): #WheDONT

It's just as well that the Iron Man 3 trailer is uninspiring.  Because I won't be seeing any more Avengers movies, and I'll bet I'm not the only one. 

Life is short, so when I saw this characteristically mildly clever but infinitely smug, zombie-themed anti-Romney clip by Joss Whedon, you know what I did?  I crossed all the future Avengers movies off my to-see list (yeah, I have one). 

That's right, all the way through Ant-Man in 2015 (that's six movies).  Plus the SHIELD TV series.  Oh, I'm sure they'll be fine, but again, life's too short, and I don't plan to spend even a moment of it wondering whether Whedon will use the Cosmic Cube as a metaphor for clean, renewable green energy or what have you.  Plenty of other films out there.  This frees up almost half my moviegoing schedule. 

You might want to make a note of that, Marvel.  And Disney.  And ABC.

It's important to show one's willingness to make sacrifices once in a while, and we non-leftists put up with an awful lot of crap in the culture fueled by ignorance like Whedon's about basic economics.  Until we decide we've had enough.

Joss, learn some economics to go with your teenage snark.  A little sarcasm is no substitute for a lot of wisdom.  It never was, much as I've tried to tolerate the ever-increasing snark, snideness, Maher-ism, Gawkering, "negging," and all-around pro-jerkiness of the culture.  Just a tiny, tiny dash of humility, by contrast -- unpopular a virtue as that is these days -- might cause you to question prevailing pro-government, anti-market narratives.  

And you know the real irony here?  I'm not even voting for Romney.  I'm voting for Gary Johnson.  I just think you're an idiot.  And a disgrace to the anti-government principles implicit in Firefly.

UPDATE: On Twitter, my Whedon boycott can now be noted or retweeted using the hashtag #WheDONT.

Todd’s 10 Favorite Online Music Clips (plus Meatloaf and Garbage!)

Over on Facebook, I already posted a politics item, a comics item, and a skeptic item today, so by tradition, that leaves one of Todd’s four zones untapped, remedied with this entry: music.  (Though I will double-dip into politics by noting that Meatloaf endorsed Romney.)

My performance of “Hey Now Now” by Cloud Room seemed to go over pretty well at a farewell karaoke party for lovely soon-to-be-expatriate Jessica Eisenberg of Jezzy and the Belles a couple days ago, but instead of linking to that fine song, here are: my top ten favorite music-related videos on the Internet (not necessarily my favorite songs), and only half are from the 80s (the last five):

•Maru attacking boxes to Slayer's "Angel of Death" (we watched him a bit at this week’s Dionysium, too, I must confess -- though a new study shows dogs prefer Beethoven to that Slayer song, really; not all studies are entirely necessary)

•"Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" by Stars

• "The Fox, the Crow, and the Cookie" by mewithoutYou

• "Treeline" by Sarah Donner and her sleepy kitten

•Strong Bad sings of "Trogdor"

•"Shock the Monkey" by Peter Gabriel (dedicated to the captured "mystery monkey" of Florida)

•"Sharkey's Day" by Laurie Anderson

•"Cuts You Up" by Peter Murphy (my karaoke specialty, though I also did "Hey Now Now" by Cloud Room the other night at the Eisenberg affair)

•"Big in Japan" by Alphaville (and, hey look: they're actually still big in Japan)

•"Synchronicity II" by the Police (this one actually is my favorite song of all time, though, like it or not)

And though it's nothing special visually, just for the heck of it: new Garbage.

See Todd moderate a Furr/Maltsev/Tubbs debate in NJ

•For a mere seven bucks, even aloof Manhattanites could easily take the NJ Transit Train from Penn Station to the Montclair State U. stop on Thursday (Oct. 25).  Why do that? 

Because at 7pm in University Hall Room 1070, I’ll moderate a debate between a conservative, a leftist, and a libertarian professor under the auspices of the Young Americans for Liberty: Dr. David Tubbs, Dr. Grover Furr, and Dr. Yuri Maltsev, respectively.  It will address issues far more philosophical than what you’ll hear from, say, Donald Trump.

•After several years of debate-moderating, I will of course be neutral and fair – though in the interests of full disclosure I should note that Dr. Furr has denounced one acquaintance of mine from my college days, Tim Snyder, since Dr. Furr argues that massacres under Stalin, about which Snyder has written to great acclaim, were greatly exaggerated (a recent piece on the popular leftist site Counterpunch made a similar argument). 

On the bright side, as I’m sure many have noted, Grover Furr – in addition to being a medievalist and a McGill alum – sounds kind of like a Muppet, which may itself be a more timely issue. 

•On a more serious note, my own pick for biggest issue that somehow slipped under the radar for the past few months is the January 2013 budget-cutting deal, now commonly referred to as the Sequester and just beginning to become a source of rhetorical contention, since politicians would no doubt like to take credit for the good parts and deny responsibility for the bad parts of this almost-unplanned but potentially very helpful development. 

I have quietly long been in favor of the Sequester slipping under the radar, by the way.  Let whoever’s president in a few months spin budget-cutting as a good thing that’s all part of his master plan, I say.

•By the way, the two photos nearby show how difficult it can be for your humble moderator to avoid the issue of regulation even when he wants to: Muchmore’s (where last night’s Dionysium was, as usual, held) must now post a sign warning patrons it is illegal to dance there – hardly a very Dionysian development – and the Starbucks closest to your humble moderator’s home had to remove its popular and unobtrusive outdoor seating pending regulatory review. 

Someday, in a Nietzschean fashion that renders all the old right and left labels irrelevant, humanity may just shrug off all the controls.  Until then: see you in New Jersey.