Left Denounces Other Leftists as White Male “Bro-gressives”

Our world is an increasingly complex and stupid one: Salon and some other pro-Obama operations have decided to smear those among their fellow leftists who support Rand Paul's anti-drones position by falsely implying that the supporters do so because they are white and male.

They've even coined the term "bro-gressives" to describe those Paul supporters (which I guess is supposed to work a bit like "Oreo" -- authentic progressives presumably knowing enough to avoid being male). Who would have foreseen (say, thirty years ago) that the day would come when being a leftist who is opposed to an aspect of militarism gets you marginalized for being a white male?

Freddie DeBoer points out a blog that retorts by compiling comments from many non-white and/or non-male supporters of the Rand Paul filibuster (including Rachel Maddow, who is still terrible in my book but for reasons having nothing to do with her being white and male).

10 Comics Notes

1. I described a book about Germany in my prior blog entry, but there’s less Germany in this entry – because DC Comics’ oldest generation of superheroes (having been revamped and reintroduced along with the rest of the universe a couple years ago) is no longer tied to World War II (surely a development that warrants mention in this blog’s current “Month of Geopolitics”). 

In the interests of making the heroes of Earth 2 (sometimes called the Justice Society) hip and up-to-date, the foe depicted sparking their creation is now the demonic Darkseid (and he did so quite recently), not that long-dead Hitler person.  Check out the anthology Earth 2 Vol. 1: The Gathering if you don’t believe me.

Of course, the studio folks at parent company Warner Brothers just ditched the Justice League movie script that had Darkseid as the villain, so whether the frantic editorial offices at DC still care about Darkseid is a mystery.  DC Comics has been home to abrupt changes in plot-plans and creative teams in recent months, to the enragement of many comics professionals.  A much-ballyhooed new writer reportedly just walked off Green Lantern over DC’s insistence, contrary to promises made when he was hired, that he immediately kill off Green Lantern John Stewart (a.k.a. that black guy from the animated shows).  The new Action (starring Superman) writer left almost before he began, too.

On the bright side, I think (to take one revamp example) fusing the character Fury (daughter of the Earth 2 Wonder Woman) with Darkseid’s minion Lashina, the Female Fury – and even giving her a combo truth-lasso/domination-whip – was a stroke of genius.  Kudos to writer James Robinson (who often worked with first-generation DC characters including Starman back in the 90s).  So good things can still happen in the new age. 

2. Still, for those who’d like their favorite superheroes to retain their established fictional histories, this Earth 2 anthology is arguably the greatest tragedy ever to befall comics: DC has revised its fictional history several times, but by restarting the Earth 2 heroes as youngsters and ditching all their accumulated baggage and adventures, DC threw out literally seventy-six years of backstory (erasing marriages, children, grandchildren, deaths, resurrections, and more, all the way back to Doctor Occult’s first appearance in 1935). 

Never has the preservation/reinvigoration tension that’s ever-present in comics (and in franchises like Star Trek) felt more drastic.

And despite the name Earth 2, this isn’t just some mirror-mirror alternate reality – this is (various complicated reboots notwithstanding) the original DC Comics Earth.  And now it’s a blank slate, albeit one in good hands with Robinson.  But let us never speak of that lost past again.  Excelsior.

3. Admittedly, it’s the quality of the new stories that matters most, not the obsessive retention of old details (and I’ve always said – even way back when I was a continuity-obsessive teenager – that the important thing is not retaining every bit of the past, just being consistent going forward).  So the most exciting thing James Robinson did last year may not have been Earth 2 but rather his Shade maxiseries, featuring another WWII-era character who happens to be immortal – and witty and rather goth. 

Whether this miniseries technically took place in the old pre-reboot DC continuity or on DC’s new main Earth is unclear – but it sure didn’t take place on the new Earth 2 because there is a mention of the former Starman named Mikaal and of his home, Opal City, whereas Robinson says over in Earth 2 that Opal City was blown up years ago in the war against Darkseid. 

My suggestion is to read the Shade’s story and ignore the rest of the DC Universe.

4. If, like me, you can’t resist noticing how the rest of that universe works, though (and I now must plead newfound professional interest for this recurring fixation, as I’ll explain below), you may have noticed how – driven largely by writers Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison but to some extent by James Robinson and Dan Didio as well – the underlying

BOOK NOTE: “Twelve Years” by Joel Agee

•Given all the “liberal-tarian” moaning over at the BleedingHeartLibertarians site about how the rest of us benighted libertarians need to think more about “white privilege” and the like, presumably they think programs like one suggesting white students be made to wear wristbands that mark them (by race) as beneficiaries of “privilege” are something we should encourage. 

One would like to think that even kids can see through political indoctrination to some extent. 

•So it’s useful to have things like Joel Agee’s Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany to show us (in this case) the extent to which even in a totalitarian country, political indoctrination ends up having less impact on teenagers’ lives than their nervous interest in the opposite sex, their pursuit of music and cheap thrills, competitiveness, and bullying.  (The book was recommended to me by Katherine Taylor, herself the author of the memoir-like novel Rules for Saying Goodbye.)

As I tweeted recently, my own schooldays exposure to East Germany came about one year before that country ceased to exist, as two visiting East German students assured an audience of dutifully attentive, left-leaning Brown students that the U.S. was inferior to their own country due to our lack of socialized medicine and omnipresent security surveillance.  Now their country’s gone and ours looks just a bit more like theirs did, but I’m not sure who the winners and losers are in that shuffle. 

On the bright side, east-Germans (now in the regional rather than national sense) provide a semi-outsider perspective within the larger German nation – a bit like Hispanic comedians in the U.S. – so that we get installation and performance artists like Sindy Butz doing shows in Europe and the U.S., promoting wearable ceramic devices of use to people of all political persuasions, and meeting me on the subway from Williamsburg a couple years ago. 

(See her, support her, read about her – and if you need still more intellectual stimulation, join me tonight at 7pm at Public Assembly in Williamsburg to see Lefty Leibowitz and others lecture about “Diseases” as part of his ongoing series of Empiricist League lectures.)

•Speaking of failed utopias, it’s probably just as well for my political purposes that plans for a BioShock movie are dead.  It’s nice the game creators cared enough about libertarianism to satirize it, but the world is probably slightly better off without a movie that would have suggested, in effect, that Ayn Rand and seasteading lead to dystopian monster-fighting.

•In 1948, though, East Germany was still very much a going concern, and Joel Agee, eight year-old biological son of Pulitzer-winning American author James Agee, went with his mother to live with his stepfather, prize-winning East German author Bodo Uhse.

It wasn’t all secret police and fear, either, in part because

Milgram, Shatner, and Travolta

You've likely heard of the infamous Milgram experiments suggesting that many people are willing to inflict pain on others so long as they are told to do so by authority figures. 

What you may not know is that popular awareness of the experiments derives in part from a 1975 TV-movie called The Tenth Level starring William Shatner as Dr. Milgram and John Travolta (uncredited) as a Yale student.

Ultimately, YOU must decide what films to rent, though. I cannot absolve you of that responsibility.

Black 47 for St. Patrick's Day, Starvation for India

"Big Fellah" by Black 47 (Black 47!!) from 1994, in honor of St. Patrick’s.

Y'know, one Black 47 member is a former member of Dexy's Midnight Runners -- but then, who isn't?

Meanwhile, in India (another country of interest to me): a ninety-second news story with a couple jarring transitions. 

10 Geopolitics Thoughts, with Carl Sagan, Killer Dolphins, and Calvin Coolidge

1. During this blog’s “Month of Geopolitics,” I should thank Deroy Murdock among others for keeping me informed about the activities of the Atlas Foundation, which has helped tell people about the ideas of liberty and free markets even in seemingly-inhospitable spots like Iran and some of the more-authoritarian corners of Latin America.

2. But it was the humble Dionysium that this week happened to have both an anarcho-capitalist and an actual politician from India in the audience at the same time (but no fistfight).

3. I also manage to have associates ranging from radical atheists to a writer for Cardinal Dolan, one of the people who’s been talked about this week during the conclave in the Vatican as a possible new Pope.  The writer’s also an alternative rock fan, to whom I dedicate this apt link (to an eighteen year-old song hovering somewhere between Dinosaur Jr. and Sinatra).

4. Killer dolphins once controlled by Ukraine are on the loose, trained to attack with knives and guns (h/t Lankford Jackson) [UPDATE: a hoax, it turns out].  Scary as a Sharktopus.

5. Far more relaxing is this meditative footage of a cat at the beach, possibly in Japan.  (By contrast, the tenacity of this small orange cat in attacking a much larger cat is both inspiring and stupid.)

6. If you were calmed by that, you’re ready to face (at most 3 minutes, I’d suggest, of) this oddly Hitchhiker’s-like video that disturbs me not so much because it lumps together every insane conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard – including one about gold from the Middle East being essential to creating superbeings and powering flying saucers – but because (if nothing else) it proves even the crazy people have great video production and graphics packages these days.  

(Similar forms of paranoia were briefly touched upon at the Dionysium, but this will be my last dip into this form of insanity for now as I turn my attention to more mainstream issues, like comic books.)

7. Those Russians can be gloomy at times, but they can also be so optimistic and unrealistic about the future it’s wacky (h/t Virginia Postrel).

8. So many of our earthly conflicts seem small when we contemplate this segment from the inspiring 1980 science series Cosmos, though you may not recall hearing about “The Meat Planet” (or laughing really, really hard) the first time you watched the show. 

9. That comedy remix may be further proof that, much as it pains me to deliver this news, “Trolls Are Bad for Science” (h/t Scarlett_156), and that could be bad for the whole human race.

10. But many looming problems fade away without us even having to take action.  It’s not popular to say that these days, but level-headed, reasonable Calvin Coolidge understood, and maybe you will too if you read Charles C. Johnson’s new book on the greatest president – yes, greatest – of the twentieth century.  If the Rand Era that we entered with Rand Paul’s epochal Senate filibuster last week climaxes with him becoming president of the United States, we may find ourselves looking to past laissez-faire presidents as models to help us understand. 

In honor of Presidents of the United States of America, let’s watch a video (directed by Roman Coppola, of all people) by that band, who formed twenty years ago.  (And in the days after that, in the second half of my “Month of Geopolitics,” let’s take a look at books on East Germany, the CIA, and Earth 2.)

Cats and Dogs, Attacking Together

Apparently, "Cats Can Be Jerks."

In another grim reminder of the moral unreliability of our furry pals: 

•On TV, Wendy and Marvin were loyal pals of the Super-Friends, aided by their dog Wonder Dog.  But did you know...

•In the comics, Wonder Dog was eventually revealed to be a demonic entity and mauled Marvin to death while leaving Wendy permanently paralyzed from the waist down, leading her supervillain father, the Calculator, to vow revenge against the heroes who allowed this to happen to her.

But since they rebooted the DC Comics universe in 2011, we'll never know if that all worked out OK.

And that's one to grow on.

Adjusting Your Host’s Right/Left Balance, plus UFOs

Tonight’s the big 8pm discussion about the drones controversy, featuring Mary Madigan and Pamela Stubbart and hosted by me at Muchmore’s (c’mon, Manhattanites, it’s just one L stop into Williamsburg, at 2 Havemeyer St., three blocks east of Bedford Ave.).

(And remember, there’s a Dionysium down in Austin, TX, too, where they, somewhat like us, had a discussion about the 80s last time – and may discuss the ethics of drones among other things next time.  That’s also the home state of Rand Paul’s new Senate pal Ted Cruz, who co-filibustered about drones a bit last week.)

I’ve been trying to reassure people on Facebook that I can be a balanced moderator in spite of my fellow libertarian Rand Paul last week emphasizing opposition to recent drone policy.  It occurs to me, though, that some might instead need reassurance I’m not a completely warmongering right-winger, since I certainly haven’t embraced all antiwar arguments in the past.

Please, allow me to oversimplify:

•As with the unspoken (and perhaps unspeakable) feminist sympathies I described in my blog entry before last, I’ve at least had reservations about militarism since childhood – even before being a libertarian.  You just might not have noticed them, since I had even bigger reservations about, for example, Naziism and Communism.

But despite recognizing that there are some menaces that must be faced militarily, I’ve never liked the triumphalist, parade-throwing form of militarism – hewing more to what might be called the grim necessity mode captured in some action films and in (the more serious) superheroics.  I’m not ashamed to say (in a reversal of conventional wisdom) that I find that mindset healthy but always found gung-ho military recruitment ads and, even more so, soulless and disingenuous-sounding defense industry ads a bit creepy – not necessarily wrong, just embarrassingly upbeat about something that should be a tragic last resort. 

And without being one of those leftist conspiracy theorist types who thinks the CIA secretly runs the whole world, I have to admit I’ve wondered – even before Rand Paul’s dad was in the Republican presidential primaries – whether a politician who openly opposed the CIA (or, say, their drones) might risk an untimely accident.  Don’t put such things past the government. 

Looking back on it, I don’t think I understood, as a young moderate-conservative, how left/anarchist/libertarian those thoughts were (and I use those political labels rather than “liberal” for good reason, since that term has more complacent, pro-establishment connotations – and perhaps should, given the sudden celebration of drones by some knee-jerk Obamaphiles over the past couple days).

Furthermore, lest I sound too marginal, we conservatives don’t entirely like McCain or David Frum anyway – so let ’em fume at Rand Paul; they’ll just confirm that they were destined all along to be seen as tangential to the main current of conservatism.  May the paradigmatic conservative henceforth be Rand Paul, regardless of drone policy (which, again, will be decided tonight at Muchmore’s).

Comparably ambiguous, I suppose, is the issue of what we can do by way of watching the government if they’re going to insist on watching us with drones and such.  Doesn’t the public need WikiLeaks as much as it needs a free press?  And if it needs WikiLeaks, doesn’t it need whistle-blowers like Bradley Manning?  And yet an army can’t just leak info like a sieve.  And having groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous become influential on foreign policy is almost as unsettling as letting governments decide foreign policy – but I’ll still take the Rand Paul Era over WWII any day.

•But what about the space aliens, you ask?

Yes Future: Cyberpunk and Monarchy

This much is certain as we head into tomorrow’s drone debate (Mon. 8pm at Muchmore’s in Williamsburg): there’s no stoppin’ technology. 

A site linked on Drudge yesterday featured an article with this great headline: “Pet Parrot Uses Beak to Drive Around in His Robot” (it’s true: watch him drive! hee hee!).

But Drudge itself, the official barometer of reality, had several headlines simultaneously yesterday seemingly designed to confirm that we now live in the cyberpunk future (not to mention a picture of Justin Bieber wearing a gas mask), including:

•Seattle Bar Becomes 1st to Ban GOOGLE Glass...

•STOCK MARKET PLAN TO TRADE WITHOUT HUMANS

•SPACEX Founder: ‘I’d like to die on Mars’...

•Cubans evade censorship by ‘exchanging computer memory sticks’

That last one will confuse some aged leftists who didn’t know there was an authoritarian government in Cuba, but it’s a time for bridge-building and new alliances, so let’s not dwell on that. 

Nor on the possible confusion among some conservatives over another of the linked articles about the Queen of England declaring that the monarchy is “implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted  in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds [taken to mean sexual orientation].”

But more interesting than that familiar boilerplate, which now sounds almost as ancient and calcified as any church incantation, is her reported support for changing the monarchy’s rules of succession so that older females come before younger males – and note that it’s green-lefty-anti-materialist Charles who’s reportedly against the idea. 

If it were up to me, they’d just abolish the monarchy and democracy at the same time and no one would have to worry about what the Queen thinks, but in the meantime: if Kate and William have a girl, I suggest everyone celebrate her hypothetical ascension by buying a copy of Bryan Talbot’s fantastic monarchist/anarchist graphic novel Heart of Empire: The Legacy of Luther Arkwright.  It's sort of like Game of Thrones except with a hot psychic Princess Victoria. 

The rules of succession in the U.S., of course, will be explained in a future Rand Paul filibuster speech and episodes of the American version of House of Cards.

International Women’s Day

(h/t for a couple items below to Frank Pohole and Gina Duclayan, who can in no way be blamed.)

I have sometimes sparred with feminists online, but then I disagree with nearly every identifiable philosophical faction to some extent, so I don’t want the feminists to think that they’re special. 

Or rather: here are sixteen sweet, fairly supportive (and completely true) thoughts in honor of International Women’s Day, including, toward the end, the briefest and most civil possible statement of why I think most formulations of feminism will always be at odds with libertarianism (despite the best reconciliation efforts of the so-called liberal-tarians, such as Sarah Skwire, who recently threw normal libertarians under the bus yet again by suggesting we’re not angry enough about rape...and I’m not at all sure how she’s gauging that, but both she and a Canadian leftist philosophy professor I know should rest assured that libertarians are completely opposed to the initiation of any form of assault – that’s our thing).

1. Coincidentally, a Rwanda-dwelling libertarian acquaintance doing development work lamented online this very week that unpaved roads combined with a lack of sports bras is one of the most challenging parts of development (in some sense of that word). 

I’m not sure exactly what she’s doing there, by the way, but presumably it’s evil, since we all know laissez-faire capitalists hate blacks and poor people.  She’s probably selling the rich tickets to watch the next genocidal massacre.  Q.E.D.

2. I have had sex in an apartment that faces Gloria Steinem’s windows, but I did not charge her a dime for anything she may have seen.  She started out as a comedy writer (also true), and it’s only fitting she be entertained in return once in a while.  

3. Men should always remember that women often find our whole half of the human race sort of frightening – and are also often frightened to say so – and you can’t entirely blame them after seeing things like the epic new trailer for Hangover III.  But it’s still epic. 

4. One of the difficulties of addressing feminist topics is of course that roughly 50-100% of human activities are somehow implicated, and there’s rarely been a greater opportunity for cherry-picking and anecdotal reasoning. 

Thus, if feminists sense a doubter, they can always claim the doubter is dwelling on the wrong, frivolous topics while everything they say should be treated with the reverence due discussions of mass rapes and child soldiers, even if the feminists didn’t really provide specifics and seemed a moment earlier merely to be complaining that a swanky nightclub downtown needs another unisex restroom. 

You are thus never more than an abrupt topic-change away from being declared an insensitive bastard when dealing with feminists, no matter how well-intentioned you may be.  And they have no short-term incentive to make things easier on you. 

Things are only getting more difficult on this front with each passing day, as the boom in media – and its diversification – means that nearly every human utterance (on any topic, not just feminism) now has fifty dissimilar audiences, some just hoping for a Family Guy reference, others deciding whether to leave an abusive boyfriend, and still others hoping not to be killed by Chechen terrorists. 

It’s never been more difficult to keep everyone happy, though we utilitarians honestly try, in part by guessing who’s most likely listening and why.

Nonetheless, the case for feminism undeniably looks strong when you see some of the manifestly-patriarchal things going on under Islam or those unpunished rapes in comparatively civil India (by contrast, and this is partly a semantic issue, I don’t have too much patience for people claiming, as if it requires any heroic exertion on their part, that ardent feminism is needed now in the U.S. to compensate for immense wrongs done to people living in the past – individualists should know it’s dangerous to claim ethics works in this collectivist way and quite often more self-congratulatory than problem-solving; further, patriarchal wrongs don’t change the fact that the West already has coercive feminist laws in place and is likely to impose more, such as the EU’s potential ban on all forms of porn – so much for the days of the uninhibited Continentals and all that).

5. Troubling and closer to home are recent reports (the details of which I don’t pretend to know) that rape is commonplace in the U.S. military and that superior officers are all too frequently harassers themselves and thus not helpful. 

I often suspect the feminists’ first impulse about something like this is to claim that if (A) this is occurring and (B) libertarians exist, then (C) libertarians must be heartless, possibly even pro-rape monsters who don’t care about real violence or finding solutions to it, to which I can only say: Which other significant political faction wants to abolish standing armies altogether? 

Or rather: feminists want to solve all subsidiary problems by tackling the vast, vague problem of relations between the sexes.  Libertarians suggest

Rand Paul and the Wider War

Even hawkish Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary magazine wrote after Sen. Rand Paul’s thirteen-hour anti-drone filibuster yesterday: “Whether you like him or not, there’s no escaping the conclusion that he is a Republican star of the first magnitude who will be a first-tier contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.”  For Commentary, that’s pretty magnanimous coming so soon after Paul’s (half-hearted) vote to confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

(Please hear shorter pro and con comments about drones – for surveillance, warfare, and other purposes – this coming Monday, March 11, at 8pm when I host another Dionysium, at Muchmore’s, 2 Havemeyer St. in Williamsburg.)

I don’t know if it’ll change or clarify policy on drone use, but yesterday’s filibuster probably made it more likely that we’ll see presidential campaign stickers in 2016 using the slogan that sprang up on Twitter in support of Paul: STAND WITH RAND.

If Paul were opposing constitutionally-ambiguous uses of drones merely out of pacifism or a left-wing aversion to American interests, he likely wouldn’t have attracted the support of several fellow Republican senators and an enthusiastic Twitter following.  He wants clear limits on government power because government is force – dangerous across the board, whether it’s stumbling its way through military matters, the economy, or ostensibly-legal pot dispensaries (whereas he’s made it very clear he doesn’t doubt the U.S.’s right to respond to a real imminent attack, whether from al Qaeda or North Korea). 

He says he’s not technically a libertarian, but now would be a great moment for libertarians, conservatives, and left-liberals who share his concerns about the Constitution and legal procedure to come together – and think of him as one focal point in a broader struggle, even if it’s inappropriate to think of any politician as a “leader.” 

Long story short, there have been big debates within libertarianism about whether libertarians should lean left or right in search of allies, but maybe we don’t need to lean at all anymore.  There may now be a space where we can simply stand (one that happens to be within the Republican Party, whether by philosophical necessity or mere happenstance).

If the precise circumstances of Paul’s increased prominence have the side effect of inconveniencing a CIA nominee, well, the CIA is an apt arm of government to inconvenience if one wants to make a statement about ambiguous, unaccountable government powers – even if to many of us, some of its functions seem less manifestly-absurd than those of, say, the Department of Commerce. 

Of course, there will still be the residual action/reaction sparring of left and right.  One online commenter noted that some Huffington Post fans were finding themselves liking drones more because of Paul’s filibuster – even fantasizing about using drones against right-wing militias.  But it likely matters more in the long run that Paul was praised by Jon Stewart – or that an ardent Hollywood liberal like John Cusack tweeted wondering where the Democrats were who should be supporting Paul on this issue, and how Obama had gone from progressive to warlord.

These aren’t my usual gauges of success – but they are interesting gauges of Paul’s potential crossover appeal, and the potential appeal of a more-libertarian, more consistently anti-force Republican Party.  Philosophically imperfect as that route may be, at the moment it certainly appears to be the path forward for us all.

But in other bridge-building news: tomorrow is International Women’s Day, and I probably owe feminists a blog entry about that (and again: see you on Monday, I hope).

DIONYSIUM 3/11: Should We Love Drones?

Hear two Dionysium speakers on the topic of our omnipresent new frenemies in the sky:

•pro-drone Mary Madigan (Twitter: @marypmadigan): blogger, private pilot, and author of the sci-fi book-in-progress Don’t Run, We Are Your Friends

•anti-drone Pamela Stubbart (Twitter: @amelapay): libertarian philosopher, educator, and entrepreneur

 

with ample audience discussion led by your host, Todd Seavey, Monday, March 11, 8pm, at the Muchmore's performance space (2 Havemeyer St., just three blocks east of the very first L subway stop into Brooklyn, the Bedford Ave. stop, with craft beers and more)

To prepare, you might enjoy this symposium entry by a Yale law professor on the possible inevitability of drone warfare or this article on the mysterious maybe-drone spotted over NYC near JFK Airport the other day.

Will terrorists overseas continue to be taken out by drones, to the delight of most Americans?  Will certain foreign leaders (not Chavez, of course)?  Will YOU, friend?  (And why should we be impressed by UFO buffs claiming they saw lights in the sky henceforth, by the way?)

P.S. Many of the developments to be discussed Monday night are of course shrouded in secrecy and cover-ups (just ask Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks), but we will not be doing any cover songs at Muchmore’s, as those are one of countless things that can lead to lawsuits these days, per the sad sign from the space we’re using, seen in the photo nearby.  Please join us anyway.

A “Month of Geopolitics” Begins with Cuts, Drinks, and Kim Jong Il

•I’m pleased that most conservatives, when push came to shove, preferred embracing Sequester budget cuts (which Americans appear to be surviving so far, you’ll notice) to whining about the cuts to the military.  It’s all government, and it all has to go eventually.

•But I’ll blog a bit about that – and decreasing enthusiasm for military intervention among both conservatives and libertarians – in a “Month of Geopolitics” on this blog. 

•Perhaps that complex, far from unanimous issue will come up tonight at 6pm at the bar Irish Exit (on 2nd near 52nd), when conservatives (including some libertarians like me) gather to drink in honor of the one-year anniversary of Andrew Breitbart’s death.  Similar gatherings are scheduled today for DC, L.A., Miami, and Houston, I believe. 

•Being a troublemaking writer is one way to address an issue without immediately resorting to bombs, too, so if you care about both peace and freedom, you might want to do things like donate to the Kickstart campaign for Michael Malice’s comedic (but mostly all too true) biography-in-progress of Kim Jong Il, Dear Reader.