Robbservations

Obama's End-Game

2012-01-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

One thing I watch for closely is how Obama is working to undermine the military. My track record of prediction is quite good since he was elected -- 100%. Elimination of 2/3 of the U.S nuclear arsenal while letting the Russians increase their nuclear forces -- under the new START treaty. His "budget deal" that gave him the authority to cut DOD budget 50% -- as long as the Congressional "super-committee" failed to reach agreement on other cuts (they did fail -- the Dems on that committee were the most left-wing, including known communists like Patty Murray). His cutting of F22 fighter program, and soon the F35. And more. The common denominator is: eviscerate the military.

Two more stories today. First is this one, Pentagon cuts reshape military, trim costs, which discusses details of more defense cuts, including

- Delay development of a new ballistic missile submarine by two years.
- Eliminate six of the Air Force's tactical-air fighter squadrons and retire or divest 130 aircraft used for moving troops and equipment.
- Retire seven Navy cruisers and two smaller amphibious ships early, postpone the purchase of a big-deck amphibious ship by one year and postpone the planned purchase of a number of other vessels for several years.
- Eliminate two Army heavy brigades stationed in Europe and compensate by rotating U.S. based units into the region for training and exercises.
- Study the possibility of further reducing the size of U.S. nuclear arsenal.

This last is the primary goal of Obama. The submarines -- secondary. The others -- gravy.

Then this next story, Senior NSC aide vetted for Pentagon assistant secretary post, about an NSC aide being sent to the Pentagon to help with budget cuts. Well, Obama is putting a lot of NSC aides over in the Pentagon right now to help with budget cuts. People close to him. Reliable people. But I immediately thought, what about this new guy, Derek Chollet? Who is he? What's his background? Does he have any suspicious associates?

Well, it turns out my first guess was exactly right--he was a "special advisor" to Strobe Talbott during the Clinton Administration. So what? Well, the most important Russian defector after the fall of the Soviet Union, Sergei Tretyakov, who used to run the KGB mission at the U.N. (hundreds of KGB agents) said Talbott was "our most important intelligence asset". During the Clinton Administration.

I would ask Tretyakov more, but two summers ago Putin had him killed -- "heart attack". (See my post The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ... to a place getting rather chilly.) Two weeks after Tretyakov's surprise death on June 13, 2010, you'll note, we arrested 10 Russian moles and were going to prosecute them--but Obama rushed to send them back to Russia.

And people wonder why I suggest Obama is a Russian mole himself? His every action is consistent with that end. Quite aside from the communist parents (two fathers) and grandparents, KGB mentor (Frank Davis), ad infinitum.

I think Obama is gearing up to win the election. When that happens -- the gloves come off. I'm 100% sure he will do everything in his power to completely eliminate the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Stay tuned.

Mr. Thompson Live

2012-01-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, published 1957:

"Listen to Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis, November 22!"

The newspapers did not mention the outbreaks of violence that had begun to burst across the country--but she watched them through the reports of train conductors about bullet-riddled cars, dismantled tracks, attacked trains, besieged stations, in. Nebraska, in Oregon, in Texas, in Montana--the futile, doomed outbreaks, prompted by nothing but despair, ending in nothing but destruction. Some were the explosions of local gangs; some spread wider. There were districts that rose in blind rebellion, arrested the local officials, expelled the agents of Washington, killed the tax collectors--then, announcing their secession from the country, went on to the final extreme of the very evil that had destroyed them, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to declare community bondage of all to all, and to perish within a week, their meager loot consumed, in the bloody hatred of all for all, in the chaos of no rule save that of the gun, to perish under the lethargic thrust of a few worn soldiers sent out from Washington to bring order to the ruins.

The newspapers did not mention it. The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution--their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital...
It was the first acknowledgment of the unacknowledged. The announcements began to appear a week in advance and went ringing across the country. "Mr. Thompson will give the people a report on the world crisis! Listen to Mr. Thompson on every radio station and television channel at 8 P.M., on November 22!"
First, the front pages of the newspapers and the shouts of the radio voices had explained it: "To counteract the fears and rumors spread by the enemies of the people, Mr. Thompson will address the country on November 22 and will give us a full report on the state of the world in this solemn moment of global crisis. Mr. Thompson will put an end to those sinister forces whose purpose is to keep us in terror and despair. He will bring light into the darkness of the world and will show us the way out of our tragic problems...

Then the chorus broke loose and went growing day by day. "Listen to Mr. Thompson on November 22!" said daily headlines. "Don't forget Mr. Thompson on November 22!" cried radio stations at the end of every program. "Mr. Thompson will tell you the truth!..."

"Don't despair! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said pennants on government cars, "Don't give up! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said banners in offices and shops. "Have faith! Listen to Mr. Thompson!" said voices in churches. "Mr. Thompson will give you the answer!" wrote army airplanes across the sky, the letters dissolving in space, and only the last two words remaining by the time the sentence was completed.

Public loud-speakers were built in the squares of New York for the day of the speech, and came to rasping life once an hour, in time with the ringing of distant clocks, to send over the worn rattle of the traffic, over the heads of the shabby crowds, the sonorous, mechanical cry of an alarm-toned voice: "Listen to Mr. Thompson's report on the world crisis, November 22!"

Do you feel lucky?

Consorting With the Devil

2012-01-14T15:54:00.000-08:00

Over on Facebook, where I sometimes ruminate to my demise, there pops up, now and then, like a multi-headed hydra out of a jack-in-the-box, the epi-phenomena of friends demanding their friends de-friend other friends who aren't acting like friends. That is, acquaintences in the virtual drawing-room of the web who are -- shall we say? -- consorting with the devil.

I think there are multiple reasons for these recurring moral pronouncements and condemnations of moral turpitude, with accompanied vitriolic demands for "de-friending".

The most superficial of the rationalizations for these assertions is that anyone disagreeing with Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff on this or that issue are corrupting Objectivism, damaging a great value, etc. Therefore if you stand for truth and goodness and don't wish to sanction evil, you must prove your rectitude in the court of public opinion and dissociate yourself from the blight, as well as dissociate yourself from the blighters of the blight.

Let's go beyond superficialities. I think the real underlying notion motivating these pronouncements is less about religious conformity than it is the false notion that a self-evident argument can be made in a simple assertion--from which comes the conviction that anyone who fails to acknowledge the facts of a matter (as presented and presumed by an apparently omniscient presenter) is inherently dishonest.

I'm intentionally not naming names on either side of the equation. I'd prefer that people form their own judgments without coloring things with personalities. For the purposes of this point, I'm asking everyone else who comments here not to name names, either.

Sometimes the pronouncements and demands are simple ones, but sometimes they are accompanied by such overwhelming "evidence" as can be crammed into a paragraph on a Facebook thread -- a link to a damning blog post, a youtube video, the latest insult, the bloodied candlestick in the broomcloset of Colonel Mustard. But it's all held up as incontrovertible proof of intellectual dishonesty, corruption and even evil, which only a blind man can't see and a dishonest person won't see.

You see the syllogism at play here: "I present here incontrovertible proof of the evil of person X. Here it is. If you won't grasp it, you are evil, too. And if you know someone who won't grasp it, they are evil. And if you don't divorce yourself from all evil associations, you are even more evil. So there. Listen up and fly right. Yours, God."

Or at least, Demi-god.

Strangely, I think the people most often associated with this technique (I won't call it reason) are generally honest and well-intentioned in some way. At least, as I've seen it on Facebook. They want to do right. They want to stand up and defend the good. But along the way, they are betraying the very thing they claim to be standing up for.

Their error is a disastrous form of intrinsicism.

I don't mean that the way some are going to jump to the conclusion -- a religious orthodoxy. That may be the eventual consequence. Hold that thought if you wish. More specifically, I mean:

The idea that a rational mind can grasp truth by simple statements.

That is, the idea that the truth is inherent in simple statements -- as if an assertion and a few randomly selected words and facts constitute sufficient intellectual grounds for another mind to reach a complex judgment about another person's thoughts and motives.

I wish I could color that statement in red, highlight it, capitalize it, enlarge the font and add a screaming voice with a brooding background musical accompaniment. Oh, wait. I can:

The idea that a rational mind can grasp truth by simple statements is false.

Sans musical accompaniment, unfortunately.

Many people take from Ayn Rand the idea that moral pronouncements and praise of the good or condemnation of the evil is proper. Well, yes, it is. If you know what the hell you are talking about. But in lieu of that it's foolish, stupid, or evil in itself.

Moral pronouncements are easy. Anyone with vocal chords can make them. Rational judgment and reasoned arguments are much harder. And in a contest between those two, I've noticed that people who lack the ability to do the former particularly well are much more inclined to do the latter. Call it a form of empowerment.

But if reasoned argument is hard, it appears that respect for the independent minds of those to whom the assertions are made is the most difficult of all.

Let me say this unequivocally: any person who attempts to impose by threats their assessments on others is operating on a standard of social metaphysics and acting completely contrary to the most fundamental principles of Objectivism.

Those who claim to be defending Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff while employing a method that openly rejects the Objectivist positions on independence and reason are themselves guiltier than those making errors about any other aspect of the philosophy.

By way of reminder, here are some quotes from Ayn Rand on the subject. The particular sources will be left as an exercise. In no particular order:

"We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell—we show. We do not claim—we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw--we can help you to name it, but not to accept it-the sight, the knowledge and the acceptance must be yours."

"I don't ask for opinions."
"What do you go by?"
"Judgment."
"Well, whose judgment did you take?"
"Mine."
"But whom did you consult about it?"
"Nobody."

"I am not committing the contemptible act of asking you to take me on faith. You have to live by your own knowledge and judgment."

"If you want to see an abstract principle, such as moral action, in material form--there it is. Look at it, ...You had to act on your own judgment, you had to have the capacity to judge, the courage to stand on the verdict of your mind..."

"Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right," said Hugh Akston, "but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don't be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own,"

"Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future," said Mulligan. "We do know, but it can't be best until you know it."

"Don't consider our interests or desires," said Francisco. "You have no duty to anyone but yourself."

"Cherryl... Cherryl, you poor kid, ...You don't have to see through the eyes of others, hold onto yours, stand on your own judgment, you know that what is, is--say it aloud, like the holiest of prayers, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

"No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live, you must live as a man—by the work and the judgment of your mind."

"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth—and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity."

"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of "knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they 'just feel it’

"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say—so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence."

"This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.

"Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment."

"You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith."

"...conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality."

"The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary."

"The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence."

"The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival."

"Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence."

"Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man."

"Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?"

"God damn you!" he screamed. "God damn you! Who do you think you are? Who told you that you could do this to people? So you're too good for that building? You want to make me ashamed of it? You rotten, lousy, conceited bastard! Who are you? You don't even have the wits to know that you're a flop, an incompetent, a beggar, a failure, a failure, a failure! And you stand there pronouncing judgment! You, against the whole country! You against everybody! Why should I listen to you? You can't frighten me. You can't touch me. I have the whole world with me!...Don't stare at me like that! I've always hated you! You didn't know that, did you? I've always hated you! I always will! I'll break you some day, I swear I will, if it's the last thing I do!"
"Peter," said Roark, "why betray so much?"

"As a matter of fact, Mr. Roark, I'm not alone in this decision. As a matter of fact, I did want you, I had decided on you, honestly I had, but it was Miss Dominique Francon, whose judgment I value most highly, who convinced me that you were not the right choice for this commission--and she was fair enough to allow me to tell you that she did."

"When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and the reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced--since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea."

"And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn't choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I'd choose three gilded balls."

"Gail Wynand was not good at taking orders. He recognized nothing but the accuracy of his own judgment."

"You're beginning to see, aren't you, Peter? Shall I make it clearer. You've never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn't want to show it. You wanted an act to help your act--a beautiful, complicated act, all twists, trimmings and words. All words. You didn't like what I said about Vincent Knowlton. You liked it when I said the same thing under cover of virtuous sentiments. You didn't want me to believe. You only wanted me to convince you that I believed. My real soul, Peter? It's real only when it's independent--you've discovered that, haven't you? It's real only when it chooses curtains and desserts--you're right about that--curtains, desserts and religions, Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you've never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. I gave you what you wanted. I became what you are, what your friends are, what most of humanity is so busy being--only with the trimmings. I didn't go around spouting book reviews to hide my emptiness of judgment--I said I had no judgment. I didn't borrow designs to hide my creative impotence--I created nothing. I didn't say that equality is a noble conception and unity the chief goal of mankind--I just agreed with everybody. You call it death, Peter? That kind of death--I've imposed it on you and on everyone around us. But you--you haven't done that. People are comfortable with you, they like you, they enjoy your presence. You've spared them the blank death. Because you've imposed it--on yourself."

"That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: 'Is this true?' They ask: 'Is this what others think is true?' Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation--anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. That's what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It's everywhere and nowhere and you can't reason with him. He's not open to reason. You can't speak to him--he can't hear. You're tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose. Steve Mallory couldn't define the monster, but he knew. That's the drooling beast he fears. The second-hander."

"By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn't have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we're asked to destroy the self."

Footnote:

In response to some personal comments posted elsewhere, I'd like to add that there are two aspects to my post: independence and epistemology, and they're closely related in this context. Let's say Person A wants to inform other people about grievous errors by Person B. How do they do it? I am in no way against this. I am only for doing it rationally, in a manner Ayn Rand would smile upon--not because I want to imitate everything she did, blindly, but because she was the best example I've ever seen of how to engage in reasoned argument, and I think that gets forgotten by many people.

It takes many forms. Sometimes it's open insults, four letter words, this person is a louse, don't have anything to do with them, etc. Sometimes people are explicit and say "de-friend them or you're no friend of mine". Sometimes that's left implicit. And everything in between. But most people can read between the lines.

Sometimes it's got a veneer of reason behind it -- some limited attempt to provide a reasoned explanation for the shortcomings of Person B, with implications of "you'd better look into this and get with the program". But insufficient reasoning for anyone else to really form any kind of proper judgment, and by implication, insufficient respect for the priorities of other people in expecting them to find the reasoned argument you didn't provide.

But what's the proper way to raise an issue about someone's errors or dishonesty? Believe me when I say, that's the thrust of my original comment.

Genuine intellectual dishonesty isn't so hard to treat. It may still take the presentation of a lot of evidence and explanations to actually prove, but comparatively, not so hard to treat. It should not involve screaming and insults and endless moral condemnation, as so much is done on FB -- it should be, in the words of Joe Friday, "Just the Facts, Ma'am". Well, mostly, but the facts leading to a conclusion of moral turpitude. It's not simply that superficial, emotionally laden arguments set a bad example (though they do that), or that it makes O-ism look bad (it does that). The fundamental is that it's not how you persuade people. It's not a process of reason. That is what I'm arguing against.

But here's the deal: intellectual dishonesty isn't usually the issue, even though most people seem to think it is. Most people just do a really crappy job of assessing honesty in other people, and the rush to condemn someone as dishonest -- which is the only proper basis for the flurry of condemnations of "evil" people -- is just horribly misplaced and destructive when the evidence as presented is insufficient and the argumentation sucks. ("Crappy" doesn't really capture just how utterly putrifyingly shitty most of the reasoning is that I see in this context.)

I think this is vastly more destructive to Objectivism than errors by any Person B I've seen. (There's more than a few.)

What I would like to see is more genuine reasoning -- on both sides of the aisle, because that's the only way to make one side.

I'd like to see more genuine recognition that many people can be blind to their errors without being dishonest.

I'd like more recognition that an honest person genuinely trying to understand the truth needs a reasoned argument and that no amount of insults and condemnations are a reasoned argument.

I'd like recognition that you don't make allies out of friends, but out convincing opponents of the truth -- and the truth requires a well-reasoned argument.

And I'd like recognition of the fact that pointlessly alienating and dissociating yourself (and asking others to dissociate themselves) from those who are honest and are trying to understand the truth is destructive in itself -- because you only expand your ranks by persuading those who aren't in your ranks. And nothing is as hopelessly stupid as alienating an honest person who agrees with you on 98% of everything.

All that said, I am defending no one's views here beyond those of my own. I am defending a process, and my comments apply to both sides.

I do sympathize with the frustration of those who see people who vociferously advocate points of view that are wrong (sometimes catastrophically) on important issues, or which seem to willfully be blind to the broadest context, or which just trivialize philosophy with inane "lifeboat situations" or worse. Again, I'm trying to leave those issues out of this discussion. I've just seen very bad reasoning on both sides. That's my point.

I'm simply saying, if you want to win the argument and bring people to your side, you have to be the most rational, and set the best example.

Footnote #2:
In later discussion, I remarked elsewhere,

1. Moral condemnation over intellectual disagreements is always inappropriate when the disagreements are honest.
2. Public condemnation demands a high standard of evidence, and mere suspicion of dishonesty in intellectual disagreements is not adequate.
3. There is no such thing as "quality control" in a proper intellectual movement. The only arbiter of "quality" is rational persuasion about ideas. Condemnation is not an argument.

A gentle reminder about focusing on the positive. Reason is the positive in this context -- the method of identifying what's true.

My interest is primarily in reminding people that advocates of reason should be focused on making rational arguments about ideas, not about getting into arguments.

My primary value is reason, and persuading people with reason. I don't really give a damn about spending time on other things; Ayn Rand certainly didn't. She was the model par excellance about how to conduct an intellectual movement. Spending time on minutiae is mostly a waste of time and effort and accomplishes nothing in the end. If people are wrong, reality will be the ultimate arbiter of that. If people are dishonest, that too.

Much more important, and difficult, is persuading people what is right. If people want to be exemplars of Objectivism, they'd better spend their time learning how to make coherent, persuasive arguments. Even if you don't persuade your opponent with those arguments, if there's an audience you'll reach other people. That's what spreads the right ideas.

Put it another way: you don't spread the right ideas by spending all your time talking about every mistake that other people have made. People want to know what you know that is right, and why.

They also want to see integrity in action -- that is, if integrity is loyalty to values, and loyalty is consistency, they would want to see, in advocates of reason, really skilled reasoning in advocating the ideas that reason implies, qua Objectivism. But if they see advocates of reason who don't care to take the time and effort to form comprehensive arguments, with precision in formulation -- the right choice of word or phrasing, the attention to answering obvious questions, reference to source materials and facts, etc., the argument is lost by the appearance of a lack of conviction among the advocates.

Ayn Rand was the master of all these qualities. Review how she conducted herself. No one was attacked more viciously than her, but she always conducted herself with class, above the fray. Even if her questioners were antagonistic (for example, Mike Wallace, Phil Donahue), she would always answer questions with detailed, respectful arguments--that is, she took them seriously.

I'm not saying she turned the other cheek when it was clear someone was dishonest, nor that she never expressed anger, but her primary focus was always on making rational arguments for her ideas.

As a further addendum, one thing that drives disputes over intellectual matters far too much is an unwillingness to admit error. Very few people like the feeling of loss of self-esteem that accompanies admission of error to an opponent.

But the genuine intellectual is interested in truth, and doesn't indulge the self-licking ice cream cone of confirmation bias -- the quest for only those arguments and facts that support their position, to the exclusion or evasion of arguments that don't. The genuine advocate of reason simply delights in discovering the truth of things, and if an opponent (or, better, a colleague) discovers it first and makes one aware of it -- the emotion is delight and gratitude, not fear of admitting wrong.

Consider it in the context of, say, some new theory of gravity. You'll have the advocates of General Relativity and the Big Bang fighting for their position, and the Newtonians and Galileans fighting passionately for their viewpoint. And along comes John Galt, let's say, who shows them a new anti-gravity motor he built, based on a completely different theory that makes General Relativity and Newtonian mechanics as obsolete as stone knives and bearskins. What would a rational man feel on being proved wrong? To quote Ayn Rand, "It's so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial achievement which is not mine!"

A Flaw in the Constitution?

2012-01-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

No institution based on a set of firm principles can survive if it allows members who hold opposite principles. Imagine if the AMA allowed witch doctors among its members, or if the American Physical Society (physicists, not massage therapists!) allowed flat-Earther's to be members. It would guarantee the end of medicine or physics.

Yet the United States, an institution founded on the principle of individual rights, allows citizens who actively promote socialism and communism -- in education, law and government.

I'm an advocate of free speech, but I don't think that means a nation should have to tolerate those among it who openly reject, by their own word and deed, the core founding principle of the country--individual rights--and work to subvert it every waking minute of their day.

I'm not saying criminalize those who reject individual rights, except where they commit crimes. But there's an enormous gulf between agreeing with individual rights and commiting crimes that prove you don't agree with individual rights. Socialists and communists -- and now Islamists -- have been working that angle for almost 100 years. I wouldn't allow them in the country to do it. In absence of a state of war against them, I would at least evict them. (In a state of war I would imprison them until the state of war is ended.)

Politicians who try to make law that violates individual rights, or who achieve that end and find it ruled unconstitutional -- should immediately lose their job and be deported. Teachers who openly advocate doctrines that violate individual rights should be judged similarly--they should be deported.

It's not a violation of their rights to deport them. It's a basic condition of "membership", or citizenship. Today, naturalized citizens or members of the military are asked to declare loyalty to the Constitution; all I'm doing is refining that statement and taking it seriously. I think everyone reaching the age of 18 should be required to take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and to the principle of individual rights. Natural-born or naturalized citizens alike who breech that oath should all be stripped of citizenship.

There should be a formal mechanism to determine that fact, a kind of court separate from the criminal courts, dedicated to one question: does this person reject individual rights? A legal process similar to a criminal trial, but with only one penalty: loss of citizenship and deportation. Bring charges and present objective evidence based on a person's words, actions and writings, and if overwhelming (as it would be in the case of someone like Obama or Pelosi or William Ayers) strip them of their citizenship and deport them as "subversives" who are incompatible with the principles of the United States of America.

It couldn't have been done before now, because until Ayn Rand there was no objective definition of individual rights. It probably couldn't be done until a rational philosophy becomes dominant, at least in the sense that it was dominant when the Founders created the United States. You'd get the religious people campaigning to make God a requirement, too. But imagine if it had been in place from the beginning, with a basically sound rational philosophy for the country--even the religious people who advocate violations of rights could have been evicted as "undesirable".

I've asked myself repeatedly if this notion somehow violates free speech. Is it wrong to demand a loyalty oath? We already do that, we just don't enforce it. If you demand a loyalty oath, is it wrong to define it precisely, in objective terms, on the basis of the one idea that one *should* demand loyalty to--fealty to individual rights? And if you have a loyalty oath, is it wrong to take it seriously and enforce it with real consequences? Does that violate "free speech"? I don't think so.

Yes, the idea could be abused if someone attempted to implement it today. But I always come back to the principle I stated above, which I think is true:

No institution based on a set of firm principles can survive if it allows members who hold opposite principles.

Ayn Rand put it somewhat differently:

"When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side."

I'm simply saying, define the basic principle of our government, clearly and openly--and put it into practice as more than a slogan. In the absence of recognizing that, I'd say the chances for the long-term survival of any rational society are bleak.

Cave Paintings of Chauvet

2011-12-27T22:09:00.000-08:00

Just about the only magazine I've subscribed to for the last 15 years is Archaeology. I was catching up on back issues and found a fascinating article on the stone age paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France, which was discovered very recently, in December of 1994.

The paintings are twice as old as any found before, and done in two periods, 30,000 years and 35,000 years ago.

This is one of the most significant archaelogical sites ever found. Some of the drawings are just amazingly good even by modern standards, including a pride of lions hunting bison and a herd of horses. Anatomically correct with shading on many many of them like a good charcoal drawing. This link to Archaeology magazine doesn't have the best images, but has the story (note there are links to different parts of the story). A little more information can be found on Wiki.

Think about that -- 5000 years separation, in the same caves. That's older than the Pyramids are to us, today.

The caves weren't habited by humans except when spring came, after the cave bears moved out. Many of the drawings have the claw marks of bears over them, and some were drawn over the claw marks.
But whatever pictures I provide here simply don't do justice to this archaeological site. If you find this interesting you must see the 90 minute documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". Must. Here is a trailer:

This is the most interesting documentary I have ever seen. (I watched on Netflix instant queue.) The paintings are incredibly extensive through 1300 feet of caves. Stunningly beautiful crystal formations throughout, often growing on hundreds and hundreds of bones of cave bears. Hundreds of very distinct human handprints on the walls, including from one prolific painter than can be identified by a crook in one finger -- his prints span the cave, from one end to the other.

The making of the film was discussed a couple issues ago of Archaeology magazine, if you want to know more. The documentary was also done in 3-D, and given how the paintings took advantage of the contours of the cave walls, I personally would buy a 3-D HD TV solely to watch this documentary again.

One thing interesting about this place -- the study involves so many specialties-- archaeology, paleontology, art history, geology, zoology, and I'm probably leaving some out.

The only thing I apologize for in advance is that the "heavenly" music that comes in now and then is annoyingly hoaky. And three idiotic, meaningless minutes at the end about albino crocodiles and the nuclear power plant 20 miles away. Yes, crocodiles. Don't ask me. A European made this. But the content transcends any of that.

For more information, see http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/ and go to "visit the cave".

A Postscript for Monument Builders

2011-11-26T12:24:00.000-08:00

In 1962, Ayn Rand wrote an essay, "The Monument Builders" (reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness), where she named the real nature of this special type of parasite:

...Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.

Think of Occupy Wall Street. But to continue the quote:

What, then, is the motive of such intellectuals? Power-lust. Power-lust —-as a manifestation of helplessness, of self-loathing, and of the desire for the unearned.

Which gets to the subject of monument builders. Rand goes on,

The desire for the unearned has two aspects: the unearned in matter and the unearned in spirit. (By "spirit" I mean: man's consciousness.) These two aspects are necessarily interrelated, but a man's desire may be focused predominantly on one or the other. The desire for the unearned in spirit is the desire for unearned greatness: it is expressed (but not defined) by the foggy murk of the term 'prestige.'

Unearned greatness is so unreal, so neurotic a concept that the wretch who seeks it cannot identify it even to himself: to identify it, is to make it impossible. He needs the irrational, undefinable slogans of altruism and collectivism to give a semiplausible form to his nameless urge and anchor it to reality—-to support his own self-deception more than to deceive his victims. "The public," "the public interest," "service to the public" are the means, the tools, the swinging pendulums of the power-luster’s self-hypnosis.

Since there is no such entity as "the public," since ...the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that "The public, c’est moi"—and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.

Think of "We are the 99%". She continues,

...Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man's mind in the pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals. But a delusion of grandeur can be served only by the switching, undefinable chimera of a public monument—which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it—which is dedicated to the service of all and none, owned by all and none, gaped at by all and enjoyed by none.

This is the ruler's only way to appease his obsession: "prestige." Prestige—-in whose eyes? In anyone's. In the eyes of his tortured victims, of the beggars in the streets of his kingdom, of the bootlickers at his court, of the foreign tribes and their rulers beyond the borders. It is to impress all those eyes-—the eyes of everyone and no one—-that the blood of generations of subjects has been spilled and spent.

Now we come to an interesting essay that appeared yesterday in Pajamas Media, titled Stealing as Policy, from the Iron Curtain to Robert Byrd, by Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Lieutenant General in the Romanian Army. Pacepa was "the highest official who has ever defected from the Soviet bloc. In 1989 Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose main accusations came out of Pacepa's book Red Horizons (Regnery Publishing, 1987), subsequently republished in 27 countries."

Over a year ago, I wrote a post, Maybe there ARE commies under every rock... that quoted Pacepa at length, in an interview where he and two other former communists explained old Soviet plans for taking over Western countries using fifth columns of thousands of communist agents burrowed into every government in Europe. So Pacepa's name caught my eye when I saw the column he penned yesterday for PJ, about how socialists inevitably become monument builders, and how this disease has infected the United States. For instance, he cites the example of the late Senator Robert Byrd:

"Over his long career in the U.S. Congress, the late Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was able to steal $3.3 billion, with a “b,” of tax money in order to build his West Virginia into a monument to himself. Several transportation projects named after him gained national notoriety. The Robert C. Byrd Highway, also known as the Appalachian Development Highway System, was dubbed “West Virginia’s road to nowhere” in 2009, after it received a $9.5 million earmark in the $410 billion Omnibus Appropriation Act and $21 million more from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. More than 50 buildings erected with tax money stolen by Senator Byrd are now named for him. Here are a few: Robert C. Byrd Community Center, Pine Grove, WV; Robert C. Byrd Federal Correction Institution, Hazelton, WV; Robert C. Byrd Visitor Center, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, WV; Robert C. Byrd United States R Courthouse and Federal Building, Charleston, WV; Robert C. Byrd Academic and Technology Center, Marshall University in Huntington, WV; Robert C. Byrd Auditorium, National Conservation Center, WV; Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, Green Bank, WV; Robert C. Byrd Library, Wheeling, WV."

And this reminded me of Ayn Rand's essay. For years, I've myself lamented and condemned the proliferation of monuments to public officials — especially living public officials. For instance, we no longer name naval ships after things like "Enterprise", "Kitty Hawk", "Lexington" or "Independence" — we name them after John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman, John C. Stennis or George W. Bush.

This habit of politicians has grown so malignant that it's now de rigueur in many of the bills passed by Congress: the real payment for securing funding for some kind of pork is not the votes-- it's the right of a politician to have his name attached to the bridges, roads, buildings, ships, airports, parks, public housing projects and just about anything else that he connived via backroom deals to get funded.

The right to be immortalized for being a looter of the people they pretend to "serve".

The movement is just getting under way for Barack Obama. As Pacepa notes:

President Obama’s current redistribution of the country’s wealth caused the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating for the first time in our country’s history, but it helped the young president to start transforming the U.S. into a monument to himself. Below is just a partial list of projects and places already named after President Obama.

California: President Barack Obama Parkway, Orlando; Obama Way, Seaside; Barack Obama Charter School, Compton; Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy, Los Angeles; Barack Obama Academy, Oakland.
Florida: Barack Obama Avenue, Opa-loka; Barack Obama Boulevard, West Park.
Maryland: Barack Obama Elementary School, Upper Marlboro.
Missouri: Barack Obama Elementary School, Pine Lawn.
Minnesota: Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary, Saint Paul.
New Jersey: Barack Obama Academy, Plainfield; Barack Obama Green Charter High School, Plainfield.
New York: Barack Obama Elementary School, Hempstead.
Pennsylvania: Obama High School, Pittsburgh.
Texas: Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy, Dallas.

Small potatoes, so far, but these are still the kinds of monuments Ayn Rand talked about in her 1962 essay. As she said then,

One may see, in certain Biblical movies, a graphic image of the meaning of public monument building: the building of the pyramids. Hordes of starved, ragged, emaciated men straining the last effort of their inadequate muscles at the inhuman task of pulling the ropes that drag large chunks of stone, straining like tortured beasts of burden under the whips of overseers, collapsing on the job and dying in the desert sands—that a dead Pharaoh might lie in an imposingly senseless structure and thus gain eternal "prestige" in the eyes of the unborn of future generations.

As she notes, our country set itself apart from so many others throughout history:

...The great distinction of the United States of America, up to the last few decades, was the modesty of its public monuments. Such monuments as did exist were genuine: they were not erected for "prestige," but were functional structures that had housed events of great historical importance. If you have seen the austere simplicity of Independence Hall, you have seen the difference between authentic grandeur and the pyramids of "public-spirited" prestige-seekers.

And we come full circle today, to the ideal embraced by Obama:

When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed, not for "the good of mankind" nor for a "noble ideal," but for the festering vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned "greatness"—and that the monument to socialism is a pyramid of public factories, public theaters and public parks, erected on a foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for "prestige" to the starless void above him.

So when you consider the agenda of Barack Obama, contemplate, for a start, the faux Roman forum he had built to celebrate his nomination 3 1/2 years ago--and from that, you may be sure that what he seeks to erect now in this country is exactly what Rand spoke of 50 years ago: monuments to himself, built on a foundation of corpses.

Dissecting a Chocolate Pudding

2011-10-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

Reading the transcript of a talk by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, it has some interesting statistics concerning the decline in violence throughout human history, but as Twain once said, there are "lies, damned lies, and there are statistics." It starts from the ridiculous assertion that

"The extraordinary 65-year stretch since the end of the Second World War has been called the "Long Peace", and has perhaps the most striking statistics of all, zero. There were zero wars between the United States and the Soviet Union (the two superpowers of the era), contrary to every expert prediction."

He conveniently ignores an awful lot of very bloody wars. Picking a few at random (and including WWII just for reference),

1939-45: World War II (55 million) [note: other sources put the toll at up to 100 million]
1946-49: Chinese civil war (1.2 million)
1946-54: France-Vietnam war (600,000)
1947: Partition of India and Pakistan (1 million)
1949-50: Mainland China vs Tibet (1,200,000)
1950-53: Korean war (3 million)
1958-61: Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (38 million)
1964-73: USA-Vietnam war (3 million)
1965: second India-Pakistan war over Kashmir
1966-69: Mao's "Cultural Revolution" (11 million)
1967-70: Nigeria-Biafra civil war (800,000)
1971: Pakistan-Bangladesh civil war (500,000)
1974-91: Ethiopian civil war (1,000,000)
1975-78: Menghitsu, Ethiopia (1.5 million)
1975-79: Khmer Rouge, Cambodia (1.7 million)
1975-2002: Angolan civil war (500,000)
1976-93: Mozambique's civil war (900,000)
1976-98: Indonesia-East Timor civil war (600,000)
1979-88: the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan (1.3 million)
1980-88: Iraq-Iran war (1 million)
1983-2002: Sudanese civil war (2 million)
1998-: Congo/Zaire's war - Rwanda and Uganda vs Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia (3.8 million)

I have to note that the source for this is so uniformly optimistic as to be ludicrous itself. One should double or triple many of those figures. It lists Stalin's purges, for instance, as 10 million dead, when better figures are at least 20 million, and some are over 30 million.

The way Pinker's thesis works is this: calculate violence on a per capita basis, and violence around the world has dramatically reduced over history; your chance of dying is less today.

Of course, on a non-per-capita basis, the number of deaths from violence has been going way up, and it isn't in the least clear to me whether he's including all the consequences of violence and statism, such as starvation, etc. How he explains his decision goes like

The denominator here is the world population, not the population size of countries involved in each war. There are arguments for doing it either way. The problem is that you can make the numbers go all over the place depending on the choice of the denominator, whether you choose the country that initiated the war, the collateral damage in other countries, the neighboring countries, and so on. So in all cases I've plotted deaths as a proportion of world population.

So if you're going to make your numbers go all over the place, why not make them go all over toward your thesis? That is, the epistemology of a self-licking ice cream cone.

As to why there's been "no wars" since WWII, he says,

"Specifically, the number of democracies has increased since the Second World War and again since the end of the Cold War, relative to the number of autocracies...."

I suppose if you consider the Soviet Union and Communist China "democracies".

"...There's been a steady increase in international trade since the end of the Second World War."

Dupes of the Collective

2011-09-23T23:40:00.000-07:00

Reading this article about Nobel-prize winning physicist Hermann Muller (1890-1967), it says

Nobel prize winner Hermann Muller knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure... his decision not to mention key scientific evidence against his position has had a far-reaching impact on our approach to regulating radiation and chemical exposure.

Muller himself served on the NAS’s Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) committee, through which the linear dose-response approach to risk assessment became firmly entrenched. The two successfully suppressed last-minute evidence from the fruit fly experiment conducted in Stern’s lab by postdoctoral researcher Ernst Caspari, and the rest is history, Calabrese says. It marked the “transformation of a threshold-guided risk assessment to one now centered on a linear dose-response."

...Muller was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery that X-rays induce genetic mutations. This helped him call attention to his long-time concern over the dangers of atomic testing.

It was a lie that led to many restraints on medical uses of radiation even today, but also bans on the testing and development of nuclear weapons by the U.S. government--so I immediately had to ask myself: was Muller a communist?

Was he doing it on behalf of a Soviet agenda, which frequently manipulated academic trends and science to the end of weakening the U.S.?

For instance, the dangers of nuclear weapons causing a planet-wide "winter" was initially a Soviet "psy-op" to manipulate the Left in this country, with the goal of influencing U.S. policy to halt weapons testing and production, as well as promoting disarmament treaties that would be beneficial to the Soviets (and now Russia). But when the nuclear winter hypothesis fell apart, it morphed into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), as a means of crippling the economies of Western countries. (In my opinion, the various attempts to limit CO2 emissions were ultimately Soviet/Russian orchestrated efforts.)

To show that this strategy wasn't limited to nukes, I think there could be credible evidence that Keynesianism was a theory with KGB origins, intended to cripple Western economies--Keynes was an avowed socialist, but he openly admired communism. For instance, he is quoted here as saying

Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible. But the new system is now sufficiently crystallized to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage.
There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one-sixth of the land surface of the world. Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got.1

...It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country [Britain] may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action.

Keynes was very probably a Fabian--a secret society of communists pretending to be socialists, working to promote communism. (Under Marxist dialectic, socialism is merely a stepping-stone to communism.) A well-known British political theorist and economist in the 1930's and 1940's, Harold Laski, was publicly a Socialist and much later revealed as a communist Fabian -- he was highly influential, and the architect of post-war Socialist India, as well as the model for Ayn Rand's fictional character Ellsworth Toohey.

So as I read the above story, which says that Hermann Muller's lie led to restrictions on U.S. nuclear weapons development, I had to ask if he was a communist. Sure enough. Typing "Hermann Muller communist" into Google brings up this biography, which says

Hermann Muller was born in Manhattan in 1890 and grew into a 5'2" science geek. His father... influenced Hermann with his socialist ideals and a love of science. ...Upon graduation from Morris High School in 1907 at age sixteen, Muller attended Columbia University and was attracted to the emerging field of genetics.

...In the 1920s, Muller performed his Nobel prize-winning research showing that X-rays could induce mutations and he became instantly famous. Muller used his fame to caution against the indiscriminate use of X-rays in medicine, but despite his warnings, some physicians even prescribed X-rays to stimulate ovulation in sterile women. His warnings angered many doctors and were largely ignored.

Muller's outspoken views on socialism also got him in trouble with the Texas administration. He helped publish a Communist newspaper at the school, and the FBI tracked his activities. Feeling that U.S. society was regressing during the Depression, Muller left for Europe in 1932.
A move to the Soviet Union in 1934 seemed to have cured Muller of his Communist sympathies, although he always remained a socialist.

Well, maybe.

By the time he left in 1937, several of his students and colleagues had "disappeared" or been shipped to Siberia.

How many people got out of Russia while it was under Stalin, simply by asking to be let out?

So I think we can safely say Muller was not only a communist, but he was working for the Soviet spy apparatus, in some capacity. In fact, his zeal for the dangers of radiation seemed to grow after he came back to the West, and

World War II forced Muller to leave Scotland in 1940 and he eventually found a permanent position at Indiana University in 1945. A year later, Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work on mutation-inducing X-rays and he used the opportunity to continue pressing for more public knowledge about the hazards of X-ray radiation.

Given that, I would say with very high probability that his lie about the dangers of radiation -- in 1946, one year after the bombs were dropped on Japan -- was part of a KGB operation to scare people in this country away from using anything associated with the word "nuclear".

It offers some insight into how the Soviets operated then, and how Russia operates today, under Putin (who is ex-KGB/FSB). Or possibly how Obama (a closet communist, in my firm opinion) pursues destructive economic policies such as "stimulus", tax increases, crippling regulations, and healthcare laws (a trillion dollars annually when fully implemented) -- all with the object of stressing the U.S. economy to the breaking point. Or his aggressive pursuit of the new START disarmament treaty, which reduces U.S. nuclear stockpiles by 2/3, while letting the Russians increase their stockpiles.

Muller was also an advocate of government-run eugenics to improve the Soviet breed and eliminate weakness in their people. See his rather long-winded letter to Stalin, where he seeks to persuade Uncle Joe of the need for such an effort. I greatly condense it, but include portions mainly to show Muller's deep committment to communism and some indication of his naive adherence and philosophical approach, which attempts to unite Marxist theory with practice; ultimately it shows he was little more than a dupe for the Collective:

To Comrade Joseph Stalin,
Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R.,
The Kremlin, Moscow
Dear Comrade Stalin,

As a scientist with confidence in the ultimate Bolshevik triumph
throughout all possible spheres of human endeavor, I come to
you with a matter of vital importance arising out of my own
science – biology, and, in particular, genetics. The matter is
clearly such that it should be referred to you yourself, primarily.
For, on the one hand, it involves such limitless potentialities of
progress. And on the other hand the passing of judgment
concerning it requires your farsighted view and your strength in
the realistic use of dialectic thought.

The matter is none less than that of the conscious control of
human biological evolution – that is, the control by man of the
hereditary material lying at the basis of life in man himself. This
is a development which bourgeois society has been quite
unable to look squarely in the face. Its evasions and perversions
of this matter are to be seen in the futile mouthings about
“Eugenics” current in bourgeois “democracies,” and the vicious
doctrine of “Race Purity” employed by the Nazis as a weapon in
class war. These spurious proposals are offered as a substitute
for socialism, i.e., as a decoy to mislead and divide workers as
well as petit bourgeois.

In opposition to these bourgeois misconstructions, geneticists
of the political left recognize that only a socialized economic
system can provide the material basis and the social and
ideological framework necessary for a really sound policy with
regard to human genetics, for a policy which will guide human
biological evolution along socially desirable lines. They
recognize further that sufficient biological knowledge and a
sufficiently refined physical technique already exist for the
production of very noteworthy results in this field even within
the span of our own lifetimes. And they are aware that both the
immediate and the ultimate possibilities of a biological kind
thus opened up under socialism so far outdistance the
biological aims hitherto envisaged by bourgeois theorists as to
make the latter appear quite ridiculous. True eugenics can only
be a product of socialism, and will, like advances in physical
technique, be one of the means used by the latter in the
betterment of life....

...The science of genetics has made it clear that there is one
means and only one whereby a worthwhile beginning may be
made in the direction of providing more favorable genes. This
is not by directly changing the genes, but by bringing about a
relatively high rate of multiplication of the most valuable genes
that can be found anywhere. For it is not possible artificially to
change the genes themselves in any particular, specified
directions. The idea that this can be done is an idle fantasy,
probably not realizable for thousands of years at least.

...The process by which such biological progression may be
accomplished artificially, with the minimum disturbance of
personal lives, is by allowing all people who wish to take part in
the production of children that have the best genetic
equipment obtainable, to obtain appropriate reproductive
material, for use by artificial insemination. No doubt this
method would first of all be sought after by women who for
some reason have been forced by circumstances to remain
unmarried. Statistics show that there are regions having a
considerable excess of female population, women who never
have had a chance to marry and probably will never have this
chance.

In this connection it should be observed that there is no
natural law which rules that a person instinctively wants and
loves exactly the product of his own sperm and egg. He
naturally loves, and feels as his, that child with whom he has
been associated and who is dependent upon and loves him, and
whom in its helplessness, he has taken care of and brought up....
...True we have today, rooted in traditions from the bourgeois
society in our past, the idea that our child must be derived from
our own reproductive cells.

...These feelings would rest upon a higher and increasingly
strong basis of morality: that morality in which the individual
finds his greatest satisfaction in the consciousness of being
instrumental in making an especially valuable contribution to
society...

...After 20 years, there should already be very
noteworthy results accruing to the benefit of the nation.
And if at time capitalism still exists beyond our borders,
this vital wealth in our youthful cadres, already
strong through social and environmental means, but
then supplemented even by the means of genetics, could not
fail to be of very considerable advantage for our side.
...All the above represents quite the antithesis of the “Race
Purification” and so-called “Eugenics” of the Nazis and their
kin, who set up artificial hierarchies of races and of classes,
branding as inferior those whom capitalism wishes to oppress,
and brandishing against them the knife of sterilization, or
restriction. The social way, on the other hand, is positive, and
works for a surplus reproduction that combines the highest
endowments of every race, as found in a classless society...
Many a mother of tomorrow, freed of the fetters of religious
superstitions, will be proud to mingle her germ plasm with that
of a Lenin or a Darwin, and to contribute to society a child
partaking of his biological attributes.

...to act upon this recognition is but to
be realists and to unite our theory with our practice. It is
especially important that our practice to right in this field, for
what material is as important to us as our human material? And
it will be acknowledged that in deciding the production of
children, the chief interests are the interests of the children
themselves, and of the children’s children. Theirs is the need,
to which we should give in proportion to our own ability.

...The above, in brief, is what appears to me to be the dialectic
view of the relations between biological and social evolution,
and a real Bolshevik attack upon the matter will be based on
the full recognition of these relations. In view of the
immediately impending rise of discussion on matters relating to
genetics it is important that the position of Soviet genetics on
this subject should soon be clear. It should have its own
standpoint, the positive, Bolshevik standpoint, to set against the
so-called “Race Purification” and perverted “Eugenics”
doctrines of the Nazis and their allies on the one hand and
against the “laissez faire” and “go slow” doctrines of the
despairing liberals on the other hand. Most liberals take an
attitude of practical hopelessness and impotence with regard to
human biological evolution, declaring that little or nothing can
be done. This is in line with their political individualism and
hopelessness. And even some communists, lacking a sufficient
biological background, or influenced by liberal thought, have
drifted to the pessimistic liberal position.

...There are of course many important points of principle and
practice involved in these proposals for which the present letter
did not have space. Some of these are taken up in the book
above mentioned, of which I am sending you a copy separately.
I should be glad to go into any further details on these subjects,
if that would be desired.

With deep respect,
In a brotherly spirit,
H. J. Muller
Senior geneticist of the Institute of Genetics of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Moscow,
Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States,
Member of the Foreign Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.,
May 5, 1936

Reportedly, Stalin ignored Muller. As the introduction to the previous letter says,

Muller’s letter is an enormously important historical text, and had it been received positively by one man it would undoubtedly have become one of the single most important documents of world history.

Maybe Stalin did ignore Muller--or maybe someone remembered his letter. In 1959, experiments were conducted in Siberia to breed tamer foxes -- and more vicious ones. (I recommend the full BBC documentary of which the following is merely a clip from The Secret Life Of The Dog.)

Atlas Shrugged Day

2011-09-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

"Who is John Galt?"
The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still--as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
"Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.
The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.
"Why does it bother you?" he asked.
...[Eddie] walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster.
He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky.
It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening's sunset, the rectangle said: September 2.

This date, and meaning, runs throughout the story of Atlas Shrugged. It's also today, as I write this.

...The calendar in the sky beyond the window of her office said: September 2. Dagny leaned wearily across her desk. The first light to snap on at the approach of dusk was always the ray that hit the calendar; when the white-glowing page appeared above the roofs, it blurred the city, hastening the darkness.
She had looked at that distant page every evening of the months behind her. Your days are numbered, it had seemed to say--as if it were marking a progression toward something it knew, but she didn't. Once, it had clocked her race to build the John Galt Line; now it was clocking her race against an unknown destroyer.
...She raised her head, as she finished reading his pages. The calendar in the distance said: September 2. The lights of the city had grown beneath it, spreading and glittering. She thought of Rearden.

In a few days, Obama (I can't call him "President" — it's too much of a desecration of that title) will be speaking to the nation.

...The last event of the day had been a large dinner reception at the home of Senor Rodrigo Gonzales, a diplomatic representative of Chile. No one had heard of Senor Gonzales a year ago, but he had [been described]... as a progressive businessman. He had lost his property--it was said--when Chile, becoming a People's State, had nationalized all properties, except those belonging to citizens of backward, non-People's countries, such as Argentina; but he had adopted an enlightened attitude and had joined the new regime, placing himself in the service of his country. His home in New York occupied an entire floor of an exclusive residential hotel. He had a fat, blank face and the eyes of a killer.
...[He had mentioned] that by agreement with the future People's State of Argentina, the properties of d'Anconia Copper would be nationalized by the People's State of Chile, in less than a month, on September 2.

I'm not saying that's what Obama's speech will be about — except in spirit.

[Dagny] shuddered and walked faster--but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city--it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of blood--and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose, she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage, she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.

But the party can only go on so long before it's over.

...On the morning of September 2, a copper wire broke in California, between two telephone poles by the track of the Pacific branch line of Taggart Transcontinental...
"Copper wire?" said James Taggart, with an odd glance that went from her face to the city beyond the window. "In a very short while, we won't have any trouble about copper."
"Why?" she asked, but he did not answer. There was nothing special to see beyond the window, only the clear sky of a sunny day, the quiet light of early afternoon on the roofs of the city and, above them, the page of the calendar, saying: September 2.

And from there the effects ripple outward.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" the voice of the radio speaker leaped forth abruptly; it had a tone of panic. "News of a shocking development has just reached us from Santiago, Chile!
"...The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d'Anconia Copper was to come as a munificent surprise to the country. [But] on the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman's gavel struck the rostrum, opening the session--almost as if the gavel's blow had set it off--the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall... The chairman averted panic and called the session to order. The act of nationalization was read to the assembly, to the sound of fire alarm sirens and distant cries. But more terrible a shock came later, when the legislators called a hasty recess to announce to the nation the good news that the people now owned d'Anconia Copper. While they were voting, word had come from the closest and farthest points of the globe that there was no d'Anconia Copper left on earth. Ladies and gentlemen, not anywhere.
"In that same instant, on the stroke of ten, by an infernal marvel of synchronization, every property of d'Anconia Copper on the face of the globe, from Chile to Siam to Spain to Pottsville, Montana, had been blown up and swept away. In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People's States of Chile and Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their hands!"

Call it the work of anti-social misanthropes, or just the natural consequence and end-game of looters everywhere.

[Dagny] saw the glare of the explosion in every face she met through the rest of the day-and in every face she passed in the darkness of the streets, that evening. If Francisco had wanted a worthy funeral pyre for d'Anconia Copper, she thought, he had succeeded. ...She saw it in the face of Hank Rearden, when she met him for dinner that evening. ...She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?"
  "His oath?" she asked, startled, thinking of the inscription on the temple of Atlantis.
  "He said to me, 'I swear--by the woman I love--that I am your friend,' He was."
  "He is."
He looked away, out at the city. They sat at the side of the room, with a sheet of glass as an invisible protection against the sweep of space and streets sixty floors below. The city seemed abnormally distant: it lay flattened down to the pool of its lowest stories. A few blocks away, its tower merging into darkness, the calendar hung at the level of their faces, not as a small, disturbing rectangle, but as an enormous screen, eerily close and large, flooded by the dead, white glow of light projected through an empty film, empty but for the letters: September 2.

The meaning is a tocsin -- an alarm bell warning of great danger.

"How could he? How could he?" a woman was demanding with petulant terror. "He had no right to do it!"
"It was an accident," said a young man with a staccato voice and an odor of public payroll. "It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people's enemies."
"Right and wrong is all very well for academic conversations," said a woman with a schoolroom voice and a barroom mouth, "but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?"
The muffled scream of a woman across the room and some half grasped signal on the edge of Dagny's vision, came simultaneously and made her whirl to look at the city.

The calendar was run by a mechanism locked in a room behind the screen, unrolling the same film year after year, projecting the dates in steady rotation, in changeless rhythm, never moving but on the stroke of midnight. The speed of Dagny's turn gave her time to see a phenomenon as unexpected as if a planet had reversed its orbit in the sky: she saw the words "September 2" moving upward and vanishing past the edge of the screen.
Then, written across the enormous page, stopping time, as a last message to the world and to the world's motor which was New York, she saw the lines of a sharp, intransigent handwriting:

Brother, you asked for it! Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia

In one sense, the entire story of Atlas Shrugged is one of contrasts between two numbers: the number "2" -- and the zero. The first is a response to the latter. As John Galt told the world,

"This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero. ...You who are worshippers of the zero--you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

"...you can no longer say to me, the builder: 'Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.' I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. ...Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

"...You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge... The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death. ...you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward--if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

"A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-nonexistence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

"...It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification.

"...All actions are caused by entities. ...An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent--which is the universe of your teachers' desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.

"...When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, ...he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both--he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero...

"You who've never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as 'misguided idealists'--may the God you invented forgive you!- they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they're after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

"...It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners--a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value:

"This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence-- the congenital dependent— is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul.

"...to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim --is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. ...Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made."

The full meaning of the number zero is concretized in the following discussion between Galt and Mr. Thompson, the leader of the country who wants Galt to save everyone from themselves-- but Thompson finds there is no common ground he can offer in trade:

"Well, what on earth do you want?"
"What on earth do I need you for?"
"Huh?"
"What have you got to offer me that I couldn't get without you?"
There was a different look in Mr. Thompson's eyes when he drew back, as if cornered, yet looked straight at Galt for the first time and said slowly, "Without me, you couldn't get out of this room, right now."
Galt smiled. "True."

"You wouldn't be able to produce anything. You could be left here to starve."
"True."
"Well, don't you see?" The loudness of homey joviality came back into Mr. Thompson's voice, as if the hint given and received were now to be safely evaded by means of humor. "What I've got to offer you is your life."
"It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson," said Galt softly.

Something about his voice made Mr. Thompson jerk to glance at him, then jerk faster to look away: Galt's smile seemed almost gentle.
"Now," said Galt, "do you see what I meant when I said that a zero can't hold a mortgage over life? It's I who'd have to grant you that kind of mortgage--and I don't. The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value."

"Who... who's said anything about murdering you?"
"Who's said anything about anything else?
...There was a long pause.
"Well?" said Galt. "What are your orders?"
"I want you to save the economy of the country!"
"I don't know how to save it."
"I want you to find a way!"
"I don't know how to find it."
"I want you to think!"
"How will your gun make me do that, Mr. Thompson?"

Mr. Thompson jerked suddenly into bustling, unnecessary motions, as if he were in a hurry, "I've got to run along," he said. "I... I have so many appointments. ...[He] paused at the door, turned to look at Galt for a moment and shook his head. "I can't figure you out," he said. "I just can't figure you out."
Galt smiled, shrugged and answered, "Who is John Galt?"

Dodging the Apocalypse

2011-08-14T15:48:00.000-07:00

A friend forwarded this LA Times story about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, alleging that Bachmann is opposed to the Renaissance and an advocate of the Dark Ages. Well, the Times' story doesn't really support that contention, but that's because their story is such apoor summary (an attempt at a hatchet job, actually) of a much longer story in The New Yorker, which rambles a lot over irrelevancies in Bachmann's past, but it does provide more useful background information for assessing Bachmann, most of it in the latter half of the long article.

To sum up: Bachmann is a certifiable evangelical nut-case (no surprise), an advocate of creationism, former abortion clinic protester, potential theocrat, and former IRS litigator -- but a slacker who stayed home most of the 4 years she worked there because she was on maternity leave. She worked on only six cases and tried exactly one case in court:

...in 1992 Bachmann sought six thousand dollars in taxes from a Chippewa Indian who failed to report three years of income from Youth Project, Inc., a community-organizing nonprofit dedicated to "social justice and peace."

If only she had done the same to a community organizer just getting started in Chicago at that time.

If you read the New Yorker story, you'll see there is evidence for the contention that Bachmann's evangelism extends not only to disdain for the Renaissance, but also leans toward a form of religious theocracy. The evidence revolves around her admitted respect for an evangelist/filmmaker named Francis Schaeffer, who has been called a key figure in the rise of the Religious Right in politics. According to New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza,

This spring, during one of her trips to Iowa, Bachmann asked the audience if anyone had heard of or seen How Should We Then Live? Many people applauded. She continued:

That also was another profound influence on Marcus’s life and my life, because we understood that the God of the Bible isn’t just about Bible stories and about Bible knowledge, or about just church on Sunday. He is the Lord of all of life. Every bit of life, including sociology, theology, biology, politics. You name the area and walk of life. He is the Lord of life. And so, as we went back to our studies, we looked at studying in a completely different light. Not for the purpose of a career but for a purpose of wondering, How does this fit into creation? How does this fit into the code and all of life that is about to come in front of us? And so we had new eyes that were opened up as we understood life now from a Biblical world view.

Schaeffer “was a tremendous philosopher,” Bachmann told me. “He wrote marvellous books and was very inspirational.” She said that Schaeffer “took Christianity beyond the Bible,” and that he showed “how the application of living according to Christian principles has helped the culture for the better.” She added, “He really tried to call Christians to do more than just go to church...

So what was Schaeffer's film? It consists of

...ten episodes tracing the influence of Christianity on Western art and culture, from ancient Rome to Roe v. Wade. In the films, Schaeffer... condemns the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism.

Well, I can't criticize any criticism of post-modernism, but it doesn't get more obscurantist than that. (Note: a proper definition of "obscurantist" is "opposition to human enlightenment and knowledge", but many on-line definitions are badly corrupted.)

The first five installments of the series are something of an art-history and philosophy course. The iconic image from the early episodes is Schaeffer standing on a raised platform next to Michelangelo’s “David” and explaining why, for all its beauty, Renaissance art represented a dangerous turn away from a God-centered world and toward a blasphemous, human-centered world.

Well, yes, that was the point, after all. This is actually old stuff for the creationist/evangelist crowd... 500 or 1000 years old.

...the film shifts in the second half. In the sixth episode, a mysterious man in a fake mustache drives around in a white van and furtively pours chemicals into a city’s water supply, while Schaeffer speculates about the possibility that the U.S. government is controlling its citizens by means of psychotropic drugs. The final two episodes of the series deal with abortion and the perils of genetic engineering.

So you can see, it starts getting a little weird. Conspirializingly weird. Schaeffer died in 1984, but his son said,

“Those first episodes are what Francis Schaeffer is doing while he was sitting in Switzerland having nice discussions with people who came through to find Jesus and talk about culture and art,” he said. But then the Roe decision came, and “it wasn’t a theory anymore. Now ‘they’ are killing babies...

And weirder yet:

"We had been warning that humanism followed to its logical conclusion without Biblical absolutes is going to go into terrible places, and, look, it’s happening right before our very eyes. Once that happens, everything becomes a kind of holy war.."

And even weirder:

Francis Schaeffer ...was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, which relies on Genesis 1:26 [sic]...

According to the Wiki,

And God blessed [Adam and Eve] and God said unto them, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." —Genesis 1:28 (KJV)

Christians typically interpret this verse as meaning that God gave humankind responsibility over the Earth, although theologians do not all agree on the nature and extent of that "dominion".

And the same Wiki defines "Dominionism":

...(also called subjectionism) is the tendency among some conservative politically-active Christians, especially in the United States, to seek influence or control over secular civil government through political action.

Lizza quotes a woman named Sara Diamond,

...who has written several books about evangelical movements in America, has succinctly defined the philosophy that resulted from Schaeffer’s interpretation: "Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns."

Lizza continues,

In 1981, three years before he died, Schaeffer published “A Christian Manifesto,” a guide for Christian activism, in which he argues for the violent overthrow of the government if Roe v. Wade isn’t reversed.

Then we get to Nancy Pearcy, another author that Bachmann likes so much:

...in 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune asked Bachmann what books she had read recently, she mentioned ...Pearcey’s [book, “Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity”] which Bachmann told me was a "wonderful" book.

Today, one of the leading proponents of Schaeffer’s version of Dominionism is Nancy Pearcey, a former student of his and a prominent creationist. Her 2004 book... teaches readers how to implement Schaeffer’s idea that a Biblical world view should suffuse every aspect of one’s life.

In the Wiki link for Pearcy, she disputes being a Dominionist:

Ryan Lizza described Pearcey as a leading proponent of Dominionism and a prominent creationist; Pearcey disputes the label "Dominionist", noting that she had never heard the term before reading Lizza's New Yorker article...

I note that this comment had to appear today -- the New Yorker story is dated tomorrow (August 15). So, clearly Pearcy is keeping tabs on things. Maybe a little more research into Schaeffer's alleged association with Dominionism is needed. I note that a search of "Francis Schaeffer Dominionism" turns up many links that dispute the Dominionist label, and blame Sara Diamond for inventing it. For instance this one picked at random:

Others might bring up Schaeffer’s book, A Christian Manifesto (Crossway, 1981). For the Dominionist watcher Sarah Diamond, this book, and this book alone, seems to be the reason she labels Schaeffer a Dominionist. But did she read the book with an open mind, or did she just read it as source material for a term that she invented (Dominionism). From reading her writings it seems as though she needed to divide all the people involved with the Christian Right, a political movement, into different categories. I would probably have done the same thing if I had been in her shoes. We need to categorize different political groups so that we have an educated and well informed electorate. But with Schaeffer, it can be proven that she has put him in the wrong category. There has been too much read into what people think Schaeffer was writing about in A Christian Manifesto. For what this book is mostly about is how to construct a Christian legal foundation for fighting abortion. If you want to call Schaeffer a "godfather," don’t call him the "godfather of Dominionism." Call him "the godfather of the anti-abortion movement/Pro Life Movement." If you read A Christian Manifesto from that point of view, things will start to fit together in your understanding of Schaeffer’s Christian Worldview.

True or not, there is certainly a great deal to dislike about Schaeffer, Pearcy and their admirer, Michele Bachmann. But is there anything to offset these negatives if our choice in the 2012 election becomes Bachmann vs. Obama?

Bachmann believes in charity, being a foster mother:

...the Bachmanns took in twenty-three girls; I spoke with one of them (she did not want her name used), who stayed with the Bachmanns for three and a half years and now lives in Colorado. She said, "I owe the Bachmanns everything. They offered me the structure I needed and taught me how to figure out goals. They really encouraged me to figure out who I was rather than who I was becoming. I turned my life around one hundred and eighty degrees."

That's a lot of girls. But the weird part (yet again) is that almost all these girls had eating disorders. Eating disorders? Go figure. I wouldn't condemn anyone for charitable acts, and foster-parenting could be a legitimate value to someone for various reasons.

Maybe Michele had an eating disorder and simply wants to help these girls, but suspect the greater motivation is that she takes her evangelizing seriously enough to indoctrinate 23 girls into Christianity. It doesn't sound like they had to endure too many exorcisms, but personally, I'd take bulemia over Christianity any day, month or year.

What else can we say about Michele? According to The New Yorker, she and her husband helped start a school with some others. Ostensibly non-denominational, but both Bachmann's left the administration of the place after objections that their religious agenda was violating the school charter.
I'm running short on good things to find, but here's something, depending on your interpretation of it: Bachmann's a typical Religious Right in being mixed up about the relation between religion and freedom:

“If there was one word on a motivation or world view, that one word would be ‘liberty,’ ” Bachmann told me in early August, when I asked about her world view. “That’s what inspires me and motivates me more than anything—just the concept of freedom, liberty, what it means. Whether it’s economic liberty, religious liberty, liberty in our finances, liberty in being able to choose the profession we have. That’s what inspired my relatives to come here back in the eighteen-fifties. It was the concept of liberty. That’s what motivates me today as well."

Maybe it's pandering to get the Tea Party vote, maybe not. She appears deeply opposed to slavery,

...the latest Bachmann controversy: an interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which she defended an earlier statement that the Founders worked tirelessly to end slavery. ...In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with Eidsmoe, her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

Though The New Yorker tries to suggest that Bachmann is actually rationalizing for slavery, I don't buy it.

She seems opposed to Socialism:

In one pamphlet, she wrote that federal education law “embraces a socialist, globalist worldview; loyalty to all government and not America.” In another, she warned of a “new restructuring of American society,” beginning with “workforce boards” that would tell every student the specific career options he or she could pursue, turning children into “human resources for a centrally planned economy.”

But Bachmann in 1976 supported the election of evangelical Democrat/Socialist Jimmy Carter. Go figure.

Etc. I think I've got the picture. It ain't pretty, but is she Count Dracula? Despite the potential "Dominionism" aspect (I'm just not knowledgable enough about contemporary Christianity to pass judgment on it), I suspect she's more like an evangelical Elmer Fudd. Lot's of passion for killing bunny rabbits, but largely clueless about which end of the gun to use.
We turn to the underlying point to all this.

I know we can't survive another term of Obama.

It's certainly best to do everything possible to keep her from being nominated and get a secular candidate (though a Mitt Romney strikes me in some ways as a worse candidate), but what if we don't? You're in the voting booth, the two choices are before you: Obama or Bachmann?

You think: Obama is destroying the economy, eviscerating the military, denuding our freedom, leading us into global war--and he'll complete the job in a second term. What will Bachmann do?

I'm going out on a limb here and say I'm pretty sure we could survive a President Bachmann -- because anything overtly religious that she tried to impose would be stopped (including any attempt to repeal abortion). The danger of a Christian theocracy is decades from now, not the next election. And in that time, if Objectivism takes hold, the Religious Right will find a much more capable opposition.

Many people I know are arguing that we must vote for Obama instead of any Christian because the Christians will impose a theocracy--but it does no service to the country to exaggerate their danger in the next election. If Obama wins, it is not an exaggeration to say: you can kiss this country goodbye.

I've said it till I'm blue in the face, but since I was the only one to correctly predict how destructive Obama would be, I'll say again just how destructive his second term could be: it may well lead to the complete end of all businesses in America, mass starvation, rampant riots (the riots in Britain are barely a taste), world war and death on a scale you can hardly imagine.

That's the short answer, but it's a reasonably high probability scenario. Maybe not 50%, but high enough. Do you want to roll those dice?

You say: Robb's going off on his rant again. Someone get him a Xanax.

For those of you who think that, ask yourself: what would you have thought would happen to the world in 1938? I'd bet you would have considered World War 2 and the death of 100 million people in the next 7 years... inconceivable.

To borrow a line from Inigo Montoya, that word may not mean what you think it does.

Re-read Atlas Shrugged. Was Ayn Rand any less pessimistic than I am?

So gauge your decision in that light: Obama is certain destruction, but Bachmann is potential destruction-- someone who sounds like she might like to impose a theocracy, and doubtless a lot of Christian supporters would be pushing her toward that end. But can she get away with it?

In a recent podcast, even Leonard Peikoff has admitted he underestimated Obama's danger to the survival of the country, and advocated voting for Republican's across the board in the mid-term election we just had. His point was essentially the one I've been making for a longer time: it does no good to claim a moral righteousness for opposing religion if you're dead.

You can listen to his comments here if you need proof ("Is religion more dangerous in America than socialism or collectivism", July 20, 2009).

Contrast to his comments on May 17, 2010, only 10 months later ("Given the Obama Administration and your stand on Republicans, will you support a vote for a Republican in November?").

So before anyone gets too wrapped up in demonizing every candidate who ever went to church, spoke in tongues and shouted "hallelujah!", consider the alternative: one candidate is a man who is working by conscious, deliberate intent to destroy the United States as rapidly as he can--Obama.

Then concretize the worst consequences of the worst Christian candidate out there right now -- Michele Bachmann (no, it's not Palin).

One candidate will destroy by malice aforethought, using nuclear weapons (possibly literally). One will stumble forward in a religious ecstasy, erecting random crucifixes, ranting about God, creating a few random programs to advocate for religion, but in the end doing very little that will materially affect your life.

The other will destroy your life.

ON the upside (if there is one), should the prospect of a President Bachmann materialize, I think she will at least buy us a few years time to spread the right ideas, especially among the Tea Party.

I can't say the same about Obama. Where Bachmann will try to impose some early steps toward theocracy, Obama is already imposing many steps toward a communist totalitarianism.

For another upside, in a certain very important sense, where Obama's election provided the chance to permanently discredit the Marxist Left (when the NY Times turns on you, as they have, you're done) and galvanize the secular Right, there is likewise an argument to be made (I offer it guardedly) that a President Bachmann will discredit the Religious Right and galvanize the secular Left--and that would leave the field open in 2016 (maybe) for someone more rational.

I'm not saying it is certain Bachmann will be nominated. I very much hope she won't be, and she should be opposed at all costs. But if she is nominated, how would you decide to vote? That's the issue. Some people I know are campaigning on a platform of "everyone has to vote for Obama instead of any religious candidate from the Right!"

But that's almost a vote of suicide.

In my view, a second Obama term is so dangerous to the existential survival of the country that there's very few candidates I won't vote for. Huckabee would be one, but he's dropped out (for now--I'm betting he fishes for a vice-presidential slot). Maybe I'm underestimating the danger of Bachmann--possibly; I might change my mind in the coming months. But if it gets so bad that I have no choice in the coming election for anyone who offers me any advantage over suicide under Obama--it will be time to get out of Dodge.

From Russia, With Thumbscrews

2011-08-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

We here at Robbservations have been remiss in diverting our readership with penetrating, and yet scintillating analysis of world events, so we return with a few peeks into the darkened corners of the intelligence world, as recounted in this story ("Russia uses dirty tricks despite U.S. ‘reset’") that appeared today:

In the past four years, Russia’s intelligence services have stepped up a campaign of intimidation and dirty tricks against U.S. officials and diplomats in Russia and the countries that used to form the Soviet Union. U.S. diplomats and officials have found their homes broken into and vandalized, or altered in ways as trivial as bathroom use; faced anonymous or veiled threats; and in some cases found themselves set up in compromising photos or videos that are later leaked to the local press and presented as a sex scandal...

Some would say that Russia is our "friend".

Despite a stated policy from President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev of warm U.S.-Russian ties, the campaign of intelligence intimidation -- or what the CIA calls “direct action” -- has persisted throughout what both sides have called a “reset” in the relations.

Well, Obama does have warm relations with Russia. He's working for Putin as a deep cover mole. Explains a lot of his actions toward the country he pretends to lead, doesn't it? Especially his desire to ruin the U.S. economy with unfettered TARP spending ($1.5T), Obamacare ($1T/year), QE1, QE2, (QE3, QE4... $T and $T more), trillions to European banks (concealed but recently revealed), and his insistence on tax increases in a time of catastrophic national unemployment ($5T over the next 10 years with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, but Obama wanted much more).

To be sure, his 50% cuts in defense spending offset that spending a terabuck or so (ie, $1T, for those of you uninitiated in the new world of high stakes finance), but he's increased spending so much, what's a trillion here or there in savings going to hurt?

Well, that's what the recent debt deal in Congress purports to save, that's what. But if you're trying to help out Russia, it's well worth the price, not that the Russians didn't make out like bandits with a START treaty that requires us to decrease our missile forces by 2/3, and allows them to increase their missile forces 30%. Yes, that's right. We're pursuing nuclear parity with a dictatorship run by a killer with delusions of world domination. It will be such a boon to world peace. Three cheers to Obama and Hillary's State Department!

Back to our story.

The most brazen example of this kind of intimidation was the Sept. 22 bombing attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. [The CIA and] A National Intelligence Council assessment sent to Congress last week confirmed that the bombing was ordered by Maj. Yevgeny Borisov of Russian military intelligence, said four U.S. officials who have read the report.

But over at Foggy Bottom, they decided "warm relations" were more important than the truth:

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research assessed that Mr. Borisov was acting as a rogue agent, these officials said.

Among the sex scandals,

According to a Jan. 30, 2009, cable from U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle disclosed by WikiLeaks, USAID employees received an email with a doctored photo of the NDI official reclining with an underage girl. The email [was] from someone purporting to be a Russian citizen [and] accused the official of raping her 9-year-old daughter.

Most reporters today need a moral compass, but this guy needs a grammar checker.

Since 2007, according to two U.S. intelligence officials, American posts in Belarus, Russia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have complained about instances in which junior Foreign Service officers have come home to find jewelry rearranged, cigarette butts stubbed out on the kitchen table, defecations in the bathroom, and break-ins with nothing of value stolen.

“It’s meant to limit a diplomat’s ability to meet with individuals by aggressively demonstrating that they are being watched."

Sort of like Facebook, actually.

In August 2009, two Russian newspapers printed stories based on spliced video footage of Mr. Hatcher [a U.S. diplomat] at a hotel room, claiming he was employing the services of a prostitute... “They intercepted some phone calls he made and spliced them in a way that made them look strange. Then they took footage of him in a hotel room or something. They made it all look like they had footage of him in sex acts with prostitutes in a hotel,” one of those officials said.

And so it goes. Right out of a James Bond movie. But then, Ian Fleming used to be a spy... he knew. As he wrote in 1956, in his introduction to From Russia, With Love,

Not that it matters, but a great deal of the background to this story is accurate. SMERSH, a contraction of Smiert Spionam--Death to Spies--exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet government.

At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikov was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct. Today, the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them, at No. 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow. The Conference Room is faithfully described and the intelligence chiefs who meet round the table are real officials who are frequently summoned to that room for purposes similar to those I have recounted.

That is, murder.

Two U.S. officials familiar with the incident, who asked not to be named, said the U.S. intelligence community saw this as the work of the FSB.

No surprises there. But that's just for domestic operations -- the FSB is the equivalent of our own FBI. With the fall of the Soviet Union (sort of), the Russian SVR replaced the KGB in handling foreign operations for things like moles, such as Obama. (Intriguing side note: Given George Soros' role in getting Obama elected, he's likely worked closely with the SVR/KGB for decades.)

Moscow’s intelligence services long have played dirty tricks on U.S. diplomats. In the “Spy vs. Spy” world of the Cold War, operations known as “honey traps” -- a young, attractive woman woos a U.S. Foreign Service officer into state of semi-undress where he can be photographed and blackmailed later -- were commonplace.

That was exactly the plot of "From Russia, With Love", by the way. SMERSH launched an operation to embarrass the Western intelligence services by trapping Bond with a beautiful Russian spy, and then intended to kill him and the spy and publish the lurid details in the press. Fortunately, Bond prevailed.

If only we had our own Bond to prevail in Washington. But all we have are counterfeit T-bills flushed from the Fed.

The KGB-trained services also on occasion would deliberately break into the hotel room or residence of visiting dignitaries. In some cases, these incidents escalated and U.S. diplomats found their pets killed.

As you can see, they can be pretty ugly. This is the Russia we are dealing with today -- one run by

Mr. Putin, a former FSB director, is widely regarded as the real man in charge of Russia’s elite establishment of current FSB and former KGB officers. In 2006, sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya produced a study that found 78 percent of Russia’s current elite had ties to the KGB or FSB.

As I said, the demise of the Soviet Union was only "sort of". But let that not diminish your Hope for Change:

Mr. Obama was far more optimistic last week in an interview with Russia’s official ITAR-Tass news agency.

“Well, first of all, I think it’s important for us to look back over the last two years and see the enormous progress we’ve made.

Yes, indeed he has. Made "progress", the root of "progressive", the euphemism and code word for "communist".

"I started talking about reset when I was still a candidate for president, and immediately reached out to President Medvedev as soon as I was elected. And we have been, I think, extraordinarily successful partners in moving towards reset,” he said.

But what is he "resetting"? In this world, phrasing is everything.

An administration official who defended Mr. Obama’s 'reset' policy stressed that the political leadership of Russia was sincere in wanting to improve ties with the United States.

Yep. I'm sure they'd like real close ties, though I'm not sure Obama will get that job as Commissar of the North American Satellite of the Russian Federation. Professionals tend not to trust starry-eyed idealists, and I think Obama would be among the first admissions to Putin's gulag on the archipelag of the North American continent. If he survived that long.

Totalitarianism, Redux

2011-08-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

Some topics are so important they have to be revisited.

Very few people realize how close we are to complete totalitarianism. Some people think they know, but it’s not until you read the Executive Orders (EOs) issued by a long succession of Presidents that you will grasp just how much power they claim without Congressional approval or Constitutional authority.

Let me say that again: these EOs claim the president can invoke them at his whim, for any emergency he cares to define.

I discussed this in some detail in an older post (The Unbridled Authority of Presidential "Executive Orders") but that's just too verbose for most people, so I want to briefly summarize them here again so you get the full impact.

Most of the EOs I summarize here have been superceded by later EO’s, but none of the claims to authority have been rescinded, only expanded. It would be interesting to read what EOs Obama is issuing. (Many EOs are classified, FYI.)

Most EOs started under John Kennedy. None have ever been challenged in court. Federal actions for the current economic crisis were probably justified under these EOs. Early EO’s were justified for nuclear attack. Later EO’s broadened the definition of an “emergency” almost without bound, though Reagan was the first President to provide some definition of an emergency, but today it could include a flu epidemic. All the EOs have blanket expropriation clauses similar to:

(f) Claimancy. Prepare plans to claim materials, manpower, equipment, supplies, and services needed to carry out assigned responsibilities and other essential functions of the agency from the appropriate agencies and work with such agencies in developing programs to insure availability of such resources in an emergency.

Go here to see the original EOs in the online federal archives.

EO 10990 allows the government to seize all highways, seaports.
EO 10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.
EO 10997 allows the government to seize all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.
EO 10998 allows the government to seize all food resources and farms.
EO 11000 allows the government to force all civilians into work brigades.
EO 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions.
EO 11002 establishes a national registration of all persons.
EO 11003 allows the government to seize all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

EO 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

EO 11005 allows the government to seize railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

EO 11051 gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

EO 11310 granted authority to the Department of Justice to enforce “industrial support”.

EO 11490 consolidates 21 Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period.

EO 11921 established control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review actions under this EO for six months. This EO is a massive expansion of previous EOs, under a Republican Administration.

EO 12148 created FEMA. An “emergency czar” was appointed. Very long, and amends many prior EOs.

EO 12656 allows the government to increase domestic intelligence and surveillance. It grants the government the right to isolate large groups of civilians. The National Guard could be federalized to seal all borders and take control of U.S. air space and all ports of entry. An EXTREMELY long EO.

The Fusion of Left and Right

2011-08-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Maybe I should have titled this "cat on a hot tin roof", but that one was taken.

The subconscious sometimes works in strange and mysterious ways, and while watching this very funny clip from the old Northern Exposure series, a flash of light from above hit me in the head with a little artistic perspective of metaphor and crass symbolism. The lesson today from the Twilight Zone is: the meaning of the budget deal that really is nothing of the sort, raising the debt ceiling a couple trillion dollars (the biggest in history), letting Bush tax cuts expire (we'll pay $5T more over the next ten years), and which abdicates Congressional authority for future tax increases to a committee.

But even if you're sick to death of what goes on in the cesspool of D.C., you gotta laugh sometime. Watch this clip, but let me set it up first.

Maggie O'Connell (Janine Turner) is an independent businesswoman, an Alaskan bushpilot operating from the town of Cicely, Alaska, somewhere near the Arctic Circle. She's also what is known as a "black widow" -- a girl for whom every boyfriend she's ever had has died in a bizarre accident.

Her latest boyfriend is Rick, a smiling, good-looking guy now going through a mid-life crisis because Maggie won't give him his pilot's license (she's his instructor) because she's learned he's color-blind. So Rick is angry with her and now run off into the Alaskan woods to drink and sulk and think in front of a campfire as owls hoot around him. Staring into the embers he hears a whistling sound from high above and looks up...

Think of Rick as John Boehner and the traditional Republican Party, his color-blindness an inability to think in principles, his campfire as the debt ceiling negotiations, and those owls as all the pundits and pressure groups exhorting him to make a compromise.

Think of Maggie as the Tea Party, or the better part of the American public at least, angry with Rick for refusing to do what's right.

Think of a de-orbitting satellite as Obama and the Democrats making a deal with Rick.

Now on to our story: we pick up as Joel Fleischman, the resident doctor of Cicely, is brought to the scene of Rick's untimely demise:

Joel: How did it happen?

Ed: Satellite fell on him.

Joel: A satellite? It hit Rick? That satellite hit Rick?

Maurice: Well not the whole satellite. Some of it disintegrated coming in. But a good part of it, yeah.

Joel: Oh, man.

Ed: Yeah, there's a problem.

Joel: A problem? You mean more than him being dead?

Maurice: Come on, you'd better take a look.

Joel: Oh, god!

Maurice: I've been in combat. I've seen men die a hundred different ways. I've never, ever seen anything like this.

Joel: Look at him!

Ed: Yeah.

Joel: It's like Rick and the satellite... it's like they--

Maurice: Merged. Fused. Combined into one.

(Ed turns away)

Joel (staring in horror): How does something like this happen?

Maurice: It's your basic physics. Let me describe re-entry for you. When this thing hit the Earth's atmosphere it was going 15,000 miles an hour. The friction was terrific. This baby came in hot!

Ed: Boy, Rick sure was lucky!

Joel: Lucky? He's dead!

Ed: Yeah, but how many people get to get hit by a satellite! I bet he makes the Guinness Book of World Records!

Maurice: So Joel. How do you plan on getting them apart?

Joel: Why ask me? You think they teach this in medical school? You don't need a doctor, you need a blacksmith! A metallurgist!

Ed: Yeah, it's kinda hard to tell where Rick stops and the satellite begins!

Maurice: I guess we'd better face the fact, these two are inseparable.

As the town doctor, Joel gets stuck with the job of telling Maggie her boyfriend is dead. The parallel here is how the American public is now learning the real details of the debt deal, which are much worse than anything we were told. Joel finds Maggie in the local pub:

Joel (uncomfortable): Hi Maggie, how are things?

Maggie: Rick didn't come home last night, okay? If he wants to behave like a child, then let him! I mean, if I have to be the bad guy, okay! But I am not going to have another death on my hands! I mean, alright, I admit, I do -- I'm sensitive. I've lost four boyfriends. Four! Do you know how that feels? And of course I ask myself, is that me? Is that something I do? What is it Fleischman? You want to tell me something, I can tell by your face.

Joel (more uneasy): Yes. Yes... I do. I want to tell you something. (speechless) ...A joke!

Maggie: A joke?

Joel: Yeah! You see, this guy goes on a trip and he leaves his cat with his friend. He calls his friend to ask how his cat is. His friend says, "The cat is dead." The guy says, "Geez! Can't you think of a way to break it to me a little more gently? You know, lead into it, your cat crawled up on the roof, there was a loose tile and it took a little fall... like that?" Next month, the guy goes on another trip, calls his friend, and asks how his mom is. The guy says, "well, she crawled up on the roof and there was a loose tile."

Maggie (laughs) Not bad!

Joel (leans forward earnestly): Rick crawled up on the roof.

Co-mingling with Disaster

2011-07-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

In a discussion elsewhere concerning what to do about the debt "problem" of the United States, and Social Security and other entitlement programs more specifically, someone replied with a whiney response straight out of Atlas Shrugged:

"The Congress stole our Social Security funds -- they like co-mingled, and removed and placed in that alleged lock box that never existed I.O.U.'S -- so, why should Social Security be targeted when it is the victim of all the greed! ..."

There is no "our Social Security funds". The entire system was a scam from the beginning, and the people who voted for it believed they could rob Peter to pay Paul and get something for nothing. Should they not bear the consequences?

If you want to fully understand this, read the section of Atlas that deals with the demise of the 20th Century Motor Company:

"...None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut--because they made it sound like anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child killer at heart and less than a human being.
"Evil-plain, naked, smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make--and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven...
"Try pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six--for your neighbor's supper--for his wife's operation--for his child's measles--for his mother's wheel chair--for his uncle's shirt--for his nephew's schooling--for the baby next door--for the baby to be born--for anyone anywhere around you--it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures--and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end.... From each according to his ability, to each according to his need...
"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives.
"At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination--when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know that they didn't do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently.
"If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice--it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell...
"Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we'd asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go.
"By that time, a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice. ...If this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale?"

The solution is simply: close down Social Security and Medicare, not reform it. Don't try to finesse the problem. Simply shut it down cold turkey and write it off as a loss. Cut everyone's taxes and say -- you're on your own. If you're old, use your own savings, get your kids to help you, or find charity.

That's it. Problem solved.

Either that, or we all face the full consequences.

Let me paint the scope of how those consequences would play out, since no one seems to really want to look that deep:

If the U.S. Government fails to deal with entitlements, we will see a complete economic collapse of this country of a kind never seen before. Hyperinflation of a thousand percent -- per day. Complete destruction of all savings, all wealth. All businesses will cease to exist. The government will try to seize control of the businesses and order everyone to work under penalty of imprisonment, but they aren't capable of operating a lemonade stand much less a large company. All production of food, fuel and every other commodity will cease.

Just cease.

No one will be able to get anywhere, do anything, or find anything to eat. Rioting, looting and general anarchy will result, with mass starvation and killing that pits everyone against anyone who has anything at all of material value. There will emerge demands for order by any means, and the rise of a fully totalitarian government as they attempt to get control of the situation. But it will be difficult to get the Army or police to control it if we can't pay or feed them.

The anarchy will spread rapidly around the world after the first collapse and swallow everyone else. World war will be almost a dead certainty in the near term (let's say 5 years at most) as the stabilizing effect of U.S. military power disappears and countries like China and Russia and Iran and others all jockey for power. Hundreds of millions may be dead when it's over. Internally, there will be likely attempts to balkanize the United States into separate countries--with factions seizing control of the West, the Midwest, the South, and other regions, but once started, it will quickly become more fragmented than this and there will be thousands of sects popping up all over, thousands of no man's lands where no outsider dares to go.

All these new states will span the gamut of fascist, communist and religious dictatorships and frequent battles will take place between them. The one production capacity that will be maintained is the one to make guns, bullets and bombs. Subsequent wars and chaos over the next century on this continent and everywhere else will likely lead to centuries of a planet that is totally despotic with progressively declining standard of living. This could lead to a new Dark Ages lasting a thousand years.

All this is possible and much of it is a certainty unless people face facts today. As long as politicians and everyone else continue to believe money grows on trees and they are entitled to loot their neighbors and to rationalize Grandpa and Grandma's need for Social Security and other benefits (even though Grandpa and Grandma bear much of the guilt for the problem because they voted themselves bread and circuses decades ago) we are headed for annihilation as a country, a world, a civilization.

I say it's much easier to tell Grandpa and Grandma: sorry! You lost your investment, game over! Now you have to bear responsibility for it. Just shut down Social Security, cut everyone's taxes, and let individuals figure out what to do to ensure their own survival, or that of their parents.

As the economy rebounds explosively from removing the shackles of the entitlement programs, I suspect it won't be too hard for people to figure out how to survive. In fact, I bet it works itself out in about a year. But the key is to simply declare Social Security a loss, right now, and remember John Galt's words:

"Get the hell out of my way."

Postscript: In response to a good op-ed ("What’s Missing From The Budget Debate") over at the Forbes.com blog for Objectivism, writers Brook and Watkins make the point that everyone's talking about Ayn Rand without employing her arguments for the morality of capitalism, and I couldn't resist adding a comment related to my preceding post:

Ayn Rand's arguments for the moral case against entitlements are essential. What we face today is primarily a conflict of moralities: the morality of altruism, which holds not merely that we are our brother's keeper, but that we are his serf -- versus the morality of rational people who have a right to live and pursue their own happiness unencumbered by unchosen duties imposed on us by others. As she said in Atlas Shrugged,
"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six--for your neighbor's supper--for his wife's operation--for his child's measles--for his mother's wheel chair --for his uncle's shirt--for his nephew's schooling--for the baby next door--for the baby to be born--for anyone anywhere around you-- it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures--and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end.... From each according to his ability, to each according to his need...."
But Ayn Rand also argued that when your principles are correct, the moral and the practical are in harmony. I think another argument can be made and must be made if the American people are to wake up to reality--present them the cold, stark logic of what will happen if the entitlements aren't ended and the status quo continues.

Who is talking these days of the fact that we will experience a collapse right out of Atlas Shrugged--or Stalinist Russia? A collapse of such magnitude that it will very quickly lead to the destruction of every business in America.

But as fast as the economy is going to collapse, it likely won't collapse fast enough to offset the printing of monopoly money by the treasury, as government tries to answer the screams of those who feel entitled, along with those of every federal, state and local payroll.

Whateever nom de plume it's floated under, QE3, 4, 5, ad infinitum are a certainty as government tries to stay ahead of the game. In a race to the bottom, confidence in the dollar will fall faster than economic output will wither, giving rise to a hyper-inflation that will dwarf anything the Argentinians could imagine--it could reach hundreds or thousands of percent per day, as it did in Weimar Germany in the 1920's.

As money becomes worthless and people realize there's no work and no food to be had anywhere, complete anarchy will seize the country, with nationwide rioting and looting, mass killings and widespread starvation. Gold will be of limited value--when there's nothing to buy at any price, there's no need for money--but the government will seize all privately owned gold anyway, along with every other surviving asset.

Without food or money to pay the Army and police, there will be a temporary collapse of the government, which will re-emerge under martial law as people scream for order. Little known Executive Orders on the books for decades will be invoked by the President to seize every major industry and conscript the entire populace into work gangs. Congress will become irrelevant, and the government will quickly spiral into complete totalitarianism.

Many people will rebel and vastly more killings will take place in the civil wars that will break out, leaving millions dead. Millions.

Without adequate surviving transportation, the country will likely balkanize into competing regions, states, tribes, gangs that will span the gamut of fascism, stalinism, religious theocracies and medieval feifdoms.

And so will go the world: without the stabilizing influence of the U.S., a world war will likely occur in the midst of this, with countries everywhere seeing the opportunity to seize their neighbor's assets or settle old grudges. The U.S. will get involved, and send conscripts overseas to die, while conscripts die domestically, too--from fighting, starvation, ill health.

These are not just possible scenarios, they are certain ones--if politicians in Washington continue to talk of "political reality" and attempt to "fine-tune" the problem to satisfy the special interest groups they've created who we can be sure will continue to demand entitlements from their brothers.

But political reality has never trumped reality. As Ayn Rand said, "You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

The stark, practical reality people need to be made aware of is that we are facing the utter destruction of our way of life, our country, our world, our civilization--in our lifetimes.
There will be no entitlements after that happens. There will be no "getting yours" before the music stops. The music will just stop, leaving everyone standing--young and old, entitled and serfs alike.

The alternative? End the entitlements, now. Shut down Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--cold turkey. Declare it a total loss. End all taxes for the entitlements.

The result? People would scramble for a few weeks, retirees would have to dip into their savings, depend on their children, approach charitable organizations for help--or get a job.

But it wouldn't last long.

The cancellation of all that debt -- tens of trillions of dollars, with interest -- with the sudden influx of so much money back into private hands -- hundreds of billions of dollars -- would give people so much confidence that the economy would explode in mere weeks with business growth and job creation.

And if you want to give it a real boost--cut $500B of regulatory agencies and suspend income taxes for a year.

That's the practical side of the argument. Because most people want to "do the right thing", the moral argument is always more fundamental--we have a right to our lives and to live them without shackles--but the practical argument might at least scare the hell out of enough people to make them demand our government do the right thing.

To quote the industrialist Francisco d'Anconia from Atlas Shrugged:
"Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

The Atlanteans

2011-06-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

That title was for a script I wrote many years ago, but it also fits our topic.

A few days ago I ran across a youtube video of a brilliant pianist, Valentina Lisitsa, and my eye was caught by her very unique style of playing. Look at this lovely performance of Chopin's Nocturne in D Flat Major (Op. 27, No. 2), and pay close attention to her hands. It's the fluid motion of her hands that mesmerized me:

I've spent three days watching those hands.

Now watch this video of her performance of Grieg's 1st Concerto (in 3 parts on youtube):
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

It was this superb performance that first attracted my attention. I've always liked Rubinstein's interpretation but it sounds lifeless compared to Lisitsa's. Watching her hands -- she makes it look effortless, though I was a little taken aback at first by the somewhat (I thought) theatrical style.

Then I noticed this fascinating comment by someone on the web page for the first movement:

"The secret of her success is that she is completely relaxing her muscles after each stroke. This technique comes from Liszt and she understood how to preserve her from muscular problems. In her repertory are the most physique pieces existing and she does them brilliant. This capacity of relaxing allows her to go on without problems (Horowitz could not...)"

She has many dozens of videos up on youtube right now if you want to hear her play, and in just a few years she's acquired many fans from every country on Earth. Many of the videos are being produced right now as an explicit means to promote her career, but they are of very high quality, like that first one, and a real delight to watch.

After listening to the Grieg Concerto I had to know a little more, and I immediately found this charming interview:

Watching this, I was struck by how unpretentious she is, and by her repose--an utterly relaxed self-confidence and assurance that reminded me distinctly of interviews with Ayn Rand. She says,

"I think of myself as an American pianist",

and

"My technique is unusual and I didn't learn it from anyone. In fact my teachers tried to fight me all the way ... I get so offended when people try to assign me to certain schools of play... no, no, no! And Russian school, definitely not!"

These things are never accidents. A Ukrainian by birth, she was 3 years and some months old when she started learning to play. She's now a proud American citizen and resident of rural North Carolina where she lives with her husband. Combined with the romanticism in the music, the pieces all started falling into place for me.

Here's another thoroughly charming interview where she explicitly states something I figured out from a comment she made elsewhere, that she has a photographic memory--when she plays, she sees the sheet music in her mind, and even sees the pages turning! This partly explains how she learned 24 Chopin Etudes from scratch in about a month... But if you watch the interview, you'll get much more insight into who she is, what it was like to grow up in Russia, where classical music was like a competitive sport, what music school itself was like (she did everything the opposite of what her teachers taught her), and why she gave up a parallel ambition to play competitive chess-- she found herself looking for the most beautiful moves rather than the best moves!

In a brief biography on her web page, she lists Rachmaninoff and Chopin as among her favorite composers (an affection I strongly share), so let's return to that first video of Chopin's haunting nocturne and you will see some of the romanticism again. I noticed that she posted the following comment on youtube:

"I went through love-hate "relationship" with this Nocturne. When I was asked by Lanaudiere Fesitval to select 7 Nocturnes for the concert (I never played any before -- to my utter shame) I had to quickly flip through the sheet music and pick ones I thought I might stand :-) This one was number "last" on my list of things to do. I didn't start learning it until it was almost too late (those who watched my webcast of practice can confirm :-)). I dreaded the moment when I will get sick and tired of this sweetest thing ever written with its gorgeous but repetitious melody....

"Then I had my "eureka" moment. It happened when I started looking at Chopin's metronome markings -- in all other Nocturnes they were perfectly in sync with today's consensus -- maybe little faster here, slower there... But this one -- oh my God! Lento Sostenuto marked as 50 beats per minute in half-measure (150BPM in eights). You know how fast is it???? Check it out and see if you can keep up with Mr. Chopin LOL ..... I can't , I still play it waaaaaay under tempo. Let's see how many "critics" will leave comments saying it is too fast .....But , no matter what, it makes a perfect sense-- and suddenly my dread turned into astonishment at Chopin's genius. The whole piece is suddenly transformed from overly long sugary-syrupy chant to an exalted and impassioned speech- you make whatever you want of this speech, maybe it is a declaration of love? After all -- the piece ends with the most beautiful duet of two voices...."

How many people use words like "exalted" and "impassioned", or phrases like "declaration of love"? I know one.

Now listen to one of my favorite Rachmaninoff preludes (G minor, Op.23 no.5), performed absolutely brilliantly in an off-the-cuff performance:

Then contrast with this encore performance (her third encore) of the same piece in Seoul (where she performed the Grieg Concerto):

Or listen to Chopin's nocturne in E Flat Major (Op.9 No.2), another favorite of mine to play:

When I was watching some of these, another thought struck me -- she's not really playing the piano.

She's making love to it.

Watch her entire body. I've never seen anything like that before. Watch her lips -- she speaks silently to the piano while playing some of these pieces, especially the tender ones.

And Chopin's beautiful "Berceuse" lullaby in D Flat Major (Op 57):

Here's a brilliant performance of one of my favorites -- Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. The speed of her hands in this defies my imagination.

Again, it was her hands that captivated me in all these pieces. I confess I've watched them over and over again. As I said, they're mesmerizing.

If you want a greater sense of her virtuousity (this is mainly for the pianists out there), watch and listen as she plays my favorite concerto of all--Rachmaninoff's 2nd... without the orchestra!

Part 2:

Part 3:

Wait till you get to the very end of the third movement! The hands are moving so fast they're a blur.

Here's another example of that, the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which I've always enjoyed playing (it has a dramatic intrigue I like, and a flow when you play it that's very enjoyable):

Or the conflict presented in the first movement to Sonata Appassionata, another that I used to like to play (it's been a long time):

I can't fault anything about how she plays this. Not a note.
(Click here for parts 2 and 3.)

When I watch these videos (and all of them are best watched full screen -- they are beautifully produced high definition video!) my nose is rubbed into the fact that someone like Valentina Lisitsa is so far above a self-taught dilletante duffer like me that she might as well be in another galaxy on the other side of the universe. But it's a nose-rubbing I'll take any time and any place so long as I can see a glimpse of greatness through my hobbyist telescope -- I worship at the altar of ability.

There's much more on youtube, but as a follow-up to all this, here's another interesting 25 minute documentary (in three parts) of Valentina's recording of Rachmaninoff's 2nd with a full orchestra.
Part 1:

(Here is Part 2 and Part 3.)

The second part of this documentary connects to the version minus orchestra. The third part of the documentary offers some more of her criticism of the Russian music school (which she says Rachmaninoff didn't follow!) and a few outtakes at the end (the last is funny).

You may note that the musicians in this documentary are rather in awe of her ability.

In my opinion, she may be one of the finest pianists of the last century--but she's in our time, and watching her play, the full scope of the human potential just amazes me. Imagine if everyone in every field fulfilled their potential to this degree. We'd live among giants in Atlantis.

Footnote: the day after posting this, I was listening again to her delightful performance of Rachmaninoff's "Moments Musicaux," Op 16 #2 E flat minor, and noticed this interesting comment on her approach to recording in one take:

Here is a tiny bit of Rachmaninoff -- his #2 of Moments Musicaux (I am going to perform a complete set in Montreal for Pro Musica this March 7th by the way).

No fancy camera work here -- just one (first note to the last) take from the real recording session. Just one of many takes, not necessarily the one that will end up on Rachmaninoff solo works CD (with First Sonata and miscellany of Preludes etc).

See, nowadays recording process is about basically making sure that every note is played, at least once. It can easily lead to making hundreds or even thousands of little "takes." If one person is apt to make a mistake here and there -- multiply it by orchestra members -- and you arrive into 1000+ takes. Everybody who tried to take a photo of a group with iPhone can relate to it. How many times have you have to take a picture to NOT get somebody with eyes shut or mouth open :-)

The difference between a live performance and a recording is just as vast as the difference between watching a play in a theater and a movie. All of it of course thanks to modern recording and editing equipment (in movies just as in music). It used to be different and great musicians of old times would come to studio, play just as they would for the audience (the only difference being, they could do another try if things didn't quite work on the first take) and go away with a magnificent recording. We can complain all we want about old recordings as being sloppy and full of wrong notes, messed passagework. We just have to remember that those are honest, unadulterated, unaided performances and I challenge any modern pianist who dares to laugh about old-timers to try to match the recordings of golden era without faking it with editing. We are all good singers in a shower - but if you face a set of microphones staring at you from a complete silence, and then the little light goes off -- and you are about to face your posterity without a safety net of "oh, we will clean it up later"-- and every little note that you miss, and every phrase that you don't play beautifully is going to live forever as your damnation--it can unnerve the strongest and most confident. Being a musician is fun!!!!!

And then after posting that footnote, I was listening to her excellent performance of Chopin's Fantasy in F minor (Op. 49), and saw an even more fascinating extended comment she made:

This is Chopin's response to Liszt's "Funerailles" (I know, I know, Liszt wrote it AFTER Chopin died -- so let's say it was Liszt's response to Chopin's Fantasy.) The same plan -- starting with a funeral introduction , same f -minor, same abundance of octaves... But Funerailles is a great piano war-horse, favorite of any "virtuoso" with a decent octave technique -- sure and cheap way to impress and thrill the audiences. Fantasy in comparison is a poor cousin, underappreciated and often misunderstood: the worst offenders are often female pianists (LOL, huuuuuge grin goes here) playing it in overly sentimental and romanticized way - complete with hands flailing, eyes rolling and hair flying :-) Guys just can't do it :-)

How did it happen? Liszt was a great self-promotion and marketing guy -- he discovered a neat trick of "programming" in music, forcing music "to tell a story"- and listeners suddenly thought, "Gee, now we understand what this music is about, how cool!" This was his trademark -- but it was certainly not his invention. In fact, most if not all music has a "program", something composer thought of when composing and something we think of when we listen. It can be something very concrete and extremely detailed (Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for example) -- or just a vague hint of an idea that makes us think further (Beethoven 5th Symphony).

The problem with detailed programs is that music can become "dated", tied to a certain event that might be of no importance to future listeners. People can relate in perpetuity to "the fate knocking on the door" of the 5th symphony. But we can never again (hopefully) feel what French audience must have felt on Berlioz' premiere during the third movement with its guillotine strike. I bet their hair was standing up and Goosebumps were covering the listeners who still remembered Terror some years before... I think that even watching Avatar in 3D is nothing in comparison to that experience :-)

Chopin was much more subtle in his "programs" -- he catered to more sophisticated smaller audience of salons rather than big concert halls. These people knew the historical context and could understand him without need to spell it out. In order to fully appreciate his music we must know at least a bit of history too. Then it becomes clear that Chopin was so different from a stereotyped effeminate, sickly romantic virtuoso image. He was a true titan, not in body but in spirit -- singlehandedly (with few brethren poets, artists etc) keeping the whole people from oblivion and cultural destruction. For his people, his country, was at this time a mere geographic term. Formerly a proud and powerful nation, one of Europe superpowers, Poland has fallen so low because of internal discord that it was picked piece by piece by strong and brutal neighbors until it disappeared. New "owners" were bent on wiping national identity and pride to secure their new acquisitions. They would have succeeded was it not for Chopin.

You know that musicologists call him a first" national" composer. For a good reason -- he created an epic of his nation in music just as Homer created his in Odyssey or Virgil in Aeneid... And we are not only talking about things like Polonaises or Mazurkas fitting into this "national" category. Fantasy is a prime example of thinly veiled national music. Why? Bear with me while I take you through last foray into history. Chopin and his family ended up in a part of Poland that was grabbed by Russian Empire. He traveled abroad with Russian passport (Chopin, a Russian composer? LOL) and he had to lie on his exit visa application (yes, I am serious) that he is in transit to New World, Americas. He lived for almost whole his life with a stamp "in Transit".

The single event in history that changed his life was Polish uprising of 1830-31, a noble but doomed to fail attempt by patriots to overthrow occupying forces. (Revolutionary Etude was written the night he got the news of Russian Cossacks entering Warsaw, he didn't know if his family even survived all carnage and rape.) The rebels was brutally destroyed and all the hope of freedom was lost. Chopin realized that he will never see his native land -- or even his family. All his life he was carrying in his soul -- and in his music -- the memory of this event and of its unsung heroes. Fantasy is an ode to all those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom.

I find these comments the most interesting -- they give the artist and her music much more depth, and meaning to me.

Footnote 2: Another interesting comment is attached to this lovely nocturne in C minor by Chopin (Op. 48, No. 1):

One of Chopin's most priceless performance remarks is at the beginning of this Nocturne -- "sotto voce". Just like that: not a girlish "piano", not an ambivalent "mezzo forte", not even meaty forte (the last thing you want here is an "opera" voice for this melody). It effectively bars all over-the-top cheap and showy "expressive emotions" -- no eye rolling allowed, no hair flailing, no hands flying, no sobs, no visible tears.... A musical equivalent of the famed British "keeping a stiff upper lip"-- this "sotto voce" gives us the right sense of what this piece is about. Just as Chopin's 2nd sonata, this nocturne deals directly and openly with such tragic subjects as death, loss and grief ... except, here you are allowed to leave personal comments. 2nd sonata is a depiction of all those things, this Nocturne is a commentary -- or an epitaph..... the fifth movement that would come after the Finale ...If you ever visit La Madeleine in Paris (Chopin's parish church where his funeral was held on October 30th) think about this Nocturne, OK?

PS: Talking about parallels between Rachmaninoff and Chopin works, don't you think that "doppio movimento" part ( last pages) sounds ominously like Rachmaninoff Etude-Tableau E flat Minor Op39?

One other thing I like in these commentaries is that the music is not something that exists just in isolation like an abstraction divorced from concretes, but it has a history and a meaning to her that goes so far as visiting these places. And in that I can find my own expanded meaning.

And connecting to this, by fortuitous coincidence, is the interview that just came out yesterday:

Footnote 3: I might as well add this fascinating comment she made about Chopin's C Sharp minor Nocturne (op 27, #1) that I actually discovered before adding the last two:

This is an enigma of a nocturne. There are many things written about it , all trying to explain it away, to make sense of it. You probably heard about " death in Venice, murder perhaps.. ....body silently covered by soft waves while the moon keeps shining etc ".....Ah, all this romantic stuff -- I will add just my two cents worth, no more ...

If nocturnes are indeed songs of love, this one has strong undertones of jealousy, betrayal and, ultimately, death.

It hauntingly fascinating -- but you can't call it beautiful. Just think about the melody here -- where is it??? And can you call this strange and gratingly chromatic chant a melody? Or .... another question, which key IS it -- C sharp minor or major? Is it a half-smile or half-cry? ...The melody very soon becomes a duet -- and then middle part comes all of a sudden as a violent burst of energy and action. I don't recall any other piece of Chopin (supposedly effeminate and weakling invalid of a composer) where he would use triple forte- fortissimo so boldly (that is like FFF forte!) The octave recitative in the left hand before the recap sounds like a curse. The most telling and poignant remark however is reserved for the very last "words" of the duet before the coda: Chopin writes "con duolo" (with grief) - the last farewell of unhappy lovers perhaps...

PS: For those visual people (like myself LOL) here is a perfect visual match: type pre-Raphaelites into Google image search -- you will see "Ophelia" and many others that fit the mood and color of the piece perfectly.

PSPS: On understanding composer's intent: Chopin often uses remark "con anima". Don't mix it with "animato" . Yes, the root is the same but the meaning and action is opposite. It was made very clear in this nocturne -- in the middle part there are measures marked "con anima" and then come the ones marked "stretto"."Con anima" bars are slowing down. He treated con anima literally -- "with soul" -- not "in an animated way". Russian language has a better direct translation "душевно"!

I had looked up "pre-Raphaelite" paintings in Google after first reading this, and her description was perfect, but about two days after reading it, I woke up late after working till 4AM, and one sip of microwaved two-day old coffee later, I suddenly realized I hadn't a clue what the term "pre-Raphaelite" meant. So I searched again, and came up with this interesting explanation off of Wiki:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three founders were soon joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form a seven-member "brotherhood".

The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art. Hence the name: Pre-Raphaelite. In particular, they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua".

To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process of painting ... and hence ... any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional kind". In contrast, they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.

The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status[citation needed], because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform-movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais's parents' house on Gower Street, London in 1848. ... They kept the existence of the Brotherhood secret from members of the Royal Academy.

The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:
1. to have genuine ideas to express;
2. to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote;
4. most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.
These principles are deliberately non-dogmatic, since the Brotherhood wished to emphasise the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and methods of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable.

Nevertheless, they were particularly fascinated by medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity that had been lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to clash with certain principles of realism, which stress the independent observation of nature.

In its early stages, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that their two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided and began to move in two directions. The realist-side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist-side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism.
In their attempts to revive the brilliance of colour found in Quattrocento art, Hunt and Millais developed a technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. They hoped that in this way their colours would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity. This emphasis on brilliance of colour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists, such as Reynolds, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect that the Pre-Raphaelites despised.
...all members of the Brotherhood signed works with their name and the initials "PRB". Between January and April 1850, the group published a literary magazine, "The Germ". ...
In 1850 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood became controversial after the exhibition of Millais's painting Christ In The House Of His Parents, considered to be blasphemous by many reviewers, notably Charles Dickens.[3] ...Their medievalism was attacked as backward-looking and their extreme devotion to detail was condemned as ugly and jarring to the eye. According to Dickens, Millais made the Holy Family look like alcoholics and slum-dwellers, adopting contorted and absurd "medieval" poses.

...The movement influenced the work of many later British artists well into the twentieth century... some claim, strongly influenced the young J.R.R. Tolkien...

In the twentieth century artistic ideals changed and art moved away from representing reality. Since the Pre-Raphaelites were fixed on portraying things with near-photographic precision, though with a distinctive attention to detailed surface-patterns, their work was devalued by many painters and critics. In particular, after the First World War, British Modernists associated Pre-Raphaelite art with the repressive and backward times in which they grew up...

Now that was interesting, and again, it lends even more insight into the musician, and her own work.

Footnote 4 (August 6):
This next video caught my eye for one reason: it shows better than almost any other how hard Lisitsa concentrates. Note especially how much she has her eyes closed--as I noted previously, she has a photographic memory and reads the music while playing, but in her head. And it shows more of how she speaks to herself while playing, and her very fluid technique, a method of relaxation and precision.

As I also noted, she normally practices 12 hours a day--because that's what she enjoys doing, to the exclusion of almost everything else. You can see it via her website -- she's put up videos of entire practice sessions, and I recommend them for anyone looking for insights into how someone becomes great at what they do. I think too many people simply have no idea--they imagine it's a little more work over the average person, a little more innate talent.

I mention all this because a topic of longtime interest to me is -- what makes greatness? I observe at least three essentials: total passion for one thing; extremely focused, consistent and precise effort to grasp what they are doing and how they do it; and an utterly dedicated work regimen.

I'm tempted to add: unusual intelligence and some unique ability that most people don't have (like photographic memory), but I'm not sure these are essential. Given the first three and a very good natural endowment of intelligence, I think the "unusual" part develops in time, especially if someone starts early enough in life. (Lisitsa started at age 3.) Some "natural" ability will help initially energize the passion, then the passion will drive the ability, and passion and ability together will drive the dedication, and all three will feed on each other.

Exceptional instruction is important, but I think a fourth possible essential factor is that the great person usually has some very early insight into the key principles of what they do so well that quickly puts them beyond the need for much instruction. This gives them a big jump in their starting point, and early confidence and enjoyment.

Footnote 5 (10/19/2011):
I just have to add one more comment. This develops the psychology of greatness somewhat more. Early in this post I echoed the comment of another fan of Valentina's, who remarked that her hand technique was a form of relaxation--anyone who's played the piano knows that difficult pieces can cause cramping in your arms or hands if you don't do some kind of relaxation while you play. But I was never fully satisfied with this explanation. She was using the technique on easy pieces, too.

Then I had a flash of insight the other day. Two comments she made starting resonating in my head. First, was her anecdote about giving up a potential career in chess because she found herself looking for the most beautiful moves rather than the best moves. Second, was her comment that she is a very visual person--code, in part, for the fact that she has a photographic memory (which I'm terribly jealous of), but the meaning is deeper--she's a very visual person. Because of her photographic memory or not, she's a very visual person.

Put those two pieces together in the context of a technique that she herself acknowledges is very unusual, which her teachers couldn't break her of -- and you get: a visually beautiful technique. That is, I think she strives to bring beauty to more than the sounds -- she strives to bring beauty to the fluid movement of her hands while she plays. I don't mean this in terms of any kind of theatricality for the audience, which had been my first unfair impression. I mean she strives to play beautifully. Sound and sight. Not primarily for her audience. I think she does it primarily for--herself. As I remarked, she makes love to the piano.

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe

2011-06-07T19:15:00.000-07:00

Guts and Self-confidence vs. The Cowardly Lion

2011-06-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

I have an infinite number of double categories to describe people, in one of my favorite phrases, "There's two kinds of people...," but the one I will dwell on here in particular are those who want to know what reality is, and those who don't.

People that want to be efficacious and successful in life fall into the first category. Those that don't give a damn about any kind of success, existential, spiritual or otherwise, fall into the second.

I think this categorical distinction applies to both Christians and the Left, among whom advocates of reason hope to make inroads. People make errors, but in the first category, it's errors of knowledge or reasoning that lead them to believe "God" or "Marxism" is somehow representative of what reality is, and so they are sucked in to the miasma of faith in God or faith in Society.

Errors of metaphysics. A malevolent universe premise might especially predispose them, but many other factors come to play.

What I'm suggesting is that before engaging in discussion with someone, it's fruitful to first determine what category someone falls into, to know the basic premise at work. If you know someone is struggling to identify the true nature of reality so that they can be successful in life (at a much deeper and broader level than economic success), that can help focus your arguments towards them. If you know they aren't, don't waste your time.

This is why I never dismiss people out of hand just because they call themselves "Christians" or "Very Left". Buried deep down inside, hidden from view there may be a solid core of allegiance to reality and reason buried somewhere, and I've seen and known too many people who suddenly "got it" and said, "I was wrong -- to hell with that!"

Literally.

This makes it all the more ridiculous when I see, as I have lately, so many avowed Objectivists running around and condemning other Objectivists over nuanced differences of opinion on complex subjects. They seem to have decided that reason is not their forte and have dedicated themselves to the proposition that emotion, condemnation and ostracism is preferable to an argument. In theory, it ought to be easier to have a reasoned argument with someone who agrees with you on 99% of the corpus of Ayn Rand's works rather than someone raised on, say, Catholicism or Marx.

While I'm on my rant, I note that this approach was so not what Ayn Rand did. She would engage with anyone, and took the larger view of her long-term objectives when she did it.

For instance, recently a story was recounted by Harry Binswanger of AR's appearance with [philosopher] John Hospers at a major university. Hospers behaved as a royal ass, and according to Harry, AR gave a very reasoned response to him. On other occasions (for instance, the famous Phil Donahue interview) AR would make an issue of rudeness -- but she never ran. As Harry tells it, she didn't walk away from Hospers, either, though he certainly deserved it in spades. No. He wasn't the audience. He was the means to the bigger audience. Instead, she ignored his rudeness and gave reasoned responses to her main audience -- everyone else in the auditorium.

Contrasts in approach can be very effective to convince people just who is the more reasoned.

More Objectivists need to remember this. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone here, but at the larger audience. Public conflict is a way to reach a lot of people, that is, that "first category" of people that I was talking about.

Unfortunately, lately I'm seeing too many Objectivists online (ie, Facebook, or as it ought to be called, "In Your Face with a Book") giving up on reasoned arguments and substituting the uppity "about-face" to diss others instead. It's so easy after all. You don't need to think or reason or put together a coherent response. You just demand they agree with you on everything, and if they don't, you slap them in the face with a haughty air of moral superiority and walk away.

Brilliant.

Yes, there's a formula for impressing the world with Ayn Rand's philosophy -- claim to be her advocate and then practice the opposite of what she did in her own life. I can just hear what she would have said to that.

But I don't think any of those who are doing it would have had the guts to do it in her presence.

For an example of greater guts and and self-confidence, look at Francisco d'Anconia. A man who always had an answer in any social situation -- and he never ran away, even when surrounded by wolves.

  Standing unnoticed on the edge of the group, Rearden heard a woman, who had large diamond earrings and a flabby, nervous face, ask tensely, "Senior d'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"
"Just exactly what it deserves,"
"Oh, how cruel!"
"Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do."
  Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil--and he's the typical product of money."
  Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.
  "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money?...
There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, "It's horrible!"--"It's not true!"--"How vicious and selfish!"--saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.
  "Senor d'Anconia," declared the woman with the earrings, "I don't agree with you!"
  "If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully."
  "Oh, I can't answer you. I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong."
  "How do you know it?"
  "I feel it. I don't go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you're heartless."
  "Madame, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I'm heartless enough to say that when you'll scream, 'But I didn't know it!'--you will not be forgiven."
  The woman turned away, a shudder running through the flesh of her cheeks and through the angry tremor of her voice: "Well, it's certainly a funny way to talk at a party!"
  A portly man with evasive eyes said loudly, his tone of forced cheerfulness suggesting that his sole concern in any issue was not to let it become unpleasant, "If this is the way you feel about money, senor, I think I'm darn glad that I've got a goodly piece of d'Anconia Copper stock."
  Francisco said gravely, "I suggest that you think twice, sir."

His opponents did the running. Not Francisco. (And of course, this was Ayn Rand.)

But it does require a much greater self-confidence and knowledge and committment to reason.

---- Postscript ----
The day after posting my comments above, a friend remarked that Ayn Rand did break off with John Hospers, with the implicit question of whether that refuted my argument. I replied:

____, yes, Ayn Rand did break off relations with Hospers -- as she absolutely should have. Hospers demonstrated an extreme form of dishonesty. But I don't think this can be equated to a lot of the superficially childish histrionics that takes place on Facebook.

And merely because AR had every right to walk out of that auditorium the moment Hospers pulled the stunt he did, she didn't blindly exercise that right without considering what would advance her greater goals -- she was above all, rational. She had an audience, and a forum, and bad as Hospers behaved, she had an opportunity to reach many active minds with a reasoned argument. She seized it.

How many people on Facebook do that? Instead of using disagreement and conflict as a chance to set an example, to make a reasoned point that will impress others with the rightness of their point of view and with their dedication to reason, they oh-so-often degenerate immediately into name-calling, "de-friending" and moral posturing to prove who is the most loyal supporter of this or that person.

Give me one example where Ayn Rand ever engaged in that kind of sycophantic behavior? Or one example where Leonard Peikoff ever did it?

In any case, AR's dissassociating from Hospers makes the point my comment started with -- which category of people was Hospers in? Those with fealty to reality, or those with fealty to whim? Clearly the latter, as he revealed. That he concealed it from her showed he was irredeemably dishonest. He was a lost cause.

We could psychologize his motives, or AR's motives for dealing with him in the first place (I doubt she was completely unaware of his intellectual dishonesty -- she was too smart for that) but it's irrelevant, because the second point of my comment remains correct: there's a lot of behavior from Objectivists or wannabees that is completely contrary to Ayn Rand's own approach to spreading ideas or persuading people, and I think they ought to know it.

To put it bluntly: they are acting as a discredit to reason, to her philosophy, and to her memory. They don't practice what they preach, they don't practice what she preached, and they don't practice what she practiced. They are acting as very poor advocates for Objectivism.

AR upheld reason, not just as a process of thought in the cloistered isolation of one's mind in an airtight room with the door sealed shut, but also as a means of rational persuasion -- to be out there in the world building arguments to reach people, because it's only by reaching people that we can effect cultural change. I'm not fabricating any motives for her here. She wrote about it enough, as when she said (in "What Can One Do?" -- in her book, Philosophy: Who Needs It) that people should speak out in any forum, in any way they can. She also wrote major novels to that same end.

But what's the point of anyone else following her example to build a base of intellectual support for the principle of reason (which was above all else what she stood for) if they then go around condemning and ostracising everyone who lacks the omniscience to see how to properly apply those principles 30 seconds after learning their validity?

It's just asininely ridiculous.

Hell, I couldn't get every electrical engineer on the planet to agree on the application of Ohm's Law in every instance (I could tell stories). But I don't respond by climbing on my soap box and shouting into a megaphone that they're worthless individuals who deserve to burn in hell and anyone who thinks otherwise or consorts with the guilty or consorts with those who consort with the guilty (ad infinitum) shall burn with them. No. I build something that works. There's my ultimate argument and my proof.

Obviously, if someone is dishonest -- sure. You dissassociate, and that might (emphasize "might") demand some public statement. Sometimes, even if someone is basically honest but incapable of following a reasoned argument for whatever reason of predisposition, or is simply rude or obnoxious, you might dissassociate just because they're irritating and maintaining contact does nothing to advance your agenda -- but that doesn't require public displays of breast-beating accompanied by a Tarzan yell of their moral worthlessness. You just pull away until such time as they start behaving as adults and keep open the possibility that they will clean up their act with time, maturity, thought and greater understanding.

But a lot of the "de-friending" and other infantile behavior I'm seeing doesn't even rise to this level. It's got the most superficial kind of rationalization to support it, which amounts to the psychology of a bully who can't marshall a reasoned response to someone more eloquent, so he resorts to the only weapon in his arsenal of ideas -- a punch in the nose. I notice a common thread of this, over and over and over again, among too many of those who climb on a soap box and revert to condemnation when they can't find the words to persuade another mind, as if their failure to construct a reasoned argument is prima facie evidence that the target of their condemnation is dishonest and unreachable.

That's just absurd.

Persuasive, logical arguments that overcome the psychological hurdles of an opponent's entire lifetime of thinking are extremely difficult to construct. Rarely -- and I do mean rarely -- can one ever persuade another of the rightness of one's point of view in a brief conversation (or email exchange). The most you can normally hope to do is plant the seeds for an eventual enlightenment. That's certainly how I approach it. First I try to establish whether my audience is basically honest and whether they have some committment to reality, and then I try to approach them as equals in a way that can be summarized as "have you ever considered this fact, this logic, this point of view?"

I don't demand agreement, I don't try to construct the comprehensive bullet-proof argument, I only ask that they consider thinking about some point or two. I try to show respect for their intelligence and their ability to think independently, and for their life-experience -- because it can really be hard for people to overcome mental baggage. (I include myself here.)

I find this a far more successful means of persuasion than condemning everyone who won't agree with me after 5 minutes of discussion.

And it's only by working at this for years and years do you get better at it. Reasoned, persuasive argument is hard. It takes a lot of thought on how to do it, and a lot of practice doing it.

But you do have to engage with others who disagree with you to get better at it. No one gets that practice by getting mad and giving up, which is what most of the de-friending is all about. That is, giving-up because verbal apoplexy or aphasia forces them to confront an undeveloped cognitive faculty that makes them feel embarassed, inadequate and inferior -- to be an advocate of reason who can't reason. This makes much of the condemnation and ostracism nothing more than an evasion to avoid confronting the loss of self-esteem in their own eyes or their peers' eyes.

I could slice and dice this ad infinitum, but my original comment, like this one, was an off-the-cuff remark that wasn't intended to be a comprehensive discussion, just something to make people think about what they are doing.

Answering the Exhortations of a Moral Leech

2011-06-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

In response to a commenter over at PJ who exhorted us all to sacrifice as our "brother's keeper", in response to this excellent op-ed by Beth Haynes in opposition to Medicare, I said:

Who is the "brother" we are obligated to be keeping?

Is it a common criminal, a moocher, a looter, a bureaucrat, or just the average guy who votes for Obama so that we can all be enslaved to provide for our "brothers" at the point of a government gun?

Or is the "brother" we are keeping someone we value -- a family member, a close friend, an acquaintence who shares our own convictions and ideas and values and returns the favor with love or appreciation or simply the inspiration of their own integrity, goodness or other virtue?

The first example is a sacrifice. The second is not.

No one should be sacrificing. We should be trading -- exchanging value for value, including the spiritual values of honesty, integrity, independence and justice.

If we help someone -- to the extent we can afford it -- it is justice to their character that make them deserving.

But to insert the dictates of the government into that equation short-circuits the entire process of individual judgment. If I can't judge who deserves my help by my standards and by my judgment of what I can afford to help them, all becomes sacrifice. I become a slave to their need and a slave to the bureaucrat who forces me to help them at the point of his gun.

To quote John Galt (Atlas Shrugged),

"I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. ...You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight.

"You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

"You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I -I am the man who has granted you your wish.

"Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you're drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself--use it now.

"The word that has destroyed you is 'sacrifice.' Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have a chance.

"'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.

"....To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you--you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

"...this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are 'non-you.'

"...Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.

"...Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.

"..."This country--the product of reason--could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man's soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved.

"...In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. ...man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads."

The Death of Childhood

2011-05-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

Reading an excellent editorial over at Capitalism Magazine on Obama's end-game to destroy Israel ("Obama's Vision of the Middle East Means The Death of Israel"), I was once again reminded that the one thing that needs more emphasis in the commentataries on Obama's "objectives" or "intentions" is what columnist Ed Cline more than hints at -- the one key fact of Obama that most people can't seem to get their heads around, or refuse to consider as "conspiratorial", "unbelievable", "impossible": that Obama's intentions are not the random result of ignorance or incompetence, but have the deliberate, conscious and purposeful goal of destruction.

Why?

I've spoken about it more than a few times on this blog. (See especially "Good Night, America", but as a sampling of others, "Obama's End Game", "Obama's Communist Past", "Yet ANOTHER commie in Comrade Barack's closet", and for some real insight into who he could be working for, "How to Brainwash a Nation" and "KGB Today".)

In the case of Israel, his objective is the destruction of Israel, pure and simple. In the case of the United States, whether by profligate spending to bankrupt us, evisceration of our nuclear arsenal to make us defenseless (coming soon, evisceration of our conventional arsenal, too), or a healthcare law that is the germ of a future totalitarianism to enslave us, his goal is the literal destruction of the United States.

No one wants to say that. It's too "conspiratorial" and "unthinkable". If you're really naive, you'll say "mean-spirited."

I won't dwell here on the motivations for the apparent nihilism of Obama (is it nihilism if you do it in the service of some existential master?), but it has to be answered at some point to better understand the danger he poses everyone--even his own supporters. (For deeper motivations, read "Good Night, America.") But whoever or whatever he serves, what Obama stands for, even if he doesn't know it himself, is the primordial creature that has been stalking mankind for thousands of years, and which is now ready to pounce once again.

If I may paraphrase maybe too generously from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", it has to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-imposed delusion -- that Obama is simply "misguided" and "inexperienced" but is still "well-intentioned". He isn't. And our lives depend on everyone understanding that.

The Role of “The Hook” in Story Writing

2011-04-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand’s 1968 essay, “Basic Principles of Literature” (reprinted in The Romantic Manifesto) discussed plot, theme, style and characterization in story-writing. It developed the fundamental principles behind these attributes in a good novel, though at a very abstract level--by analogy, at the level that Newton’s Laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetics are to applied physics. The information in this essay is essential if you want to be a writer, but not nearly enough for anyone to learn to be a writer. A foundation for becoming one, no more.

Her essay is perhaps most well-known for its comparison of a scene in her novel The Fountainhead—to the same scene written from a different perspective of characterization in the protagonist, Howard Roark. To a lesser degree, her essay is also known for comparing the stylization of scenes by Thomas Wolfe and Mickey Spillane, to illustrate their approaches to concretizing detail vs. presenting evaluations to a reader—an excerpt from one of the novels of Spillane (who was a good friend of ARs) illustrates a method that counts on an active mind and which doesn’t attempt to substitute the writer’s evaluations for your own, by means of selective presentation of perceptions and conceptual identifications. Wolfe, in contrast, is the archetype of the un-focused writer who, unable to dissect his own evaluations, merely repeats what he feels and expects you to feel along. As Rand wrote,

Let us compare the literary style of two excerpts from two different novels [One Lonely Night, by Spillane, and The Web and the Rock, by Wolfe], reproduced below. Both are descriptions of the same subject: New York City at night. Observe which one of them re-creates the visual reality of a specific scene, and which one deals with vague, emotional assertions and floating abstractions.

First excerpt [Spillane]:
Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.

Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink.
Second excerpt [Wolfe]:
That hour, that moment, and that place struck with a peerless co-incision upon the very heart of his own youth, the crest and zenith of his own desire. The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match. He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night—of Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacre-Coeur, in its vast, mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance; of London with its smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable—had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious, but had yet produced no beauty that could equal this.

As a footnote, this particular comparison is mildly notable from a historical perspective, because, according to some accounts, Barbara Branden loved the works of Wolfe and was offended by AR’s criticism of him.

I won’t quote everything AR said about these two paragraphs, but this much she said is relevant to the discussion here:

...Observe the difference in their methods. There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane's description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness. Wolfe does not describe the city; he does not give us a single characteristic visual detail. He asserts that the city is "beautiful," but does not tell us what makes it beautiful. Such words as "beautiful," "astounding," "incomparable," "thrilling," "lovely" are estimates; in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.

Spillane's style is reality-oriented and addressed to an objective psycho-epistemology: he provides the facts and expects the reader to react accordingly. Wolfe's style is emotion-oriented and addressed to a subjective psycho-epistemology: he expects the reader to accept emotions divorced from facts, and to accept them second-hand.

I merely recount this as a prelude to a literary comparison I’d like to make of my own. As I noted, the principles Ayn Rand discussed are very general—literature 101—and being a successful writer of serious Romantic fiction (that is, in the philosophical sense of Romanticism and serious in the sense of something enduring) requires so much more, that I would say Romantic fiction writing is possibly (in my opinion) the most difficult job there is for human beings to pursue.

I mean that. It is incredibly hard to do well. I’ve sketched some observations to support that claim in previous posts, but to summarize, there’s so much one has to know—about not merely the technical attributes of story, but also human psychology, life in general, history, philosophy, the introspective workings of your own inner psychology, and above all, your training, practice and capacity to integrate everything you know into a coherent, logical (ie, fully consistent) progression of events, with characters that are compelling and believable, in an original plot of deep meaning for your readers (or viewers)—that at any one moment in time there’s only a few people on the planet (if that) who are capable of doing first-rank writing.   But even among the lesser writers (let’s say, best-selling popular authors and screenwriters), there’s still only a few hundred on the planet who can do the job of writing good pot-boilers. Story writing is hard. It requires imagination, knowledge, intelligence, a unique psychology and a lot of independence.

I’ve found over the years in my own study and practice as a wanna-be (we’re still working at it) that there’s so many things essential to good writing that I couldn’t begin to address them all here, but one that’s been of interest of late is—how do you hook your audience?

This is not an optional issue for any writer. If you don’t hook your audience in a few moments of reading, or a few minutes after that, you don’t sell a book or a screenplay.   People simply won’t give you more time than that. You wouldn’t give any unknown author more time than that, I guarantee it.

Fiction writing is above all about motivating your audience to read what you write. You have to sell yourself, in effect, not merely through the publisher’s own marketing (if you are so fortunate), but through the opening pages of your work.

The initial attention span of a prospective customer for your novel (or short story or screenplay) is about one short paragraph. Fail to interest them with that much prose and that much prose alone, and they close the cover and move on. Get them interested enough in the first paragraph and they might read a page or two. Get them interested in a page or two and they might buy the book.   That’s how a hook works.

Try it. I’ve done the exercise myself: Go to a bookstore and start picking up the best-sellers. When I do this I consciously commit to reading exactly one paragraph on page one and no more. If that paragraph hooks me, I’ll commit to reading more. By this method you can quickly sort out the good writers from the not so good, and decide what authors really know their craft.

You will quickly see a huge disparity between the really successful writers and those that are less successful. Actually, even among the very successful authors there’s a huge disparity in ability to do this well. Marketing and a large support staff (sadly) cover up a lot of sins. That many authors can make a living with writing a poor “hook” tells you something about how forgiving the reading public can be... but they aren’t infinitely forgiving.

If a novel is basically good, word of mouth can overcome a mediocre “hook”, for instance, but you might have a hard time getting that word of mouth working for you without a really good hook—sales won’t build rapidly if readers aren’t excited and intrigued by the opening moments in your story. If you don’t have a track record as a best-selling author, this applies in spades—you can bet your bottom royalty payment that editors and producers won’t give an amateur more than a one page glance.

(One producer was well-known for reading scripts upside down and flipping the pages randomly—if the pattern of dark and light didn’t look right, he tossed it. Sadly, it’s actually a pretty good system for weeding out most scripts.)

So—it’s absolutely essential to have a good hook. And that’s my focus here. But what makes a good one?
Taking a cue from Ayn Rand’s essay, let me state what I think are the basic principles—of the hook.

Fundamentally, you have to interest the reader in what you write, but of course it has to be in relation to the story. I only mention this because many bad movies ignore this and use any arbitrary element to get your attention (car chases, explosions, violence, sex, etc), and then the story diverges with no relation whatsoever to the opening. This is a massive cheat, and the cashing-in is when the reviews come in—or the audience figures it out and stops attending—but especially when the long-term sales bottom-out too quickly. (The miracle of modern marketing is that some low-level of long-term sales can be achieved for stinkers by appealing to the ignorant, gullible and clueless, of course, but that’s a sewer I don’t wish to dive into.)

Here’s my take on it, keeping in mind that this is only a blog-post of my thoughts, not an exhaustive treatise that can even claim to be correct in every aspect. My approach follows the simple guideline of “who, what, where, when, why”. (The “how” is of course, the story.)

1. You must hint the basic conflict of your story. You have to create some crucial question in the reader’s mind not only that there is a conflict but that it’s an interesting conflict. “How’s it going to end?” is a cliche in the industry, but so true. You have to plant this question in your reader’s head, and you’ve got to develop it and sustain it through every page of the story. You can’t just present a didactic summary suitable for a medical conference or an episode of Dragnet. “There was a murder. It had to be solved. I was the man.” You might begin with something so prosaic as “Fred didn’t like Mary,” but the next words you say had better say more to give a hint of why Fred didn’t like Mary, and why this will be relevant and interesting to the lives of a general audience.

2. You have to introduce the basic setting of the story—the conflict exists in a context, and you can’t understand and “get” the conflict without some grasp of the world you’re going to be entering. You don’t have to present every detail, but you must give enough for the reader to orient himself.

3. You have to introduce a one or more crucial characters, though they don’t have to be the main protagonists, and you must hint at their essential natures and illustrate the conflict between them. Again, it doesn’t have to be every character, nor even the main characters, but they do have to be crucial. The standard here is to hook your audience, not educate them.

4. You have to hint at the underlying theme of the story. If this is a pot-boiler rather than Dostoevsky, the theme may not run deep, but usually there is something. The message of Die Hard, for instance, was primarily “most government officials are bureaucratic morons, but a few dedicated people make all the difference.” Think about it. But for serious stories, the universal meaning is that which will offer the reader/viewer some guidance in their lives. Not the level of a Tom Clancy novel (World War 3 could break out, we could all die, yadayada) but deeper—life in general and your place in the universe, insights into human nature, etc. (See AR for a much better exposition on this point.)

5. What questions have you raised?

Number five applies to all the previous four points and more (that’s what I mean by “hint”)—but it’s so important it simply must be included as a separate point.

Above all, you have to raise questions in the mind of the reader—questions about each of my points. You do not try to answer these points. You are trying to raise questions in the mind of a reader (or viewer) to make him want to discover the answers over the next 200 pages or 2 hours of viewing time. The principle here is to appeal to an active mind that wants to understand and integrate what he’s reading (or seeing) into a coherent whole.

The information has to be highly selective, and presented rat-a-tat-tat to get their attention quickly, while allowing their mind to put the pieces together into something recognizable—but for god’s sake, don’t let them succeed!   That’s called “predictable”. You have to let the entire story answer those questions—if you want to make a living at it. (But of course, you’d better deliver by the end—every fact and statement better add up to a logical whole of characters of consistent motivations you understand, in a world that you can grasp, for a thematic purpose that makes sense.)

I’ll give you a very good example from Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury. Taking account for some writing deficiencies for his very first novel, it has a superb opening hook that any aspiring writer should pay close attention to:

------ I, the Jury, page one -------

I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.

Who put her arms around her? For what reason? What’s happened? Where is this room? Why is Myrna sobbing? Remember, this is the first paragraph for an entire novel. Do you want to read more?

“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.

This doesn’t develop the suspense that much, but it establishes a little more context and we know we’re at a crime scene now. But who is talking?

Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said.

After only about 10 lines, we have a pretty good idea now. We know who Pat is, and now we have one-half a name for our narrator—Mike.

In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

You see how each new detail pulls you forward in machine-gun fashion. But no detail is enough, and each new one raises new questions. The hook is all about creating questions in the mind of your reader in relation to a basic conflict. The conflict here is murder. Who was it? And why was it?

      Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face.   For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?”
      “In the stomach. Better not look at it. The killer carved the nose off a forty-five and gave it to him low.”
      I threw back the sheet and a curse caught in my throat. Jack was in shorts, his one hand still clutching his belly in agony. The bullet went in clean, but where it came out left a hole big enough to cram a fist into.

As a diversion, note the very strong element of characterization present here: we now know that “Mike” is the kind of man who is willing to face reality head-on: he can look directly at the gory mess that had been his best friend. He wants to understand exactly what happened to his best friend. He is willing to look at a gaping hole in a nearly naked one-armed man who had once saved his life. He wants to use his mind no matter the terrible emotional impact it will have on him. This sets the stage for everything that follows in the novel.

All this is on page one of my edition—and reading it, I want to go on to page 2: I have too many questions to let this drop.

    Very gently I pulled the sheet back and stood up. It wasn’t a complicated setup. A trail of blood led from the table beside the bed to where Jack’s artificial arm lay. Under him the throw rug was ruffled and twisted. He had tried to drag himself along with his one arm, but never reached what he was after.
      His police positive, still in the holster, was looped over the back of the chair. That was what he wanted. With a slug in his gut he never gave up.
    I pointed to the rocket, overbalanced under the weight of the .38. “Did you move the chair, Pat?”
      “No, why?”
      “It doesn’t belong there. Don’t you see?”
      Pat looked puzzled. “What are you getting at?”
      “That chair was over there by the bed. I’ve been here often enough to remember that much. After the killer shot Jack, he pulled himself toward the chair.   But the killer didn’t leave after the shooting.   He stood here and watched him grovel on the floor in agony. Jack was after that gun but he never reached it.   He could have if the killer didn’t move it. The trigger-happy bastard must have stood by the door laughing while Jack tried to make his last play. He kept pulling the chair back, inch by inch, until Jack gave up. Tormenting a guy who’s been through all sorts of hell. Laughing. This was no ordinary murder, Pat. It’s as cold-blooded and as deliberate as I ever saw one.   I’m going to get the one that did this.”

And now we’re launched into the story... We still don’t know who “Mike” is, but we’ve some idea he’s not a guy who is likely to fail. We want to know how he’ll solve this and determine the fate of the murderer—which the title of the novel provides another crucial clue for. (That’s another closely related aspect of the “hook”.)

I don’t want to belabor the analysis. “Analysis paralysis” is one of the biggest failings for anyone trying to learn to write. (Or any graduate student trying to learn to think.) But the other failing is no analysis at all—you do need to know a few things. Nonetheless, over-analysis divorced from hard practice and contact with reality is the biggest factor undermining writing. (Speaking from personal experience, and doesn’t this essay speak to “pot, kettle, black”?) So let me now turn to a comparison of a couple really brilliant examples of the “hook” which I believe will be more helpful than any amount of literary dissection by me.

I want to contrast Ayn Rand’s own style to another superb author that she wrote about elsewhere in The Romantic Manifesto – Ian Fleming: the author of the James Bond novels (which bear little relation at all to any of the movies).

The novels are Atlas Shrugged and From Russia With Love. Again, the goal here isn’t to analyze either in great detail, but to juxtapose the opening paragraphs of these two novels directly before you—to show how they work to hook the reader for two very different types of stories, that ironically possess a certain similarity in underlying themes—both deal with killers. Atlas deals with the men of the mind going on strike against killers of the spirit, and From Russia With Love deals James Bond defending himself against an incredibly ruthless and capable Russian assassin sent to kill him.

I originally extracted both extended excerpts without any attempt to make them the same length, but it was coincidental and very interesting to me that both came out almost exactly 2500 words—that may be a useful guideline for the time any author has to hook his reader after the first paragraph on the opening page.

Now read both excerpts straight through, keeping in mind my five points of key information to convey in a hook: 1. Basic conflict, 2. Setting, 3. Crucial characters, 4. Theme. 5. Questions Raised.

Also keep in mind what Ayn Rand said about how Spillane

“...presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness.”

You will note as you read that both she and Fleming exert this kind of perceptual selectivity par excellance. They rely on you to build your picture of their scenes piece-by-piece, but direct you to form your own conclusions and questions based on what they give your mind to work on, and in what order. Recall composer Richard Halley’s words to Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged:

"That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion—emotions be damned!—I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired."

And now the excerpts:

---------- Opening to From Russia With Love ------------

    The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
    He might have been drowned and fished out of the pool and laid out on the grass to dry while the police or the next-of-kin were summoned. Even the little pile of objects in the grass beside his head might have been his personal effects, meticulously assembled in full view so that no one should think that something had been stolen by his rescuers.
    To judge by the glittering pile, this had been, or was, a rich man. It contained the typical membership badges of the rich man's club—a money clip, made of a Mexican fifty-dollar piece and holding a substantial wad of banknotes, a well-used gold Dunhill lighter, an oval gold cigarette case with the wavy ridges and discreet turquoise button that means Fabergé, and the sort of novel a rich man pulls out of the bookcase to take into the garden—The Little Nugget—an old P. G. Wodehouse. There was also a bulky gold wristwatch on a well-used brown crocodile strap. It was a Girard-Perregaux model designed for people who like gadgets, and it had a sweep second-hand and two little windows in the face to tell the day of the month, and the month, and the phase of the moon. The story it now told was 2.30 on June 10th with the moon three-quarters full.
    A blue and green dragon-fly flashed out from among the rose bushes at the end of the garden and hovered in mid-air a few inches above the base of the man's spine. It had been attracted by the golden shimmer of the June sunshine on the ridge of fine blond hairs above the coccyx. A puff of breeze came off the sea. The tiny field of hairs bent gently. The dragon-fly darted nervously sideways and hung above the man's left shoulder, looking down. The young grass below the man's open mouth stirred. A large drop of sweat rolled down the side of the fleshy nose and dropped glittering into the grass. That was enough. The dragon-fly flashed away through the roses and over the jagged glass on top of the high garden wall. It might be good food, but it moved.
    The garden in which the man lay was about an acre of well-kept lawn surrounded on three sides by thickly banked rose bushes from which came the steady murmur of bees. Behind the drowsy noise of the bees the sea boomed softly at the bottom of the cliff at the end of the garden. There was no view of the sea from the garden—no view of anything except of the sky and the clouds above the twelve-foot wall. In fact you could only see out of the property from the two upstairs bedrooms of the villa that formed the fourth side of this very private enclosure. From them you could see a great expanse of blue water in front of you and, on either side, the upper windows of neighbouring villas and the tops of the trees in their garden—Mediterranean-type evergreen oaks, stone pines, casuarinas and an occasional palm tree.
    The villa was modern—a squat elongated box without ornament. On the garden side the flat pink-washed facade was pierced by four iron-framed windows and by a central glass door leading on to a small square of pale green glazed tiles. The tiles merged into the lawn. The other side of the villa, standing back a few yards from a dusty road, was almost identical. But on this side the four windows were barred, and the central door was of oak.
    The villa had two medium-sized bedrooms on the upper floor and on the ground floor a sitting-room and a kitchen, part of which was walled off into a lavatory. There was no bathroom.
    The drowsy luxurious silence of early afternoon was broken by the sound of a car coming down the road. It stopped in front of the villa. There was the tinny clang of a car door being slammed and the car drove on. The door bell rang twice. The naked man beside the swimming pool did not move, but, at the noise of the bell and of the departing car, his eyes had for an instant opened very wide. It was as if the eyelids had pricked up like an animal's ears. The man immediately remembered where he was and the day of the week and the time of the day. The noises were identified. The eyelids with their fringe of short, sandy eyelashes drooped drowsily back over the very pale blue, opaque, inward-looking eyes. The small cruel lips opened in a wide jaw-breaking yawn which brought saliva into the mouth. The man spat the saliva into the grass and waited.
    A young woman carrying a small string bag and dressed in a white cotton shirt and a short, unalluring blue skirt came through the glass door and strode mannishly across the glazed tiles and the stretch of lawn towards the naked man. A few yards away from him, she dropped her string bag on the grass and sat down and took off her cheap and rather dusty shoes. Then she stood up and unbuttoned her shirt and took it off and put it, neatly folded, beside the string bag.
    The girl had nothing on under the shirt. Her skin was pleasantly sunburned and her shoulders and fine breasts shone with health. When she bent her arms to undo the side-buttons of her skirt, small tufts of fair hair showed in her armpits. The impression of a healthy animal peasant girl was heightened by the chunky hips in faded blue stockinet bathing trunks and the thick short thighs and legs that were revealed when she had stripped.
    The girl put the skirt neatly beside her shirt, opened the string bag, took out an old soda-water bottle containing some heavy colourless liquid and went over to the man and knelt on the grass beside him. She poured some of the liquid, a light olive oil, scented, as was everything in that part of the world, with roses, between his shoulder blades and, after flexing her fingers like a pianist, began massaging the sterno-mastoid and the trapezius muscles at the back of the man's neck.
    It was hard work. The man was immensely strong and the bulging muscles at the base of the neck hardly yielded to the girl's thumbs even when the downward weight of her shoulders was behind them. By the time she was finished with the man she would be soaked in perspiration and so utterly exhausted that she would fall into the swimming pool and then lie down in the shade and sleep until the car came for her. But that wasn't what she minded as her hands worked automatically on across the man's back. It was her instinctive horror for the finest body she had ever seen.
    None of this horror showed in the flat, impassive face of the masseuse, and the upward-slanting black eyes under the fringe of short coarse black hair were as empty as oil slicks, but inside her the animal whimpered and cringed and her pulse-rate, if it had occurred to her to take it, would have been high.
    Once again, as so often over the past two years, she wondered why she loathed this splendid body, and once again she vaguely tried to analyse her revulsion. Perhaps this time she would get rid of feelings which she felt guiltily certain were much more unprofessional than the sexual desire some of her patients awoke in her.
    To take the small things first: his hair. She looked down at the round, smallish head on the sinewy neck. It was covered with tight red-gold curls that should have reminded her pleasantly of the formalized hair in the pictures she had seen of classical statues. But the curls were somehow too tight, too thickly pressed against each other and against the skull. They set her teeth on edge like finger-nails against pile carpet.
    And the golden curls came down so low into the back of the neck—almost (she thought in professional terms) to the fifth cervical vertebra. And there they stopped abruptly in a straight line of small stiff golden hairs.
    The girl paused to give her hands a rest and sat back on her haunches. The beautiful upper half of her body was already shining with sweat. She wiped the back of her forearm across her forehead and reached for the bottle of oil. She poured about a tablespoonful on to the small furry plateau at the base of the man's spine, flexed her fingers and bent forward again.
    This embryo tail of golden down above the cleft of the buttocks—in a lover it would have been gay, exciting, but on this man it was somehow bestial. No, reptilian. But snakes had no hair. Well, she couldn't help that. It seemed reptilian to her. She shifted her hands on down to the two mounds of the gluteal muscles. Now was the time when many of her patients, particularly the young ones on the football team, would start joking with her. Then, if she was not very careful, the suggestions would come. Sometimes she could silence these by digging sharply down towards the sciatic nerve. At other times, and particularly if she found the man attractive, there would be giggling arguments, a brief wrestling-match and a quick, delicious surrender.
    With this man it was different, almost uncannily different. From the very first he had been like a lump of inanimate meat. In two years he had never said a word to her. When she had done his back and it was time for him to turn over, neither his eyes nor his body had once shown the smallest interest in her. When she tapped his shoulder, he would just roll over and gaze at the sky through half-closed lids and occasionally let out one of the long shuddering yawns that were the only sign that he had human reactions at all.
    The girl shifted her position and slowly worked down the right leg towards the Achilles tendon. When she came to it, she looked back up the fine body. Was her revulsion only physical? Was it the reddish colour of the sunburn on the naturally milk-white skin, the sort of roast meat look? Was it the texture of the skin itself, the deep, widely spaced pores in the satiny surface? The thickly scattered orange freckles on the shoulders? Or was it the asexuality of the man? The indifference of these splendid, insolently bulging muscles? Or was it spiritual—an animal instinct telling her that inside this wonderful body there was an evil person?
    The masseuse got to her feet and stood, twisting her head slowly from side to side and flexing her shoulders. She stretched her arms out sideways and then upwards and held them for a moment to get the blood down out of them. She went to her string bag and took out a hand-towel and wiped the perspiration off her face and body.
    When she turned back to the man, he had already rolled over and now lay, his head resting on one open hand, gazing blankly at the sky. The disengaged arm was flung out on the grass, waiting for her. She walked over and knelt on the grass behind his head. She rubbed some oil into her palms, picked up the limp half-open hand and started kneading the short thick fingers.
    The girl glanced nervously sideways at the red-brown face below the crown of tight golden curls. Superficially it was all right—handsome in a butcher's-boyish way, with its full pink cheeks, upturned nose and rounded chin. But, looked at closer, there was something cruel about the thin-lipped rather pursed mouth, a pigginess about the wide nostrils in the upturned nose, and the blankness that veiled the very pale blue eyes communicated itself over the whole face and made it look drowned and morgue-like. It was, she reflected, as if someone had taken a china doll and painted its face to frighten.
    The masseuse worked up the arm to the huge biceps. Where had the man got these fantastic muscles from? Was he a boxer? What did he do with his formidable body? Rumour said this was a police villa. The two men-servants were obviously guards of some sort, although they did the cooking and the housework. Regularly every month the man went away for a few days and she would be told not to come. And from time to time she would be told to stay away for a week, or two weeks, or a month. Once, after one of these absences, the man's neck and the upper part of his body had been a mass of bruises. On another occasion the red corner of a half-healed wound had shown under a foot of surgical plaster down the ribs over his heart. She had never dared to ask about him at the hospital or in the town. When she had first been sent to the house, one of the men-servants had told her that if she spoke about what she saw she would go to prison. Back at the hospital, the Chief Superintendent, who had never recognized her existence before, had sent for her and had said the same thing. She would go to prison. The girl's strong fingers gouged nervously into the big deltoid muscle on the point of the shoulder. She had always known it was a matter of State Security. Perhaps that was what revolted her about this splendid body. Perhaps it was just fear of the organization that had the body in custody. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of who he might be, of what he could order to be done to her. Quickly she opened them again. He might have noticed. But the eyes gazed blankly up at the sky.
    Now—she reached for the oil—to do the face.
    The girl's thumbs had scarcely pressed into the sockets of the man's closed eyes when the telephone in the house started ringing. The sound reached impatiently out into the quiet garden. At once the man was up on one knee like a runner waiting for the gun. But he didn't move forward. The ringing stopped. There was the mutter of a voice. The girl could not hear what it was saying, but it sounded humble, noting instructions. The voice stopped and one of the men-servants showed briefly at the door, made a gesture of summons, and went back into the house. Half way through the gesture, the naked man was already running. She watched the brown back flash through the open glass door. Better not let him find her there when he came out again—doing nothing, perhaps listening. She got to her feet, took two steps to the concrete edge of the pool and dived gracefully in.
    Although it would have explained her instincts about the man whose body she massaged, it was as well for the girl's peace of mind that she did not know who he was.
    His real name was Donovan Grant, or `Red' Grant. But, for the past ten years, it had been Krassno Granitski, with the code-name of ‘Granit’.
    He was the Chief Executioner of SMERSH, the murder apparat of the M.G.B., and at this moment he was receiving his instructions on the M.G.B. direct line with Moscow.

------- Opening to Atlas Shrugged ---------

    "Who is John Galt?"
   The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still—as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
   "Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.
   The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.
   "Why does it bother you?" he asked.
   "It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers.
   He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations, and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum's particular despair.
   "Go get your cup of coffee," he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face.
   "Thank you, sir," said the voice, without interest, and the face leaned forward for a moment. The face was wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation; the eyes were intelligent. Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there's nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.
   Eddie Willers pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. He had to stop this, he thought; he was beginning to imagine things. Had he always felt it? He was thirty-two years old. He tried to think back. No, he hadn't; but he could not remember when it had started. The feeling came to him Suddenly, at random intervals, and now it was coming more often than ever. It's the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight.
   The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.
   No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked.
   He walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster.
   He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky.
   It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening's sunset, the rectangle said: September 2.
   Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed to blend with his sense of uneasiness; it had the same quality.
   He thought suddenly that there was some phrase, a kind of quotation, that expressed what the calendar seemed to suggest. But he could not recall it. He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it nor dismiss it. He glanced back. The white rectangle stood above the roofs, saying in immovable finality: September 2.
   Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured—and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.
   When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of goods, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.
   He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather.
   The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
   One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside—just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.
   Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal—the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.
   Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness—and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.
   He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment's glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence.
   He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, "Whatever is right," and added, "You ought to do something great... I mean, the two of us together."
   "What?" she asked. He said, "I don't know. That's what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains." "What for?" she asked. He said, "The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?" "I don't know." "We'll have to find out." She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.
   Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, "Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't. He knew that they weren't. He thought of that, as he turned a corner and came to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental.
   The building stood over the street as its tallest and proudest structure. Eddie Willers always smiled at his first sight of it. Its long bands of windows were unbroken, in contrast to those of its neighbors. Its rising lines cut the sky, with no crumbling corners or worn edges. It seemed to stand above the years, untouched. It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers.
   Whenever he entered the Taggart Building, he felt relief and a sense of security. This was a place of competence and power. The floors of its hallways were mirrors made of marble. The frosted rectangles of its electric fixtures were chips of solid light. Behind sheets of glass, rows of girls sat at typewriters, the clicking of their keys like the sound of speeding train wheels. And like an answering echo, a faint shudder went through the walls at times, rising from under the building, from the tunnels of the great terminal where trains started out to cross a continent and stopped after crossing it again, as they had started and stopped for generation after generation. Taggart Transcontinental, thought Eddie Willers, From Ocean to Ocean—the proud slogan of his childhood, so much more shining and holy than any commandment of the Bible. From Ocean to Ocean, forever—thought Eddie Willers, in the manner of a rededication, as he walked through the spotless halls into the heart of the building, into the office of James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.
   James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.
   He lifted his head with irritation, at the sound of the opening door.
   "Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me," said James Taggart.
   Eddie Willers walked toward the desk.
   "It's important, Jim," he said, not raising his voice.
   "All right, all right, what is it?"
   Eddie Willers looked at a map on the wall of the office. The map's colors had faded under the glass—he wondered dimly how many Taggart presidents had sat before it and for how many years. The Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, the network of red lines slashing the faded body of the country from New York to San Francisco, looked like a system of blood vessels. It looked as if once, long ago, the blood had shot down the main artery and, under the pressure of its own overabundance, had branched out at random points, running all over the country. One red streak twisted its way from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to El Paso, Texas—the Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental. New tracing had been added recently and the red streak had been extended south beyond El Paso—but Eddie Willers turned away hastily when his eyes reached that point.
   He looked at James Taggart and said, "It's the Rio Norte Line." He noticed Taggart's glance moving down to a corner of the desk. "We've had another wreck."
   "Railroad accidents happen every day. Did you have to bother me about that?"
   "You know what I'm saying, Jim. The Rio Norte is done for. That track is shot. Down the whole line."
   "We are getting a new track."
   Eddie Willers continued as if there had been no answer: "That track is shot. It's no use trying to run trains down there. People are giving up trying to use them."
   "There is not a railroad in the country, it seems to me, that doesn't have a few branches running at a deficit. We're not the only ones. It's a national condition—a temporary national condition."
   Eddie stood looking at him silently. What Taggart disliked about Eddie Willers was this habit of looking straight into people's eyes. Eddie's eyes were blue, wide and questioning; he had blond hair and a square face, unremarkable except for that look of scrupulous attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.
   "What do you want?" snapped Taggart.
   "I just came to tell you something you had to know, because somebody had to tell you."
   "That we've had another accident?"
   "That we can't give up the Rio Norte Line."

-------- End Examples --------

Now, having read these both, do you want to read more? That is the role of a hook.

Atlas Shrugged, the Movie, Redux

2011-04-20T11:47:00.001-07:00

Someone commented to me that they thought I was being too harsh and insulting in my condemnation of Atlas Shrugged, Part 1, by comparing it to the Cortlandt Homes project in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead--from the climax, when second-hand architect Peter Keating allows a masterpiece housing project designed by protagonist architect Howard Roark to be bastardized and destroyed by pretentious intellectual looters. (See also my blog post on this subject.) It was suggested to me that AS, Part 1 was actually superior to The Fountainhead movie, screenplay by Ayn Rand herself.

I felt compelled to reply that on almost any measure of artistic merit, AS, Part 1 is inferior to TF. I won't say "vastly". The direction of TF by King Vidor was not good. Gary Cooper's portrayal of Howard Roark was wooden, at best. But it at least felt like a serious movie, not a hacked together weekend production of Second City Television. Patricia Neal was perhaps the best in TF, and way above actress Taylor Schilling's portrayal of Dagny Taggart in AS, Part 1, in ability and presence. Raymond Massey ("Gail Wynand") and other actors in The Fountainhead movie were vastly superior to the polyglot band of weekend dinner-theater pirates in the rest of the AS, Part 1 roles. Rand's screenplay, whatever the shortcomings because of length and post-production studio fiddling, was infinitely better than the pathetic mess written by Aglialoro and his traveling troop of literary clowns.

It was suggested that remarks by me that people are "rationalizing" their liking of AS, Part 1 constituted argument by ad hominem. I don't engage in personal attacks. I do try to be accurate and state facts. I say I'm correct that many people are rationalizing the merits of the AS movie because

A) they desperately wanted to see a movie;

B) they want to "win one for the Gipper", ie, stick up for our side to promote the movie, and

C) they want to defend any liking they may have (based on A) or have expressed (based on B) because their self-esteem is tied up in their own (or others) perception of artistic appraisals, and so they seek to forestall any loss in self-esteem they may suffer because of liking a stinker.

That's not an attack on anyone, merely an observation over decades of what might loosely be called "human nature" in response to movies.

I will forego any psychological analysis of whether that's really "human nature", but let me clarify the other implication of that statement. An appraisal of a movie involves two aspects of our cognition: the objective artistic merits (including technical details of production) and our own personal value hierarchy and psycho-epistemological sense of life. Sadly, most people (especially Objectivists) don't realize that there is nothing whatever wrong with liking a stinker for your own reasons. Virtually everyone I know (O-ist or not) attempts to defend their own subjective tastes on artistic grounds, because that is the route to self-esteem (they think). But in doing so, they undermine the entire aspect of objective appraisal. That is, objectivity as such. It's much more honest to delineate what is objectively good about a movie, including a comparative assessment based on the best possible to Man, and simply say, "I like this stinker for my own, personal reasons, but artistically it has serious shortcomings" (or is even a complete bomb).

I can point to many movies for which I like this or that aspect on this basis, but still say it's a piece of crap. I won't bore you with examples here, but I could provide a long list. But I won't fake reality either for myself or for others and pretend that my subjective likes and dislikes are artistically good ones and objectively valid.

Of course, people differ in their ability or training or experience to objectively appraise a work of art--they can make mistakes in delineating and correctly assessing the objective vs. the subjective aspects of a work of art. Errors of knowledge, as Ayn Rand said. But that doesn't mean they're right. And when someone either unschooled in the arts, and especially, knowingly unschooled and inexperienced in creating art--especially good art--attempts to flaunt their subjective opinion as worthy of objective consideration by others, they had better have a really good argument with strong facts on their side. But then, to do that they need more grasp of (in this case) moviemaking, screenwriting, directing, acting, cinematography, editing, ad nauseum, than merely the experience of sitting in the movie theater with a lot of popcorn and soda. Otherwise, it's all an attempt to defend the Primacy of Emotions and the thesis "It's good because I like it!"

But I must add this last comment: those who wish to defend AS, Part 1 purely on the grounds of item B ("win one for the Gipper") are doing Ayn Rand and Objectivism no service at all. They are damaging us. Yes, book sales are up. They would be up if AS, Part 1 was filmed on toilet paper and done with hand puppets--purely because of the publicity. That is a short-term effect, and it could be accomplished by other means.

The long-term effect is much more problematic. You don't inspire people with the intellectuality of Objectivism by telling them we stand for shlock art. Michelango didn't inspire the people of the Renaissance by doing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with paint-by-numbers. Peter Keating did not inspire people to go into the practice of designing beautiful architecture by destroying Cortlandt Homes. A is not non-A.

Do you argue that at least the movie inspires the unwashed masses to be made more aware of the more concrete aspects of Objectivism?--individual rights, capitalism, etc--and hope that's enough? That's the approach of the Libertarians, who treat such things as primary and have no grasp of how metaphysics and epistemology determine them. On that basis, we lose in the long run. The only possible long-term benefit I see from promoting AS, Part 1 as a wonderful production, is if someone buys the book as a result and then leaves it lying around until some day his future kid picks it up.

But it's still a lie. The book contests are a much more effective way to expose kids to AS.

How many of you recall what Ayn Rand said to the HUAC committee about lies in regard to Soviet propaganda inserted in American film-making?

Rand: "... Now, here is what I cannot understand at all: if the excuse that has been given here [to this committee] is that we had to produce the picture in wartime, just how can it help the war effort? If it is to deceive the American people, if it were to present to the American people a better picture of Russia than it really is, then that sort of an attitude is nothing but the theory of the Nazi elite – that a choice group of intellectual or other leaders will tell the people lies for their own good. That, I don't think, is the American way of giving people information. We do not have to deceive the people at any time, in war or peace. ... I don’t believe the American people should ever be told any lies, publicly or privately [that is, by the government or by the movies]. I don’t believe that lies are practical. I think the international situation now rather supports me. I don’t think it was necessary to deceive the American people about the nature of Russia..."

A far better approach in my view is for serious Objectivists to stand up and publicly condemn the movie, and acknowledge and proclaim to the world that the production was hijacked by unintellectual cretins who neither understood nor genuinely respected Ayn Rand nor her ideas, and let the public at large see that her genuine defenders had no participation in and have no respect for the travesty that was filmed. The controversy that would surround this would surely attract a lot more positive public attention to the book than defending the quality of that movie. At least Objectivism wouldn't be stigmatized as being populated by "groupies" and unintellectual, artistically unsophisticated and unrefined boobs.

A River Runs Through the Aliens

2011-04-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

And the flood shall set you free... Reading this editorial over at Pajamas Media (which I'm not a fan of, by the way -- I moniter PJ only as a barometer) I was struck by how poorly and with such lack of insight the author (someone named Barry Rubin) attempted to illuminate us with a metaphor based on a story by Philip K. Dick:

Now, tell me if you think Dick predicted his future, our present. Here’s the plot: The aliens on Ganymede want to invade and conquer the Earth. They have a clever plan for softening up the target. The main character, an Earth Customs Service investigator, is called in for an important assignment.Ganymede... wants to export three toys to earth. ...one of them — they don’t know which — is a deadly weapon. But Earth people are crazy for Ganymede novelties...

Yes, indeed. Those novelties. I have to condense -- in his enthusiasm for space aliens, the author breaks loose his tether and drifts out of orbit. But his point is

One toy is a virtual reality set — pretty clever of Dick to imagine that in 1959 — so that a child can wear goggles and equipment to believe, for example, that he’s a cowboy. The second toy is a set of toy soldiers and a castle... The final toy is a board game, like Monopoly. ...the game has become a best-seller. The problem is that the way to win the game is by going bankrupt. The worse the trades you make, the better you do in the game. ...Ganymede is planning to bankrupt the Earth through indoctrination and easily take it over.

You get it. The river here is neither wide nor deep, and runs somewhere through the asteroid belt. But Rubin drinks deeply while taking a meteor shower and draws this conclusion:

So the moral is that the ultimate threat is not military — the toy soldiers — but ideological.

This is what is known as the fallacy of post hoc, ergo, propter hiccup. Or perhaps an example of sitting a monkey at a typewriter to pound out Les Miserable -- the statement is true, even if the reasoning is founded on one crucial step in our evolutionary development -- Piltdown Man.

How does this story parallel the contemporary West’s situation? Do you have to ask? Because Americans and Europeans are being indoctrinated to think that the weaker, less religious and patriotic, more deeply in debt, and wallowing in guilt their societies are, the better. The first one to go bankrupt — in every sense of the word — wins.

Inquiring minds do have to ask--if you can deduce the missing link between his major premise and his conclusion, you're better than me.

There are certainly much more prescient books if one wants to ruminate on the ideological causes of our decline. AKA, Atlas Shrugged. And if you want the post-apocalyptic version, Anthem.

But the more important point that Rubin almost touched on was Ayn Rand's view that philosophy -- the ideas men embrace about reality, intellectuality and morality -- is the prime mover of history. This is what made her books such accurate predictors of our future. Surprisingly, I've found far too many of her own admirers who don't grasp this.

But let's keep this lighter for a moment. If you want a science fiction story that more presciently predicts our decline, don't go to P.K. Dick -- go to E.M. Forster, and read The Machine Stops, about a civilization that has buried itself underground, where no one ever leaves their rooms, and they all spend every waking minute watching viewing screens that they use for all communication and information.

Remarkably, The Machine Stops was written in 1909. It could have been written in 2011.

I've commented on it in a distant post, not because it's a great story, but because it's relevant, so let's re-visit. It is a story about a civilization completely out of touch with reality -- until the machine stops. The machine that keeps them alive. Everyone. The machine that powers their viewing screens, provides all light and heat and comfort and entertainment. (If you live in Chicago you may get this point very well, but then, we're all Chicagoans now.)

In this story, people do occasionally come up for air to travel on high-speed "air-ships", but mostly they fear the light on the surface, and largely they are a people out of touch with reality, counting on the machine to just keep chugging along and providing them the necessities of life. And when it doesn't -- civilization collapses.

...They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the Earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven...

"Is there any hope, Kuno?"

"None for us."

"Where are you?"

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.

"Quicker," he gasped, "I am dying - but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine."

"...But Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the Earth? Is this - tunnel, this poisoned darkness - really not the end?"

"Never," said Kuno, "never. Humanity has learnt its lesson."

As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

I won't trouble you too much with the metaphors here, but if you can't figure it out, you'd better, because the solution isn't to hide underground and escape reality with more unreality. The "garments we've woven" are the ideas we've come to worship as a culture which are destroying us -- post-modernism, socialism, communism, statism, fascism, unbridled democracy, un-principled pragmatism, subjectivism, dogmatic skepticism, fanatical religious mysticism, obscurantist anti-technological environmentalism, unlimited "tolerance" of any openly irrational notion -- you fill in the blanks, there's plenty of examples in all our universities and churches and government offices, and even in our boardrooms.

But above all we have become a culture that worships the idea of sacrifice--of everything good to everything evil, especially reason and the individual in the name of faith and the Collective--on the altars of tradition, compromise, novelty, nihilism and unbridled emotionalism.

The solution isn't more sacrifice. The solution is to value (the antithesis of sacrifice) the ideas that built our civilization--reason, individual rights, facts, principles, absolute truths, and intellectual honesty in all things.

Forster's story is far from perfect, and you can always twist metaphors to fit your purpose--but you'd better not. Ideas are the prime movers of history, if you only take the time to look a little deeper than the last war, the latest election results, or the river bottoms of the New York Times and the Drudge Report.

Broiling deBroglie ... Phun Physics for Phreaks & Geeks

2011-04-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

Merely to shake up our audience, because that is, after all, why we are here, I offer something for the physicists, engineers and other geek savants to ruminate about. I thought I would just copy some personal notes out of a Word doc I typed up a while ago, and voila, here it would appear to enlighten and enchant you -- but no, it was vastly more painful than that. Let me tell you, you haven't lived (or died) till you've tried to put equations into Blogger... this was a learning experience, and there is nothing intuitive about the formatting you are seeing here. So appreciate it. Or else.

Let’s say you have two electrons in free space, and one of them is in motion towards the other electron. At rest, each has a relativistic mass-energy,

(1)

Now assume each electron has a corresponding electromagnetic frequency f_e associated with a single photon,

(2)

(3)

Where h is Planck’s constant. For an electron, this frequency is quite high – about 10²⁰ Hz. 100 million terahertz.

Assume a photon of energy E_e can be bound in a circular loop in some way to comprise the electron. (Think of annihilating an electron and positron into two gamma rays—what were the gammas before the annihilation?) By analogy, think of the binding as something like total internal reflection within a dielectric sphere, though my idea is more like a spatial distortion caused by the intense localized concentration of electromagnetic energy.

Further, assume the electrostatic Coulomb field of the electron is modulated at the frequency f_e, and think of the static field as radiating outward as a spherical evanescent wave (a near-field effect) —that is, without releasing any electromagnetic energy. This is by analogy to the external evanescent field around an optical glass fiber. This isn’t entirely unreasonable (it can even explain electron spin and magnetic moment), but a more detailed explanation requires adapting a field solution for a fiber optic waveguide to spherical coordinates of a dielectric sphere, taking the limit for a sphere radius of zero. (Only in this limit does the evanescent field of a sphere exhibit the 1/r² static field dependences of a Coulomb force.)

If you’re really interested in evanescent fields, you can look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanescent_wave, though the treatment is poor. A better reference is a good graduate textbook on electromagnetic fields (eg, Ramo or Jackson). For now, simply assume the Coulomb field can be derived as the evanescent field of a bound photon in a dielectric sphere of zero radius.

Coulomb’s Law for the force of interaction between the static fields of two electrons is

(4)

If the static fields of the electrons are modulated at frequency f_e, it seems reasonable to say that the Coulomb force is modulated as well. We can set aside for the moment exactly how it is modulated (it might be discrete, for instance, rather than sinusoidal). The main goal is to see if there is a wavelength for the force coupling, on the premises given.

If you grant the premises, at slow speed the electron moving at speed v “sees” the radiating wavefronts of the Coulomb field from the static electron as dopplered up to the frequency

(5)

The premise is the Coulomb force experienced by the moving electron is envelope modulated at the frequency difference Df (greek delta evaded my formatting skills) between the oncoming wavefronts at frequency f^'_e, and its own internal frequency f_e. This is our "matter wave”.

(6)

By analogy to an electronic mixer used to subtract frequencies in a radio frequency (RF) heterodyning stage, this is the beat frequency between the two electrons. If you could observe the interacting wavefronts of the (hypothetical) modulated static fields of the two electrons, you would see an envelope modulation corresponding to this beat frequency, and the envelope would be traveling at the speed of light c with a wavelength

(7)

(8)

Which is, voila, the deBroglie formula (click that link whether you think you know how to pronounce "deBroglie" or not), where p is the non-relativistic momentum of the moving electron. It is worth noting that the same result would be obtained for however many photons we assume to comprise the electron rest energy. It is only important that electrons are the same. The same result would apply for protons to protons. Or any other particle to another particle like itself.

There are a number of problems with my assumptions, but it is intriguing that they give deBroglie’s matter wavelength from such a simple derivation, and worth speculating whether the idea has more substance.

In my next post for this exciting thrill-ride of a thread, I'll show you how to derive all the basic relations of special relativity in 2 pages. From first principles. Really. But before that I shall probably meet the same fate as Hypatia in Agora.

The Vanished Library and "Agora"

2011-03-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

At a friend's suggestion, I saw Agora two nights ago and I confess I'm still digesting it, but I can relate what mixed reactions I have so far.

Having long been an amateur student of this period, I found the subject matter and theme fascinating. I was reminded of a book I read long ago, The Vanished Library (Luciano Canfora), which didn't go into the story of Hypatia, but did develop the entire mystery of what happened to the Great Library of Alexandria, which was established by the Ptolemies who ruled after Alexander the Great, a repository of all knowledge in the ancient world.

I have no issues whatsover with any "artistic license" that was taken with historical fact. The criticisms I've heard here are completely irrelevant to good storytelling with a message. The message itself was both powerful and relevant to today. Not just in regard to dangers of a resurgent Christianity, as some I know (not in this group) have mentioned. Not just as a parallel to the rise of Islam in the modern world. (The infiltration of Islam into Western countries with the spread of Sharia law, especially.) But metaphorically -- the barbarian, reason-hating Christians could just as well represent the post-Modern Left sacking the legacy of Western civilization and butchering Reason.

The directing was excellent, and stayed true to the "view from space" that was established in the opening sequence: there were many fascinating shots directly overhead the ancient Library of Alexandria, showing the Christians and other Alexandrians running, fighting, fleeing through the streets. I felt the godlike perspective of watching the harmless, random, even childish antics of ants, and how whatever greatness the people of that time had achieved -- in the Library, in the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria (one of the seven Wonders of the ancient world), and more -- could have been reduced to such self-destructive behavior.

The art direction was possibly the finest I've ever seen. I marvel at how they created the sets, mattes, CG and costumes. I couldn't tell which I was looking at, but I felt like I was in 391 AD. The cinematography and lighting direction were also superb -- almost every frame in that movie I could frame and put on my wall.

Where I'm mixed on the movie is the script and acting. Neither were terrible--but neither were great. The acting was competent, but I felt like I was watching something just barely a notch above a made-for-TV movie. Most of the actors struck me as struggling to deliver their lines -- but honestly struggling, and trying to learn and do better throughout the film, as if they sensed they had been handed a great responsibility and were doing something important enough to demand their best. Hypatia was a bit wooden, and perhaps the best of all, but for all the lead characters we needed the power of a Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix or the presence of a Connie Nielsen (by way of comparison to Gladiator).

Another big shortcoming of the script was that it needed a stronger love story. Yes, the movie was about a woman who was devoted to ideas. But should the archetype of ideas represent a Platonic Ideal, divorced from Earthly concerns? Yes, the movie displayed Orestes' love for Hypatia, as well as the conflicted love of her slave, Davus. But it all had a very Victorian quality: repressed and formal that was just barely compensated by Davus nearly raping Hypatia during the sacking of the Great Library. Contrast, however, with the similar scene of Roark and Dominique in The Fountainhead. (With Roark compared to Hypatia, and Hypatia compared to Dominique...)

What was very good about the script is what it attempted, how close it came to achieving it, and how it attempted it. Hypatia's fascination with the heavens was a brilliant counterpoint to the earthiness of the barbarians. I felt this from the opening sequence as we viewed the Earth from space. Not only did this make a subtle parallel to Hypatia's love of the Heavens that was only evident as the story progressed (and thereby her love of reason was heavenly...), but it conveyed that eerie sense I alluded to earlier, that I was in 391 AD. This was aided by photography that had the feel of looking at a color photograph faded with age.

The only thing that took me out of 391 AD even slightly was the opening text crawl establishing the setting and period, and the text at the end describing Hypatia's fate. I can't criticize the need for something, given that it was a historical drama, but my temptation would have been to delete the text crawl at the opening, end the film on fade to black, wait 15 seconds, and then run all the text as a separate footnote to the story.

In general, the script was somewhat beyond the ability of the screenwriters. I say "somewhat" -- they didn't fail, but they didn't succeed spectacularly. The action wasn't strongly motivated enough, the conflicts weren't developed enough, and the relationships didn't exhibit enough passion or impact. The dialogue did have it's moments, but were more about competence than brilliance.

Overall, the motivation of the action could have been alleviated with more screen time (at least an extra half-hour), but the development of the human conflicts and dialogue simply needed a stronger writer.

Overall, it reminded me somewhat of 1492, Conquest of Paradise--a movie that wasn't bad, but was far from great, either, though which ended on one fine scene. Columbus, back from the New World, is confronted by Sanchez in the court of Queen Isabella (if I'm remembering correctly), a "practical" man in the seat of government who held the idealistic Columbus in contempt:

Sanchez: [disgusted] You're a dreamer.
Columbus: [looking out a window] Tell me, what do you see?
Sanchez: [pausing] I see rooftops, I see palaces, I see towers, I see spires that reach... to the sky! I see civilization!
Columbus: All of them built by people like me. No matter how long you live, Sanchez, there is something that will never change between us. I did it. You didn't.

If not for this final scene, I'd say 1492 wouldn't be worth watching. But it did have this scene. Agora needed something like it to counter the terrible tragedy of the end, Hypatia's death. However, Agora did have a stronger storyline, and while its best scenes were somewhat more diluted than the final scene of 1492, the overall effect was stronger, and this redeemed the movie with me.

As a last note, a day after watching Agora, I had an odd feeling -- of deja vu. I realized I identified strongly with, of all people ... Hypatia. It must be a sign of the times.

The Robbaldi Prophecy

2011-03-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

I thought this article on how foreign Donors are paying off the professors in our universities to work against American interests was interesting.

Adversaries have been buying sway in Congress and the public eye by funding American professors who advocate for them, to the tune of $600M.... When educators who are identified as professors from prestigious universities testify before Congress, write op-eds, and appear on public or media sponsored panels, most readers and listeners value their words more than those of others less credentialed. Perhaps this is especially the case when the subject is foreign affairs... For this reason, concern is growing that our universities, especially those highly regarded, have been receiving very large sums of cash from abroad, often from countries or citizens of countries which hold positions antithetical to our interests or engage in conduct shocking to our values.

I think it has some validity. As if it wasn't bad enough that these prof's were working against us all on their own. The monetary sums and scope of the actions aren't huge, but to me indicative of a larger pattern and the steady drip-drip of efforts to undermine the United States. I still say there is a widespread organization behind it all (albeit driven by philosophies, religions, ideologies), and our country is completely helpless right now except for Objectivism. That is, one major faction spans the Arab world (there are two sub-factions: Iran and the Saudis, of which Al Qaeda serves both), another in Russia (who have seized de facto control of the U.S. government, in my opinion, based on a long-term plan that spanned over 50 years). If you can't win against superior firepower, you use a different kind of firepower. The Chinese are primarily about stealing every bit of our technology to my observations, but the others are mostly about undermining our ideas and institutions as a means to their ends. (The Chinese believe they can match us in firepower in 10 years or so.)

We could throw in the many other ideological forces, including the gullible Left in general, the less-gullible George Soros faction (which has some kind of connection to the Russian faction, but is more allied with the communist internationale in some way I haven't been able to directly divine), the Catholic Church (which may be the most philosophically organized, and certainly the most intellectual--they are behind the neo-cons), and here at home, the many nihilist/revolutionary post-modern/socialist/communist academics and the less intellectually organized bible-thumping Protestants (who are mainly puppets to the Vatican's schemes) -- but the sum total is a worldwide effort to destroy the United States that can only be prevented with philosophical inoculation of the right kind. That is, the vaccine of Objectivism, if there's still time. (Is there? Who knows.)

If you can forgive a superficial metaphor, so many of the players in all the "patriotic" factions inside the U.S. remind me of characters in the TV show "Alias" -- who didn't realize the supposed black ops group of the CIA they were working for (SD-6, Special Directorate 6), was actually part of "The Alliance", a world-wide network of the very enemy they thought they were fighting against. Ie, if you've seen the show, SD-6 pretends to be part of the CIA, and it's agents will do *anything* to defend the Republic (including murder), but instead of defending the country, their every mission had been to undermine and ultimately lead to the downfall of the U.S.

The point of this metaphor is an early episode of the series, when CIA agent Vaughn rolls out a very large, detailed chart showing duped SD-6 agent Sidney Bristow (Jennifer Garner, for whom Vaughn is the "handler") that the web of SD-6 is massively more extensive than she ever suspected, spanning the entire planet -- it's a Medusa that can't be eliminated by lopping off the tentacle of one field office in L.A. That's where we are with regard to all the conspiracies by foreign countries and interests now working to destroy the United States.

Obama's End Game

2011-03-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

There have been people I know who belittled my suggestion that Obama is actually a Russian mole with the objective of eliminating the entire U.S. arsenal. This article ("US reviewing nuclear arsenal with eye to new cuts") is another nail in that coffin.

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has begun examining whether it can make cuts to its nuclear weapons stockpiles that go beyond those outlined in a recent treaty with Russia. ...Arms control advocates say the United States is mired in Cold War-era thinking about nuclear deterrence and are pressing the administration to use the review to rethink U.S. nuclear requirements. They say the decisions will be a test of President Barack Obama's commitment nearly two years ago to put the world on a path toward eliminating nuclear weapons.

I'll make an even more radical suggestion -- don't be surprised if Obama attempts to unilaterally begin destroying nuclear weapons or delivery systems by executive fiat before his term is over.

I note also (once again) that his chief arms reduction negotiator, Rose Gottemoeller , is also, in my opinion, a Russian mole. She completely fits the profile. (Not that half his White House staff doesn't fit it also.)

...the study could shape talks it has proposed with Russia on weapons not covered by the New START treaty. The administration wants to focus on stored nuclear weapons and those intended for short-range delivery, known as tactical nuclear weapons. But negotiations with Russia also could lead to further reductions in deployed long-range nuclear weapons.

Rose, I might add, is also an advocate of unilateral cuts in non-nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

In my opinion, even the new Start treaty puts this country seriously at risk for a nuclear first strike, when you factor in the number of warheads carried on single submarines or bombers, and simply calculate the number of targets you have to hit. How many subs, airbases and missile silos do you have to hit? A few hundred. (Usually a third of the subs are in port at any one time, anyway.)

Then include all the stolen secrets (it's been a hemorrhage for 20 years) that increase the accuracy and lethality of enemy ICBMs to hit our hardened silos, or their ability to now track our submarines. (A sub that's even 2000 feet underwater couldn't survive even a small nuke exploded on the surface -- pressure wave would crush the hull.) I would bet that a credible war games scenario could show that at least 90% (and possibly much higher) of our nuclear deterrent could be taken out with high probability based on Obama's arms reduction objectives.

If the Republicans could get control of the Presidency and Senate, a priority at least as big as repeal of the Health Care bill would be, in my opinion, abrogation or repeal of the new Start Treaty.

The Radioactive Cloud of the Times

2011-03-15T03:01:00.000-07:00

This NY Times headline (see footnote below -- story disappeared) for March 15 is breathlessly sensationalizing the alleged radiation spike of 400milli-Sieverts per hour from the Fukushima nuclear plant crisis in Japan:

Japan Faces Potential Nuclear Disaster as Radiation Levels Rise
...Radiation measurements reported on Tuesday showed a spike of radioactivity around the plant that made the leakage significantly worse than it had been, with levels measured at one point as high as 400 millisieverts an hour. Even 7 minutes of exposure at that level will reach the maximum annual dose that a worker at an American nuclear plant is allowed. And exposure for 75 minutes would likely lead to acute radiation sickness...

But if you read this story in the next link below,

Radiation levels fall at stricken Japan nuclear plant

TOKYO Tue Mar 15, 2011 3:36am EDT (Reuters) - Radiation levels fell at Japan's quake-stricken nuclear power plant on the northeast coast, the Japanese government said on Tuesday, after an earlier spike in radiation.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that radiation levels at the Fukushima Daiichi complex, more than 200 km north of Tokyo, had fallen dramatically to 596.4 microsieverts per hour as of 0630 GMT.

That level is almost 700 times less than the levels reported in the morning, after two fresh blasts at the complex.

The Japanese government here is saying radiation levels are "currently" 596.4 micro-sieverts per hour, "700 times less than the levels reported in the morning." You will note that 596.4 x 700 = 417milli-Sieverts/hr. You will also note that the "morning" in Japan was about 5 hours before the second story came out:

Now, I think it's fair to say that if the reactor had breached containment, radiation levels would not have declined since "the morning". How long did the high radiation levels last? Take a look at the graphic I've included here, which is a radiation reading taken from Tokyo after the hydrogen gas explosion blew apart the reactor building surrounding the nuclear containment vessel. (That is, it blew apart the structure that keeps the rain off.)

Apparently the spike in radiation only lasted a couple hours and then went away. This graph suggests to me it's the source of the "400milli-Sievert/hr" figure -- I suspect someone extrapolated from a geiger measurement in Tokyo. Just a guess. But at best this figure refers to the area around the plant, not in Tokyo. If the plant radiation levels were measured, say, 1000 feet from the source, the levels in Tokyo (150 miles away) would have to be at least 500,000 times lower, if we are talking about direct radiation.

Of course, note that the levels returned to essentially background levels very quickly. This wouldn't happen from direct radiation. So my other guess is that when the hydrogen explosion occurred, the wind carried aloft a dust cloud filled with various short lived isotopes of debris in the seawater (think of whatever is in seawater ... minerals, seaweed, whatever) they'd been pumping through the reactor, and it drifted over Tokyo. That wouldn't be a lot of radioactive material. Then the wind changed. Problem solved.

I also read that the Japanese government has ordered all radiation measurements to now be given in micro-sieverts to avoid "ambiguity". That sounds to me like someone screwed up and translated "micro" to "milli" when the Japanese Prime minister made his morning announcement (confusing "micro" with "milli" is very common with non-technical people) and they didn't want it to happen again.

The Reuters story came out about the time NY Times went to press, but it hasn't stopped the NY Times from running their front page lead story about the radiation levels of 400milli-sieverts.

FYI, 1 milli-Sievert per hour = 0.1rem. 600micro-Sieverts (present levels at the Fukushima plant, at the time this is written, 4AM MDT) are about 0.06rem. Almost exactly a chest x-ray. 1-3rem is about the average annual dose someone will get at sea level. See http://www.ornl.gov/sci/env_rpt/aser95/tb-a-2.pdf This will go up about 30-40 times if you fly a lot. That is, you gain about 1mrem per year for every 200 feet in altitude. At my house, I suffer about 40mrems exposure per year.

Footnote 6 hours later: The front-page link changed and the original story disappeared, so I've attached a copy below, but I note that if you google the headline (in quotes) you now get 14,700 hits for this article -- everyone on the the planet has linked it. It's spreading like the toxic cloud after a nuclear explosion. The Times is continuing to spin this story, though, with front-page "info-videos" suggesting the inner containment building was breached, though it hasn't been according to other accounts I've seen so far. We live in an age where journalism is more like a "dirty" bomb spreading radioactive debris of half-truths, mis-truths, rumor, innuendo, propaganda and outright lies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html

Japan Faces Potential Nuclear Disaster as Radiation Levels Rise

TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to the statements of Japanese government and industry officials.

In a brief address to the nation at 11 a.m. Tokyo time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm, but warned that radiation had already spread from the crippled reactors and there was “a very high risk” of further leakage. Fortunately, the prevailing winds were sweeping most of the plume of radioactivity out into the Pacific Ocean, rather than over populated areas.

The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another — the third in four days at the plant — already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago.

It diminished hopes earlier in the day that engineers at the plant, working at tremendous personal risk, might yet succeed in cooling down the most damaged of the reactors, No. 2, by pumping in sea water. According to government statements, most of the 800 workers at the plant had been withdrawn, leaving 50 or so workers in a desperate effort to keep the cores of three stricken reactors cooled with seawater pumped by firefighting equipment, while the same crews battled to put out the fire at the No. 4 reactor, which they claimed to have done just after noon on Tuesday.

That fourth reactor had been turned off and was under refurbishment for months before the earthquake and tsunami hit the plant on Friday. But the plant contains spent fuel rods that were removed from the reactor, and experts guessed that the pool containing those rods had run dry, allowing the rods to overheat and catch fire. That is almost as dangerous as the fuel in working reactors melting down, because the spent fuel can also spew radioactivity into the atmosphere.

After an emergency cabinet meeting, the Japanese government told people living with 30 kilometers, about 18 miles, of the Daiichi plant to stay indoors, keep their windows closed and stop using air conditioning.

Mr. Kan, whose government was extraordinarily weak before the sequence of calamities struck the nation, told the Japanese people that “although this incident is of great concern, I ask you to react very calmly.” And in fact, there seemed to be little panic, but huge apprehension in a country where the drift of radioactivity brings up memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the haunting images of post-war Japan.

The two critical questions over the next day or so are how much radioactive material is spewed into the atmosphere, and where the winds carry it. Readings reported on Tuesday showed a spike of radioactivity around the plant that made the leakage categorically worse than in had been, with radiation levels measured at one point as high as 400 millisieverts an hour. Even 7 minutes of exposure at that level will reach the maximum annual dose that a worker at an American nuclear plant is allowed. And exposure for 75 minutes would likely lead to acute radiation sickness.

The extent of the public health risk depends on how long such elevated levels persist — they may have declined after the fire at No. 4 reactor was extinguished — as well as how far and fast the radioactive materials spread, and whether the limited evacuation plan announced by the government proves sufficient.
The succession of problems at Daiichi was initially difficult to interpret — with confusion compounded by incomplete and inconsistent information provided by government officials and executives of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power.

But industry executives in close contact with officials in Japan expressed extreme concern that the authorities were close to losing control over the fuel melting that has been ongoing in three reactors at Daiichi, especially at the crippled No. 2 reactor where the containment has been damaged.

Tokyo Electric Power said Tuesday that after the explosion at the No. 2 reactor, pressure had dropped in the “suppression pool” — a section at the bottom of the reactor that converts steam to water and is part of the critical function of keeping the nuclear fuel protected. After that occurred, radiation levels outside No. 2 were reported to have risen sharply.

“We are on the brink. We are now facing the worst-case scenario,” said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. “We can assume that the containment vessel at Reactor No. 2 is already breached. If there is heavy melting inside the reactor, large amounts of radiation will most definitely be released.”

Another executive said the chain of events at Daiichi suggested that it would be difficult to maintain emergency seawater cooling operations for an extended period if the containment vessel at one reactor had been compromised because radiation levels could threaten the health of workers nearby.
If all workers do in fact leave the plant, the nuclear fuel in all three reactors is likely to melt down, which would lead to wholesale releases of radioactive material — by far the largest accident of its kind since the Chernobyl.

Even if a full meltdown is averted, Japanese officials have been facing unpalatable options. One was to continue flooding the reactors and venting the resulting steam, while hoping that the prevailing winds did not turn south toward Tokyo or west, across northern Japan to the Korean Peninsula. The other was to hope that the worst of the overheating was over, and that with the passage of a few more days the nuclear cores would cool enough to essentially entomb the radioactivity inside the plants, which clearly will never be used again. Both approaches carried huge risks.

While Japanese officials made no comparisons to past accidents, the release of an unknown quantity of radioactive gases and particles — all signs that the reactor cores were damaged from at least partial melting of fuel — added considerable tension to the effort to cool the reactors.

“It’s way past Three Mile Island already,” said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. “The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.”

The sharp deterioration came after a frantic day and night of rescue efforts focused largely on the No. 2 reactor. There, a malfunctioning valve prevented workers from manually venting the containment vessel to release pressure and allow fresh seawater to be injected into it. That meant that the extraordinary remedy emergency workers had jury-rigged to keep the nuclear fuel from overheating no longer worked.

As a result, the nuclear fuel in that reactor was exposed for many hours, increasing the risk of a breach of the container vessel and more dangerous emissions of radioactive particles.

By Tuesday morning, Tokyo Electric Power said that it had fixed the valve and resumed seawater injections, but that it had detected possible leaks in the containment vessel that prevented water from fully covering the fuel rods.

Then an explosion hit that reactor. After a series of conflicting reports about what level of damage was inflicted on the reactor after that blast, Mr. Edano said, “there is a very high probability that a portion of the container vessel was damaged.”

The steel container vessels that protect nuclear fuel in reactors are considered crucial to maintain the integrity of the reactor and the safety of the fuel.

Mr. Edano, however, said that the level of leaking at the No. 2 reactor remained small, raising the prospect that the container was sufficiently intact to protect the nuclear fuel inside.

The Monster Stalking the Tea Party

2011-03-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

I highly recommend this superbly factual article by C. Bradley Thompson on the philosophy of the neoconservative movement. What totally captures the essence of the neocons for me is this summary, that what the neocons uphold is

"...Platonic idealism is compatible with Machiavellian realism."

When you think how Platonism spawned most of the great philosophical/political evils today, including Marxism and Catholic theocracy, and that Machiavellian "realism" rationalizes the most egregious kind of power lust, it's a truly frightening identification.

To sum up what I get from this article in my own words, I would say the neoconservatives construct an intellectual Frankenstein's monster by stitching together the ideas of collectivism, fascism, religious authoritarianism, mysticism, subjectivism, altruism, unprincipled pragmatism, goose-stepping patriotism, and total self-sacrifice of the individual to the state with bits and pieces of Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch (superman), and then dressing it up in a cotton print dress and a heavy layer of the mascara of "god, faith, tradition". In a single word, I would characterize it as a soft form of Nazism, masquerading (for now) as some indefinable kind of "Americanism", to borrow Thompson's term.

Form your own conclusions. To quote Thompson,

"...the neoconservatives reject the values and principles associated with Enlightenment liberalism—namely, reason, egoism, individual rights, material acquisition, limited government, freedom, capitalism, science, and technology. They are repulsed by the moral ethos associated with liberal-capitalism, and they praise the nobility of the 'barbarian' virtues such as discipline, courage, daring, endurance, loyalty, renunciation, obedience, and sacrifice."

The essence, for them, is that they hate the founding principles of the United States of America, but can't quite admit it to themselves. They call themselves "Conservatives", yet merely pay lip service to the Constitution, while rejecting everything it stands for.

"The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, read the Bible, go to church, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtues, sacrifice themselves to the “common good,” obey the commands of the government, fight wars, and die for the state. ...The grand purpose of national-greatness foreign policy is to inspire the American people to transcend their vulgar, infantilized, and selfish interests for uplifting national projects."

"The neocons’ basic moral-political principle is clear and simple: the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the nation-state. ...wise statesmen must learn to use “forcible restraint” and “benevolent coercion” in order to keep down the selfish and base desires of ordinary men. ...[They believe] it is entirely appropriate for a philosophically trained political elite to guide them to their true happiness and to prevent them from making bad decisions. The highest purpose of neoconservative statesmanship is therefore to shape preferences, form habits, cultivate virtues, and create the “good” society."

Shades of Michael Bloomberg. Though I have no idea if Bloomberg is a neocon or a merely very liberal, at some point, what's the diff? But if they have one foot in the modern conservative movement, the other foot has firmly stepped into a pile of some kind of Marxist-fascist doo-doo:

"The neocons take the “political community” or what Irving Kristol called the “collective self” as the primary unit of moral, social and political value ...ordinary people are irrational and must be guided by those who are rational. According to Irving Kristol, there are “different kinds of truth for different kinds of people... Neoconservatives believe the opinions of the nation must therefore be shaped by those who rule. To control ideas is to control public opinion... Morality is therefore defined as overcoming one’s petty self-interest so as to sacrifice for the common good..."

"They advocate using the coercive power of the state to regulate man’s economic life and his spiritual life... [and advocate] a new managerial state—a state controlled and regulated by a mandarin class of conservative virtucrats who think the American people are incapable of governing themselves without the help of the neocons’ special, a priori wisdom. They are the conservative version of FDR’s brain trust: they want to regulate virtually all areas of human thought and action."

As for the Nietzsche / Nazi allusion, the neocons embrace

"The grand purpose of national-greatness foreign policy is to inspire the American people to transcend their vulgar, infantilized, and selfish interests for uplifting national projects. The neoconservatives’ policy of benevolent hegemony. ...[Leo] Strauss and the neocons believe that life is or should be defined by conflict and that a state of ongoing peace and prosperity is morally degrading..."

Of course, many of the neocons would deny they are neocons -- they're just being politically pragmatic (ie, unprincipled on principle), and defending traditional religious "values". But Thompson argues

"The neocons’ talk about moderation and prudence is really only meant to disarm intellectually their competitors in the conservative-libertarian movement who want to defend the Founders’ principles of individual rights and limited government. The neocons preach moderation as a virtue so that ordinary people will accept compromise as inevitable.

So the next time your hear a Republican open his mouth about "political reality" and giving up your selfish interests for the good of the nation -- grab a pitchfork, and get ready to storm the castle.

Mass Extinction... So how do you feel about that?

2011-03-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

The drugging of America continues... A long article from the NY Times, but worth reading. They don't say it (institutional psychosis prevents them, I'm sure), but it's another example of how the government directed insurance market has destroyed a profession.

Well, it's psychiatry. A sort of wanna-be profession. But still.

It's even bigger than that, though. The patient's own problems are so much about how the government schools, welfare and other policies has bred a populace ripe for chronic neurosis in need of therapy. A symptom of a greater philosophical disease, of course. But can a country survive for much longer like this???

Excerpts:

"...But the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Levin, stopped him and said: “Hold it. I’m not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

I will be interjecting emphasis like that here and there. Rather than swearing, that is.

"Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy... Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with each patient. So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved.

"...Dr. Levin, 68, first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its heyday. Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjustments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then, his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep them functional."

It's all so connected to the so-called ADHD "epidemic" and the goal of teachers, administrators, guidance "counselors" and parents who drug energetic children into passivity rather than treating the primary disease -- cognitive dismorphism built of anti-conceptual schooling and chronic, overwhelming boredom caused by it.

"Dr. Levin has found the transition difficult. He now resists helping patients to manage their lives better. “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their problems,” he said, “and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”

To grasp this one, try an analogy like, "I'm your doctor, I'm not trained to get too interested in your injuries. I don't want to get side-tracked by healing you."

Oh. Wait.

...“I miss the mystery and intrigue of psychotherapy,” he said. “Now I feel like a good Volkswagen mechanic. I’m good at it,” Dr. Levin went on, “but there’s not a lot to master in medications."

I have to agree. He's probably a good Volkswagon mechanic. Volk = "people". Wagon= "bus them through".

"... A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients..."

"...Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression ,"

Not so recent. At least 50 years. This has been known for decades. Aka, cognitive therapy.

"...but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago. Insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session....

"...years ago, he often saw patients 10 or more times before arriving at a diagnosis. Now, he makes that decision in the first 45-minute visit. “You have to have a diagnosis to get paid,” he said with a shrug. “I play the game.”

Apparently not the 'game' of the Hippocratic Oath, however. A game more like... tennis, perhaps. They bounce into your office, and you bat them out with a prescription of Xanax or Ritalin. Game, set, match.

Robb Shrugs, Discobulus Punts

2011-02-23T17:19:00.000-08:00

With the release of part 1 of the new "Atlas Shrugged" movie, I've been cringing as each new trailer, excerpt or production detail comes out, and one of the kindest things I could say about it is that if Dagny was Lillian and Rearden was Paul Larkin and Lillian was Francisco and Rearden's brother Phillip was Al Capone and the producers worked for Barnum and Bailey -- it might make sense.

Not everyone feels that way, and I could point to many who are excited and others who are merely phlegmatic, but a common theme among even those who dislike it mildly is that it could have been worse, and "heck, at least it will provide good P.R. for the book, get people reading Rand."

Or not.

I've heard it enough that I am compelled to respond. Here is where I think that analysis goes wrong: under this approach, "Atlas Shrugged, the Travesty" is acceptable and a positive influence in the culture if it basically adheres to the book, and to the philosophy, and the characters follow the same action, with the same convictions.

But imagine the same standard for a sculpture, let's say. Call it, "Discobulus", the famous work of ancient Greece. Instead of a perfectly balanced, graceful man exuding thoughtful power in motion, imagine an incompetent artist trying to "interpret" this to his "honest" best -- I'm talking of a person of no or little training in art or human anatomy, trying to render such a theme. Say it's Joe Sixpack or Peter Keating trying to be a great artist.

What would you get?

Awkward, poorly executed, distorted human form, embarrassing. Now Peter puts it on display in the Louvre for all to see his "interpretation", and let's say that most people going through the Louvre had never seen the original. Well, doubtless, you'd find a few people who would say, "that's nice", maybe even a few others with absolutely no knowledge of art till that moment who would say "great!" and they'd look at the sign below that says, "Rendering of Discobulus by Peter Keating". "Wow, that Keating knows his stuff." How many would track down the original?

Many others would walk past indifferently, others would walk past in disgust. How many of those would say, "Boy, I'd sure like to see the original! Which wing of this museum is it in? Let's go!!"

And how many others would say, "it may not be perfect, but hey, it's great P.R. for the original Greek statue! It will really introduce a lot of people who never heard of it before!"

If that's not clear enough, now apply this approach to Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with an amateur musician at the piano -- actually, not even an amateur, but someone who says, "hey, I know I've only been a bodybuilder my whole life, but I bet I can play the piano, too, without too much study!" Someone who really, really likes the Second Concerto and wants to perform it. For the world. To help promote Rachmaninoff's music to the unenlightened.

I don't really have to explain this one, do I?

Tending to the Sick

2011-02-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

Paul Hsieh wrote an excellent op-ed over at PJ that damns the moral agenda of introducing social activism into medical ethics, citing the example of doctors writing "excuses" for protesters in Wisconsin. I made the comment,

Dr. Hsieh is correct in saying, "...“social justice” is frequently just a euphemism for a socialist political agenda of leftist politics, redistribution of wealth, and heavy state controls over the marketplace," but let's add the motivation underlying this: the morality of self-sacrifice.

Everything that drives this agenda is the destruction of the individual in the name of the collective. Under this kind of politics and morality, you are nothing -- the State, the "Volk", or just your local community and neighbors and even your government-run HMO are more important. Any group of any size is more important than you are. Any ambition, any happiness, any achievement and any judgment you may ever wish to exert can be sacrificed to any one who claims that he represents "the people" or whatever other tribe they are pidgeon-holing you into.

You are a pidgeon to them, after all. Just part of the flock. Have some more seed -- or take an aspirin instead of an MRI.

Even doctors are amorphous non-entities under this kind of morality, like the social-activist doctors in Wisconsin. Everyone is sacrificed to everyone else: patient's health and lives are sacrificed to "budget savings," and doctor's judgment and integrity and just remuneration for years of excruciatingly difficult study and practice are sacrificed to sate the power-lust of "community organizers", bureaucrats and those quasi-governmental professional organizations that have been seized by the collectivists. (Who include not just Leftists but too many do-gooders on the Right, too.)

And so it goes.

Play this out across the nation and across the world, in every profession and every realm of human action. In Ayn Rand's words, "the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrifice".

It is.

The dignity of the individual needs to be reclaimed -- including the individual doctor, the individual patient, and the individual doctor-patient relationship. Expel the government from any involvement in medicine, at any level, for any purpose. Expel the government from all aspects of dictating the economy, and us. In the words of Rand's hero, John Galt, from Atlas Shrugged: "Get the hell out of my way!"

The London Telegraph Takes on Plato

2011-02-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

We here at Robbservations have been remiss in our reportorial duties of late, so to get back in the saddle, so to speak, let's do a fun topic that I posted elsewhere to some friends. The subject is a link to a news story on yet another sighting of the ancient city of Atlantis. Or not.

If you go to Google Earth and put in the latitude/longitude coordinates from the article (31 15'15.53N 24 15'30.53W), there is indeed a very odd undersea grid of lines in the seabed that is 100 miles x 80 miles in extent at a depth of 18,000 feet. It's almost certainly either a hughly unusual geological formation (you can find all sorts of similar things if you scan the seabed of the world, though this one is admittedly different) or some smartass at the mapping service has been playing games. I'll put my money on the latter before I attribute the grid to Atlanteans, mermaids, mutant seacows or space aliens. The likely explanation to me is that it's an artifact of defective source data they used for the ocean mapping, which probably came from a ship on the surface that was using sonar while following a grid pattern to map the ocean floor, with GPS to guide it. Probably oil exploration. Any number of things could have caused errors in the depth measurements -- uncalibrated equipment, old equipment, defective equipment, sloppy measurements (imagine if they were taken 40 years ago, say), sea conditions, who knows what.

As for Atlantis, the "experts" who persist in believing it could be in the Atlantic ocean haven't the foggiest clue of the history of pre-antiquity or the way people in ancient times viewed their world, for which there was no "Atlantic Ocean", a modern term. The end of the world in Plato's time was about Gibralter, if even that far, and the historical record wasn't good enough to locate Atlantis precisely. Plato was guilty of a lot of hyperbole, and I doubt he could count well enough to tell the difference between 9000 years and 2000 years before his time based on nothing but hand-me-down stories. His methods of radio-carbon dating were somewhat lacking. There is this interesting bit I found online:

"The oldest known mention of "Atlantic" is in The Histories of Herodotus around 450 BC (Hdt. 1.202.4): Atlantis thalassa (Greek: Ἀτλαντὶς θάλασσα; English: Sea of Atlas); see also: Atlas Mountains. Another name historically used[who?] was the ancient term Ethiopic Ocean, derived from Ethiopia, whose name was sometimes used as a synonym for all of Africa and thus for the ocean.[citation needed] Before Europeans discovered other oceans, the term "ocean" itself was synonymous with the waters beyond the Strait of Gibraltar that we now know as the Atlantic. The Greeks believed this ocean to be a gigantic river encircling the world."

So Plato doubtless picked up on Herodotus' mention of "Atlantis".

In any case, I think we would know the details of a geologic event 9000 years ago that sunk 10,000 square miles of land by over 18,000 feet. I agree with those who place Atlantis on the ancient island of Thera, aka, modern Santorini, which had an extensive Minoan civilization on it, an offshoot of the civilization on Crete. Around 2200BC it suffered possibly the world's most cataclysmic volcanic eruption in human times (say, over a span of 100,000 years or more) creating the "ring-shape" that Plato gave to the Atlantean world, except, after they were all gone. This volcanic eruption was likely the source of all the great flood myths that appeared among many religions, including Noah's, as well as accounts from Jason and the Argonauts. Some estimates suggest that the magnitude of the Tsunami hitting the Greek mainland could have exceeded 1000 feet high. On Crete, 60 miles to the south, there are multi-ton blocks of stone from an ancient seawall that were pushed something like a half-mile inland, toward Knossos. I'm going on memory, so don't beat me up too much over dates and distances.

You see, in any case, to the Greeks of Plato's time that "Atlantis" was simply a place a long way off that something terrible happened, and when your principle mode of transportation was a big rowboat with sails, a hundred miles (the distance from mainland Greece to Thera) is a long way off. Throw in 2000 years of big fish stories and the accuracy is bound to suffer, but probably not so much as you'll read in the London Telegraph.

My Take on How To Be a Writer -- or Not

2010-12-29T22:44:00.001-08:00

The essay in this link discusses "how to be a fiction writer" by a successful sci-fi writer (Jerry Pournelle, a nice guy whom I had the privilege to share a beer with last summer, coincidentally). It is interesting, if inadequate -- it points you in the general direction of north, but won't get you to the Pole. But at the end he links to an even more interesting discussion of "how to be a writer" by sci-fi author Robert Heinlein in this transcript.

Heinlein offers more substance in his guidance to budding writers (in this case the '73 class of midshipmen at the Naval Academy), though I have serious disagreements with a few things he says. (Quite aside from his opinions on a proper morality, which are horrible -- based on a Kantian hierarchy that puts the individual on the bottom and makes self-sacrifice for the group the supreme imperative, but yet, in a twisted way, he still upholds the absolute sanctity of individual selfishness. Go figure.)

There's a common theme among many successful writers who say you "can't teach writing"-- they say you just have to write to "know" how to write. I mean, yes, you can't learn brain surgery from a book, either; you've got to operate on a lot of cadavers and patients. But I do think there is more to teach than "work at it a lot".

That cliche grates on me, I confess. Having investigated this in more grueling detail than I care to bore you with, I think there are many reasons why writing (or more specifically, fiction writing) hasn't been taught well, so with that in mind, let this fiction-writing novice (well, screen-writing novice) take a stab at just a few things that I think are relevant here:

1. The existing approaches to teaching fiction writing suck, big time. All of them. Get any of the books on the subject. You'll come away with an invincible sense of "AHA! Now I know what to do!" And then you'll go and try to apply that wonderful theory and flounder hopelessly in developing a really good story. Exhibit A: Hollywood.   Hollywood is wonderful at knowing a good story when they see it, but creating a good story is largely hit-or-miss with them. (Exhibit B: every sequel ever made.)

ALL of these books suffer from hopelessly misplaced methods of analyzing other writer's works, and randomly misplaced tips for how to outline and develop your own work according to "successful" books, movies or plays. ("The three act structure is generally recognized as superior..." blah, blah-blah, delivered in a very stiff New England tone of upper-crust condescension, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.)

In other words, they largely advocate the art of imitation, achieved by stringing together cliches with a cultivated look of faux originality.

Yes, on that basis, no one will learn writing. In the absence of proper theories of nuclear engineering you couldn't teach the design of nuclear power plants, either. I mean, if you were doing it based on a theory of alchemy and woodworking, you wouldn't get very far, would you? You'd just have to rely on those who possess the noble art of nuclear "divination", who innately "know", somehow, the nuances of the proper metal alloys and cooling systems and radioisotopes required. That's sort of where writing is today, with regard to schooling, and why it "can't" be taught. The proper theory hasn't been properly expounded into people's heads.

2. Writing good fiction requires a very broad base of knowledge, much more so than other fields, and it has to be almost fully automatized before you can write anything of real quality -- especially, compelling dialogue.   (Very few writers today write good dialogue in my opinion. Mainly they're very good at avoiding writing dialogue -- at all costs.) Ayn Rand discusses this somewhat in her fiction course, but barely touches on what should be emphasized with a jack-hammer to the brain: you've got to train your subconscious, and then rely on it while writing -- give it the reins. In writing, deep analysis of the quality of what you've written comes after trained "intuition" (ie, programmed cognitive reaction to a particular set of concretes defined according to a creative purpose) puts words on paper. Anything else breeds "analysis paralysis" and crappy writing.

3. Writing requires the ability and interest in doing lots of research--say, 16th century history if you want to do a novel on Magellan's voyage. Heinlein touches on some of the things you need to know, but I think he goes way overboard in demanding encyclopaedic knowledge before you even get started. You could spend a lifetime acquiring seven PhD's, by his standard, before you ever wrote a single word (though he was very knowledgable himself).

4. Much more important is the writer's ability to gain insights into the nature of human psychology as such, and how it's expressed in human interactions, culture, trade, wars, business, romance, etc. This is how you get to universal conflicts that anyone can relate to.

5. Writing fiction also requires a certain kind of psychology in the writer himself -- the kind of psychology that relishes the experience of human conflict and seeks it out in developing a story line, while understanding it at a deep emotional level. Most people want to avoid conflict at all costs. They run like hell from it. No. If this is what you want, become an accountant, not a fiction writer. A writer wants to make the lives of his characters a living hell -- and drag out the suspense of it as long as possible -- before resolving anything. If you can't stand the pressure, get out of the cooker.

6. Writing also requires a psychology that genuinely enjoys observing and understanding people and their interactions, and finds them fascinating. If you don't have that psychology to start with, it's going to be an incredibly uphill battle to acquire it, though it can be done. Introverts and overly cautious people need not apply -- unless they're willing to become a whole lot more extroverted and willing to take risks in their own lives.

7. And it requires a certain devil-may-care self-confidence and separation of your self-worth from what you write. You can spend a lot of time outlining a story to reach a clear plot, theme and climax, and then find you have to chuck it more or less as you start writing in detail--because the moment you start putting words in characters' mouths they're going to become vastly more real to you, and this will suggest much better how they are going to get you to the climax -- what they need to be, who is important, who isn't, along with new conflicts, the need for new characters, etc. The old cliche of a writer having to be willing to "murder his darlings" (the precious baubles of your words on paper) is relevant here, but more accurately, in chucking a detailed plot on the spur of the moment for an even better arc, a writer has to be willing to murder the psychological support system of his self-image. That takes confidence and a belief in your ability to do it all over again from scratch, faster, easier, and better.

8. For that reason you've got to have a certain artist's psychology when you do outline a story (IMHO), one which doesn't obsess too much on controlling every word and deed of each character like the roles in a Victorian drama. Your outline will simply change too much when you do the detailed writing. Broad strokes are the ticket -- what's my climax? Who are my characters and what do they need to be to get me there? What are the key sub-conflicts? Etc. This is sort of what the chapter titles in a novel accomplish for a writer. Writing is very much Aristotelian causation in action -- define your entities (your characters and their purposes), define your goal (the climax), set up the situation (what kind of world are the characters in), and the action will drive naturally toward the climax if you understand all that and aren't just jumping from cliche to cliche.

9. You also need a very active mind in relation to making your own observations about life in general. You need something original to say. Some unique observations or perspective you can put in the mouths or choices of your characters. If all you're doing is stringing cliches together, you're wasting your time. The story will be boring and predictable by definition. (Note that you might make a good living at it if your audience wouldn't know a cliche from meat cleaver. Hence, the miracle of Titanic.)

10. You need to be brutally honest with yourself and about what you're writing. If it's crap, it's crap (ever see "Educating Rita"?), and you've got to be willing to confront that even if it hurts (it will). In the beginning you won't know what's crap, but your "crap-detector" will always creep ahead of your writing ability and keep you on your toes. If you're honest with yourself, your crap-detector will scare the crap out of you and pull you forward to greater heights of competence and skill.

11. And you need to be highly selfish to write. I don't mean this as a cliche. Writing is a very personal and possessive thing, and you have to do it for those reasons -- the thrill of putting your words on paper, the excitement of reaching your climax with your characters and your meaning attached to it. (Remember Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone? Typing the last words of her latest novel and weeping with joy? So true.) And the desire to be alone for hours on end, day after day after day, for up to 6 hours each day, shut up in a room, no TV, no radio, inside your own thoughts, for the rest of your writing career...

All this is hopelessly inadequate as a summary -- I've probably left out at least fifty other key points, including many I don't even know -- but it does provide the broad strokes of some things *I* think are essential to being a fiction writer, speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to learn the craft, but who hasn't made it yet (ie, a paying gig).

If I was to summarize all this I'd put it this way: if you want to be a writer, you have to want to make yourself the kind of person who can write. It isn't about learning to write so much -- that's almost easy if you've got the right psychology to begin with. It's about learning to be re-make yourself as the kind of person possessing the psychology of one who can write.

A lot of what Ayn Rand said about writing is very relevant but I would say hopelessly inadequate in itself if you don't start with the writing "gene". She just outlines the broad principles ("writing 101") and barely touches on the necessary psychology you have to develop. Meaning no criticism whatsoever because the subject is so complex, I class the entire corpus of her discussions on fiction writing as "Writing 101" because if you don't have the innate writer's psychology it's going to take several years (maybe many years, maybe a lifetime) of firm guidance to acquire it -- at least if you want to do good writing. I think the training required to be a writer is not so much about learning how to model your stories on "successful" plot constructions and character conflicts (very little of that, really), but on how to cultivate the writing mentality itself.

Though some people do have an "innate" ability--the Ayn Rand's, Victor Hugo's, Paddy Chayefsky's, and, to lesser degree, the J.J. Abrams' and Aaron Sorkin's all had big head starts, psychologically speaking.

I shouldn't say "gene". I really do think dramatic writing can be learned with the right committment and enough time and effort. If Ayn Rand started out at the top of the evolutionary ladder of writing talent, most of us are still waddling with Cro-magnon cave dwellers and gnawing on the petrified bones of stale cliches from hairy pachyderms. To mix this metaphor even more, most of us start out a lot further from the starting line of good writing. Sometimes a few miles from the starting line (like me), which a fervent desire alone won't overcome unless there's some guidance for how to even enter the race.

Others simply lack the committment. But here the motto of Delphi in Ancient Greece applies: Know Thyself. If you can't muster the committment to develop the writing mentality, don't waste your time in deluding yourself you can be a fiction writer. You never will. Set yourself down, look yourself in the mirror and take stock: are you willing to become a different person?

But if you can overcome the basic psychological hurdles, then I think a knowledge of the broad principles will let fiction writing come more or less naturally to you, with enough practice. Then you just write a lot till you're good at it. And in a word, speaking as a novice, that's my take on the subject.