Positive Liberty

Yesterday I went to TG Cigars to pick up a couple of stogies for the vacation: 5 Vegas A-Series “Apostles.” To connoisseurs, they’re Churchill-sized, with a Costa Rican maduro wrapper. To everyone else, they’re known as stinky sticks.

Although a cigar is a nice change of pace, I’m usually more of a pipe smoker, so while at the cigar shop I took a look at some of their tobacco pipes and hookahs. I recalled my father’s pipe collection, and one pipe in particular: a relic from my childhood memories, possibly plastic, possibly ceramic, with a perfectly smooth, Carolina-blue finish and an aluminum stem looking for all the world like a heat sink on a CPU.

The pipe looked like a spaceship, or like something a mad scientist had improvised, artfully, from his lab equipment. Its races right past tacky, and verges closely on bizarre. I love this pipe, I thought to myself. I covet this pipe.

“Ah well, I’ll probably never find its like again,” I said to myself. I thought I knew, too, because I’d looked for it on eBay and never found anything quite like it.

I paid for my Apostles and left. And when I came home there was a package for me on the kitchen table. Here’s what I found inside. Continue Reading »

Leitmotif: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken

Assorted links, in which various parties get what they deserve, below the fold. Continue Reading »

STRUNG OUT!…in his life. Say that about him and he would have pulled your god damned tongue out!

Today is August 9 and my Dad tells me it has some special anniversary for the Nixon Presidency. My Dad — an old New Deal/Great Society Democrat — disdained Nixon. We kids, my two brothers and I objected to a “Mother’s Day,” a “Father’s Day,” but no “Kid’s Day,” so we created one. And my Dad choose August 8th or 9th, I can’t remember, because of the Nixon anniversary.

Me — I object to the Nixon Presidency chiefly for how he meddled with free market economics and I think he makes a great foil for jokes and imitations like Howard Stern’s [Fred Norris does a great impression], The Simpson’s and Dan Aykroyd’s.

Since I’ve blogged about The Bohemian Grove conspiracy nonsense before, what follows is a funny clip from the Nixon tapes talking about San Fransisco, the Bohemian Grove, and Nixon’s distaste for the “god damned faggy” environments of such.

[E]very night in cities all over the country, perfectly good music goes to waste on people content to stand there. More than one event function planner and wedding DJ has noticed that it’s harder to get the party started. In Boston, the city’s humongous twin dance clubs, Axis and Avalon, no longer even exist; they were recently demolished to make way for a giant House of Blues. And for the first time in recent memory, we’re having a serious party-dance crisis.

Today there’s probably not one person in a thousand who knows how to dance a proper minuet. (Antiquarian though I am, I’m not one of them.)

This is not a crisis. This is a crisis. Or this. But not this. If you think I’m going to shed any tears for the Chicken Noodle Soup (Yes, it’s a dance. Who knew?), then I’d like to invite you to our next soiree, where we shall dance a cotillion, followed by a Viennese waltz, and after that some good old fashioned tarantellas.

And Scaramouche, can you do the fandango? Nope… I didn’t think so. Obviously, it’s a crisis.

The prankster in me finds this interview by Alex Jones of David Gergen quite funny in the “Punked”/”Borat” vein.

I’d respect their confidentiality if the Bohemian Grove would have me. Their rituals sound like tremendous fun. They remind me of 70s era metal, much tamer than the stuff Marylin Manson does today. I’d love to drink fine scotch while watching the “Cremation of Care.” If I had Bohemian Grove $$, I’d hire Heaven & Hell — Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler — to play “Heaven & Hell” during that ceremony.

“Sing me a song, you’re a singer
Do me a wrong, you’re a bringer of evil
The devil is never a maker
The less that you give, you’re a taker
So its on and on and on, its heaven and hell,…”

Speaking of which….

It’s a great riff! Tony Iommi metal riff master general.

Some Saturday music for you. Most of Walsh’s (of Kansas) best material was written by Kerry Livgren (guitar/keyboard/main writer for Kansas). Walsh wrote some good and some not so good tunes for Kansas and non-Kansas.

Every Step of the Way was from Walsh’s first solo album. It’s a good, straight ahead-blues rock song, though a prog-rock length of 9 minutes long. It starts off with Walsh’s low range and slowly builds from there. Even if Kansas/Walsh isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, hopefully you’ll understand from listening to the tune, why I think Walsh in his prime had the perfect white rock voice (something Steve Hackett once noted of Walsh).

In the meantime, like a lot of aging rock vocalists, Walsh lost some tone and range. But at his 1/2 best still sings better than most rock vocalists especially those his age. The following is a good solo song from the “mature” Walsh.

Reader Chris Berez alerted me to the fact that the Watchmen trailer is up. It looks really good. Watchmen is the greatest comic book/graphic novel ever produced, certainly one day will be viewed as essential reading in the Western Canon. Comic book geeks rightly worry that the movie will ruin such a magnificent piece of literature. Based on the trailer, my hopes are up.

The best thing they could (similar to what was done in the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s “Sin City”) is shoot right from the comic book and take as few artistic liberties as possible. Write Alan Moore’s dialog exactly into the actors’ mouths. What’s challenging is that Watchmen is a 12-part book and has too much content for even a 3 hour movie. So some artistic liberties are going to be inevitable. Hopefully the movie will be successful and then encourage more folks to read the graphic novel.

My mentor, Harry Browne, rarely referred to the “war on drugs” without the modifier, “insane.” It’s accurate and it just rolls off the tongue — “the insane war on drugs.” How crazy is the war on drugs?

Judge Jim Gray, along with a prominent California, business attorney, writing for the LA Times, provide a compelling yet concise description of the lunacy of our war on a substance, titled “This is the U.S. on drugs.” Their piece is well done. I recommend you bookmark it, because you’ll rarely find the argument made so quickly, so simply, and so definitively. Continue Reading »

He had been a skeptic before his encounter; but on that day, his inner world shifted, and he became afraid. He stopped giving directions. He stopped trusting strangers. He knew that magical penis loss was a real and terrifying possibility.

It’s actually a very thought-provoking article. But also with one of the funniest sentences I’ve read in weeks.

Diamonds are scarce like every other economic good. Their scarcity, however, is vastly exaggerated by those in the business of marketing them as a luxury. If the cure for cancer were discovered tomorrow, however, and if it somehow required natural, i.e., not man-made diamonds, the demand for diamonds would skyrocket and they would legitimately command an even higher price.

Food, by contrast, is not a luxury but a necessity, at least in its most elementary forms. Moreover, the poorer you are, the more you will spend of whatever your income may be on food and the more vulnerable you will be to any sudden and significant increase in its price. Four dollar a gallon gasoline inconveniences middle-class Americans but a 75% increase in global food prices is catastrophic for poor people around the world.

Which is precisely what an unpublished World Bank study is being reported as claiming.

In the rush to report such things (and, yes, the rush to report such reports), it more often than not occurs that sensational conclusions such as this are not only misleadingly taken out of context but, once the data is actually made available, subsequently shown to be unsubstantiated by that data. That needs to be said here, as well.

Still, whatever the figure may be, whether it is 75% or the laughably and unbelievably small 3% the U.S. government has claimed plant-derived fuels contribute to recent food price increases, it takes no more than common sense (never in large supply, I grant you) and a passing grade in intro economics to realize that a new and large demand for a commodity will at the very least temporarily raise its market price. Moreover, at some point, if that demand continues or, worse yet, continues to grow, suppliers will not be able to meet such increased demand at whatever the former market price may have been.

U.S. energy policy (not unlike U.S. health care policy) is criminally broken. I mean “criminal” in a moral, not a legal sense, and yet the fact that alternative bio-fuels like ethanol are being mandated by our elected weasels in Washington artificially skewing both the energy and the food markets and contributing no end to the misery of the world’s poor probably should be a crime of some sort. It is, in fact, simply a forced redistribution of wealth for nothing more than the ephemeral political advantage of those office holders who temporarily placate their constituencies as a result, never mind the unintended and sometimes tragic consequences others must suffer.

But that is the political reality. Starving people in third world nations don’t vote in U.S. elections, whereas Kansas and Nebraska corn farmers do.

(* Yes, I do in fact know that when Adam Smith first wrote about corn laws the word “corn” was a generic term for grains.)

Today’s best parenthetical remark comes from my colleague Will Wilkinson:

(Ramen is cheaper than cat food, by the way. I investigated this in college.)

Check it out here. And yes, that is the guy from WKRP in Cincinnati, the late great Gordon Jump.

I hate to admit that when I was younger I watched waaaaaay too much TV which helps me especially appreciate Family Guy, the creator of which Seth MacFarlane is likewise my age and watched way too many episodes of shows like this when he was growing up (and often incorporates those references into his show). Fortuitously, given that “Family Guy” is one of the most popular programs of my students, it helps me form a meaningful connection when I do my best to “edutain” them. In education, never underestimate the value of a good Simpsons or Family Guy example.

It is said of a man that you cannot know how far he has come unless you know where he began. Perhaps on the occasion of George Carlin’s death this might be said as well about American comedy in the last half century and so also of America, itself.

Carlin’s 1972 Class Clown was the first comedy album I ever bought. It was dedicated “to Leonard Schneider for taking all the risks.” But like Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, Carlin was himself arrested for obscenity, ironically for doing his best known bit from that album, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” (As far as I can tell, at least when it comes to broadcast television, the list is still valid.)

I remember earlier appearances of Carlin, clean-shaven, dressed in suit and tie and more wacky than cutting-edge, doing guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, his Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman, cracking Johnny up rattling off a meteorological jargon packed weather report only to end with “But our radar has also just picked up hundreds of ICBMs heading our way, so I wouldn’t sweat the cold front.”

Carlin changed with the times over the course of the sixties and early seventies and, it could also be said, helped in his own small way to change them. The sort of comedy we tolerate, let alone laugh at, says something about us. Carlin was funnier than Bruce, his “observational” eye for the absurd or the merely comical, especially in matters of language, was much sharper than Seinfeld’s and his “transgressiveness” was far more authentic than 99% of the comics that came along after him.

I don’t think it would be too unfair to describe Carlin’s politics as left-libertarian, though the leftist bent often got the better of his libertarian inclinations whenever the two came into conflict. But it is probably more fair to say that Carlin’s comedy was a study in equal opportunity misanthropy, notwithstanding the fact that some targets are just richer than others. Regardless, his was a unique talent. In any ranking of 20th century comedy genius, a pantheon that would include, for example, Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, George Carlin would almost certainly make the Top Ten.

Herewith, a 2005 Carlin interview with the Onion A.V. Club.

Neil Young — one of my music idols — and his relatively new song “When God Made Me.” This could serve as an anthem for theological liberalism or a warm theistic universalism.