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So James Cameron, judging by the stories told about his ego, must be at least a little peeved that his ex-wife got the Oscar for Best Picture after all the money he spent on special effects and 3D.  By contrast, the director of the 1953 horror blockbuster House of Wax, which helped launch the original 3D craze, was blind in one eye, thus lacked depth perception, and wasn’t really sure what all the fuss was about.  James Cameron has two working eyes, of course, but no soul.

Many an 80s film buff is probably hoping right now that Corey Haim has an immortal soul, after news of his untimely passing.  I never met him, though I did once overhear a drunk young man on the streets of Manhattan complaining that he had just come from a party where “That movie guy, Corey Feldman, was hitting on my girl!”  So that’s, like, three degrees.

I would be less excited about a connection to Sandra Bullock.  Best Actress winner Bullock apparently turned down her role in The Blind Side three times before finally accepting it, because she was uncomfortable portraying a devout Christian. So how good an actress could she be?

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More amenable to portraying a Christian woman was my companion at an NYSalon event last night at which Ron Bailey and other panelists discussed genetic reductionism/determinsim, which revealed that even some scientists — in this case British neuroscientist and panel member Stuart Derbyshire — are inclined to think that something nigh-mystical is going on (or at least vaguely Hegelian and non-material) when humans exercise agency and make “free” choices.

To my companion, this sounded about right, even if it was rather vague, but to me, the whole discussion was mainly a reminder that I’m in no danger of becoming a mere genetic determinist because Read the rest of this entry »

A colleague points out this unusually slick and funny anti-government song parody from last year, Tim Hawkins’ “The Government Can,” based on “The Candy Man.”  Given how much mileage the left gets out of priding itself on having the edge in hipness and irony, we need more of this.  A half-century ago, they thought they were intellectually superior because they had John Kenneth Galbraith, and now they think they are because they have Jon Stewart.

The Sam Adams Alliance (itself a reminder that brewing and freedom go together, like the fine reading I heard last night by Max Watman from his history of moonshine, Chasing the White Dog, at the bar Half King) has done a survey of Tea Party organizers and finds, as has been my impression from attending a few, that they are admirably focused on the less-spending message instead of tangential social issues.

Among findings from the survey listed on the Sam Adams site:

•A large number are politically involved for the first time. 47 percent of activists surveyed said that they were “uninvolved” or “rarely involved” in politics before their participation in Tea Party groups.
•When asked which issues were “very important” to them, 92 percent said “budget,” 85 percent said “economy,” and 80 percent said “defense.”
•No respondents listed social issues as an “important direction” for the movement.
•86 percent oppose the formation of a third-party.
•90 percent cited “to stand up for my beliefs” when characterizing their initial reason for involvement.
•62 percent identified as Republicans, 28 percent as Independents, 10 percent as “Tea Party”

Meanwhile, within government, things continue to get done through ugly wheeling and dealing, and on that front, retiring New York congressman Eric Massa now says he’s being forced out by Rahm Emanuel and other Democrats because of his opposition to Obamacare, using what he claims are exaggerated sexual harassment charges against him.

Without knowing the details of the accusations against him, though, I just like the fact that he (A) uses being completely drunk as a defense, something you don’t hear from politicians a lot these days, and (B) paraphrases (presumably) his lewd comment to an associate as a remark about “frakking” — which may, of course, mean that Massa, like so many political people I know, is a Battlestar: Galactica fan.

One of my favorite things is hearing people complain about something you barely understand but complaining in sufficient detail that you almost come to share their passion about the obscure problem, like the time a video editor complained to me at length about his dongle being taken without permission, or the letter to the editor I once heard a comedian read onstage by some irate citizen denouncing banks in the harshest possible terms for doing away with change-sorting machines.  When Green Party activist Chris Brodeur ran for office in NYC, his platform included getting rid of mesh garbage cans because he was tired of throwing things into them and having them pass right through — and he wanted more publicly-visible clocks because wearing a watch makes his wrist sweat.

In a similar vein, if you spent last night’s Oscar broadcast hearing friends or family complain about bad movies, you might enjoy, as a change of pace, this brief, list-like denunciation of annoying common problems with role-playing videogames.  I have almost never played these sorts of games, but after reading the article, I too want medieval shopkeeps to stop giving speeches about their wares before I can buy things from them, for example.

Yikes: Shia LaBeouf is surprisingly, perhaps admirably, frank about revealing what a deep emotional crisis his co-star Michael Douglas from next month’s Wall Street sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, is going through.  Douglas won an Oscar in 1987 for playing ruthless trader Gordon Gekko and now returns to the role — with Oliver Stone directing again and depicting Gekko warning about the current financial crisis after he gets out of a long prison stint, reformed.

Ironically, though, Douglas’s real-life son is now in prison, and it sounds like that matters to him a lot more than his movie work, which is to his credit, really.  I was already tempted — half out of a sense of duty, half out of perverse curiosity — to see the film just to discern what fresh anti-capitalist propaganda America’s favorite Chavez-lionizing director is foisting on us.  Now it may become one of those things like Martin Sheen’s performance in Apocalypse Now or Heath Ledger’s in The Dark Knight that we all have to see just to watch the cracks forming.

I suspect the film will not emphasize the fact that the homogeneity bred by regulation contributes to the potential for broad, systemic collapses instead of isolated ones — but that idea is explained at some length in last year’s special issue of Critical Review on “Causes of the Financial Crisis,” soon to be reprinted as a book, so pick that up as a supplement to the film.

On the eve of the Oscars, I contemplate three odd films 2010 brings that likely will not be nominees in next year’s Best Picture category:

•an ill-advised-sounding thriller called Frozen about three men stuck throughout the film on a ski lift chair after dark (claustrophobic terror done wrong, sounds like)

•a trippy film called Enter the Void about a ghost watching the after-effects of his murder on criminals in Japan, from the same director who did the earlier film Irreversible, which was made controversial in part by having a nine-minute-long one-take scene of Monica Belucci’s character being raped, all of which sounds like stuff the Wachowskis might enjoy

•the parkour-themed sequel District 13: Ultimatum, from a series that I only now realize is not only produced by Luc Besson but directed by the director of Taken. I bought the Taken DVD on Nybakken’s pro-patriarchal-violence recommendation and liked it (Kyle Smith did not).

There’s been talk that the same director may do a Dune remake (which might sound something like, “You have my son. If you give him back, this ends and I will let you go. If you run, or you hurt him, I will find you, I will attack you with giant sandworms, and I will kill you.”) My two main hopes for a new Dune: subtract 80% of the stuff David Lynch tried to squeeze in but add the stuff about Paul Atreides perceiving branching timelines every time he makes a historic decision — one way peace, the other death-dealing hordes marauding across the galaxy with him at their head, etc. Just like when I decide where to eat lunch.

On the parkour thing, it occurs to me that I don’t really know the rules of parkour (or “free running,” the art of running and climbing one’s way across urban landscapes, so frequently deployed in action movies from Bond to Bourne to Hulk in recent years). Would I automatically lose if I concluded, “You know, I think, weighing all my options, I’m going to try running on the sidewalk, thus avoiding the whole scaling-fire-escapes thing and the clambering over a parked bus thing”? Do you get points for climbing extra-crazy objects, even while ostensibly trying to move as quickly as possible? I’m sure the Wikipedia page explains all this, but for the moment I’m enjoying the old-fashioned sensation of not knowing.

Afraid things will be crowded tonight at, say, the Broadway and 68th IMAX theatre if you try to see Tim Burton’s visually delightful and adventure-film-intense version of Alice in Wonderland? Then why not join me a few blocks away at 2 West 64th St., where the Ethical Culture Society will be taking a trip down a more recent rabbit hole, by watching The Matrix and then discussing its philosophical and spiritual implications?

I must go (reception 6:30, film 7) if only to cap this religious-discussion-themed week (which also included our fine, feisty Debate at Lolita Bar between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer, in which a crowd with admittedly few Christians concluded, by not too wide a margin, that Christianity is indeed for wimps). Tonight, I must also spread the insights of my friend Read Schuchardt who has pointed out that the first Matrix movie, while invoking numerous overlapping symbol-systems and philosophies, owes a great deal of its remake-reality-to-your-individual-will vibe to the bland yet creepy Landmark Forum self-help cult, of which the Wachowski Siblings are apparently graduates.

Read correctly predicted before the Matrix sequels came out that Christians enthusiastic about the first film and its messiah narrative would be disappointed by the sequels, which, to stay true to the Forum formula, would have to end with the messiah subverted, slain, and supplanted by individuals’ own diverse efforts. No more Trinity by trilogy’s end, either.

Of course, the Forum grew out of the older self-help cult Est, which was a conscious attempt to create something like Scientology without the aliens — and to some it might seem almost as nutty for Ethical Culture to have something resembling a church without a god, but for all their flaws, I’d say both at least represent slight improvements over their source material, so I may as well check out the latter group for an evening. Icky as watered-down quasi-religions and, say, Unitarianism can be, they may be a crude glimpse of the future if humans retain the social cohesion and moral lectures that religion contains but are capable of gradually shedding specific supernatural claims for lack of evidence (as careful thinkers, with intellectual integrity and honesty, eventually must).

Surveying the panoply of classic films easily available to the modern cinephile in advance of the Oscars, I finally watched the DVD of the ensemble rap drama/comedy Krush Groove from 1985 that I picked up at a convenience store recently.  It was pretty awesome.

I admit that for me, no hiphop fan, the big thrill is seeing the charismatic Sheila E., the she-Prince, not only performing numbers like “Love Bizarre” but acting — even doing a big love scene and getting into a heartbreaking triangle with Run from Run-DMC.  She’s so lovely even when just speaking (rather than writhing onstage in pseudo-eighteenth-century garb), I feel it vindicates my long-term plan, formed in childhood, to live in the big city with her and Annie Lennox, not so wholly unlike the way things turned out, really.  Hearing how unnatural E. sounds in the two scenes that require her to rap, I was further charmed, in an admittedly assimilationist way.  She’s no more street than I am.

But in Krush Groove, we also get to see the Fat Boys getting in trouble in high school and celebrating the Sbarro’s on West 49th St. with their heartfelt rap “All You Can Eat.”  We see Run get into a fight with a fledgling hiphop record exec over Run’s last-minute unilateral decision to put the untested Ms. E onstage.  Drama!   And will the exec’s fledgling company, aided by the likes of Kurtis Blow, be able to come up with the $5,000 they need to pay off the loan shark who made the printing of their first big record possible?  Mainly, though: Sheila E. (did you know her brother is the biological father of Nicole Richie?).

Two brief chronal oddities of note: a short-shrift cameo of only a few seconds by some guys called the Beastie Boys — and a DJ wearing a Husker Du t-shirt when they weren’t yet well known (not that they were ever huge, really) — but Husker Du are from the St. Paul, MN area, like Ms. E’s colleague Prince.  Coincidence?

To broaden my horizons, I will make a point to watch the 1940s ballet tragedy The Red Shoes at some point soon, and my friends Jake and Holly’s thirteen year-old son Max recommends this song by Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight’s our big Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is Christianity for Wimps?” — and one question sure to arise is whether wimps are, in fact, bad. Take our level of tolerance for violence as an example.

Surely, violence manifests itself in all sorts of horrible ways (else we would have no police and indeed would never even have established the first known written law code, since Hammurabi was as keen to prevent random fights as we are — nothing could be more morally-traditional than the suppression of violence). At the same time, one would not want to so isolate people from the existence of violence that they are incapable of dealing with it when it arises — even dealing some of it out when, arguably, it is necessary.

One of the ex-Misfits at our last debate reminisced fondly about an errant fan who interfered with a concert and was given a necessary — and educational — beat-down, and I have just recently rewatched the impressive early Jackie Chan movie Drunken Master, in which his character is sent off to learn the art of “drunken boxing” because only that fighting form will teach him mental/moral discipline while at the same time producing chaotic physical movements too confusing for opponents to match (the sequel is better, though, as Nybakken would want me to acknowledge).

While I’d love a completely peaceful world as much as the next guy, I was always troubled as a child by the artificial removal of violence from depictions of the world. One of my earliest political thoughts was resentment of a ban in the 1980s on the depiction of realistic guns on kids’ cartoons (would they take my Star Wars action figures away next?). And it is annoying that drivers always pulled themselves intact out of the most spectacular car crashes on The A-Team (thanks of course to the impressive work of the Joey Chitwood stunt team, as we all seemed to know back then). Congressmen on the lookout for violence tend to be pleased that no one gets their limbs ripped off on such shows, but wouldn’t that be more honest and perhaps even a greater deterrent to “trying this at home”?

All of this explains why I’m starting to think that despite Clash of the Titans coming out next month, the April movie I’m really looking forward to is: Read the rest of this entry »

I saw Alice in Wonderland, about which I am sworn to secrecy for now, but I will just say that from the posters alone you can glean that Helena Bonham-Carter’s character has a sinister grin and a giant forehead, if you’re into that (and if you are, that’s one more weird side topic we can discuss at tomorrow night’s Debate at Lolita Bar on Christianity).

Depp aside: Johnny Depp will apparently be making another appearance with a woman with a sinister grin and giant forehead, Vanessa Paradis, this one portraying an ahistorically hottified Simone de Beauvoir. I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of some important philosophical and gender issues thanks to that movie.

On the recommendation of Kyle Smith, I also finally saw last year’s In the Loop (in a very limited pre-Oscar re-release here), which combines the feel of The Office, Aaron Sorkin, and all the petty backstabbing young wonks or overly aggressive government men you’ve ever encountered in DC to create an angry, hilarious, alarming depiction of the nonsense that shapes policy, governmental bureaucracy, and committee attendance in London and Washington.

It’s misleading to talk about it as a movie that parodies inept prewar intelligence, really, because the specific political issue the characters are fighting and swearing and sweating over is almost as irrelevant to the viewer as it is to the characters, who are more concerned with getting perks, being noticed by the media, and advancing their own careers. War is to In the Loop as paper products are to The Office — and one is left with the convincing impression that that’s about how big issues work in London and DC as well.

And speaking of movies that leave you questioning whether the British (or any other people) are fit to rule, let’s end by taking a moment to review perhaps the most (left-)anarchist moment in film history: Read the rest of this entry »

This Wednesday, March 3 (at 8pm), we will broach the weighty question of theologically-inspired wussitude with two dueling conservatives:

•Richard Spencer (formerly an editor at American Conservative and TakiMag and now the founding editor of AlternativeRight.com, which launches today) argues YES.

•Helen Rittelmeyer (a writer/editor whose work has been used by First Things, Culture11, American Spectator, American Conservative, The Weekly Standard, and New York Post, among other venues) argues NO.

•Michel Evanchik moderates and Todd Seavey hosts/organizes.

Voting on the question at the end: you, the audience — bring a whole faction if you like, spreading the good word to Christians, skeptics, and neo-pagans alike.

Free admission, cash bar. The debates, usually pitting two opponents against each other (in a civil and often humorous fashion), take place on the basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

One arguably non-wimpy manifestation of Christianity that I noticed in New York Times last month: churches (like a lot of other groups in the past decade, I suspect) organizing “fight clubs” (this piece was also pointed out to me by Katie Surrence).

ANNIVERSARY NOTE: This Wednesday event marks five years of the Seavey/Evanchik team overseeing these debates — and on a more personal note, for those keeping track, this period, give or take a month or two, also marks:

•Four years of me organizing the separate Manhattan Project social events for politicos

•Three years of this near-daily blog

•And a whopping eight years of me editing skeptical, pro-science material at ACSH

I think I will celebrate with a trip into an alternate universe where the rules of neither logic nor science apply — or at least, I’ll go see an advance screening of Alice in Wonderland tonight, and, starting tomorrow, I will blog about other films this week as we approach Oscar Sunday.

Even though this “Month of Ayn Rand” I declared saw me reading a Rand speech at Yale and mentioning her frequently (though not in as much depth as I’d planned) on this blog, it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not an Objectivist.  Indeed, as I noted last month, in this clip, at the four-minute mark, I ask Ayn Rand Institute head Yaron Brook if we really want more selfishness and can plausibly call the motivations of burglars and labor unions “altruistic” in anything other than a sense so linguistically idiosyncratic as to be obfuscatory.

I asked in my capacity as a four-time Stossel audience member, almost as prestigious an honor as multiple Oscars.  I also attended a taping about healthcare and one about food at which I actually made a comment in defense of Twinkie-eating, but the only time I spoke and made it into the final edit besides the Rand clip was my before-and-after double-comment the night of Obama’s State of the Union, with the URL of this very blog flashed under my talking head — ah, multimedia.  I can’t find my Obama-mocking comments online, but you can at least glimpse my head as Cato’s David Boaz starts talking in this clip from that same broadcast.

One day soon, I should really upgrade all my (notoriously limited) electronic media capacity so that I can easily do things like transfer my SOTU comments from DVD and/or VHS to online — and in general make fuller use of the mighty media power of Fox Business Network.

Face-to-face is good, too, of course (thus things like our impending religion debate at Lolita Bar between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer), and the three nights in the middle of last week saw me at social/networking events run, respectively, by a Randian, a group of skeptics, and Institute for Humane Studies libertarians — the third at religious King’s College in the basement of the Empire State Building, presumably taking its name from the powerful being above us who always goes through one’s mind in that location, King Kong.

And on that note, I will turn my attention for most of the coming week of blog entries to movies, just in time for the Oscars.  Rand loved Hollywood and would no doubt have approved.

Today, with a Tea Party occurring at 11am in front of New York City Hall, I’m reminded that fat statist bastard Mike Huckabee said one reason he skipped the CPAC event this year is that the libertarians are taking it over, and they’re not real Republicans. He says he prefers the Tea Parties. Actually, I prefer libertarians, real Republicans, and Tea Parties to Huckabee. I’m a big-tent guy.

A plurality of CPAC attenders voted Ron Paul their favorite for 2012 presidential candidate (though plenty of other CPAC-goers greeted his victory with boos), so Huckabee may be factually correct, anyway. Glenn Greenwald thinks Huckabee is also more honest than most of the GOP, which only feigns anti-government sentiment when out of power. In response, I’d say that of course politicians love power more than principle — but unless one believes that hypocrisy itself is a sort of deadly radiation that directly kills American citizens, better (at least sometimes) to have imperfect government-limiters in power than honest government-expanders. At least the hypocrites may occasionally feel obliged to live up to their rhetoric, if only to keep up appearances. God help us, by contrast, if the Democrats ever live up to all their socialist promises.

But to look at the Paul/mainstream divide less cynically for a change: what if one is essentially moderate on military and security issues — and thus genuinely untroubled by the gulf between the Paulites and Cheneyans in that area, perhaps even seeing the two as balancing each other out in a relatively healthy way? Does that not perhaps make the acceptance of this ragtag coalition reasonable for a typical supporter? No party is unanimous, but it can “average out” to an acceptable coalitional message. It may prove useless for other reasons, but internal contradictions alone can’t be sufficient to damn any political party large enough to make a difference, especially in those cases where the contradictions capture some genuinely perplexing tensions — and let me just note again that all I really want are some damn budget cuts.

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There are always still-more-radical approaches to fighting the power than voting for Ron Paul, of course. It’s interesting that the daughter of that guy who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin still Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 27 — one year after the small first New York City Tea Party protest at City Hall that led to a gigantic, underreported Tea Party protest there a month or so later (both of which I attended) — there will be an 11am Tea Party anniversary rally, once more at City Hall.  If things are still cold and slushy from the snowfall of the past twenty-four hours, though, I fear attendance may be more along the lines of the smaller first protest.  I will be with them in spirit but physically somewhere warm and dry — but, y’know, you should go, because why should I suffer?

I should note, once again, that despite the attempts to label the Tea Partiers crazy or racist, I saw countless signs with Rand quotes and anti-spending slogans at the events and no racist slogans (though with thousands of people at the larger rally, I’m sure you could find something awful if you insisted on trying — though not as easily as, say, finding anti-Semitic slogans at antiwar rallies).

If you go tomorrow, in fact, consider wearing this snazzy Atlas Shrugged book cover t-shirt pointed out to me by Ali Kokmen (who is not an Objectivist and indeed isn’t even sure he approves of Rand’s fondness for James Bond, arguably not her most shocking position).

I’ll say this for print books, even though I’m one of those people who thinks paper is doomed sooner or later: At least books on paper can’t be hacked, as this site recently was, and my apologies if it takes me and my able webmaster a while to delete some of the freaky-looking but mercifully infrequent glyphs now scattered in my old entries.

A grim reminder how much snow we got: I think I may technically have heard a man killed by the storm yesterday, or at least, after ACSH let us out of work early, I was near 69th and Fifth in Central Park at about 3:25pm, trudging home and a bit disturbed by the size of the slushy ice clumps falling like a meteor shower from the trees — and then I heard an immense and protracted “crack” that sounded exactly like a huge tree limb breaking off, learning only today that a man died at that time in that area due to a falling limb.  I heard no cries of alarm or anything but recall briefly thinking, “That sounded like a big, dangerous tree limb falling, and I’m glad I’m nearly out of the Park.”  Tomorrow, then, is likely to be better than yesterday.

It’s disappointing that a movie of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie didn’t quite happen — and that we’ll never see the ad campaign that likely would have resulted, with Jolie accompanied by the question “WHO IS JOHN GALT?”  In what may be just an odd coincidence, Jolie is now being seen in ads for her upcoming action movie Salt, with the tagline “WHO IS SALT?”

While I await at least a TV miniseries version of the Rand story, at least I have a first edition, first printing of Atlas Shrugged (alas, without the dust jacket, so better to keep the copy than to make a few hundred on eBay) given to me by hippie-ish organic farmer and former Berkeley-dweller Valerie Jackson, ironically enough.   (The one I’ve been lugging around reading lately, though, is a paperback edition kindly provided to studio audience members after the Stossel episode about the book.)

Comparably ironic, perhaps, is the fact that although libertarians like the Institute for Humane Studies folk I’ll see tonight still gather on the lower floors of the Empire State Building — where Rand had her headquarters decades ago — libertarians now gather there thanks to the hospitality of the very-Christian institution King’s College (and they don’t mean “king of freight trains”).   This is no weirder, of course, than the fusionist combo of traditionalists and free-marketeers that makes up the broader conservative movement — but let’s not exaggerate the long-term logical necessity of the religious element of that coalition, regardless of its short-term electoral necessity.

I’ll grant that the most efficient four-word libertarian message in all of history was probably “Thou shalt not steal,” but I am not as convinced as one of my interlocutors at my Yale speech last week was that religious folk will always tend to be the anti-totalitarians and atheists (such as the Communists) to be the totalitarians.   Indeed, it strikes me that, in what should be a relief to secular conservatives everywhere, the time for making that generalization has clearly passed.

After all, authoritarian as China and Russia may be, the nastiest totalitarian regimes on the planet in this century arguably are motivated by faith.  The West threatens them precisely because it is Read the rest of this entry »

Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute.  This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully taken hold, thank goodness.  (Perhaps without all the bailout and stimulus spending it would have, and in some sense we’d be in worse shape, ideologically if not economically.)

And I’ve been reading Atlas myself, for the first time since college (having read it the same pivotal summer that I read several of her books plus Locke, Smith, Mill, the Constitution, the Declaration, Reason magazine, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and de Tocqueville for good measure).  Then, it was the collapse of Communism, not capitalism, that was the hot topic.  Even then I objected to some aspects of Rand, such as the suggestion that altruism must lead to forced redistribution instead of, as has often been the case historically, being the antidote to forced redistribution.  So, I was fully prepared to dislike Atlas now that I’m older and wiser — but I have to confess, at the risk of looking like a hopeless libertarian geek, that I like it even more now.

Despite people usually remembering Rand for her somewhat flat heroes, it’s all the weaseling, mushy-middle, business-oriented but non-capitalist, PR-obsessed, science-politicizing, continually-evasive, chronically-indecisive characters who seem so painfully, urgently real now — and who are not quite captured so well in any other novel of which I am aware, at least not in the sprawling, highly-relevant context of an increasingly hobbled economy.  The book is really more about evasion than heroism in some sense, and it’s the former that is harder to understand intuitively (at least for some of us).

The brain doesn’t like to dwell on the ugly details of evasive, self-contradictory thinking, obviously, whereas the basics of heroism are so intuitively appealing that someone even paid $1 million for a copy of Action Comics #1, as noted by this article, which, oddly enough, quotes the drummer from System of a Down, who is also apparently a comic book dealer.  (This is another reminder that I’d love to know how successful bands have to get before the members tend to quit their other jobs.  Is anyone from Metric working in a Montreal bookstore?  And come to think of it, don’t I love Metric songs like “Stadium Love” precisely because so much other 00s rock sounded wussy and evasive, even when feigning garage-rock wildness?)

If you feel that YOU cannot avoid the topic of evasive thinking and what to do about it, perhaps we can discuss it tonight shortly after 8pm with the group Drinking Skeptically, at the aptly-named bar the Four-Faced Liar in the Village.  And more Rand thoughts tomorrow.