•The Center for Inquiry has declared today, September 30, Blasphemy Day, and they’re encouraging people to show their skeptical courage by e-mailing them blasphemous thoughts by midnight tonight at BlasphemyContest[at]CenterforInquiry.net — all of which strikes me as even worse PR than Richard Dawkins. A well-adjusted skeptic, it seems to me, shouldn’t be going out [...]
After noting dissent among libertarians in the second of yesterday’s entries, I should note that I really don’t place that much value on tribal unity or team loyalty per se — except in so far as they’re necessary (a) to achieve some goal more important than the issues that divide or (b) to demonstrate one’s [...]
It’s delightful to see Ron Paul’s book End the Fed in the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list. I have to confess I thought criticism of the Federal Reserve, while warranted, was probably one of Paul’s fringiest issues back when his presidential campaign started in 2007, but now it looks like one [...]
I didn’t quite get around to writing the entry I intended on Bernanke and Keynes having pro-market supporters, but here in the interim is a link to the fascinating Wiktionary page on the word “dingleberry,”* which has some surprising uses.
*Come to think of it, I suppose I should dedicate this lexicographical blog entry to the [...]
Have you noticed that (after decades of calling people fascists) the liberal elite has now decided not only that you can’t analogize them to the Nazis (or they’ll criticize you as much as they did Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg), which is fair enough, but that you basically can’t analogize anything to the Nazis anymore?
At [...]
Three TV-related thoughts:
•Thanks to the omnipresence of t-shirts and the like bearing the Thundercats symbol — that black tiger profile on a red background — the viral marketing campaign for the inevitable eventual live-action movie is going to be very, very easy to pull off, as the grinning producers probably already know.
•My thanks to Paul [...]
I think I’ll be at Otto’s Shrunken Head tonight for their 60s garage rock night, since bachelor-partying George Fishman likes that stuff (as do a couple of my favorite conservative women, as it happens).
My own tastes appear to have a new name: I can’t help noticing that DevilsNight.com — the online station that I’ve long [...]
It’s been a hectic week — but one in which I encountered some signs of hope:
•Whiteout wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to expect — nothing momentous, but a decent little thriller.
•Walking downtown to watch it last night, I saw thousands of Iranian-descended people protesting against the Iranian regime, with posters saying things like [...]
Michael Moore, whose Capitalism documentary goes into limited release today, may be wrong about many things, but he still does a fairly good job, most of the time, of sounding like an aw-shucks regular-Joe populist.
Once in a while, of course, he lets the mask slip and shows an astonishing fondness for Cuba or what have [...]
I don’t know which will have been more depressing, last night’s communistic Michael Moore documentary or the reportedly-lame adaptation of Greg Rucka’s comic book Whiteout, which I’ll probably see tomorrow night.
But I think I know what movie this year will have cost far more money — and is, I think, destined to lose far more [...]
I’m scheduled to see Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story tonight, but other documentarians are already in the streets here in New York City, where the libertarian makers of the anti-green film Not Evil, Just Wrong were shooting a scene at the site of a carbon-rationing conference, while nearby minions — at least a dozen [...]
Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to see an advance screening of Michael Moore’s no doubt inflammatory and ludicrous new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story. But of course, one ought to gauge ideas by their best and most nuanced defenders, not by their most clownish ones. Sometimes, like a lot of people, I feel guilty about [...]
Tyler Cowen’s recent writing about the virtues of mild autism included reference to autistic people being better than most at detecting subtle changes in sounds (though not necessarily their emotional implications). I was reminded by this of (a) the suspicion I no doubt share with a lot of people lately that someday there’ll be [...]
If all goes according to plan, I see the Decemberists tomorrow night, see the new documentary about the Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello sometime in the next few days, and then one week from tonight go to the tiki bar Otto’s Shrunken Head for their monthly 60s garage rock night and/or their Saturday psychobilly event [...]
Michele Carlo, Janice “Girlbomb” Erlbaum, Rev. Jen Miller, and others are reading at Belleville Lounge in Park Slope at 7:30 tonight (at Fifth Ave. and 5th St. in Brooklyn; F, M, or R to the 9th St./4th Ave. stop). I’ve seen the three named writers all read/declaim before (two of them as Lolita Bar [...]