Just in case anyone’s still confused about the difference between (or wants to be on the two separate e-mail invite lists for) the first-Wednesday monthly Debates at Lolita Bar I host and the third-Wednesday monthly Manhattan Project bar gatherings I also host (mainly for people who like to chat about politics), note that tomorrow should [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (March 2010): The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus
When Ali Kokmen gave me a copy of this book, I was suspicious because it’s only 118 pages long, basically an extended version of the author’s New Republic article by the same title, but at that length, I figured I may [...]
•Cirque du Soleil, originally from Quebec, may be trying too hard to seem New Yorky with their new show based here: flappers, jazz dance, Vaudeville, urban motifs — and it’s called
Banana Shpeel.
•George Lucas just had to go and “improve” his original Star Wars trilogy with various digital enhancements and lame prequels — but, despite his [...]
As if the differing Obamacare House and Senate bills being passed as a mere reconciliation bill weren’t an odd enough looming threat, NR points out that Obamacare might get passed without there even being a reconciliation bill, treating the Senate version as passed if the House passes smaller bills tweaking it. In their official PDF [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m sure to many people it seems like too disturbing a topic to broach, but I must not be the only one over the past few days who’s been thinking, “Even if you find the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai troubling, isn’t it sort of nice to hear that it may have been [...]
With my Italian libertarian economist friend, I rewatched the very libertarian Italian movie We the Living, adapted in 1942 without Rand’s authorization (but with her retroactive approval decades later) from her early novel about a young woman in Rand’s native Soviet Union dreaming of escape and torn between two lovers, one anti-communist but driven to [...]