Monthly Archive

Hello again everyone. I know it’s been awhile. I’ve been busy. Thanks for waiting on me to return. It’s so appreciated. :P

Anyway today I want to talk about the difference between perceived and actual depth of subject in popular culture. That is, in popular culture, I find that merely stating the obvious, if it aligns with a certain point of view, is perceived as “deep,” while the other view is “shallow,” when this may or may not actually be the case.

First case in point: Most of society has been trained since we were young to be regretful of our “consumer-based” tendencies, and big corporations and the like. Maybe this is just me, but this sort of thing, has been around since I was a small child. And who doesn’t prefer to shop at Mom-and-Pop Bookstore than Barnes and Noble, when we can? But of course Barnes and Noble is usually cheaper, so we tend to end up just going there and then feeling bad about it. Of course today I’m not going to go into whether or not that’s justified, but certainly the anti-corporate point of view is sort of knee-jerk whenever you really think about it. To end up pro-corporate you have to seriously go into economics and how corporations help third-world countries go through industrial revolutions to become first world countries, and practically no one thinks about it that long. So isn’t that the “deep” point? Anyway, that’s not the point.

I want to talk about Fight Club. Mostly the movie; I haven’t read the book and have no intention to do so.

Fight Club is an excellent movie. But that’s all it is. I don’t know if Chuck Palahniuk intended on it just being a good book/film, or if he really believed the drivel he is touting in the movie. And it’s not even that it’s necessarily wrong, it’s just that it’s obvious.

For those unfamiliar, in the film Tyler Durden starts a project called “Project Mayhem,” whose ultimate goal is to end the existence of corporations and financial institutions through their overthrow by their workers who have all become part of Project Mayhem.

This is a thinly veiled Communist Revolution, with the workers overthrowing their dirty Capitalist masters. But I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen watch this film and talk about their “eyes being opened.” And I’m like, “About what?” Most of these people were left-leaning and believed in the evil of corporations, true or not, to begin with. So does “deep” just mean “I agreed with it from the get-go and it pointed it out?” Maybe.

The same seems to be true in Handlebars By Flobots. This is a song I’ve seen pass around, and it’s another that people keep telling me is, like, so deep.

This one basically has the same message. Do you have few aspirations for yourself? Do you like “the community?” Then you’re peace-loving! Do you want to make money and run a company? Then you must be a warmonger! How dare you choose the path of moneymaking? You killed “the community!”

The whole song is rubbish, but I get a lot of people telling me how wonderful the song is because it’s “so deep.” And really its not. Especially when you have the video in front of you, the message is thinly veiled and the song itself is musically forgettable. And after all that, its message is again the belief that many of those people had before.

Apparently depth in popular culture merely means pointing out the beliefs of the consumer through analogy.

This brings me to works like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which lives in the delicate balance between utter nonsense and depth. Of course on the one side you have songs like I Am The Walrus by the Beatles, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show nears that boundary, and might even cross it. I might be even more duped than those who think it has a single-layered meaning. But that’s not the point.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show lives in cult-following-world, constantly misinterpreted or not interpreted at all. But the reason it is relevant to this discussion is because it is a satire of everything that I have been talking about. By merely bringing up the topic of taboo sexual fetishes and not cringing at them, those who see it immediately jump to the conclusion that it is a deep commentary on sexual repression in our society. But the joke is on them. The movie is ridiculous and has no real commentary on sexual taboo, it just makes a big show of it all. And in doing so it not only laughs at societal norms and sexual repression, but those who think that merely bringing up the topic is “deep.” Think about that next time you go to a live show.

Actually don’t. The live shows aren’t about that at all. They are about stress relief. (Which is also partially what Fight Club is about). But I digress. Take it away, Lips!

It’s early in the Obama administration, and today is tax day. So now it’s time to look at one of Obama’s key promises: he would not raise taxes on the bottom 95% of Americans.

Today I’m not going to talk theory, and I’m not going to talk about what it means for the bottom 95% when the top 5% have their taxes raised. I’m just going to talk about taxes that will directly affect the bottom 95%.

First off, there’s the cigarette tax that just went into effect. This is not an income tax, but assuming that someone in the bottom smokes, it’s a direct tax on them. But then.. who does smoke?

Well, according to the Oral Cancer Foundation:

Smoking prevalence was higher among adults living below the poverty level (32.3 percent) than those living at or above the poverty level (23.5 percent).

So this is a.. poverty tax? I guess you could quit smoking to avoid the tax, but that wasn’t the promise. The no new taxes promise is broken. So if I hear one more person tell me that I’m a sheep because “Obama isn’t going to raise my taxes,” I am going to scream.

There will be an update when Obama raises the Energy tax. Remember, it was his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, who said “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” which are roughly three times that of what they are here. Ready to pay $6/gallon?

We hear a lot about the government ‘creating jobs,’ and the like with government ‘stimulus funds’ and ‘bailout funds,’ etc. The kneejerk reaction of those untrained in economics is “Oh this is good, we’re in a recession so we need more jobs. If the government creates jobs, then there will be more money for people to spend and the economy will start rolling again.”

The kneejerk alternative reaction is “Oh great, the government is going to create jobs. This is bad because the government is going to increase its debt etc etc” OK you know the arguments. You’ve heard them a thousand times. But what about truly legit jobs? What about things we do need? I mean, there is government money going for things like blueberry research in Georgia which are almost certainly pork if not otherwise unneeded, but what about, for instance, scientific research at a large institute?

Well first let’s talk theory and then I’ll bring up an example of what happens when government money is introduced to a project. The trouble with government money is that it’s guaranteed as long as you spend all of what you got this year. This is because anything you don’t spend shows that the grant was too big, and therefore can be cut, but if you spend every red cent, the government sees that you must be under-funded, and more money will be granted.

This distorts the profit incentive and encourages stagnation and bad money handling. Let’s look at two imaginary research and development projects.

Project 1 is being developed with private funds. If they don’t get it developed quickly and get it working and on the market, investment capital will dry up and the investors will move on to more profitable ventures. The entrepeneurs will likely be ruined and won’t garner much support for more investment should they have another idea. In the face of ruin, the entrepeneurs work hard to get their product out as fast as possible.

Project 2 is being developed with public funds. The law, being that much research is needed for the development of this product, states that funding will be given for the project until it is finished at which point the government will simply give the product to the developers. Even though they have the possibility to make more money should they finish their project, the entrepeneurs are encouraged to work slowly and even feign progress because as long as they are “still researching,” there will be a paycheck. And as long as they use all of their money each year, the paycheck will grow because the government will assume that they are underfunded.

Example: cold fusion technology. How close we are to getting cold fusion is debatable, as is whether or not it’s even possible in the first place. Regardless, researchers have been announcing that we are just a few years from getting it to work for several decades, and buckets of public money has been thrown in to help them get there. Many professors have built their retirements off of pretending to do research and publishing papers that prove that we need fusion technology and that government money is the only way to go.

Example: Amtrak. This is probably the best example. Amtrak is an abysmal failure. Riding Amtrak takes longer and costs more than driving in many situations, and sometimes costs as much as flying. Amtrak is subsidized, which stems growth because the industry no longer has any profit incentive to progress. The reason this example is so good is that in contrast, the American freight rail industry is booming. Getting some ridiculous efficiency like 400 miles per ton of freight per gallon, compared directly with Amtrak’s own 38 mpg per passenger. Let’s put that in perspective.

A minivan weighs about a ton. With eight passengers, your fully-loaded minivan weighs about 1.5 tons, assuming each person in the van weighs a little over 100 lbs. Your minivan probably gets around 25 mpg highway fully loaded if you have a standard minivan like a Toyota Sienna, which I believe gets around 28 under best circumstances.

So if you’re alone in your minivan, you’re looking at 25 mpg per person.

Get a passenger? 50 mpg per person, because you’re splitting the gas. Got 7 passengers? 25*8 = 200 mpg/passenger. You’re also moving about 1.5 tons, so we can compare that to the freight efficiency by saying that’s 25 mpg / 1.5 tons1/.075 = 16 2/3 miles per gallon per ton.

So what does this mean? A fully loaded minivan is 5.26 times as efficient at moving passengers than Amtrak, (and remember this is just fuel and not including time), even carrying one passenger, added onto the driver, and driving that big gas-guzzling van, is still more efficient than taking the train.

But even fully loaded, your minivan is a whopping 24 times less efficient at moving passengers (by weight) than a commercial freight train. I think it’s a relatively safe conjecture to say that if Amtrak wasn’t subsidized, their numbers would be a lot closer to this. Just to sum up:

Amtrak (subsidized) can move a single passenger (around 150 lbs) at 38 mpg. That’s 38 miles per gallon per .075 tons, or 2.85 miles per gallon per ton.

Commercial freight trains are over 140 times as efficient as Amtrak. This is what government money does. This is why government money is bad. Actually, this is only one of a myriad of reasons. But this is one reason.

This goes under “politics,” until I have enough for a “philosophy” section, I suppose.

It has recently come to my attention via a friend of mine that “Objectivism and Christianity are incompatible.” While it is true that Ayn Rand was an athiest and rejected “mysticism,” and would probably hate me for even trying to reconcile Christianity and Objectivism, I feel that this is the one place where her pure philosophy falls short.

Rand hated mysticism and the bending-of-knee, and believed Man should be proud of his accomplishments, and not defer them to some all-powerful being. However, I get the feeling from Atlas Shrugged that much of this is based on Rand’s own incapability or non-desire to be a follower of Christ, and sadly not based on the Reason which she holds so dear.

There are a few points of obvious contention that I wish to address beyond Rand’s personal beefs with religion that come up. One is the issue of sacrifice. During Galt’s speech, he says of sacrifice:

If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is.

He says a lot more, but it comes down to that very concrete analogy. So then, what of the “Divine Sacrifice” of Jesus on the cross? The problem here is not Objectivism, which is correct, nor is it Christianity, which is also correct, but it is in the name “Divine Sacrifice.” The cross was not a sacrifice! It was a trade: Jesus’s mortal life for our immortal souls. Something of lesser value for something of greater value. Dare I put so much emphasis on the value of our soul to the Lord? But He even said it, in the oft-quoted John 3:16 (NASB):

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

What this means is that to the Lord, the giving of Christ on the cross was most certainly not a sacrifice in the proper meaning of the term. God loves you. And that is the very point of what Christ did.

OK, so what of Original Sin? Galt has this to say:

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

Surely, we are punished for Adam’s sin in Eden, but this punishment is washed clean with baptism. So Christians are not punished for this sin, but that is not the point. And maybe it’s best here to agree to disagree. Because Original Sin does not affect the way in which a Christian leads his life any more than it affects an Athiest, beyond baptism. But this isn’t the point that Ayn Rand is trying to make. The point that Rand is trying to make is that Man is not inherently evil, as some would interpret Original Sin (including her) to imply. But this is not what Original Sin implies; it implies that Man is inherently unclean, and without repentance cannot enter the kingdom of God.

The real, underlying argument being made is that man is inherently selfish, and that being selfish is not being evil. But what of this? Christianity calls for us to be poor and follow Christ right? Christ said (Matthew 19:24, NASB):

Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

This is a complicated verse. For one thing, many theologians do not believe that Jesus meant a sewing needle, implying that it was impossible for a rich man to enter Heaven. In fact this makes little sense, especially since King David was a king. Some believe this means “spiritually poor,” but that’s not the whole picture. Many theologians believe Jesus was talking about a gate in Jerusalem called the “Eye of the Needle,” which had a low entrance. In order for a camel to pass through it, the camel would have to unload all of its baggage, and cross through on its knees.

This is not the only place that the Bible seems to disparage on the “selfishness” of Capitalism. There is also this passage (Mark 10:17-22):

As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. “You know the commandments, ‘DO NOT MURDER, DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, DO NOT STEAL, DO NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS, Do not defraud, HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER.’” And he said to Him, “Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth up.” Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property.

To properly interpret this passage, one must realize two things. The first is that when commanded, one must obey. This is Jesus, in the flesh telling this man to follow Him. The most important part here is that the man was more attached to his property than to his love of Jesus. This is his main folly.

Secondly, he is a man of wealth in ancient Rome. While there are merchants, this is unlikely as merchants were a very small class. Those who were wealthy in ancient times gained their wealth by stealing from the producers through taxes, or by working for the government. These people are called ‘looters and moochers,’ by Ayn Rand. These people were not honest, and neither was anything they owned produced by their own hand. The producers labored and slaved for the sake of the privileged few who were hand-picked by no one.

This does not mean that every rich man was unjust, just look at David. Nor does it mean that every poor man was just, however the two were much more related in this aristocracy than they are in our meritocracy.

Through Capitalism, we understand that by striving to produce a life for ourselves, we drive an economy that will make life better for everyone, even those who do not adhere to our system. Looking to history, we can see evidence of this, amongst other places, during the Cold War when the US sent wheat to the USSR who were having a famine, because their oligarchy could not produce enough food, while our republic was producing a surplus.

Objectivism is compatible with Christianity, if Christianity is studied properly. Objectivism teaches the virtue of making oneself happy, and that in doing so one will make the lives of those around oneself better. Christianity teaches the virtue of making your neighbor’s life better, but doesn’t speak of the ‘how.’ The issues of sacrifice and Original Sin are issues of misnomer, and that of wealth isn’t an issue of the wealth itself, but instead the method of getting wealth. Are you stealing the wealth at the tip of a sword or the muzzle of a gun? Or are you earning it? What Rand failed to realize is that while Reason is Man’s best attribute, that which separates him from the animal, she doesn’t realize that Reason is a gift from God, His greatest gift.

To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. -John Galt

Please note that all of the John Galt quotes can be found on the Ayn Rand lexicon and also in Atlas Shrugged as well as in For the New Intellectual by Ayn Rand.

This is the best interview I have seen in a long, long time, and it deserves to be posted and re-posted. This guy is a scoundrel and Glenn takes him to task. Priceless.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I did say it first, at least from what I am aware of, when I wrote Birds, Stones, and Economic Stimuli awhile back, but I’ve had this article from the Washington Independent brought to my attention today and I’m happy to see someone in the real media talking about the cause of the drug violence in Mexico. Of course, as real journalists with futures and careers they’re all too scared to say we should legalize super-scary cocaine (and even more super-scary meth) because from what I understand these are the Big Three in funding the drug cartels, but pot is of course a step in the right direction.

Now if only they’d learn from history that prohibition of a substance increases usage, maybe we could get some real changes made.