Full-time professional hate-monger Mikki Kendall reminds you: everything is your fault, white feminists

As I've discussed before on this blog, there is nothing that Mikki Kendall, professional hater and unethical journalist hates more - if you go by what she talks about online - than white feminists.

Nothing.

That's why, when I dared to disagree with her two years ago, and said that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were not racists, but in fact were feminists who were trying to make a feminist point with one of their songs, she used the power of her Tumblr blog and her Tumblr mob to smear me as a "racist" in Google results. She has no shame about it - she lies whenever she feels like it. In fact, they blamed me for it - because I asked them to stop it, that made them do it more. And it was my fault because I dared to complain about it.

This is called "blaming the victim" but of course since I am a white feminist I am not a victim - I am the source of all evil.

And it's no good trying to be her pal, as Amanda Marcotte found out - she'll hate you and accuse you of stealing credit from women of color anyway. Because she fucking hates your ugly white bitch feminist guts.

She's at it again here on August 12, 2013.

There is a hashtag called #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen which is where they list all your stupid white feminist bitch sins. Although they are too chickenshit to actually name names, except for Satan Incarnate - aka Lena Dunham.

And guess who started this hashtag? The woman who hates white feminists more than anything else in the world - as this Twitterer explains:

Karnythia is one of Mikki Kendall's screen names.

If you are a white feminist, you can go onto Twitter and discover just how much you are to blame for everything, and how much you are hated by Mikki Kendall and her band of haters.

You don't like it? Shut up white feminist, everybody hates you, and nobody cares what you think and everything is your fault.

Here are just a tiny sampling of all the things that are your fault:

Aura Bogado ‏@aurabogado25m

#solidarityisforwhitewomen is when you're sick of the hashtag for a few hours, and we're sick of your privilege for a few centuries

Because you see, you are a white feminist and therefore you don't acknowledge white privilege and it doesn't matter if you were oppressed as a woman because IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!

Chitra Nagarajan ‏@chitranagarajan1h

When NOBODY talks of Indian women fighting for suffrage IN THE UK & needs proof #solidarityisforwhitewomen http://www.blackfeminists.org/2013/03/20/indiansuffragette/ …

You know whose fault it is that Indian women are not being talked about in the UK? That's right - it's your fault, white feminist.

@imanwashere1m

#solidarityisforwhitewomen who major in art history because their trust fund gave them the green light

If you are a white feminist you are automatically rich.

Susan Komen's Ghost ‏@SusanKomenGhost4m

#solidarityisforwhitewomen when breast cancer survival rates improve overall .... But not for women of color.

This is 100% your fault, white feminist. You should kill yourself now for killing women of color. Which you know you do. Because everything is your fault.

Tae Phoenix ‏@TaePhoenix2h

#solidarityisforwhitewomen when we assume that miniskirts and tube tops = "liberated" and hijabs and modest clothing = "oppressed."

Because white feminists must not dare criticize religion.

Beth Kelly ‏@emkelly5h

When the media covers efforts to recover a young white girl but continues to ignore the missing women of color #solidarityisforwhitewomen

Of course this is your fault, white feminist, because everybody knows that white feminists control the media.

More reasons why white feminists are the root of all evil, and Mikki Kendall's full-time job is blaming white feminists for everything soon.

The wonders of the FringeNYC selection process

My friend Valerie invited me along to see a Fringe Festival show that she had been assigned to review for Timeout New York. And I have to say, those involved with the show, PERFECTLY NORMEL PEOPLE should be thanking their lucky stars that Valerie was assigned the review and not someone like me, who has a much lower tolerance for the hackneyed and the cheezy. She thought it was "cute." I thought it was like watching a bunch of Youtube cat videos in a nursing home - the crass doufus audience full of old people laughed at every played-out, tired joke, especially the woman behind me, who, even after the tenth time the dumb-guy character replaced one word with another, because he's so stupid, still screamed with laughter, forcing me to listen yet again to her rasping smoker's cackle.

I was just reading an article in the NYTimes about how "selective" the New York Fringe Festival is:

In assembling the festival, Ms. Holy said, quality is just one consideration. Diversity is also important: it means not only trying to get a mix of ages, experience, geography and points of view...

Quality is a consideration? Really? Did anybody read this play before selecting it? It's an unholy synthesis of third-rate Neil Simon and 1970s sitcom gags. 

The play is a reminiscence by a (fictional) writer, of his youth in the early 1980s during which he lived with an Italian family in Queens while attending NYU. His name is Hadley but a couple of the Italians decide to call him Lefty, and the older women characters in the play are so stupid that they never figure out that "Lefty" is his nickname. At the end of the play, when he is referred to as Lefty they are still asking "who's Lefty?" The audience found this hysterically funny, of course.

At first I thought the play was set in the 1960s until a character in the third scene mentions President Reagan because:

• The actor cast as the narrator had to be at least in his 60s. I was in college in the early 1980s and nobody I know who is my age looks as old as this guy. 
• The first scene is down on a family farm in Kansas, and Ma and Pa seemed like they were straight out of the Grapes of Wrath.
• In the the second scene Hadley shows up in NYC and is immediately mugged.
• The third scene features a character named "Rainbow" who is dressed like a hippie. An utterly pointless character who has five lines and then we never see her again. 

In fact, even though the main character is a college student, we never see him at college, ever. The entire play except for the first three scenes and the last is set in the Italian family's house.

Now I'm not saying that you can't do a play about some writer's zany younger days, but you should at least try to be a little original about it, instead of recycling every hackneyed scenario and trope. In one scene Hadley and one of the Italian family's cousins are falling in love on the porch swing. They say nothing interesting in the scene - it's a completely standard "young people falling in love" set-up. But it still isn't pedestrian enough for the playwrights (a husband and wife team) and they have to have the narrator pop up yet again and tell us in the clunkiest "poetic" language possible about how he and the cousin were falling in love. You know, in case we didn't get it by watching the scene.

At the end of the play the cousin shows up, all grown up (although still played by the actor who played the young woman even though the narrator is played by two different actors) to a book signing by the narrator. It's apparent they haven't seen each other in a long time - but the play doesn't explain why they ended their relationship in the first place. You would think that would be a pretty important issue to deal with, in a reminiscence of youth. But the play has no time for this because it needs time for all the tired old gags.

And the narrator device was not only badly used, I wasn't even sure at first the narrator was played by an actor. He was so bad I thought (before I looked at the playbill) that he was the author of the play we were watching and insisted on playing the narrator too.

But the absolute worst aspect of this play was that the Italian grandfather has been mysteriously struck deaf and dumb for the past three years, and then he accidentally reveals to Hadley that he's been faking it.

The only fallout of him being such an asshole - or alternatively, of the people he lives with being so incredibly horrible that his only response (other than to move out) is to stop speaking to them completely - is that he says "I guess I shouldn't have done that" and they all go "aw that's OK Granpaw, thanks for re-asserting your patriarchal imperative, since everything went to hell when we let women run things around here."

I paraphrased that last line, but that's basically the message. And given how stupid the older women are (who's Lefty?) in the world of this play I guess it makes sense. 

And then they all learn lessons about The Importance of Family and We Should Not Be Mean To Each Other.

And one more thing - I'm pretty sure that a character mentions that Frank Sinatra is up in heaven. The play is set in the early 1980s. Frank Sinatra died in 1998.

On the plus side, the production's actors were mostly good, especially the actors who played the young people, and especially Patrick Arnheim who was freaking amazing and managed to give as much dimension as possible to a thankless ethnic stereotype of a role.

I've been to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (my first play production was part of it one year) and I've been to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I saw quite a bit of crap at both of those. But they did not have a selection process, so they have an excuse. But according to the article cited above:

Around 70 to 80 FringeNYC jurors are recruited each year; this year’s range in age from their teens to their 70s, and in experience from scientist to Broadway house manager. Some have been festival participants or interns. Others came to Ms. Holy’s attention by referral. They undertake a complex and time-intensive process of reading, ranking and reporting back to a panel that makes the final decisions.

Why do they bother? I can't see how a lottery would yield anything worse than the crap shows (and this one is certainly not the only one I've seen) that are included in FringeNYC. 

The last of the monologues

Done! All four NYCPlaywrights June 2013 monologues are done. Now I can concentrate on writing plays and practicing piano for my upcoming chamber music course.

This one was fun to record (catnip high!) and fun to edit too.

 

Workshop Theater Company still telling mostly men's stories

Well I checked in with the Workshop Theater Company's web site and in spite of one of their head honchos claiming a couple of years ago that they have a good record for producing women's plays, in fact, although they have improved since last year, they still favor men over women.

Here is their lineup of playwrights:

Female

• Lou-Lou Igbokwe
• Dana Leslie Goldstein

Male

• Phillip Hall
• William Shakespeare
• Greg Oliver Bodine
• Eddie Antar
• Sandy Moore
• Charles Gerber

And since they're not exactly a shining beacon of progressivism, it's no surprise that they promote their plays with images of female body parts. I expect it's because they are incapable of questioning the convention that says you must always show sexy female body parts when promoting something to do with heterosexual sex.

There's a grand tradition of dismembered female bodies in advertising. You couldn't expect the Workshop Theater Company to buck such a grand tradition.

So heckuva job, Workshop Theater Company.

Thanks to the sexual revolution we can
now promote plays with images of
women's asses. You've come a long way baby.

Finally the true nature of Steven Pinker is being acknowledged

I've been saying it on this blog for ten years. But now thanks to Pinker's latest exercise in ignorance, arrogance and insults against all non-evolutionary psychologists, in The New Republic, his repellent character is being widely acknowledged:

 First P. Z. Meyers responds:

Hooooly craaaaaap. 

Look, there’s some reasonable stuff deeper in, but that opening…could he possibly have been more arrogant, patronizing, and ahistorical? Not only is he appropriating philosophers into the fold of science, but worse, he’s placing them in his favored disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology. Does the man ever step outside of his office building on the Harvard campus?
Descartes and Hume were not evolutionary psychologists. He’s doing great violence to the intellectual contributions of those men — and further, he’s turning evolutionary psychology into an amorphous and meaningless grab-bag which can swallow up every thought in the world. The latter, at least, is a common practice within evo psych, but please. Hume was a philosopher. He was not a psychologist, a biologist, or a chemist. He was not doing science, even though he thought a lot about science.

Meyers links to this tumblr blog which is even more outraged:

“I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block.”  

Did you follow that, folks?  Stephen fucking Pinker, the great scientific genius, is going to go back in time to correct Spinoza’s arguments and “guide” him.  The idea that these thinkers wrote “in the absence of formal theory” is so reductive and offensive.  Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Spinoza’s Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and his correspondences with Olderburg and others, Hume’s Treatise…these thinkers were conscious of formal method and self-reflexive about it in a way few scientists today are even remotely capable of.  Incredibly, implausibly, each of these philosophers invented an inferential method, from the ground up, instead of taking for granted any assumption they were taught.   

Predictably Jerry Coyne, who worships all the ev-psych New Atheists loves the article and actually admits to being Pinker's fanboy. Truly disgusting.

It's just a matter of time before it's general knowledge that Pinker pals around with racists like Razib Khan and Steve Sailer.

They Found Too Much Johnson!

Can there ever be too much johnson (snicker)?

Two years ago I noted that Orson Welles had directed a movie that I declared at the time had the best title of any movie ever: Too Much Johnson.

But the movie was believed to have been lost.

Well I learned in the NYTimes today that lo and behold! they found Too Much Johnson!

For generations, Welles scholars have been intrigued by “Too Much Johnson,” which would seem to represent Welles’s first real experience composing a film to be seen by a paying public, with the support of a professional cast and a professional crew. But for over 50 years, no print had been known to exist.

Welles never quite finished editing the large amount of footage he shot for “Too Much Johnson,” and when the show folded out of town, after a disastrous preview in Stony Creek, Conn., he set the film aside and forgot about it. 

Sometime in the 1960s, as Welles told Frank Brady for an article in the November 1978 issue of American Film, he came across the material again, in his villa in Spain. “I can’t remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was,” Welles recalled. “I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it. It had a fine quality. Cotten was magnificent, and I immediately made plans to edit it and send it to Joe as a birthday present.” 

Regrettably, while Welles was away for an acting job, a fire destroyed the villa and most of its contents. “Too Much Johnson,” which had been shot on highly inflammable nitrate stock, had apparently been lost to the ages. 

But things have turned out otherwise. “Too Much Johnson” has reappeared — discovered not in Spain but in the warehouse of a shipping company in the northern Italian port city of Pordenone, where the footage had apparently been abandoned sometime in the 1970s. Old films turn up with some regularity under similar circumstances — independent filmmakers aren’t always known for promptly paying their storage bills — but because nitrate becomes even more dangerously unstable as it ages, the usual practice is to junk it as quickly as possible.

Smoking catnip

I shot the final of the four monologue videos for the NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month project. My actor friend Kitty played a college professor trying marijuana for the first time.

We used catnip instead of marijuana in the joint.

Kitty swears she got high from the catnip and I wouldn't be surprised - when I shot the video for HIGH ON EMMA SAFFORD a couple of years ago we put catnip in a pipe and smoked it and we all got high from it - and my cats went nuts.

This is not a placebo effect - apparently you can get a mild buzz from smoking catnip.

Kitty is the Martha Stewart of catnip joints

Texas is the worst state ever

Texas isn't the only state that allows police departments to profit by legal shake-down operations, but it is the worst. This article is mind-boggling (but also, very nicely, not behind the paywall.)

TAKEN
Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?

David Guillory started his research by driving his cluttered red Volkswagen Jetta to the Shelby County courthouse, in Center, Texas, where he examined the ledgers that listed the past two years of the county’s legal cases. He wanted to see “any case styled ‘The State of Texas versus’ anything that sounds like a piece of property.” The clerk began hauling out one bulging accordion file after another. 

“The eye-opening event was pulling those files,” Guillory told me. One of the first cases that caught his attention was titled State of Texas vs. One Gold Crucifix. The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued. That’s how it went in dozens more cases involving cash, cars, and jewelry. A number of files contained slips of paper of a sort he’d never seen before. These were roadside property waivers, improvised by the district attorney, which threatened criminal charges unless drivers agreed to hand over valuables. 

Guillory eventually found the deal threatening to take Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s children unless the couple signed away their money to Shelby County. “It’s like they were memorializing the fact that they were abdicating their responsibility to fight crime,” Guillory said. “If you believe children are in sufficient danger that they should be removed from their parents—don’t trade that for money!” Usually, police and prosecutors are careful about how they broker such exchanges. But Shelby County officials were so brazen about their swap-meet approach to law enforcement, he says, “they put it in the damn document!” 

Patterns began to emerge. Nearly all the targets had been pulled over for routine traffic stops. Many drove rental cars and came from out of state. None appeared to have been issued tickets. And the targets were disproportionately black or Latino. A finding of discrimination could bring judicial scrutiny. “It was a highway-piracy operation,” Guillory said, and, he thought, material for a class-action lawsuit.

And as if that wasn't bad enough...

In Texas, Traffic Stops For Women Regularly Include Searches Of Their Vaginas

So of course it's time to post Lewis Black's riff on Texas...

Third of 4 monologues

Almost done with this monologue project for NYCPlaywrights. I always tell myself I'll never do another one of these video projects and I always end up doing another one.

I think this one turned out pretty well. I really like the little skip that Doug gives during his perp walk. And there's a real Jack Nicholson thing going on in his manic laugh.

And yes, the hallway of my apartment building does look like the inside of a prison.

Atlas Shrugged: What have we learned?

OK, so to summarize what I have learned about Ayn Rand and her last novel, Atlas Shrugged these past couple of months:

• Ayn Rand was emotionally scarred at age five when her mother gave away her mechanical chicken to an orphanage. This caused Rand to devote her life to preaching against giving your stuff away to other people. The chicken incident itself shows up in Atlas Shrugged as one example of the common people going Galt after being inspired by John Galt's long-ass speech: someone assaults a mother for making her 5-year-old give his "best toy" to a neighbor's child.

• Ayn Rand maintained on many occasions that nobody ever helped her, most notably in the Afterward to Atlas Shrugged in which she states: No one helped me, nor did I think that at any time it was anyone's duty to help me. Both the Heller and the Burns biographies make it clear that Rand had lots of help throughout her life. But the most deliciously ironic help she received was from the Bolsheviks, as the Heller biography notes:

...she benefitted from the Bolshevik regime, since Lenin had adopted Kerensky's policy of offering educational opportunities to Jews and women, while doing away with tuition fees and reducing the full term of study to three years. These changes were meant to help factory workers, but they made it possible for her to get the kind of education, and degree, that her parents could have only dreamed of.

• It seems probable that Ayn Rand had Asperger's Syndrome, she had many of the hallmarks: she found it difficult to relate to other children growing up; collected rocks and later stamps; could not make small talk; was obsessed with mechanical things; demonstrated very little outward empathy; and was a monomaniac, especially about Objectivism. Her work reflected her predilections: she is utterly incapable of writing small talk, even when trying to demonstrate how stupid and useless the society people are in Atlas Shrugged. The best she can do is have the society people lecture each other on the latest postmodernist idiocy - or have one of her Supermen like Francisco d'Anconia hijack the conversation for pages of hectoring on the superiority of selfishness and the gold standard.

• Because Rand's The Fountainhead had sold so well, Bennett Cerf of Random House wanted her next novel for his publishing company so much that he agreed to allow Rand's work to proceed with virtually no editing, except for some minor word-tweaking. And it shows:
• Rand re-writes the Prometheus myth, making it completely illogical: d'Anconia suggests that John Galt is like Prometheus who got tired of having his liver pecked out by vultures (eagles in the original myth) and withdrew his fire until humans call off their vultures. The absurdity of humans punishing a god for gifting them with fire (Zeus punishes Prometheus in the original which makes a hell of a lot more sense) is second only to the absurdity that in Rand's version, Prometheus can apparently get away from the vultures any time he wants. Which means that he was voluntarily allowing "vultures" to peck out his liver every day. Possibly in some kind of kinky S&M way. 
• When a train full of rotten produce from California arrives in New York, Rand has the produce dumped into the East River. Which would entail having the produce transported from the Hudson River, where the railroad terminals were located, on the west side of Manhattan, all the way across town. The most appalling aspect of this mistake is that Ayn Rand lived in Manhattan, at 36 East 36th Street, six blocks away from the East River when she was writing Atlas Shrugged.
• Hank Rearden can't figure out how Francisco d'Anconia heard his speech, since he wasn't there in the room where Rearden made the speech, even though two pages earlier someone told Hank they heard his speech on the radio.
• Although he works as a track laborer for Targart Transcontinental, John Galt is able to take month-long vacations and can afford to travel all over the country, using his proselytizing skills to convince the world's richest men to follow him to Colorado.
• The sheer, mind-boggling repetition: several Random House personnel suggested to Rand she might want to cut some things down. She refused.

•  Rand's understanding of the cause-and-effects of human societies and behaviors is simplistic in the extreme. She will accept no explanation for the existence of collectivism and altruism except that this is what people have been taught to believe by parents and especially by college professors. And when a wealthy family collectivize their own factory, the ultimate explanation that Rand provides is that the leading family member, Ivy Starns, is simply a sadistic monster who enjoys denying money to hard workers. And it is this - the self-collectivization for the goal of sadistic pleasure - that is the basis of John Galt's "stopping the motor of the world" and thus the basis of the entire novel. Rand believed that her ideological opponents were insane sadists. That is the ultimate premise that Objectivism rests upon.

• The most prominent feature of Atlas Shrugged is its extreme binary view of the world - it is the most common criticism of the novel: the good guys are uniformly physically attractive and skillful and smart, the bad guys are uniformly unattractive (even Lillian Rearden who is constantly described as having "dead eyes") and stupid and incompetent and cruel. It is this extreme dichotomy that renders the novel ridiculous to so many people. Atlas Shrugged has been jokingly compared to The Lord of the Rings, except, the punchline goes, that LOTR "involves orcs." But I would argue that Rand so dehumanizes her ideological opponents that in fact Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings both involve orcs.

• Sexuality in Atlas Shrugged has two basic modes: violence-infused melodrama or decade-long celibacy. Of the four main heros: Dagny, d'Anconia, Rearden and Galt, all except Rearden go for at least a decade, in the prime of their youth, without sex. And Rearden is married for nine years to a woman he decided he despised after one month of marriage. And in spite of that, except for Dagny, has never apparently had sex with another woman.

• The homoeroticism of Atlas Shrugged is undeniable, in spite of Rand's own stated revulsion towards homosexuality. It is the result, I would suggest, of Rand's inability to take any point of view except her own - which is another trait said to be typical of autism. Each of her heroes represent her own personal taste in men, and so why shouldn't they enjoy each other's beauty, or long to see each other? And since it is narratively convenient for Rearden and d'Anconia to step aside when Dagny decides she prefers John Galt, they do so immediately and without a single complaint; and soon after Rearden and d'Anconia end up together on a sofa murmuring each others names. 

• The idealized and utterly unrealistic depiction of the world of business in Atlas Shrugged might have something to do with Alan Greenspan's view of how things should work:

"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity -- myself especially -- are in a state of shocked disbelief," 

In Atlas Shrugged, this is how Rand has John Galt explain how rational businessmen do things:

"...there is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business, nor in trade, nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible, and destruction from their view of the practical. There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another, if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent - they're all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not receive a market, a fortune, or immortal fame - they will merely destroy production, employment and art. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy - so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients."

There is nothing quite so fantastical as this in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Let us check Rand's premises:

• Only irrationality causes conflict of interests among men.
• Lies do not work.
• The unearned cannot be had.
• When businessmen "throttle" a superior competitor they are "wishing facts out of existence.
• People desire the impossible and long to destroy because they've been preached into self-destruction and self-sacrifice.

It should be pretty self-evident why all of these are wrong. But they also beg so many questions: if a businessman is able to "throttle" a superior competitor - and we don't know exactly what throttle means, but let's assume she's not talking out-and-out murder - is the other really the "superior" competitor?

And certainly the unearned is had all the time. That's what inheritance is all about. Does Rand mean "had" not in some material sense but in some cosmic metaphysical sense? That would seem to be a contradiction of her entire worldview.

And who is it that is preaching "self-destruction" and "self-sacrifice" and why would people be so quick to accept those values, if indeed they do, when those values are such obvious roads to unhappiness?

Actually, we do know who is preaching self-destruction and self-sacrifice - the collectivists like Ivy Starnes, who, as I've already discussed, do so purely out of sadism.

So this fantasy of how men should behave - with an absurd concept of "rational" self-interest - is how Alan Greenspan apparently expected lending institutions to behave.

And if Rand's premises aren't convincingly contradictory and implausible enough, consider that Galt's speech here is delivered to Dagny Taggart as an explanation for why Francisco d'Anconia, who has been celibate for the past twelve years, has stepped aside so that Galt can have Dagny for himself in a monogamous relationship, without so much as a word of complaint. For as John Galt continues:

"No one's unhappiness but my own is in my power to achieve or destroy. You should have had more respect for him and for me than to fear what you had feared."

What Dagny had feared was the d'Anconia might behave as virtually anybody who is jilted might behave. But as d'Anconia is one of Rand's Superman Objectivist businessmen, of course he would give Dagny up: d'Anconia realizes that John Galt is objectively superior to himself and thus more deserving of the most perfect woman in the world.

Ayn Rand herself could not live up to the "rational" Gulcher lifestyle - when her married boyfriend left her for another woman she had a complete meltdown.

And this eccentric, un-self-aware novelist was a huge influence on Alan Greenspan. The more you think about it, the more baffling it is.

More research for my play

Now that I've finished reading Atlas Shrugged I have to do other research for my play. I found some excellent resources.

Of course the Front Line episode "The Warning" - in convenient transcript format. As well as a transcript of their interview with Brooksley Born.

Public Citizen (founded by Ralph Nader) has an excellent overview of the 2008 meltdown and the ongoing effort to regulate derivatives.

The CFTC's actual Concept Release which, by merely posing questions about regulating derivatives caused Larry Summers to freak out - before it was actually published.

The Commodity Futures Modernization Act which prevented the CFTC from regulating derivatives.

And a Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis, seen on the left. You can click the graphic to enlarge it enough to read it.

P.Z. Myers vs. the Evo-psychos

Bravo to P. Z. Myers, for assuming the late Stephen Jay Gould's role of scourge of the evolutionary psychologists. While there are plenty of scientists who disagree with evolutionary psychology premises, testing strategies, etc., few actually take the time to do battle with popularizers of evolutionary psychology like Steven Pinker.

At one time I thought that Jerry Coyne might be the successor to Gould but he's gradually become a social conservative, making common cause with the likes of Sam Harris in his efforts to target Muslims for ethnic profiling. I knew Coyne was going downhill at that point and no longer to be trusted about anything.

As Pinker has done on several occasions with his critics, Coyne suggests that Myers real motive in rejecting evolutionary psychology is political correctness.

Myers responds to Coyne here.

At one time Coyne and Myers appeared to be part of the happy "New Atheist" family but I think that two issues have caused a breakup, with Coyne siding with the New Atheists - who all happen to be proponents of evolutionary psychology - and Myers drawing away from the family - the right-wing views on gun control and Muslim profiling of Sam Harris and the sexism of Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer.

Although I am disappointed that Myers still appears to be a booster of Richard Dawkins in spite of Myers taking Rebecca Watson's side against Dawkins and his role in elevator-gate.

Now that Myers has come out so strenuously against evolutionary psychology, and specifically against Steven Pinker, who won the 2013 Dawkins award, I wonder how Dawkins will respond.

More from the shore

We eventually walked over from Wildwood Crest to Wildwood proper and it is still definitely trashy in Wildwood. I guess some things never change.

Speaking of which, we also went to Cape May, which has also not changed since I was last there on vacation fourteen years ago.

It was definitely the highlight of the trip. We had tea at the Emlen Physick Estate tea room - although the tea itself was a disappointment. It was not what I consider a real tea service, since all the other places I've been to that serve traditional afternoon tea - at the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia, at Lady Mendl's tea room, in London - they put tea leaves in a pot and you pour from there into your cup - with a mesh to catch the leaves, usually. Well here they gave us a pot of hot water and tea bags. The desserts were good though, and they had a pretty little garden.

The best part though was going to Cape May point, which is the opposite of Wildwood - uncommercial and with few people. The beach was practically empty - although I suppose the fact that you can no longer swim in the state park area of the beach is a big reason. Anyway, a pod of dolphins showed up and it was such fun to watch them.

Of course I couldn't get good dolphin pix thanks to this iPhone camera.

Wildwood Crest

Wildwood Crest has fancy man-hole covers

My family has a place in Wildwood Crest this summer so I went down to visit for a few days. If it was up to me, it would have been Cape May, but Wildwood Crest turned out to be much better than I expected. I guess Wildwood Crest is the non-trashy Wildwood - although I was last in Wildwood twenty years ago, so maybe things are less trashy in the Wildwoods all around.

Wildwood survived Hurricane Sandy better than most parts of the Jersey Shore thanks no doubt to its really wide beaches. It takes forever to get from the street to the water's edge.

It's too bad my cell phone camera lens is so scratched up. It makes everything look foggy. But I'm not about to buy a whole new iPhone just for the camera.

Long walkway to the longer beach

I took this for the umbrella composition

Charming breakfast nook 

Party girl here got too much sun and too little sleep the night before and wound up with a killer headache and so had to bail out on my mom's birthday dinner. But at least Elvis showed up and my niece got a picture for Facebook.

The synergy of greatness that is St. Elmo's Fire

Brian Eno in 1974

I knew who Eno was, vaguely. I knew he was part of the whole glam rock thing, and had worked with David Bowie - but since I was never big on glam rock or David Bowie I hadn't paid much attention to Eno.

Well.

It turns out that Eno had a hand in two songs that I absolutely love.
Eno, along with Daniel Lanois was the producer of the U2 album Achtung Baby, with a favorite song "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World." When I discovered this I wondered if Eno was involved in another favorite song, Daniel Lanois' "The Maker." And sure enough, Eno played and sang on Lanois' album Acadie.

And then there is the Talking Head's Remain in Light, which, according to Wikipedia:

All songs written and composed by David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth.

AND he produced Are We Not Men? We are Devo!

Truly amazing. Brian Eno has had a huge influence on music that I loved my whole life and I had no idea.

What really got me to notice Eno though, was his own album, from 1975, Another Green World, specifically the one song St. Elmo's Fire (nothing to do with the Brat Pack movie from 1985.)

I love St. Elmo's Fire. But why is it so great? Here it is on Youtube. Unfortunately the sound quality doesn't do the song justice.

The reason it's so great is because it's a synergy of separate greatnesses.

The greatness that is easiest to detect is the solo by Robert Fripp, a well-known guitar virtuoso. But it's only a lesser greatness without the synergy. 

There is the electronica setting greatness. The noodling at the beginning that turns into a solid bedrock of sound, with the rhythm piano, and then the rising-falling stair-step electronic sound behind the refrain "the blue August moon, the cool August moon."

The minimalist evocative lyrics greatness:

Brown eyes and I was tired
We had walked and we had scrambled
Through the moors and through the briars
Through the endless blue meanders.  

In the blue august moon
In the cool august moon  

Over the nights and through the fires
We went surging down the wires
Through the towns and on the highways
Through the storms in all their thundering.  

In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon  

Then we rested in a desert
Where the bones were white as teeth sir
And we saw St. Elmo's Fire
Splitting ions in the ether.  

In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon
In the blue August moon
In the cool August moon.

At first the lyrics describe a fairly commonplace journey, with moors, briars and meanders (bends in a river) in the blue, cool August moon. Although being cool in August seems slightly off, but then Eno is British. But then:

Over the nights and through the fires We went surging down the wires Through the towns and on the highways Through the storms in all their thundering.  

Surging down the wires? What's that about? It adds a whole dimension concerning the identities of Brown Eyes and I. And then the last set of lyrics, the crowning moment of greatness:

Then we rested in a desert Where the bones were white as teeth sir And we saw St. Elmo's Fire Splitting ions in the ether.  

And this is where the timing greatness comes in and pulls it altogether. Because the guitar solo, which lasts the entire rest of the song kicks in right before "splitting ions in the ether."

Now I admit I didn't notice a lot of this until after repeated listenings. I must have listened to this song a hundred times by now. In fact, it gets better with repeated listenings because it's too hard to process the synergy of greatnesses in one single listen. Only after a few go-rounds does it really kick in that the epic guitar solo begins right at "...saw St. Elmo's Fire" -with a sustained note that goes from soft to loud and doesn't change until just after the word "ether" and the first bang of the rhythm piano. And then it goes all out. It's a mind-expander.

But what is "St. Elmo's Fire?" Well, I don't think it's necessary to know what it is in order to appreciation the song, but I found that reading this account by James Braid, the primary discoverer of hypnotherapy did add to my appreciation - which I consider one more greatness to add to the mix:

...It was about nine o'clock, P.M. I had no sooner got on horseback than I observed the tips of both the horse's ears to be quite luminous: the edges of my hat had the same appearance. I was soon deprived of these luminaries by a shower of moist snow which immediately began to fall. The horse's ears soon became wet and lost their luminous appearance; but the edges of my hat, being longer of getting wet, continued to give the luminous appearance somewhat longer. I could observe an immense number of minute sparks darting towards the horse's ears and the margin of my hat, which produced a very beautiful appearance, and I was sorry to be so soon deprived of it...

Eno has a web site.

The Carlos Danger Name Generator

Get your sexting pseudonym at Slate.

Mine is  Inigo Hazard

They hate him for his greatness

I have finished reading Atlas Shrugged!

I started this task while blogging about it all the way back on May 6. There were long stretches at the beginning where I stopped reading it but I've been really pushing myself for the past couple of weeks to get it done - I wanted to get on with my life.

There's not a whole lot to tell about the rest of the novel after John Galt's long-ass speech. The US goes downhill rapidly, and the parasite characters just keep getting progressively more hysterical and screechy and at last James Taggart loses his marbles and realizes why he and the other parasites hate John Galt and by extension all the other Randian Supermen:

...he knew it was Galt's greatness that he wanted to torture and destroy.

So the rest of the novel is Rand settling accounts with everybody who has committed a thought crime against Objectivism - Robert Stadler is killed by the parasite destructo-machine, but then we always knew that he could never fit in down at the Gulch - he's initially described as bald and homely.

Rand liked to claim that Objectivism was a philosophy for living on earth, but actually it was a philosophy for Ayn Rand living on earth, built on Rand's preposterously high self-regard and personal mythologizing that, as she states explicitly in the afterwards to Atlas Shrugged:

No one helped me, nor did I think that at any time it was anyone's duty to help me.

Nobody except the Bolsheviks, her family in Russia, her extended family in Chicago, Cecil B. DeMille, her husband, her sycophants, Bennett Cerf who admitted he despised her belief-system, but published her novel any way, the Social Security Administration, and a whole bunch of others. But like all those who receive government aid who believe that they are self-made, Rand simply takes it all as a deserved entitlement.

This belief-system is encapsulated in the behavior of John Galt, who is hired to work for the Twentieth Century Motor Company, where he designs a motor. Please note that John Galt was not an entrepreneur - he designed the motor while on the clock for this company, using their equipment and resources, and if it's like any other company, working under some kind of agreement that the company has rights over his motor. So Galt takes off when he doesn't approve of the company's new management structure (they hilariously collectivized their own factory) and conveniently he's the only person who knows how the motor works.

And this is why you should always hire technical writers for any technological project.*

But like Ayn Rand, John Galt is convinced that he did it entirely on his own - nobody helped him. Which is why he's so pissed off, like Richard Halley, for never being properly appreciated and in just the right way.

I think that this blogger sums up Galt and the book pretty well:

The fact that apparently a very large number of people don’t recognize Galt as the genocidal prick he is suggests a) Rand’s skill at stacking the story-telling deck is not to be discounted, and b) as with any audience with a large number of nerds in it, a non-trivial number of Atlas Shrugged readers are possibly far enough along the Asperger spectrum that they don’t recognize humanity does not in fact easily suss out into Randian capitalist superheroes on one side and craven socialist losers on the other, or that Rand’s neatly-stacked deck doesn’t mirror the world as it is, or (if one gives it any sort of genuine reflection) model it as it should be.

As for Rand herself, whether she had Asperger's or not, at heart she was an authoritarian, and that particular trait become more pronounced as she aged, as the Heller biography notes:

From the Blumenthals and Leonard Peikoff, she demanded a foot soldier's forfeiture of privacy. "She was relentless in pursuit of psychological errors" Allan (Blumenthal) recalled, and she seemed abnormally preoccupied with uprooting all deviations from her convictions and aesthetic tastes. Throughout the 1970s she needled Allan about his penchant for playing Beethoven and other pre- or post-Romantic composers privately, on his own piano, and ridiculed Joan (Blumenthal) for her appreciation of painters including Rembrandt... After an evening's bickering about the immorality of the Blumenthals "sense of life," she would phone the next day to find out if they had reconsidered their opinions; if not she renewed the argument the following evening and the evening after that. She questioned their choices of travel, entertainment and friends and accused them of being secretive when they withheld information from her...

...in 1978 these friends of twenty-five years' standing phoned to tell her they would no longer see her. She talked of 'denouncing' them but was persuaded that another public falling-out might further undermine her reputation. They were quietly designated enemies and Allan was written out of her will.

 (Rand's secretary) Barbara Weiss resigned. Over the course of fifteen years, Weiss had looked on as dozens of hapless followers had endured interrogation and humiliation. At first, she had attributed her employer's anger to a blind, passionate, highly charged moral temperament. Later, "I saw how repressed she was, and I knew [her anger] had to come from fear." Weiss said, echoing an observation made two decades earlier by Random House copy editor Bertha Krantz. "I decided she was possibly the most fearful person I had ever met." After the Blumenthal's departure, Weiss decided that Rand was not, after all, unconscious of the turbulence and pain she had caused in the lives of people who had cared for her, including Frank (O'Connor, Rand's husband). "She just robbed him of everything," the secretary said. "I [came to] look on her as a killer of people."

Sad. But when you think of her severe personality limitations, Ayn Rand had a much better life than anybody could possibly expect. But it's not because no one helped her. And they didn't hate her because of her greatness.

In addition to the two Rand biographies, I also got a copy of Rand's play, NIGHT OF JANUARY 16th. It had a run on Broadway - and has an entry the Playbill Vault and you can watch what looks like a college performance of the play here.

But I think I deserve a break from Ayn Rand, for a little while.

But you should go to McSweeney's and read OUR DAUGHTER ISN’T A SELFISH BRAT; YOUR SON JUST HASN’T READ ATLAS SHRUGGED.

And if you still haven't had your share of Rand fail, check out the ongoing analysis of Atlas Shrugged over at Daylight Atheism.

*I have been earning my living for the past 20 years as a technical writer.

The second NYCPlaywrights June monologue

Another one down, two more to go. I felt bad for Tony the actor. We recorded this before the heat wave broke - it was done in my apartment and I had to turn off the window air conditioner because it was too noisy. It quickly became seriously hot in my living room, especially with all the lights I had on - you can see he was sweating, although it doesn't look as bad on camera as it did live. The playwright was pleased though,  so we did our job.

More on Ayn Rand and Monthy Python

I came across these pithy remarks by film critic Joel E. Siegel about the biography Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life:

Like lice, the writings of Ayn Rand keep reinfesting the American consciousness. Resistant to dousings of rational analysis and common sense, they attach themselves to impressionable adolescent minds, vulnerable hosts for her simplistic pseudo-philosophical rejection of collectivism and religion, and celebration of individualism, capitalism, solipsism, romanticism, and self-esteem. By the time one generation matures sufficiently to recognize the shallowness of her thinking, a new one begins itching.

Yes, perfect. Except that this was written in 1997 before the age of Paul Ryan. But to the Monty Python part:

With her large, luminous eyes and unflappable self-assurance, Rand is a magnetic camera subject. But her ideas bear the same relation to philosophy that Pop-Tarts do to Viennese pastry. As she soberly explains her Objectivist principles to Mike Wallace in the film’s opening sequence, one can’t help recalling Anne Elk’s vapid theorizing in a memorable Monty Python episode. Riding the same hobbyhorse for half a century (and, in Paxton’s movie, 137 minutes), this self-dubbed “fanatic of individualism” quickly wears out her welcome.

Eddie Lampert and the Twentieth Century Motor Company

Lynne Stuart Parramore at Slate made the Lampert-Rand connection and writes: Ayn Rand killed Sears. Here she spells out the Rand connection and the failures.

At Sears, Lampert set out to create the Ayn Rand model of a giant firm. The company got a radical restructuring. It was something that had been tried at giant industrial conglomerates like GE, but never with a retailer.

First, Lampert broke the company into over 30 individual units, each with its own management, and each measured separately for profit and loss. Acting in their individual self-interest, they would be forced to compete with each other and thereby generate higher profits.

What actually happened is that units began to behave something like the cutthroat city-states of Italy around the time Machiavelli was penning his guide to rule-by-selfishness. As Mina Kimes has reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, they went to war with each other.

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently that Sears’ own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears’ circulars, and since the unit with the most money got the most ad space, one Mother’s Day circular ended up being released featuring a mini bike for boys on its cover. Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees focused solely on making money in their own unit ceased to have any loyalty the company or stake in its survival. Eddie Lampert taunted employees by posting under a fake name on the company’s internal social network.

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals.  Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

In 2012, Lampert bought a $40 million home on Indian Creek Island, near Miami, just around the time he decided to sell 1,200 Sears stores and close an additional 173. That same year, Sears Holding was named the sixth worst place in America to work by AOL Jobs.

She then concludes:

It’s probably a good thing Ayn Rand never tried to run a business.

Not only did Ayn Rand never try to run a business, virtually the only business she had any dealings with ever was show business.

I consider it just desserts for Rand to get the blame for Lampert's failure, in exchange for the Twentieth Century Motor Company, the Straw Business that was suddenly, inexplicably collectivized by its owners, causing John Galt to go Galt. The Bum on the Train explains:

It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought in a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it too, and everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. The plan was that everybody would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.           

 Of course it isn't enough to ask us to believe that people who inherited a factory would suddenly decide they wanted to give six thousand other people a say in how the factory would be run. Rand wants us to believe that this "communist" factory would also turn into a sweatshop:

"We're all one big family" they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't stand, working an acetylene torch together ten hours a day..."

Of course it doesn't take a pseudo-Communist parable system to force people to work long hours for low pay. It's happening all over the world right now, under 100% capitalism.

And note that the "Communists" refer to their collective as a family. Families are never a source of good in Atlas Shrugged. 

Rand discounts entirely any possible materialistic causes of socialist movements and blames the cause on her favorite villains:

Hadn't we heard it all our lives, from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers and in every newspaper we ever read, and every movie and every public speech?

And the primary force behind the Twentieth Century Motor Company is one of the two heirs (the third committed suicide) name Ivy Starnes, who doesn't care about wealth. The only, absolutely only reason given by Rand for why this person collectivized her own factory is pure psychopathy:

She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil you should see the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once and who'd just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

So there it is right there. Ayn Rand seriously believed that the only possible reason for anybody to favor socialist policies was sadism. 

But why would Ivy Starnes have to go to the effort to collectivize her factory when it is an entirely unnecessary step? If what you want to do is jerk people around, dock their pay, demote them, fail to live up to your promises, etc. etc. I can testify from personal experience that your standard private property loving employer is entirely capable of doing anything that Ivy Starnes did after she collectivized her own factory.

And in fact, the only reason why it isn't done more often by private property loving employers is because of unions. We know the results of laissez-faire capitalism, both in the United States before unions, and all over the world right now.

Ayn Rand's simplistic parable offers no reasoned analysis about aspects of Communism, socialism, capitalism, monarchy, etc. It's a children's battle of Good vs. Evil that is entirely useless for adults, and extremely silly to boot. 

When men with lots of money take the extremely silly as their Bible, all hell will break loose.

Ayn Rand's Revenge

OK, so John Galt's long-ass speech. I skimmed it. It was impossible to read it carefully word for word since it is just a rehash of what Rand had already said throughout the book.

What I found far more interesting was the response of some of the members of the public to Galt's inspiring call to anti-altruism:

Nobody had ever granted them the title of "the better men" or granting it, had paused to grasp that title's meaning, but everybody knew, each in his own community, neighborhood, office or shop, and in his own identified terms, who would be the men that now failed to appear on some coming morning and who would silently vanish in search of some unknown frontiers - the men whose faces were tighter than the faces around them, whose eyes were more direct, whose energy was more conscientiously enduring...

Rand just hate hate hated a fat or flabby face. Truly, having a "tight" face was a sign of innate superiority in Rand's strange mind.

And one of the examples of the little people going Galt is especially strange:

...the case of a woman with a fractured jaw: she had been slapped in the face by a total stranger, who had heard her ordering her five-year-old son to give his best toy to the children of neighbors.

Of all the illustrations of the noble cause of going Galt, why would Rand come up with this? A mother ordered her own kid to give his best toy away. Is this really a common problem that requires Objectivism to address? Whoever heard of a mother doing such a thing anyway?

And then I remembered...

When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children's playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand's two-and-a-half year old sister Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away. Natasha held onto the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later. When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled... (and) explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn't have relinquished them in the first place.

 - Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

Clearly the stranger breaking the woman's jaw is the spectre of Ayn Rand, getting her revenge against her mother's betrayal and the loss of her beloved wind-up chicken.

The chick of course, could only have been named "Rosebud."

Atlas Shrugged is such a whirling merry-go-round of awfulness that it’s difficult to find a starting point to grab onto...

Before I get into John Galt's long-ass speech, I want to quote from this humorous but for the most part accurate description of the strange entity that is John Galt in Atlas Shrugged in the Uncyclopedia...

...His second career was that of a track laborer at Taggart Transcontinental... There he apparently worked for twelve years, never getting laid. Ever. At all. He took his minimal wage track laborer's salary and used it to finance a multi-thousand dollar lab in his slum apartment and to fund his cross country trips to every industrialist, artist and scientist in America. He not only had the extra cash for these train trips, but plenty of vacation time to take those trains to every state in the union. And plenty of cash to stay in hotels while persuading rich men to give up all they own and live in the wilderness of Colorado. 

Evidence of his staggering super-proselytizing power is evident in that he could take a vacation not only for one month each year, but also any other time he pleased. Stationed in New York City, he could get time off to take a train trip to Pennsylvania, Colorado, Utah...

***

...It was at this point that he was able to persuade Michael "Midas" Mulligan to buy a huge patch of wilderness in Colorado, and hide it with super futuristic ray screens to camouflage it. Then all the formerly rich folk moved there. And with no prior training or ability, were able to live off the land, becoming farmers, sheep herders, cattle ranchers, fishermen, miners, smelters, blacksmiths and a few dozen other highly specialized trades that take years of training and far more than just common sense and an HGTV video series. 

We are to imagine here that they all funded their little homes and factories and businesses in the middle of nowhere themselves, though perhaps Midas loaned out a lot of gold -- gold to people who had no place to spend it but amongst their currently assetless selves. 

Plumbing and electricity found its way there, all the machines and materials pretty much just appearing. Or Midas bought it all and had it super secretly shipped in. And again gave it away to assetless people. Hoping that they'd duplicate two centuries of industrial progress quickly enough to pay him back with interest. And without the thousands of manual laborers necessary for the construction of even a small foundry, the 'men of the mind' constructed power plants, factories, aircraft mechanic shops and -- seriously -- a mint. How? Somehow. Don't start that again!

***

Sometime in all of this, he peeped at Dagny Taggart, Vice President of where he worked. And by "peeped", this is literal. He first spied her legs as she was walking down some stairs in a dress. As most guys know exactly what they are likely to see when staring up stairs while women in dresses walk down, this seems to have been a special hobby of the J-Dawg's. Though as he's not been laid in the entirety of his life, this may perhaps be forgiven, though feared. 

In any case, having seen Dagny's legs, and then the rest of Dagny, he knew -- as does any Randian hero -- everything he needed to know about her philosophy, morality and outlook on life. A Randian hero always knows these things just by looking at faces, and in the J-Dawg's case, he had seen her legs, too, so he also knew how she voted and what her favorite color was. I guess. 

Interestingly, he was aware that his old college buddy Cisco had laid Dagny. And that Cisco was still carrying a torch for her. A torch that Cisco was willing to carry forever, and had carried for at least 12 years, never laying a single other woman... 

***

...J-Dawg, like most sixth graders, shows he likes a girl by torturing her. Fully aware that Dagny is trying to keep the industrialists working, so that her life is easier and the world works well, he deliberately uses his super-proselytizing powers to remove each industrialist that she relies on. 

Of course, if he was just about some noble mission, he'd persuade each industrialist to quit in a more logical order, and at least, do so in order of ease of reaching them - he being confined to a train and his track laborer's salary. That and his foreman is getting tired of the endless and weekly vacation requests. 

Or, if pure and decent love was his motive, he'd persuade Dagny first, then get the rest of the industrialists. But seeing how well the plan "torture first, win her love later" had worked for his buddy Cisco, he decided to do the same.

***

J-Dawg... told Dagny that there were "no rules" but then immediately told her yet another rule. 

• "Our first rule here, Miss Taggart, is that one must always see for oneself." (A "first" implies a "second", last I checked.) 
• "Miss Taggart, we have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind. But we have certain customs which we all observe..." (The word "but" is used to negate what just preceded, especially with the word "all" instead of "most of us" used, and if there are "no rules", what happened to the "first rule" he already told her of?) 
• "I'll warn you now that there is one word that is forbidden in this valley: the word, 'give'." ("warn"? "forbidden"? Wow, sounds pretty free, Kim Jong Galt!) 
• "We have no rules of any kind, except one. When a man took our oath, it meant a single commitment: not to work in his own profession, not to give to the world the benefit of his mind." ("except" negates the concept of "no rules", and note that the "one" rule is different than other "one" rules!)

The "customs" that "all" observe seem rather vague and all encompassing. And to mean whatever J-Dawg wants them to mean at any given time. 

Apparently then Galt's Gulch is a monarchy with the concept of "benign neglect". In other words, if J-Dawg's not paying attention, it's benign, otherwise, words are forbidden, jobs regulated, communications prohibited, learning from bitter experience required, and the love of your life hit upon.

***

Since I'm on this non-original work binge, I might as well quote from this blogger's brilliant critique of Atlas Shrugged:

John Galt’s most impressive feat isn’t that he stopped the motor of the world, it’s that he stopped  the motor of the world in his spare time, during his month-long annual leave from his job as a railroad laborer in Taggart Terminal.  Say, since when did railroad laborers get month-long  vacations?  As Daffy Duck once declared (really), “strong union!”  Not only did America’s unions “bring you the five-day work week,” they gave John Galt the freedom to build his Gulch in the bargain. John Galt is an inspiration and mocking rebuke to every wannabe author convinced that his day job is the only thing between him and that Great Novel inside him.   

You have to love the irony. Almost as much as the irony that Ayn Rand was able to overcome sexism, anti-Semitism and poverty and go to college thanks to the Bolsheviks.

And then this blogger, the Wit Memo, to my delight, calls out that whiny bitch Richard Halley:

It’s through Richard Halley, and her rendering of other artists, that Ayn Rand reveals the most about herself. In reading the following two passages, keep in mind that according to a November 2009 NYer article, Ayn Rand was personally devastated by poor reviews and never quite made it as a screenwriter, her initial dream.  First, right before the Comet train explodes in Taggart Tunnel, Ayn presents a roster of the doomed Looters occupying the train’s sleeper compartments, making clear through hokey, bilious descriptions that they well deserve their imminent, fiery deaths.  She saves her most curious choler for a playwright... 

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling, little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

Jump from there right to Richard Halley’s rant against a certain type of artist, at page 728:

This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage and love for truth --- as against a sloppy bum who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn’t the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained by such crude concepts as ‘being’ or ‘meaning,’ he’s the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn’t know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like vomit out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn’t stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel---he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! 

Wit Memo likes to think of that “flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard!” part as the icing on a deliciously diagnostic cake.  

Although my favorite part is the first claus of this paragraph:

“Atlas Shrugged” is such a whirling merry-go-round of awfulness that it’s difficult to find a starting point to grab onto, so we might as well begin with the Bad Guys, the villains.  Selling Big Ideas in a work of fiction requires credible antagonists to be vanquished by heroes exemplifying the Big Ideas, and the antagonists in “Atlas Shrugged” don’t sell because they’re simply not credible.  

"Whirling merry-go-round of awfulness." Perfect.

And how timely - in the latest New Yorker: John Hodgman: Ask Ayn.  Best bit:

I do not approve of the so-called hippies, but I do not approve of any government control over drugs. The government does not have the right to tell any individual what to do with his or her health and life. You probably know that I received a prescription for the stimulant Benzedrine, or “speed.” I can say rationally that it increases my happiness and my productivity. For example, some time ago I went to Studio 54, because I love to dance on speed. I took fifteen speed pills, and I got into a contest with Liza Minnelli over who could roar most like a jaguar. She simply sounded like a stupid lion. 

Then the inside of my head began to sound like a jet engine and so I went to the bathroom. I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of “Atlas Shrugged.” Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper. I cannot include these words in a new edition, alas, because I did not write them so much as encode them on the toilet paper by biting it. 

As I write this, I am drinking speed, and you cannot stop me. You cannot stop me, America, with your altruism and your Alan Alda and your Fresca cans biting at my skin. I shall speed across this country like a great high-speed train and the U.S. shall be forever changed in my wake.