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JLS  Symposium on Atlas Shrugged  Finally Available

By on November 27, 2009 16
Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

The last issue of Journal of Libertarian Studies – last as in most recent (it remains to be seen whether it’s the last absolutely, as there might be at least one more issue) – was devoted inter alia to a symposium on the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, with new contributions by Barbara Branden, Geoff Plauché, and Jennifer Baker, and two previously unpublished pieces by Murray Rothbard – one an amazingly revealing fan letter to Rand, and one a defense of Rand’s aesthetic theory. (The rest of the issue is interesting too, including a dandy piece by Bob Higgs on anarchism. For further details, see the summaries here and here.)

I’m particularly proud of that issue – but until recently, it wasn’t available online yet. Now it is. Gaudete igitur.

It looks to me as though hard copies of that issue (21.4) are available for sale also, but I haven’t tested whether that’s true.

O is for Visitor

By on November 25, 2009 3

V: Humankind's Last Stand

Great line from Jesse Walker:

IDEA FOR A MINISERIES: Extraterrestrials come to Earth promising hope and change. Gradually their sinister plot is revealed: They will take over the planet and run it pretty much the same way it was being run before.

Who Said It?

By on November 22, 2009 4

Magritte - Lovers

Can you guess the source of this passage?

– Do your people always quarrel thus?

– Always.

– Why?

– I do not know. They take their mates for life and are permitted but one and though both men and women have a choice in the selection of their mates they never seem to be satisfied with one another and are always quarreling, usually because neither one nor the other is faithful. Do the men and women quarrel thus in the land from which you come?

– No. They do not. If they did they would be thrown out of the tribe.

– But suppose that they find that they do not like one another?

– Then they do not live together. They separate and if they care to they find other mates.

– That is wicked. We would kill any of our people who did such a thing.

– At least we are all a very happy people, which is more than you can say for yourselves, and, after all, happiness, it seems to me, is everything.

– Perhaps you are right.

The answer.

Icky Sticky Anarchy

By on November 22, 2009 11

I came from a real tough neighborhood.
I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

– Rodney Dangerfield

the bricks of society

According to Simon Read, in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Anarchism, But Were Afraid to Ask: “The English anarchist Colin Ward calls anarchism the cement that holds the bricks of society.”

That’s a great line, paradoxical-sounding but true (though I usually quote it as “Anarchy is the glue that holds society together”). It’s a more succinct, and more radical, version of Paine’s “Great part of that order …” passage. (See also Emerson’s “hooks and eyes” line.) But where, exactly, does Colin Ward say it – if he does?

After looking through some Ward books I own and doing some internet searches (as well as searches through Ward’s books via Amazon’s “look/search inside” feature), I can’t find any place where he says this – though I did find a passage assigning the social-cement role to human solidarity, and another assigning it to music-making.

Can any of my readers recognise/confirm/disconfirm this quote?

Name of the Game

By on November 19, 2009 8
Paragon Park's Bermuda Triangle

Paragon Park's Bermuda Triangle

Back in the mid-80s – and specifically, IIRC, the summers of ’84 and ’85 – I worked at a now-defunct amusement park in Hull, Massachusetts, called Paragon Park (which proudly advertised itself as featuring “the world’s oldest all-wooden rollercoaster,” like that was a good thing). And in the park’s arcade area, hidden amongst the pinball machines, was the most amazing video game I’d ever seen.

I don’t remember what the game was called, but it featured a race among flying cars zooming along a highway that twisted and curved through outer space (so one had to dodge random asteroids and so on). This game not only had far more sophisticated and realistic digital imagery than anything I’d seen before – it also had far more sophisticated and realistic digital imagery than anything I would see for years after that, while relatively unfancy-looking games like Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Snake continued to dominate the market.

Eventually, of course the look of my mystery game became standard throughout the industry, and its quality has long since been surpassed. Still, for a long time that game was, in my experience at least, a solitary advanced scout for the wave of the future, without contemporary parallel or, apparently, contemporary fame. So my question is: do any of my readers have any idea what this game could have been?

Not having a picture of the game, I offer a picture of my favourite ride (both to ride and to operate) at Paragon Park – the Bermuda Triangle.

Uncle Sam Goddamn

By on November 15, 2009 4

 
(Video CHT Kelly Patterson via Charles.)

Lyrics:

Welcome to the United Snakes
land of the thief
home of the slave
the grand imperial guard
where the dollar is sacred and proud

Smoke and mirrors, stripes and stars
stolen for the cross in the name of God
bloodshed, genocide, rape, and fraud
writ into the pages of the law, good lord
the cold continent [?] latchkey child
ran away one day and started acting foul
king of where the wild things are – daddy’s proud
’cause the Roman Empire done passed it down
imported and tortured a work force
and never healed the wounds or shook the curse off
now the grown up Goliath nation
holdin’ open auditions for the part of David
can ya feel?
nothing can save ya, you question the reign
you get rushed in and chained up
fist raised but I must be insane
’cause I can’t figure a single goddamn way to change it

Welcome to the United Snakes
land of the thief
home of the slave
the grand imperial guard
where the dollar is sacred
and power is God

All must bow to the fat and lazy
the fuck you obey me
and why do they hate me – who me?
only two generations away
from the world’s most despicable slavery trade
pioneered so many ways to degrade
a human being that it can’t be changed to this day
legacy so ingrained in the way that we think
we no longer need chains to be slaves
lord, it’s a shameful display
the overseers even got raped along the way
’cause the children can’t escape from the pain
and they born with the poisonous hatred in their veins
try an’ separate a man from his soul
you only strengthen him and lose your own
but shoot that fucker if he walk near the throne
remind him that this is my home – now I’m gone

You don’t give money to the bums
on a corner with a sign
bleeding from their gums
talking about you don’t support a crackhead
what you think happens to the money from your taxes?
shit, the government’s an addict
with a billion-dollar-a-week kill-brown-people habit
and even if you ain’t on the front line
when Massa yell crunch time you right back at it
plain look at how you hustling backwards
at the end of the year add up what they subtracted
three outta twelve months your salary pay for that madness
man, that’s savage
what’s left? – get a big ass plasma
to see where they made Dan Rather point the damn camera
only approved questions get answered
now stand your ass up for that national anthem

Custom made (you’re so low)
to consume the noose (you’re so low)
keep saying we’re free (you’re so low)
but we’re all just loose (you’re so low)
keep saying we’re free (you’re so low)
but we’re all just loose (you’re so low)

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