(De)Evolution in Movies

I occasionally peruse the website of the pop artist Brandon Bird because his drawings and paintings of celebrities are really damn funny. His work is absurd satire, and I get a kick out of it. Well, I just stopped by again for the first time in months and found something that has, perhaps, an unintentionally serious streak. At the very least it speaks an unfortunate truth while also being funny.

In an illustration called "Evolution of the Leading Man," Bird captures not just the decline of the stature of movie leading men from Cary Grant to today, but of the overall decline into naturalism of art in general. (click image for full size)
I think this is one of the reasons for the popularity of superhero movies. When the only options for leading men are fat, messy stoners on the one hand, and fantastical if often morally ambiguous superheros on the other, a lot of people are drawn to the latter if only to see the depiction of someone larger than life. We'll know things are getting better when we can reverse the regression and bring back romantic realism in movies, with new Cary Grants and Katherine Hepburns.

Atlas Sales Track With Government Interventions

A recent article in The Economist discusses the rising sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and shows how they have been spiking when the government makes an assault on the free market.

Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news (see chart). The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of England’s bail-out of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sales of the book rose after America’s Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obama’s stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed and Mr Obama announced a new mortgage-modification plan.

The accompanying chart is perhaps even more compelling because the spikes are so pronounced:The article also mentions that Atlas briefly surpassed Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope in the Amazon best seller rankings. Right now, Obama's book is #49 and Atlas Shrugged is #61. But I wonder if these figures are truly indicative the the popularity of either book. They only rank specific versions of a book.

It is only the mass market paperback version of Audacity that is ranked #49. The hardcover edition is #1,017. The "nice paperback" edition (the bigger, nicer edition) is #4,087.

It is the nice paperback version of Atlas that is ranked #61. The hardcover edition is #130, and the mass market edition is #203. Think about that. Three different versions of the book are in (roughly) the top 200 selling books on Amazon. That is amazing.

I would be very interested to see Amazon combine the sales numbers of all the different formats for a book -- print, audio CD, Kindle, etc. -- because I think it would be a much more accurate accounting of the relative popularity of each title.

Amazon also has best-seller lists for different categories of books, and the "classic fiction" category is amusing. Three print versions of Atlas Shrugged are numbers 1-3, the Atlas Shrugged (Cliffs Notes) (by Andrew Bernstein) is #20, and yet another paperback version is #44. The Fountainhead is #6, #27, and #76.

It is a great testament to the ideas presented in these novels that not only are the sales of the books still so high (and they continue to climb) over 50 years after they were published, but also that people are turning to those ideas to understand what they sense is going wrong in the world. Perhaps they will learn that the dangers they see aren't new, but that they are the same destructive forces that have been plaguing mankind for millennia -- namely altruisim, mysticism, and statism -- and that any hope for a solution relies on the ideas of reason, self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism.


[HT: Boaz Arad]

When You're A Dad...

When you're the father of a 3-year-old boy, it's quite possible that you could go to work and not notice for over two hours that you have a blue monster truck sticker on your chest.

Boston Globe Says ObamaCare Will Save Money... Later

More from the White House Summit On Spending Our Money -- The Boston Globe reports, wishfully, that expanding government programs to "provide health insurance to most Americans, ...could increase spending in the short term but would be designed to save money later." Nowhere in the article do they support that idea, with quotes or analysis. It doesn't even appear, at least from their reporting, that Obama even said that it would "save money later." Perhaps this is the nature of the post-Obama world of hope... people just imagine what he said or meant, and then vigorously agree with it.

I have written previously about some of the proposed health care plans that call for massive expansion of Medicare, and what this will mean for the country. Take a look at this chart from the Wall Street Journal, based on Medicare/Medicaid spending projections as a percentage of the economy:I have no idea how increasing entitlement programs will save anyone money in the long run, and the Congressional Budget Office seems to agree. Any attempts to justify greater government meddling in the health care market by appealing to cost-savings are absurd.

I wrote in November, after Obama was elected:

The first 100 days of a presidency are the most active, and therefore the most dangerous (at least in today's political and philosophical climate). I fear we will be hit with the devastating one-two punch of nationalized healthcare and disastrous carbon-capping environmental regulations. America is already staggering under the furious assault of Big Government, and I'm not sure she can absorb the blows coming in Obama's 100 days.

I haven't seen much that specifically addressed carbon-capping recently, but I think I was right about the one-two punch. It's just that the biggest punch was the nationalization of the banks and the "stimulus," with its related sucker-punch of smuggling in universal health care. This is day 35... I'm dreading the next 65 days.

Obama Chameleon

President Barack Obama continues to blow in the wind, saying whatever his particular audience wants to hear, in defiance of the facts of reality (which he evades) or the dictates of his principles (if he has any).

At an economic summit on fiscal responsibility at the White House yesterday, the man who has presided over an unfathomably quick growth of the deficit, said to his bi-partisan audience:

“I want to be very clear,” Obama said in opening the session in the White House State Dining Room. “We cannot and will not sustain deficits like these without end. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration and the next generation.”

The irony of this statement wasn't lost on others, including Sen. Orrin Hatch (from Politico.com):

"It is ironic that the president is holding a summit on fiscal responsibility less than a week after instigating and signing a massive, wasteful stimulus bill,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told Politico. “Convening groups to talk about deficits and holding a photo-op isn't going to pay off our debts -- we should be focusing on reducing our estimated $1.2 trillion deficit by reforming entitlement programs and reducing wasteful government spending…That would be something all Americans could support, not just the limited group admitted to attend his summit today."

I listened to some of what Obama said at the meeting, as it was presented this morning on NPR, and he was folksy, amiable, and well-spoken. At one point, in reference to government procurement and fiscal responsibility in government, John McCain attacked the plans for a new high-tech fleet of Presidential helicopters. Obama played the stand-up comedian, cracked some jokes, and then agreed with McCain. I was left with the distinct impression that Obama has a near total lack of any of his own ideas and simply reflects what he thinks the crowd wants to hear. And also that the White House summit was sublime political theater without any substance.

Obama is a chameleon. When pushing for trillions of dollars of aid to nationalize the banks, the situation is too dire to worry about the deficit. When he is talking to congressmen about fiscal restraint, he talks the talk about halving the deficit and blames the Bush administration for the inherited problems. The press pretends not to notice the sleight of hand and blithely reports that people are "hopeful."

One Mind on Strike

From this week's Objectivist Roundup, I found one of the more compelling blog posts I've read in a long time. It's the story of one man's decision to go on strike because of government involvement in his work. Jim Woods writes:

We live in a time when billions of dollars of market capitalization can be wiped out by a single political speech, statutory command, or regulatory decree; and those politicians consume our lives as much as our dollars, a problem my friends have heard me complain about for decades related to my industry. ...

For me, the end started when the Democrats retook Congress in 2006. ... our public servants made it impossible to raise capital to finance new business; consequently, the America taxpayers, without much attention in the media, took over liability for tens of billions of dollars in financing and risk. The Bush Administration and Congress followed this formula later that same year, when the chickens of failed public policy came home to roost throughout the financial services industry.

It is illegal for me to be profitable in my trade, so I am on strike as I refuse to be a slave. [all emphasis added]

Read the whole post. It's tragic and inspirational at the same time. In the final (full) paragraph, as I noted in the comments on his blog, Jim not only sounds a call to arms, but comes up with an analogy I had never considered before, and I think it's perfect:

In the novel _Atlas Shrugged_, each striker chose different guises to wear in their Strike: one became a playboy, another a pirate, and another a modern Harriet Tubman. I won’t make decorative light switch covers nor will I become a hobbyist. I have been educated in politics, divined the intricacies of federal regulation, and by profession I am an Integrator, who sees the whole picture from the smallest detail to the broadest perspective, all at the same time. I will choose my own strike path… [emphasis added]

I had never considered John Galt a modern Harriet Tubman, but what a great comparison! The Underground Railroad and Galt's strike, both delivering man from slavery; the former from an immoral system, and the other from a corrupt morality.

I don't think it's time for a full-scale strike of the men of the mind... not yet. But it's clear that for some individuals, the time has come to turn their backs on a world that makes it impossible--or illegal--to live freely and productively.

Think of the Trees!

Have you ever received an email where the sender included something like the following at the end of their signature?

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

I just got one like this, with the cute little webdings "P" (a tree with a... river?), and instead of green, it had me seeing red. It says to me, in effect, "I, the sender of this email, am an unthinking, dogmatic, idiot." Probably not what was intended, eh?

It also says to me that the sender has a tragically wrong view of values. She places intrinsic value on "the environment" wholly apart from the valuers -- humans. Sure, I'm making assumptions about a person based on their email signature, but if she puts her ideology out there like that, why shouldn't I? The woman just told me that I should think, not about my values, my ease or comfort in reading what she wrote, but instead I should be concerned with the impact of one sheet of paper and some ink on "the environment."

To this, I say "to hell with you!" I'll print the damn thing out five million times if it fits my needs.

I think I'll begin including a variation of this signature on my own emails:

Please consider using reason and your own independent judgment regarding the printing of this email. If it fits your needs, print a forest's worth. The environment be damned!

100 Books (plus 10)

Because I'm a stick-in-the-mud and a fuddy-duddy, I rarely do these types of lists. It's one of the reasons I don't really like FaceBook. Also, you kids get off my lawn!

That said, this list of 100 books was kind of fun and gratifying to do. I first saw it at RationalJenn and 3-Ring-Binder.

Here's how you play 100 Books:

• Bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you intend to read.
• Strike out those you will never, ever read. (my little addition to this exercise)

Note: watching the movie doesn’t count.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Currently reading for the first time with my 5 yr old)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Read some of both the old and new, using a historical – i.e. secular – study guide. It was moderately interesting.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Does reading most of them over the course of a few decades count?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Oh how I wish I could un-read this book. Though for cultural knowledge of my enemies, I suppose it has some value.)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (This, plus the other 5 books in the series... I've probably read the whole series 4 times. I also read the "prequels" by Herbert's son, but they are really not very good.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (I tried to read it and got about 1/3 of the way on three different occassions, and have no intention of trying again.)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I tried to read this a few times, forgetting each time why I stopped after the first 20 pages. Just pure crap.)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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Not a bad showing, and I find it interesting that I have so few itallicized titles. From that list, I've read most everything I want to. And there are a lot I will never pick up.

Now, what of the glaring omissions and the overall weirdness of the list? I read in the comments on RationalJenn's post that this list is likely from The Guardian (UK) and that rings a bell. I detect a strong British slant in the list--way too much Dickens and Austen (though I can forgive the Austen). There are very few prominent American novels, and their absence is glaring in light of the fact that things like "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is there. I know this isn't a "100 Best Books of All Time" list, but seriously? Mitch Albom?

Where are (for good or for bad):

1) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
2) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
3) For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
4) Sophie's Choice - William Styron
5) The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
6) Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
7) The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov
8) Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
9) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
10) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

I'm sure I'm missing some other good/bad/important ones, but at the very least the addition of these ten would pad my numbers make a better list.

Home Improvement -- Restoring a Front Door

One of the charming parts about my house (reminder: 1880's Stick Victorian style) was that the front door was a French door. It was all glass and really fit the style of the house. However, there were a few big problems with it. First and foremost, the total width of the door opening was only 36 inches--regular door width. This means that in regular usage (with one side kept stationary) when the door was opened there was only half the amount of space to go through than is normal. The stationary side could be opened, but it was difficult to do with bags of groceries in your hands, so we were often left to shimmy through sideways. The second problem was that it was an old door with non-tempered, non-insulated glass, and there were gaps along all the edges. In winter, it was like a wind tunnel of cold air. We resorted to hanging a big heavy curtain inside the door, much like restaurants do, to keep the cold out.

With heating oil prices sky high at the beginning of the winter, I finally decided to get a more traditional single panel door. But not wanting either a cheap-looking steel or fiberglass door, or to shell out $1600+ (at least) for a custom solid wood door, I decided to buy a salvaged door and restore it.

I drove down to the closest large architectural salvage business and picked out a nice solid wood door with a single (empty) cutout for glass that was in very good shape -- minimal marring of the wood, and it was just the right size. I only needed to strip and refinish it, and get a new piece of glass and new hardware. The door itself was $200.

I also bought an antique brass lockset for $20 that was just the right size and only needed cleaning and refinishing. Here is a photo of the lockset, after I was about halfway done with the polishing:Note that this is an old style mortise lock, where the piece in the top right of the photo is inserted into the edge of the door. Also note that all of the pieces, including the faceplates, are solid brass, very heavy, with a wonderful feel to them. It's difficult to determine the age of this particular lock, but my guess is that it's roughly 100 years old, give or take a couple decades. The interior working parts are solid cast brass, and all they needed was some cleaning. It's remarkable how well this mechanism still works.The above photo is the interior of the lock. I took the picture before I dug in so that I could put it all back together if one of the springs popped the pieces all over. The catch is missing in the picture because I had already removed it to clean it. Another amazing thing about this mechanism is that newly manufactured versions look almost exactly the same. The technology has needed minimal updates in well over 100 years.

In the midst of this activity, I was sanding, staining, and finishing the door itself. After extensive research into dozens of options for stain and urethane (or lacquer or shellac or tung oil...) I decided to go with what I could get at Home Depot for lack of conclusive reason not to. I used MinWax Dark Walnut Stain and Sealer, and MinWax Helmsman Spar Urethane. Having never finished woodwork before, this took some trial and error, but after many many coats, I finally finished it. (this took weeks and weeks, what with the holidays, birthdays, work, etc.)

Also during this time, I ordered a new piece of glass for the door. It turns out that they can put a nice beveled edge on tempered glass, which is great because it really adds a touch of elegance to the glass, and fits with the vintage nature of the house, the door, and the hardware. That was $95.

Add in another $75 for solid brass hinges that match the hinges in the rest of the house (and including all the incidentals and supplies I didn't mention above) and the total cost for this project came in under $500. I installed it this past weekend and it actually fit! I had measured and measured and was pretty sure it would, but you never know. Not a great photo, but you should be able to make out how well the polishing of the brass knob worked, as well as the faint outline of the beveled glass. The thing to the left is one of the panels of the old French door. Once the weather is consistently warmer, I'll strip and refinish the trim to match the color of the door.

The foyer is no longer a wind tunnel, which is one immediate benefit of the project. I can now walk in the front door without turning sideways, and my dogs can't see out the door and bark at every person or squirrel that happens by. And when I pull the door shut, there is a solid, deep, resonating sound of pleasant finality -- ka-THUNK!

----------------
Update: My wife took a better photo of the door (see below), and we also discussed painting the trim the color of the rest of the house trim rather than staining it to match the door, to make it pop. That idea was thanks to this month's This Old House Magazine that arrived yesterday with a multi-page spread about updating your front door, and another spread detailing staining and finishing techniques. It was only two months late to help...

Caption Contest

Post your caption idea in the comments. The winner gets $787,000,000,000.
Some suggestions:

-"We did it for the children... the yummy, yummy children."

-"We're going to Disney World, while it's still in business!"

-"Mmmmm....  braaiiinnnnnnnsss"

Teddy's On Our Side

I sent a letter to both of my esteemed senators last week--John Kerry and Ted Kennedy--suggesting strongly that they vote against the stimulus bill. John must be mulling it over because he hasn't gotten back to me, but Teddy just responded personally with a very charming email that really shows that a) he gave a lot of thought to what I had to say, and b) he has my best interests in mind.

I mean, just look at what he wrote! I can feel his hot air puffing up the sails of our economy already.

Dear Mr. August:

Thank you for your recent letter on the economy and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, S. 1. This is a very important issue to me, and I'm committed to making sure that hardworking families get the help they need.

Day after day, we see distressing evidence that our economy is continuing in the wrong direction. The unemployment rate is rising, the cost of basic essentials such as food and fuel is soaring, and foreclosures and bankruptcies are skyrocketing. Our failing economy has a real impact on the lives of tens of millions of Americans. Every day, working men and women are being forced to make impossible choices between feeding their families, paying their bills, and keeping their homes.

That's why I strongly support immediate stimulus legislation to help those in need and revive our economy as soon as possible. The Senate stimulus proposal is a major step in the right direction. It contains targeted spending and tax incentives designed to jump-start the economy as quickly as possible. It also provides help to the large number of unemployed workers, including 75,000 in Massachusetts, who have exhausted their unemployment benefits while they continue to look for jobs.

There's still more to be done in coming days before the legislation is complete. I believe we must add assistance for the millions of families struggling to heat their homes, and give greater assistance to those who need help in feeding their families. I will fight to create targeted spending on infrastructure improvements, as well as more aid for educational system and job training. The recovery package is large, but when implemented correctly, it will give our country much needed improvements in jobs, health care, education and clean energy, ushering in a prosperous America for generations to come.

We have much to do in the days ahead, and I intend to do all I can to make sure that working people in Massachusetts aren't left behind.

Thank you again for your letter on this pressing issue.



Sincerely,
Edward M. Kennedy

I don't know about the rest of you, but it sounds like us working folk in Massachusetts are going to clean up with this one. Too bad for you! Ha! Thanks Teddy. You're the man.

Objectivist Roundup #83

Welcome to the February 12, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Roundup.

This roundup features posts by blog authors who are advocates of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. She called it a "philosophy for living on earth" -- as opposed to religious mysticism focused on some non-existent other world, or an ivory tower mishmash of conflicting ideas disconnected from reality and the lives of men -- and further described Objectivism this way:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

And with that, I am pleased to present Objectivist Roundup #83!

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1. Brian Phillips presents "Practical" Arguments for Property Rights posted at Houston Property Rights, saying, "During my twenty years defending property rights, I have regularly encountered individuals who rely on economic and similar "practical" arguments in the defense of property rights. But these arguments are seldom effective, because people are ultimately moved by morality."


2. John Drake presents Productivity with kids posted at Try Reason!, saying, "Maintaining high productivity can be possible as a parent, but it requires a different mindset."


3. Burgess Laughlin presents Ayn Rand on writing book reviews posted at Making Progress, saying, "These notes from a brief section of The Art of Nonfiction cover the what, how, and why of reviewing books."


4. Bill Brown presents Cargo Cult Capitalism posted at The New Clarion, saying, "After a trip to Ethiopia in December, I was curious why the country was so poor given all the commerce I witnessed. This post is an attempt to sort it out."


5. Dan Edge presents The Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion hedge fund scam is being called "the biggest Ponzi scheme in history," but the title properly belongs to the Social Security program."


6. Roberto Sarrionandia presents The Right to Education vs The Right to Life posted at Tito's Blog, saying, "Why the right to education is incompatible with the right to life."


7. Ari Armstrong presents Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet: $4.72 Per Day posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "Here is a more detailed description of my low-budget, low-carb shopping expedition."


8. Jim Woods presents Death by Altruism posted at Words by Woods, saying, "A philosophic autopsy examining the pioneer of heart bypass surgery illuminates the path upon which Obama asks America to walk."


9. Amy Mossoff presents Don't Call Me Stupid posted at The Little Things, saying, "How the word "stupid" has become the new swear word, and what that says about our culture."


10. Diana Hsieh presents Cake Wrecks posted at NoodleFood, saying, "If you desperately need to get in touch with the funny -- as I do, due to my dissertation crunch -- you'll enjoy Cake Wrecks."


11. Daniel presents What Are Americans Drinking? posted at The Nearby Pen, saying, "This post supports freedom in the beer market--specifically the right of grocery owners to sell alcohol over a certain content."


12. Rational Jenn presents On Siblings posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "I discuss a few ideas for parenting siblings, with the key idea being: Each child is an individual."


13. Paul Hsieh presents My PajamasMedia OpEd on Cass Sunstein posted at NoodleFood, saying, "The PajamasMedia political commentary site published my latest OpEd on the dangers of "libertarian paternalism"."


14. Peter Cresswell presents Minimum wage rise: everybody loses posted at Not PC, saying, "In the teeth of a world depression, New Zealand's government has just elected to raise, instead of abolish, the minimum wage. It's not about economics, it's just politics."


15. Michael Labeit presents On "The Undercurrent" vs. the Overcast posted at Philosophical Mortician, saying, "American college students have plenty to learn from their Objectivist peers."


16. Edward Cline presents Mending the Fabric posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "A respondent to "An Inauguration of Tyranny" chided me for writing so much about current political trends and events, such as Barack Obama's election and his and Congress's plans to "socialize" the country by hook or by crook -- chiefly by crook. Here is my answer."


17. Tom Stelene presents Christianity Is Not Great, Pt. 2 posted at The Imaginary Philosophy, saying, "This is the second part in a series of posts arguing against Dinesh D'Souza's book, What's So Great About Christianity?"


18. And I have to add this, though it wasn't submitted by the author, because it succintly describes the roadmap to economic recovery that the country desperately needs to follow. How to Solve Economic Crisis in 5 minutes, by Doug Reich at The Rational Capitalist.

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That concludes this edition of the Objectivist Roundup. Next week's host is The Rule of Reason. Submit your blog article to the Objectivist Roundup using our carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: Objectivist Roundup, blog carnival.

Goodbye Boston Globe

I have been a daily subscriber to the Boston Globe for many years. It is delivered to my home around 5 o'clock each morning, and is thus an integral part of my morning routine: up at 5:30am, let dogs out, get paper off the front porch, make coffee and some eggs, read paper front to back.

I continued my subscription despite the paper's strong leftward lean because I valued the local, national and world news (however slanted), the opinion page, the coverage of the local sports teams, and lately because I could count on the paper to be a nearly endless source of blog material.

But I just can't stomach it any longer.

Since Obama won the presidency, the din of leftist self-congratulation grew louder, and by the inauguration it was overwhelming. Undisguised praise for the stimulus bill and urgent calls for climate change action spilled off the opinion pages and into the "real" news. Not that this didn't happen regularly before, but now every page of the paper--from the international news to the entertainment section--was dripping with a cynical smugness that said "just look what we can do now that we're in power!" The only part of the paper that escaped it was the sports section.

Last week, I called Globe customer service and happily canceled my subscription.

In the interest of full disclosure, this decision was also a financial one, as I'm trimming expenses in all phases of my life. But I would have once considered getting the Boston Globe every morning to be a worthwhile expenditure that I would have made sure to budget for. Now it is simply too much of a stinking pile of propaganda for me to waste my money.

I'm not sure what my new morning routine will be. Will I cozy up to the laptop with my cup of french roast and read the feeds from the Wall Street Journal? Perhaps I'll use the time to take a bite out of my reading list. But one thing's for sure: no more Boston Globe.