Ron Paul Stays On Message: "On the 'Cash for Clunkers' program that gives government aid for people trading in old gas guzzlers, which will then be destroyed: a bad idea because it destroys a vital market for the poor.
'A new driver or new worker needs a cheap car,' Paul said.
On the release of two American journalists by North Korea to former President Bill Clinton: a 'wonderful' confirmation of Paul's contention that the U.S. should talk to and trade with North Korea.
'Despite this ranting about 'don't talk to them, invade them, bomb them'... it is just great to show you can talk to people no matter how bad they look,' Paul said in a recent interview."
"...I'd rather read through the worst novel ever written than sit through the best movie ever made..."
The Cigarette-Smoking Man to Bill Mulder, "Musings of the Cigarette-Smoking Man'
Movies don't satisfy me for the most part. I find more release from looking at my father's golden retriever perform auto-analingus from across the room, or watching the NYM infielders drop game-ending pop ups.
A lot of people, particularly Syed Hossain, find my opinions of movies annoying. They also find my "in-movie commentary" as much a pestilence as I am forced to swallow down there unbridled silence. If you are with someone, and you are bearing witness to scenes that are absolutely ridiculous, or hysterically stupid, you have an obligation to make remarks during the film, while it is actually playing; not just retain these mental notes for use later. I find arching my head back for 3 hours to eat inflated prices of cancerous-inducent food that tastes like crap with a bunch of strangers in uncomfortable seats isn't the best usage of my time. Especially when you're with friends! Why would you go spend time with friends at a movie theater? Yes, you are physically sitting next to them, but your mind is fused into a screen. I actually think going out to the movies on legitimate "dates" is a catastrophic idea, I've never done it. Why would you want to spend the few hours you have with the woman you're trying to court, NOT paying attention to her?
Generally speaking, I find watching movies in cinemas to be unpleasurable and I'm not a big fan of doing it. Aside from trashing Keynesians and the State, my other muses in life consist of New York Yankees, jazz, family time and unprotected sex with multiple partners.
For the most part, it's my amateur opinion to say that the majority of films I've watched in my life were complete, disastrous flops and were probably produced as a result of a bunch of misallocated resources. There is a system I devised that I use to rate how much I like or dislike films. I've adopted a neoclassical approaching in translating my internal, subjective ordinal rankings of satisfaction that I receive from watching bad movies descending from 100 (highest) to 0 (least) into a numerical scale of cardinal values, using a utility function.
Only an Austrian will catch that last joke.
"Magnificent" = 99-100
"Decent" = 40-98.99999999
"Shit, terrible, fucktastic" or someother expletive in Spanish = -10,000,000 - 39.9
Here's a list of the worst of the worst that I could think of, there's so many more:
Sicko
The Preacher's Wife
Titanic
Wall-E
Saving Private Ryan
Deep Impact
Bowling for Columbine
Angels and Demons
War of the Worlds
Godfather, Pt. II
Schindler's List
Amadeus
Iron Man
Hitch
Conspiracy Theory
Borat
The Departed
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
World Trade Center
Transformers I & II
Mulan
Aladdin
The Lion King
Billboard Dad
I also put the following films in my bag of all-time best, in no particular order:
Wedding Crashers
Star Wars
Antz
Up
Bobby
American Gangster
Charlie Wilson's War
Gangs of New York
The Darjeeling Limited
Mission to Mars/Red Planet
A Clockwork Orange
The Lord of the Rings
Annie Hall
Recount
The Matrix
Wall Street
Old School
Flubber
Thank You For Smoking
There Will Be Blood
Godfather, Pt. III
The Bank Job
The Dark Knight
Enemy of the State/Minority Report
X-Files: Fight the Future
Evolution
Glengarry Glen Ross
And if you want an example of action packed, unrealistic, science fiction movie done right, watch The Dark Knight.
Sometime last year, the Columbia Daily Spectator had a blarticle titled "In Defense of Libertarianism", written to no surprise by someone who clearly does not understand libertarianism. He makes a fairly unbiased, but albeit, misinformed analysis of the pros and cons of the libertarian doctrine. I speculate that the impetus for writing it was a mixture of the CUL blog and the growing freedom movement, especially since it has been more vocal in the past couple months.
I was upset by this blog post. Not that I dislike libertarianism from appearing, in an blog post, media is always good. Despite a few flaws here and there, I can actually swallow this.However, the writer makes one comment towards the end, which showed me he had studied libertarianism more than I perceived:
"Well, not really. That's a facile, straw-man understanding. Libertarians aren't anarchists (at least, not the smart ones)-they understand that some government is necessary just to make people get along. How much government? A police force seems necessary. A defense force probably, as well. Other institutions? Perhaps. But does the government know what crops should be grown, and when and where and how much, let alone what farmers should do the growing? Libertarianism predicts what experience shows: over-regulation is a recipe for naught but pork-barrel cronyism."
It's a pretty loaded statement he makes (which I highlighted in bold) because if he's read most serious libertarian papers, he would have realized that the "smartest" libertarians are indeed anarchists. That's because most libertarians follow the non-aggression axiom, and the logical deductions that are derived from that principle is that you can't support a coercive monopoly of law and public security.
I remember cracking the following joke last November with some people that supported FDR's New Deal and the nanny state in general. "Don't be surprised if one day the government actually starts paying us with our own tax dollars to cash in our cars and bail out General Motors". I was obviously wrong, we didn't bailout General Motors, we basically nationalized it. Excuse me, I mean the Federal government partially nationalized. Much in the same way we have partial abortions, and partial pregnancies. In doing some research for an article I'm writing on the lunacy behind this "Cash for Clunkers" program, I came across cars.gov, which for moral reasons, I won't hyperlink you to. I found that Glenn Beck can provide a better explanation as to why you shouldn't head there:
Now I know what thoughts are flowing through your mind's canal. The same thing hit me after I saw this and started reminiscing into yesteryear. With conservatives like Jonah Goldberg, who needs crazy libertarians like Ron Paul, Nick Gillespie and Gene Callahan defending freedom from the intrusiveness of the Federal government! Yee-haw!
Who ever said libertarians like Murray N. Rothbard and Albert Jay Nock and Henry Hazlitt were the great enemies of the State must have been laced with some variety of a psychedelic intoxicant because supporting the abolition of the Federal Reserve is just "irrational".
So is this.
Stay free, America. More than just the world is watching.
As a final note, I'd like to express Klein's perspective and the mass of people that share her views with the following comment that commented on Cowen's review. It sums up the distorted, tunneled vision that many people that align themselves with democratic socialism adhere to. Setting that aside, I feel you'll be "shocked" for another reason:
"Crediting 'free markets' for the growth of freedom and modernity is like crediting 'religion' for women's liberation. Feudalism is the logical outcome of free markets, as we've seen throughout history. The only way to insure REAL free markets is to deny all inheritance windfalls, so that men and women really are created equal, and all acquired wealth in life is earned not given by birthright. Until then, the ingnoble free markets will continue to be slave markets, despite the wet dreams of economists."
An undergraduate at Columbia University majoring in economics and philosophy.
Abstains from liquor and is a bibliophiliac. Dislikes animal rights and feels a moral obligation in bringing light to the Socialists of all parties. I consider myself a stormtrooper of the Yankee Universe and a classic liberal of the Misesian strand.
