Those wily Canadians, they manage to get everywhere. Next thing you know they'll be all over Hollywood. This time, though, they're in North Korea.
It's fascinating. Fourteen short mini-episodes. I watched all of them in one sitting, and everyone I recommended it to did the same. Pay attention to the tea girl, to the traffic, and to the differences between the two sides of the DMZ. Amusing observations about Abbey Road and the Sex Pistols, too.
Oh, and before you start to feel superior, North Korea does have a home page.
Yeah, I know.
(Hat tip: Perry de Havilland at Samizdata)
As I am in the midst of a reread of Live and Let Die and a first read of Farewell, My Lovely, it is only fitting that I pass on this 1954 BBC Radio One interview: Ian Fleming interviewing a more-than-somewhat drunken Raymond Chandler. Both acquit themselves well.
I agree with Mr. Fleming's expostulation to Mr. Chandler: "But you write better books than I do." Yet I remain a fan, having read most of Fleming's stuff (I started with Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and indeed, learned of the existence of the Bond books thereby).
Ayn Rand was, famously, a fan of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels (though she was more reserved about the movie versions). I have no idea what her opinion of Chandler was, nor do I particularly care: I've read him myself. Take a gander at Chandler's 1944 essay "The Simple Art of Murder" to see why his fiction is worth reading...
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.
Yes.
If you're a Cuban artist, it might be nice if you were Yoan Capote:
Yoan Capote, a popular 31-year-old artist living in Havana, came of age during what Cubans call the "Special Period" of economic crisis in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Recently, his conceptual sculptures have won attention from dealers in the U.S. and, in 2006, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. For one piece, titled "Nostalgia," he built a brick wall inside a suitcase.
He first met American buyers through a string of museum-led tours during a spell in the late 1990s when the U.S. travel restrictions were loosened, a trend that ended sharply after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Now, he says, Americans are beginning to trickle into his studio again, and he and his peers are "preparing now for a time when Cuba will change."
For him, that means strengthening ties with the local, government-owned Galeria Habana, which until recently he overlooked in favor of his New York and European dealers when selling major works. His local dealer Luis Miret last month found an American buyer who paid about $44,000 for "The Island," a seascape he made by weaving together thousands of bloodied fishhooks. He says the city's two other top galleries are also positioning themselves to handle an influx of high-end visitors.
One acquaintance chatted with a Cuban training to become a doctor. Her rent was 100 pesos a month. Her income was 30 pesos. When asked how she paid the bills, she replied that she prostituted herself once a week -- twice weekly when the rent was due.
While poor compared to the United States, Cuba in 1958 had a per capita GDP of $3,170 according to the OECD. (Canada's was $8,947.). But Cuba outranked all other Latin American countries except four: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela.Tellingly, in 1958, the island nation's per person wealth was higher than any East Asian country or colony, save Japan, which barely beat Cuba at only $3,290. Hong Kong had a per capita GDP of $2,924, Singapore's was $2,294, the Philippines' was $1,447, Taiwan's per person GDP stood at $1,387 and South Korea's was $1,112.
Thus in 1958, Cuba was almost as rich as Japan, one and half times as wealthy as Singapore, richer than Hong Kong, and three times as prosperous as South Korea.
Fifty years later, Cuba is one of the poorest countries in Latin America.
Meanwhile, jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan (the latter two also had dictators and problems similar to Cuba in the 1950s) have long eclipsed Cuba. They've done so not only in per capita wealth, but in measurements Castro's defenders point to when they assert the Marxist revolution "worked," such as in health care and education.
Go ahead and compare the two recent articles on Cuba: Kelly Crow's Wall Street Journal Online piece on "The Cuban Art Revolution" from March 22 and Mark Milke's canada.com article, "Viva Castro's departure," from the first of the month.
Do note, as well, the first Cuban artwork shown in the Crow piece. By photographer Carlos Garacoia, the title is "Rivoli, or the Place Where Blood Flows," which, among other things, illustrates the famously crumbling architecture of Havana.
And that's in Havana, the capital/largest city/Showplace of the Revolution. If Havana is falling apart, and its medical students are working as prostitutes, can you imagine what the rest of the country is like?
Hint: it ain't Singapore.
(Hat tip on the Cuban art story: Michael Ham at Leisureguy)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
That is the complete text of Amendment I to the United States Constitiution, which was ratified by December 15, 1791 and has since then been the law of the land. And yet, "law of the land" and the clear language above notwithstanding, it is undeniably true that by December 15 of this year the voters of this country will have elected to the presidency a candidate who is not committed to the principle of free speech. May it not be Senator John McCain.
Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute quotes Senator McCain from an appearance on the Don Imus radio show:
Sen. McCain was once asked whether McCain-Feingold abridges freedom of speech. He implicitly admitted that it does: "I would rather have a clean government than one where quote 'First Amendment rights' are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government." We should tell Sen. McCain and those who agree with him that a government which strips us of our right to free speech is by that very fact corrupt.
Senator McCain, no one asked you what you'd rather have -- largely, I suppose, because few people trust you. You created and sponsored this legislation, the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection ActBipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and you've been defending it ever since 1995.
People, forget the Keating Five scandal. Forget the annoyance of seeing journalist after journalist characterize this lifetime Washington insider as a "maverick." Forget even his famous temper (although I do fully expect to see Senator McCain's head explode on national television). John McCain's successful strike at free speech makes him unfit for any federal office, including the one he now holds. We do not stand to benefit by electing him to executive office.
Read Yaron Brook's column here.
Read the text of the Bill of Rights and the rest of the US Consitution here. You could navigate to it from the US Senate's home page, but why would you bother?
More comments from Gus Van Horn -- including some links, and his views on Matt Welch's anti-McCain comments -- here.
Wow.
I'd never seen this before: video and photographs of changing a light bulb at the top of the Empire State Building.
Seriously:
As the song says, "coming down is the hardest thing." I'll bet it is.
(Hat tip: Mantic)
Excellent.
The Australian comic duo Clark and Dawe on the subprime meltdown, here.
"People who don't know what they're doing will buy anything, Bryan." Quite. For example, they'll continue to argue desperately that the Republicans are the "lesser of two evils."
(Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg at The Corner)
So, President Bush has announced that his team is "on top of" the nation's economic situation -- the ever-widening real estate mess, the collapse of Bear Stearns and its federally-assisted buyout by JPMorganChase, and the fears that other large financial firms face similar futures.
Let's see, now...this is the guy who gave us the largest single entitlement increase since the Great Society -- the prescription drugs welfare for seniors bill. This is the guy who federalized education with No Child Left Behind. This is the guy who signed the McCain-Feingold anti-free speech legislation into law, even while opining that it was probably unconstitutional. This is the guy who has told us that when people hurt, government has to act. This is the guy whose economic team has recently floated the trial balloon of licensing for mortgage brokers.
Do remember the Mises observation that government interventions in the economy create problems, which are then used to argue for yet more interventions, which create more problems...
Or remember Wesley Mouch's wail, "I need more powers!"
Remember that line from The Fly: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
The Bush team is on top of the problem? That's what I'm afraid of.
Okay, so you've decided to attend Il Trovatore at El Paso Opera on September 11. Good call: nothing like opera to serve as a stand-in for the defense of western civilization. You earn major points for making such a stand. You still have some skills to perfect, though, the better to impress your date.
Let's start with preparing your absinthe, shall we?
Good to go.
(Hat tip: Michael Ham at Later On...)
Still celebrating the anniversary of Josef Stalin's -- you know, the guy Whittaker Chambers once worked for -- death? Well, keep up the festivities: it's Thursday, which means going to Objectivist Round Up #34 over at Rational Jenn.
William F. Buckley, Jr. has now been dead a week. Encomia to him have been written by, of course, conservatives, not a few libertarians, many liberals and of course, members of the press. What is left, then, for an Objectivist to say?
Just this: ultimately, he'll be remembered for his shallowness and for his dishonesty, as well as for being a pretty poor judge of people. I offer in evidence these words of his, from his Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? his anthology of "American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century." Buckley is regaling his readers with the history of how he built the modern conservative coalition, along the way pitching Ayn Rand out of the movement on her ear:
Since this is an empirical probe, based on my own experience as editor of National Review, I shall speak about people and ideas with which National Review has had trouble making common cause. In 1957, Whittaker Chambers reviewed Atlas Shrugged, the novel by Miss Ayn Rand wherein she explicates the philosophy of "Objectivism," which is what she has chosen to call her creed. Man of the Right, or conservative, or whatever you wish to call him, Chambers did in fact read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement. He did so by pointing out that her philosophy is in fact another kind of materialism -- not the dialectical materialism of Marx, but the materialism of technocracy, of the relentless self-server who lives for himself and for absolutely no one else, whose concern for others is explainable merely as an intellectualized recognition of the relationship between helping others and helping oneself. Religion is the first enemy of the Objectivist and, after religion, the state -- respectively, "the mysticism of the mind" and "the mysticism of the muscle." "Randian Man," wrote Chambers, "like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world."
Her exclusion from the conservative community was, I am sure, in part the result of her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendance, intellectual and moral; but also there is the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenburg, or Savonarola, or Ayn Rand. Chambers knew that specific ideologies come and go but that rhetorical totalism is always in the air, searching for the ideologue-on-the-make; and so he said things about Miss Rand's tone of voice which, I would hazard the guess, if they were true of anyone else's voice, would tend to make it eo ipso unacceptable for the conservative. "...The book's [Atlas Shrugged] dictatorial tone...," Chambers wrote,
is its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal...resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber -- go!"
Buckley ends his discussion of Rand thus: "What the experience proved, it seems to me, beyond the unacceptability of Miss Rand's ideas and rhetoric, is that no conservative cosmology whose every star and planet is given in a master book of coordinates is very likely to sweep American conservatives off their feet. They are enough conservative and anti-ideological to resist totally closed systems, those systems that do not provide for deep and continuing mysteries. They may be pro-ideology and ultraconservative enough to resist such asseverations as that conservatism is merely "an attitude of mind," as one contributor to this volume once upon a time asserted. But I predict, on the basis of a long association with American conservatives, that there isn't anybody around scribbling into his sacred book a series of all-fulfilling formulae which will serve the conservatives as an Apostles' Creed. Miss Rand tried it, and because she tried it, she compounded the failure of her ideas. She will have to go down as an Objectivist; my guess is she will go down as a novelist or, possibly, just plain go down, period."
Think about what Buckley is claiming here: Conservatism implies religion. Ayn Rand is an enemy of religion. So we're to believe that Ayn Rand, therefore, who didn't claim to be a conservative, tried to write an Apostles' Creed -- for conservatives? And Whittaker Chambers was therefore wise and noble to drum her out of the conservative movement? Who does Buckley think he is writing to, children? Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
And by all means, pay no attention to the conservative behind the curtain. What do we know about this Whittaker Chambers, a man revered by Buckley and by many other conservatives? We know that he was a liar by trade, a liar of long standing and apparently of some skill. He was a courier for the Soviet intelligence services operating in the United States before World War II, who left such service without revealing its existence to the FBI or to anyone else. When he did approach the FBI with his knowledge, he deliberately held some of his knowledge back. He didn't want to hurt his former friends, apparently. He held back in his testimony before Congress, more than once.
I like that line about "To a gas chamber -- go!" Whittaker Chambers either lied about having read Atlas Shrugged at all, or he lied about what he found in it -- or,perhaps he was simply the most incompetent book reviewer in the history of western civilization.
This is a noble man? And Buckley is a wise and sophisticated man? They belonged together, all right.
For make no mistake: William F. Buckley, Jr. was proud of his association and friendship with Whittaker Chambers, he is remembered for it to this day by the National Review crowd, and he will be remembered for it for years to come. The NR types remain proud of the Chambers hit piece on Rand, too, and it is still available online here. Judge it for yourself.
So it's now been a week and William F. Buckley, Jr -- like Francisco Franco -- is still dead. Soon, with any justice at all, he will be joined by another widely admired charming sophisticate, Fidel Castro.
Buckley once opined that Ayn Rand's novels were probably read for "the fornicating bits." Right: guess that's why they sell a few hundred thousand copies a year although free porn is easily available on the internet. Meanwhile, consider that Buckley treasured his friendship with scum like Whittaker Chambers, while eventually rejecting associations with John T. Flynn and Ayn Rand -- and, at least in the case with Ayn Rand, there was more than a shade of dishonesty involved. Whatever else is to be said about him, that must be said. This is, perhaps, all we need to know.
A "Happy Anniversary" is due to Nicholas Provenzo of The Rule of Reason, who, twenty years ago Monday discovered the joys of life at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina.
Semper Fi, Nick. Stay cockstrong.