Peace is not the answer. War is the answer. President George W. Bush never asked for or followed my advice, but I sent him this letter on April 6, 2002: Dear Mr. President: I urge you to make a radical change to your policy regarding the conflict of Israel against the dictatorial and murderous regimes […]
… because we are still acting like police and social workers while our enemies are fighting a war, and because our political leaders still do not recognize the enemy: Islamists, especially Islamic governments. The evil monster Osama Bin Laden has been killed (shot in the head) by American military heroes. Good. But centuries from now, […]
(A slightly revised version of this post appears in Capitalism Magazine, April 17, 2011) I do not recommend the movie based—unfaithfully and ineptly, in my judgment—on Atlas Shrugged (Rand 1957) that opens today. (See my analysis of one scene here.) Instead, I urge every thoughtful individual to read the novel, again and again, and to […]
I have seen the movie, Atlas Shrugged Part 1. I do not plan to publish a review, but I have written an essay comparing one scene, viewable on the Internet, to the corresponding scene in the novel. In this essay, my secondary purpose is to judge this small part of the movie; my primary purpose […]
For the past two weeks, since the political protests in Eqypt began, Americans have been arguing about how to handle Egypt. The way to handle Egypt is to handle Iran. During the rioting in Iran in June 2009, I wrote the post Now is the Time to Strike Iran. Of course, any time is a […]
This morning, I celebrated the birthday of Ayn Rand. I opened Atlas Shrugged to a page at random, and began reading. The passage I read was about a great injustice committed against one of the heroes. I was reminded of great injustices in world events today, foreseen by this passage. Yet the very brilliance of […]
Immediately after the monstrously evil, murderous rampage in Tucson last Saturday, leading voices on the political Left in media and government blamed the political Right. In particular, they blamed the TEA Party, along with commentators such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, for its lack of civility, for its hate-filled, “vitriolic rhetoric” that allegedly leads […]
On Sunday, June 27, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman—I state his credentials at the risk of being accused of ad hominem—wrote this in his piece, The Third Depression: … over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy. … officials seem to be […]
Private Property is the Solution For this blog entry, let me leave aside the following facts, which are oil and water under the bridge. BP’s off-shore oil leases, like all off-shore oil leases, are leases to use federal property. (Hat tip to this article in The Freeman.) The land and water are owned by the […]
I love movies in the Romantic tradition of heroic characters engaged in the ingenious and passionate pursuit of important values. I love what Ayn Rand calls the “benevolent universe.” [—Added 5/2/10.] These are movies that I look forward to seeing again and again. There are many movies I have not yet seen, so I may […]