I posted this message on Facebook in August 2018 and again in August 2019. The message is especially important in 2020, with civilization under assault. Are you an artist who loves beauty, not ugliness; virtues, not flaws; heroes, not mediocrities; integrity, not contradictions; clarity, not ambiguity; aspiration, not futility; romance, not promiscuity; eloquence, not vulgarity; […]
The Recreation, Arts, and Parks Tax—the RAP Tax—is a one-tenth-of-one-percent sales tax levied by Cedar City, Utah on all purchases within the city. One third of the tax money is spent on what the government considers good art. This tax forces individuals to pay for specific works of art against their will. The RAP Tax […]
I recommend this short article by Charlotte Cushman, and I am grateful to her for quoting me. Monogamy is Moral, Promiscuity is Not
This is the entire text of a 30-second, presumably scripted, commercial for MSNBC, spoken by MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry. We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: “Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.” We haven’t had a […]
Today, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of man’s landing on the Moon, I read Ayn Rand on “Apollo 11” (The Objectivist, September 1969). Here are some excerpts: The meaning of the sight [the launch] lay in the fact that when those dark-red wings of fire flared open, one knew that one was not looking at […]
In a comment on my previous post (America’s Empty Foreign Policy: “What Our Enemies Must Understand is … ”) Burgess Laughlin of Making Progress raised interesting questions regarding “moral courage.” To my pleasant surprise, Wikipedia describes moral courage fairly well: “Physical courage” is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, or threat of death, […]