$8.2 Million for Senate Seat

Roy Moore has won a defamation case against a Democratic PAC.  For those who don't recall, Moore was the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama in 2017.  His campaign was harmed by an ad that claimed he hit on teenaged girls at the mall in 1979 and that his behavior resulted in being banned from the mall.  Of course, Moore denied it.  Nonetheless, he lost the race and Democrat Doug Jones was elected.  Now, many years after the fact, Moore has been vindicated (sort of) and the Democratic PAC ordered to pay $8.2 million in damages.  Obviously, this may be overturned on appeal, but it raises an interesting question: if the Democrats had been told in 2017 that it would cost them $8.2 million to win the race, would they agree to the price?  Will this fine deter future defamation or encourage more?

Roy Moore is an odd bird and may have lost anyway.  The teenager in question was 14 when he told her she was pretty but 16 (Alabama's age of consent) when he asked her for a date.  For a guy in his 30s at the time, that's cradle-robbing.  Then again, I wasn't raised in Alabama where this may be just fine.  Let the folks of Alabama decide.  On the other hand, Alabama hadn't elected a Democrat in 25 years prior to Doug Jones; Moore was running in a Republican state and replacing the new US Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

Richard Armour

FBI Raid vs. Phone Call

Not so long ago, President Trump called the president of Ukraine.  During that call, Trump wanted the president to investigate claims regarding Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Vice President Joe Biden calling for the firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.  Shokin had been investigating Burisma for corruption.  The phone call was leaked and accusations of quid pro quo and efforts to undermine a potential political opponent were raised.  Soon, an impeachment followed.  Of course, the video of Joe Biden demanding that Victor Shokin get fired or $1 billion in funding would be canceled was somehow not viewed as a quid pro quo.  In any case, the precedent is clear: if you investigate a potential political rival, you deserve impeachment.

On Monday, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.  More than a year and a half after he left office and strangely close to the midterm elections, the Biden Administration didn't merely ask the local authorities to maybe look into misappropriated documents.  No, they dispatched the FBI in force.  Is Trump a potential political rival to President Biden?  Indeed, he is. Looking at the recently established precedent, it seems that an impeachment is in order.  Right?

Luckily for President Biden, Republicans are spineless.  If they do reclaim the House and/or Senate, they will do nothing.  They may hold some pointless hearings, but they won't defund the FBI or the DOJ.  They certainly won't try an impeachment.  If they did impeach, the very media that was cheerleading the Trump impeachments will decry how this one is a threat to our democracy.  The media are mostly organs of the Democratic Party, just as is the bureaucratic state.  If the Republicans had a spine, they would use the power of the purse to starve the bureaucratic state that hates them.  Washington DC votes over 90% Democrat and yet the Republicans keep funding their enemies.

Life of Brian (1979)

Three wise men arrive in Nazareth to find a baby with his mother.  She initially tries to chase them away but changes her mind when they claim to bear gifts.  The baby is named Brian.  The wise men soon realize their mistake and reclaim the gifts and take them to the manger across the street.  Years later, Brian (Graham Chapman) and his mother (Terry Jones) attend a sermon at some mount by a fellow named Jesus.  However, they are far in the back and don't really hear it well.  Brian's mother would rather attend a stoning.  Of course, women aren't allowed at stonings, so she purchases a false beard on the way.  Not surprisingly, most of the crowd is wearing false beards.  Brian sells snacks at the gladiator arena.  While there, he meets Judith (Sue Jones-Davies) and is smitten.  She is a member of the People's Front of Judea, which seeks to eject the Romans.  Brian joins and soon finds himself on a mission to kidnap Pontius Pilate's wife!

Monty Python are together again, finding humor in ancient Israel.  There's the vendor (Eric Idle) who won't sell anything unless Brian haggles the price down, the leper (Michael Palin) cured by Jesus who can no longer survive from alms, the Roman legionnaire (John Cleese) who corrects Brian's anti-Roman graffiti and demands he write it 100 times, Pontius Pilate with an Elmer Fudd accent, Brian being repeatedly mistaken as a messiah, and much more.  Python humor in Biblical times.

Recommended.

The Fountainhead

Howard Roark is an aspiring architect who has no interest in copying the styles of earlier eras.  As such, he is expelled from the Stanton Institute of Technology.  His roommate, Peter Keating, graduates at the top of the class and is instantly hired by the prestigious architecture firm of Francon & Heyer.  Roark finds himself employed by Henry Camden, a formerly prominent architect.  Keating rockets to prominence and success mostly through political maneuvering while Roark eeks a living.  At one point, Roark accepts a job at Francon & Heyer.  Throughout his trials, it is evident that Roark is the competent architect who designs Keating's most successful projects.  Roark is often thwarted by his own intransigence regarding his work.  He builds in his style or not at all.  Though Roark is The Fountainhead, his story is largely told by the people who surround him: Dominique Francon - the woman who loves him, Peter Keating - the man who fears, hates, and admires him, Gale Wynand - a newspaper man who becomes a disciple.  Roark hardly speaks through most of the book, and when he does it is a philosophical lecture to one of his adherents.

Reading the book, it is strikingly visual.  Rand sets scenes with sharp edges and paints her characters vividly.  One can easily see the characters as Art Deco reliefs on the side of Rockefeller Center.  Roark's style calls forth Frank Lloyd Wright, who has often been viewed as a model for Roark.

This is a philosophy book that tackles individualism vs. collectivism, creators vs. second-handers, conformists vs. non-conformists.  Roark is the Christ figure, the perfect individual who is without sin and incorruptible.  He has his adherents and his vocal critics.  Keating, who is a conformist, both hates and admires Roark.  The lead conformist is Ellsworth Toohey, an author and columnist who promotes the mediocre while decrying the exceptional.  It may sound ludicrous that Toohey would gain a greater following than Roark, but he calls for selflessness and altruism.  The unyielding Roark can never be viewed as selfless or altruistic.  Individualism is selfishness personified, according to Toohey.

The book hints at the themes to come in Atlas Shrugged (1957).  Toohey is a self-declared socialist, a perfect cog in the government that caused John Gault to engineer a strike against it.  It is a very long book, but it is never boring.  Roark and Dominique are often difficult to fathom, giving the story the quality of a fable; real people don't do such things.

Highly recommended.

The Sandman (2022)

In 1916, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), the king of dreams and nightmares, has ventured from his realm to hunt for a nightmare.  The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook) has escaped to the waking world to become a serial killer.  No sooner does Morpheus find The Corinthian than he is entrapped by an occultist, Sir Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance).  Burgess takes the Sandman's tools - a ruby, a helmet, and a bag of endless sand - and demands that Morpheus resurrect the son who died in World War I.  Morpheus doesn't deign to speak to his captor.  It is 100 years before Morpheus is freed when the enchantment holding him is broken.  He finds that his powers are limited without his tools and he quests for them.  Of course, he knows that The Corinthian is still loose.

This Netflix series based on a popular Neil Gaiman comic book series (1989 - 1996) is interesting but entirely too woke.  One of the common complaints on IMDb is that multiple characters have been race and gender swapped.  John Constantine (the same from the 2005 Keanu Reeves movie) is here Johanna Constantine.  The presence of blacks throughout English history is ahistorical and kind of goofy.  Really, so little of the series takes place in historic England that one wonders why black characters are prominently included.  However, these are small things compared to the LGBT representation and almost universal presence of mixed-race couples.  Johanna Constantine is a Lesbian and her girlfriend is black.   Alex Burgess, son of Roderick, loves Paul, a black man.  The princess - an unspecified British Royal - is seeking to marry Kevin, a black man.  In the diner where John Dee (David Thewlis) misuses the Sandman's ruby, we have a mixed couple (Filipino woman & bisexual black man), a Lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual waitress, and a heterosexual man; just your average random selection of people in upstate New York.  In Florida, we meet a drag queen named Hal who owns a B&B.  It also turns out that The Corinthian is gay, having several opportunities to express his affection.  Probably around 50% of all kisses in the show were homosexual.  Representation, don't you know.

The show has promise but the woke propaganda is hard to overlook.  Clearly, this wasn't present in the source material from 25 years ago.  No, this is something that modern Wokesters injected.  I don't mind the race swapping secondary characters (Idris Elba was great as Heimdall in the Thor movies) but gender-swapping and the flood of LGBT characters is grating.

Skip.

Who Picks What is News?

There is a scene in A Beautiful Mind where John Nash (Russell Crowe) asks Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) to pick a shape.  She chooses an umbrella.  Looking at the stars, he then picks out a number of stars that form an umbrella.  She is impressed and asks him to find an octopus.  This reminds me of the news.  There are countless events that happen around the country and the world every day, but there is only so much room on the front page or the evening news.  Someone has to choose which of those countless events are newsworthy.  Let's just consider murders.  If the media gave every homicide equal weight, the picture that would be painted is thus (FBI Crime Statistics 2020):

Consider that the African American population is 14% of the nation but accounts for 50% of the offenders and 56% of the victims.  Black Lives Matter would have us believe that white cops are gunning down unarmed blacks.  In fact, gang members are killing other gang members.  Given the option between stopping all the cop shootings or all the gang shootings, which would result in a better outcome for the African American community?  What does the news imply?

Of course, the editors must pick and choose among the stories of the day, but it is incumbent upon the news consumer to realize that someone made this particular selection.  The selection inevitably reflects the views of the selector.  If one does not sample news from multiple sources with different points of view, the 'news' is, in fact, propaganda.  That may not be intentional, but that would be the effect.

Minimum Wage is Always Zero

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.

Thomas Sowell

Whenever someone talks of raising the minimum wage, I think of this quote from Thomas Sowell.  Is it better to raise the wages and thus shove the least productive into unemployment or abolish the minimum and let employers pay what the employee will accept.  No person will voluntarily accept a job that does not make them better off and no employer will hire an additional employee if that does not make them better off.  The minimum wage is just a case of self-declared do-gooders deciding what is 'fair' according to them, without regard to the market, the employee, or the employer.

Along those same lines, taxing the rich does not improve the lot of the poor.  It may please some to see the wealthy punished through taxation, but it harms the economy.  The government is always less efficient in spending money than private individuals.  Had the money remained in the hands of the wealthy, they would invest it with an eye toward profit or spend it on goods, both of which spur growth.  By contrast, government will spend it with no concern of a financial return, which is how we get expensive boondoggles with huge cost overruns.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. 

Abraham Lincoln