Quick Roundup 416

Edison Hour

Don't forget to crank up the illumination this Saturday at 8:30 p.m., local time. And swap out any Bush Bulbs beforehand or you'll short-change the man in the wattage department.

Objectivist Roundup

Stop by Erosophia for your choice from about two dozen of the week's best posts by Objectivist bloggers.

Breaking the Ice

As Bubblehead put it so well:

I think that surfacing through the ice is one of the coolest things Submariners do that we can talk about publicly. One of my main disappointments in my submarine career is that I never made it under the ice. What's your favorite story from operating in the Arctic?

I never got to do that either, but I'm enjoying the pictures he points to as well as the comment thread he started.

Crackin' a Grin

Matt reminded me this morning of a video I was unable to view yesterday morning.

Seeing and hearing that did me a lot of good!

Obama to the contrary, there is hope for the world.

One for Dad

When my dad died a little over eight years ago, my baby brother put together a CD of some of his favorite songs. This post by Myrhaf reminded me of one of them, which you can see below:

He, who once thought of Queen as a "Led Zeppelin wannabe," goes on:

Queen's homosexual sensibility completely eluded me in the '70s. But then, it was not until years later that I realized I was one of the few straight male high school thespians. All those other guys were flaming gays, and I never realized it.

Another thing I never realized was how sexual a lot of lyrics were. I'm stunned now that our parents let us listen to this music and play it in our garage band. For instance, take the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman."Another thing I never realized was how sexual a lot of lyrics were. I'm stunned now that our parents let us listen to this music and play it in our garage band. For instance, take the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman." [bold added]

Myrhaf, I think you just answered your own question!

The Context-Dropping Left

Writing for the Huffington Post, Ed Kilgore -- tacitly admitting that he shares the same morality as the more consistent religious conservatives in the process -- "warns" the rank-and-file against being too quick to "go Galt":

What I'd like to do as a public service is simply to remind folks tempted to "go Gault" [sic] or to gush ignorantly about the subject in blogs or on Fox that they are flirting with a philosophy that is profoundly and expressly hostile to anything that could remotely be described as "conservative." And before anyone even thinks of offering the "you-don't-have-to-be-a-fascist-to-love-Ezra-Pound's-poetry" defense, it's important to understand that John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, and their creator Ayn Rand represent a remorselessly unified and logical world-view that can't be sliced and diced into bite-sized portions you can take or leave. ...

The following are a sprinkling of quotes from Rand's work that ought to make any self-conscious conservative think twice about scribbing [sic] "Who is John Galt?" on the nearest whiteboard.

The quotes are all pulled from The Ayn Rand Lexicon. Then, after quoting Whittaker Chambers, whose "review" of Atlas Shrugged demonstrated that he never really graduated from collectivism, Kilgore adds:

So make up your minds, conservatives: check out of your jobs and take to the hills, leaving God, the Republican Party, family values, and everything else behind but your sovereign self. If you're not ready to do all of these things, then please, for the love of Rand, stop talking about "Going Galt." You're just embarrassing yourself.

On one level, Kilgore is correct: Rand leaves no room for faith, sacrifice, and collectivism. But on another level, he is being profoundly dishonest. While he does quote Rand on a number of points, he glosses over the whole reason she presented her philosophy in novel form.

The events in Atlas demonstrate how the ideas that men hold have real-life consequences. Rand was no left-wing nihilist who attacked Christian ideals just for the hell of it. She attacked them because they're demonstrably immoral and have exactly the kind of consequences we're seeing today.

Any conservative reading Kilgore's "warning" should read the real one between the lines. Why is this left-winger suddenly so much a fan of "God, the Republican Party, family values, and everything else?" Maybe it's because he sees them as fellow enemies of capitalism and your life.

Maybe it's time, as Ayn Rand so often put it, to, "Check your premises."

-- CAV