Harry “Goodlife” Harrison dies

Well, I mean, doesn’t it sound that way? And how does the Guardian boast about legalistic tax immunity? Are they that cynical and duplicitous, or do they just not care?

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

I prefer Mr Vidal’s fiction and essays (most of them) to Mr Buckley’s (particularly his later, more orotund style). Politically, of course, it is the opposite. I don’t trust artists’ political opinions: they don’t really study these things.

Creation is a good novel, once one gets past the few Vidal-isms therein. (Martin Amis noted that one must write “disinterestedly” to make good art, which is why self-inserting authors, or their opinions, go down so poorly so often, and why Vidal’s political novels and later work suffer.) You may be offended by Myra Breckinridge; certainly, if homosexuality squicks you, I don’t recommend you read it, any more than I would advise someone who faints at the sight of blood to watch a Hammer Studios Dracula film. Christopher Isherwood, Vidal’s close friend, wrote to Vidal that he thought MB was a kind of self-portrait: when I compare Myra Breckinridge with the sequel, Myron, I can see the change in Vidal’s outlook: Myron is an angry, negative polemic.

Kalki was a great, downer-ending science-fiction story: the only proper SF Vidal ever wrote. Messiah was also very good, as were The Judgment of Paris, Julian and 1876, especially since there were fewer real figures in the last (historical) novel, so less temptation. (Vidal’s crush on James A. Garfield is rather amusing.)

Palimpsest was a good memoir, though it cribbed much of his own previous writing on himself and his acquaintances, but it cribbed well.

For the essays: basically, anything Vidal wrote on Art is worth reading. His prose could achieve a kind of water-clear transparency at those times, something he never, ever could do with politics.

p.s. One normally calls this clarity “limpid” or “pellucid,” sadly, those words are so abused I leave them out here.

p.p.s. Hillsdale College has Buckley's papers, including his excellent
“On Experiencing Gore Vidal”. Sadly, no direct URL exists: type “gore vidal” in the search bar and click to page two.

McCartney’s personal sexuality

ETA: I used to wonder if Paul McCartney was bisexual. Actually, now I don't, partly on the strength of this interview. If Paul has a trope that led him to write these lyrics, I would say he likes making fun of his own homebody-ness. Anyway, back to my half-baked theory, now discredited, I think.

There’s not much evidence, but I think it could be true. Consider that in Prick Up Your Ears, the Beatle picking up gay playwright Joe Orton to discuss another Beatle movie screenplay is McCartney.

Consider also the lyrics:

“Jet”: “And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette.”

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:

Happy ever after in the market place
Molly lets the children lend a hand
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face
And in the evening she's a singer with the band

Or “Get Back”:

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman
But she was another man.
All the girls around her say she's got it coming
But she gets it while she can.

They keep explaining these as mistakes. Well, Mr McCartney sings this soi disant mistake over two lines; more than a mere substitution. Also note the matching of the pronoun: Desmond does his pretty face.

Perhaps Mr McCartney simply enjoys sexual confusion as a comedic gambit: he’d be hardly alone. People like casting Lennon as the adventurous one but there are good reasons against that. Lennon grew up without a father or other male role model. McCartney grew up with a musician dad and apparently learned a lot from him. The latter type tends to be more secure and more willing to experiment (or be seen as such). Lennon’s childhood would create a personality more likely to be hostile to bi- or homosexuality.

Again, no proof. And yes, I am open to charges of projection, I know. But I do wonder.

Edmund Burke on American Colonial History

All this was done by England whilst England pursued trade and forgot revenue. You not only acquired commerce, but you actually created the very objects of trade in America; and by that creation you raised the trade of this kingdom at least fourfold. America had the compensation of your capital, which made her bear her servitude. She had another compensation, which you are now going to take away from her. She had, except the commercial restraint, every characteristic mark of a free people in all her internal concerns. She had the image of the British Constitution. She had the substance. She was taxed by her own representatives. She chose most of her own magistrates. She paid them all. She had in effect the sole disposal of her own internal government. This whole state of commercial servitude and civil liberty, taken together, is certainly not perfect freedom; but comparing it with the ordinary circumstances of human nature, it was an happy and a liberal condition.

— Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation,” 19 April 1774.

A great speech. I am not a Burke partisan, but I admire his strategies. Burke is the great Humanist who formed the gentler side of Thomas Hobbes’ absolutism, noting in Reflections on the Revolution in France that Englishmen would rather die than exercise the right to hire and replace public officials.

This prediction was not quite… fulfilled, as you may have noted. From the same speech, he discusses George Grenville and the habits of office:

He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,—a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into business,—I mean into the business of office, and the limited and fixed methods and forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had, undoubtedly, in that line; and there is no knowledge which is not valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much conversant in office are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in their common order; but when the high-roads are broken up, and the waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue. Among regulations, that which stood first in reputation was his idol: I mean the Act of Navigation. He has often professed it to be so. The policy of that act is, I readily admit, in many respects well understood. But I do say, that, if the act be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is not changed and modified according to the change of times and the fluctuation of circumstances, it must do great mischief, and frequently even defeat its own purpose.

Austrian Economists and Fellow Travelers

Sweet. The Ludwig von Mises site has photos of various economists. Above we see one Friedrich August Hayek, author of many substantive works, and one massive hit: The Road to Serfdom.

This sounds like the crappiest movie in the world. The characters are: first grade teacher (at a private school, not one of those public school losers), a biographer of George Bernard Shaw, a social worker, and a non-profit service lawyer.

Who are these awful little people? The teacher should be teaching art and science, but “is better known for his musical adaptations.” Uh-huh.

No machinists. No IT techs. No insurance agents. Just soft little people in soft little jobs; the only thing post-modern Hollywood knows. Oh, and hey: the box office was soft, too. Odd, that.

Harry "Keynes" Potter and the Mindless Automatons

Via The American Magazine, Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims won the Nobel prize in economics:

The state of the economy was set by the intersection of aggregate demand and aggregate supply curves. An adept policy maker could, by pulling the right levers and twisting the right knobs, shift these curves and thereby set the economy on the proper course. Implicitly, to such a policy mastermind, the economy was populated with individuals who acted in reliable, predictable ways.

Some are accusing Sargent and Sims of finally recognizing that people aren't rational. This is not what they mean: the old Keynesian model did not utilize rational actors, but robots who acted according to simplified models without self-correcting behavior. In fact, some people are ahead of the curve, predicting the economists, and some people, well, some few people never learn. People are not perfectly rational, but neither are they mindless automatons.

Obama's marginal counter-revolution

But why should we worry about them? Imagine for a moment that Buffett’s sentiments are fairly common and that even 19 out of 20 employers would just pay the higher taxes and only one would throw in the towel. What does it matter if there were only one tax-sensitive outlier in the bunch? That would be a mere 5 percent; should it really drive the whole conversation?

Why, yes… yes it should.

Clive Barker and the Dearthly Imagination

Anyone else read Clive Barker? I'm halfway through Imajica. Is there a reason why the fiendishly creative author of the Books of Blood, the most inventive horror since H.P. Lovecraft, has done nothing in The Great and Secret Show and Imajica but re-write Weaveworld, only not as well? Damn it, “In the Hills, the Cities” almost made my brain explode. Ian made me read it while he sat there so he could watch me experience the reading of it. Imajica makes me feel like I'm forever reading with the next clause pre-ringing in my head, already surfing the next sentence I haven't read yet.

(Not to mention Hellraiser, the single greatest re-imagining of Hell since Dante Alighieri. That is why an ex-girlfriend scorned sequel Pinhead in the Catholic church: the Cenobites were miles away from Christianity.)

Hitchens on “The Personal Is Political”

Christopher Hitchens on the most awful catchphrase ever:

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

The Dead Horse theory

From the Steitz for Senate page, the Dead Horse theory:

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government and education more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And of course....

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.