I've been out of town

I was unexpectedly sent out of town on Monday; hence the lack of posts.

Fortunately, the general "tone" of this site was elevated in my absence. On the previous post, NickM and Dr. Ralph and Tarrant Liberty Guy engaged in a spirited (yet polite and scholarly) debate on the merits of government-funded artwork. (Dr. Liz and the Lazy Slacker chimed in on other issues.)



In appreciation to everyone who read the whole thing, I'd like to offer up this desecration of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Compliments of Democratic Underground. For more of the same, click here. (If you're a Kinkade anti-fan, it's worth it !)

My design proposal for The Department Of Culture

Here's Bill Wilson, writing at Get Liberty:

But now comes yet another cause du’jour that is both ludicrous and deathly dangerous all at the same time. From the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times has come the clarion call for an entire new Department of Government: a Department of Culture.
Now, seeing what has happened to education since the creation of the Department of Education, or the state of Housing under the guidance of that august agency, I can understand those who are a bit nervous about a Department of Culture. And well they should be nervous, if not in a downright state of panic.

Bill, I think you need to relax.

I'll admit that governmental goofiness in the public schools is creating a plethora of private academies and an exodus to the suburbs.
Government housing boondoggles have long been a corrupt landlord honeypot.
V.A. Hospitals are the warm-up act for the medical care we'll get if [the President-elect] is true to his word on socialized medicine.

People seldom use the U.S. Mail for anything vital. The Department of Agriculture never met a millionaire farmer that it didn't abolutely adore.

But a cabinet level Department of Culture could be wonderful, IF they would allow me to design the facility in which it is housed.

I want to design the place, inside and out, as a living, breathing symbol of government involvement in our national culture.

I want to model the facility along the lines of Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project. I can't build an exact replica because the Cabrini-Green building won't sit still long enough to be properly imitated. That place has been morphing into various screwed-up shapes and sizes ever since the government realized they'd screwed up by building it in the first place. If you're not familiar with Cabrini-Green, here's Wikipedia:

Cabrini-Green is a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) public housing development on Chicago's North Side.... At its height, Cabrini-Green was home to 15,000 people, living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Over the years, gang violence and neglect created terrible conditions for the residents, and the name "Cabrini-Green" became synonymous with the problems associated with public housing in the United States.

Eventually, the Federal Government had to take control of the place from the Chicago Housing Authority. The Feds, leaving no crisis unexploited, are taking advantage of the situation by slowly tearing down Cabrini-Green. And rebuilding it. (Never do it once if you can do it twice for double the money.)

My architectural homage to the Cabrini-Green facility will never be finished either, symbolizing the constant re-birthing of Art and Culture. A statue of a giant wrecking ball near the entrance would also symbolize constant employment for all my contractor donors and buddies, which is all that matters.

At the top of the steps leading to the Department of Culture (D.O.C.), I intend to place a duplicate of this truly godawful statue from the FDR memorial.

You might remember some controversy about this sculpture. FDR went to great lengths to conceal his partial paralysis from the public (only two photos of him in his wheelchair are known to exist). But various special interest groups lobbied for the wheelchair to be included in any and all sculptures of FDR. Like it or dislike it, the result would horrify FDR.

Two years ago, as the controversy over the monument was fomenting, David Roosevelt said the memorial should not be ''a vehicle for making a social statement.''
But as Mr. Clinton noted today, 16 of Roosevelt's grandchildren have now called for a more vivid depiction of his disability, as have former Presidents George Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford.

Hence the cape around the (assumed) wheelchair on this particular statue at the memorial. Art by compromise. You gotta love it.

So if my Department is going to advocate "vivid depictions of disabilities", I want to have another statue in the rotunda of the D.O.C. to vividly depict the disabilities endured by Clinton, Bush, Carter and Ford.

After leaving the rotunda, visitors and employees will encounter the "Piss Christ" fountain, based on the government-rewarded artwork by American photographer Andres Serrano, which depicts a small plastic Christ On The Cross submerged in a glass of Serrano's urine. Serrano got $15,000.00 from the National Endowment for the Arts as a reward for producing this photo. The Piss Christ Fountain will be immediately behind the D.O.C. rotunda, eliminating the need for restrooms in that area, but slightly increasing the space required for the mop closet.

(Like many of you, I think $15,000.00 was too high of a price for a mere photograph. If Andres Serrano is going to have any more works funded by my D.O.C., he's going to have to fill the fountain first. The hard way. We'll provide him with plenty of water for, ummm, processing.)

As visitors leave the P.C. fountain, they will be drawn into the corridor of Lighght. Yes, Lighght.

"Lighght" is both the title and the complete text of a one-word poem by Aram Saroyan, for which Saroyan received $750 from the NEA, way back in 1970 when that was real money. But think about it. Lighght. Lighght.

So perfect.

That poem'll make you throw rocks at Shakespeare, The Psalms, or almost any limerick you can think of. Lighght. I'll have it on the walls. It'll be written on the floor. Lighght. Lighght.

In the midst of all the Lighght, I'll construct a small podium which will give two paragraphs of additional information about the Lighght poem. I don't have room to reproduce the text here, but hit on this link to be enlighghtened, and ghghet back to me after readinghgh. It's O So Serious, and very much worth the trip.

Look below. Very closely. Lighght is there. This is a signed and numbered silkscreened print of the lighght poem that you can purchase through The Paris Review. They don't list the price - they only give an email address to which you can send enquiries. It's available in a limited edition of 150.

Damn, I wish I had typed that.

Visitors ghghoing throughgh throughgh the ghghlass hall of lighght will be ghghiven a chance to ghghive ghghenerous donations toward fundinghgh more of Saroyan's work.

After leaving the hall of lighght, visitors will enter a vast network of administrative offices. There will be thousands and thousands of offices, so I will need thousands and thousands of government bureaucrats to staff these offices. Otherwise, I will be perceived as wasting office space (government waste is a BIG no-no at my D.O.C.) Plus, as the currently fashionable logic goes, this will create jobs.

Every office will have a flatscreen TV playing Ken Burns' series on The Civil War, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is an homage to the importance of Ken Burns' documentaries in obtaining funding for the National Endowment For The Humanities every year at renewal time. Without Ken Burns, the NEH would have very little except a motley band of performance artists who sing the ingredients of cereal boxes while shaving a gong with an electric razor. (I don't know if the performance artist shown below gets any NEA or NEH funding for his art, but when I open the Department Of Culture to the general public, this guy's going to play a role in the opening ceremony. I hope he uses a gong.)

Of course, no government ripoff can ever be fully funded without saccharine pleas that the boondoggle/bailout/subsidy/giveaway under discussion is "for the children". I'll have a large Children's Art Center near the exit of the Department Of Culture, fully equipped with modeling clay, fingerpaint, brushes, canvas, poster board, easels, drum sets, fighter pilot helmets, and toilets. After a long day spent touring the D.O.C., the little kiddos can create their own piece of American Culture !

The kids will have to pay a small fee to participate. They'll have to pay another fee to have their art considered in the Best Of The D.O.C. competition. And to have a shot at winning, they'll voluntarily make an additional contribution to each judge's re-appointment campaign. Therefore, I'm going to name the children's area The Rod Blagojevich "Pay To Play" Pavillion.

All guests and employees will leave The Department Of Culture through the base of a giant mural called "The Robert Mapplethorpe Exit".

So please write your representatives, and let them know that you're in favor of creating The Department Of Culture.

It's for the children.

pics from here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Great Moments in Anti-Semitism

A tip o' the hat to Denny at The Grouchy Old Cripple.

What Makes America Great

This is from the inaugural shoot-out of the American Zootsuiters Association.
You won't be missing much by scooting up to the one minute mark.
They guy at the 2:00 mark is waaaay to big to be doing anything on an obstacle course.
Anyone with a 1920's Flapper Shooting Heavy Artillery fetish can fast forward to 3:00.
Whoever filmed the 3:30 to 4:30 stretch deserves the Congressional Medal Of Honor for bravery, even if the camera was mounted on a tripod.


Who are they hurting?
No one.
Whose lives are they endangering?
Their own.
Whose choice should that be?
Their own.

HT to Keyboard and a .45

The Ron Paul Page-A-Day

Amazon.com recently announced that Dr. Ron Paul's "The Revolution: A Manifesto" was the most positively reviewed book (by Amazon customers) of 2008.
I've read it twice, and am currently plowing through it a third time.

I'm going to skip a groove here, but hang with me for a second. VampE recently sent me a link to a Tom Robbins website on which a blogger posts a few paragraphs from a Robbins novel every week, and the readers have a chance to discuss it. Devotees of that site are going through the current book (Jitterbug Perfume) at the same pace, discussing and commenting as they go.

This blogger only posts a few random paragraphs from each chapter, just as a frame of reference to get a conversation going or to draw new readers into the Tom Robbins universe.

I hope to do the same thing with "The Revolution: A Manifesto", but in an all-inclusive manner. I'd like to post a couple of pages per week until the entire book is on this site, or until the Grand Central Publishing group tells me to cease and desist (for copyright reasons).

Warning: Do not read any of this if you want to remain comfortable while voting for The Mommy Party and Daddy Party candidates.

So with no further ado, here's Chapter One, Page One and Two of the Ron Paul Page-A-Day service.

"Every election season America is presented with a series of false choices. Should we launch preemptive wars against this country or that one? Should every American neighborhood live under this social policy or that one? Should a third of our income be taken away by an income tax or a national sales tax? The shared assumptions behind these questions, on the other hand, are never cast in doubt, or even raised. And anyone who wants to ask different questions or who suggests that the questions as framed exclude attractive, humane alternatives, is ipso facto excluded from mainstream discussion.

And so every four years we are treated to the same tired, predictable routine: two candidates with few disagreements on fundamentals pretend that they represent dramatically different philosophies of government.

The supposedly conservative candidate tells us us about "waste" in government, and ticks off $10 million in frivolous pork-barrel projects that outrage him - the inevitable bridge-to-nowhere project, or a study of the effects of celery consumption on arresting memory loss - in order to elicit laughter and applause from partisan audiences. All right, so that's 0.00045 percent of the federal budget dealt with; what does he propose to do with the other 99.99955 percent, in order to return our country to living within its means? Not a word. Those same three or four silly programs will be brought up all campaign long, and that's all we'll hear about where the candidate stands on spending. But conservatives are told that they must support these candidates, and so they do, hoping for the best. And nothing changes.

Even war doesn't really distinguish the two parties from each other. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted for the Iraq war. With the exception of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, even the Democrats who postured as antiwar candidates for the 2008 primary elections are not especially opposed to needless wars. They typically have a laundry list of other military interventions they would support, none of which make any sense, would make our country any safer, or would do a thing to return our country to fiscal sanity. But liberals are told that they must support these candidates, and so they do, hoping for the best. And nothing changes.

Social Security, and other Ponzi schemes

Here's Tim Slagle, writing in the December issue of Liberty magazine:



Here’s the reason why a private insurance program will always be a better option than Social Security: there was a slump in the market this week, but it will recover. Almost all the value it had will come back in time. On the other hand, everything you have ever paid into Social Security has been spent. It’s gone. Social Security is completely bankrupt, and trillions of dollars in debt. If it were a private corporation, its administrators would all be in jail.
So if you had your choice, whether to put 15% of your income into Social Security, or the stock market, where would you put it? And in a free country, shouldn’t you be entitled to make that choice?

First off, the total bankruptcy of Social Security has been brought to you by the same people who think they can regulate the stock market. But, I digress.

Let's take Mr. Slagle's statement a few steps further..... Given the total lack of accountability in the Social Security system, I think that all of us - Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, members of the Green Party, and the Flat Earth Society - all of us would've prefered to put all of our money into the stock market from Day One, and do without Social Security altogether, right? There is no money at all in the S.S. fund. It's now a troubled Ponzi scheme. Surely we can agree on that much.

But what if you were only given the choice of withdrawing all of your contributions to Social Security and putting it into the market on the day before the recent financial meltdown? Would you still do it?

Of course you would. Unless we immediately open the border to a jillion Mexican teen-agers, there simply aren't enough people coming into the workforce to keep the current Bernie Madoff-style Social Security scheme afloat. It's doomed.

One last question.... Is there ANY scenario in which you wouldn't prefer to have all of your Social Security payments put into stocks/mutual funds/etc. ?

So why aren't we allowed to do it?

Happy New Year !

Happy New Year !

Photo from here.