Free Capitalist

Happy birthday! May I sing Glory Britannia, or are you not into antique anthems?

I'm not an expert, though I've been trying to find out precisely for the same reasons as your question. The fact that we used to be a lot slimmer and thinner than we are, and a lot of Europe still is to this day, and there must be some causative fact behind that. I know that the introduction of KFC into a daily meal routine in the 70s perverted the normalcy of proper human diet, since it's delicious, and plainly atrocious in its dietic aspects. Nowadays KFC has found the old frying insufficient, so they double-deep-fry (double-krispy) their chicken if you ask them, for a doubly-quick dose of cholesterol blockage and heart-attacks at 39. Anyway to get back to my topic, I don't know a lot of 50s diet details (but I know the statistics, so something must've been there). First off, I think they were much more physically fit, and apt to do physical exercises than we are. Second fact, let me admit that I think they did use bacon ("eggs and bacon" stereotype breakfast), so strike that against my point. But on the other hand, I am almost certain that they consumed wheat bread in enormous proportions, while we use mainly white bread now, and it is much worse biologically/chemically-wise. It contains grain particles that have been grinded into sheer powder, while wheat bread contains less-ground grain. As a result, this white bread powder is transformed into energy immediately, from the simple physics of there being more surface area for the digestive juices to work on. This produces an energy rush, and then a down, just like sugar; and since we can't take advantage of so much energy instantly, it's stored into fat. Wheat bread, with less-ground particles, takes considerably more to digest. The input of energy is even and gradual keeping you more energetic throughout the day, and letting you work off the incoming energy before it ends up being stored away.

Definitely Replace it with another freedom games. It's absolutely preposterous that we have this 'cosmopolitan' mindset nowadays, in the UN, in the Olympics, that we, all of us humanity, are 'in it together', and so let's just join in and sing kum-ba-ya even though back home some live free and others will get tortured shortly after their return. The Olympics in the first place was instituted by free Greek cities, to distinguish the Greeks from the barbarians. And it was brought back in the Victorian Era to revive ideals such as this one. I'm sure that the founders, and the revivers, would be pretty shocked that the Olympics has turned into a muscled Chinese athlete running with utmost strain on the cover of top US magazines, a slave tool of his own country but proud to serve his masters. It'd be a bit like some Persian king sending a bunch of burly men to compete in the athletics -- it doesn't matter if they were physically adequate, mentally they were not, and would be laughed out.

That's exactly right! I myself drop by to eat a salad, maybe a burger once in a while, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But fries, despite taste, are basically just solid cholesterol. It's absolutely horrible what was done to the American cuisine in these last 20 years, when healthy cooked food was displaced by 'cuisine' which has an almost literal ton of cholesterol, and will make your tongue feel good just before it kills you. Anyway, I guess we can discuss Fast Food in another thread. The point I was trying to make is that most people -- who don't drop by just for a salad like me, like Ray for a split combo, or Jordan for iced coffees -- folks who eat a regular expected portion of McDonalds cuisine, have their life expectancy drop dramatically. Stussy said that if non-organic food was that chemically infested, some lawyers would have already pinpointed it. No lawyers are managing to nail the McDonalds "cholesterol diet", and the best they can do is if someone burns themselves on the coffee. So it is unlikely that lawyers are the final arbiters of whether non-organic food is 'ok' or not. I'm not a stickler, I mostly eat regular food as well, and maybe will buy some organic Beef Stroganoff simply because it tastes better. But I have been alerted in recent years to the fact that there's a lot of food out there that is simply very bad for me; in contrast with let's say 50s cuisine, where almost everything you'd eat was completely innocent. Or in Italy today, their 'fast food' is comprised of healthy grown and cooked food, which is made fast only because they serve it quickly; but it's prepared over a long period of time. Thus the Italians for instance are very fit people. They cook their pasta halfway, not completely white like we do, and so the carbohydrates don't explode into our body when we digest it. They call it Pasta A la Tempe. There's lots of healthy cuisine that we in the States have simply forgotten how to eat.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...icle4392846.ece

Yeah, but think of it this way -- there's nothing more deadly out there than your friendly neighborhood McDonalds. It literally, if you start eating it more or less regularly, will kill you. Yet no lawyers are chasing 400-lb people with horrific coronary problems caused by McDonalds food. The best they can get away with is if someone burns themselves on the hot coffee, that's about it.

I hope people recognized that this was a satire, a fairly vicious and biting one at that.

Logicism, is a new term. Necessarily it's founded by some yet another incompetent professor trying to coin a new term. The underlying question is -- is rationalism compatible with Objectivism. Objectivism deals with a lot more than just logic and syllogisms, but the logical part of Objectivism takes into great consideration observation, and induction, while putting deductions in a secondary place.

There obviously is not going to be any good, proper history of the Renaissance published in the last 100 years. Ewv's advice just to go in the library will not work; worse, you're likely to pick one of the books fairly respected in the modern scholarly community, such as by Paul Kristellar. If modern scholars would accept the notion of Renassance at all, he would be the one to explain it to them. He's the expert on that period in modern times, and I cannot tell you just how terrible is, and how horrible his ideas are. He's the epitome of the men who twisted young minds into horrific, comprachico proportions. So -- who else is there then? I think what you're asking is: what are the great Victorian books which were written on the Renaissance. Then people still understood its greatness. The best book, I've found, is Education in the Age of the Renaissance, by W.H. Woodward. It focuses with an intense light on the early humanists, their Latin Classical education, their deepest values; the transmission of Greek Classics by Crysoloras in the nick of time before the Turks savaged Constantinople; etc. It's not a whole history. It won't give a lot on the great Petrarch who founded the Renaissance, and there's not much in it on art. It just deals with the essentials, and the essential few figures at the core of it -- Guarino who taught Italy, Erasmus who taught France, and Melanchthon who established Classical schools in Germany (which Kepler and Leibnitz were later educated in). This is book is the key to unlocking all of the Renaissance, since education and literature are more fundamental than artistic developments. But art is important, and what the Renaissance is famous for. To get the best insight into the Renaissance art, from early Florentine efforts to shake off medievalism, to fullest expresions later, there's nothing better than Medici, by G.F. Young. Both of these were published in the first years of the 20th century, and represent the last (and best, as far as I know) effort to give the Renaissance its due. Burckhardt is not a great Renaissance book. There was a book published just this month, making huge waves in literary circles: 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. It's an incipid volume all about how the Chinese delegation to Florence in 1434 transmitted to Italy all of China's great inventions, which ignited the marvelous scientific and technical jumps which Italy is signified by in the 15-16th centuries. But I'm going to surprise you by saying that it's actually a fairly great access-point into the amazing Italian engineers, because if you disregard the book's preposterous and horrible thesis, the detail and attention which the author lavishes on the staggering Renaissance engineering is unparalleled anywhere in modern literature. The author puts all of his breath and effort into explaining how the great Renaissance was fueled by (sic) equally great Chinese scientists, while no self-respecting critic today will admit there even was a Renaissance worth talking about. So this horrible book, with a horrible thesis, underneath it all has a good and accessible insight into Italy's engineering and scientific revolution. That's about all the topics I can help with -- education, Classics and values; then art; then engineering and science.

Happy Belated one!

I thought the movie was just great. I also felt like some parts were rushed, but maybe that will pass if I have a second viewing, on Mercury's suggestion. Warning: There are spoilers about this movie in this post. Leaving aside the minor praise, or minor complaints, the overarching aspects of the movie -- the theme, the complexity of the main characters -- were just breathtaking. The movie is not so much an episode, as almost a whole lifetime. Characters appear, grow, develop in very plausible ways, take over a whole city with power you never suspected in them at the beginning, etc. I half-expected Two-Face to be a 'hook' as the villain of the next Batman movie, as is commonly done in comic films, most notably Spiderman. Consequently I was surprised by his role, and by the sensitive attention that the film gave to his morality, his development, and his downfall. Dent wasn't a caricature of a villain, he wasn't a 'hook' into any future movie; he wasn't a villain period. He was a man, whose fall from virtue was sensitively and very sympathetically treated. And he died at the end, not as a caricuture or a means to something else, but only a means to demonstrating Dark Knight's theme, and of no other film; the theme of vulnerability of virtue, of its two powerful opposite exponents in Joker and Batman, with Dent perched in the middle. Batman appeared to me much more moral man than in Begins, a man very powerfully concerned with his own morality, in the midst of luxury and beautiful women hanging on his every word. Joker was spectacular, in his own different way -- he surprised by not possessing any gravitas, being almost contemptible, but also undeniably brilliant and powerful in his own way, thus presenting his own brand of a very menacing millain. I simply can't believe how we trace his rise to power, from a small-time crook to a giant villain who took over all of Gotham. It's all breathtaking and larger-than life. Excellent film.

Petarch, the father of modern Europe, wrote this. He lived in the Middle Ages. He then proceeded to found all of modern Europe.

To briefly reply, I didn't post that as my own personal statement. Why it's important is that the composer culturally and educationally hails from the very center of intellectual life of New York City, such as it is now. New York liberals, and liberals generally, no longer sing songs about America, or experience heart-string tugs in connection to this country (except with multicultural toleration as the only thing that excuses this country's vices). But Peter Cincotti, clearly from the center of that milieu, surprisingly chooses America as the subject of his highest artistic effort; and delivers it in a lyrical and highly creative fashion. His song even makes strong references to early American history. I mean there's nothing typical about it. To my mind, he, and his culture are the ones saying goodbye to America, a great old sort of men who were once the heroes of American life, and virtue. It's a beautiful testimony to the past, for him it is a goodbye to the future, but for me a resounding defiance in the present.I said some people sometimes fish for the worst news possible because I've seen plenty of it previously (not from you), and you've been inquiring by what standard you can judge if America is finally fallen now. Maybe I misunderstood, but I think in a completely different way. I don't want to know if it's "finally fallen", or by which marks we could know if it has. And in the corner of my mind I have vivid examples of just how truly bad countries were in the past, and how little it stopped them from reaching forward and becoming better. So it's not marks by which I can judge decline, that I seek; but instead concrete steps by which I myself will be able to make the most powerful difference possible.

Greenspan is a very curious character. He's bad in every way, he's completely sold out his gold standard ideas of the 1960s, endorsed the Fed and rose to even control it.... and then what did he do when at the top of the Fed hierarchy? He told them to follow the price of the gold ounce, religiously. As a result, the US has been under a quasi-gold-standard for two decades from 1980s to 1990s, at what point he relaxed his discipline, caused the great bubble, and retired.

I don't look for an "essential marker", because I don't think essential markers even exist. I mean, unless a country has completely physically disintegrated, or the capacity to act became forbidden, it's never "a fundamentally fallen" country. I mean look, I already gave you the most starkly depressing example -- the Middle Ages. A few enlightened Brits looked at their country, and gasped in disgust, and set on reforming their country's rotten ways and unsightly principles. I mean what does it even give you, psychologically, to classify the US as essentially gone? Does it allow you more options, or open up more possibilities? I don't get why good people sometimes pursue the worst news possible. To a historically minded person, which you are, it should be clear that countries have been in absolutely more horrible conditions than the US in previous times; again, think Middle Ages!, and yet intransigent men have always come and pulled them out. If you're tired waiting for that ideal man to solve all of our problems, why can't you become him yourself? Learn to speak persuasively, join the city council, advance upwards through your honesty, become a mayor of a city, and then a governor, and before you know it, a good, honest man is leading one of the fifty states in the union. Self-pity is never useful. Nor is it how intransigent men have solved their crises in the past.

I had in mind the playing of rock music in the car, versus drive-by gangster rap, which is always audible at least three blocks away. A reasonable person always walks by such a car and asks himself, "Doesn't this guy have some manners?".

A blog has recently published some images from the house of Augustus (first Roman emperor in 30 BC), paintings which were discovered in the 60s and 70s but have been under lock until recent times. The rooms emphasize elegance and simplicity, and strive to convince the viewer that wallks have "disappeared and that they can extraordinary landscapes and architectural vistas in the far distance". http://eternallycool.net/?p=1245 Keep in mind, as you gaze on these images, that they're actually cold, hard walls, without modern amenities -- so great is the mastery which makes them come alive. If you're interested check out another blog entry from the same site: http://eternallycool.net/?p=1054 There you'll find paintings like the following: which Raphael used made a pilgrimage to Rome for, and studied, producing a direct link between ancient Rome and Renaissance art. Let me remind you again that that leg, exposed from beneath beautiful drapery, is 2,000 years old.

Some more examples that I came upon: Another good one: One might think that this next one was executed by Michelangelo:

Exactly!

... even more surely, we should accept.

All the time. It is a falsely historic truism we are taught nowadays, that history moves in "eras", and during the Enlightenment era, or the Renaissance, countries were uniformly good, or uniformly moving towards the right direction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Upon careful inspection you find the history of Europe punctuated with crises, and with men who stepped in to turn their country around. In the early 1800s Charles Babbage wrote that England had lost all of its Renaissance creative impulse, and was stagnating into complete oblivion. You can still read his seminal essay, and take a lot of notice of its title: Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes. To change the course of things, he came to power, founded the Royal Academy of Sciences and peopled it with capable men. Britain thus impelled, turned around into a gigantic technological and scientific powerhouse of the 19th century, and he went on to build a mechanical, pre-electronic, computer! At the beginning of the 18th century, Joseph Addison, the most spectacular writer of his time, said that Britain has lost all capacity for literature and creativity; the native soil had become too barren and was incapable of producing great writers like the old Shakespeare anymore. He went on to write and teach, and through his own and close allies' gargantuan effort, he had initiated a revolution in English creativity literature, so that by the 19th century, you would get amazing novels like Middlemarch and Sherlock Holmes. When men awoke from the Middle Ages, a few singular Brits were stunned at their culture's own barbarity and irrationality in comparison to the old Romans, and proceeded with great urgency to rise to places of power and attempt to turn Britain around. Which, needless to say, they succeeded. And that's the story of just one country in Europe. The history of every country during the supposedly monolithic 'good times' was peopled with constant declines and falls, averted through titanic efforts of far-seeing individuals. Just the Greek and Roman history is itself replete with stories of statesmen who lived in corrupted and slowly rotting cities, and singlehanded turned the entire society and its people around through the sheer power of their intellect and will, Demosthenes, Cicero, Camillus, etc. ==== In regards to this thread, I am a bit perplexed at why we review one Presidential candidate but avoid all contrast with the other. Surely we accept should candidates not on how they score according to our wishful thinking and rosy heights of imagination; but most importantly in how they contrast with the other alternatives, and taking almost no other consideration into account, than that. I also don't understand this notion to send candidates the message to get out of the way. Something of a more precise suggestion would be welcome.

From "the bad review", http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,372561,00.html: I don't understand what it is with this notion that black people are supposed to "send up" traditionally moral and good characters or values. Why is "black music" supposed to be obnoxious and loud in contrast to "white music", even rock'n'roll, played with respectful quietness? And why is a "black comedy" supposed to mock superheroes, and put the concept on its own head? I really hope Hancock doesn't do that. I was hoping to see it, since I love Will Smith films, but this really made me have a second thought.

I have a completely 180 degree opposite perspective from this one. All his life, Wall-E wants nothing more out of himself than to just be more human, an to imitate humans in theier most beautiful and profound form. Humanity, in its perfect and healthiest state, is the highest standard that this movie can conjure up; so that when we face a certain revelation later in the movie, it is not a strike at Humanity with its capital H, but a strike at us for being too fat, slothful and lazy, in comparison to the vigorous, beautiful men from Hello Dolly, whom Wall-E worships. If you think of the character of Wall-E, and how he's more human than most of the human characters, I think you'll agree with me that this is one of the most profoundly human-worshipping movies made in a long time.

Yes but what happens when Sarkozy is out? Look how, just by himself he's in a boycott against the Chinese Olympics, and prevents Turkey from entering into the EU. He's materialized out of nowhere to suddenly be the biggest hope Europe's future (a Frech president, of all people...). Dutch politicians are all corrupt -- look how they're repressing Geert, how indifferent they were to Ayaan Hirsi's life, how they suppressed the Mohammed cartoons. Germany hosts the 2nd largest population of Muslims and their hospitals (from what I hear) are beginning to look favorably upon the science of acupuncture... Absent of communism, absent of any great moral conflict, Europe is still folding in on itself.

Thanks Ed. The shocking thing about this statement is that a) it treats sharia as a valid principle of laws period, and that it's stated by Britain's top judge. I don't know what's going on with that country.