The American Individualist

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

2012-01-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

By Joseph Kellard

Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs presents Apple’s creator as a passionately driven producer that demanded excellence, both of him and others, and who was beset by intense emotionalist tendencies.

Jobs’ legacy is that he primarily transformed existing systems into innovative products, from the Macintosh to the iPad — which others either couldn’t create or even foresee. As Isaacson writes: “On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, ‘Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?’” (p.170)

Jobs embedded in Apple’s DNA the premium he put on integration, whether it was software and hardware; aesthetics and engineer/exterior design; or multiple products — computers, phones, music players — into singular devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

While Isaacson lauds and emphasizes Jobs’ masterful work, he paints with a heavy brush when portraying his relationships with others. Here, his motif is Jobs’ “reality distortion field” — a term his colleagues coined to describe what is a basically a package deal that includes examples of putting an “I wish” above a “what is”; pushing his workers to meet seemingly impossible deadlines that they sometimes met; and outright deception, as when he tried to deny fathering his first child. Moreover, to Jobs, there was usually no middle ground between your ideas or work: they were either brilliant or “shit.”

Yet Jobs was also a straight shooter, often harshly so, and so he’s painted sensationally as an insensitive jerk. When asked about this characterization, Jobs basically replied that his honesty was necessary to rid Apple of anyone other than A players.

But in writing his chapter on Jobs’ legacy, Isaacson concludes: “Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.” (p.565)

Unfortunately, Isaacson falls short of truly uncovering the particular philosophic ideas that drove Jobs’ trailblazing work. He mostly writes about them superficially (e.g., Jobs’ love of “simplicity” in his products is attributed to his beliefs in Zen Buddhism), and often Isaacson explains his insights in terms of “instincts”/“intuition,” as did Jobs.

Of course, this is to be expected in our anti-philosophical age, as well as from a biographer who was a former editor at Time and a chairman at CNN, neither news organization of which represents objective journalism. Obviously, like most modern biographers, Isaacson felt compelled to “balance” every prominent personality and character trait.

Ultimately, while Isaacson is incapable of concluding that Jobs was a moral giant for his outstanding innovations, his biography nevertheless manages to evoke a spirit that projects this fundamental truth and makes it a particularly worthy read.

The Seed of My Love of Reading

2012-01-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

By Joseph Kellard

Go ahead, you can say it. The image accompanying this blog post looks like a book that’s been through a war. Well, not quite.

I salvaged Four Stars from the World of Sports from a flood in my apartment, due to a Calcutta-like downpour a few years ago. I had to keep this book from my childhood. I realized, even if not explicitly until now, that it held a certain significance to me. I believe it is the first sports book, and perhaps the first “real” book after a diet of Green Eggs and Ham and others like Charlotte’s Web, that I had read on my own.

I recall my mother buying it for me at my elementary school, P.S. 21 in Flushing. I think I was in third grade and I bought it at a book fair there. It featured some of the great athletes of the day from the four major sports, baseball’s Henry Aaron, football’s Roger Staubach, basketball’s Kareem Abdul Jabbar and hockey’s Bobby Orr.

Leafing through its time- and weather-beaten brown pages now, I remember some of its photos and illustrations, but I remember little, if anything, about the stories. One of my problems as a young boy was that I didn’t read very well, and had particular trouble with comprehension. But I do recall enjoying the book and learning about the lives of these sports idols.

One of my earliest memories of watching sports was rushing home one summer night to the living room in my parents’ second-floor apartment on 26^th Avenue, as I watched on television Henry Aaron hit his historic 715 home run that broke Babe Ruth’s career record.

On that same set (probably a Zenith), I vaguely recall watching Joe Namath play football. I had already heard enough about the legendary quarterback to realize I was watching someone special. I remember vaguely that earlier that year I watched my first Super Bowl, when the Miami Dolphins defeated the Minnesota Vikings. That’s when I became a Dolphins' fan.

Since I didn’t read well as a young boy, so I didn’t read much. At that time, my interest in watching sports was in its fledgling state, so I don’t recall reading many or any other sports books after Four Stars. Maybe I did; maybe I didn’t—and if I did they didn’t make enough of an impression on me to save them. Four Stars did. Maybe because it was the first book I read in which I was offered (real-life) heroes.

My parents thought my reading problems had something to do with poor eyesight, so they bought me reading glasses. I thought this was totally senseless. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. At about that time, my parents brought me to a reading specialist, and she said I had dyslexia. I ditched the eyeglass, but mainly because wearing them wasn’t cool.

When I reflect back on this now, I realized my troubles could be traced and reduced to one main issue: motivation. Sure, when reading, I definitely mixed up letters and words, and that certainly made it a struggle; but it actually wasn’t until a few years later, when my parents observed my already intense interest in sports, that they got the bright idea to buy me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Their thinking was this: why not have him read about a subject that interests him? I remember the days of my mother working with me, having me read story after story in Reader’s Digest. I enjoyed some of the stories, especially one about a captain of a boat who remained calm through a storm that threatened to capsize the vessel and navigated through the squall. But it wasn’t until I started to read about sports that I read consistently and often, and my problems with reading just faded away.

That’s really the genesis of my love of reading that has endured to this day. I believe that seed was planted with this one book, Four Stars.

Steve Jobs Interview for The Smithsonian

2011-12-28T04:18:00.000-08:00

By Joseph Kellard
Did you know Steve Jobs thought our government-run public schools were terrible union-driven bureaucracies, not meritocracies (to use his words)? It’s one of the best slices of this interview he did for an Smithsonian Oral History project that was conduced by the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Program in 1995.

Jobs offers his thoughts on a host of issues —from the artistry he believed was integ...ral to making computers, how Apple was coasting and steadily declining while he was out of the company, to hiring A-class producers and firing lesser employees, to Pixar and digitally animated films such as Toy Story, to so-called “social responsibilities.”

In answer to a question about the latter (near the end of the interview), Job’s took issue with the faith that he had any such responsibilities. Instead, he said, “We’re all going to be dead soon. That’s my point of view. Someone once told me: ‘Live each day as if it will be your last, and one day you’ll certainly be right.’ And I do that … I think you have a responsibility to do really good stuff and get it out there for people to use and let them build on the shoulders of it and keep making better stuff.”

In hindsight, after experiencing all the great products that Jobs came to produced in the computer, film, communications and music industries, it’s safe to say he lived by his words that put his love of his work above all else.

While you can, as I did, take issue with some of his views, particularly on monopolies, the government’s roll to protect the Internet as a “public trust,” and Silicon Valley’s innovations as primarily the product of the so-called 1960’s counterculture, there’s a lot to enjoy in this interview. Most of all, he comes across as a thoughtful, articulate, impassioned innovator.

Photo by Joseph Kellard

Photos: Rockefeller Center at Christmas

2011-12-24T08:38:00.000-08:00

“The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.” ~ Ayn Rand

Photos by Joseph Kellard

Why I'm an Early Bird

2011-12-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

By Joseph Kellard
People ask me how I do it. I get out of bed to start my day at 5 a.m. I've been doing this for many years, and the root of my answer lies in the Olympics.

Yes, my biorhythms are also to blame. Since my youth I've been a deep sleeper, and that certainly plays into why I’m an early riser. When I was younger I used to need, at most, about eight hours of sleep a night, and most of my adult life I've been able to get by on six hours, and sometimes less.

I set my alarm at 4:20 a.m., and occasionally I wake up before the alarm sounds. I have it set to sports talk radio, and I often hit snooze intermittently throughout. Otherwise, I'll either catch more z's or run what I call “word salads” — word association-like, stream-of-consciousness-type sentences — thorough my head, with the sole purpose of seeing what words and phrases I can summon from my vocabulary bank. Once I toss the covers off me, though, I routinely head to my work desk to write or read on my MacBook, after which I drive to the gym, three to four days a week.

I started my early morning activities back during my early 20-something years, when I worked out with weights in my garage in the dark of morning. I was drawn to do this because it made me feel productive while most of America was still sleeping.

My inspiration came years earlier, when I was a kid watching the Olympics on television, specifically the features on athletes — the cross-country skiers, skaters or gymnasts who awoke before dawn to trek to the hills, ice rink or gym to train before heading to school or work. I found this incredibly inspiring.

I knew some night owls, with friends and relatives among them. They were the kind who never appeared to get sleepy while most of us watched late-night television with our eyes half shut from our couches. But they typically slept late the next morning, and that’s why being a night owl never appealed to me. Getting up earl always seemed to me like an accomplishment, something that required a certain effort, whereas staying up late just didn’t.

When I used to live with others, including night owls who watched TV late, getting up early in the morning was always the only opportunity to take advantage of some quiet in the house, which was a tremendous value when I needed to think, write or read. Today I live alone in a studio apartment in a home that almost seems hermetically sealed to sound. It’s too good to be true.

I continue covet the serenity of early morning, especially its contrast to the hustle and bustle of where I live in the suburbs of New York City, the city that never sleeps. And I make sure to wake up early each morning to capture it.

Conspiracy Theories and Freedom Don't Mix

2011-11-26T02:43:00.000-08:00

By Joseph Kellard
A recent commentary piece in The New York Times taps into the corrupted mentality — the faith-based conspiracy mindset — that pervades Egypt and explains why that Muslim nation, as well as the wider Islam-dominated Middle East, will not establish freedom anytime soon.

When dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced from power earlier this year, a major development of the so-called Arab Spring, it was widely pronounced that Egyptians were now “free,” or had won their “freedom.” Actually, they were merely freed temporarily from the force imposed by their latest dictator. Political freedom, in fact, depends on each individual’s freedom from government coercion, or, to put it positively and more fundamentally, freedom depends on the establishment of a government that upholds individual rights, including the right to free thought and speech — that is, the freedom to adopt whatever philosophy or religion one chooses and to voice its teachings.

Such a government cannot and will not take root in Egypt when the interim government there indiscriminately guns down non-Muslims on the streets of Cairo, nor when the next elected government is likely to be dominated by Muslims that will force their religion on others.

In his Times’ commentary on Nov. 20, "After Egypt’s Revolution, Christians Are Living in Fear," Andre Aciman, an Egyptian-born Jew who is a literature professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that Egypt's interim government failed to take responsibility for its massacre of Christians as they demonstrated in Cairo after their church was burned to the ground. Aciman writes that confusion and conflicting accounts ensued over who instigated the incident, and that the interim prime minister blamed the massacre on “hidden hands.” Aciman explains:

Sadly, the phrase “hidden hands” remains a part of Egypt’s political rhetoric more than 50 years later — an invitation for every Egyptian to write in the name of his or her favorite bugaboo. Rather than see things for what they are, Egyptians, from their leaders on down, have always preferred the blame game — and with good reason. Blaming some insidious clandestine villain for anything invariably works in a country where hearsay passes for truth and paranoia for knowledge.

Sometimes those hidden hands are called Langley, or the West, or, all else failing, of course, the Mossad. Sometimes “hidden hands” stands for any number of foreign or local conspiracies carried out by corrupt or disgruntled apparatchiks of one stripe or another who are forever eager to tarnish and discredit the public trust.

The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period. False rumor, which is the opiate of the Egyptian masses and the bread and butter of political discourse in the Arab world, trumps clarity, reason and the will to tolerate a different opinion, let alone a different religion or the spirit of open discourse.

In short, a nation cannot establish freedom when, by and large, its people fundamentally gather what they believe is knowledge and truth based on hearsay, paranoia, false rumor and conspiracy theories at the expense of reason. Reason is man's only means of knowledge, and it is the basis of the only free or semi-free nations in history, all of them Western products of the pro-reason Enlightenment. When reason is the first to go in dealing with other men, so goes freedom.

When freedom is at stake and people yearn to possess it, conspiracy theories, particularly those based on faith, won't cut it. Yet they are a product of the Islamic world's basic mental modus operandi: religious faith. As Elan Jurno, author of Winning the Unwinnable War, explains in his essay “Exposing Anti-Mulsim ‘Conspiracies,” published in the Spring 2006 issue of The Objective Standard:

“...[T]hough it is unsupported by facts or logic, the conspirator steadfastly clings to his belief. The source of his belief is faith — the blind acceptance of some idea sustained by feeling in the absence or defiance of evidence. This epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge, is a fundamental tenant of Islam, as it is of all religions. And this is the key to understanding the conspiracy mentality.”

It also is the key to understanding why freedom will continue to elude Egypt and the Middle East.

America Attacked For Its Values

2011-09-10T18:09:00.001-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

One day as I drove down Lexington Avenue, I understood the reverence author-philosopher Ayn Rand had for New York City.

From an incline along that avenue, a vantage point from which I'd never seen Manhattan, I was awed by the many tall, stately buildings that lined the perfectly straight street for miles. Finally I had grasped how this view that resembled a canyon, along with the entire metropolis, sprang not from nature, but from the human mind.

I was reminded of a passage from Miss Rand's novel The Fountainhead: "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?"

On Sept. 11, 2001, after I'd watched Islamic terrorists destroy the Twin Towers and the innocents within them, I was reminded of what Miss Rand wrote about evil:

"They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed; they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence ... You who've never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as 'misguided idealists,’ they are the essence of evil."

This passage from Atlas Shrugged serves to answer people who are bewildered over how human beings can act so savagely. At root, terrorists are motivated by nihilism, the desire to destroy values and existence.

These terrorists understood that the skyscraper is uniquely American.

Because of our nation's unprecedented liberty, Americans were free to form independent judgments and act on them. This atmosphere spawned the Industrial Revolution, which saw great technological advances and laborsaving devices, such as the steel girders and elevators that made skyscrapers possible. The Twin Towers specifically embodied capitalism and its foundation: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which spawned America's unsurpassed prosperity.

Those gleaming, soaring, stately towers were a proud boast of all these sublime human achievements and values. And this is why the nihilists twice targeted them. They hated them because of their source: the liberated human mind. They don't want America's freedom, its industriousness, its technological advances, its high standard of living — or its skyscrapers.

They only want us to lose them through their destructive acts.

This upcoming war is between America and religious fundamentalism (of any kind). In essence, Americans use reason to choose their values and actions; the fundamentalists have blind faith in God's dogma. We value freedom; they value theocratic totalitarianism. We value the individual; they sacrifice the individual to supernatural entities (e.g., God and heaven). We pursue and achieve happiness here on earth; they damn this earth and martyr themselves for an afterworld.

At root, we want life and they want death. The United States should give the murderous Islamic fundamentalists what they want, in part, as an act of justice for we Americans who want to live.

* This column was mildly edited from its original version that was published in the Oceanside/Island Park Herald in September 2001.

* The painting, The Sun Also Rises, by Frank O’Conner (Ayn Rand’s husband), appeared on the 25th anniversary editon of The Fountainhead.

9/11 Vignette: Joseph Kellard

2011-09-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

Every patriotic American suffered when Islamic terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent people on Sept. 11, 2001. I was a reporter then for the Oceanside/Island Park Herald. Although I was deeply outraged and dispirited by this atrocity, the aftermath provided me with invaluable experiences.

While I didn’t lose a loved one that day, through my many talks with 9/11 families I came to empathize more intensely with those who did.

I can still hear the chilling, soulful cries of Amy Haviland, an Oceanside mother of two young children who on 9/11 lost both her husband, Timothy, a vice president at Marsh & McLennan, and her brother, FDNY firefighter Robert Spear.

I remember visiting the Freeport home of Lauraine Marchese after her daughter Laura’s remains at Ground Zero were identified months later, and how this news shattered her mother’s last, desperate hope that somehow, some way she was still alive somewhere.

I learned that it’s horrible enough for a loved one to, say, be murdered by a common street criminal, but to have him perish in a mass slaughter splashed across television screens and newspapers worldwide magnifies the horror dramatically.

As a journalist, I feel honored and privileged that these families willingly shared their raw thoughts, anger and anguish with me. Sometimes their pain brought me to tears. Their suffering further grounded the horror and evil of the terrorist attacks — and thereby solidified my intense conviction that the jihadists and their supporters must be brought to justice.

Unfortunately, over the past decade this sense of justice has faded in many Americans. But thankfully it endured with me, in part because of the vivid memories I have covering the families most directly impacted by that horrific day. They will never forget the wrongs done them. Neither must we.

The Moon Goddess with a Sun-like Presence

2011-07-09T07:46:00.000-07:00

An analysis of Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

By Joseph Kellard

She is the center of attention in a room at one of the world’s largest museums.

Diana, a reduction of a weathervane that Augustus Saint-Gaudens created for the top of an early Madison Square Garden, is poised atop a pedestal in the middle of the ground floor at the American Wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What stands out about this sculpture, other than her brilliant gilt, are her subtly contrasting yet complimentary halves that lend her a certain harmony.

First, Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt, holds the archer’s standard upright posture — of pointing an arrow and stretching a bow, all the while keeping a steady hand and focus — that denotes tension and intensity. But, unlike archers who also plant their legs evenly apart on the flat earth, Diana assumes a different position that distinguishes her. In contrast to her upper half, she stands decidedly off balance, not only on one foot, but also on her tiptoes while balanced on an orb. This position, combined with her right foot that kicks out slightly behind her, dangling off the pedestal, makes Diana appear, at once and overall, both imbalanced yet stable.

Remember, Diana was created as a weathervane, placed high above on a building, so Saint-Gaudens probably created her right leg to stick outward to provide the wind some mass to help turn her, as is the purpose of her bow and her left arm that holds it. But artistically her leg jutting out adds to her lightness of being and harmony, an airy quality also evoked by her streamlined body and nudity.

The Met recreates this sense of Diana’s purpose by placing her on a high pedestal, above all the grounded sculptures and art-lovers that gaze up at her, just as her original stood atop a tower at Madison Square Garden. In the American Wing, with its windows-framed roof that allows natural light to flood in, Diana’s height and gold cast effectively give this moon goddess a sun-like presence there.

Description of Diana at the base of her pedestal:
Diana
1892-93; this cast, 1928
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Aware of Saint-Gauden’s desire to model a female nude, the architect Stanford White (1853 - 1906) gave him the commission for a weathervane for the tower of Madison Square Garden (demolished 1925). The first, eighteen-foot-tall sculpture proved too large and was replaced in 1894 by a streamlined version, five feet shorter. It became one of New York’s most popular landmarks, and the sculptor capitalized on its success by issuing numerous reductions. This cast is a half-sized model of the second version, produced from a cement cast once owned by White. Saint-Gaudens eschewed the traditional full-bodied interpretation of Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt, focusing instead on simple, elegant lines and a strong silhouette.

What a Russian Immigrant Taught Me About American Patriotism

2011-07-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

"America is the land of the uncommon man. It is the land where man is free to develop his genius – and to get its just rewards.” ~ Ayn Rand

By Joseph Kellard

As Independence Day nears and as debates over immigration rage on, I’m reminded of how an atheist émigré from communist Russia taught me what it means to be an American patriot.

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, once wrote: “The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”

Rand’s books all evoke this glorification of America. When I first encountered them, though, I was a left-wing ideologue who questioned whether she knew that ours was a racist society that had stolen its land from the Indians, enslaved blacks and exploited the poor. Yet, despite that I believed those claims, a prideful lump always swelled in my throat whenever I heard our national anthem.

Looking back, I realize that I at least suspected there was much more to America than these charges of theft, racism and exploitation. For this reason, Rand’s uncompromising praise of our nation struck a chord with me, and I felt compelled to consider and investigate her justification for it.

Unlike conservatives who attributed America’s greatness to its being “God’s chosen country,” Rand showed that the United States was the result and crowning achievement of the Enlightenment, the 18th century intellectual movement that championed reason and challenged religion’s dogma and pervasive influence. Our Founding Father’s explicit respect for reason, Rand noted, lead them to create an unprecedented nation, founded on the philosophical principle that each individual has an inalienable right to his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. And this moral and political foundation of individual rights, Rand recognized, was what distinguished America from all nations, past and present.

America’s Founders intended our nation to be one in which each individual has a right to think for himself and pursue his independent values as he sees fit, while simultaneously respecting that right in others. In America, as our Founders intended, no authority, whether a god, tribal chief, king, pope or bureaucrat, would dictate the course of any individual’s life; he would live for himself, “neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself,” Rand wrote.

This new nation would prove to be vastly different from the monarchies, oligarchies and theocracies of the past. Indeed, as Rand demonstrated, its foundation in individual rights (and the corresponding politico-economic system, capitalism) caused America to emerge as a nation of free-thinking, productive individuals, a land of scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and businessmen who made possible an array of labor- and time-saving advances that dramatically increased prosperity and quality of life.

In short, Rand showed that at the root of America’s founding and prosperity is the principle of individual rights.

Related to this, she taught me that one should evaluate our Founders (and historical figures in general), not on the basis of how they were like their predecessors and contemporaries, but on the basis of how they fundamentally distinguished themselves. I came to see that our Founders represented a unique bridge between the irrationalities and injustices of the old world and the much greater heights still open to this nation.

Although some founders owned slaves, it is crucial to note that some form of slavery existed in virtually all pre-American societies. What’s most significant about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington is not that they too owned slaves, but that they were the first in history to uphold individual rights that are universal to all men, and thereby laid the moral and political foundation for slavery’s eventual abolition.

Rand also understood that racism could not be the cause of America’s unprecedented power and prosperity, noting that insofar as debilitating racism existed in America, it was not so much in the freer, capitalist, industrial North as it was in the agrarian, almost feudal South. Nor was America’s alleged exploitation of the Indians the cause of her power and prosperity.

Whereas others have painted America as a backward, tribalist society, Rand showed that these characteristics better described the societies of the original Indians, and contested the claim that they had a “right” to this land: “If a ‘country’ does not protect rights, if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of the tribal chief, why should you respect the ‘rights’ that they don’t have or respect?” she once asked rhetorically.

That which America enjoys today, Rand showed, was not taken from the slaves or Indians, but was created here by her free inhabitants.

On some level, America’s immigrants have always recognized these facts about America. They have not arrived on our shores expecting to be enslaved and exploited: They have come here expecting to live freely and prosperously.

Perhaps this was why Rand was in a position to identify what’s great about America. She defected from the Soviet slave state, where millions of innocents were slaughtered based on such communist ideals as self-sacrifice, equality of results and an all-powerful state that dictated how individuals must think and live. Rand knew that in America she would be free to think independently and to write and profit from books that offered trailblazing, challenging ideas, perhaps best exemplified by the provocatively titled The Virtue of Selfishness.

In fact, although it is beyond the scope of this piece to demonstrate it, Rand’s books provide the philosophical foundation on which America can properly complete and ground its revolutionary principles and reach infinitely greater, unimagined heights.

So what does it mean to mean to be an American patriot? As I learned from both the examples and writings of a Russian immigrant, it means that one acknowledges, cherishes and advocates that which is truly unique about this nation, its foundation in each individual’s moral and political right to live his life free of coercion in the pursuit of his own selfish values and happiness.

* I would like thank Alan Germani for providing valuable comments to improve an earlier version of this op-ed.

Book Review: Gulag by Anne Applebaum

2011-06-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard
When published in 2003, Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History was touted as the most authoritative, comprehensive book on the Soviet labor camps.

Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist, recounts the many facets of this decades-long slave system. Among her topics are the gulag's origin and expansion, the living conditions and distinctive work at the various camps, and how prisoners survived, rebelled, escaped and died.

While Gulag presents what were, to me, some surprising details, including that numerous prisoners were actually released, Applebaum routinely returns, whether implicitly or explicitly, to the evil purpose of the camps.

One example comes in her comparison of Nazi and Soviet camps. She notes that the Soviet camps focused more on exploiting labor than on deliberately killing "enemies of the people," whereas in Nazi concentration camps, where a Jew's death was virtually assured, the reverse was true. Gulag prisoners usually died not by being deliberately killed, but by the system's "gross inefficiency and neglect,” Applebaum writes. Yet she demonstrates that certain labor camp projects, such as useless grand canals, reflected the communists' desire to kill for killing's sake:

"A propaganda slogan declared that the ‘Danube-Black Sea Canal is the tomb of the Romanian bourgeoisie!' Given that up to 200,000 people may have died building it, that may have indeed been the canal's real purpose."

In the epilogue to her primarily fact-finding, journalist book, Applebaum properly touches on the realities of the post-Soviet population's widespread evasion of this important part of Russia’s history, and points to its harmful consequences, such as Putin's authoritarian rule. Yet, for a book on this subject and its scope, she draws virtually no cause-and-effect relationship between communist ideology and the gulag. Worse, her deeper, conclusive commentary on her subject is actually anti-philosophical:

"Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow man has been — and will be — repeated again and again”; and: "The more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature."

In other words, Applebaum believes not in fundamental philosophic ideas — chief among them being communism’s glorification of self-sacrifice to the state — as the underlying cause of the gulag, but rather man’s “ability,” that is, his (alleged) innate evil, to destroy his fellow man, and certain unspecified “circumstances.”

One of Gulag’s merits, however, is that it offers many concretizations of communism’s inevitable results: mass privations, disease, starvation and death. As I read the various injustices that Soviet citizens suffered under this slave system (within a slave state), I was reminded of accusations that communists and their apologists had leveled against capitalism and the United States. Recall that they claimed that capitalists “exploit” their workers, and asserted that Soviet Russia held the most promise for the “common man,” the promise of unprecedented prosperity and equality of results. All of this came to mind as I read this passage:

"Ivan Nikishov, who became the boss of Dalstroi in 1939, in the wake of the purges, and held the post until 1948, became infamous for accumulating riches in the middle of desperate poverty. [Prison bosses] even began to compete with one another, in a fantastic version of keeping up with the Jonses."

While Applebaum fails to provide a deeper, philosophic understanding of how communism led to the gulag, her book nevertheless provides many examples that help ground the stark reality of that false, evil ideology.

* This is a revision of a previously posted review.

Jesus vs. Howard Roark

2011-06-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard
While talk continues in Objectivist circles about a Christian organization's comparison of Ayn Rand to Jesus, I'd like to remind or enlighten HBLers [subscribers to the Harry Binswanger List], as I did when Mel Gibson's “The Passion of the Christ” was all the rage, about an excellent letter Miss Rand wrote that contrasts Jesus and Howard Roark. You'll find it in “Letters of Any Rand” (p. 287, hardcover), under the title: “To Sylvia Austin, a fan.”

Among the ideas Ayn Rand addresses are the contradiction between individualism (in regard to Christianity's reverence for the sanctity of the individual soul) and Jesus' morality of altruism, the demeaning implication that what is noble in man is strictly divine and not human, “bearing each other's burdens,” and “loving one another.”

About the latter she wrote: “Since all men are not virtuous, to love them for their vices would be a monstrous conception and a vicious injustice. One can not love such men as Stalin or Hitler. One can not love both a man like Roark and a man like Toohey. If one says one does, it merely means that one does not love at all.”

Stick that in your pipe, American Values Network!

Color Breathes Life Into an Ordinary Painting

2011-06-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard
Why did I take a photo of this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you ask?

It should be obvious: the colors are brilliant and complimentary. They are used to make the central subjects stand out boldly in an otherwise nondescript scene that is as simple as its title suggests: Arabs Crossing the Desert (early 1870s).

The rich reds, yellows and green in the horsemen’s robes are set against and complimented by the expanse of cloudless blue sky, and the varieties of color used also comes across in the three different-colored horses: chestnut brown, gray and white.

The artist, Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French painter and sculpture (1824-1904), could have painted all the horses the same color, just as he could have given all the horsemen uniform clothes (perhaps their different-colored robes denote something about their status?). But then the painting would not stand out in anyway, since the action it depicts is slow and subdued, and the subjects are mostly hidden under their clothes.

Arabs Crossing the Desert is a great example of how color can carry a painting, making a rather routines scene “pop” and come alive.

The Vine

2011-06-05T15:29:00.001-07:00

By Joseph Kellard
Whenever I trek to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I always try to pass through the American Wing to catch even just a glimpse of The Vine, by Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (1880-1980). During my most recent visit there, with my new Nikon D90 in hand, I took several snapshots of this beautiful sculpture from a variety of angles.

The Vine is one of my two favorite sculptures, competing only with Joy by Sam Axton.

As I did with Joy, I eventually want to break down and analyze why exactly I find The Vine so special, why it strikes a particularly powerful chord with me, and perhaps put to rest which of the two sculptures I can definitively call my top favorite — that is, if I decided this is really necessary or even possible.

Today, I simply want to show a few shots of this beautiful sculpture that evokes a similarly elative spirit as Joy. Which of the two works of art more effectively evokes that spirit — and why? These are questions to be answered perhaps another day.

The following is a description of The Vine that accompanies the sculpture at the Met:

In the early twentieth century, sculptures of dancing women were produced in great numbers, inspired in part by the popularity of Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Anna Pavlova. Frishmuth often turned to dancers for her sculptural themes and employed them to pose for her with musical accompaniment. Show stretching upward and outward in imitation of a living vine, this lyrical nude balances on tiptoe in the ecstasy of performance, a grapevine suspended in her hands. The first version of the work, a statuette eleven and a quarter inches high, was enormously popular, cast in an edition of 396. In 1923, Frishmuth enlarged the sculpture to monumental scale, using Desha Delteil of the Fokine Ballet as her model.

A Positive Voice for 100 Voices

2011-04-26T17:30:00.000-07:00

My informal review of a compelling book

By Joseph Kellard

I recently finished reading 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand. I’m about to embark on writing a book review for a publication, so I’m not going to write nearly as much as I would like to about this great book. But I do have a few things to say about it that I think you'll find interesting, if not compelling.

First and foremost, I learned about Ayn Rand more in depth, not only about matters I already knew about her, but many new factors I never knew, both minor and major. When you admire a person as much as I do Ayn Rand, this is the type of book you devour. I, at least, like to learn as much as I can about my heroes.

What’s interesting about this book is that Ayn Rand’s life, character and personality are told through interviews with various people who knew Ayn Rand, from acquaintances to relatives to fans to the most ardent studiers and adherents of her philosophy. The opinions and perspectives are wide ranging, from those who found her and her philosophy unfavorable to those who were in complete awe of her intelligence, honesty and original ideas.

From John Ridpath: “She had available at her mental fingertips a hug integrated body of knowledge. Once she understood any question put to her clearly, she would have no difficulty in answering it completely, including brining her questioner to see other implications of the question, and even to answering, in advance, ramifications of the discussion she knew the questioner would arrive at later.”

Scott McConnell, the interviewer and creator of this book, established the media department and oral history program at the Ayn Rand Institute. And when reading his various interviews, it’s important to keep in mind that you must, of course, judge the accuracy of what people say — what you should take with a grain (or much more) of salt, and what is probably true since so many of those who were interviewed mentioned it.

With this in mind, the reader must recognize that what some people say about Ayn Rand may reflect more on them than it does her. For example, the book starts with an interview with Rand’s sister, Nora, translated from Russian, and she shows contempt for her sister and her philosophy. Here, I recognized that Nora left the Soviet Union and visited her sister in America, and even though Ayn Rand offered her the opportunity to remain in freedom, Nora chose to return to the communist slave pen. That’s certainly something to keep in mind when considering Nora’s comments about her sister.

One observation that was often mentioned among the people interviewed was that Ayn Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, were deeply in love with one another and cared greatly for one another through their 50-plus year marriage.

Another reoccurring observation was that Ayn Rand had a commanding, forceful personality when it came to intellectual matters and was always especially intense when discussing philosophical ideas and their life and death implications, and yet her more casual side (if that’s even a proper way to describe her in repose) revealed a woman of extraordinary patience, graciousness, warmth and benevolence.

There are some real gems in the book. One of my favorites is an interview with Marcella Rabwin. She was a former coworker of Ayn Rand’s, and Rand based her conformist character, Peter Keating in The Fountainhead, on her. Rabwin tells McConnell that she enjoyed reading the The Fountainhead, and that she had met Rand again after she had read it. Rand asked her about the philosophy in the book, to which Rabwin said: “I said that I didn’t know there was any philosophy in it.” And later in the interview, McConnell asks Rabwin what she thought of Peter Keating. Her reply: “Who?”

This is priceless!

I wish I could give a more thoughtful and formal review of this book. I have other priorities at this time. For now, all I can say is that if you want to learn more, much more, about Ayn Rand and the integrity she had toward her philosophy in many areas of her life, in work, romance, friendships, daily living, etc., then you absolutely must read this book.

My Long Road to Objectivism

2011-04-16T16:56:00.001-07:00

A looked back at my years-long introduction to Ayn Rand and her books that changed my life.

By Joseph Kellard

It all began unceremoniously enough, on a routine summer afternoon when I was about 12. I noticed a book in the grass next to my teenage sister, Maureen, as she sunbathed in our yard. It was a white paperback, a novel that, certainly unbeknownst to me then, would come to dramatically change my life — unfortunately, not for many years.

I picked it up and liked the interesting painting on the cover, with its spotlight-like bars of sunrays that pierced dark clouds onto a city of skyscrapers. The novel’s title, The Fountainhead, in black, bold letters, piqued my curiosity, and I thought it was cool how the author, Ayn Rand, spelled her first name, which I (mistakenly) thought was pronounced “Ann.”

I don’t recall asking my sister anything about the book, perhaps because I had no interest in reading much beyond my next issue of Sports Illustrated. And although that moment was fleeting, it made an impression, bared out in years to come, as I would recall that moment when I periodically came across that author's name and her book throughout my youth.

My second encounter came a few years later, when I switched to reading Muscle & Fitness and Muscle Mag, two magazines that fed my teenage hopes of building a Mr. America-type physique. They featured articles by Mike Mentzer, a top bodybuilder who occasionally quoted passages from a character in The Fountainhead that evoked the virtues of individualism and independent thought. Mentzer used Rand’s words to buttress his unorthodoxed philosophy of high-intensity training, a system that challenged the sport’s conventional views on how to build eye-popping muscles.

Thanks to Mentzer, I got a tantalizing taste of the ideas from that novel my sister once read. Around this time, I too was starting to pick up novels on my own, reading mostly 19th century classics, especially by Dickens and Tolstoy. But for some unknown reason, I was not yet inspired enough to pick up The Fountainhead. Instead, I put it with others on my imaginary “must read” list.

A few more years would pass before I came across the unusual name of its author. I was likely in my late teens or early 20s when I opened 2112, an album by Rush, a progressive rock band, and read this dedication inside: “Lyrics by Neil Peart, with acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand.”

Meanwhile, a college philosophy class had inspired me to read the works of different thinkers and I found I was partial to Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ, as well as Dostoyevsky’s novels, especially Notes from Underground, a book with a protagonist who believes that 2+2 can equal 5.

Still, I was not reaching for Ayn Rand’s novels or non-fiction at bookstores, but my next encounter with her words would prove decisive. On the dusty, overstocked shelves at a used bookstore, I came across a newly published compilation of Playboy interviews, entitled The Playboy Interview: The Best of Three Decades 1962-1992. It featured interviews with everyone from Muhammad Ali to Yassir Arafat to Bob Dylan, as well as that novelist that my sister had read, Mike Mentzer quoted and a lyricist-drummer considered a genius.

By then I was in mid-20s and writing shorts stories with aspirations to become the next Joyce Carol Oates or the young Truman Capote. Philosophically, I was a subjectivist; politically a liberal. I recall that the issues I was grappling with most then were my agnosticism and growing distaste for the teachings of Christianity and Catholicism.

I skimmed through Rand’s interview, first published in 1964, probably glossed over some passages, like her high praise of capitalism and ultra-limited government, and likely bought the book based on other parts that I found provocative, particularly her ideas on religion.

On original sin:
“If man is guilty by nature, he has no choice about it. If he has no choice, the issue does not belong in the field of morality. Morality pertains only to the sphere of man’s free will — only to those actions which are open to his choice. To consider man guilty by nature is a contradiction in terms.”

On the symbol of the Cross:
“[A]ccording to the Christian mythology, [Jesus] died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice.”

On faith:
“Faith as such is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. … [A]s philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very – how should I say it – dangerous or malevolent base: on the grounds of faith.”

Let’s just say I went home and eagerly read the entire interview. It served as my entrée to Rand's ideas on a variety of sublime subjects – on reason and faith, selfishness and self-sacrifice, the proper foundation for love, the importance of sex in man’s life, the proper role of government, the individual versus the collective – and it had me savoring much more. And what better book of hers for me to start with than The Fountainhead? Actually, when I finally sat down to read it, I think I picked up the copy that my sister read more than a decade prior.

Two distinct impressions endure from my initial reading of The Fountainhead. First, I underlined, in agreement with, the words of Ellsworth Toohey, who I would later learn is the novel’s villain. I had faith in his professed ideals about self-sacrifice and what some now call “social justice.” But – and this is a big, life-changing “but” – there was also the novel’s main character and hero, Howard Roark, the individualist, innovative architect whose quotes I remembered from Mentzer’s articles. Roark was, hands down, unlike any character I had come across in any work of literature I had read, from Othello to A Tale of Two Cities to The Brothers Karamazov to East of Eden to In Cold Blood.

This early passage in the novel, as Roark is still being introduced to the reader, struck me: “People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring at him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people. Howard Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.”

Howard Roark captivated me. And what I found most fascinating, from the start of the novel to its end, was his supreme confidence and his unconcern for what others thought of him, a characteristic captured best by his clipped, self-assured manner of speaking:

Toohey: “Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”

Roark: “But I don’t think of you.”

To put it simply, Roark was cool. As I read the novel, which made scant mention of his childhood, and certainly after I completed it, there was one question that lingered: How did he get that way?

I absolutely needed to know. And I knew at least this much: the answer was to be found in learning more about the philosophy of the author who created him. After I had put off reading The Fountainhead for many years, I then took all the time I could to read Ayn Rand’s many novels and non-fiction books, to learn and put into action the ideas that shaped Roark’s character.

My quest started with The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand’s provocatively titled non-fiction book that lays out her radical ethics of rational selfishness. After that, I turned to her most important work, Atlas Shrugged, an epic novel with a lengthy speech near the end that broadly summarizes her fundamental philosophy. I still didn't want to admit it then, stuck as I still was to my subjectivist-liberal sensibilites then, but I was hooked.

I soon read all of Ayn Rand’s books, putting off until last Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, because I didn’t want to believe that that exploitive economic system could be good. But I knew I was discovering a radically different but logical way of viewing the world. On a personal scale, her philosophy was one that, slowly but surely, with some early faltering and many pains along the way, helped me to develop my self-esteem, heighten my happiness and strengthen my pride.

I sometimes ask where I might be today if that painting (by Ayn Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor) on the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead hadn’t caught my preteen eye on that summer day? I don’t know, and sometimes I’m afraid to entertain such thoughts. But I undoubtedly discovered the philosophy just in the nick of time, just before it probably became too late for me to expect to make any real, fundamental changes to my troubled character and life.

And for that, I will forever be indebted to Ayn Rand, and this commentary is one of my many payments to her good name.

Movie Review: Atlas Shrugged

2011-04-16T04:07:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

The Atlas Shrugged movie is a shell of the novel.

  The scripted dialogue was too off-base to allow me to excuse it as the best we can expect, given the state of our corrupt (moving-making) culture. It should have and could have been better, especially since this was as an independent film. Moreover, there was virtually no explicitly stated philosophy, except for a passing comment here or there (I think Dagny uttered the words: “stupid altruists,” which sums up perfectly my two points here).  

And except for an opening montage about the terrible state of the nation/world, the movie throughout failed miserably to project that a national collapse is looming.  

Of all the miscast characters, Francisco was the worst — my sister summed it up best when she commented that he looked like a Mexican drug dealer (think Al Pacino as Scarface — not the character you want his appearance to project). The acting was too often flat; the actors failed to capture the spirit of their characters. But given their script, you can half excuse them. The actor who played Rearden was probably the best. He did a good but not a great job.  

Yes, the movie had some good moments, such as when Rearden is offered to sell his innovative metal to the government and he rejects the bribe, insisting, when asked why not, “Because it’s mine," and when earlier he shows no care about the "public perception" of him and admits that his only goal is "to make money." All good. But those moments seemed too few and far between, including the love scene between Rearden and Dagny, which came and went in a flash. (I hated that he prefaced their sex with: “I want to kiss you.” I can’t believe that line, in that moment, is in the novel.) Also, the visuals were sometimes spectacular, especially the trains riding through the Colorado landscape. But that’s the most excited I can get about this movie.   

It was a not terrible, and I would recommend that you see it if you are a fan of the book. And to those who have not yet read it, I think it will give you just enough to pique your curiosity to finally pick it up to find out what it's really all about. The shell of a great novel is there, and that’s a much better shell than most novels can provide. But I’ll chalk this one up as another example of a movie that falls far short of living up to the novel, and just hope that the filmmakers do a much better work with parts 2 and 3. In the meantime, go read the novel!

Bridge Renaming Ceremony Attracts Hundreds

2011-03-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

They honored Michael Valente, Long Beach's only Medal of Honor recipient, at City Hall on March 25.

By JOSEPH KELLARD

Ralph Madalena wrote one letter last spring and that was all it took.

Madalena requested the renaming of the Nassau County-owned Long Beach Bridge in honor of his grandfather, World War I veteran Michael Valente, and mailed the letter to County Executive Ed Mangano and County Legislator Denise Ford, as well as other government officials and local veterans groups.

On Friday, less than a year later, Long Beach City Hall played host to the official bridge re-naming ceremony, with hundreds of people packed into the sixth-floor chambers, after the County Legislature last July voted unanimously to rename the bridge to Michael Valente Memorial Bridge.

“Many cultures believe that you never die, so long as you are remembered, and people like my grandfather live on,” said Madalena with his wife, Francesca Capitano, a former Long Beach City Council member, and his daughter, Katherine Madalena, by his side.

Private Valente, an infantryman, rescued his regiment from disaster in France on Sept. 29, 1918, and for his heroic acts he became Long Beach's lone recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor — the highest award for valor given to a member of the U.S. Armed Forces for actions against an enemy force. More than 3,440 medals have been awarded since its inception in 1861.

Friday’s ceremony featured several speakers, including former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato, Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg and Long Beach City Manager Charles Theofan, as well as Joe Sciame, chairman of Conference of Presidents, David Laskin, author of the book The Long Way Home, which features a passage on Valente, and Stella Grillo from the New York State Order Sons of Italy in America. Everyone from local to national veterans groups to Long Beach students to Valente’s family, who travelled from as far as Florida to California, attended the morning event.

The formal ceremony for the renaming was originally planned for Sept. 29, a date the city council designated Michael Valente Day in Long Beach in 2008. It was postponed to March 25, which is designated Medal of Honor Day nationwide. Ford was instrumental in spearheading and organizing the event.

“He put himself in great danger to save so many,” Ford said about Valente in her opening remarks.

The legislator and other speakers, some of who were friends with Valente, remembered and honored a man whose courageous acts came when his regiment, Company D of the 107th Infantry, was suffering heavy casualties during operations against German forces at the Hindenburg line near Ronssoy, France. Alongside a fellow soldier, Valente rushed forward through intense machine gun fire directly on an enemy nest, killing two gunners and capturing five enemy soldiers.

Discovering another machine gun nest nearby that rained heavy fire on American forces, Valente and his companion charged it, killed the gunner, jumped into the enemy trench, killed two more soldiers and captured 21 others. Valente's actions represent the first penetration of the Hindenburg line, Madalena said.

Nearly 11 years later to the day, on Sept. 27, 1929, President Herbert Hoover decorated Valente, then a retired sergeant, with the medal in Washington. "It's the proudest moment of my life," Valente said, according to a New York Times account dated the day after.

On Friday, Sciame, who chairs an Italian organization, said it was not just a proud day for his fellow Americans of Italian heritage, but also for the children of Long Beach.

“Every time they go over that bridge, they’re going to see the name of a man who … came to this country, worked hard, fought in a war, as many of us have done, but he was a hero. And so, I say Michael Valente was a positive role model who we should emulate, refer to and study him, and let’s get his name in the history books.”

From Italy to France to the Long Beach Boardwalk

Valente emigrated from his native Italy to Ogdensburg, N.Y., in 1915, and three years later he entered Company D of the New York National Guard, which was later incorporated into the 27th Division. In May of 1918, he was deployed to France to fight on the front lines.

After the war, Valente married Margareta Marchello and moved to her hometown, Newark, N.J., before the couple settled in Long Beach around 1919, eventually buying a home on West Walnut Street where they raised three children. Valente was a contractor and real estate agent who built houses in Long Beach, but he eventually gave up the business to work as the city marshal at City Hall.

“When I look back at Michael Valente, I remember this giant of a man,” Weisenberg said about the veteran who stood 6 feet tall with blond hair, blue eyes and a barrel chest. “… He was like a John Wayne, only quiet. He was giving. He was loving. He was a model.”

After Valente retired in 1965, he greeted people at La Serenata, a restaurant at the original Long Beach Library, now the site of Sutton Place on West Park Avenue. Among the local veterans groups, Valente was most active in the VFW Post. He was always active, particularly in his garden, and he rode his bike on the boardwalk regularly right up until his final years. Valente died in 1976 at age 80.

The city named one of its senior apartments, on National Boulevard near City Hall, after Valente, as did the Sons of Italy lodge he attended.

City Manager Charles Theofan asked the audience not to lose sight of the symbolism of a bridge.

“A bridge takes us to another place,” he said. “Let us hope that one day mankind will take us to a better place, where peace between nations will rule the day.”

There's No Denying, State and Science Don't Mix

2011-02-28T19:32:00.000-08:00

In "Fact-Free Science," Judith Warner of the New York Times praises President Obama’s request for budgetary increases for scientific research, particularly of “alternative energy,” but she then goes on to decry the so-called “politicization of science” of those pesky global warming “deniers.”

But what is government financing of scientific research if not the marriage of science and state, that is, the politicization of science? Government dollars are political dollars, and their injection into science, ultimately, is the injection of those whose political ideology rules the day. This is the corruption of science.

There’s much more not to like about this Time’s piece, particularly in that Warner tries to paint so-called global warming “deniers” (who are akin to Holocaust deniers) as taking a page from leftists of decades past, who explicitly denied reality’s existence as a way to undercut the very idea of scientific truth. But the reality Warner denies is that leftists still do this, that is, their global warming/climate change scaremongering entirely rest on those corrupt underlying premises that deny reality and thus (scientific) truths.

For now, let’s just stick to the idea that there should and must be a wall of separation between science and state. To deny that truth is to invite the corruption that makes up the state of climate science.

Russia's Slide Back into Statism Rolls On

2011-01-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

By Joseph Kellard

Surprisingly, the New York Times reports, as objectively as it can, on a successful oil businessman whose life, property and riches an authoritarian government — i.e., Putin’s Russia, has destroyed. The article, “Guilty Verdict for a Tycoon, and Russia,” is a great snapshot of how this outcome for Mikhail Khodorkovsky — “who had built and presided over Yukos, the biggest and best-run company in the country” —is the result of a government run primarily by arbitrary laws/regulations, political favors and pull and, of course, a complete disregard for the rights of man.

“Even since the Yukos affair, corrupt Russian politicians and businessmen have routinely used arbitrary laws and regulations to grab assets that didn’t belong to them. Royal Dutch Shell was the majority partner in a group that included the state-owned monopoly Gazprom to develop a giant oil and natural gas field. Suddenly, in 2006, it ran into severe environmental and regulatory problems — problems that disappeared as soon as Shell ceded majority ownership to Gazprom.”

Book on Columbus Has Lessons on Historical Evaluation

2010-10-11T03:09:00.000-07:00

I learned so much about how to interpret history just from reading Thomas Bowden’s book on Columbus and his multiculturalists critiques, those haters of all things Western Civilization, which I first picked up during my early years in Objectivism.

I learned how to evaluate an historical figure according to the context of his time, and by means of what is most historically essential and significant about such figures, to name just a couple of the most important lessons I culled from “The Enemies of Christopher Columbus.” I learned that just as there is an objective method of evaluating science, so, too, is there one for evaluating history — and, really, everything else.

Sure, buy this book if you’re interested in learning more about how to objectively evaluation the many unjust attacks against Columbus and his successors in the Americas — e.g. he didn’t really “discover” America, Europeans “stole” the land from the natives, Columbus and the Europeans were unprecedentedly brutal to the Indians — and why calling them “Native Americans” is a misnomer. But I recommended it even more as a great book to learn the method of thinking needed to objectively evaluate historical figures in general. In other words, it provides the opposite of what most people are taught from kindergarten to college.

Why Communists Have Largely Escaped Justice

2010-10-06T03:44:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

While it's good to see that some mass murdering communists are finally being brought to (some) justice, the fact is that communism and its practitioners will continue to fade into history relatively unscathed. The author of this City Journal article makes a few good points, but he falls short on others.

He is right, for example, to point out that the Western media writes as if the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was just some murderous gang that happened to be in power at the time, and not what they in fact were: a group ideologically driven by communism. (I recently pointed to a New York Times article and five-minute video on these Cambodian tribunals, both of which never used the words "communist" or “communism” to describe the Khmer Rouge.)

I think the author falls short, however, when describing why Communists have never been brought to justice until now. He writes that there are two reasons:

“First, Communism enjoys a kind of ideological immunity because it claims to be on the side of progress. Second, Communists remain in power in Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Havana. And in areas where they've lost power--as in the former Soviet Union--the Communists arranged their own immunity by converting themselves into social democrats, businessmen, or nationalist leaders.”

His points are valid but not fundamental. He’s right that communism enjoys ideological immunity, but it’s not primarily because communists claimed to be on the side of progress. It’s because of the morality communist champion -- which is essentially a secularization of Christianity.

While Christians through the ages told men to sacrifice themselves to God and his self-appointed representatives on earth, the Communists told men to drop God and sacrifice for your fellow men, particularly the mother country and the state (their self-appointed representatives). Now, Nazism preached the same ideology, and that’s why the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes rose to power at the same time. But Nazism (which stands for National *Socialism,* with Germany as the homeland of socialism/communism) put an explicitly racial bent on their ideology, while the communists mainly championed the proletariat or social classes (although that’s not to say that communists were not tribalists-racists, too, they were).

Nazism is considered the greater evil, or unfortunately to many people the only evil, because it was explicitly racists, whereas, the believe, communism was merely trying to make society more “equal” between “the rich” and the poor. Nothing wrong with that, even if tens of millions had to be slaughtered in the process, right? Communism is noble in theory; it was just that the wrong people got in power and corrupted it.

That’s the standard line that you’ll hear from communism’s apologists. But the reality is communism was evil in practice because it is evil in theory — especially it’s altruistic morality that preaches self-sacrifice as the moral good.

This is what people like the author of this article must come to understand, otherwise communism will always be looked at as a non- or lesser evil in comparison to Nazism. In reality, they are ideological twins and their practice in reality led to the same results: mass murder (although communists slaughtered many, many more innocents).

Let Them Know

2010-08-03T03:21:00.000-07:00

One form of activism is to take the initiative to contact prominent people or publications to make them aware of Objectivism and Objectivists, particularly if the Ayn Rand devotee has accomplished something of note. I read a review of two new books on Norman Podhoretz and the neoconservative movement in the New York Times book review last Sunday. When I’d read a certain sentence, I immediately decided to write to the Times to let them know about another new book about the neocons. No matter if the Times reviews the book that I suggests, I know I’ll have achieved my other purpose in writing to the nation’s most prominent newspaper: letting its editors know that Objectivists are writing serious books on important topics.

To the New York Times:

This is not a letter for publication, but rather it is a suggestion for your Sunday book review. In his review of two books on Norman Podhoretz and the neoconservatives “Turning Right,” (Aug. 1, 2010), Damon Linker writes about the book “Running Commentary,” “The result is the best book to date about neoconservatism …”

I beg to differ. The new book “Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea,” by C. Bradley Thompson, a political science professor at Clemson University, and Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, deserves this praise instead.

What makes their book original and the most insightful on this subject, and thus worthy of a review, is that Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brook evaluate this intellectual and political movement from a thoroughly new perspective, one gaining more ground and support as sales of “Atlas Shrugged” soar during these economically and politically distressing times: Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. If nothing else, their book draws clear and important distinctions between Objectivism and conservatism, two “-isms” that some people mistakenly or purposely lump together.

What other authors on this subject could demonstrate and come to the convincing conclusion that neoconservatism is actually a form of anti-Americanism – a rejection of the founding principles of this nation? That alone should intrigue you’re reviewers enough to read this serious, well-reasoned book. Otherwise, they should discover why Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic has already called this book a must-read.

I call it a must-review.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, NY

Identifying Our Enemies

2010-08-02T17:26:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

While the Obama administration tries to eliminate any mention of Islam in connection to that religion’s faithful who, through words and force, are working to destroy the United States, Israel and other Western nations, there are individuals who are doing the opposite by clarifying certain crucial terms and issues.

That is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of “Infidel” and “Nomad,” accomplishes in this 2007 interview in which she rejects the term “war on terrorism” as inaccurate.

“It’s not a war on terror, it’s a war on Islam,” she says. “… The United States was attacked on the 11th of September in the name of Islam.”

This is true, and to name it otherwise is to deflect the blame for this war where it properly belongs, on its Islamic initiators and aggressors. “Terrorism” is merely an action, in particular a tactic, and actions are derived from people who initiate them. You wage a war against particular people, not their actions or tactics. So who are committing the terrorist acts? What motivates them?

In this war, it is the people most faithful to Islam. Ms. Ali is right to say that the Muslims who flew planes into the Twin Towers did so based on a conviction, that their attacks were ideologically motivated, no different than the communists and Nazis. In short, she identifies what the Obama administration wants to whitewash: that the terrorists act on particular ideology: Islam.

Yet this identification is not as precise as it should be, and thankfully Ms. Ali understands this issue and takes it an important step further. She appears uneasy with the term “war on Islam,” but not necessarily because it is still imprecise to say one is waging a war on a religion. Rather, she understands that this is an imprecise perspective from which to name the war.

Wars are started by aggressors, those who initiate force. The aggressors in this war are those faithful to Islam, who initiated this war, decades prior to 9/11, specifically on the West – particularly the people who most represent the core Western values that they adamantly oppose: reason, individualism and freedom. Properly described, this war is the Islamic radicals’ war on the West. And Ms. Ali shows that she understands this fact when she says: “It isn’t a war that was declared on Islam, but it is a declaration of war in the name of Islam on civil society and all the freedoms that we believe in.”

The Obama administration – just like the Bush administration before it but on a greater scale – evades these important facts. Meanwhile, certain defeatists still spout perhaps the weakest charges against the so-called war on terrorism, that is, that we can’t know who our are enemies are because they don’t wear uniforms, like the Nazis did during World War II. But think how much worse it is when our leaders fear even to name the ideology that motivates these non-uniformed Islamic aggressors? If we ever expect to destroy our Islamic enemies enough to have their followers permanently cease their aggression against us – and we’ve known for decades that our main enemy is the mullahs ruling in Iran --then we must, as a first crucial step, precisely name our enemy and the ideology that defines them.

Thankfully, we have individuals like Ms. Ali who are brave enough to identify our ideological enemies.

Letter on Environmentalism's Doomsday Predictions

2010-07-29T02:22:00.000-07:00

I wrote this letter in response to this column in today’s New York Times. Thanks to OEditors Paul Hsieh and Amit Ghate for their edits that improved my letter. Here's hoping it gets published!

To the Editor:

(Re: “The Right and the Climate,” by Ross Douthat, July 25, 2010)

Overpopulation and worldwide famine weren't the only 1970's-era doomsday predictions that never came true. Environmentalists also falsely predicted catastrophic man-made “global cooling.” The so-called consensus among them then was that industrial man was driving the planet toward another cataclysmic Ice Age.

However, as that cooling cycle naturally gave way to a warming one, the greens switched the alarm to “global warming.” Now, as that cycle has started to trend back toward a cooling earth, they’ve again cooked up yet another scenario, this time the ambiguous, all-purpose “climate change.”

Those who are merely skeptical of the environmentalists’ doomsday scenarios should call their methodology for what it truly is: pseudo-science.

Joseph Kellard

Communism's Nuremberg Trials?

2010-07-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

Finally, after 1.7 million Cambodians were slaughtered under Khmer Rouge more than 30 years ago, some members of that communist regime are being brought to justice. Communism has never had its Nuremberg Trials – instead some communists went on to become major political players in new governments after their regimes collapsed. Putin is the poster boy.

Perhaps these Cambodian tribunals we lead to others like them, but I doubt it – and that’s primarily because people still hold to the faith that communism was noble in theory (that is, that sacrifice to the group, especially the wealthy to the poor, is good) but failed in practice (but only because those who practiced it didn’t do it right).

In a small way, this New York Time’s article only exacerbates all these evasions. You’d never know from this article or the nearly eight-minute video that accompanies it that Khmer Rouge was communist — the word is nowhere to be found or heard.

* This post was edited from its original.

And Now The Payoff

2010-07-19T19:14:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

I got a check in the mail today. It came just a few days after I got my hands on the summer issue of The Objective Standard, a quarterly publication for an intellectually curious general audience that analyzes political and cultural issues from Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. The check was for a book review I wrote that was printed in that same issue.

My review of John Eisenberg’s “That First Season,” a book about Vince Lombardi’s rookie year coaching the Green Bay Packers, was my first publication in an established, respected outlet — one that I know has high standards. On top of this, later this year, my letter to another football great, Dan Marino, will be printed in a high school textbook published by Pearson Education. I expect a check for this notch on my resume sometime in November.

While it’s certainly gratifying getting money for my work, what’s most important in these two instances is that my writing will reach a wider audience. Why is this important? Well, it means my ideas are reaching and potentially influencing more people. And outside of the absolute selfish joy I get from writing alone, this is the most important goal of my writing. It means I’m introducing more people to the ideas that I think are true, have shaped my life for the better and hopefully more of the world that I live in.

I’m immensely grateful, mainly to myself and those who have recognized my value, that my countless hours, days and years of writing have paid off enough to allow me to make my living at what I love to do. I’ve earned my keep as a journalist now for the past decade, and I’ve greatly enjoyed this line of work. But while I’ve come across and written stories about people that have helped to convey my sense of life and broader philosophy through these subjects, since in some of their qualities they have reflected both, more often journalism is far from the best vehicle to promote your worldview.

If I had my way, I would make my living as an Objectivist commentator, writing my opinions, and thus conveying my idea, on many important issues of the day. I’d also like to go on to write a few non-fiction books. Until then, I’ll stick with journalism to keep earning my keep, while on the side I will continue to write in other mediums as a way to promote my worldview, whether through essays in Objectivist publications, opinion pieces in non-Objectivists newspapers and website, and books.

I recently completed a 6,000 word essay on the fundamental ideas of Christianity and Catholicism, and how I believe these have played a fundamental role in the Catholic Church’s ongoing sex scandals. Again, what’s most important is the great pleasure and satisfaction I get from writing such a thought-provoking piece, and those emotions will turn to joy if my essay is published and thus read more widely than it otherwise would be on this blog or similar, limited outlets. I believe that wider, general audience desperately needs to know my ideas on this issue, and I expect that my ideas would then have an impact in shaping my world for the better, even if only on a small scale. Ultimately, it would mean a better world for me and the people I value to live in. And, who knows, this issue may become the subject of one of the books I would like to write one day, thereby gaining a potentially larger audience and impact. Lord knows the world needs such a book.

For now, though, I want the momentum of my publishing success to continue. So even as I prepare for a new journalism job that’s taking up a lot of time and effort, I’m making the time and finding the effort to work on revising a poem about romantic love and sex that I believe has the potential for print in a reputable poetry publication. And this foray into poetry just might lead me back to writing short stories, a genre that, in part, is where my writing began as a teenager.

Here’s the bottom line: I set out at a young age to become a professional and published writer, and those goals have become, slowly but surely, a reality.

The Boss Is Dead: Long Live the Yankees!

2010-07-13T17:29:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

“Breathing is first, winning is second,” New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner once said.

That comment captures the essence of Steinbrenner, who died of a heart attack today at 80. If you want to know why the Yankees have become the most successful sports franchise in the world, it is that worship of winning, above all else, that explains it. It is what I and many others will and should remember most about the legendary and controversial owner.

“George never accepted second best,” said Mike Francesa, a sports radio host in New York. “And he always made it very clear he was going to demand performance. And when you have ownership that demands performance, you win. When you have ownership that’s complacent, you lose.”

That is the bottom line in professional sports, although many Yankees and Steinbrenner critics say that their success is due to another bottom line, the one that makes the Bombers the team that spend the most money on payroll each year. But Steinbrenner became the greatest owner in sports, not because of his bank account, but because of his will and efforts to win.

“He never stopped trying,” Steinbrenner once said his tombstone should read.

I became a Yankee fan when I was a young boy, a few years after Steinbrenner bought the team for $8 million in 1973. Within the span of a few years, he made the once proud and highly-successful franchise relevant again. New York won the American League pennant in 1976, followed by two World Series titles in 1977 and 1978.

Steinbrenner developed a reputation as a volatile owner, one who would stooped to sometimes petty, nasty behavior toward his players and managers. He fired and hired Billy Martin five times, and overall he changed managers more than 20 times. During the 1980s, his team went into a doldrums, and Steinbrenner was known as a meddling owner, which kept managers and players from wanting to wear the pinstripes. The lowest point came in 1990, when Steinbrenner was banned from baseball after he had paid a gambler to dig up controversial information about one of his players, Dave Winfield, in an effort to smear the slugger.

Nicknamed “The Boss,” Steinbrenner evolved into a larger-than-life figure whose fame went beyond sports, a persona that would come to be parodied on the hit comedy sitcom “Seinfeld.”

After his return to baseball in 1993, Steinbrenner mellowed, at least enough to take a more hands-off approach and allow his baseball personnel to make their own, independent decisions. The newer, more patient Steinbrenner was a reflection of another side to the man, one who is described as enormously caring and generous by players and others who knew him best. The result was four more World Series championships from 1996 to 2000.

While the Yankees had already been the most successful franchise in sports long before Steinbrenner bought the team, with 20 championship banners waving in their famed stadium, he took the team to a new level of success in the modern era. Steinbrenner is capitalist who made the Yankees into a worldwide brand with an estimated worth today of $3 billion. The YES Network that he created in 2002 has played a large part in that success, and today the team draws 4 million fans to Yankees Stadium.

“Later on, he understood the new economics of baseball better than anybody else,” said Franseca, whose radio show is aired on Yes, “and he’s made it work with the network, with the branding of the team, with every move he’s made.”

The critics relish any opportunity to say that the Yankees’ success is due to all the money they spend. The Yankees did just that in 2009 and won another World Series. But they also spent the most money of any team for eight years prior but never won a championship. True, they made it to the playoffs all but one year, including two World Series, and there is no doubt that spending the most money puts a team in the position to win. But there are other significant factors involved that make up a championship team, one of which includes having the right players come together to play as a winning team, superstars or not. But, above all else, the will to win has to undergird it all. This is what the Yankees, through good times and bad, have always had under Steinbrenner.

“George was not in it for the money,” Franseca said. “I know that sounds crazy … George was in this because he loved the game, he loved the competitiveness, and he loved the brand and he wanted to win, first and foremost he wanted to win.”

Other baseball owners are as wealthy as or wealthier than Steinbrenner, but he knew that in order to get results and to make even more money, you must spend and invest money – and to do so wisely. And along with that came Steinbrenner’s famous will to win.

In remembering The Boss today, Derek Jeter, who has won five World Series with the Yankees since he started playing shortstop for the team in 1996, said: “Everyone knows how tough he was … But you understood where it came from. He wanted to win, and he expected perfection.”

Letter on Spending

2010-07-12T03:10:00.000-07:00

This is an email I dashed off and sent this morning to a columnist at the New York Observer, for his column “Show Us the Money,” in the July 12, 2010 issue.

To Joe Conason:

Government spending as a means to economic recovery is horrible, rights-violating economics.

The myth that Franklin Roosevelt’s spending during the Great Depression lifted this nation out of that economic catastrophe is well documented in books such as “New Deal or Raw Deal” by Burton Fulsom Jr. Moreover, Obama’s so-called “stimulus” plan has done nothing of substance, and the canard that it saved this nation from sinking into a depression evades the fact that all that money must be paid for one day -- which will further depress the economy and prevent it from growing as it otherwise would under a free, capitalist economy.

That some poll finds a substantial majority of people favor more spending than less just means that most favor bureaucrats and politicians violating their individual rights to their property. Far from being as inevitable as death, taxation is theft and thus a massive violation of every individual’s right to keep his own money and spend it as he sees fit.

Politicians and their constituents who claim some need or some “right” to something -- such as medical care, housing, education -- have no right to these values on anyone’s dime. Those who produce, both rich and poor, have a moral and thus a political right to keep what they have earned, what is in fact theirs, and no ohter individual has any moral claim on it. One individual’s need is not a claim on any other individual’s life and property.

Those who want the government to loot other people’s earnings to spend it on their alleged “rights” to housing, medical care, education and other values had better look to voluntary charity to fulfill their needs, or, better yet, their own productive abilities, if they so chose to employ them.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow NY

Four New Books I'm Reading

2010-07-11T05:22:00.001-07:00
I mistakenly posted my latest blog post "Four New Books I'm Reading" to my journalism blog. Go read it at: http://bit.ly/cA2lIb

Letter to Dan Marino to be Published in Textbook

2010-05-13T02:15:00.000-07:00

Pearson Education, which I’m told is one of the largest textbook publishers in the United States, bought this letter that I wrote five years ago, “An Open Letter to Dan Marino,” and plans to publish it in an upcoming textbook for high school freshmen. As I understand it, the letter will be included in a chapter with the theme “choices writers make.”

~ Joseph Kellard

Dan Marino, who retired as the most productive quarterback in National Football League history, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 2005. I wrote the following letter to the football legend prior to the August 2 induction ceremony.

“[T]the sight of an achievement [is] the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.” ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Dear Dan Marino,

Congratulations on your induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I thought this momentous occasion was the best time to tell you that you are among a select few people who have had a particularly positive influence on me. These few include my mother, who sparked in me a love for knowledge, Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance man devoted to an impassioned pursuit to know the world, and novelist Ayn Rand, a philosopher who discovered the knowledge necessary to achieve success and happiness in life.

Unlike most professions, professional sports put a spotlight on their participants for everyone to see, and athletics (particularly football, my favorite sport) illustrate, in a condensed, intensely exciting fashion, the virtues and values necessary for success in any field. Further, sport is one of the few fields left in our society in which achievement, excellence and even perfection are widely pursued and celebrated. Sports fans can routinely observe all of these qualities displayed in concrete action and be inspired to apply them to their own lives and work.

So I dismiss the detractors who deride sport as “just a game,” and who say “it contributes nothing to society.” Instead, I liken the careers of some athletes to works of art, such as novels or movies that project what men should and can be. At a certain level, an elite athlete stands as a real-life fictional hero, like a Roy Hobbes in The Natural. This is what your Hall of Fame career means to me. By faithfully following your play with the Miami Dolphins (my favorite team), I was offered the sight of a man who projected, game in and game out for 17 years, a host of exemplary virtues and values.

Your top value was to win every game and, ultimately, a championship. That this singleness of purpose was never subordinated to any other goal was made clear by your disappointed demeanor after you had tied or broken NFL career quarterback records in games the Dolphins nevertheless lost. Your brash confidence was an outgrowth of your ability to throw a football with unprecedented laser speed and pinpoint accuracy. This competence fueled your unshakable belief that at any point in a game you could put your team on your shoulders and singlehandedly command a victory. Some of the most memorable games in which these qualities shinned were your defeat of the undefeated Bears in 1985, your five touchdown passes against the Patriots on your return from a season-ending Achilles injury in 1994, and the come-from-behind victory on your fake-spike play against the Jets later that year.

And it was the hope that you gave to your fans — the hope that even with mere seconds left on the clock you could still stage a comeback (something you did in a near record number of games) — that was the most inspirational part of your career. Even in games the Dolphins were almost certain to lose, you still continued to play your heart out. You knew no other way to play. And you would undoubtedly have won many such games if your teammates had suddenly exhibited just half of your exemplary confidence, competence and will to win.

That is why it is myopic and unjust that some people highlight that you never won a Super Bowl. In actually, it was primarily the Dolphins teams around you that never won. When the greatest pure passer, the most productive quarterback, and one of the fiercest competitors in NFL history is the leader of a team, the fault for never having won a championship must lie elsewhere.

Add to all the above your study of the game, particularly of the opposing defenses that you famously picked apart, and the thought with which you approached your craft. Your intelligence — along with your considerable mental and physical toughness that allowed you to play in an outstanding 145 consecutive games for 17 seasons — are the keys to why you are the quarterback with the second most victories ever.

Considering all that you had to endure around you, it’s no wonder you became a fiery leader. Your leadership was captured best by that trademark piercing stare you darted at your teammates who failed to give their all as you always did. That stare said everything about your approach to football: take your work intensely seriously and expect the same in others.

And I learned form an interview with your son, Dan Jr., on Inside the NFL, that your leadership on the field carried over into your everyday life. He stressed that instead of telling him what the right things to do are, you mainly taught by example. And Dan Jr., an aspiring actor, also said something that reveals that you taught him a crucial lesson. “I don’t play a lot of sports,” he said. “But my father doesn’t really care about that. What he cares about is that you work really hard at what you love to do. And I really learned that from him.”

This reminds me of a scene from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, when Howard Roark, a heroic, innovative architect, sits on a boulder overlooking a valley dotted with summer resort homes that he created. A boy on a bike comes across this view and is awed by Roark’s achievement. The scene ends with this inspiring passage: “Roark looked after [the young man who headed down a path toward the houses below]. He had never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.”

I’m writing this letter because I want you to know that by offering me the sight of an outstanding athlete over his long career, you have played an important part in giving me the inspiration to pursue a lifetime of values. A poor student in school who in early adulthood had one foot on a road to self-destruction, I was able to turn my life around to the point where I have both feet firmly planted on a path to self-fulfillment. Today, I’m pursuing my passion, a writing career, with the seriousness, singleness of purpose and love of work that, in part, your career illustrated is desirable and possible and can bring success and happiness to a person’s life.

In closing, Dan Marino, I simply want to say to you what the boy on the bike told Roark before he headed toward his valley of homes: “Thank you.”

Joseph Kellard

* This letter was edited moderately from its original version.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and freelance writer. To read more of Mr. Kellard’s work, visit his commentary blog The American Individualist at theamericanindividualist.blogspot.com, and his journalism blog at josephkellard.blogspot.com.

Joy

2010-05-02T19:07:00.000-07:00
Sculptor: Sam Axton

By Joseph Kellard

When you first encounter Sam Axton's bronze maquette sculpture "Joy," you are struck immediately by this beautiful woman’s lively mobility. Joy’s swinging arm and kicked-back leg evoke this animation, but it is the rousing sweep of her hair that lends it a distinct spice. Straight, layered and flowing, Joy's hair mirrors a bird’s wing in flight, streaming parallel along with her rearward-moving limbs to create the suggestion that she is poised to soar.

But if Joy’s hair were depicted differently, how might it alter this significant sensation? What if Mr. Axton opted instead to give Joy corkscrew hair, put her locks in a ponytail or allowed them to hang straight down or, worst of all, gave her with a short, pageboy cut? Clearly, this would have deflated her hint at flight.

Similarly, if he had left more mass on her otherwise accentuated slim figure, he would have destroyed her airy elegance. Her smooth skin, perky breasts and taught thighs and buttocks already emphasize her womanly youth, each complimenting her signature weightlessness. If Mr. Axton made Joy fat or bulky or even gave her just some athletic musculature, each frame would have robbed her of the lightness of being that is integral to the theme of this work.

To formulate that theme, we'll have to figure out what Joy is doing — what is her purpose?

First, we see that she's in the midst of sprinting, with her right leg striding forward. But where is she headed? Perhaps she's running from someone? If so, then why does she stretch her arm backward and hold her hand out as if reaching for something to grab? Is Joy in an athletic race, waiting for an imagined runner to pass her a baton?

If either scenario were plausible, though, Mr. Axton would have likely made Joy’s right foot or heel appear as if it were digging firmly into the ground. Instead, only the tips of her toes touch down, heightening her walking-on-clouds aura. Joy is not engaged in an intense relay race.

This is evidence further when we contemplate her relaxed, fearless face. Her eyes are wide and eager, her smile broad and effervescent, as if she's found something or, more likely, someone trailing her whom she admires or adores. This tells us that she’s reaching for someone’s hand, summoning this person to join her on her journey ahead.

Note also that Joy's right arm and hand are parallel to the ground, telling us that she seeks the hand of peer, an adult, not a child for whom she would otherwise have to reach down. More importantly, she rests her left hand on her chest. What do these details reveal and how do they integrate with what we've already come to discern about this sculpture? They are Joy's subtlest yet most telling features.

At first glance, her left hand seems to suggestively exclaim: "Do you mean me!," as if someone has made a claim about her. But observe that rather than point an accusatory finger at herself, her fingers are spread wide and evenly, touching ever so slightly but specifically on her left breast, as if her heart is aflutter — as if Joy is in love.

With this, we can come to our theme, which is that with her sweeping hair and a sprint about to go airborne, while she beams radiantly and sashays forward, Joy embodies the ideal that romantic love can energize and inspire us to travel more happily, spiritedly and lightly through life.

* Dianne Durante, author of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, offered me some valuable suggestions for this analysis.

Tea Party – A Year Later

2010-04-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

By Joseph Kellard

I dropped by the tea party at the Massapequa train station today, Tax Day, April 15, the same event that I reported on last year. This time, however, I took off my reporter’s hat and went with the sole purpose of passing out some Ayn Rand Samplers – a small book of excerpts from her novels and non-fiction – several of which I’d left in the trunk of my car after handing them out at an Independence Day tea part in Huntington last July 4. The crowd appeared to be less than half of what is was last April, but people were generally eager to accept my free book. In many of the Samplers, I inserted photocopies of a column I’d written about Ayn Rand and American patriotism, which I’d printed in my newspaper, along with some other Objectivist literature.

Anyway, there wasn’t much to this event other than concerned Americans brandishing sings along Sunrise Highway, soliciting supportive motorists to honk their horns. A few men were walking around amplifying their dissatisfaction with the Obama administration and Congress. Unfortunately, one man talked about the “illegal” immigrants that Obama wants to give amnesty to, and here I join with some other Objectivists who think that not only should he grant amnesty but he and all Americans should also apologize to them. Our immigration policies are disgraceful.

During the approximately 40 minutes I was there, I stopped and talked briefly to a few people. Most of those who I’d handed the Samplers to seemed to have at least heard of Ayn Rand, while others clearly knew her and seemed eager to finally get their hands on something she had written. These are all good signs.

I crossed paths with my childhood friend, Laura, who is now one of my Facebook friends, who told me that I had inspired her to read Atlas Shrugged, which she called “amazing.” That’s always satisfying to hear, since that’s my main purpose for attending these tea parties, one of which I spoke at last year.

At one point, a group of young people in a car, waiting at a red light, started to antagonize some of the peaceful people lining the sidewalk with sings and American and “Don’t tread on me” flags, as one young man held a photo of Obama out the window and started to yell them. And right before I left, as I was talking to my friend Laura, a young man wearing a red t-shirt bearing a Soviet hammer and sickle on it walked through the crowd, obviously looking to provoke a response. I left for home.

All in all, I was happy to take a few minutes on Tax Day to help spread the Objectivist word. The tea partiers, and particularly Americans in generally, desperately need to read and hear those words.

Did Students Heed My Career Advice?

2010-03-17T18:04:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

When I was editor of the Oceanside-Island Park Herald, I gave talks to students from fourth grade up to the high school level on Career Day. I eagerly agreed to talk to students about my career and to offer them advice that would have served me well when I was their age.

While I spoke briefly about my work as a journalist, I spent most of my talk emphasizing to students that they should choose a profession that they can enjoy and love. I believe a long-range, productive career is the cornerstone of self-confidence, pride and happiness, and that an individual can't fully achieve these values stuck in a job they don't like.

To get them to understand this fact, I asked them to imagine being stuck each day, every week, in a class they disliked, whether it's math or English or science. With my analogy, some students gave a knowing groan.

I told each class my own story to give them an example of someone finding a career they loved. When I was in grade school, I was a poor student with a mild form of dyslexia, so my biggest problems were with reading, writing and spelling. Knowing I loved sports, however, my parents bought me a subscription to Sports Illustrated, believing, correctly, that this would motivate me to read. Immersing myself in stories of my sports heroes, my reading proficiency soared.

Through my teen years, I expanded my reading to include encyclopedias and works by writers ranging from Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy to Hemingway, Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. I made lists of unfamiliar words and historical and mythological figures that had me reaching for my dictionaries and Britannica. During those years, I had become so fascinated with the many ways to use the English language that I began to write short stories and poems. I had decided I wanted to be a fiction writer.

My deeper purpose in telling students all of this was to get them to take my experiences as a guide for how to start thinking about their own potential careers and career choices. Specifically, I wanted them to consider some activities they enjoy, and to think about applying these to the seemingly countless career choices they have in this land of opportunity.

"Maybe you love animals and have always been intrigued by doctors," I explained to them, "so why not think of becoming a vet? Perhaps you like to talk a lot and enjoy athletics, so being a sports announcer might be your bag. Are you a numbers person? If so, maybe your calling is to teach math, be an accountant or work with statistics."

I made sure to tell them that I had left college to work at a well-paying, full-time "job" with a medical company. But within a few years I realized that this was not my field. I was bored and felt stuck, as if I were in a dreaded algebra class each day. But I noted that I never gave up on my writing and self-education, reading writers on subjects ranging from philosophy, history and art to politics, American culture and sports. I began to write some opinion columns that were published in a few semi-prominent newspapers, and this led me to try my hand at freelance reporting and, eventually, a career in journalism.

I also stressed to students that it's not enough to just dream about a particular career, but that they must take the necessary steps to attain their ideal. It's one thing to for someone to say "I want to write a novel," and another to have the motivation and commitment to invest the countless hours and enormous effort — researching information, striving to find the precise words and write perfect sentences, re-editing one draft after another — to become a published fiction writer.

When one fourth-grader told me that he would like to be the next Derek Jeter, I asked him if he played Little League and practiced baseball even during the winter. One girl told me she wanted to be a lawyer. I told her that, in part, she'll have to learn how to speak well to present her cases, and that she should take some public speaking classes when she gets to high school.

The last time I talked on Career Day, at Hegarty Elementary School in Island Park, when I left the classroom that day to head back to my office, I had hoped that at least a few students had learned a lesson that I didn't fully understand in my youth: Making a career choice is one of the most important decisions an individual will ever make — and is crucial to his or her happiness. If the students followed this advice, then they likely won't have to struggle unnecessarily for several years and through a string of dead-end jobs before finally finding a profession to be passionate about.

Are You Certain You’re an Atheist?

2010-03-06T19:16:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

When conversation about God comes up in good (or even bad) company, I, of course, tell people that I’m an atheist. Because religionists mistakenly believe that God created the universe and is the absolute moral authority, they tend to lump atheists together, recognizing no fundamental distinction between them. To them, atheism is a philosophy, a comprehensive way of viewing life and the word, if, that is, they think on that level at all. They’re blind to what atheism fundamentally is, a minor aspect of one branch of philosophy: metaphysics.

To take the conversation to the epistemological level, I make sure to tell people that an atheist is not merely someone who denies the existence of God, but is certain that he does not exist — that his believers have never presented any rational evidence for his existence.

Uttering that word, certain (or certainty), tends to jolt people, both religionists and atheists alike. Some of the faithful have told me that I can’t be certain of this. Who am I to be so brazen as to say that God certainly doesn’t exist? No non-believer can hold so absolute a position, when all absolutes derive from the word of God.

On the other side of the philosophical aisle are the subjectivist “atheists.” If there is something they don’t believe in at all, it’s not necessarily God, but rather absolutes and certainty. However, anything less than certainty on their part, in my philosophical view, is agnosticism, an epistemological position that leaves the door open for God’s possible existence. Not surprisingly, and with even a little probing, you’ll find that many self-professed atheists are just agnostics at heart — because with that organ they just feel that possibility. Anything’s possible, right?

So while I certainly don’t fundamentally define myself as an atheist – there’s much, much more to life and philosophy than God – when I do mention that I am a non-believer, I try to bring up this issue of certainty, which distinguishes my position. This gives religionists the sense that others can and do uphold absolutes — outside of God’s commandments. And the atheists wannabes sense that maybe they’re just mere skeptics, doubters of all things a truly confident person can claim to know for certain, including that God absolutely does not exist.

* I made a minor spelling correction to the original post.

The Virtue of … Objectivist “Proselytizing”

2010-03-05T16:47:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

All the recent talk on the Harry Binswanger List about the sales and recommendations of “The Virtue of Selfishness” reminds me of the only time I recall giving that book to a perfect stranger.

Several years ago, a Jehovah's Witness family in their Sunday best was making the rounds proselytizing door-to-door on my block. They, or some other indistinguishable family, would come around occasionally, maybe once a year, and on this particular day they sent a young girl, say 10-years-old, to knock on my door.

When I opened it and said hello, she handed me a small, thin black book of excerpted Scripture. When I accepted it, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head.

I told her to wait a minute, as I climbed the stairs to my room and grabbed a copy of "The Virtue of Selfishness." I returned to the door and handed it to her, while her parents remained standing on the sidewalk at the front gate. The girl took it, thanked me and walked away. I watched out my window as she looked at the cover and showed it to her parents as they strolled to my neighbor’s house.

I never saw that girl again, and for all I know the book went in the garbage when she got home, or in the gutter on the drive there. On the other hand, perhaps she kept the book and, when old enough to understand its brilliant content, read it and went on to read Ayn Rand’s other books. Dare I speculate that she’s an Objectivist today? Who knows.

But what I do know is that I was satisfied giving that young girl something she’d never get at her church: the opportunity to face a lifetime with self-esteem and happiness.

* I made minor grammatical and spelling changes to the original post.

The Selfish Figure Skater

2010-02-27T16:47:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Joannie Rochette is the Canadian figure skater who (I’m told) performed outstandingly in the Olympics last Tuesday, considering that two days before her mother, Therese -- whom she describes as her biggest fan, best friend and “the most critical person you could ever meet” -- died of a massive heart attack.

Occasionally, sports fans like me will hear a proud assertion of selfishness that is notable, and Rochette provided this when asked why she simply didn’t pack her bags and head home after he mother’s death. Rochette, who went on to skate in the women’s final and earned a bronze medal, said about her decision:

“‘I just went out there and did what my mother would have wanted me to do,’ a teary-eyed Rochette said after the woman’s final on Thursday, the first time she had spoken publicly since her mother died here [Vancouver] on Sunday. ‘I did this first of all for myself because my mother taught me to think of myself first. She always wanted me to be a strong person.’”

She thought of herself first!? How refreshingly selfish! Granted, an athlete in individualist sports such as figure skating, tennis or golf, as opposed to team sports like football, baseball or hockey, is more apt to get away with selfish statements -- especially when grieving. In team sports, however, athletes are routinely told “there’s no ‘I’ in team,” they’re praised for being a “selfless” teammates, and if they show signs of individualist behavior -- sometimes even if their actions help their team toward their common goal of winning -- they’re criticized for being “selfish.”

But winning is or should be any athlete’s primary goal, whether in individual or team sports, and his fans, whether they realize it or not, root for him to be as selfish as he can be in the pursuit of that goal. In sports, there’s no redistribution of points from the “haves” to the “have not.” As Michael Jordan replied when one of his coaches essentially accused him of selfishness because he singlehandedly took over and won a game: “There’s ‘I’ in win.”

I’m happy to hear that Rochette was strong enough to overcome her grief just enough to think of herself first, skate and win bronze. Three cheers for selfishness!

Letters on Tea Party and Founders & Religion

2010-02-17T03:32:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Below are two letters I wrote last night and revised and emailed this morning to the editors at The New York Times. One is a response to an article about the Tea Party movement, the other a reply to an article on the role religion played in the founding of America. I must thank OActivist editors Paul Hsieh and Amit Ghate, who made some valuable suggestions and edits that improved my letters. Here's hoping they both get published. Happy reading ...!

To the Editor:

(Re: “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right,” 2/16) The Tea Party movement is not about militia, libertarian or Timothy McVeigh-type anarchists. True, Tea Partiers are a hodgepodge, the best of whom rally loosely around the concept of liberty. Thus, their problem is something most Americans share: they lack a fundamental understanding of freedom.

Above all, they need intellectual leadership. Given the alarming growth of statism under the Bush-Obama administrations, both Republicans and Democrats are finally awaking to a long-developing threat. Disappointingly, the Tea Partiers' reaction has largely been on an emotional level, a sense that their individual sovereignty and rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are in danger. Unfortunately, they can’t translate that sense into a much-needed coherent philosophical or political stance.

Americans must form a more intellectual platform that champions individual rights. Until then, the Tea Party will be impotent to effect any substantive or lasting change toward liberty. In short, it needs a philosophical revolution.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow NY

To the Editor:
(Re: “How Christian Were The Founders?,” Sunday Magazine 2/14) Those who insist that America’s Founders established a nation based on Christianity drop historical context.

True, some Founders were Christians who made appeals to religion. But this was no different than their European predecessors throughout the religion-saturated Medieval and Middle ages who ruled over unfree Christian nations. What makes the Founders historically distinguishable is that they were products of the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, when religion and faith were seriously challenged, as encapsulated by Galileo’s life.

Many Founders, including Jefferson and Adams, were steeped in and heavily influenced by the works of Greek and Roman thinkers. The deists among them bravely questioned God and religion as the basis of a nation. Brooke Allen objectively lays out this intellectual revolution in her book “Moral Minority.”

The Founders knew enough to establish a nation that gave no religion any political authority, and aimed to keep it separate from the state.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow NY

* I made some grammatical changes to the original post.

Channeling Ted Kaczynski

2010-02-14T15:56:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

If you’re motivated to read, firsthand, what passes for intellectual leadership in America today, then I have a telling essay for you.

Before I first discovered Ayn Rand in the early 1990s, I used to read regularly “The Best American Essays,” an annual anthology of magazine essays. Once I started to read Miss Rand heavily, I lost interest in this publication — and now I know why. Recently I decided to buy the 2009 anthology, curious to see what it was that I once enjoyed about this series several years ago. Well, I’m six essays in (out of 22) and while none are enlightening, some are downright dreadful. The topper, so far, is an essay titled “Faustian Economics,” by Wendell Berry, a novelist, poet and essayist, which was originally published in Harper’s.

The essay perfectly exemplifies the “ideas” motivating the environmental movement. It centers on man’s alleged blindness to “limits,” both his and Earth’s. Rather than provide excerpts from this essay, I’d rather share some of the notes I took while reading it, which I’ve fleshed out here for clarity:

* The author makes no attempt to ground many of his claims. A rationalist?

* He primarily uses “limits” as a packaged deal to decry all that he hates about Technological/Industrial Man.

* He pushes environmentalism’s limited-resources orthodoxy: we’re all just rapacious consumers who, when we do produce, are just using up more and more of Earth’s resources that will inevitably run out…someday.

* He appeals to religion to give his environmentalist claims moral weight — primarily to condemn selfishness and greed.

* He essentially takes the position that too much knowledge is bad — we should know that there are limits and mistakenly believe we can be omniscient.

* Capitalism is a zerosum economic system, consequently money is a fixed (limited) pie and so the haves leave nothing for the have-nots.

* Those who don’t want to accept limits are those who don’t want to sacrifice to “anything whatever.”

* Men aren’t worth anything and don’t amount to anything — even if each man had two lives.

You may reach different, more insightful conclusions than I did. But, nevertheless, this is as near a naked hatred of selfishness, capitalism and (industrial-technology) man as you’ll find in a mainstream (supposed) intellectual publication.

* I made some minor grammatical changes to the original post. ~ JK

Environmentalists’ Claims Continue to Melt

2010-02-12T05:28:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

I learned from an Objectivist blogger that the Utah House of Representatives just passed a resolution that: "implies climate change science is a conspiracy, and urges the EPA to stop all carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs. Among other things, the resolution claims there is ‘a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome.’"

The Heartland Institute posted a brief report about the bill here, which leads to a link to a fuller report here.

You can also read the bill in full.

As the blogger pointed out, the government should have no involvement in scientific matters, including catastrophic global warming. But it's nevertheless a telling sign that a legislative body is actually coming out and voting against this scam that has become orthodoxy to many Americans and others. It's telling us that environmentalists' claims on this issue are continuing to melt.

Shooing Away Potential Fountainhead Fans

2010-02-05T19:47:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

I wrote and sent the following reply to a so-called book reviewer of "The Fountainhead" -- whose denigrating comments about the novel were posted on the website of Tehelka, described as India's Independent weekly news magazine.

To Samrat Chakrabarti:

In an effort to get your readers not to read certain books, among them my favorite novel “The Fountainhead," you write:

“Ayn Rand Memo to the young Indian — Ayn Rand is not a philosopher and The Fountainhead is not the philosophical El-dorado, in fact we are not sure there is one. People are not made of cardboard, a good argument needs rigour and philosophy begins with an acknowledgement both of the complex world we live in and the paradoxes of the human condition. Rape is not the same as passion, ambition is not the measure of man and an aggressive, no-holds-barred individualism as a personal philosophy is particularly attractive during years of heightened hormonal confusion.”

First, Objectivism offers inquiring minds a comprehensive philosophy, from metaphysics to ethics to esthetics. Your readers should read "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand," by Leonard Peikoff, to fully understand the absurdity of your claim. The discerning reader will understand why, when they come across life’s complexities and contradictions, that there can be and are answers and that there is, as Ayn Rand called Objectivism, "a philosophy for living on earth."

Moreover, the characters in her novels are anything but cardboard – Miss Rand sheds the deadening, mind-numbing details that naturalist writers employ in their novels to supposedly make them more "realistic," and instead focuses on the essentials aspects of the particular type of human being that she wanted to portrait -- and in the process her novels made some very perceptive and even innovative observations, such as the second-handedness of Peter Keating.

As to the alleged "rape" scene in The Fountainhead, you should point your readers to an excellent essay, "Understanding the 'rape' Scene in The Fountainhead," by Andrew Bernstein, in "Essays on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead,” which explains why Roark’s first sexual encounter with Dominique was anything but rape.

Lastly, I’ll address just the most important of your parting slights. It’s a slight that is best encapsulated by the person who read Miss Rand’s books in their youth and says: "I used to like Ayn Rand, but then I grew up." No, you gave up!

"The Fountainhead" was the first book that I ever read by Ayn Rand, back in my mid-20s, when I used to read a slew of novels by naturalist writers. By the end of the novel I was totally captivated by Roark -- and Ayn Rand and, later, her philosophy of Objectivism. I went on to read all of her books.

I can confidently say that reading the “The Fountainhead” started the long, roller-coaster ride process of changing around my troubled life for the better when I was still young. That’s primarily due to the fact that Miss Rand wasn’t a journalistic, naturalistic-type writer, but rather a romantic realist who created heroic characters as they could be and ought to be. If reading “The Fountainhead” had that profound impact on me, then it can do the same for the very readers you’re trying to shoo away from this great, philosophic, life-changing novel.

~ Joseph Kellard
East Meadow NY

A Vacation from Global Warming

2010-01-11T17:45:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

So here’s the Global Warmists’ latest evasion that they’re working feverishly to concoct: Those among them who acknowledge what is, in reality, the current, cyclical cooling trend are trying to paint it as a mere blip on the way to an Earth that will someday still fry. The Daily Mail reports:

“Could we be in for 30 years of global COOLING?”

Here's the key passage from this report:

”'The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.'”

“Many meteorologists have blamed the current freeze on 'Arctic oscillation' - a weather pattern in which areas of high pressure have pushed the warming jetstream away from Britain. They have insisted this temporary change will have no effect on long-term warming patterns.”

So to the Warmists the cooling trend is a "pause" or a "temporary" change (i.e., “climate change”) that will have no long-term impact on our Earth’s destiny … global warming. The mysticism from those who worship at the First Church of Global Warming just never ceases.

You Play to Win a Championship

2009-12-30T20:16:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Should the Indianapolis Colts have pulled quarterback Peyton Manning and their other starters in their game against the New York Jets, which in effect greatly diminished their chances to maintain their perfect, undefeated season? The Colts ended up losing the game they otherwise had a good shot to win. Here's my basic thoughts on the issue:

No regular season game, no matter if the team in question has already clinched a playoff spot or even the top seed in their division, is meaningless. If that were true, then there would be no debate about whether the Colts' coach should have pulled Manning & Co.

While it’s true that you should always play to win the game, this goal is subordinate to the fact that you primarily play for the top prize, the championship, the Super Bowl.

And if a coach deems that that goal requires giving his team less than its best chance to win, as the Colts coach did when he pulled the incomparable Manning for an inexperienced quarterback, then so be it. Even though you’ve greatly diminished your chance to win the game, you still give all your effort to win it.

This is recognition of the fact that not all games are of equal weight, that in certain (winning) circumstances, it’s not necessary to give all your effort in each and every game. You play to win, yes, but not at the price of jeopardizing the ultimate goal: a championship.

Some coaches allow their starters play throughout the season, no matter the circumstance, as the Patriots did two seasons ago when they had an unbeaten record and were chasing perfection. The Colts had that chance, too, this season, but unlike the 2007 Patriots they are opting not to pursue a perfect season. Instead, they are focusing on doing what they believe they need to do, and that is to win a championship. The Patriots had that goal to, and they played all their starters the whole year, and none got hurt—and then they lost in the Super Bowl to the Giants. Some members of that team, such as Rodney Harrison, said that the pressure of going undefeated definitely got to them.

What one sports radio personality here in New York said is that the teams that pursue perfection are pursuing immortality. Everyone who knows the game well knows that only one team has had a perfect season and went on to win the Super Bowl: the 1972 Miami Dolphins. They are an immortal team because of that record. And that is what teams like the 2007 Patriots were pursuing. But, remember, the goal is not to win immortality – that is, recognition in the eyes of others – but the satisfaction and pride of winning a championship, first and foremost. All else, including immortality, should be subordinate to this goal.

Ultimately, the goal is to win a championship, and sometimes within the context of a season that does not necessarily mean that you have to try your best or give your team its best chance to win every game. You should always play to win the game, but that doesn't mean that you have to give yourself the best chance to win every game, if doing so (i.e. keeping your irreplaceable players in the game) may jeopardize the top goal: winning a championship.

The mantra shouldn’t be: you play to win the game—because a single game is just a stepping stone among others toward the ultimate stone, the Super Bowl. You play to win a championship, and everything else must be subordinate to that goal.

Letter on (Christmas) "Consumerism" Printed in USA Today

2009-12-29T03:05:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

USA Today printed my letter about (Christmas) “consumerism” in Tuesday’s paper, entitling it “Buying is a virtue."

I responded to one of those interchangeable Christmastime opinion columns that have some good things to say about consumerism, but ultimately conclude that materialism is a path to being vacuous and the cure lies in religion. Hence the column’s title: "You can't buy the real gifts of Christmas."

I must thank OActivist Paul Hsieh for his suggestions and edit that improved my original draft. Anywhere, here is the printed version:

The perennial rants against Christmas consumerism fail to acknowledge man's highest virtue: production — the virtue that makes consumption possible, sustains his life and uplifts his spirit.

Productive individuals must exercise other virtuous behavior, particularly rationality, honesty, efficiency and love of hard work.When productive individuals buy cars, computers, iPhones and other material goods, they celebrate their highest virtues. And they develop well-earned self-esteem, happiness and pride.

In contrast, the stereotypical insatiable consumer is essentially a social conformist, motivated to keep up with the Joneses and who has never learned to appreciate the inseparable connection between productivity and virtue.

However, when that connection is made, consumerism is something to celebrate.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, N.Y.

Announcing Dr. Andrew Bernstein’s New Book “Capitalism Unbound”

2009-12-19T03:32:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Dr. Andrew Bernstein has published his latest book, “Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights.”

Here’s a description of the new book on Amazon.com:

“This book is a concise explanation of capitalism's moral and economic superiority to socialism, including America's current mixed-economy welfare state. This volume offers a focused, essentialized, and condensed argument ideal for the layman who admires capitalism but lacking a succinct, accessible explanation of its moral and economic virtues.”

I was on a hike in upstate New York with Dr. Bernstein and other Objectivists a few months ago and he’d mentioned then that this volume was an abridged version of his excellent book “The Capitalism Manifesto” -- only better. On his Facebook page, Dr. Bernstein writes that “Capitalism Unbound” is “the best book I’ve ever written,” and “Any Rand’s works aside, the best book ever on capitalism. Ever.”

While there’s no mention yet of his new book on Dr. Bernstein’s web site, you may want to follow up there to get more information about his new book:

www.andrewbernstein.net

Conservative Sees the Light on Pragmatism

2009-12-13T03:15:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Over at the conservative commentary site townhall.com, I was intrigued to read "Principle vs. Pragmatism," a column by Ken Connor, who is unknown to me.

Halfway through reading this column, I thought that perhaps a conservative has come to see the light about the destructiveness of pragmatism. Heck, he even invokes Aristotle:

"The truth of the matter is that when it comes to the most fundamental questions about human society, culture, and government, the middle ground is not a sensible place to occupy. When it comes down to the fundamentals, things are either right or they are wrong; to suggest that they may be right for me and wrong for you is nonsense. Moral relativism comes into conflict with the Law of Non-Contradiction when operating at the level of fundamental values."

But, alas, the light this conservative was seeing came from Heaven.

"There are, as our forefathers recognized, certain universal and self-evident truths. Human beings, for example, have been endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to life. It is, therefore, wrong to murder an innocent human being, regardless of whether they are in the womb or in a nursing home. The act of murder is wrong regardless of who makes the decision to carry it out (mother, doctor, family) or how it is denominated (abortion, mercy killing, euthanasia). The character of an act is not changed by the rhetoric that accompanies it or the person who performs it. Such an act cannot be both right and wrong--right for you and wrong for me. It is either right or wrong--period.

"There are certain principles that define the world view of Christian conservatives, principles that we are unwilling to budge on …"

Connor goes on to invoke God and "other principles" that he and other Christians will not compromise on, without noting what those alleged principles are exactly.

Since Connor's basis of morality is God's arbitrary commandments and not the one-and-only reality from which principles are rationally derived, Lord only knows what those "other principles" of his may be, but you can safely bet that they are not a proper foundation for freedom.

* - I made some minor revisions to the original post.

Worshiping at The First Church of Global Warming

2009-12-07T16:52:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

USA Today features a front-page story today that offers a portrait of the many religious groups doing their part to help avert the next alleged Apocalypse – i.e., “climate change.” In short, they’re joining hands and their faith with environmentalists who worship at the First Church of Global Warming.

Here are some excerpts from this article (which in the print edition sports this headline “For them, climate change summit is God’s work”):

“If anyone can help move the debate, it's faith-based leaders, says Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

"‘This is a very religious country. God the Creator still does better in polls than any politician,’ says Lieberman, who backs legislation to mandate lower carbon emissions. He says he first began to embrace the environmental cause 20 years ago because of his own spiritual beliefs.

“Lieberman, who is Jewish and has deep ties with evangelicals, says religious leaders and constituents could still help swing some Senate votes, especially among Republicans. ‘This helps put the issue in the broader context ... of exercising our responsibility to protect God's creation ... and that helps us,’ he says.”

* * *

“Byron Johnson, director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, says there is evidence of a generational split on environmental issues among Evangelicals.

“In a recent poll, his institute found that 73% of young Evangelicals agree with the statement that ‘Global climate change will have disastrous effects’ — compared to 59% of older Evangelicals.

“That's no big surprise, [Sen. James] Inhofe says. ‘These young ones, their entire lives, all they've heard is that global warming doctrine,’ he says, shaking his head.

"The schools are just filling their heads with this issue."

Send your letters to: editor@usatoday.com

My Cap Tip to the Times

2009-12-03T19:11:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

So there I was this morning, sitting in a Starbucks with an iced green tea in one hand and a New York Times in the other, wearing my driving cap, when I came across an article in the Styles section on the growing popularity of the driving cap. The article opens with the observation that more men seem to be doffing their baseball caps for the stylish driving cap.

“Many men have taken to the far worthier wool driving cap, and with good reason. It may not suggest that you are an indie-rock guitar rebel who thinks two chords are plenty, but it will keep your head warmer — and more important, your hair neater — in cold weather.”

Last year I decided it was time to find another style of headwear rather than my favorite but aging Yankees baseball cap and my tight-fitting wool skull cap for when the mercury goes way south. Actually, I had started my hunt for a driving cap in 2007, after I saw the every-stylish Tom Brady, the “Golden Boy” quarterback for the New England Patriots, wear one after a post-game press conference. Now, I’d always associated the driving cap with my Uncle Dan, an Italian immigrant and World War I veteran, which he often wore, as well as with old, white New York City cab drivers from decades past. But on Brady made the cap looked stylish, and that’s what a Super Bowl-winning quarterback with model good looks can do: sell cool.

I shopped around, and it took me bit of time to find just the right cap. I originally bought a brown, plaid-patterned cap that turned out to be oversized, flaring out to make me look like a 1930s newsboy selling papers on a city street corner, as alluded to in the Times article, or a hip-hop rapper, definitely a false advertisement. So I hung it up, searched some more, and found a smaller, slate gray cap at Banana Republic, which framed my face just right and that I could tilt to the side to add a bit of flare.

“Many men, drawn to the cap’s misty English gentry connotations, opt for plaids or tweeds of a colorful stripe, for some country-squire pizzazz. But its background is squarely 19th-century working class, when they were such common garb as to be known simply as caps. (The 20th-century desire to upgrade its status can be seen in the name “driving cap,” as well as its aliases: ‘ivy cap’ or ‘golf cap.’) In a humbler-looking fabric, like a gray or brown herringbone, a plain loden or a lightly speckled tweed, the cap looks great with a peacoat, leather jacket or fisherman’s sweater — or anything one might deem more Irish than squirish.”

I’m on the hunt again for another driving cap, like the one pictured in the Times article. If you find one, especially at a cheaper price, let me know. If you do, I’ll tip my cap to you.

Barbie in a Burka

2009-11-27T19:53:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Despite feminist critics who attack her as a cause of anorexia among young women, the Barbie doll has come to symbolize the independent, attractive, fashionable career woman. But now, on her 50th birthday, she has had a burka thrown over her -- by Westerners!

"One of the world's most famous children's toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover - wearing a burkha. Wearing the traditional Islamic dress, the iconic doll is going undercover for a charity auction in connection with Sotheby's for Save The Children. More than 500 Barbies went on show yesterday at the Salone dei Cinquecento, in Florence, Italy."

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have banned Barbie dolls. According to Wikipedia, Saudi Arabia's Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice stated "Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful."

Now Westerners have obscured Barbie dolls in burkas - in bright-colors apparently to make them seem fashionable (!) -- while others have praised the new doll because she allegedly gives Muslim girls a Barbie that "represents them."

But outside this world of childish make-believe, the burka is a symbol of force, of oppression of women by religious brutes who rule with an iron Islamic fist.

Let's chalk this up as another example of the depraved lengths to which multiculturalism has taken the West.

Letter on Ad Hominem Attack on Ayn Rand

2009-11-19T02:19:00.000-08:00
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online today posted a letter I wrote in response to columnist who scribbled an ad hominem attack on Ayn Rand. My letter is the 11th one listed.

Reg Henry's drive-by criticism

Reg Henry comes off as a coward in his column "Who Spawned All These Nuts? Ayn Rand" (Nov. 11).

He hides behind so-called humor and oversimplifications to attack those he dislikes. For example, he writes that some readers erupted with volcanic name-calling because of his "mild criticism" of Sarah Palin -- but he fails to mention whether that criticism was rational or ... crazy. Often, it's not mere criticism that people are responding to but the nature of the criticism -- and whether it is fair or unjust.

Likewise, he blames Ayn Rand for all the alleged "nutty" ideas out there today. God forbid that people call Barack Obama's efforts to take over the banking and health-care industries for what they are: "socialist" -- that is, government wresting control of the means of production in an industry.

But never once does he give an example of her ideas, other than to summarize them as "greed is good" and leave it as that. In short, his criticism of Ms. Rand amounts to an ad hominem attack.

Based on this smear job, I'll chalk him up as just another of many drive-by critics of Ayn Rand who are too intellectually impotent to stop and provide any rational criticism of her philosophy.

Now who's the name-caller and crazy one?

JOSEPH KELLARD
East Meadow, N.Y

With Freedom Comes Responsibility: Part II

2009-11-18T18:44:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

In my post “With Freedom Comes Responsibility,” I wrote that when I read coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall in left-leaning newspapers, such as the New York Times, I found little mention of the actual oppression and suffering people endured under communist regimes. What was mentioned are the people who, after they were freed from communism’s chains, longed for the supposed security of those same regimes. Most importantly, there was no mention of the responsibility that comes along with freedom, particularly the need for individuals to think and live independently -- in short, to cultivate and exercise self-esteem.

On Wednesday, however, the Times addressed these issues in its report on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Prague in an article called “Celebrating Revolution With Roots in a Rumor”:

Once again, I read about those who favor life under communism:

“In a recent survey by the Czech Academy of Sciences, 81 percent of Czechs said they did not want a return of the old regime, even as a notable 14 percent said that life before 1989 was better.”

Note that what’s “notable” to the Times is that 14 percent. But, to the newspaper’s credit, the reporter found and quoted a freedom-lover who criticizes those 14-percenters:

“But others, like Mirek Kodym, 56, a ponytailed former security guard who published illegal political and literary tracts before 1989 and marched on Tuesday as he had 20years ago, said the Velvet Revolution had been a seminal moment in which a beleaguered nation had finally tasted freedom.

“‘Today you can be what you want to be and do what you want to do, and no one will interfere,’ he said. ‘The nostalgia for the past is a stupid thing.”

Of course, the Times had to mention Vaclav Havel, the leader of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, who figured prominently in the article. Here’s the most important passage:

“[Havel] recently argued that nostalgia for the old regime reflected the condition of a people who had been imprisoned for so long that they did not know what to do with their newfound freedom.

“‘I have often compared it to being released from prison,’ he said. ‘In prison everything is laid out for you; you don’t have to decide on anything. They tell you when to get up, what to wear, everything is decided for you by others. If you live in this for years and are then suddenly released, freedom becomes a burden.”

So the Times finally, although indirectly, touched on the issue of freedom and responsibility, those fundamental issues that the 14 percenters and the Times would otherwise rather evade.

Letter on Religion and Terrorism

2009-11-16T18:55:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Conservative, committed religionist and jihadist apologist Dinesh D’Souza wrote a column “Don’t blame God for terrorism” in Monday’s USA Today.

In large lettering above the start of the column, D’Souza’s basic stand is summarized as follows: “After the Fort Hood massacre and others, some people – often atheist stalwarts – like to point at the corrosive influence of religion. But a closer look suggests that the most notorious killers usually act on secular motives.”

Here’s an excerpt from his column:

”Marx's call to eliminate the next world by establishing a communist utopia on this one was taken up with a vengeance by Lenin and a host of communist leaders who followed him. These despots established atheism as state doctrine in the Soviet Union, and other Marxist regimes around the world followed. In the past hundred years, these regimes, led by people such as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il and others, have murdered over 100 million people. Even bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, doesn't come close.”

In response, I submitted the following letter:

To the Editor:

Because Dinesh D’Souza and other religionists believe that a God exists and provides men with commandments that constitute an absolutist moral code, so they believe that those who don’t believe in God are fundamentally no different.

But atheism is merely a metaphysical view that rejects God’s alleged existence, and is thus not a comprehensive philosophic system. It leaves wide open what an atheist actually believes in other branches, including ethics and politics. And atheistic communism is merely a secularized version of religion.

While religion commands an unquestioning faith in and sacrifice to God, a being said to be omnipresent and therefore without a particular identity, communism preaches an unquestioning faith in and sacrifice to the state or “society,” an entity that is nobody in particular but everyone in general except you. Both religionists and atheistic communists are mystics, the former of spirit and the latter of muscle, and a man either has faith in what they preach or else!

As the atheistic philosopher Ayn Rand pointed out, faith and force are corollaries. She showed that when men dispense with reality and reason -- their only means to knowledge, persuasion and agreement -- then their only means of dealing with each other is ultimately by force. Disbelievers must be done away with, either by burning at the stake, by overwork in frigid forced labor camps, or by suicidal pilots crashing airliners into their office towers.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, NY

With Freedom Comes Responsibility

2009-11-16T03:05:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

From the title essay in Ayn Rand's book "For the New Intellectual":

"From the start of the post-Renaissance period, philosophy — released from its bondage as handmaiden of theology — went seeking a new form of servitude, like a frightened slave, broken in spirit, who recoils from the responsibility of freedom."

This reminds me of my recent readings, particularly in the New York Times, on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Of the few articles and columns on the subject I came across, there was little, if any, mention of the actual oppression and suffering people faced under communist regimes. But, of course, readers read about when communist-states collapsed and people got a taste of freedom, many of them eventually longed for the supposed security blanket of the Soviet Union — you know, that state that took care of everyone from cradle to grave. In reality, the communists really took care of people getting into those (mass) graves. What I didn’t read about, particularly in those opinion columns, was any mention of the responsibility of freedom, which first and foremost demands that you think for yourself and stand on your own two feet.

What About The Reds?

2009-11-05T14:45:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Earlier this decade, when my nephew attended Oceanside Middle School, his teachers devoted a month to the Holocaust. He and his fellow eight-graders had to read a book, watch a movie and write several reports on this important subject.

As students nationwide are taught the horrors of Nazism, however, I won’t hold my breath waiting for those same educators to teach anything comparable about the grand-scale horrors of an equally evil ideology: communism.

I’m reminded of this as the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall approaches on Nov. 9. While growing up during the Cold War era, I’d seen many movies and documentaries and read books, both in and outside of Oceanside schools, about Hitler’s atrocities. Why then did it take me until my late-20s to finally discover the collective horrors committed by Communist dictators — an estimated 100 million people perished under Marxist regimes, and countless others suffered widespread poverty and deprivations?

I initially discovered communism’s legacy on my own by reading Russian authors Ayn Rand and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who both survived the Soviet slave state. More recently, I completed “The Black Book of Communism,” the most comprehensive tome on Marxist utopias, whose ever-present political imprisonments, tortures and executions continue today, and “Gulag,” by Anne Applebaum, an equally thorough study of the Soviet forced-labor camp system.

I've since learned that in Soviet Russia the mass murders began immediately under Vladimir Lenin and peaked with Joseph Stalin, who from 1932 to 1933 systematically starved an estimated 6 to 10 million peasants in Ukraine after they rebelled against his collectivized farm system. Under the reds, tens of millions of people were deported to gulags, many in frigid Siberia, where most perished.

Mao Tse-tung can unquestionably be called history's worst mass murderer, having orchestrated a massive famine from 1959 to 1961 that killed between 20 and 43 million Chinese, and overall the communist dictator slaughtered some 65 million people.

During Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, a third of that nation's citizens were sacrificed in what is the greatest proportion of a population exterminated under a communist dictatorship.

It is disgraceful that educators never teach, give short shrift to, or rationalize away the horrors in these and other nations that instituted communism or still do, as in North Korea and Cuba. Yet a fundamental and complete understanding of both Nazism and communism requires that they are taught together — they represent two sides of the same ideological coin.

As with the Holocaust, the horrors of communism have their deniers and apologists. The difference is the Nazi sympathizers are properly condemned and shunned, but some gulag deniers still hold high positions in our universities. These professors and their former students in education, the mainstream media and government still preach that communism is noble in theory but failed in practice. In reality, communism, like Nazism, failed miserably in practice because it is anti-life in theory.

At root, both preach that the individual must sacrifice for the group and state, be it “the master race” under an Aryan regime or “the working class” under a dictatorship of the proletariat; that the individual has no right to his life, liberty, property or the pursuit of his own happiness; that he must obey the dictates of the state; and that its use of physical force is a justifiable means to effect these ends.

The most important lesson students can learn about totalitarian regimes is that both ideologies lead to the systematic violation of individual rights, the moral-political principle that is America’s original foundation, and ultimately had to lead to mass deaths.

But how can students learn such lessons when communism and its history are virtually ignored, its ideology is still taught as noble, and some openly celebrate communist killers such as Mao and Che Guevara?

For starters, educators can assign their students novels like Ayn Rand’s “We The Living,” to introduce them to Marxist ideals and the perpetual hopelessness and fear people suffer living under a communist state, and Solzehenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which revealed the brutality of the Soviet labor camps.

We cannot expect the horrors of history's bloodiest regimes to never happen again if our educators fail to teach students about the corrupt ideas that made them happen.

Two Anniversaries Highlight America's Philosophic Failures

2009-11-04T03:03:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

This month marks 30 years since the Iranian hostage crisis began and 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell.

What must Americans understand about these milestones, the rise of Islamic totalitarianism and the collapse of communism, to understand why these forces continue to threaten our lives and freedoms today?

After three decades, the Iranian regime that initiated war against America on Nov.4, 1979, having stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 American hostages for 444days, has since emerged as the world’s premier sponsor of terrorism, murdering and maiming thousands of Americans from Beirut in 1983 to Afghanistan today. This has happened because our appeasing, timid leaders, both Democrats and Republicans alike, have all along refused to put even a scratch on Iran’s ruling ayatollahs and mullahs.

And two decades after communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and, soon after, Soviet Russia, we are witnessing the resurgence of socialism -- at home. This phenomenon is due, in large part, to the so-called defenders of capitalism, the Republicans-conservatives, who have resigned themselves to accept the welfare state that brought us our now bankrupt Medicare and Social Security systems, rather than mount a principled, moral defense of capitalism.

How essentially did we get to this point?

Note that with the rise of socialism in the early 20th century, age-old religion took a back seat as communists promised unprecedented material prosperity wherever they brutally spread their ideology. Yet, in reality, communism was no more than a secularization of religion. Communism adopted religion’s altruist ethics that commanded men to sacrifice their lives to God’s will and substituted him with demands to sacrifice to society and the state instead. The Berlin Wall came to represent the communism’s universal slave state, crushing its citizens’ fundamental rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, and those who tried to escape to freedom were shot dead, treated like common criminals going over a prison wall.

Long before the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, communism had demonstrated its anti-life impotence and evil, failing miserably to produces any semblance of a “workers paradise” on earth, with widespread poverty and deprivations and mass death -- an estimated 100 million people slaughtered from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China to Castro’s Cuba.

When in 1991 Soviet Russia collapsed, some hailed it as “the end of history,” as if capitalism had triumphed and America faced no other enemies. But there stood religion, both at home and abroad, already filling the void with its promises of paradise in a mystical afterworld. As communism-socialism wasted away, Iran’s Islamic revolution emerged in 1979 as the latest enemy of the West and religion was resurrected in America.

Like the communists, the Islamics watched America become an unprecedented superpower, both economically and militarily, based on fundamental premises antithetical to their own: reason, individualism, individual rights and the selfish pursuit of happiness. Like communism, the religionists preach faith and obedience to something allegedly higher than the individual. While communists extolled sacrifice to an all-powerful proletariat state, the religionists demand submission to an all-powerful god. Thus, to Iran’s ruling clerics -- who properly viewed America as an essentially secularist, this-worldly nation – called her “the Great Satan,” and since the hostage crisis have made “death to America” their mantra.

Meanwhile, at home, Ronald Reagan and his supporters ushered in religious revival, declaring America a nation based on Judeo-Christian values. And although Reagan rightfully identified Soviet Russia as an “evil empire,” he nevertheless held arms negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, who threatened this nation with nuclear annihilation, and Regan did nothing when Iranian-backed terrorists murdered 241 U.S. Marines at barracks in Beirut in 1983.

When the Soviet Union expired, the terrorists lost their main resource. Suddenly, life-long terrorist Yasir Arafat played peaceful with Israel, and the post-Ayatollah Khomeini regime posed as “moderates.” Al Qaeda, however, who proceeded to build on Iran’s Islamic revolution and bombed American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen. Next came September 11, 2001.

The born-again Christian George W. Bush responded by downplaying the terrorists as representing “a fringe form of Islamic extremism” who otherwise pervert “a religion of peace.” Thus Bush was unable to identify our enemy as motivated by religion’s essence of faith and force, and so he failed to properly frame the war as Islam vs. Western Civilization. Instead of destroying the enemy, he turned to nation-building campaigns to bring Iraq and Afghanistan “democracy,” that is, mob rule. All the while, Bush allowed those nations to adopt Islam as a cornerstone of their constitutions, and left the Iranian regime still intact to build nuclear weapons. Today the Obama administration, which is holding America’s first open diplomatic talks with the Iranians since the hostage crisis, is pursuing the same appeasing, timid policies.

America is at this point, in part, because conservatives have only offered religion as an answer to communism-socialism and Islamic totalitarianism. Through its support of faith-based welfare programs, expansion of socialized medical programs and bank bailouts, Bush laid the groundwork for the Obama administration to swiftly push for an explicit socialist agenda in finance and automobiles, and now looks to do the same in the medical and energy industries. Meanwhile, Obama makes nice with Palestinian terrorists and socialist like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, as White House communications director Antia Dunn praises communist mass murder Mao Tse-tung.

This week and next, as we watch images of the freedom-lovers who took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall 20 years ago and the Iranian thugs who blindfolded their American hostages 30 years ago, we must recognize that the forces of communism-socialism and Islamic totalitarianism continue to threatened our freedoms and lives. And to weaken and finally stamp them out, we must uncompromisingly champion and practice not faith but reason, not collectivism but individualism, not the all-powerful state but individual rights, not force but voluntary trade, not self-sacrifice but rational selfishness.

Nothing less will save this great nation.

Ayn Rand, Anti-Communism and Dogma

2009-10-21T02:56:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

I wrote this comment this morning and emailed it to the author of a synopsis-type commentary on the two new biographies about Ayn Rand.

Caroline Baum,

I want to address two passages that appeared in your piece on the two new books on Any Rand that I read at bloomberg.com:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=agnUNf5tVa_U

You wrote:

"Born Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. [Petersburg], Russia, to Jewish parents, Rand had a privileged upbringing. Her father, Zinovy, was a successful pharmacist; her mother, Anna, a social climber. Rand watched as the Bolsheviks seized her father’s pharmacy in 1918. Zinovy refused to work for the Communists, which was the clear inspiration for 'Atlas.'"

This scenario is often repeated by people, especially those insufficiently familiar with Ayn Rand's life, as the reason for her strong anti-Communism. But Miss Rand began to develop her essentially anti-collectivist, anti-statist ideas while she was a girl growing up in czarist Russia, before the Communist took power.

While the Communist confiscation of her family's property certainly played a part in the development of her mature views that influenced her writings, it is not the event that so many misinformed observers and commentators make into a primary, seminal matter. For Miss Rand, it took more, much more, than just one concrete event to form her most fundamental ideas and inspire such writings as Atlas Shrugged.

Also, you wrote:

"Any question or challenge from acolytes would incite her, leading to expulsion and the severing of the relationship for life."

"Any" question or challenge? This is a complete distortion that lends credence to the unjust portrait that Ayn Rand was dogmatic about Objectivism. I’m sure that many of her admirers who knew her well, including her closest associate Dr. Leonard Peikoff, would give you and the authors of these two new books ample evidence to the contrary.

Joseph Kellard

Rand as Advocate of Whim-Worship?

2009-10-16T03:25:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

This morning, I dashed off a reply to a commentator who concluded in a column that reason, as advocated by Ayn Rand, leads to competing “absolutes” that allows men to rob one another.

Mr. Duncan:

In your column “How we got to where we are,” you wrote about Ayn Rand's summation of her philosophy:

"The problem with this thesis is that it is self-contradictory. Reason cannot be an absolute if you reject the outside source of morality as it is found in biblical morality. If your own happiness is the moral purpose of life, then your own reason becomes the arbiter of that absolute, but one person's reason may (or perhaps necessarily will) conflict with another's, making neither 'absolute.' What if one man's reason tells him that his happiness will only be had by robbing another man of his wallet? Obviously, an impasse is created."

Ayn Rand was not an advocate of the reason-as-subjectivism scenario that you've painted here. Using reason does not lead to competing subjectivist “absolutes,” which is the actual contradiction that you have created.

Miss Rand demonstrated that by using reason – that is, exercising the laws of logic -- an individual can discover objective reality, including his nature as a man and his requirements to live. His nature requires that he use his rational mind to live his life according to his own values and choices, and that he has a right to do so, so long as he does not violate the rights of other men to pursue their own “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” – which was the Founding Fathers' implicit nod to the virtue of selfishness.

Reason demonstrates that no man has any right to initiate force against other men, no right to murder, rape or rob him. When a man steals another man’s wallet, thus violating his right to his life and property, he is an irrationalist – that is, he is not exercising his faculty of reason. And a proper, individual rights-respecting nation punishes him for his crime. In short, reason demonstrates that a man has an absolute right to his life and property (his wallet), and not a right to act on a subjectivist *whim* to take it from him.

Here, and elsewhere in your column (such as on the issue of collectivism) you misrepresent Miss Rand's philosophy because you either don't understand it, or you do but are deliberately trying to distort it.

~ Joseph Kellard

The White House Declares War on Fox News

2009-10-12T17:15:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

The White House is zeroing in on Fox News. According to the New York Times and Associated Press, the Obama administration is going on the offensive against the cable news network, which it regards as an arm of the Republican Party and as intent on tearing down the president.

“Fox’s Volley With Obama Intensifying” (Times)

“Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.”

“White House targets Fox as it goes after press critics” (AP)

“The White House has gone on the offensive against its critics in the press, singling out Fox News and going so far as to accuse the News Corp.-owned network of waging a ‘war against Barack Obama.’”

Here’s a key passage from this particular article:

“Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said the White House may be lashing out at Fox ‘because the Democratic base is starting to be more critical of Obama.

"‘The world was expected to be transformed in approximately a month and it just didn't quite happen that way,’ Sabato said. ‘So if you're in that position and you need to rally your base, you need to find a common enemy.’”

I remember hearing once that Bill Clinton said that while he was president, he had never heard of Rush Limbaugh. Of course, that’s a typical Clinton lie. But so long as Clinton could pretend Limbaugh didn’t exist, he could not openly attack the conservative talk radio host and threaten his freedom of speech. I’m not aware of anything Clinton may have done behind the scenes to try to silence Limbaugh, but in recent years he has made clear his contempt for certain media types, including Fox News.

On the other hand, Obama from the start of his presidency, and even during his campaign, has often publicly mentioned his critics, particularly Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Limbaugh, so much so that he is obviously disturbed (not just bothered) by them. And now he and his administration are openly targeting them. The question is, what are the next steps Obama will take, openly or behind the scenes, on his road to silence his critics.

Let's Take Back Columbus Day

2009-10-10T03:01:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

This Columbus Day weekend, read Objectivist Tom Bowden's book "Enemies of Christopher Columbus."

Read his latest op-ed “Let’s Take Back Columbus Day."

Mr. Bowden’s also has some upcoming lectures based on this op-ed.

Or watch his lecture “Columbus Day Without Guilt”:

Mr. Bowden has also done some radio interviews about Christopher Columbus and the attack on the day in his name, here:

http://tinyurl.com/yfwfdoc

http://tinyurl.com/ygnl8fs

Happy Columbus Day weekend!

Michael Moore, Catholics and Capitalists

2009-10-03T18:10:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

So Michael Moore turns to the Catholic Church to give his anti-capitalist screed, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” some moral weight. Yeah, I know, that church is a real moral authority, isn't it?

“Many of the talking heads in the film are Catholic clergy, including the bishop of Detroit, who proclaim capitalism to be a ‘sin’ and ‘radically evil.’ ‘Eventually,’ one prophesies, ‘God will come down and eradicate it.’”

Read the New York magazine article in full.

Also, who do you think Moore turned to in order to fund his film? Capitalists, who else! Jonathan Hoenig, a.k.a. Capitalist Pig, highlights this other curious fact in a recent column:

“Ironically, as has been repeatedly pointed out around the blogosphere in recent days, the film itself was funded by (publicly owned and traded) Viacom (VIA.B) and the Weinstein Company, a entertainment company which raised $490 million from investors to pay for, among other projects, Moore’s film. I guess capitalism is immoral and corrupt, except when it’s going to fund your own self-important movie exposing the depravity of capitalism.”

Amadinejad a Guest at the Essex House

2009-09-24T02:32:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

I learned from the Harry Binswanger List that Iran’s puppet dictator Mahmoud Amadinejad stayed at the Essex House in New York City on Wednesday, when he took part in denouncing America and Israel during his speech at the United Nations. This morning, I dashed off the following email to Jumeirah, a UAE-based company that owns the Essex House, and sent it to reservations@jumeirah.com. I would suggest that you do the same or something similar.

To Jumeirah,

I just learned that Iranian dictator and avowed Holocaust denier Mahmoud Amadinejad stayed at your New York City hotel, the Essex House, on Wednesday. As a New Yorker, I've never had the need to stay at your hotel, but I plan to suggest to many others that they never patronize the Essex House so long as your company owns it.

As an American, I consider Amadinejad and the theocratic, murderous regime he represents to be grave threat to this great nation where you do business. During its 30-year history, that Islamic regime has terrorized and murdered hundreds of Americans from Teheran to Lebanon to Saudi Arabia to Iraq, and is thereby at war with America. Further, the regime allows congregants at its mosques to regularly chant "Death to America,” and Amadinejad vows to wipe our important ally, Israel, off the map in the Middle East, where it is the only free nation in sea of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

I can’t think of a worst guest to keep at your hotel, and I plan to let many others know about this injustice on your part, and hope they follow through by boycotting the Essex House and your company.

~ Joseph Kellard

Newsweek's Ralph Nader-John Galt Comparisons

2009-09-18T03:07:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Newsweek features a review on Ralph Nader’s new book that draws comparisons to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.

“During our real-life moment—when center-left health-insurance-reform proposals generate comparison to Nazism—Nader's dramatic imagining of an even bolder progressive revolution doesn't look irrationally exuberant as much as obstinately out to lunch. The irony is that Nader has become a Galt-like figure himself, preferring to go on strike from an imperfect two-party system rather than live in it. Utopianists of all stripes should take a hard look.”

Below is a reply I dashed off early this morning and left in the comments section. It looks like my comment is the first to appear there. So get in while you can.

Comment:

At the end of his book review, Seth Colter compares Ralph Nader to John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, in that Nader goes on strike from “an imperfect two-party system.” But in reality, Nader is nothing more than a poser, trying to disguise that he’s an outgrowth of the individual rights-destroying, altruism-worshiping political left that has long dominated the Democratic Party (as well as the GOP). So, Nader brands his politics by a different name, but his so-called ideas and solutions are fundamentally not different than the Dems: use state force to make others, esp. the wealth producers, act according to your leftist ideals.

Unlike Nader, John Galt was a productive genius who upheld each individual’s right to be free from force to pursue the right to his own life, liberty and happiness. Unlike Nader, who rose to notoriety as a “consumer advocate,” Galt understood and championed this fundamental fact: before you can consume, you must produce. Galt was, in effect, a “producer advocate.” Nader’s politics consists of forcing the producers to give to those who put consumption before production – that is, the parasites – to, in effect, force the producers to live for the parasites.

I recommend Newsweek readers shrug off any interest in Nader’s tired, unjust philosophy of altruism and statism and bask in Ayn Rand’s innovative philosophy of Objectivism, as projected in her greatest novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which the producers – [the] individuals who hold up the world – are properly glorified and the Nader-like parasite-advocates are exposed as the evil men they really are.

Michael Jordan Scores One For "I"

2009-09-11T20:28:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Michael Jordan was inducted in the Hall of Fame on Friday night. His speech stood out.

Sports fans know all too well the anti-individualist bromide: "There's no 'I' in 'team.'" Well, Jordan challenged such so-called wisdom. During his speech, he told a story about one of his coaches. "I could never please Tex … I can remember a game … we were down five or 10 points, and I go off for about 25 points and we come back and win the game. And we're walking off the floor and Tex looked at me and said, 'You know, there's no 'I' in 'team.' I said, 'Tex, there's no 'I' in 'team,' but there's 'I' in 'win.'"

(The audience applauded and laughed -- as if to say: how bold.)

"I think he got my message: I'll do anything to win. If that means we play team format, we win, if that means I have to do whatever I have to do, we're going to win."

As Jordan described his love of basketball, he said: "It's provided me with a platform to share my passion with millions in a way that I neither expected nor could have imagined in my career. I hope that it's given the millions of people that I've touched the optimism and desire to achieve their goals through hard work, perseverance and a positive attitude."

The 46-year-old concluded as follows: "One day you might look up and see me playing the game at 50." (The crowd chuckled.) "Oh, don't laugh. Never say 'never.' Because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion."

With this, I was reminded of Andrew Bernstein's 1998 ARI op-ed entitled "What Young People Really Need: Not Volunteerism but Happiness and Heroes":

"What do you think young people find more inspiring: the sight of Jimmy Carter building churches in the jungles of Guatemala, or the vision of Michael Jordan soaring through the air, winning championships and earning millions, then flashing his joyous, brilliant, life-giving smile? The truth is that Michael Jordan's extraordinary success has inspired far more young people, poor, middle-class or rich, black, white or Asian, to strive for their own dreams than an army of social workers could ever think possible. As Ayn Rand puts it in Atlas Shrugged, 'The sight of an achievement is the greatest gift that a human being could offer to others.'"

Excellent New York Times Op-Ed on "Peak Oil"

2009-08-25T14:24:00.000-07:00
The New York Times today published an excellent op-ed: "'Peak Oil' Is a Waste of Energy":

"Let's take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don't report that additional recoverable oil as 'newly discovered,' the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years."

~ Joseph Kellard

Guggenheim's Wright Exhibit Inspires

2009-07-20T03:33:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

I became interested in Frank Lloyd Wright through studying Objectivism and, subsequently, by browsing through or buying pictorial books on his work. Outside of the Guggenheim Museum and a replica of a prairie house interior at the Metropolitan Museum, I've yet to experience his buildings firsthand. In short, my knowledge of his life and work is superficial. And so I left the ongoing Wright exhibit at the Guggenheim, which celebrates the museum's 50th anniversary, with a deeper appreciation for the great American architect.

What intrigued me most were the renderings — some of them broad drawings spread out like battlefield maps — of his commissions that never materialized. The most ambitious of these is the Mile High Office Tower (528 floors!) for Chicago. (I didn't take the audio tour, so I'm unsure how serious Wright actually was about building this massive, soaring project.)

Other impressive but unbuilt projects were the Pittsburgh Point Park Civic Center, the Huntington Hartford Sports Club/Play Resort, and the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium. Wright even made cityscape plans for Baghdad, where he was originally commissioned to design an opera house.
The theme of the exhibit, which is entitled "From Within Outward," is that Wright developed original interiors based largely on their relation to their exterior environments. "As a result, exteriors became pure projections of the space that was shaped on the inside," reads the program. The exhibit also features models and animated video of his buildings.

Of course, walking through this exhibit in one of Wright's masterpieces certainly heightened my experience — especially since the section on the Guggenheim came last, at the apex of the museum's spiraling rotunda.

I left with a greater understanding of the architect's original, innovative mind and marveled at the scope of his work. He designed everything from homes, houses of worship and hotels to office buildings, schools and an aquarium. He drew up more than 1,000 projects and developed about 500 of them. Wright worked into his 90s, dying just months before the Guggenheim opened in 1959. In addition to his productive longevity, his career and life clearly ended on the highest of notes.

The exhibit is open until August 23.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist living in New York.

Sag Harbor in Words and Photos

2009-07-17T04:09:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Herman Melville made mention of it in “Moby Dick,” and, for what it’s worth, John Steinbeck lived there.

I’m talking about Sag Harbor, my favorite spot in the Hamptons, the area on the east end of Long Island. This week I took a trip there, and while killing time tending to some social business, I drove around and took some photos that I’ve posted here.

What I like most about Sag Harbor, a former whaling port, is that it has kept its small town America atmosphere, with a Main Street that curves through the small village. Among its features are a grocer, general store, hotel, liquor store, restaurants, bookstore and Art Deco-style movie theater. Both sides of the street sport rows of head-in parked cars and tree-lined sidewalks with park benches.

At the north end of Main Street is Marine Park, where everything from cruise ship-like yachts are docked alongside sail boats and some small fishing boats the size of a twin bed. At the foot of Sag Harbor’s main thoroughfare are a church and a grave yard bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. They are known as the Old Whaler's Church and Old Burial Ground and have ties to the American Revolution.

Throughout the surrounding neighborhoods are many quaint homes, some of them obviously dating back centuries to the village’s founding. Also outside town are a whaling museum and an old library.

Just north of Sag Harbor is an area known as North Haven, where a friend of mine owns a home. In the back of her neighborhood is a small beach that I always make sure I visit whenever I’m in town. Along this beach are a few modern homes that look out onto the serene Sag Harbor Bay. It’s got a few too many rocks, but I trek there for the view and the absolute peace and quiet.

To learn more about Sag Harbor,see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sag_Harbor,_NY

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and commentator living in New York.

Photos by Joseph Kellard

Letter on Socialism-Capitalism in WIRED

2009-07-16T15:02:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

WIRED magazine (August 2009) printed a letter I wrote in response to an article entitled “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online” (June 2009), by Kevin Kelly.

Here’s a slice from this article of very mixed premises and terms:

“Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about collaboration per se. But the tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.”

My letter was printed first among four others:

What Kevin Kelly calls new socialism in computing and the like is, in fact, capitalism. Voluntary cooperation and collaboration among individuals are actually forms of free trade. This new “socialism” is made possible under governments that (at least in this realm) respect property rights, the cornerstone of a capitalist system. Let’s dispense with Kelly’s equivocation on socialism and give capitalism its due.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, New York

Independence Day Tea Party on Long Island

2009-07-06T18:17:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

“Oh, I love Ayn Rand! I’m a member of an Objectivist Club at my school,” the college-aged woman told me. What a welcoming reaction from the first person I handed a free Ayn Rand sampler to at the tea party I attended on Independence Day.

Inside each sampler, I slipped in copies of ARC flyers “The Significance of Atlas Shrugged” and “What the Tea Party Movement Must Stand For,” along with The Undercurrent’s special tea party edition and my recent newspaper column “A Russian Immigrant’s Lesson in American Patriotism.” That column caught the eye of one party-goer, who told me she too was a Russian immigrant. While ignorant of Rand, she readily accepted my packet of literature.

Both women were among some 115 people who showed up at the morning tea party in the middle of a busy intersection in Huntington, a town on Long Island’s north shore. Party-goers held signs and waved American flags on all four corners. There were no speakers, and one party organizer conducted mostly unimaginative chants (e.g., “Obama must go!” “Throw the bums out!” “No socialism!”), as some passers-by honked their car horns in solidarity.

Meanwhile, I handed out about 75 packets. Virtually everyone I selectively approached was receptive, as I described Rand as “a great American patriot.” About a third of the party-goers told me that they had either already read Ayn Rand or had at least heard of her. One woman started to tell me about the “aristocracy of land” in Old Europe and compared it to today’s political environment. I pointed out that a chapter in Atlas Shrugged is titled “The Aristocracy of Pull,” and she reacted with an agreeable raised eyebrow, smile and nod.

Unfortunately, the party organizers passed out literature that dismissed the principle of church-state separation and lamented “attacks on religion,” as one of them held a sign that read “Faith, family and freedom” — or some similar trio of conservative tripe. Another woman went around promoting Ron Paul’s politics, while others handing out voter registration forms and bumper stickers that read: “Spread my work ethic, not my wealth!”

While certainly not an intellectual crowd, the people I chose to give packets seemed at least receptive to reading the literature. I drove away satisfied and happy that I’d helped spread Ayn Rand’s word and, hopefully, further softened the culture a bit more toward Objectivism.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist living in New York. Visit his journalism website at www.josephkellard.blogspot.com.

A Russian Immigrant's Lesson in American Patriotism

2009-07-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

“America is the land of the uncommon man. It is the land where man is free to develop his genius – and to get its just rewards.” ~ Ayn Rand

By Joseph Kellard

As Independence Day nears and debates over immigration rage on, I’m reminded of how an atheist émigré from Soviet Russia taught me what it means to be an American patriot.

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, once wrote: “The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”

Rand’s books all evoke this glorification of America, but when I first read them I was a left-wing ideologue who questioned whether she knew that ours was a racist society that had stolen this land from the Indians, enslaved blacks and exploited the poor. Nonetheless, whenever I heard our national anthem, a prideful lump always swelled in my throat. Looking back, I realize that I grasped, even as I bought into these vicious charges, that there was much more to America. That’s why Rand’s uncompromising praise of this nation struck a chord with me.

Unlike conservatives, who explained America’s greatness by calling it “God’s chosen country,” Rand showed that the United States was the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment, the 18th century intellectual movement that championed reason and challenged and thus broke religion’s dogma and pervasive influence. Our Founding Fathers, Rand noted, were explicitly pro-reason, leading them to form an unprecedented nation based on the philosophical principle that each individual has an inalienable right to his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Rand recognized that America was distinguished from all nations, past and present, by its moral and political foundation: individual rights. That is, that each individual has a right to think for himself and pursue his independent values as he sees fit, simultaneously respecting that right in others. No authority — no god, tribal chief, king, pope or bureaucrat — may dictate the course of any individual’s life; he may live for himself, “neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself,” Rand wrote.

Based on individual rights and their corresponding economic system, capitalism, America emerged as a nation of free-thinking, productive individuals. A land of scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and businessmen who made possible an array of labor- and time-saving advances — including the cotton gin, refrigeration, electric lighting, oil-based energy, assembly-line production, the telephone, the airplane and air conditioning — which incalculably raised everyone’s standard of living, prosperity and life expectancy.

Rand’s books also taught me that what’s fundamental about being American is not such irrelevancies as your birthplace or race, but that you understand and choose to live by the fundamental ideas that underpin this great country.

Moreover, I learned that what’s most relevant when evaluating historical figures is not how they were like their predecessors and contemporaries, but how they distinguished themselves. I came to see that our founders represent a unique bridge between the irrationalities and injustices of the old world and the much greater heights still open to this nation.

While some founders owned slaves, for example, it is crucial to note that some form of slavery existed in virtually all pre-American societies. And so what’s most significant about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington is that they were the first in history to uphold individual rights that are universal to all men, and thereby laid the moral and political foundation for slavery’s eventual abolition.

Rand also understood that America could never be a racist society yet still rise to its unprecedented status, and noted that insofar as racism existed it was a force mainly in the almost feudal, agrarian South, which lost the Civil War to the freer, capitalist, industrial North. She knew America was not the backward, tribalist society as others painted it, and showed that this was true of the original Indians, contesting the claim that they had a “right” to this land: “If a ‘country’ does not protect rights, if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief, why should you respect the ‘rights’ that they don’t have or respect?” she once asked rhetorically.

Lastly, her life illustrates what’s great about America. She defected from the Soviet slave state, where millions of innocents were slaughtered based on such communist ideals as self-sacrifice, equality of results and an all-powerful state that dictated how individuals must think and live. Rand knew that in America she would be free to think independently and write books that offered innovative, challenging ideas, exemplified by the provocatively titled The Virtue of Selfishness.

Her books provide the philosophical foundation on which America can properly complete and ground its revolutionary principles and reach infinitely greater, unimagined heights.

Atlas Shrugged On Display Nationwide

2009-05-22T02:49:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

While I was in a Barnes & Noble here on Long Island earlier this week, a cardboard display featuring a colorful image of Atlas caught my eye. The stand-up display was devoted exclusively to copies of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and it was placed next to a display table filled with classic novels.

I wrote to B&N about this store several weeks ago, asking why it didn’t have copies of the hot-selling novel on a prominent display table. Within a week or two after sending my email, the store had ordered several copies of Atlas Shrugged and put them on the regular fiction self, as well as stacked several larger, trade-sized editions on a display table.

I wrote to the Ayn Rand Institute to let them know about this latest display. Kurt Kramer, an office manager from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, wrote back that this display is part of a nationwide campaign by Penguin Publishing.

I’d like to think that through my efforts, and by inspiring others on the OActivism list to ask their local B&N stores to put Atlas on display, I played a part in influencing that campaign.

David Brooks: Republicans Need Collectivism

2009-05-05T20:40:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

According to David Brooks, the conservative op-ed columnist at the New York Times, the problem with Republicans is that they are paragons of individualism and freedom-and that's why their losing power to the Left. His solution: turn to collectivism.

In his May 4 column, "The Long Voyage Home," he writes:

"Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom that they are no longer the party of community and order."

You can send your letters to the editor here:

letters@nytimes.com

Tax Revolt: This Is Joseph Kellard Speaking

2009-04-25T15:52:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Rational selfishness got a hearing at a “tax revolt” in Levittown, Long Island, hosted by a Young Republicans Club on Saturday. In other words, I got the opportunity to speak to a crowd of about 100 people.

Throughout, I held a sign that read: “Ayn Rand was right, Read Alas Shrugged, www.aynrand.com.” Two teens waved their “Who Is John Galt?” signs at me. One scheduled speaker told me about mine: “That’s a great sign.” And a 20-something man told me he’s reading Atlas, say it was “amazing” how Rand “predicted everything going on today” in 1957.

The speakers gave standard conservative speeches, railing against onerous taxes, left-wing media and the loss of personal responsibility. The best comment among them was: “I like making money and being sorta selfish.”

This woman, the emcee, later gave the microphone to anyone willing to talk. A few protestors made more standard comments.

I recall that I started my speech by mentioning Atlas Shrugged, and said that our nation’s founding principles – the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – are based on rational selfishness, the morality that Ayn Rand fully, explicitly developed and advocated.

Mentioning a speaker who had questioned how it was possible that socialism was making a comeback, I also noted that our nation grew out of tax revolts and that we’re still holding them today. “It’s because Americans still hold to the morality of self-sacrifice, the belief that we must live our lives for others,” I said. “If we don’t question that ethic and understand that there is nothing morally wrong with living for our own sake, then we can expect more and more taxes.”

I said that self-sacrifice is the basis for such government programs as welfare for the poor “to, yes, even Social Security and Medicare.”

I ended by stressing that the tea parties/tax revolts will ultimately amount to nothing unless people challenge the morality of self-sacrifice and uphold the rationally selfish principles on which America was founded. The crowd gave me a generous, if slightly reserved, hand.

After I handed the microphone back to the emcee and walked to my car, I heard her tell the crowd that what I said was “partly true,” and she tried to qualify my appeal to rational selfishness by saying it was OK to help others!

Ultimately, all that matters is that I was able to broadcast the central issue: rational selfishness = freedom.

Tea Time

2009-04-23T02:21:00.000-07:00
Local taxpayers join nationwide series of protests

By Joseph Kellard

For Frank McQuade, it was a tough decision to skip his annual trip to the gala dinner at the New York State Republican Convention in Manhattan last week and instead have some tea. The Long Beach attorney joined about 350 protesters who lined the sidewalks of Sunrise Highway at the Massapequa train station in a Tax Day Tea Party, one of hundreds held across the country.

The sign-wielding, American flag-waving Nassau County protesters voiced their discontent with what they called government’s burdensome taxes, ongoing bailouts, massive spending and pending inflation, as rush-hour motorists honked in solidarity.

“Duty really calls to be at the tea party, because the answer at this point is not parties, not the entrenched,” said McQuade. “… Taxation is choking off initiative, watering down the free market system and is going to burden us with debt that is going to change the face of this country not as we anticipated when [President] Obama was elected.”

For the protests, tea became TEA, standing for “taxed enough already,” and the gatherings — on April 15, for obvious reasons —were likened to the Boston Tea Party of 1773. There were some 25 protests on Long Island alone, from Hicksville to East Hampton, and according to one estimate, there were more than a half-million participants nationwide.

In Massapequa, some voiced their concern with what they described as their fellow Americans’ loss of personal responsibility and can-do spirit, while others characterized Obama, former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain as fundamentally alike on economics, and a few expressed alarm that Obama had pushed out General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner.

Many flashed hand-made signs reading, “No taxation without representation,” “Dump the tea, dump the tax,” “We the people, not we the government,” “Foreclose the White House,” “I am not your ATM” and “No socialized medicine.”

Mike Friechter, a Bellmore attorney who held a sign that said “Obamanomics: Trickle up poverty,” said he believes the president is governing as a socialist.

“Growth is unlimited by imagination, hard work and the American spirit,” Friechter said. “The idea of punishing people for being successful in life is counterproductive. It just makes everyone equally poor, and that’s what we’re protesting against. We want the politicians to know that we won’t be silent about this outrageous spending.”

Tom Walsh, owner of a home-inspecting business, called politicians at all levels “tax crazy,” and said that while he is forced to cut back, they continue to expand government budgets. “We’re committing suicide and they’re spending us into oblivion,” said Walsh, a Syosset resident. “People have no idea what a trillion is, and we’re never going to pay this money back.”

While a few politicians were in attendance, including the Nassau County Legislature’s minority leader, Republican Peter Schmitt, the Massapequa organizers made it a point not to invite government officials. “This is not an affiliation with any political party,” said organizer Laura Gill. “This is really just American taxpayers on Long Island coming together who are just looking to be really vocal about our displeasure with what is going on.”

Gill, who works in insurance, said she organized the event mostly through word of mouth and a Web site, and got involved because Obama’s stimulus bill “will take a heavy toll on hardworking American taxpayers,” she said. “They feel that their American dream and the future of their children is going to be gone.”

Another party-goer, Charles Hapaey, said he is most concerned about the impact increased government spending will have on future generations. “We have to stop it now,” said Hapaey, noting that his property taxes have risen $9,000 since he bought his West Islip home in 2002. “Otherwise they’re going to have a problem that they’re not going to be able to deal with in the years to come.”

Hapaey, who was holding a “Don’t punish success” sign, said his wife works as many as 70 hours a week on her own local newspaper, and he fears that Obama will reverse President Clinton’s “workfare” programs, which took people off the welfare rolls. “If she’s going to put in that time and be successful, why should I be paying for someone who wants to put in 30 hours a week, not put in the time and do just enough to get by, and then I have to supplement their income?” Hapaey said. “I’m not happy with that.”

A nationwide protest is planned for July Fourth. Gill said she plans to keep in touch with other participants, and discuss ways to effect change, from becoming watchdogs of Washington to voting together. “I think what the tea parties will do is make people realize that this is not what the American people want, and nobody is behind it except for the very small few who are going to benefit from it,” she said. “Let’s get back to the American dream. You reap the benefits of working hard, and no more handouts.”

Celebrate Individualism, Not Ethnicity

2009-03-12T17:12:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

On St. Patrick's Day I won’t be wearing a button that reads “Proud to be Irish.” While I’m of Celtic stock, I’m neither proud nor ashamed to be Irish, but indifferent to this fact, as I would be if I were of any other ethnicity or race. Instead, I’m proud to be an individualist and an American, and believe our nation would be much better off if each of us rediscovered this outlook.

Individuals, of course, can properly enjoy ethnic-oriented celebrations such as St. Patrick's Day, with their particular music, dance, food, drink and (green) outfits. But I won’t proclaim any pride in my ethnicity or race.

That’s because pride is the emotional reward an individual earns after he achieves personally chosen rational values, such as honesty, a productive career, sticking to a healthy diet and earning a doctoral degree. Conversely, a man’s racial makeup is inborn and therefore outside his realm of choice. He can’t take pride in this non-achievement. And while he can be proud that his role models are individuals who did great things, he can’t take any pride for their achievements, especially because he shares their race.

For example, I can’t take pride for being a white man because Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were great achievers. To do so would be to adopt a false pride. Only through my own choices, actions and achievements can I, like any individual, foster pride.

I’m proud that I’ve overcome some learning obstacles in my youth to achieve certain goals I set, such as becoming a writer. I’m also proud to be an American, but not because I was born here, or because I belong to a nation that produced the great Americans previously mentioned, or because I subscribe to the faith “my country, right or wrong,” a nationalist attitude typical in Europe.

Instead, I’m a proud American because I chose to remain here and live by and fight for the original ideals that built this great nation: a love of the liberty that allows me to pursue my own life, values and happiness. In this land, I’m still free to choose my own creed, career, productive activities and friends, and be a self-made individual, just like the Edisons and Fords of America.

Being Irish is part of who I am, part of my heritage, but it plays no role in my basic identity. I define myself by the values and goals I chose to pursue and achieved, not by unquestioning conformity to the traditions of my ethnic-racial ancestry, nor by its achievers.

Yet America, the land of individualism, even in the aftermath of electing its first black president, remains Balkanized by race. This problem originates when children are taught to identify themselves primarily with their ethnic-racial heritage. Unchecked by individualism — by the idea that each person is autonomous and has the free will and reasoning mind to think for himself — these teachings lead, ultimately, to such abominations as calls for slave reparations, in which the individuals who would receive these handouts were never enslaved, nor have the individuals punished to pay them ever enslaved anyone. In reality, no individual is responsible, guilty or innocent, not as victimizer nor as victim, by virtue of their racial ancestors.

It’s high time for Americans to shed their false racial “pride” — and should stop championing essentially race-based pseudo-ideals such as multiculturalism — to pursue universal values beneficial to all men, no matter their biology or background. Identifying primarily with one’s physical genetics or racial heritage, and the eventual irrational divisions, wars and mass killings this tribalism has ultimately caused throughout history, is nothing to be proud of.

Stimulus is Freedom

2009-03-11T17:46:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

A New York Times reporter asked Barack Obama if he is a socialist. The president dismissed the question, but later called the reporter back to elaborate on his position. Here is part of what he told the reporter:

"I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -- the prescription drug plan -- without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that *we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles* and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word 'socialist' around can’t say the same." (Emphasis mine.)

So Obama promotes his administration as operating “entriely consistent with free-market principles.” Yeah, right, and slavery is freedom.

Yet, even for a leftist, Obama is treading no new deceptive ground here. I remember when Howard Dean was making a run for the presidency, he called himself a capitalist, or a believer in the free-market system, or something to that dishonest effect. Perhaps more leftists do it than I have witnessed.

What’s interesting, thought, is that Obama is on the defensive, trying to paint himself as a capitalist (although I don’t think he would use that particular dirty word -- not yet). So to put it more accurately, he’s trying to downplay his heavy socialist leanings. The president understands the negatives associated with the socialist label. Sadly, while many American voters do understand it (why else would he be so defensive about it?), still not enough grasp it deeply enough. If they did, they wouldn’t allow him to get away with the wrecking ball that is his economic policies.

Meanwhile, he’s doing his darndest to keep that ball swining under cover of capitalism.

New York Times on Climate Change Conference

2009-03-09T16:13:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

The New York Times is reporting on the International Conference on Climate Change. The reporting is, of course, slanted. Just to give one example: The Times, reflexively, must mention how the Heartland Institute, the pro-freer market organizer of the conference, is funded by “Big Oil” -- which is one of the environmentalists pat non-arguments against global warming “skeptics.”

The article does not mention Yaron Brook or Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, who were expected to attend this three-day conference. I'll keep my eyes out for any mentions in the Times over the next few days, assuming they dare write anything further about this conference. I’ll check the editorial pages, too.

I had an LTE published in the Times in recent weeks, so I can’t submit another until late March (I think there is a 30-day rule for submissions). But other OActivists who are particularly interested in this issue may want to send in their own LTEs.

http://tinyurl.com/ctyg7h

“From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations.

“Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support ‘to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.’
“Joseph L. Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, said Exxon and other companies were just shifting their stance to improve their image. The Heartland meeting, he said, was the last bastion of intellectual honesty on the climate issue."

Four Outstanding Opinion Pieces

2009-02-28T13:51:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

I want to pass along four outstanding opinion pieces that I read this week. I’ve provided a brief description of each piece, along with their links and an excerpt from each one.

Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute tackles and challenges the growing push for “environmentally-friendly” energies in his op-ed “The Green Energy Fantasy.”

“There is a reason why less than 2 percent of the world’s energy currently comes from ‘renewable’ sources such as wind and solar--the very sources that are supposedly going to power the new green economy: despite billions of dollars in government subsidies, funding decades of research, they have not proven themselves to be practical sources of energy. Indeed, without government mandates forcing their adoption in most Western countries, their high cost would make them even less prevalent.”

Gina Gorlin challenges those who laud Obama as an intellectual to take a second look at this belief in her piece “Obama the Intellectual?,” published in the latest edition of the Objectivist student newspaper The Undercurrent.

“In action, Obama is clearly not an intellectual. He, like Bush and other politicians, is a pragmatist—the exact opposite of an intellectual. Issue after issue, including taxes, the Iraq war, and the environment, reveals that Obama has made decisions, not with reference to firm principles derived from a careful and scholarly investigation of the facts, but by trying to find some middle ground in a landscape of competing opinions.”

Over at Real Clear Politics, Robert Tracinski takes on the task of deciding whether President Obama will turn out to be more like FDR or Jimmy Carter in his column “The ‘Can-Do’ Economy Killer.”

“I have been wondering whether Barack Obama will turn out to be another Jimmy Carter or another Franklin Roosevelt. The least bad option is Carter: a leader whose policies are disastrous for the economy and for US foreign policy, but who ends up being rejected by the American people and voted out of office after only one term -- as opposed to a leader like FDR, whose policies are also disastrous, but who ends up being loved by the American people nonetheless and voted back into office.”

Elsewhere, Tracinski writes about the influence Ayn Rand’ ideas are having on some in the media who are challenging and speaking out against Obama’s “stimulus” plan, and others calling for greater government intervention in the economy, in his column “The Ayn Rand Factor in the Santelli Revolt.”

“It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance to a government takeover of the economy is coming from people influenced by Ayn Rand. She has long functioned as a stiffener of resolve and as the fountainhead of pro-free-market ideas.”

New York Times Prints Letter on Stimulus-Stagflation

2009-02-22T04:01:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

The New York Times today revised and printed a letter I submitted to the newspaper in reply to an op-ed by Paul D. Ryan, which I posted about here on Feb. 17 ("Not a 'Stimulus' But a Return to Stagflation"). Recall that Ryan's editorial, entitled "Thirty Yeas Later, a Return to Stagflation," concluded that the "stimulus" plan will only ultimately lead to higher inflation and higher unemployment.

Below is my letter as printed.

To the Editor:

Paul D. Ryan properly points to the lesson of the government-induced stagflation of the 1970s as the result of the same spending and borrowing policies of the "stimulus" plan. He also recognizes that the Federal Reserve's policies of manipulating interest rates and expanding the money supply were an essential cause of today's financial crisis.

But instead of calling for reforms and cost controls for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Mr. Ryan should propose drastic cuts in spending on these entitlements.

Government interference in the economy fundamentally caused today's crisis, and only more freedom -- more separation between state and economics -- will get us out of it.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, N.Y., Feb. 14, 2009

Not a "Stimulus," But a Return to Stagflation

2009-02-14T08:21:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

The New York Times today (Sat., Feb. 14) has a good op-ed by Paul D. Ryan entitled “Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation.” In it, Ryan, who is described as a Republican representative from Wisconsin, concludes that the “stimulus” plan will only ultimately lead to higher inflation and higher unemployment.

Here’s the beef of Ryan’s op-ed:

“Combine high inflation and high unemployment and you have stagflation. Hindsight shows how the pain of the late 1970s and early 1980s could have been avoided, yet we’re now again planning to borrow and spend — and raise taxes — as President Jimmy Carter did. Soon we may again find ourselves watching a rising ‘misery index’ of inflation and unemployment together. If that happens, individual earning power will evaporate, and our standard of living will decline.

“To prevent stagflation, we should enact fiscal policy reforms that apply the lessons we learned from the 1970s. Keynesian stimuli based on borrowing and spending have not worked and will not work. One-time rebate checks do not increase the incentive to expand business operations and create jobs. But marginal cuts in tax rates do. We also must lower our job-killing corporate income tax rate, the highest in the industrialized world after Japan, and ease business worries by making it clear that there will be no tax increases in 2010.

“We should also re-establish the sound dollar. For the past decade, the Federal Reserve has manipulated interest rates and vastly over-expanded the money supply — and in so doing fueled the housing bubble that precipitated our current crisis …”

Unfortunately, Ryan doesn’t call for drastic cuts in spending to accompany his proposed tax cuts, and he calls for “reform” for those socialist behemoths otherwise known as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Nevertheless, this is a good op-ed that should be given support with positive letters to the editor: letters@nytimes.com.

Here’s my letter:

To the Editor:

Paul Ryan is correct, the “stimulus” plan will only ultimately lead to higher inflation and higher unemployment “Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation” (Sat., Feb. 14).

Ryan properly points to the lesson of the government-induced stagflation of the 1970s as the logical result of the same state spending and borrowing policies at the core of the current plan. He also recognizes that the Federal Reserves policies of manipulating interest rates and expanding the money supply were an essential cause of today’s financial crisis. However, instead of calling for reform of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Ryan should be targeting these bureaucratic behemoths for drastic spending cuts to accompany his proposed tax cuts.

Government interference in the economy fundamentally caused today’s crisis, and only more freedom -- more separation between state and economics -- will get us out of it.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, NY

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and commentator living in New York. Contact him at Theainet1@optonline.net.

Art and The Inconsequentialness of Nature

2009-02-08T17:22:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

On Saturday I was enticed to the Nassau County Museum of Art for the exhibit: “Poetic Journey: Hudson River Paintings from the Grey Collection.” (The next day, the New York Times gave it a well-deserved positive review: "For Serene Transport, Hudson River School Paintings.")

I enjoy some paintings from this school, particularly those of Albert Bierstadt, for their panoramic landscapes of valleys and mountains and their stylized recreation of nature, especially their brilliant colors and sharp contrasts between light and dark (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/dy3y5t). When men appear in these paintings, I view them mainly as a means for the artist to accentuate the vast landscapes and to lend them some perspective.

Unfortunately, my positive experience at the exhibit was undercut, slightly, by some of the descriptions of the paintings (which, I was told, are usually written by the curator):

“Trout Stream” by T. Worthington Whittredge, 1870s

“… The man fishing in the background is symbolic of the smallness of humanity compared to the grandeur of nature. The fisherman seems so inconsequential next to the enormous trees and beautiful, glittering steam that he almost vanishes into the wilderness.”

“View of Yosemite” by Thomas Hill, 1887
(No URL available)

“ … On the left-hand side, there is a man riding a horse, but he almost blends into the earth, which conveys the smallness of humanity against the rising cliffs and the great, never ending expanse of nature.”

Here I was reminded of the passage from “The Fountainhead” when Dominique asks Wynand if he’d never felt how small he was when looking at the ocean:

"Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man's magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes."

At the exhibit, the curator described another landscape, “Sunset” by George Inness, 1878-79, as follows:

“ … There are no people in this image, though in the background there is a building with smoke of the increasing human presence and the negative impact industrialization has on the Earth’s natural resources.”

Perhaps, the curator recognizes that the smoke stack represents man’s “magnificent capacity” to conquer nature, thus demonstrating how inconsequential nature is next to man’s rational mind.

School Boards and Objectivist Activism

2009-01-25T17:01:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Over at the Harry Binswanger List, a subscriber from South Carolina recently raised the issue of Objectivists possibly getting involved in intellectual activism by joining local school boards. I don't think this is a good way for Objectivists to fundamentally fight the good fight.

For years now I’ve covered school boards for the newspaper company I work for here on Long Island. The great majority of items in school budgets are mandated by the state, from high school courses and tests to handicapped-accessible construction such as ramps and bathrooms. I believe that, on average, state mandates comprise as much as 90 percent of school budgets. At least that’s the case in some of the towns I’ve covered.

The school district administrators and board trustees spend their time trying to find ways to reduced school taxes, which here on Long Island are heavily tied to property taxes, by keeping the status quo in terms of course offerings, or cutting services and teacher aides, or by purchasing materials, from toilet paper to bricks for construction of schools, from the lowest bidders. You get what you pay for, right?

If Objectivists want to get involved in activism in public education, I think they would be better off trying to influence the powers at the state level, where they devise and hand down their mandates, rather than run for seats on school boards, where ideological influence is minimal and concrete issues rule the day.

What’s the Difference Between Madoff and Social Security?

2009-01-23T03:28:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

In the midst of our financial collapse, as well as in the wake of the Bernie Madoff case, I keep hearing and reading many people express this basic sentiment: “Can you imagine if we privatize Social Security, like President Bush tried to do, and we all had our life savings invested in the stock market?”

For example, here is commentary from the current New Yorker magazine: “To begin changing the [Social Security] system into one that allowed individual stock-market accounts (can you imagine how *that* would have worked out?) might have made it possible to realize the long-running conservative dream of a truly dominant Republican Party.”

The implication of the question here is that, to leave your life savings to the stock market is highly volatile – as the financial crisis has shown – so it’s good that government taxes us each paycheck and keeps that money safe and secure in the Social Security system, as well as guaranteed when we retire.

The problem with this illogic is that, while the stock market certainly has risks like many human endeavors (crossing the street safely is just one of them), the chance that one may lose their shirt in the stock market is made much more riskier because the government is so heavily involved in regulating the financial industry, including the stock market -- that is, keeping it unfree.

As I have argued elsewhere before, the economic meltdown was essentially caused by government intervention and regulations, not their lack thereof as the state interventionists always argue. For many years now, banking, housing and insurance have been the most regulated areas of the economy, not to mention the financial industry and stock market. While government bureaucrats are busy enforcing all kinds of non-objective laws that actually persecute innocent people, treating them as if they are guilty until proven innocent simply because they are pursuing profit (as any producer does), they actually did little or nothing of what government legitimately is supposed to do: Look out for defrauders. Thus, the Madoffs of America, large like him or on a much small scale, go undetected.

The saturation of government regulation in the economy is what increases the uncertainty and volatility of the financial industries, including the stock market, which greatly increases the risks that investors in it will lose their shirts.

Moreover, this government control over the financial industry is the essence of the Social Security system. If Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, in which the money of some investors was taken to cover up and pay out the investments of other, usually earlier investors, while Madoff made off with their money, then Social Security, too, is also a Ponzi scheme destined to crash – as it already has.

At least with the stock market, an individual has the freedom to choose whether to invest their life savings in a single stock or a diversity of them. He may also forgo investing in his retirement, say, to pay for a house today that he expects one day to get a huge return on, only to turn and sell it when he retires and use that money for his senior years. In the end, if his choices and decisions work out or not, the responsibility for them ultimately lies with him, and only he gets hurt.

Social Security does not allow for such freedom. Government forces productive people to pay into its system through taxes, that is, by force. And the way the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security is set up, today’s producers who see a good portion of their taxes go to Social Security, are actually seeing it go to pay for today’s retirees whose own Social Security taxes were take out and used up by previous retirees. There comes a point that the money that is being thrown into the system runs out, and requires more and more taxes to keep it solvent.

Inevitably, one day, the Social Security system is going to completely crash, and if the mentality in Washington then remains as it is today, the politicians will seek a massive bailout of the system, paid of course by your taxes, which will only increase and leave you with less money to spend or invest on anything, including your retirement account.

There’s really no essential difference between the Madoff case and Social Security, except that Madoff allegedly committed his fraud without others realizing he was actually doing so. What is the government and American people’s excuse for the open Ponzi scheme that is Social Security?

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and commentator living in New York. Contact him at Theainet1@optonline.net.

Letter on Rand's Detractors

2009-01-19T02:51:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

The Smokey Mountain News in North Carolina published a letter I wrote in response to the newspaper’s Jan. 7 editorial “Who is Ayn Rand?”

http://tinyurl.com/82fynn

The editorial was written to accompany an article, “Who controls what’s taught?,” by Julia Merchant, which begins: “Western Carolina University’s College of Business recently secured a $1 million donation from BB&T — but not before discerning faculty fought to loosen the strings that came with the donation.”

http://tinyurl.com/78l4ck

Here’s my letter as originally written and published:

http://tinyurl.com/95sym7

Rand attackers are usually gratuitous

To the Editor:

I’m glad to see that your editorial board recognizes the enduring impact of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism on our culture (“Who is Ayn Rand?,” Jan. 7, 2009).

Of course, it’s no surprise that the modern philosophers Darryl Hale speaks of are antagonistic toward Rand. That’s because her supposedly “lightweight” ideas seriously challenge and rock their philosophies at their very core. When I come across critics of Rand’s philosophy and her novels — “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” — particularly among so-called intellectuals, I find few of them provide any serious grounding for their critiques. Usually, they are outright ad hominem attacks, or mere drive-by gratuitous remarks, such as the one in your editorial: Rand “carried her ideas too far.”

Surely these tactics are signs of lightweights, and are a complete contrast to Rand, who could and did take any philosophy, whether she agreed with it or not, and reduce it to its fundamentals.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, N.Y.

Madoff, Social Security--What's The Difference?

2009-01-17T08:01:00.001-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

There is a good, terse letter from an unknown writer (that is, I assume a non-Objectivist) in the print edition of USA Today this weekend. It properly compares Social Security to Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme, with the headline: “Social Security the worst Ponzi.”

"The difference between the way Social Security works and Madoff's alleged scam is that the 'investors' in Social Security can't stop or demand a return of their contributions."

Read the letter, and while you're at it leave a supportive comment, at:

http://tinyurl.com/89ksw7

'60 Minutes' Features Flynn Family

2009-01-11T05:47:00.001-08:00

DWI tragedy reexamined

By Joseph Kellard

“I wanted that courthouse on top of him, I wanted him buried under the jail, I want him dead," Neil Flynn, of Lido Beach, said on “60 Minutes” last Sunday.

Flynn was referring to Martin Heidgen, the Valley Stream man who killed his 7-year-old daughter, Katie, in a horrific drunk-driving accident on the Meadowbrook Parkway three and a half years ago.

Flynn appeared in the opening segment of CBS's top-rated news show, which focused on Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice and her crusade to more severely penalize drunk drivers, and especially those who kill other drivers. The Flynn-Heidgen case was the centerpiece of the report.

Seated beside his wife, Jennifer, Flynn told “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon, “I relive the crash, I think about it every day, I have nightmares about it every night, and I live my life without my daughter because of it.”

The crash Flynn relives occurred early on the morning of July 2, 2005. Driving north in a Chevrolet pickup truck at high speed in the southbound lanes of the Meadowbrook with a blood-alcohol content three times the legal limit, Heidgen slammed into the limousine that was taking Katie and her sister, parents and grandparents home from a wedding reception in Bayville, where she had been a flower girl at her aunt's wedding. While Heidgen suffered only wrist and ankle injuries, the limo driver, Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, of Farmingdale, was crushed to death, Katie was decapitated, and other passengers were severely injured.

Instead of manslaughter, the typical charge for a DWI fatality, Heidgen was charged with murder. So instead of facing a sentence ranging from probation to 15 years in prison, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 18 years to life in October 2006.

“The statute under which he was charged required us to prove that, through his actions, he had a completely depraved indifference to human life,” Rice explained to Simon. “His actions made the deaths of Katie Flynn and Stanley Rabinowitz inevitable. It was as inevitable as taking a gun and firing it at an individual who is standing five feet away from me.”

Heidgen's attorney, Stephen Lamagna of Garden City, told Simon that charging his client with murder instead of vehicular homicide was akin to treating him like a cold-blooded killer on a par with serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer. “Are we as a society ready to water down what murder is and turn our sons and daughters into murderers who go out and drink and drive and cause a fatal accident?” Lamagna said.

“No matter how tragic these cases are ... they're an unintentional act that was caused by the alcohol. But for the alcohol, this wouldn't have happened.”

Rice responded that being drunk should not absolve Heidgen of responsibility for his actions.

“What kind of lawlessness would you have if intoxication excused that kind of behavior?” she said.

Catherine Olian, the producer of the “60 Minutes” segment, told the Herald that the main reason the show's producers decided to spotlight this case was its groundbreaking outcome.

“There are very sad deaths from drunk driving all the time, and that wouldn't make us do a story,” Olian explained. “It was the fact that [Heidgen] was convicted of murder that made us interested in the story. That's when we thought how drunk-driving deaths are treated in the courts. Was this usual or unusual?”

The show began researching the story last spring, Olian said, interviewing prosecutors and defense attorneys in several states and looking into the range of laws dealing with drunk driving. “60 Minutes” staffers found that while some states —most notably, Texas — have tried drunk drivers for murder, no one had ever been convicted on a murder charge.

“I think it's about something that hits most people's lives in some way or another,” Olian said of the story, whose airing was delayed last fall due to constantly breaking news on the economy and the presidential election. “And I think it's a societal problem that people don't really know how to deal with.”

Simon told the Herald that what he took away from the story was that the tragedy had two sides — Katie Flynn's horrific death and her family’s agony over it, and Heidgen's future. “He's also dead because he'll be in prison the rest of his life,” Simon said. “That's also a tragedy and a waste, even though I think he deserves it.”

While Lamagna declined comment on the report, Rice said that the show “did an exceptional job of showing the inevitable consequences of drunk driving. It highlighted a life-and-death issue that's happening in every community across the country.”

Asked why she thinks her campaign to more severely punish drunk drivers attracted so much attention, Rice said she believes that, historically, prosecutors have been reluctant to push the envelope on the issue.

“I think that's because there are still so many people who sympathize with the drunk driver,” she said, echoing a point she made on the show. “That is the mindset we are trying to change here, and that's why I think it has a national appeal.”

On Tuesday afternoon, less than 48 hours after the show aired, Rice said her office had received hundreds of calls and e-mails. “They were thanking us for our leadership on this issue,” she said, noting that the volume of comments was unusually high.

Within 24 hours of the broadcast, there were some 500 comments posted on the “60 Minutes” Web site. Olian said that most were from viewers who disagreed with Rice’s stance.

“People who disagree tend to post more on any story,” she said.

Neil Flynn did not return a call for comment, and Heidgen declined to appear on “60 Minutes” because his case is under appeal.

The Peace Process War

2009-01-08T17:51:00.000-08:00
I dashed off the following letter, in response to Anne Applebaum’s column “It’s a War Process,” and emailed it to the editor at the Washington Post. A nod must go to commentator Robert Tracinski, who years ago coined the excellent phrase "the Peace Process War."

http://tinyurl.com/8xykd6

To the Editor:

[Re: “It’s a War Process,” by Anne Applebaum, Jan. 6, 2009]

Israel’s ongoing wars with her Islamic aggressors can best be described collectively as “the Peace Process War.”

It underscores the theater of the absurd that is this process. It essentially goes like this: Israel’s enemies attack her, Israel retaliates in self-defense, and all outsiders clamor for a cease fire and peace negotiations. And then, after Israel’s concessions are made, this whole process -- this cycle of Islamic aggression -- starts all over again.

In reality, Israel has every right to exist and destroy her aggressors; Hamas, an Iranian-back terrorist group, has no right to exist, let alone exact negotiations and concessions from Israel.

More fundamentally, Israel must destroy the root of this hydra of Islamic aggression: Iran. Israel must utterly wipe out Iran’s ruling clerics, nuclear facilities, military institutions and mosques that regularly chant “death to Israel.”

Only then will peace have a chance.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, NY

Ayers Speaks: An Exercise In Evasion

2008-12-07T18:29:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground terrorist who was turned into a central figure in Obama’s bid for the presidency, decide to keep quite, that is, to speak no evil, during the campaign. Now that Obama, who once wrote a positive blurb for one of his books, is headed to the White House, Ayers has spoken: he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, published on Friday, Dec. 5. I’m posting the link to it here because it’s a good example of an exercise in evasion. As an example, I give you this paragraph:

"The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war."

http://tinyurl.com/5svp2s

Mind you, the Times once wrote a profile piece on Ayers entitled “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives.” Here’s the opening paragraph from that article:

“‘I don't regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn't do enough.’ Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.”

I find it eerie that this article was published on September 11, 2001. It’s quite possible that on that morning some soon-to-be murder victims -- who boarded a few airplanes that radical Muslims would hijack and crash into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon -- had that edition of the Times in hand and read Ayers’ words: “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.”

http://tinyurl.com/5jhnl2

No doubt, the likes of Ayers and his America-hating leftist-anarchist comrades, indirectly, helped pave the way for their horrific deaths on 9/11.

Consider Obama's Pending Cynics

2008-11-08T03:47:00.000-08:00
By Joseph Kellard

Over at the Harry Binswanger List, a subscriber wrote the following about the presidential election:

“What's really depressing is that 70% of newly registered voters (if I heard Fox News correctly) voted for Obama. Welcome to the future.”

While this is discouraging news, we must project where these new, mostly younger voters will be after Obama's four-year term. When the reality of the president-elect's policies smack them across the face -- whether it's when his spinelessness toward our enemies emboldens them to slaughter more Americans, or when his socialist policies further sickens our ill economy, or when he starts inviting Rev. Jeremiah Wright-types to the White House to talk slave reparations, or when he's unable to deliver on his vague and impossible promises on a host of issues from the environment to health care --I'm sure many of them will, eventually, become disillusioned by and cynical of their political Messiah.

These teen and 20-something voters may come to realize, even if not explicitly, that what Obama originally offered was not actual "change," but rather the same tired, failed Leftist policies that their teachers and professors never taught them about in their economics and history classes. The worst among them, of course, will stick by Obama, evading reality to defend and rationalize even his most obvious disasters -- encouraged, in part, by a still worshiping mainstream media.

But this time around, as against the Carter and Clinton years, these cynics will have a new, potent force to reckon with: an increasing number of Objectivist activists. Following the lead of the Ayn Rand Institute and the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, we will offer them a realistic alternative before they give up and start attending Sunday Mass, as Obama did and found Rev. Wright instead of Ayn Rand.

After writing the above, I read this New York Times article that seems to buttress this post: "With Victory in Hand, Obama Aides Say Task Now Is to Temper High Expectations”:

http://tinyurl.com/59sahu

"President-elect Barack Obama has begun an effort to tamp down what his aides fear are unusually high expectations among his supporters, and will remind Americans regularly throughout the transition that the nation's challenges are substantial and will take time to address."

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and commentator living in New York. Contact him at Theainet1@optonline.net.

Greenspan Abandoned Objectivism Long Ago

2008-10-31T02:35:00.000-07:00
Of course, the financial mess is largely being blamed on capitalism, and given that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted that his ideology was wrong, Ayn Rand’s detractors are falling all over themselves to point fingers at her philosophy of Objectivism. Greenspan once, long ago, adhered to that philosophy, but abandoned it for sure once he became the head of the Fed. These facts are what Miss Rand’s detractors want to ignore so that they can smear her ideas. So whenever I see their evasions pop up in some article or opinion piece, I’ve been answering them with this stock comment:

To Whom It Concerns:

The economic meltdown in the U.S. was essentially caused by government intervention and regulations, not their lack thereof. For many years now, banking, housing and insurance have been the most regulated areas of the economy.

As to Mr. Greenspan, the philosophy he put into practice is the opposite of capitalism. Back in the 1960s, Ayn Rand taught him why capitalism requires that there be a wall of separation between economics and state, and why the Federal Reserve, as the state’s central economic planner, must be abolished. Yet Greenspan went on to become the Fed's leader and champion -- keeping interest rates artificially low and manipulating the money supply. So he long ago rejected Miss Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- and now he and all of us are paying the price for it.

JOSEPH KELLARD
East Meadow, NY

Peikoff On The Election

2008-10-29T02:22:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Dr. Leonard Peikoff offers his brief thoughts on the presidential race on his Oct. 20 podcast:

http://tinyurl.com/5ekg6x

Here's how Dr. Peikoff starts:

"I have this podcast to discuss ideas, not to choose among the lowest subhumans. I wouldn't dream of voting in this election, not for either side."

Here's how he sums up:

"Personally, I think McCain comes across as a tired moron, Obama as a lying phony, Bidden as an enjoyably hilarious windbag, and Sarah Palin as an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron, a phony and a windbag."

McCain's War Policy is a Dud

2008-09-16T02:17:00.000-07:00
McCain’s War Policy is a Dud

By Joseph Kellard

So John McCain may "bomb" Iran. The important questions are
what should he bomb and to what extent.

A committed altruist-pragmatist Republican, McCain would likely
just compromisingly target Iran's nuclear facilities, thus leaving the
ruling theocrats unscathed to rebuild or import their nukes and
capabilities to strike us another day.

But even if McCain wiped out that whole lot of theocrats, they'd be
replaced by their ideological peers. The theocrats pull the strings on
everything in Iran, from how women must dress in public to the
thugs that have taken hostage, terrorized and murdered Americans
for nearly three decades. Supposedly most young Iranians are more
secular, pro-American and want "democracy," but how long must
we wait for them to overthrow their Islamic regime? They've done
little to even weaken it, and I'm suspicious about just how
committed they are to freedom. That the theocrats remain in power
tells me that they still have a lot of support.

So an effective bombing campaign would not only wipe out Iran's
theocrats, but also all their major mosques--especially those where
congregants chant "Death to America"--and any major religious
schools, as well as their nuclear facilities and military complexes.

If the Iranians dared to rebuild another Koran-based government,
our leaders must tell them they will suffer similar consequences.

I can dream, can't I?

Meanwhile, Obama wants to have a "dialogue" with the Iranian
theocrats. So, right now, about the best we can expect is that the
theocrats' own irrationality will do them in. But the timetable for
such a collapse is really impossible to predict, particularly when
you consider the endless propping up Iran receives from the
American Left, our appeasing, so-called European allies and our
enemies in Russia, China and North Korea.

Ultimately, McCain's limited bombing campaign would amount to
little if anything, just as Bush's "surge" is nothing more than a push
for "representative government" so that Iraqis can vote themselves
into some form of statism, as the Taliban-Al Qaeda regroup again in
Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iran contracts out to have others do its
dirty terrorist work.

Our terrible political choices are part of the suffering we continue to
endure due to years of pragmatic foreign policy, and we're assured
to suffer further deadly consequences under Obama or McCain.
This won't change much until our leaders start acting on what the
Yaron Brook- and John Lewis-influenced policy makers in America
propose: all out war!

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and commentator living in New York. Contact him at Theainet1@optonline.net.

Conspiracy Theorists: The "9/11 Truthers"

2008-09-10T18:24:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

The City Journal has an article on its website, “A Conspiracy of Crackpots,” by John Avlon, regarding the so-called “9/11 Truthers.”

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0910ja.html

I sent the following post in response to the article:

Conspiracy theorists like the so-called 9/11 Truthers are fundamentally akin to the radical Islamics who, yes, actually attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Islamic 9/11 terrorists held radically to the essence of Islam (and religion as such): faith, that is, the suspension of reason to believe in something that otherwise has no evidence to tie it to reality. The Islamics have faith in the dogmas of their religion, which commands them to go slay non-believers, simply because they reject their particular faith.

Faith, too, explains the essence of the “Truthers.” The “Truthers” enemy is the actual truth, since it doesn’t conform to their particular faith: that America is an evil nation that deserved what it got (from the Islamics) on 9/11. But they try to mask this hatred by, figuratively speaking, faithfully flying planes into the facts, that is, by dreaming up conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact, that is, America itself perpetrated 9/11, so that it’s war-mongering leaders could go to war in the Middle East. The reality they evade is that the Islamics in the Mid-East, most particularly the Iranian theocrats, have been waging war on America for decades before 9/11.

Conspiracy theorists such as the “Truthers” are fundamentally at war with reality.

They Deserve Every Penny

2008-09-02T13:14:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Fellow Objectivist Sylvia Bokor and I had letters published in the Boston Globe in response to another letter-writer who challenged Ayn Rand fans to justify CEO pay. Here's the relevant part of his letter:

"The average chief executive makes 344 times as much as the average worker in major US corporations … I challenge any 'free'-market apologists, clutching their Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman books, to come up with a reasonable explanation for this execrable distribution of wealth."

http://tinyurl.com/5mheoc

Here's how our letters appeared:

They deserve every penny

September 2, 2008

RE BRYAN Tucker's challenge to Ayn Rand fans ("Too little outrage over pay inequity," Letters, Aug. 28): There's no need to apologize for free markets. But because of considerable miseducation, there is a need to explain them. Tucker's use of the phrase "execrable distribution of wealth" indicates his mistaken Marxist-Keynesian views. Properly, wealth should not be "distributed." It should be earned. Chief executives do that. They earn a lot of money because they have a great deal more responsibility than other employees do. Most important, they create jobs, expand production, and thereby raise the standard of living.

Politicians' promises to "create" jobs are self-aggrandizement. Politicians don't create jobs. CEOs do. That's why they're highly paid.

SYLVIA BOKOR, Albuquerque

CEOS MAKE much more money than the "average" worker because they are exceptional. In short, they are the brains behind a corporation, that is, the Atlases on whose shoulders the entire operation of the corporation fundamentally depends.

JOSEPH KELLARD, East Meadow, N.Y.

http://tinyurl.com/5mheocc

Harlequin Saves

2008-08-10T18:20:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard
In her book “Infidel,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali acknowledges several people who made it possible for her to survive the Islamic tribalism she grew up under in Africa, to escape to Holland after her father arranged for her to marry a man she didn’t love and to prosper thereafter. But if I were to cite one overriding factor that saved her, it would be the Western novels she read.

Throughout “Infidel,” Ali brings up these books again and again, particularly in regard to love, sex and marriage. To understand their impact, it’s important to recognize the mind-numbing, repressive culture she had to endure. Ali was born in Somalia to religious, clannish Muslim parents, and her mother taught her to memorize old chants of war and death, raids, and camel herding, and female Somali poetry that never mentioned love, which is, she writes, “considered synonymous with desire, and sexual desire is seen as low — literally unspeakable.”

Fortunately, Ali and her family moved to non-Muslim Kenya, where she attended a British colonial-based school and learned English. There she read “1984,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Wuthering Heights” and tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.

“Later on there were sexy books: Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele,” she writes. “All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas — races were equal, women were equal to men — and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me.”

Here are some other excerpts:

“[T]he spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit. It was fanned by the free-spirited novels … Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.”

“I always found it uncomfortable to be opposed to the West. For me, Britain and America were the countries in my books where there was decency and individual choice.”

“I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it … [T]he kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage … I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own.”

“Infidel” is a great study for someone who would like to (further) concretize the crucial, life-sustaining role that art plays in man’s life.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.

A Monadnock Valley Experience

2008-08-04T14:05:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

My sister, nephew and his friend, Evan, who had never been to New York City before, visited me from Virginia recently. Acting as amateur tour guide, I drove them around Manhattan one Saturday. Once we made it into the city from the Triborough Bridge, Evan, who is 14, expressed awe at the size of some large, modern apartment buildings. As we drove through mid-town, he kept looking upward out the back window. (I was reminded of that line from the first letter in the book "Letters of Ayn Rand": "I am so Americanized that I can walk in the streets without raising my head to look at the skyscrapers.")

Among our stops or the places we passed were Park Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum, Central Park, Trump Tower, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, the GE Building, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Flatiron Building, McSorley's Old Ale House, Wall Street, the still undeveloped property where the Twin Towers once stood, the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge.

I noticed Evan continued to take particular interest in the buildings, and he revealed that he wants to be an architect. So later, back on Long Island, I handed him a copy of the 25th Anniversary edition of "The Fountainhead," whose cover features Frank O'Conner's wonderful painting "Man Also Rises." I told Evan he may be too young to understand the book. If so, I suggested he pick it up again in a few years.

Evan told me that his mother's boyfriend had already suggested that he read the novel; that it had "changed his life." (Sound familiar?) Evan also said he liked to read and enjoyed books about "psychology." I said that the novel is very philosophical. He thanked me, and said that after reading the description on the back cover, it sounded interesting.

Afterward, I thought about the young man on the bike who meets Howard Roark while he sits on a boulder overlooking a valley dotted with summer resort homes that he created. No, I didn't create "The Fountainhead," but giving it to a youth like Evan nevertheless reminded me of that famous line from that scene at Monadnock Valley: "Roark looked after him. He had never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime."

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.

Electric Cars and "Alternative" Energy

2008-07-21T14:32:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

The New York Times on Saturday (7/19/08) published an honest report, "Costly Toys, or a New Era for Drivers?" by Joe Nocera, on the state of electric car technology. A discerning, objectively-informed reader can see in the article a microcosm of the "alternative" energy industry. That is, electric cars are still years away from being a viable competitor to gas-run vehicles, just as other so-called green technologies, including wind and solar energy, still fail to possess the capabilities to be mass-productive and send oil into obsolescence.

Here are a few key excerpts:

"In the documentary ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?’ – about the EV1, an all-electric car General Motors began making in 1996 and killed once and for all in 2003 – the filmmakers posit the theory that the vehicle was done in by a grand conspiracy involving the oil industry, the Bush administration and the car industry. But that's not what happened. Gas was cheap when the EV1 was on the market; auto buyers preferred S.U.V.'s. And the technology didn't exist to allow the EV1 to become a viable mass-market automobile. Among its flaws, the EV1 used a nickel metal hydride battery that couldn't get more than 75 miles before needing a charge."

"[E]ven though the range of an electric car can extend to 200 miles or more, that is still not enough for people to abandon internal combustion engines. Surveys have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of people drive 50 miles or less a day - and the nascent electric car industry takes great comfort in those numbers. But what happens when you want to take a longer drive?"

"A plug-in hybrid would drive completely on electricity until the battery runs down - after about 40 miles or so - and only then would the car switch to internal combustion. Such a solution has the potential to cut the nation's gasoline bill in half."

Read the whole article at:

http://tinyurl.com/62243p

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.

George Carlin The Nihilist

2008-06-29T02:56:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

The late comedian George Carlin was at his best when he dissected the English language and the ways that people misused it. For example, watch this classic routine on airline safety:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GFW6NHbWX0E

Carlin was also great at demonstrating the absurdities and contradictions of religion. Here’s a pretty standard routine on what he had to say about it:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o

But mostly I could not watch Carlin because he spewed a seething hatred toward man as such. Despite being an atheist who understood the evils of religion, this view was part of his broader perspective that human beings are evil. Apparently, Carlin never let go of the idea of Original Sin — that man is born corrupt by his nature — that I’m sure he learned in Catholic school.

Carlin’s man-hatred is clearly evident in his views on environmentalism, in which he disparages the green movement, not because he (correctly) regards it as anti-man, but because he primarily sees it (incorrectly) as a movement to make life better for man on Earth. But, actually, this was only his ostensible view of environmentalism. Notice that, when he puts himself in the position of Mother Earth in the video clip below, he says that he “dreams” for a virus like AIDS as Earth’s defense against man. In turn, he comes off as man-hating as a radical environmentalist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&NR=1

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HWYI0vEb-u4

Below is an excerpt from an AP article on Carlin after he died last week. It will give you a better idea as to why I believe he was, essentially, a poster-boy nihilist — that is, a person who fundamentally has no values and actively seeks to destroy values as such:

"I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.

Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN."

"The world is a big theater-in-the round as far as I'm concerned, and I'd love to watch it spin itself into oblivion," he said. "Tune in and watch the human adventure."

George Carlin wasn’t joking. He meant it.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.

Communists and The Olympics

2008-06-22T15:08:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

In the March 2002 issue of The Intellectual Activist, Robert Tracinski wrote an essay on that year's scandal at the winter Olympics. The scandal involved collusion between Russian and French judges to alter scores in figure skating. At those games, a flawless pair of Canadian skaters was robbed of first place so that a Russian couple could take the gold.

In his essay, Mr. Tracinski, while providing historical perspective on the former Soviet Union's state-run Olympics program, wrote the following: "For decades, Olympic gold medals were a key element of Communist propaganda. The Olympic games, like other cultural and intellectual 'exchange' programs, were meant to present the Soviet Union and its satellite dictatorships as countries worthy of dealing with the West as equals, both as moral equals and as cultural, technological, and material equals. Sports had a particular role in promoting the alleged material strength of Communism. The healthy bodies of East-Bloc athletes on the Olympic podium were meant to distract our attention from the starving masses of their countrymen."

Tracinski goes on in that essay to note how the Soviets invested many resources in their Olympic athletes, particularly their figure-skaters, and that for those athletes this investment was a rare way for them, under the Soviet dictatorship, "to obtain money, special treatment, and the privileged of traveling abroad."

(Incidentally, I must add that the Soviets also poured a lot into their hockey program. Soviet hockey players were breed to be outstanding athletes -- thanks to the state paying their way, they were able to eat, sleep and drink hockey, 24/7/365. The Soviets won the Olympic gold metal in four consecutive winter Olympic games prior to the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid -- when the Americans "miraculously" defeated them and later won gold -- and two took two more gold medals after this. Note, also, that Russia has not won gold in hockey since the Soviet state dissolved).

Anyway, I thought of Tracinki's TIA essay this week when I read about China's state-backed Olympic program in a recent Time magazine article ("China's Sports School: Crazy for Gold"). Although Communism is waning in influence in modern China, this article clearly demonstrates that collectivism and nationalism are nevertheless very much alive well. But Communist authoritarianism is still being used to recruit athletes in order to help the mother country reach its goal of wracking up the most gold medals at this summer's Olympic games in Beijing.

Here are some excerpts, the first being the opening paragraph:

"A year ago, a slender girl called Cloud had no idea she would dedicate her life to lifting disks of iron above her head. Then a stranger came to her remote village in eastern China's Shandong province, took detailed measurements of her shoulder width, thigh length and waist circumference -- and announced she would have the honor of serving her motherland as a weight lifter. The then 14-year-old daughter of vegetable farmers had little choice in the matter. She had been chosen to be a cog in China's vast sports machine, a multibillion-dollar apparatus designed with one primary goal in mind: churning out Olympic gold medalists."

"For most Chinese, victory in Beijing will not only prove their country's status as a potential superpower but also erase its historic humiliation by colonial powers. Stupefied by opium, cowed by Western firepower, China was dismissed at the outset of the 20th century as the 'sick man of Asia.' Indeed, the first article Chairman Mao ever published was on the importance of sporting success to the national psyche. 'Our nation is wanting in strength," he fretted back in 1917. 'If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?'"

Read the full article here:

http://tinyurl.com/6qtlqx

Skyscraper Boom Signals Post-9/11 Defeat

2008-06-15T19:31:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

It's great to see that the quintessential American architecture, the skyscraper, is growing in popularity globally as record-high buildings are piercing skies in various corners of the world. What's discouraging, however, is that many are rising in the Middle East (e.g., Saudi Arabia), while it has become tougher to build tall in post-9/11 America.

I read all about this trend in a New York Times' article on Sunday:

http://tinyurl.com/6jhoc6

"Nearly seven years after the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York portended a pullback from cloud-grazing construction, the world is in the midst of a huge wave of tall building construction, both in number and in size."

"Some of the most ambitious developments are in the petro-fueled economies of the Middle East and Russia. Among the most anticipated is the $1 billion Burj Dubai, a massive tower being developed by Emaar Properties in the United Arab Emirates."

"In contrast, she [Carol Willis, an urban historian and director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York] says that large developments in New York and other Western cities these days are likely to encounter public opposition - as evidenced by initial public reaction to Forrest City Ratner's plan for the 22-acre Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and Jean Nouvel's soaring Midtown Manhattan tower, commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer."

Observe that in the land that produced the terrorists that destroyed the Twin Towers, some of the tallest skyscrapers are going up, while in the city where the attacks took place, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to build at all, and the skyscraper that will replace the towers is significantly smaller in scale.

This is a less obvious but nevertheless significant example of how the radical Islamics are winning the so-called "war on terrorism."

We Must Learn From Their Era's Example

2008-05-28T16:01:00.000-07:00
By Joseph Kellard

Occasionally an unusual, even incredible story falls onto a journalist's lap. It happened to me in 2003, when I was a reporter for the Oceanside-Island Park Herald. After Ed Hynes read my article on Nat Glanz, these two fellow World War II prisoners of war decided to reunite.

It's incredible that they had met for just 10 minutes in a Nazi prison camp nearly six decades before, yet Hynes remembered Glanz from certain details in my article about his war experiences. Incredibly, they had both lived in Oceanside all those years, and even belonged to the same veterans organization, but never knew about each other until after my story appeared in the Herald.

That story still makes me reflect on my seven-plus years as a reporter, writing about people from many walks of life, and how among all of them, I’ve come to learn about and respect no group of individuals more than war veterans. Growing up, I'd never attended Memorial Day or Veterans Day ceremonies. But after hearing the vets and their supporters speak while I reported on those events, particularly after Sept. 11, 2001, I began to understand their significance more deeply. And no vets are more significant to me than those who fought in World War II.

They were called on to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan, two evil regimes bent on America’s destruction. With the fall of both regimes at American hands — especially the decimation of two Japanese cities with atomic bombs — our leaders set an example to the equally evil Soviet regime (a parasitic "ally"), which sought world-wide Communist rule, that it too could meet with our nation’s unprecedented military might and will to use it.

This is why men such as Hynes and Glanz — who fought at the Battle of the Bulge, were imprisoned together in a Nazi camp, and witnessed the tragedies of war-torn Europe — should be admired and endlessly thanked. They put their lives on the line so that they, their loved ones and all of us can enjoy the freedoms that have made America the most advanced, prosperous and greatest nation in history — a status earned thanks to our forefathers’ original and core ideal that each individual has an inalienable right to his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

When I watched as Hynes and Glanz embraced and exchanged war stories at their first meeting in sixty years, I realized how special it was for me to be among two members of a rapidly shrinking fraternity who fought in history’s most significant war. I still think about how vets like them are ordinary men, but are nonetheless extraordinary in what they helped accomplish. In short, they fought to preserve the only ultimate hope for mankind and civilization: the United States of America.

Today, I am also reminded of how we are in the midst of a new war (well, actually a war whose origins can be traced to the Iranian theocrats who took Americans hostage in 1979), one in which we face an enemy of Islamic radicals who are as evil, and in certain respects more dangerous, than their Nazi and Communist predecessors. They seethe with hatred for America’s ideals and her outstanding success, and they seek not merely to conquer, but to annihilate us infidels and our way of life, and would certainly do so if given the chance.

Hynes and Glanz embody an era of Americans who righteously and confidently faced down, fought and destroyed those earlier threats to this great nation. Let's hope the lessons of their lives, and the moral certainty with which they and their leaders’ fought World War II, are not lost on us today. Those lessons and, more importantly, their implementation in action are our only hope.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.