The Nature of Things

This story is just too deliciously ironic to ignore. Remember Ayn Rand, heroine of the conservative/tea partier cause? She believed in individual self-sufficiency. Individuals should stand or fall on their own, based on their own efforts. It is a philosophy that essentially extolls survival of the fittest - or the richest and most ruthless. There is no social contract in Rand-world. We do not owe anything to our neighbors. Most importantly, we should not accept any assistance from the government and government, in its truest and most righteous form, should not offer any. But if you happen to contract lung cancer, all that philosophy apparently goes out the window, because, you see, Ayn Rand - yes, Mrs. John Galt, herself - applied for and received Social Security and Medicare when she became ill with lung cancer. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she ...

Alan Furst is an excellent writer of historical fiction whose chosen period and place for the settings of his novels is Europe from 1933 to 1945. The Polish Officer is the third of his novels that I have read, after The Foreign Correspondent and Dark Star . The first two were full of suspense and kept me on the edge of my seat so I knew what to expect from this one. It did not disappoint. Captain Alexander de Milja defends his city of Warsaw as the Germans advance in 1939, but the Germans have too much firepower. The war in Poland is over almost before it is begun. Except it really isn't. The Poles fight on by other means, implacably opposing their invaders in ways both great and small, but stealthily, indirectly, underground. Before the last shot of the direct war is fired, Captain de Milja is recruited to help carry on the indirect war. His first task is to transport the gold that constitutes much of Poland's national treasury out of the country and take it safely beyond...

I've been following the stories of the popular uprising and demonstrations in Egypt, after the uprising which toppled the totalitarian government in nearby Tunisia. It seems that northern Africa is a hotbed of insurrection at the moment. I don't pretend to understand all the issues involved, other than the observation that in both places, masses of people are asking for democratization of their country's government. It is a widespread human yearning which has been made stronger by modern technology and the coming of the Internet to isolated regions around the world. That explains why the Egyptian government is shutting down Internet and cell phone access in their country today. Admittedly, my following of this story has been mostly on the Internet and in print. I haven't watched television news coverage of it, but I have read some of the critiques of that coverage and the one that appeared in Salon.com today was particularly illuminating. Salon makes the point tha...

In Florida today, a five-year-old dropped a loaded gun in his pre-kindergarten classroom. Meanwhile, out in Utah, the state legislature is all set to make the Browning M1911 semiautomatic pistol , a gun whose only purpose is to kill people, the state gun. It would be the first state to designate a state gun, but no doubt will not be the last. Can Texas be far behind? And, of course, all across the country today, 34 more people were murdered with handguns, but that hardly even qualifies as a news story any more. It is expected and we just accept it. What kind of country have we become? I am disgusted.

The Very Serious People in Washington love to talk about fixing Social Security. Never mind that Social Security is working perfectly well and nonpolitical assessments of the program indicate that it will not even begin to get close to being in deficit for another 30 to 40 years. "No, no, no!" the politicians shout. "Social Security is in terrible, terrible trouble! You must let us fix it!" I would not trust most of these yahoos to fix a hangnail, much less a program I will depend on for much of my livelihood in my - ahem - declining years. For one thing, the most prominently mentioned "fix" is lowering benefits and raising the retirement age, because people are living longer its proponents argue, but the truth is they really aren't. Very well off people who have access to the best of health care and who don't particularly need Social Security are living substantially longer, but for poor and middle-class people - THOSE WHO DEPEND ON SOCIAL...