Ayn Rand, young and svelte, in Hollywood

Ilya Somin, at Volokh, having just finished Jennifer Burns’s excellent new biography of Ayn Rand, makes a point of recommending it, and offers his own view of Rand.

Ayn Rand was the greatest popularizer of libertarian ideas of the last 100 years. Many more people have read Rand’s books than have read all the works of Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Nozick, and all the other modern libertarian thinkers combined. In becoming a libertarian without any influence from Rand, I was actually unusual. Over the last 15 years, I have met a large number of libertarian intellectuals and activists of the last two generations, including some of the most famous. More often than not, reading Rand influenced their conversion to libertarianism, even though very few fully endorse her theories or consider themselves Objectivists. Burns quotes Milton Friedman’s perceptive assessment of Rand as “an utterly intolerant and dogmatic person who did a great deal of good.” I think he was probably right.

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Fellow Volokhian David Bernstein, responding to Ilya, adds his own personal tribute to Ayn.

Rand turns Marxism on its head. While Marxists argue that “capitalists” make their profits on the backs of the working class, Rand illustrates that the working class, as such, makes almost no contribution to wealth, but relies on the efforts, risks, sacrifices, and most of all the genius of the entrepreneurial class. Consider, as a thought experiment, what living standards would be like if every person in the world had an IQ around the median of 103, and otherwise had average talents and ambition. Does anyone seriously doubt that “workers,” and everyone else, would be a lot poorer than they are today, and indeed would likely be living as poorly as our hunting and gathering ancestors?

As I’ve previously observed, a lot of people on both the political left and right neglected to consider some pretty obvious aspects and details of the liaison between Roman Polanski and a certain young lady 32 years ago and simply accepted her Grand Jury testimony uncritically as a perfectly factual and objective version of events.

That acceptance of a less than complete, biased and self-interested account, combined with a liberal application of emotionalism and indignation, easily turned a tawdry Hollywood casting couch trist into a horrid sex crime with a child victim. Left or right, a surprisingly large number of people seem to find the editorial equivalent of participation in a lynch mob to be a gratifying form of self expression.

The probation officer all those years ago was in possession of a more accurate and complete understanding of the case, and his sentencing report, quoted by the New York Times, arrives at very different conclusions.

The report, submitted by acting probation officer Kenneth F. Fare, and signed by a deputy, Irwin Gold, recommended that Mr. Polanski receive probation without jail time for his conviction on one count of having unlawful sex with a minor. In a summary paragraph, the report said: “Jail is not being recommended at the present time. The present offense appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgement by the defendant.” It went on to note that the victim and her parent, as well as an examining psychiatrist, recommended against jail, while a second psychiatrist described the offense as neither “aggressive nor forceful.”

Despite Ms. Geimer’s age and her testimony that she had objected to having sex with Mr. Polanski and asked to leave Jack Nicholson’s house, where the incident occurred, the probation report concluded, “There was some indication that circumstances were provocative, that there was some permissiveness by the mother,” and “that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing.”

As we see, the authorities at the time, took the young lady’s testimony of her own reluctance with a very large grain of salt, doubtless concluding that both the circumstances of the encounter and many of her own actions signaled explicitly affirmative intentions.

The most interesting aspect of all of this is the fact that Roman Polanski’s flight thirty one years ago was precipitated by precisely the same sort of journalistic feeding frenzy which has been replayed all over again recently. A firestorm of sensationalized accounts of Polanski’s misdeed alarmed the publicity-conscious judge who intended to set aside the conventional processes of justice and overrule a plea bargain already agreed to by both the prosecution and the defense.

Polanski did not escape justice. He had already served a 42 day term of imprisonment, which was supposed to constitute his actual sentence. Polanski also settled privately with the young lady, paying her a sum of money of a specific amount never publicly disclosed. What Polanski escaped was injustice.

He escaped a breach of the normal, impartial, and objective processes of justice, which were in the process of collapsing due to official cowardice and unwillingness to resist a wave of public indignation, mischievously created by irresponsible journalism.

Long-standing cultural restraints on sexual expression and activity have been dwindling away in America for all of the last century, but one powerful prohibition not only survives, but continues to be able to turn ordinary Americans into something very much resembling belligerent Muslims bent on wiping out any stain upon the chastity of their females in blood: the issue of age.

Underage sex is still a kind of priapic third rail. And like Nabokov’s Humbert, Roman Polanski proved to be another sophisticated European gentilhomme d’un certain âge susceptible to the charms of the knowing nymphette. His sin happens to be relatively unique in being capable of getting Americans in general worked up into a lather of righteous indignation just as effectively in 2009 as in 1978 or in 1955 (the publication date of Lolita).

In exactly the same way that the idea of black sexual aggression directed at white women was once upon a time so horrifying an idea to the general community in certain American states that any close resemblance to that supreme phobia could suffice to set into motion the processes of storytelling which would fit the details of the actual case into the terrible archetype, frequently with lethal results, so too today is the idea of adult sexual aggression directed at children a compelling, and potentially dangerous, archetype.

Let’s try another literary trope. Picture Roman Polanski, not as Humbert Humbert, but as Tom Robinson, the black defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird. Just like the Polanski case, To Kill a Mockingbird features a public frenzy of indignation at a defendant accused of being a sexual aggressor toward an innocent victim, who is supposed to be protected from the advances of anyone like the defendant by powerful social taboos. Just as in the Harper Lee novel, adjudication of the Roman Polanski case revolved around issues of just who was the actual initiator and whether female consent had been given. Fearful archetypes and framing narratives can work in exactly the same in either case, can’t they?

Sarah Palin’s new book Going Rogue will not be released by its publisher until November 17, but it is already the Number 1 best selling title on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

A hit piece in the New York Post sneers over the fact that Sarah Palin had the assistance of a collaborator (Lynn Vincent) in producing her book. The press never talks that way about books (all written with –or by– collaborators) published by democrats like the Clintons.

I suppose the difference is that Palin identified her collaborator publicly, rather than denying one existed.

JWF reports that Palin is having the last laugh over the Post attack piece’s “blithering idiot” insult. Apparently, she is getting hundreds of speech requests at her new $100,000 speaking fee. On top of her $7 million book advance, those speeches will quickly pay off the legal expenses that caused her to relinquish the Alaska governorship, and will give her a platform to use to make an impact on the political issues of the day.

David Malki’s original Electroplasmic Hydrocephalic Genre Fiction Generator 2000 design.

Liam Cooke’s working model

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

In New Republic, Jonathan Chait, uses the purported review space for two new biographies of Ayn Rand –Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (to be released October 27) — to deliver instead an attack on Rand and her philosophy of which Ellsworth Toohey would be proud.

Admirers of Rand will enjoy reading this relatively sophisticated analysis of her influence, and will probably also perversely enjoy (in the mode of intellectual pathologist) the ingenious and sophistical rhetorical ploys Chait uses to defend his own leftism.

We’re really squabbling over nothing, Chait explains in a particularly artful pair of paragraphs. Accept Chait’s numbers (if you do, come see me about a bridge I’m selling), and it all becomes clear: the difference between conservative and liberal tax policies amounts to a tiny, scarcely significant, percentage.

Most of the right-wing commentary purporting to prove that the rich bear the overwhelming burden of government relies upon the simple trick of citing only the income tax, which is progressive, while ignoring more regressive levies. A brief overview of the facts lends some perspective to the fears of a new Red Terror. Our government divides its functions between the federal, state, and local levels. State and local governments tend to raise revenue in ways that tax the poor at higher rates than the rich. (It is difficult for a state or a locality to maintain higher rates on the rich, who can easily move to another town or state that offers lower rates.) The federal government raises some of its revenue from progressive sources, such as the income tax, but also healthy chunks from regressive levies, such as the payroll tax.

The sum total of these taxes levies a slightly higher rate on the rich. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers pay 29.4 percent of their income in local, state, and federal taxes. The top 1 percent pay an average total tax rate of 30.9 percent–slightly higher, but hardly the sort of punishment that ought to prompt thoughts of withdrawing from society to create a secret realm of capitalistic übermenschen. These numbers tend to bounce back and forth, depending upon which party controls the government at any given time. If Obama succeeds in enacting his tax policies, the tax burden on the rich will bump up slightly, just as it bumped down under George W. Bush.

Excellent reading for train rides through Rocky Mountain tunnels.

Humorist Harry Stein’s a new book, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, skewering the intolerance, self-regard, and intellectual provinciality of the establishment left is the occasion of this Front Page interview.

F(ront)P(age): …What inspired you to write this book?

Stein: It was simply the fact of living in a dark blue locale – the artsy New York suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, literally and figuratively an extension of the Upper West Side – and daily facing the reality that, for all my neighbors’ ostentatious ‘tolerance,’ they are astonishingly intolerant of anyone who challenges their own left-of-center assumptions and beliefs. There are millions of us conservatives marooned in places like this all over America, and I wanted the book to reflect their experiences, horrific, amusing and otherwise. I also want to encourage those who tend to hide in the conservative closet to stand up and be counted – something that, in the age of Obama, is more essential than ever.

FP: Why is New York so liberal? What forces made it so?

Stein: …Historically, New York is a city of immigrants — immigrants who, in many cases, were fleeing genuine oppression. (This was certainly my grandparents’ case). So their tendency, way back when, was to be extremely liberal, if not outright radical, in their political orientation. And leftist politics, like any other faith, tends to be inherited. Question many New Yorkers closely about why and how they became liberal and they’ll look at you as if you’re mad; they’ve always been this way, so has everyone they know, how could anyone possibly be anything else? In fact, they’ll have contempt for you for even posing such an absurd question. …

FP: … Why are liberals and leftists so abusive?

Stein: I really believe it’s because they grasp on some level — we’re talking way, way, deep down, miles below consciousness — that their ideas do not stand up to rational argument. Theirs is a belief system grounded on faith, not on facts and certainly not, God knows, justified by experience. So they simply cannot afford to accord their opponents the status of moral equals; they must be attacked, and dismissed, as evil. That’s why trying to have an honest and fair-minded discussion with such people is useless, As soon as they’re cornered, they reflexively resort to name calling. …

FP: …Can you talk a bit about this echo chamber that the Left lives in? …

Stein: ‘Echo chamber’ is the right term, because these views tend not simply to be endlessly repeated in such environments, but amplified through the repeating. Something that strikes many of us who live in such environments is how blithely unaware they are of conservative views. What they think they know about who we are and what we believe, picked up from the likes of NPR or The New York Times, is invariably distorted; we’re reduced to crude caricature, so as to flatter their own smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

Maybe readers allowing you to purchase electronic copies of books from giant impersonal corporations are not such a good idea after all.

What happens when Amazon decides, for reasons of its own, that you should not be in possession of a particular book? Pop! It’s gone. Eliminated by your friendly corporation’s software update system.

Big Brother came calling on Amazon customers yesterday, as the New York Times reports.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

The Times reports that the Holden Caulfield alienation franchise is currently under attack by brand infringement.

(Last Wednesday,) a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order forbidding publication in the United States of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” a takeoff on — J. D. Salinger’s lawyers say rip-off of — “The Catcher in the Rye,” written by a young Swedish writer styling himself J. D. California.

Until the judge makes her final ruling, Mr. Salinger’s fans will be spared the prospect of encountering Holden Caulfield, the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into dementia.

But, matters are far worse than that: poor Holden’s 1950s vocabulary and teenage preoccupations have grown out-of-date, and nobody even feels sorry for him any more.

Holden may have bigger problems than the insults of irreverent parodists and other “phonies,” as Holden would put it. Even as Mr. Salinger, who is 90 and in ailing health, seeks to keep control of his most famous creation, there are signs that Holden may be losing his grip on the kids.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” published in 1951, is still a staple of the high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to. What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

The alienated teenager has lost much of his novelty, said Ariel Levenson, an English teacher at the Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Holden’s home turf. She added that even the students who liked the book tend to find the language — “phony,” “her hands were lousy with rocks,” the relentless “goddams” — grating and dated.

“Holden Caulfield is supposed to be this paradigmatic teenager we can all relate to, but we don’t really speak this way or talk about these things,” Ms. Levenson said, summarizing a typical response. At the public charter school where she used to teach, she said, “I had a lot of students comment, ‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’ ”

A 15th century manuscript of the Forme of Cury, a book of recipes compiled by Richard II‘s master cooks, from the collection of the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester has been digitized, making available online in its original form one of the most famous medieval cookbooks.

The Forme includes recipes for pike, porpoise, blancmange, and even “loseyns” (lasagna), a dish of baked pasta with cheese.

BBC

1:19 video

An 18th century printed edition is also available online at Project Gutenberg.

The local historical society atBerwick, Pennsylvania, a borough of 10,000 people in largely rural Columbia County, was inventorying its collection of Early America almanacs and discovered it possessed a rare 1733 first annual edition of Benjamin Franklin‘s Poor Richard’s Almanack.

The almanac, bound with several others, proved authentic, and was sold yesterday at Sotheby’s, bringing $556,500, the second largest price ever paid at auction for an American book. The record holder remains George Washington’s copy of the Federalist Papers also sold by Sotheby’s in 1990 for $1.4 million.

Whatever will the historical society do with so much money?

Some news agency‘s account.

I know myself of a county courthouse in Pennsylvania where original documents signed by Benjamin Franklin in his capacity as secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are still sitting unrecognized in the county clerk’s office. I could have pointed out their value, but I kind of like the idea of their being in the same place they’ve always been.

The Austrian writer Alexander Maria Norbert Lernet-Holenia, 1897-1976, served as an officer in both World Wars

I think possibly the most comical death scene in all literature may be found in Lernet-Holenia’s The Resurrection of Maltravers, 1936:

Count Georg Maltravers, a ne’er-do-well representative of an Ur-Adel family “descended from no lesser a being than Merwech, the son of an ocean demon, who had overpowered the Queen of the Franks as she bathed in the sea,” takes refuge with his estranged brother upon release from prison after serving a twenty-two month sentence for cheating at cards.

Shunned by his family as the result of his disgrace (and because of his manifest contempt for his brother’s bourgeois wife), Maltravers disconsolately roams the countryside desultorily bird shooting. He is finally injured in a shooting accident, and collapses from loss of blood having been injured in the hand by a burst barrel.

A peasant lifted him up, placed him on his wagon, and took him home, like the peasant in the tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake.

When the Hospitaller was alone with the patient, he sat down on the edge of his bed, and Maltravers grabbed Le Boutillier’s hands, laying them on his own forehead and eyes. At that instant, Le Boutillier realized that Maltravers was dying. His reclining body jolted, and he sat up halfway. Le Boutillier hastily withdrew his hands from the patient’s eyes, reached for a glass of port on the night table, and was about to hand it to him. But as he bent over, Maltravers sat further up, their heads collided, the port was spilled on the bed cover, Maltravers fell back and was dead.

In reality, our hero is not actually dead at all. He awakens in his coffin, dressed in his old cavalry uniform, breaks out of the family crypt, and sets off for new adventures, determined to make a major change in his mode of living.

WorldNetDaily:

A bookstore in Texas has sparked some comments – and criticisms – for having displayed a number of books about Barack and Michelle Obama under a “Religion” sign in the children’s section of its facility.