For our Memphis-area readers: Saturday will see another iteration of the always-popular Memphis Area Blogger’s Bash; see Dark Bilious Vapors for all the gory details.

Update: Mike has a writeup, and Abby has pictures.

I can’t say I have a huge amount of sympathy for the political views of Ward Churchill, the UC-Boulder professor who now won’t be speaking at Hamilton College. That said, he’s a tenured faculty member at Colorado—however ill-judged the decision to tenure him was—and even if he weren’t tenured, the facts that he’s an insensitive jackass with repellant views and a walking testimonial for the validity of Godwin’s Law wouldn’t rise to the level so as to justify his firing.

More at Protein Wisdom and Cold Spring Shops; another account of Churchill’s travails appears in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed daily update ($).

Steven Taylor notes a lengthy piece in today’s Los Angeles Times looking at efforts to amend the Constitution to permit naturalized citizens to serve as president and vice-president.

The article also looks at the historical circumstances that gave rise to the prohibition on foreign-born citizens serving as president, although mention of Britain’s 1689 Glorious Revolution, in which the Stuart monarchy was displaced by the Dutch House of Orange is curiously omitted, and past efforts to eliminate that prohibition.

I previously discussed my support for such an amendment here.

The writing on the wall was there for some time, but now it’s official; Star Trek: Enterprise will come to an end after four seasons on UPN. Although I have to say that (at least creatively) Enterprise was on the rebound, hopefully this will give the powers that be behind Trek a few years to sit down and rethink their approach to telling stories; maybe they’ll even learn something from Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, which is getting significantly better ratings in a less desirable timeslot and with a big chunk of the potential audience having already seen the episodes that have already aired in Britain. (þ: OTB)

You know, I don’t think referring to the state’s leading football prospects as the state’s “Ten Most Wanted” is really projecting the image wanted by Ole Miss, State, and Southern.

As a recovering Randroid—well, it was a phase of mine about fifteen years ago and it lasted less than a year—I thought I should comment on all of the recent attention that’s been given to Rand. Cass has a good post that explores it, and she even mentions my love of Rush!!

First on Rand. Cass has asked if the world we live in now—the values we claim to hold—is Rand or Rand-lite. Definitely Rand-lite, as I see it. Rand considered things as mundane, and necessary, as taxation to be slavery of one to another. If I recall correctly, she was trying to come up with a way for the government to operate without taxes, such as charging people for access to the courts and police protection. Similarly, she was quite dogmatic about, well, everything. She considered self-sacrifice repulsive, even though Cass gives the matter a more thoughtful reading. One passage I recall is her trying to figure out if one should risk his life to save another’s. I believe she used the lifeboat scenario and concluded that in an emergency, self-sacrifice might be appropriate.

Ultimately, what turned me off of Rand was the coldness of her philosophy. Her philosophy could be taken straight out of the Declaration of Independence, but she takes it to an extreme that is unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a very basic, even foundational, description of liberty and one which I whole-heartedly endorse. In fact, The Declaration is as close to a holy book as I have. However, I see it more as defining the role of government than telling me how to live my life.

Now to Rush. My love for them pre-dates the Randroid period by seven or eight years. My first exposure to them was through the album Moving Pictures and if you listen to the lyrics to Tom Sawyer, it’s pretty clear that they were influenced by Rand. One blurb: “his mind is not for rent; to any God or government”. Sounds like her to me.

The other songs that I can think of, off the top of my head, that were influenced by her include Free Will and all of the album 2112. The title song is several things, one of which is a rant against totalitarianism and is also about human aspirations. IIRC, the first words are “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”, though the meaning isn’t the same as the Bible. In fact, it means the opposite. The meek will be trapped on Earth while the brave and adventurous will capture the solar system, though they will have to continue their battle against totalitarianism.

Lately, though, my favorite Rush song has been Red Sector A. It’s a story about the horrors of gulags, or concentration camps, and is quite moving. I can still remember the arguments about Rush starting to use synthesizers in their music (it happened a few years before Grace Under Pressure, which has Red Sector A, but I was a bit young to appreciate Rush when they made the switch; I was still hung up on Blondie and Rapper’s Delight).

Rush is still my favorite group, though Rand has been replaced by Hayek and Friedman.

See also these posts (here and here) at Marginal Revolution.

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