I’m an atheist, and I love Christmas. If you think that’s a contradiction, think again. …

“The best aspect of Christmas,” Ayn Rand once observed, is “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 departments 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.”

Before Christians co-opted the holiday in the fourth century … it was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, of the days beginning to grow longer. The Northern European tradition of bringing evergreens indoors, for instance, was a reminder that life and production were soon to return to the now frozen earth. …

When you genuinely feel good about your own life and when you’re allowed to acknowledge and celebrate that joy, you come to wish the same happiness for others. It is those who despise their own lives who lash out at and make life miserable for the rest of us.

The commercialism of Christmas reinforces our goodwill. When you scour the malls in search of the perfect gift for a loved one and witness the cornucopia of goods and lights and decorations, you can’t help but feel that your fellow human beings are not enemies to be feared or fools to be avoided but fellow travelers and potential allies in the quest for joy. …

But any celebration can be corrupted. It’s not uncommon today to hear people say Christmas is their most stressful period. … Seeking something to blame, they blame the commercialism of the season. But there is no commandment, “Thou shall buy a present for every­one you know.” This is the religious mentality of duty rearing its ugly head again. Do and buy only that which you can truly afford and enjoy; there are myriad ways to celebrate with loved ones without spending a cent.

Read the whole article: Commercialism Only Adds to Joy of the Holidays.

This coming Saturday (Nov. 7) Front Range Objectivism is hosting the program’s annual fund-raising dinner in Arvada:

“Free Books to Colorado Teachers” Fundraising Dinner!
The evening will include two talks by local Objectivist philosophers,

a joint question and answer period, and then a fundraising auction.

For more details on the talks and auction, see:

http://bit.ly/q1RuA

* When: Saturday, November 7, 2009, 5:30 pm social hour (cash bar);
6:30 pm dinner; 7:30 pm talks and Q&A; 9:00 pm auction

* Where: West Woods Golf Club, 6655 Quaker Street in Arvada, Colorado

* Cost: $40 per individual, plus $25 suggested donation to the FRO
Free Books to Colorado Teachers Campaign. $25 for students.

RSVP by November 1 to Anders Ingemarson via e-mail to
anders@frontrangeobjectivism.com
or by phone at 303-751-3111. Space is limited!  Visit the event web

page for payment details: http://bit.ly/q1RuA

For more details on the FRO’s “Free Books to Colorado Teachers”
Project, visit:

http://www.frontrangeobjectivism.com/cbp.html

No one likes to hold their nose and vote for a candidate they perceive as the “lesser of two evils.”  But voting for your favorite minor-party candidate can help elect the “greater of two evils.” The preferential voting systems mentioned above could remedy this.  Another benefit is that if minor parties had a chance to win, media gatekeepers would report on them more.  This would help publicize worthwhile policy proposals that major parties don’t mention.

But don’t expect elected officials to support any such change. They support self-serving campaign finance laws and ballot access regulations that protect incumbents and the two major parties at the expense of minor-party candidates.

In any case, it’s wrong to claim, as some do, that voting should be mandatory or that it’s a “civic duty.” Our only obligations as citizens is to abstain from violating the rights of others.

To vote is to express a political opinion or preference.  Just as government should not prohibit such expression, nor should government mandate it.  Who benefits when you’re forced to express a preference for a politician you consider to be “the lesser of two evils?” The politician, of course.  Votes signal approval, and government should not force citizens to express approval for ideas or candidates they dislike.

I credit this perspective on mandatory voting to Ayn Rand, who wrote in a letter dated February 21 1950:

A proposal to introduce compulsory voting is worse than mere looting of material property. Such a proposal establishes the principle that the government has the right to use compulsion against the human mind and to force an expression of political opinion from men who do not choose to express it.

…tens of thousands of people who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina and are still living in federally owned trailers will be forced to find a new place to live. After nearly three years, the federal government’s temporary housing is coming to an end.

These folks are not going to have an easy time of it, because affordable housing in the Gulf Coast region is scarce. The problem has persisted despite billions in government aid – and the efforts of large private developers – because of a shortage of skilled laborers and sky-high insurance rates.

Yet now there is hope, in the person of John Sawyer. Not only does this 64-year-old Bostonian believe he can build houses people can afford to buy and insure; he says they will withstand the next big storm. And, by the way, he intends to makes a tidy profit. …

Virtually no one else has been able to do so, it should be noted, even with existing tax incentives and other programs. The Mississippi Development Authority (MDA) is preparing its latest attempt to tackle the problem by allocating $350 million in federal money to developers to build “affordable homes.”

But according to MDA officials, these developers will import many of their workers. Inevitably, this will drive up the cost of construction. And it seems unlikely that any of them will be building the cement fortress that has elated insurance broker Sneed. In short, insurance rates will be high. MDA officials suggest that their subsidies will make these homes cheaper to buy and this will enable homeowners to fork out more for insurance.

One consortium of well-respected, nonprofit developers, which includes Enterprise Corporation of the Delta and Enterprise Community Partners, has already run into problems. In the wake of Katrina, they used both local and imported labor to build modular homes along the Mississippi coast. The cost to buyers ranged between $83 and $115 per square foot.

The houses were made of wood (not concrete), which is probably one reason they cost between $3,000 and $5,000 a year to insure. Recently, this same outfit applied for an MDA loan to develop a 1,100 acre property in Biloxi, Miss. But several officials involved in the project told me that the deal may fall apart, largely because of the cost of labor and insurance.

HT, my mother-in-law (as of this autumn, formally).

Ayn Rand has probably influenced my thinking, values, ideals, and life more than any other author. I read The Fountainhead during the summer of 1991, and it just woke me up to what’s important to me, my values, and priorities in life, etc. Some good links are:
1. The Literary Achievement of The Fountainhead
2. Excerpt from The Fountainhead: Roark’s Courtroom speech
3. Excerpt from The Fountainhead: Rand’s description of Howard Roark’s Monadnock Valley development.. For me, this passage is quite powerful, as are the few other ones where Roark meets Stephen Mallory and Henry Cameron. Just thinking about it activates me, and this is why I wanted to call this block “Mondanock,” but the blogspot.com domain name was was already taken.
4. The ethics section of my political links.
5. Ayn Rand’s Contribution to the Cause of Freedom, by Roderick T. Long, a philosophy professor whose work I respect. This article has good links, though perhaps written for those already in the know.

The Pete Townsend with kiddie-porn thing. So it’s not a crime to look at it, I think, but to purchase it may be. If so, the reason is that it promotes the crime, in a similar manner that buying “hot” DVD players off the back of truck does. So, what about watching a show like COPS? Assuming it’s real. (I should check that.) I mean, if someone has a financial incentive for criminals to exist, i.e., the producers of COPS, or police officers themselves, then might they be prone to create more laws? This reminds me of an Ayn Rand quote found on DUIGulag.com

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren�t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor objectively interpreted-and you can create a nation of law-breakers–and then you cash in on guilt.

I’ve found this Dire Straits lyric in my thoughts recently: “When you point your finger ’cause your plan fell through, you’ve got three long fingers pointing back at you.” Hmm.

The song I heard is called “Do You Realize”…that everyone you know, someday, will die. Woah. Gotta be ready for that, no? Just having heard this song has made me think a lot.

Can I really be angry with people if I remember this? Sure, but it put things in perspective. Then I thought of what David Kelley saus about traditional notions of compassion and benevolence in his book Unrugged Individualism. Well, I can’t find the passage, but I think the point was that there’s something wrong if benevolence is based on the attitude that “life sucks, and we’re all in the same boat of dispair, and we’ll all die anyway.” Kelley mentions that when we light a match, we only look for an explanation when it does not light. That’s an example of what Ayn Rand calls the “benevolent universe” sense of life.

But still, there is something healthy in my reaction to the song. Maybe it’s just that it puts things in perspective. When I think of think song, and consider a person I know, I realize that he (she…) is in the same boat I am, at that he is now alive and striving to achieve values, and that whatever the context of our interation, be it working, sports, politics, talking at a party, that this person has a larger, more important “project” going, that of his entire life. And whatever we’re doing at the moment is probably just a small part of it.

Also, Father’s Day was last Sunday. I’d always thought it to be a “Hallmark Holiday”, which it probably is, so I discounted its meaning. But then I thought to myself that in contrast to say, by father’s birthday, this day is to show appreciation for my father as my father. So that makes sense. Less secular cultures probably had moer of this, even though such “respect for elders” is probably more about class authoritarianism than sincere respect and appreciation by one individual for another.

Work is going OK. That is, I am enjoying it. Really, there’s just me. The question is “How am I in relationship to my work? I am either stuck, frustrated, cruising, etc. Sort of like “how’s the tennis game?” It’s a metaphor.

Ah, “just me.” That’s a bit frustrating. Perhaps I’d like a job where I deal with people more. At the cost of (my notion of) control? More on this later.

Softball. This is it. When else am I so focused and present, and enjoying myself in the moment? I find myself telling people to hustle, or making strange cheering sounds. And the hits. My hits were beautiful today. Line drives. Ahh.

But I don’t want to over do it. Last year I played so much that when I was up, it did not care. I thought “so I’m up again, big deal.” The “ho-hum” experience of the Inner Game. What’s the solution to that, once I’m there? Pay attention to something new? Thye ball’s trajectory, or try pulling to ball. (I did that today, with success.)

Time to log on and post.