First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour-inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization” (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being – not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

A 10-year-old boy is taking a stand for “liberty and justice for all,” refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance until gays and lesbians enjoy equal rights. Good for him. But this will be best achieved by getting the state out of marriage entirely. Let people define marriage how they will. Barring that, the second best option so long as the state monopolizes the definition and the legal system is to insist that the state has no right to limit marriage to opposite-sex unions, thus denying homosexuals equal legal rights, tax benefits, etc., within its auspices.

The state can never bring “liberty and justice for all” so it is incoherent, though a good rhetorical device, to make one’s pledging allegiance to it contingent on its doing so. Pledging allegiance is itself morally suspect insofar as it carries connotations of feudalism, and morally bankrupt insofar as allegiance is pledged to the state. I think it is no accident that the Pledge was not created until after the Civil War, in 1892, roughly a hundred years after the signing of the Constitution and not long before the US government’s first overseas imperial war. Nor that its creator, Francis Bellamy, was a statist-socialist intent on promoting nationalism in public indoctrination camps schools. (Incidentally, as an aside, the phrase “under God” wasn’t added to the Pledge until 1954, and “in God we trust” wasn’t the official US motto until 1956.)

Quality Time With The Kids – Watch more free videos

Consumer Reports reports that hookahs are not as healthy as many people seem to think. I’m not surprised. What I find interesting and disturbing is the view about law and the state that is expressed by the CR employee’s kid Daniel at the end of the article. What is this guy teaching his kid, huh? “They wouldn’t make something legal if it were so unsafe.” As if everything is naturally illegal by default, and it is the job of wise state’smen to choose what to make legal (allow us to do).

Ever wondered why the cost of college tuition keeps going up and up and up? Well, here’s your answer. Now, go get even and put an end this insanity.

I added a new quote to the Great Quotes on the left sidebar. I hope it is not too pretentious of me, as it is one of my own, albeit but a modification of a great Rothbard quote on ignorance of economics.

Here they are for comparison:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Murray Rothbard

“It is no crime to be ignorant of philosophy, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be abstruse and of little relevance for life. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on philosophical subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Me

And yes, there is a real living inspiration for this little piece of creative modification, but the person or persons shall remain nameless – or at least unnamed by me here. ;o)

It’s not the kids; it’s the education system that’s stupid.

There’s a new study out in the July 2007 issue (Vol.XL, No.3) of PS: Political Science & Politics, published by the American Political Science Association (APSA). It purports to rank universities by the quantity of quality job placements of the Ph.D.s graduating from their political science departments.

86 schools that awarded at least 30 Ph.D.s over the 15 year period from 1990-2004 were ranked; those that didn’t, weren’t. Included in the weighting system are the following criteria: percentage of Ph.D. recipients placed in tenure-track faculty positions; prominence of the schools at which they are placed; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of number of faculty, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of student graduates, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated (with a per-capita measurement derived by dividing each row of the matrix by the number of Ph.D.s granted by the institution). Not all of us get tenure-track jobs, or university jobs at all for that matter – shocking and horrifying, I know.

Where does LSU come out on this ranking system? 52 out of the 86…of the universities that met the criterion noted in the first sentence of the above paragraph. There are probably a lot of universities not ranked at all because they don’t meet this criterion. LSU ranked close behind Vanderbilt, UC – Davis, and Penn State. It ranked ahead of, in descending order, Arizona State; U. of Florida; SUNY, Binghamton; Notre Dame; George Washington; SUNY, Buffalo; UC – Santa Barbara; Washington State; Georgetown; Purdue; Claremont Grad.; Hawaii; Fordham; Catholic University; U. of Nebraska; Temple; and Texas Tech, among others. This is not bad news for me…I think.

Whew! The semester is finally over and I survived intact with three A’s, and most of my students survived too! I finished grading Tuesday and, hopefullly!, finished with fielding questions about final exams and with the begging (and demanding!) for higher grades. My grade distribution turned out pretty skewed towards A’s and B’s, probably because of the optional extra credit paper and the fact that I dropped some of the lowest quiz grades. 15 A’s, 14 B’s, 7 C’s, 3 D’s, and 3 F’s. One of those F’s, though, was someone who apparently forgot to drop the class because I never saw him and he never took any of the quizzes or exams. Aside from Mr. Absentee, I ended with 42 students after starting with 51. Not bad. I think my first time teaching seems to have been a success. At least a few of my students mentioned that they were intellectually stimulated and challenged.

On a different note, it is amazing how the least deserving in the class will come to their professor expecting to be given a higher grade simply because they want it or need it. I had this one student who skipped well over half of the class periods during the first half of the semester. She failed the first exam, managed to improve to a D on the second exam, and barely pulled off a C on the final. She actually started coming to class semi-regularly during the second third and regularly during the last third of the semester. Sure, that shows some improvement and a recognition that she hurt herself in the beginning. She also did the extra credit paper. But it was too little too late. She came up 10 raw points shy of a C for her final grade. One of the reasons was that I don’t think she was doing the reading, and probably not paying attention well in class, as evidenced by still relatively low quiz grades. She claimed she worked so hard to improve her grade, the hardest of anyone in the class, and deserved “a way better grade.” (I’m also a harsh grader, by the way. ;o) ) But obviously she didn’t, and she wanted an undeserved C. Opportunistic egalitarians demanding the undeserved get my hackles up, so needless to say I didn’t give it to her. Besides, where am I going to come up with 10 points to fill the gap? If someone is just one or two or three points away from the next highest grade and he or she has given me reason to suspect that s/he really tried hard, then I might be able to give him/her the benefit of the doubt. I can’t do anything with such a large gap though. Oh, and that girl claimed she went all-out and pulled an all-nighter to study for my exam. Sorry! That just isn’t good enough. Complex material like that of political philosophy takes time to absorb and understand. For someone who has been struggling through the class, one night of intensive studying just ain’t gonna cut it.

Anyway, now that the semester is over I should be posting on here more often and more regularly. Expect the latest version of my “Death and Harm” paper to be uploaded soon!

It’s funny… I was told by a professor in my department a while back that my beliefs on economics and political economy amounted to nothing more than ideology. Indeed, my “ideology” (libertarianism) made him, in his own words, uneasy. Well, it was his fault for asking ideologically-laden questions in class in the first place. One time, he asked my fellow grad students and I, in our comparative political economy class, whether we favored a flat income tax or a progressive income tax. Most preferred progressive, of course, but when he got around to me I quite naturally had to say: no income tax. But that answer was out of bounds. It is perfectly acceptable to debate the merits of different varieties of statism, but to question the merit of statism itself is out of the question. It wasn’t long after this episode that he called me into his office and told me that the theories of the Austrian School of Economics, because they didn’t involve empirical (quantitative) testing, amounted to an ideology and that my Austro-libertarianism made him uneasy. He then recommended that I seek another major for my Ph.D. (Miraculously, I still got an A in the class.)

What is funny is that these so-called social scientists reject logical arguments and value judgments as unscientific while holding up empirical quantitative testing of arbitrary hypotheses with crude measures as scientific. They seem to think that truth cannot be arrived at by logical reasoning and that value judgments are arbitrary and subjective. Yet they do not see that if my position amounts to nothing more than ideology, then all the more so does theirs. They have simply shifted the realm of what is considered acceptable debate from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to a certain methodology. A case in point is hegemonic stability theory in the field of international relations. Scholars debating the merits of this theory cannot agree on how to define, measure, and operationalize hegemony; consequently, they cannot agree whether the theory is correct or not (assuming dubiously that empirical quantitative analysis could answer that definitively anyway). So, one can’t question the ideology of empirical qualitative/quantitative (especially quantitative) hypothesis testing. One can only question how to go about doing this so-called science from within the accepted ideological framework. The dismal state of affairs prevailing in the hegemonic stability theory debate pervades all of mainstream political science; indeed, I dare say, all of mainstream social science.

I finally put the finishing touches on the syllabus for my first college-level course. And the first day of class is only Tuesday, January 18th! The course is POLI 2060; that’s Introduction to Political Theory.

The only hard requirements I had to follow in designing my course is that I had to cover Aristotle’s Ethics and the Federalist Papers. Other thinkers I will be covering include the standard ones: Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. But I’m giving this course a bit of a contemporary international politics spin by emphasizing the relation of man, the State, and war, especially in the latter third of the course. There I cover statist and anarchist socialism (Marx and Bakunin), individualist anarchism (Henry David Thoreau), classical liberalism (Frederic Bastiat and Randolph Bourne), and radical libertarianism (Gerard Radnitzky and Murray N. Rothbard). I finish up with a brief article on “Tolkien vs. Power.”

Check out the syllabus (in pdf format) on my website. Or view it directly.

Outgoing NASA chief Sean O’Keefe has thrown in his hat as a contender for the recently vacated Chancellorship of my alma mater, Louisiana State University. Fortune help us. The last thing LSU needs, if it is to improve its national standing among Research One universities, is the head of that supremely incompetent and inefficient bureaucracy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to take the reins. His resume is actually seen by the PTB as alluring.

“I am very impressed with what he has accomplished,” said Stewart Slack of Shreveport, chairman of the board that governs the LSU system. “His experience at the national level will help us.”

Wow… I’m at a loss for words.

See here, here, and here for the story.