Third Annual Lights ON for Earth Hour

Earth Hour is a global movement uniting people to protect the planet. Towards the end of March every year, Earth Hour brings together communities from across the world celebrating a commitment to the planet by switching off lights for one designated hour…Earth Hour 2013 will be held on Saturday 23 March between 8.30PM and 9.30PM in your local time zone.       - www.earthhour.org

You are cordially invited to a different celebration. At 8:30 PM on Saturday, turn on every lamp in your house to celebrate the beauty and utility of electric lighting.

The harnessing of electricity is a magnificent achievement and should be celebrated. The nighttime American cityscape inspired artists like Robert Hoppe, filmmakers like Woody Allen, and refugees like Ayn Rand, who wrote of her arrival in New York after years of starvation, poverty, and repression in Soviet Russia, “seeing the first lighted skyscrapers – it was snowing, very faintly, and I think I began to cry.” To plunge iconic buildings and landmarks, buildings that have had that kind of effect on people, to plunge them into darkness is shameful indeed.

But also, turn on your lights to express skepticism about the global warming theory. The Earth Hour website describes the event as “born out of a hope that we could mobilize people to take action on climate change”. But as I’ve written elsewhere, although the rise in global temperatures is well-established, there is evidence it is a natural phenomenon, unrelated to the electric light bulb. There’s good reason to question the sort of action the organizers of Earth Hour are calling for.

Finally, turn on your lights to protest the Big Government agenda. Republican gains in the 2010 elections may have killed the prospects for Cap and Trade legislation for now. But the Obama administration is persisting in its efforts to tax and regulate nearly every productive activity by executive order. In a 2011 interview with Audobon magazine, then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said, “There’s clearly a need for the EPA to continue doing what it said it would do, which is to use the Clean Air Act to address carbon pollution and to recognize that progress is possible. We can make strides along with other agencies or departments on the executive side, even in the absence of legislation.” Show your opposition to this end run around the people’s representatives in Congress.

BTW, I’d like to create an album of homes lit up for Earth Hour. If you get a pic and are willing to share, please send it to me at Michael_Isenberg@MonteferroPress.com

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about hospital gowns, freedom, and the silliness of the environmental movement. Check it out on Amazon.com

The Front Lines of the Culture Wars...

I was trying to find a good quote about the culture wars. As I slogged through what seemed like the hundredth post-election article with the words conservative despair in the headline, I found this gem in the comments:

Stories are important. Storytellers have a specific type of power. They shape memories and impressions. The victors write history – but anyone can write a story, and those who write the best and most popular stories win the culture wars. Don’t just give it up to them. Fight back. – Jamie W.

As one of the characters in The Fountainhead said, “Do you think I picked the things in my art gallery by their signatures?” I didn’t have to follow the link to know who “Jamie W.” is. Jamie Wilson runs conservativefiction.com and is a senior editor at Liberty Island Magazine. So she knows about storytelling, and she’s right, of course. Before our fellow citizens will vote for liberty, they need to understand it and believe in it – and stories are an effective way to connect with them on a gut level.

But stories can't change hearts and minds if no one reads them. This is especially problematic for writers of conservative and libertarian fiction: they're mostly indie authors who do not have the publicity department of Random House or the sales force of Simon and Schuster to promote their life's work.

With that end in mind, I’m pleased to announce the first issue of my new e-mail newsletter, Never Surrender, will be released on Friday, February 1. The title, of course, is taken from the advice Winston Churchill gave to the British people when the Nazi hordes were consolidating their takeover of France and the Battle of Britain was imminent.

In Never Surrender, I will share the latest from novelists whose characters take responsibility for their own lives and live traditional values; comedians who laugh at the absurdity of political correctness; and filmmakers who use the power of cinema to tell tales of liberty overcoming tyranny, and, along the way, give us a sense that there are things in life that are sacred. Issue 1 will feature capsule reviews of works by Kia Heavey and Christopher Bunn and news from FrackNation, Loren Spivack, and (speak of the devil) Jamie Wilson.

In a shameless effort to build circulation, I’m going to commit marketing. Subscribe to my free newsletter, Never Surrender, by February 28 and automatically be entered in a drawing to win a copy of your choice of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Glenn Beck's The Overton Window.

To begin your free subscription to Never Surrender, and be entered into the drawing, email subscribe@MonteferroPress.com.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about hospital gowns, freedom, and never surrendering. Check it out on Amazon.com

Movie Review: Atlas Shrugged Part II

Photo source: atlasshruggedmovie.com

I almost didn’t write this. For the first 80 minutes of Atlas Shrugged Part II, I didn’t think I could write a good review and I didn’t want to write a bad one. Ayn Rand’s dystopian epic about a collapsing economy and Americans giving up in despair has long been one of my favorite books. I had written a great review of Part I, but the first two-thirds of this new movie were disappointing. The problem was directing. Although he had an experienced and talented cast, director John Putch just couldn't seem to get good performances out of them.

Samantha Mathis, as railroad executive Dagny Taggart, couldn’t deliver a line naturally to save her life. Mostly she moped around like a wet washcloth. Jason Beghe as steel magnate Hank Rearden sounded like he escaped from the cast of The Godfather, and Esai Morales made for a rather subdued Francisco d’Anconia. The speeches were flat and disconnected from the scenes around them.

Then came Directive 10-289. The government sought to prevent the economic emergency from getting worse by outlawing change. Businesses were prohibited from raising or lowering their output. Employees were prohibited from leaving their jobs. In other words, they were slaves. New Yorkers halted in the street to watch identical images of the president announce the new law, Big Brother-like, from every giant screen in Times Square. Suddenly, Atlas Shrugged Part II had become drama.

The rest of the movie was exciting and fast-paced. Rex Linn gave the best performance of the film as Kip Chalmers, a politician on his way to a fundraiser. He seemed to channel Fred Thompson as he bullied Dagny’s brother James to provide a new locomotive when the one pulling his train broke down. An older, and possibly unsafe coal-burner was found and in a gripping scene, the train got stuck inside a smoke-filled tunnel—with an army munitions train hurtling towards it in the other direction.

And then we even got to see Dagny become forceful. I wanted to cheer when she finally stood up to smarmy bureaucrat Wesley Mouch.

I didn’t completely hate the early parts. There were touches here and there that I enjoyed, many of them provided by the minor characters. Diedrich Bader was very likable as Quentin Daniels, as was, surprisingly, Bug Hall as the Wet Nurse. Star Trek Voyager’s Robert Picardo played Dr. Stadler the way I always imagined him. The production values were better than in Part I: views through the windows made the offices of New York City seem less like movie sets and more like, well, the offices of New York City. There was a great discussion about Rearden Steel on a news show, with Sean Hannity and Juan Williams as panelists. Mr Hannity defended Rearden, of course. And we got to hear the music of Richard Halley. Although his Fourth Concerto had, in the movie, become a rhapsody, the piece was true to the description in the book: “The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising, and they were the rising itself….[Dagny] listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have to be kept going.” These bright spots kept me going until the movie got to the good stuff—which really was worth seeing.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a dystopian comedy about a collapsing economy and Americans fighting back. Check it out on Amazon.com.

Ayn Rand answers Barack Obama – again

It’s been 55 years since Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged – and yet the 1957 epic seems to have anticipated every argument that Barack Obama is using in the presidential campaign of 2012. Which just goes to show how stale his arguments are.

Photo sources: Wikipedia, White House

Rand’s answer to “You didn’t build that” has already been making the rounds of the Internet. Now the president has brought Robin Hood into the debate, accusing “Romney Hood” of reversing the usual formula by stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. There was a character in Atlas Shrugged who did exactly that. The pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld become the terror of the seas by capturing government aid ships. Here’s what Danneskjöld had to say about Robin Hood in a conversation with steel magnate Hank Rearden:

“I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”         “What man?”         “Robin Hood.”         Rearden looked at him blankly, not understanding.         “He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I’m the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich—or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.”         “What in blazes do you mean?…”         “It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters.”

A “mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters?” And to think Rand never even met Obama.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about politics, freedom, and hospital gowns. Check it out on Amazon.com.