Discovering Paul Ryan: An Odyssey in Twitter

There's something kind of wondrous about watching major world events unfold via a late-night Twitter feed. While a lot of the people hanging around are Aussies or Kiwis and thus up at totally reasonable hours, everyone else is drunk, insomniac, a crank, a news junkie or a dangerous loner. And, because there are fewer people around — and because those who are seem more forthrightly oddball — the response to these momentous events feels a little more intimate and authentic.

Watching Paul Ryan (R-WI) be introduced to the United States as the next GOP Vice Presidential candidate, and watching large portions of the still-awake, grouchy barfly part of the United States reject him like a diseased organ was a blast. There, at midnight, were thousands of people having fun with the careening, inevitable horror. It was as if all these strangers were in on some prank, giggling as it unfolded. Paul Ryan? The nerd undertaker? Really? Ahahahaha.

Dispatches from Libertopia: College Edition

College is a wonderful place. A community of people engaged in the same pursuits provides a welcoming environment that fosters speculation, intellectual adventure and novel risks. Perhaps credit for this falls on a positive context for self esteem or just on the suspicion that everyone else is equally frightened and prone to "fake it until they make it," but for many of us it's a rare chance to truly take conceptual leaps. Some of us shouldn't.

Sadly, for every kid who builds an airboat that runs off old McDonald's fryer oil, there are two pre-law Randroids who will militantly argue the affirmative case in, "Resolved: The United States should legalize indentured servitude for the benefit of poor people at or above the age of majority." Or there's a girl like Stephanie Grace, who employs that intellectual freedom to address whether black people possess subhuman intelligence, provided that one defines "human intelligence" as "white-people smart."

In fact, the abundance of bongs and the consequence-free collegiate bubble that repels the practical and harsh elements of reality often form the genesis of Libertarian sociopathy. Reality is a thought experiment; people and products are all numbers, and death, suffering, pain, neglect and contempt are just remainders that someone at George Mason or the University of Chicago with enough math degrees will eventually square away for good at no cost to the Libertarian explaining this.

How to Score While Seeing 'Atlas Shrugged'

Two years ago, I joined The Atlasphere, an Ayn Rand fan "singles" website. Since then, its regular email newsletter had provided me a weekly dose of unintended joy and even helped me to make a new friend. Today, both the site and I can teach you how to selfishly take what's rightfully yours: lovin'.

Atlas Shrugged: Part I opens in theaters today, a detail which, if you know anything about income tax, summarizes the film's production beautifully. In most years, April 15 is tax day, a release-date coincidence that would drive home the film's toddler-snit cry of government injustice with a bit of calendric irony. This year, tax day is April 18, while April 15 celebrates the emancipation of black people from their economic and biological "superiors," capping off a litany of ironies about the production of Atlas Shrugged that impeach it even on its own terms.

For a film about the truly elite making their own destiny and setting the world aright by turning their backs on lesser peoples, at their discretion, it has: a cast that can in no way be construed as elite; a roster of elite actors who turned it down; two screenwriters and a producer you've rightfully never heard of; a 30-year history of the TV/Hollywood marketplace saying, "You are not desirable and cannot successfully compete," and, as such, a production funded via handouts and charity from ideologues trying desperately to foist their message on others.

I Will Turn You Into Francisco Stankonia

Note: Here to share his tips for picking up single objectivist ladies is occasional Destructo contributor and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who previously explained our Ten Favorite Albums of the Decade, offered Birther Queen Orly Taitz asylum in his bedroom, described a black luxury car of divine provenance and who, of course, used to totally nail Ayn Rand. This article continues from Part I: How to Score While Seeing 'Atlas Shrugged'.

15 Tricks to Taggin' a Taggart Trampstamp
by ALAN GREENSPAN

I can't believe I'm writing for these assholes again, but when my homeboy Phil Coates — whose last name on a lady's lips is a verb — dropped the ballin' for the first time in his career, I felt like I had no choice but to step in. The fact is, a movie event like this should provide a plush panoply of primo pussy for the (re)producer on the prowl, and it's only a matter of a few tips and tricks to make sure you take this cinematic cash-bash and leverage it into a gash-bash. I'm not from the government, and I'm here to help.

The trouble with the Ayn brand is that too many motherfuckers psych themselves out about it, thinking it's so high-end that they need do some crazy shit or else a fine lady is going to walk out on them. They get so uptight, they dynamite their own erection. Thing is, just remember, these girls value makin' a wad, and I'm not talking about the bills in your pocket. Any girl who asks for that is not a true objectivist mama. I'm telling you, whoever that girl is, she's got a looter-cooter on her. The only value is in earning; let a lady know that you're an earner, and you're gonna earn her — nasty.

Here are 15 tips to get you invested up in her portholio:

Thomas Sowell Looks at Nature v. Nurture and Realizes That You Have the Brainpan of a Stagecoach Tilter

Last week we met Thomas Sowell, a black libertarian/objectivist economist and purveyor of tautologies and fact-free scary stories, toasted by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and FreeRepublic, because he puts a nice minority face on policies that punish minorities. Reading Sowell talk about race and social welfare programs is like pulling up outside a Louisville mansion and having the black lawn jockey statue come alive and say, "Wow, thank God there aren't any black people here. Nice Town Car."

On The Atlasphere, an objectivist singles website, a tagline appends each of Sowell's reprinted columns, indicating that he's written dozens of non-fiction books. This sounds impressive until you read Sowell and understand that his ideas are usually unencumbered by reality. On the rare times that they go for broke and attempt to describe things that exist, they shout unconnected ideas into the ether, making pronouncements about things either mutually contradictory or irrelevant to each other.

This is one of those times.

Meet Thomas Sowell: A Moron

One of the smartest things I've ever done began as a lark last year and still sends me spam mail weekly. I'd just finished reading a mammoth message-board thread where one person had successfully trolled a series of Northeastern personals websites by deliberately mirroring anyone he spoke to and trusting that the joy of narcissistic recognition would do the rest. He wasn't wrong.

I closed the window on the final page and said to myself, "I bet this would work even better on objectivists."

Within about five minutes, I was fleshing out my profile on The Atlasphere, evidently the internet's premiere objectivist dating site, with the mission of "Connecting Admirers of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged."

My efforts didn't pan out so well. I loaded my profile with economically and socially attractive traits, claimed I graduated from George Mason, attached a sexy photo, then sat back and waited for the objectifish to take the bait. Nothing happened. I'd gravely miscalculated. No good objectivist is going to make an effort to get you to like them: it's your job to get them to like you.

After abandoning my epistolary idea, I discovered the secondary, but much richer, pleasures of The Atlasphere: the endless reprinted columns from aggrieved libertarian and objectivist thinkers there to explain why it was someone else's fault that the site's members had seen destiny derailed and global ascendancy denied for so long — but, presumably, still only temporarily.

Field of Schemes II: Obama's Not a Natural-Born Man

The other week, while talking to a friend of mine, I extolled the awesomeness of the multiple baseball games I could watch on Opening Day with MLB Extra Innings, and expressed dismay that my backlog of article ideas seemed to be all book reviews. At this moment, President Obama threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener, and I thought, "Hel-lo, let's see what's happening at the National Review."

A little over a month ago, Mr. Awesome had this idea about Newsweek: "I bet I could go to Newsweek.com, like, right now, and the first story I'd see would be a complete puff piece with no information or insight." He's right, and to a certain extent, this is always true of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. Only instead of puff pieces without information, the daily fare is venomous attack propped up by fraudulent claims to research, baseless appeals to history or the rich chutzpah of either lies "linked" to sourced material or spun from whole cloth. It's just as vacuous as Newsweek, but the vacuity is tinged with contempt and malevolence. It's like the difference between staring at an empty cardboard box or at an empty shipping crate studded with rusted nails and graffitied with death's heads and a picture of someone having sex with your mother.

Anybody could write two articles per day, forever, just refreshing the Weekly Standard or National Review and breaking down the current iteration of craven dishonesty. The trouble is that it's exhausting. American conservatives are on to a sweet deal, here: making shit up is not a time-intensive gig. And somehow the burden of proof always falls on the people who note the absence of credibility. Forthright people are probably already busy reading difficult books with facts in them, so merely trying to course-correct the national dialogue involves doubling their workload. For the most part, this is why I don't bother. I have shit to do, like write about Amish pornography.

Greenspan to UN: Let My Orly Go

Note: we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, like to broaden our coverage of the national discourse by occasionally turning to voices and viewpoints not represented by our regular contributors. To discuss "Birther Queen" Orly Taitz's attorney's recent announcement that she has sought the UN's protection from Barack Obama's skilled army of ACORN-trained assassins, we again turn to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Orly Taitz, I Want You to Seek Asylum in My Pants
by ALAN GREENSPAN

Despite jabs I've suffered over the years for my "vedic calm" and "mandarin reticence," I am no different from any other human being and feel the need to reach out to others in their times of trial.

No, not the vast majority. I've never cared for them, to be perfectly honest. Especially not those who are armed and certainly as few people as possible who could be called "poor" or, worse, announce themselves as such before the driver can get around to the side of the car. But I am not inhuman.

Let's Make LolRands!

Friends, if you're like me, there's only one thing that you like better than beating an evasive person with a copy of Atlas Strugged that you've fastened to a cricket bat to use as a cudgel, and that's making lolcats!

"Lolcats" are macro images of large impact-font text written at a kindergarten level and pasted over pictures of cats. Although they originated elsewhere on the internet, they were popularized by my favorite website, 4Chan, with their weekly "caturday" celebration.

Well, to be honest, I went too long without taking these two great tastes and seeing if they tasted great together. That is, until my friend Robert found a picture of our favorite queen of Objectivism with an actual cat, IMmed me the picture with a macro on it, and said, "lol, i upgraded ur rand."

He wasn't fooling! It took just minutes before I got into the game, trying my hand at this dynamic new phenomenon. Why not join us? Just take this source image or this source image and head over to the Lolcat Builder and submit your own!

If there's one thing I've learned about the internet, it's that everyone loves cats that talk like a child with blunt-force trauma to the head, and everyone loves a political philosophy that sounds exactly like what that same kid would come up with. Why argue with socialists, communists and perverts anymore when you can do it with LolRands and tell those evasive yahoos "fcuk u, gots mine" with an image of Ayn Rand herself?

Here's what we've made so far. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with!