We got photos at the border of each state we went to, except for Texas, because it was raining when we crossed the border there.

We drove 14 hours the first day, Thursday, and spent the night in Mississippi.  I stayed off the interstates for the most part, heading north at Tallahassee towards Montgomery, Alabama.  I prefer the scenic route when I go on road trips and I find that county roads only add a little bit of time onto the trip, but are so much more interesting.   The next day, Friday, we drove 6 hours (almost all of it on I-20) to Rockwall Texas, which is just East of Dallas.

Sunshine in Rockwall County Courthouse… a brand new building.

The marriage ceremony was very brief.

Cockey, Brandon, and Brandon’s parents after the marriage ceremony.

After Brandon and Cockey were married, we went out to dinner at a very nice steakhouse. After that we went to a bar and drank a bunch.

On Saturday, Sunshine and I went to the Dallas World Aquarium, which was absolutely fantastic.  See the post below this one for all the photos from that.

In the evening, we went to Brandon’s parent’s home for the wedding reception.   There was dancing, karaoke, and of course lots of Texas cooking which was out of this world.

There was also a wedding cake…

And the traditional oversized-bite-of-cake-in-the-mouth was very amusing.

On Sunday, Sunshine and I drove from Dallas to just outside New Orleans, where we met up with our old friend, Bob from Thailand, and his family.  We went out and had a fantastic Cajun dinner, and Bob was a fantastic host by providing us with a coupon for a free night at a nearby hotel.

Sunshine ate 5 pounds of crawfish (which were in season) with a little help from the rest of us.

Me, Sunshine, Ta, and Bob with Gina and Cristina in front.  (They’ve grown so much since I last saw them, and now they speak perfect English… but unfortunately almost no Thai!)

On Monday morning, Sunshine and I drove across the 23-mile-long Pontchartrain bridge and visited the French Quarter of New Orleans for a few minutes before heading back to Florida.

We missed Mardi Gras this year, but Sunshine says she will be back next year and she’s all ready!

After that, we had an uneventful trip back to Florida, arriving home late but not too tired out.

And that, it seems, is the point of the whole book: 1200 pages explaining what might happen to society if you eliminate every hard-working, smart (but not college-educated… another hobgoblin of the book) person from the workforce. Duh.

So here is a summary of the story: Dagny Taggart is the savvy and industrious Vice President of a railroad. Her brother as President. The story revolves around her efforts to keep her railroad running despite the best efforts of the government to ensure that her success does not harm other railroad companies. Dagny’s brother, James, agrees with the government that the success of their railroad should not come at the expense of anybody else, but does not actively block her efforts as he does like success, just not the responsibility, risk, or governmental opprobrium that comes with it. A man named Hank Reardon supplies Dagny with the steel she needs to build her railways, and he faces similar problems from both his family and the government: His steel is of higher quality and the government considers that quality a threat to other steel makers and passes laws specifically designed to put him out of business (though his dogged determination and simple nonchalance about anything the government has to say sees him through to continued success). A man named Francisco is an Argentinian copper magnate and rakehell who seems to be playing everybody in the world (business and political) for suckers… a game that leaves everyone except the reader confused: He is an obvious saboteur of the economic and governmental machinery.

Business owners with less determination to succeed than Dagny and Reardon slowly close up shop and disappear. It seems that they are being convinced to pack it in by Francisco and his partner in conspiracy, a man named John Galt, to go into early, temporary retirement in a secret, hidden valley in Colorado where they can practice unfettered capitalism, creativity, and research beyond the reach of the government (or it seems, incredibly, their own families). Meanwhile, a third man in the conspiracy named Ragnar proactively works on the collapse as a high-seas pirate, attacking any shipping of “looted” products (i.e. any material being shipped to or from America with the aim of helping those who do not produce). Obviously, more and more producers disappear, the economy collapses under more and more ridiculous government rules (such as: “no new inventions will be allowed” or “every producer must produce the same as last year, no more, no less”) and everybody left behind starves and fights until the government collapses and the “producers” from Colorado (with gold saved up from Ragnar’s piracy) can swoop back in and rebuild a grand new society.

First rule for this book is you have to remind yourself that it was written in the 1950′s by a lady escaped from Communist Russia: That frame of mind is important because the book really is a product of the times in which it was written — technologically, socially, and mentally. This really is a book about the evils of communism.

Second rule for this book is that you can’t remind yourself that this book is used as a cautionary tale amongst America’s far right wing: Only in the most general ways could I relate what I read in this book to anything that we are experiencing in modern times; the specific behaviors of the government are far too detached from even the most fundamental sensibilities.

Third rule for this book is that you need to prepare yourself for some awfully long, rambling passages and speeches. There are some that go on for 10 or 20 pages and really do not say anything or add to the plot. John Galt’s speech toward the end of the book is a 3-hour colloquium on the importance of “rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride” is truly mind numbing. (I stopped reading after 10 minutes and went to a cliff-note summary.)

But in the end, this story was crap for one simple reason: It was filled with straw men possessing not a shred of intelligence. Author Ayn Rand essentially wrote every conversation between one of the “producers” and one of the “looters” as such: Producer says something extremely intelligent; the looter stammers and stutters and says, “but that’s not my concern.” No really. If you read Orwell’s “1984″, you run into some really dangerous minds arrayed against the hero, and you can grasp the fact that Orwell’s world became as it did because the smartest people in the world decided to be evil. In “Atlas Shrugged”, you feel nothing but intellectual contempt for the bad guys and suppose that even you yourself could give them a rhetorical smack-down and leave them blubbering just like the protagonists of the story.

In other words, Rand attributes world-altering skills to people who don’t possess a lick of common sense among them, let alone any kind of devious sophistry or philosophy that would permit them to operate unhindered. In my opinion, if you are going to write a book on competing world views, you have to create a nemesis who is intellectually strong enough to support the opposing world view so that you can understand its supposed danger. What reader can really fear a government run by Keystone cops?

I will say that Ayn Rand’s prose is good. She can paint a good picture, and her clever use of simile in nontraditional ways is engaging. There were some great philosophical one-liners (“the opposite of charity is justice”) in there as well, and nobody can say that Ayn Rand’s is not a world-class mind.

But in summary, the story simply asks an intelligent reader to ignore too many unanswered questions and contradictions. It assumes too much and thinks too little. The book is a philosophical conclusion whose suppositions are then forced to go to great lengths to achieve it.

In other words, you have to be very smart and very gullible in order to walk away from this book with any sense of satisfaction.

Tonight, we celebrated Aunt Alice’s birthday here at the house. She is my mother’s cousin. (She like things cooked on the grill, but has no grill of her own, so we had hamburgers.) Her sister, Aunt Carol was here, as was Uncle Bob. Other than that, we did not get much done today.

It was a bit of a rainy day, but there was a lot to see and do, and we had a nice time walking around as well as sitting and enjoying Filipino culinary treats.

I was really surprised, listening to these guys: They spoke in very blunt and proud terms about the violence they visited upon people they were arresting. They spoke at a level that I had not heard since high school: The testosterone-laden, predatory, boastful, solipsistic manner of boys who are only able to see the world in stark, stunted terms. These guys were obviously a product of their environment, certainly; a reflection of the people they go up against.

But it stuck in my mind: These guys are gangsters. They are part of a gang who fights against the other gangs and anybody else who comes in their sights… and you better not get in their way.

Everywhere I look on the internet, I’m seeing stories of police who find excuses — usually ex post facto — to visit violence upon people with whom they are enforcing the law. I don’t know if it is our new “camera-everywhere” culture that is bringing light to these offences, or just some infectious process of contempt that I saw illustrated so clearly in those two detectives… but it has gotten to me: It has now become quite obvious that you don’t have to be breaking the law in order to suddenly find yourself accidentally cast as the antagonist of an angry cop. It’s happening on a more-than-daily basis to more and more mundane versions of the American population.

Here is just this week’s list of police misbehavior, as posted on Reddit:

• Houston “peace officer” almost tazes 2 people outside of Wal-Mart trying to record a vlog
  
• Boston pays $170,000 to photographer wrongfully arrested for filming police
  
• Man mistakenly shot with Taser sues City of Austin, police officer
  
• Pasadena Police Arrest 911 Caller After Unarmed Suspect Is Killed
  
• Cops: 10-Year-Old Charged With Felony After Stealing Bicycle
  
• Yet Another Story Of A Guy Arrested For Filming Police
  
• 68 year old ex-marine shot to death by police in his own home after he accidentally triggered his medical alert service in his sleep.
  
• Felony charges have been dropped against a Florida woman after a cellphone tape of her arrest sharply contradicted Coral Springs officers Nicole Stasnek and Derek Fernandes’ version of events
  
• CT state trooper suspended after burglary arrest
  
• Joiner Ar police chief Robert Yerbey arrested in connection with torture and neglect of a 77 year old man.
  
• Man tazed twice in the back while complying with orders from Harris County, Texas Officer Mark Nissen is suing him and the City of Waterloo.
  
• Man Arrested, Charged With Assault For Pointing Finger At Cops
  
• Cop kicks complying suspect in head like a soccer ball
  
• A brutal beating of teen burglary suspect caught on tape leads to an attempted cover up and no justice
  
• Pa. student charged after taking traffic stop pics
  
• Tasered law professor sues police
  
• One week after two Humphreys Co TN cops are indited for severely beating a handcuffed man, two more decide to follow an innocent man far out of their jurisdiction then beat him and search his business without cause or warrant.
  
• Windsor(Ontario, Canada) Cops Accused of Cover-Up in Beating of Doctor
  
• F.C.P.D. officer assaults citizen then arrests him for it.
  

I understand that the chances are microscopic, but to me it seems that the likelihood that you’ll suddenly find yourself in a situation like the people linked to above has gone up substantially in the last few years: Cops will beat you for protesting, for taking videos or pictures, for dressing the wrong way or being in the wrong neighborhood, or whatever. There is a real culture of violence pervading the police departments of this country and I really hope that police brass figure out ways of calming their officers down sooner rather than later.

Well, okay: You missed the following…

There. Now you and I are all caught up.

Having said that…

What kind of stupidity is this “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act“? It would “ban abortions performed because of the race or gender of the fetus”.

Now, first of all, how many white women go to an abortion clinic and say, “I don’t want to have a Chinese baby. So best to just kill it.” How many black women go to an abortion clinic and say, “I don’t want to have a black baby. If the baby had been white, I’d have it… but I’m pretty sure this baby is going to be black. So abort! Abort! Abort!”

So, race? Banning abortions based on race? That’s just retarded.

Second, banning abortions based on gender? While there is claimed to be a test that can determine gender at 6 weeks (1-1/2 months) of pregnancy, it is not considered reliable and most people do not find out the gender of a baby until 20 weeks (5 months). Only 1% of abortions happen after 20 weeks, and nearly 100% of those abortions occur due to the fetus not being survivable outside the womb.

So, gender? Highly unlikely… close to 100% unlikely.

And, let me just pass along a bit of information to the law makers that they probably had not considered: If you make abortions based on race or gender illegal (even if such abortions actually existed in the real world — which they don’t) all a woman has to do is NOT TELL the abortion clinic that she is having an abortion because of the baby’s race or gender, and nobody will ever know.

I swear to God, anti-choice politicians really can be so dumb sometimes.