Galt's Gulch in Beck's American Dream Labs


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Galt's Gulch in Beck's American Dream Labs

I have to post this. Glenn is embarking on a project called "American Dream Labs" whrere he is going hi-tech and to the outer reaches of dreaming the American Dream. From following the announcements last year, I already know there are a lot of big brainiacs involved in it in some capacity like Ray Kurzweil.

But the most emotional part for me was when he talked about setting up his own Galt's Gulch with this project. I think there's going to be a lot more reference to Ayn Rand as he goes along.

You can get a taste at the video below.

(EDIT: Sorry, the video doesn't embed. You can watch it at the link on TheBlaze below:)

After Much Anticipation, Glenn Beck Unveils ‘American Dream Labs’

It's corny to react as I did, I know, but when Glenn ended saying, in a dramatic tone, "Hank Rearden is about to pour some steel," then the sound of the train came, a shiver of pure joy went up my spine.

Michael

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Here's a screenshot of the announcement of the article on the front page of TheBlaze.

I circled the interesting part in red.

Beck-GaltsGultch.jpg

Galt's Gulch is right in the middle of his plans.

Michael

I have been following his talk about the 'American Dream Labs' but I'm not sure what to think about it yet.

Dennis

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I kind of see what Beck would like to do...

Dennis,

No you don't. But I'm no one to talk. Neither did I.

Galt's Gulch is going to be here, in a city--a real city--called Independence. It's going to be part theme park, but it's also going to be the real deal, producing its own energy, food, etc., and exporting the surplus for sale.

Glenn unveils his most ambitious and visionary dream: Independence

Projected cost is over $2 billion.

I think he's going to pull this thing off. Lots of big guns and big brains are standing with him.

Did you see the hommage he paid to Atlas Shrugged in his monologue?

btw - What a weird theme song, reggae with a choo choo train. :smile:

Michael

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I kind of see what Beck would like to do...

Dennis,

No you don't. But I'm no one to talk. Neither did I.

Galt's Gulch is going to be here, in a city--a real city--called Independence. It's going to be part theme park, but it's also going to be the real deal, producing its own energy, food, etc., and exporting the surplus for sale.

Glenn unveils his most ambitious and visionary dream: Independence

Projected cost is over $2 billion.

I think he's going to pull this thing off. Lots of big guns and big brains are standing with him.

Did you see the hommage he paid to Atlas Shrugged in his monologue?

btw - What a weird theme song, reggae with a choo choo train. :smile:

Michael

It seems he has something larger in mind than what I thought - at first I thought he was pushing towards a Menlo Park/Dreamworks Animation Campus but it sounds more like a Mall of the Americas/Disney Park. I assume it will be in Texas but I'm still not seeing how he keeps the boot of government off his throat. 2 billion will get you a lot of infrastructure development but little in the way of filled buildings - he will need 50X that from investors over time.

Dennis

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I kind of see what Beck would like to do...

Dennis,

No you don't. But I'm no one to talk. Neither did I.

Galt's Gulch is going to be here, in a city--a real city--called Independence. It's going to be part theme park, but it's also going to be the real deal, producing its own energy, food, etc., and exporting the surplus for sale.

Glenn unveils his most ambitious and visionary dream: Independence

Projected cost is over $2 billion.

I think he's going to pull this thing off. Lots of big guns and big brains are standing with him.

Did you see the hommage he paid to Atlas Shrugged in his monologue?

btw - What a weird theme song, reggae with a choo choo train. :smile:

Michael

It seems he has something larger in mind than what I thought - at first I thought he was pushing towards a Menlo Park/Dreamworks Animation Campus but it sounds more like a Mall of the Americas/Disney Park. I assume it will be in Texas but I'm still not seeing how he keeps the boot of government off his throat. 2 billion will get you a lot of infrastructure development but little in the way of filled buildings - he will need 50X that from investors over time.

Dennis

I understand it is about changing the culture and this would be the outpost and shining example of the culture we have lost. I see tourist interest but unless he can get a state to fully support his efforts and keep the Federal Government out as much as possible I'm not seeing the rest of the economic picture - a path towards success beyond the entertainment industry.

Dennis

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I have to underscore MSK's comments. More to the point, I have to apologize for not having endorsed them a couple of years ago. STORY is highly important to understanding., We understand by analogy and narrative. Even the most empirical of sciences explain reality to us by analogy and narrarative. It is not whimsical that quarks have charm, flavor, and color. If they did not, they would have sdkjdsgh, xcivbu4539I*&g, and :L<{<. That electrons have "spin" seems intelligible to us, but if an electron is a point, then the basketball's "spin" is inapplicable. However, we need the analogy, the narrative, the story.

Have you ever heard this story?

Once upon a time, we lived in the Garden of Eden <hunter/gatherer society> <near-laissez faire constitutional republic>. But the Serpent Lucifer <capitalists> <progressives> stole it from us with trickery and guile. However, if we all band together, we can create a <City of God> <socialist society> <Objectivist society>, not for ourselves, but for our children.

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I understand it is about changing the culture and this would be the outpost and shining example of the culture we have lost. I see tourist interest but unless he can get a state to fully support his efforts and keep the Federal Government out as much as possible I'm not seeing the rest of the economic picture - a path towards success beyond the entertainment industry.

The best states for this Beck project would be the Carolinas and Kentucky. Both offer tax and other incentives for religious theme parks, based on a demonstrated potential for local employment. Carolina (north) still has the remnants of the Bakker theme park, and Tennessee/Kentucky each fought pitched battles to offer enough incentives for the upcoming God's Gulch theme park, known now by the name "Ark Encounter."

What is Galt's Gulch but the Ark Encounter, updated by a Mormon? The Mormons already have their own theme park. It is called Utah.

See http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/08/10/kentucky-city-gives-bible-theme-park-a-75-tax-break/ for details.

There is a term in the Skeptical camp for these efforts and their success. Instead of Tornado Alley, it is "Theme Park Alley (gawd)." And it is truly great.

Dennis, do not mistake this for an EPCOT Center or like Paolo Soari's encampment/utopia ... this is NOT entertainment. It is very serious business indeed.

Edited by william.scherk
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North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee... why am I not enthused?

The picture of Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shrugged was so beautiful that it almost eclipses the harsh reality of Nueva Germania in which the Ayrans bred idiots. California's Utopian Communities by Robert V. Hine (1953) is a classic. Like inflation in revolutionary France, these are not just the hard luck stories from some hapless ideologues. It is what happens every time the experiment is run. Objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, it is impossible to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity and still thrive. Your "life chances" (see here) are better in Moscow under Stalin than in Galt's Gulch. Even in Hitler's wartime Berlin, Jews held protests because the international community could see them. Where will be your international community when you are dressed up like a captialist pig famer in an Objectivist Theme Park in Tennessee?

Show me a plan where a Galt's Gulch community intends to export valuable goods and services, so that it can import what it cannot produce -- flatscreen TVs, olives, avocados, oranges, ... Even at Whole Foods Number 1 here in Austin, they sell Yellow, Orange and Red Peppers grown in Holland and blueberries grown in Chile. What fresh fruit will you eat in December and January in your Objectivist Theme Park?

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I still think that the best and biggest Capitalist Theme Park on earth is Dubai.

That it is run by a theocratic hereditary ruler, the Emir, should neither be here nor there.

Edited by william.scherk
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A friend of mine, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, just came back from there, and said almost the same thing: they make their money from transshipment. In the Objectivist sense, they produce nothing. In strict capitalist terms, they produce the only thing that matters thereby own the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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MEM, in context, I think you mean Dubai. If your friend is an economist, this might add amplification (from Wikipedia's article "Economy of Dubai" (a very interesting read):

The International Herald Tribune has described it as "centrally-planned free-market capitalism."

I think some key words you may have missed, Michael ... Tourism, Manufacturing, etcetera. Saying Dubai is based on transshipment is like saying Singapore is an entrepot. True, but misleading.

Adding a bit to amplify both our points:

The government has set up industry-specific free zones throughout the city. Dubai Internet City, now combined with Dubai Media City as part of TECOM (Dubai Technology, Electronic Commerce and Media Free Zone Authority) is one such enclave whose members include IT firms such as EMC Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Microsoft, Sage Software and IBM, and media organisations such as MBC, CNN, Reuters, ARY and AP. Dubai Knowledge Village (KV), an education and training hub, is also set up to complement the Free Zone's other two clusters, Dubai Internet City and Dubai Media City, by providing the facilities to train the clusters' future knowledge workers. Dubai Outsourcing Zone is for companies who are involved in outsourcing activities can set up their offices with concessions provided by Dubai Government. Internet access is restricted in most areas of Dubai with a proxy server filtering out sites deemed to be against cultural and religious values of the UAE. However, areas served by TECOM (an internet service provider) are currently not filtered.

Oooh, Dubai Internet City. Dubai Knowledge Village. Key word: Infrastructure ...

I think Beck should try to lease a floor in the Burj Dubai. It has that look of all fine Objectikitsch.

Edited by william.scherk
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Read the bio: she is an art historian. She was in Dubai on her way to dig with archaelogist. She said that she expected "Internet City" to be a mall with shops. Rather, it is an an actual city wherein Google, Amazon, et alia, and others more, have buildings of their own. She said that "Media City" was the same for movie studios. "They are twenty years ahead of us," she said.

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Read the bio: she is an art historian. She was in Dubai on her way to dig with archaelogist. She said that she expected "Internet City" to be a mall with shops. Rather, it is an an actual city wherein Google, Amazon, et alia, and others more, have buildings of their own. She said that "Media City" was the same for movie studios. "They are twenty years ahead of us," she said.

I am wondering how they are 20 years ahead of us? From the small amount I know of Dubai they hire in their experts from all over the world. Those hired include us.

Dennis

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North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee... why am I not enthused?

The picture of Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shrugged was so beautiful that it almost eclipses the harsh reality of Nueva Germania in which the Ayrans bred idiots. California's Utopian Communities by Robert V. Hine (1953) is a classic. Like inflation in revolutionary France, these are not just the hard luck stories from some hapless ideologues. It is what happens every time the experiment is run. Objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, it is impossible to cut yourself off from the rest of humanity and still thrive. Your "life chances" (see here) are better in Moscow under Stalin than in Galt's Gulch. Even in Hitler's wartime Berlin, Jews held protests because the international community could see them. Where will be your international community when you are dressed up like a captialist pig famer in an Objectivist Theme Park in Tennessee?

Show me a plan where a Galt's Gulch community intends to export valuable goods and services, so that it can import what it cannot produce -- flatscreen TVs, olives, avocados, oranges, ... Even at Whole Foods Number 1 here in Austin, they sell Yellow, Orange and Red Peppers grown in Holland and blueberries grown in Chile. What fresh fruit will you eat in December and January in your Objectivist Theme Park?

Continuing fresh produce from overseas presumes stable oil supplies, stable markets, stable currencies, and peaceful trade. Cars burning in the streets like in Greece or the suburbs of Paris is what is coming if the fiscal implosion is not stopped. Beck is interested in training our current generation in the lost arts of self sufficiency. Can your blueberries - or black raspberries here locally. Can your peppers for winter use, its all been done before but most people have no clue how.

Dennis

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Consider what follows as a bad case (not worst case) scenario. If oil disappeared tomorrow, right now, here and now, the world has more sailing ships than existed 200 years ago on the eve of steam power. Dubai, Singapore, Manhattan (and Manhattan, Kansas) all survive and thrive on trade. So-called "self-sufficiency" has failed every time it was tried, as has every communist utopia, and for exactly the same objective reasons. No living entity, not even a single cell, can survive without exchange.

Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World by Carolyn Nordstrom (University of California Press, 2007), brings home the special agony of Africa. Early on, she introduces us to Okidi, a boy of about nine who sells cigarettes – Marlboros most often – one-up in the wartorn outback of Angola. Okidi shows Nordstom the convenience store that fronts him.

“This is where I get my cigarettes.”
“Do you have to buy them?”
He shook his head no:
“The man gives me a packet, and when I have sold all of the cigarettes, I return to give him his share of the money, and get more.”

The store proffers a wide range of convenience goods. Even the owner’s Mercedes is for sale. The store faces an ad hoc open air market where an even wider variety of articles, including pharmaceuticals and art, can be had in a place where, paradoxically, no one has any money.

“I met Okidi, the young war orphan, when I was charting ‘robber barons’: those who trade for immense profits, most visible in international exchanges of resources (gold, diamonds, timber, humans, etc.) for arms. Military supplies are so expensive the few countries’ tax bases can provide sufficient funds to purchase them. National currencies in war zones are generally shunned by financial markets: they tend to be weak and unpredictable monies that few urban industrial centers can accept. Natural resources become the ‘hard currencies’ of choice to raise the capital to run wars and countries. Given the pressures of international laws, sanctions, and national industry regulations, much of this commerce crosses the line of the law in the journey from source to profit.”
“The illegal is also sustained by a human desire for beauty. In these places, people congregate to seek or sell pitifully small amounts of food or a handful of live-saving medicines, often carried over-mined fields and under gunfire. Amidst these critical necessities, there often something of beauty for sale, a delicate piece of cloth, a pair of counterfeit Nike shoes, or the recording of a beloved musician, carried across the trenches of hell and outside the law, one, it would seem, to remind us of our spark of humanity.” (Nordstrom, 9)

The convenience store was momentarily unattended and Nordstrom waited to meet and interview the owner. Inside was an open bucket for cash as people bought small items on the honor system – again a paradox, seemingly of deep sociological consequence, but which Nordstrom observed and reported without further comment.

Only now with news about the pirates off Somalia do we consider that the routes of travel may not be open, clear and safe. We here in America today use the phrase “highway robbery” only figuratively. In Africa, things are different.

In fact, shipping routes are markets, and thus they are matters of opportunity. The number of markets and routes to these marketplaces is not unlimited. Once routes are operating with confidence, all manner of goods can pass along them. A shipping container can “contain” arms, cigarettes, and the latest pirated DVDs, along with a host of other commodities ranging from the seriously illegal to the merely mundane. (Nordstrom, 8)


It is a situation that we Americans in particular ought to relate to. “A frontier combines (often immense) freedom, danger, and profit.” (Nordstrom, 12) Anywhere from three-fourths to 90% of Angola’s economy is “informal” or illegal and that is fairly typical for Africa, where, on the whole, more than half of the economy is off-the-books. (Nordstrom 15, 105, 109) An area military commander explained to Carolyn Nordstrom that the land-mined road, the bombed out bridge and his troops assured that nothing could pass from Muleque to Luanda, from the provinces to the towns, ultimately to or from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola. However, standing in a marketplace, an “unemployed businessman” from Luanda validated the evidence of her senses: barriers notwithstanding, goods flowed across this no-go zone. (Nordstrom, 14-15)

Africa offers a microcosm of the failed globalist future – a world where safe shipping lanes have economic value, where war zones and the relics of past wars squat on daily life, where commerce is untaxed and unregulated and where anything can be had for a price, though also where entrepreneurship is ad hoc and based on trust. It is not the panopticon street, parking lot, bank and convenience store where every perpetration is recorded and virally posted on the Internet and all transactions are electronic and electronically traced.

The Future of Capitalism and its Relationship to Transnational, Multinational and Global Crime by Michael E. Marotta. (CRIM 592: Global Crime. Dr. Gregg Barak; Eastern Michigan University; Fall 2009)

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So-called "self-sufficiency" has failed every time it was tried, as has every communist utopia, and for exactly the same objective reasons. No living entity, not even a single cell, can survive without exchange.

Beck is talking about self-sufficiency enough to survive the short term consequences of the collapse. When bad weather hits it is best to have supplies for a few weeks till normal times return. When the largest financial collapse in the history of mankind hits you better have supplies for months or a couple years plus the ability to get by with as little outside trade as possible for an extended period of time. The looters will eventually starve or be killed leaving those who value honest trade and those are largely self-sufficient behind. Being self-sufficient means being able to deal with the looters as well. The police cannot protect you when overwhelmed and depending on their personal situation or orders they may become looters as well. Things will settle down into some kind of new normal but surviving the collapse is the first step.

Dennis

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Mother Jones, that sanctuary of progressive shill-craft, is not amused:

Glenn Beck Building Ayn Rand-Inspired Utopia

The MJ folks are afraid to say anything substantive because they keep predicting Glenn's demise and he keeps coming back stronger. So they are relying on the power of image to try to say what they dare not. After all, how can an image make a wrong prediction? Besides, 2 billion smackaroonies are still 2 billion, even for a progressive.

Ask Al Gore. That dude sold out to big oil at about 5% of that figure. (He just sold Current TV to Al Jazeera and his cut is around $100 million).

Here's the illustrious art work Mother Jones prefers to publish over its previous gleeful un-predictions.

beck_castle.jpg

Michael

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Mother Jones, that sanctuary of progressive shill-craft, is not amused:

Glenn Beck Building Ayn Rand-Inspired Utopia

I must have misread the Mother Jones article. I took it as obvious that the writer was richly amused. Most of the article simply quoted the Blaze page that MSK introduced earlier in the thread.

By far the most telling aspects of the Beck announcement and the MJ reaction are the comments on both sites. They seem to reinforce the message from each side. I will post a representative selection later ...

The MJ folks are afraid to say anything substantive because they keep predicting Glenn's demise and he keeps coming back stronger. So they are relying on the power of image to try to say what they dare not. After all, how can an image make a wrong prediction? Besides, 2 billion smackaroonies are still 2 billion, even for a progressive.

The MJ folks might differ on the notion that Beck keeps coming back stronger, and even if they used unethical imagery to deride Beck's God's Gulch amusement park, the fact remains that Beck cited Disney as his primary inspiration.

So Mother Jones depicts Beck in a picture that features him in the forefront and a Magic Castle in the background.

Someone will explain to us how this is a nasty use of 'story' or 'narrative' and how the depiction somehow makes whoopee with truth.

Edited by william.scherk
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