Spot the Logical Fallacy

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Today's edition of "Spot the Logical Fallacy" comes from the medicolegal world:

1) A pregnant mother who had a prior Caesarean section now wants to deliver her next baby at home.

2) Her obstetrician warns her that it's dangerous and advises the she have the baby in a hospital.

3) The mother ignores her doctor's advice and has a home birth anyways.

4) The baby is born with "severe brain damage".

5) The doctor gets sued. According to the article, "Plaintiffs told prospective jurors earlier this week that they are seeking more than $13 million in damages."

Question: Can you spot the logical fallacy in the plaintiff's case? More importantly, will the jury?

Answer: The doctor's defense lawyer correctly states, "[T]he physician should not be held accountable 'for choices she didn't make, and for choices she counseled against.'"

Extra credit question: Would this sort of thing increase or decrease medical costs?

Thank you all for playing!

Memo to Gates: The Cause of Third-World Poverty Is Not Capitalism, But a Lack of Capitalism

By Alex Epstein from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Memo to Gates: The Cause of Third-World Poverty Is Not Capitalism, But a Lack of Capitalism
January 28, 2008

Irvine, CA--Bill Gates made waves at the World Economic Forum by calling on Western nations to adopt a new, “creative capitalism.” He complained that under “pure capitalism . . . . the great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least . . .” Gates called for corporations and governments to devote far more time and money “doing work that eases the world's inequities.”

“Gates’s entire speech essentially blames Western capitalism for the Third World’s poverty,” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, “and offers a slightly more sophisticated form of foreign welfare handouts as the antidote. But the West did not become wealthy at the Third World’s expense--we did not seize computers, houses, pharmaceuticals, and railroads from the Sahara. We created our wealth under capitalism, the system that liberates individuals to produce and trade without interference. And Third World countries could do the same if they adopted that system.

“The last 200 years have shown that wherever capitalism is adopted--from Singapore to the United States to Hong Kong to Australia--it enables its citizens to create wealth and prosper. Yet not one word of Gates’s speech calls for poor countries to change their anti-capitalist governments.

“No matter how many billions Bill Gates gives to poor nations, until he starts advocating universal capitalism instead of attacking it, he is acting as an enemy of prosperity in the undeveloped world.”

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Romney's War Plans

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Captain Ed asked Mitt Romney how he would fight the global Jihad. Romney's answer:

Well, we face a wide array of nations that are under the threat of global Jihadist, and some like the Philippines or Indonesia the threat is of a very different nature of that, which is being experienced in a place like Iraq and so our involvement and the nature of our involvement is going to be different. So let me describe the kind of options we have. First, I would bring together other nations along with ourselves to make sure collectively that we are fighting global Jihad and that we are fighting it with our military as well as our non-military resources. In terms of our military force, in some cases it will require the kind of actions that you see in a place like Afghanistan, a full military attack. In others, a different kind of military effort would be called for. As an example, in the Philippines, an Army Special Forces team was able to help those people reject an offshoot of Al Qaeda. This was not, you know, men with rifles and tanks but instead a Special Forces unit that helped build bridges, build water projects, move the civilian population to support the Filipino government and democracy and ultimately that has virtually eliminated the threat of global Jihad there. And I have called for what I have described as a special partnership force; meaning the creation of small units of intelligence plus army special forces personnel which are able to drawn into a nation which ask for help, to support that nation in its effort to reject the violent and the extreme. In many cases, the Muslim nation itself will be able to do the best job in eliminating the threat of radical Jihad and we can support that effort through a special partnership force of the type I have described.

This answer is weak. First, he talks about working with other nations. Building coalitions has only sapped our strength for the last 20 years and convinced the enemy we're more worried about world opinion than self-defense. In order to show the enemy we are serious about war, we need to forget building a pretense of international cooperation and set about defeating the enemy alone. The most devastating message the enemy could get at this moment is that America does not give a damn what France thinks, we are going to destroy our enemy.

Second, Romney is talking about more altruistic nation-building instead of waging war. Notice what he envisions Special Forces doing:

This was not, you know, men with rifles and tanks but instead a Special Forces unit that helped build bridges, build water projects, move the civilian population to support the Filipino government and democracy...

Romney has no vision of waging serious war. There is no mention here of eradicating states that sponsor terrorism and no mention of going after Iran. His presidency will be an extension of Bush's neoconservative "Long War." We'll be pouring American tax dollars into every jungle on the globe, but the enemy will live on.

UPDATE: Romney stinks of pragmatism. It's common among Republicans. Toward the end of his life, Richard Nixon, the ultimate pragmatist, was asked how he would advise Bush 41 to defend himself against charges of flip-flopping. Nixon's reply, as I remember it, was, "Easy! Just say 'That was then, this is now.'"

It makes sense to a pragmatist. I mean, yesterday was a whole different day, with different circumstances to deal with. How can anyone keep principles when responding to the crisis of the hour?

Romney, with his long history of flip-flops, his emphasis on managerial expertise (don't they teach pragmatism at Harvard Business School?) and his seeming lack of any principled center other than religion, strikes me as very much a pragmatist. This is another thing to watch as we get to know him better. If he ever gets into the White House, he could make Bush look like Goldwater.

Post picked up by WSJ

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Wall Street Journal has picked up my previous post (via the OO Meta-blog feed) on Bill Gates and listed it on their online version under "Related Articles and Blogs". Now if that just doesn't beat all.

Will McCain Get the Nomination?

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

After Florida, it looks like John McCain will be the next President of the USA. I suspect Giuliani will be his Vice President pick because Rudy could bring New York, New Jersey and Connecticut with him. If the Democrat has to expend resources protecting that turf, it will be tough for the Dem to win. Plus, Rudy's quitting and endorsing McCain is a huge help going into Super Tuesday.

I think McCain will beat Romney, whose pragmatism makes him seem like "Mr. Plastic," a phony man who says whatever is needed, depending on who he's talking to. (Didn't we get enough of that from Clinton and Bush 41?) McCain, whatever you think of him, comes across as an honest, plainspoken man. At least by politicians' standards. Of all the candidates in both parties, Romney is the one I'd least want to have a beer with. Still, Romney could win if Conservatives rally around him to stop McCain. Romney will have to spend his money -- lots of it.

McCain, if he is the Republican nominee, will beat either Obama or Clinton. McCain loves to flout conservatives, and that maverick streak appeals to independents. This is a shallow criterion by which to measure a candidate, but a great many people give voting little thought. I know an independent who admires McCain, because, in his words, "He seems like a nice guy." And that, apparently, is enough to win an independent's vote.

McCain is the Democrats' worst nightmare. In the end, Republicans will hold their nose and vote for him simply because he doesn't have a D after his name. The Republicans will be energized sometime in October when the Democrats begin playing dirty tricks and attempting to assassinate McCain's character. The Democrat Party is the best thing the Republican Party has going for it! Add legions of independents voting for a candidate who is more their guy than anyone since Perot in 1992, and you have the making of a rout. (Imagine Perot's 19% added to whatever Bush got in '92.)

I believe Republicans are voting for McCain because of his electability. The purpose of political parties, after all, is winning elections.

Robert Tracinski observes in his latest TIA Daily that Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama represents a public rebuke of Clinton's cynicism.

This means that the Democrats are now beginning to see their party's primary as a test of their own moral self-image: jaded pragmatists for the Clintons, youthful idealists for Obama. On those terms, how many Democrats—hoping to recapture their party's youthful glory days—will be able to resist Obama?

So the Democrats, a party of collectivists that would happily enslave us all to the welfare state, are voting from idealism. Meanwhile, Republicans, who until recently were know to mumble from time to time in favor of real ideals such as liberty and small government, are voting from a cynical, unprincipled yearning for power. Cue the Yeats line:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But that's not exactly apt, as the Republicans are far from the best we have in America.

A McCain nomination might be good for America for two reasons. First, people will better see that the Republican Party is a party of big government and welfare state. Classical liberals and other supporters of free markets and individual liberty will better see that neither party is for them. Second, if an economic crisis hits the next president, be he Democrat or Republican, it will be a little harder to blame it on capitalism.

UPDATE: Slight revision.

Too Good to Be True?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Editor's Note: I have just returned to Houston from being out of town. I have a backlog of comments and my "Comcastic" ISP didn't exactly help me get to them this morning. My apologies for taking a little longer to get to them.


There is a story in today's Houston Chronicle that caused me to drop my jaw for a moment. A local race-baiter, Quanell X, has apparently seen the errors of his ways (at least with respect to the Holocaust) and wants to make amends.

Reflecting on some belligerent remarks he had made about Jews just before the Million Man March in 1995, Quanell X sounds like a man jolted to the core by the revelation that he has been grossly, tragically mistaken about something very important through his entire adult life.

"I apologize to every Jewish (Holocaust) survivor that may have heard anything I have ever said," Quanell said at the end of his tour, which culminated with his placing a stone at an outside memorial, a Jewish custom at a gravesite. "How could I say anything in a vile, malicious or repugnant manner to anyone who has been in one of these camps? I should have never threatened like that.

"I seek the forgiveness of every survivor who has heard the words I've said," he continued. "I did not say them in the proper manner to make the point I was trying to get across. I can see and understand how they might be utterly paranoid (of) a person such as myself."

Michael Goldberg, the chair-elect of the museum's board of directors, welcomed Quanell[ X]'s visit despite initial concerns that he might be using the museum as a backdrop for a different agenda.

"I think the apology and emotions I heard today were ones that fall within the scope of this museum," Goldberg said. "Quanell said he understood that I could be taking some risk by having him come here. My view is that the message of this museum is to turn hate into hope. The chance of sharing the message of the museum was too great not to take the risk." [bold added]

And if this doesn't remind one of Boris Yeltsin's "supermarket epiphany," the following will.

He said the change began about six years ago when he came face to face with racism within the Muslim community. After helping to organize a pro-Palestinian protest at the Israeli consulate in Houston, he discovered that some Palestinian protest leaders were not happy that an African-American Muslim would play such a visible role. The source of their discomfort was the color of his skin.

"It was almost like somebody had taken two electrical currents and stuck them to me and touched me. It shook me," he said. "I grew up believing that racism did not exist among Muslims. ... I grew up believing that whenever I saw a Muslim, he would see me as his brother ... no matter where he was from or what racial background he came from, or what race or group of people he belonged to."

That led him first to depression and disillusionment, then to a period of education and enlightenment. He said he found out that racism has existed in the Muslim world since its earliest days, and that Muslims played a role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. [bold added]

Quanell X remains Moslem and sympathetic to religious terrorism as far as I know, and has, as recently as late 2006 continued to engage in racial demagoguery, so if this really is a change -- and not simply an attempt to grab the moral high ground by grandstanding -- it is only the very beginning of his journey to enlightenment.

Today's civil rights movement should be furthering the goal of individual rights, not striving to pit racial collectives against each other in pressure group warfare or actual fighting. Even if Quanell X is genuinely contrite, the concept of individual rights is complex, its foundations nontrivial, and the requirements for the protection of individual rights remain at odds with everything I know of that this man has said until recently and has done in his public life. The cause of freedom, of individual rights, can be harmed even more by an incompetent ally than by an overt enemy. I hope Quannell X is not just sincere, but diligent.

And I will be paying attention.

-- CAV

An Education Stimulus Package

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Washington,D.C. (Jan 25, 2007): President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today announced a bipartisan stimulus plan to improve higher education. Announcing the initiative on the White House lawn, the president said: "This package is urgent. We must boost falling grades with an immediate stimulus. I urge Congress to act soon."

The president had suggested increasing every student's GPA by 0.2 points, but Democrats objected, saying that help should be targetted to those who need it most. "The President wanted to use the failing grades of poor students as an excuse to raise grades for the good ones", speaker Pelosi commented, "while we wanted to help those who really need the help".

The compromise plan will add 0.4 to all students with a GPA under 3.0, but will add less for students scoring better, gradually phasing out to zero for anyone with a 3.8 or above.

On the campaign trail, Senator Obama criticized the deal, as a quick-fix, saying that grades were not enough; students who do well should be made to pay more, since they are obviously getting more from the system. The amounts raised could be used to pay for extra tuition for students who are failing. "We need a plan that creates hope", said the Senator, "we need creative solutions". GOP candidate Mike Huckabee, called for more structural changes and science programs that taught Intelligent Design.

Meanwhile, most students interview were happy with the new plan. "I can definitely use the help I can get", said Mitt Koplaski, who studies economics at the University of Oregon.

My question is this: if you can tell that this is spoof, explain why, in principle.

[Hat tip: "UMassHoops", posting on "The Motley Fool", for the kernel idea.]

Effective Standing Orders

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Usually, when a person needs to remember to do something, he gives himself a standing order associated with some trigger, e.g. "check the tire pressure and wiper fluid when changing the oil on the car." Sometimes, however, new standing orders will not stick to well-automatized actions. Case in point:

Early last spring, I bought a well-reviewed, cheap car seat heater. I'm using it regularly this winter. Unfortunately, it remains fully operational -- and so drains the car battery -- if left plugged into the cigarette lighter when the car is off. Predictably, I left it plugged in a few times accidentally, despite my best efforts to remember to unplug it when turning off the car. I should just be able to add it to my standard leaving-the-car checklist, I thought. That didn't work at all, however. A few weeks ago, I finally managed to drain my car battery. (Thankfully, I did so at a convenient time, as I was home and didn't need to go anywhere. Paul gave me a jump.) Given the inflexibility of my teaching schedule, that's not a consequence I could afford to risk in the future.

After that, I considered buying a "battery drain guard" (like this one), but I hate to spend $20 on a silly memory problem. So I decided to try a different solution. Instead of trying to remember to unplug the heater, I plug it in in such a way that I can't forget. I run the rather long cord over my thigh so that it's totally out of the way -- until I try to leave the car. Then I need to unplug the heater to get out of the car smoothly. So far, I've found it totally reliable: it's easy to remember to plug it in via that convoluted route and impossible to forget to unplug it.

The basic reason why this new method works whereas my old method failed is that my getting-out-of-the-car routine is very thoroughly automatized. I'm not thinking of the car seat heater; I have no immediate reason to do so. That's not true of plugging in the car seat heater; it happens whenever I notice that I'm cold. So while I'm already thinking about it, I can easily plug it in by a slightly odd route.

So I'd put the general principle as follows: If you're trying to automatize some new action, don't attempt to force yourself to remember ex nihilo, but instead find some way to connect to it to your natural patterns of thought.

Notably, that's precisely what a well-managed (i.e a GTD-type) task list does. Instead of overloading your mind with the task of remembering all that you need and want to do, you only need to automatize checking and managing your task list. For people with lots to do like me, such a task list is essential not only to productivity but also to basic peace of mind.

Obama's Big Day

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I just listened to Barack Obama give his victory speech in South Carolina. And lo, it was a mighty blast of wind. What a voice! What inspiring rhetoric! Full of sound and fury signifying nothing!

What does "Change we can believe in" mean? As near as I can guess, it means that we have been promised change in the past, but things have always stayed the same; now, however, you can believe in Obama's promises because he will actually change things in Washington, D.C. Or something like that. If I'm wrong, tell me in the comments. I could easily be wrong, as the motto is one of those vague political slogans that are calculated to offend no one. I mean, who will think, "But I want change I CAN'T believe in"?

In his speech Obama said (putting it all in my words) he wants to socialize medicine, to withdraw our troops from Iraq and to throw more money at public education. The Iraq stand does represent legitimate change. The rest is just more welfare state, and there ain't nothin' new about that.

I take all his talk about rising above race as a coded slap at the Clintons, who have done their best to remind white voters that Obama has melanin in his skin. Anything that humiliates a Clinton is always welcome. This is the most gratifying aspect of Obama's electoral success.

Can Obama win on November 4th? Yes, if he keeps his angry leftist wife hidden until November 5th. Yes, if the Republicans nominate Mitt Romney, a pandering, insincere man who makes Obama look like Martin Luther King, Jr. First, though, Obama has to get past the Clinton machine, which I don't see happening.

As of today both the Republican and Democrat nomination is yet to be decided. Super Tuesday will be the political junky's Superbowl.

UPDATE: On second thought, my interpretation of Obama's slogan, "Change we can believe in," is wrong. My meaning would be better phrased, "Promises we can believe."

Perhaps Obama's slogan is attempting to combine the word change with idealism. So the slogan is saying, "Obama's change will bring about our ideals." If your ideals are altruism-collectivism-statism, that makes sense. (One might reword the slogan as "Change that will enslave us.") Ultimately, the slogan doesn't have to make sense as long as it makes Obama's voters feel good.

Prospectus Defense

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Hooray for me!
Hooray for me!
Hooray for me!

I successfully defended my prospectus today. It went fabulously well. The four (of five) faculty on my committee able to attend seemed broadly supportive of my project, with good questions, comments, and challenges. They voted to pass me, so now the only work left for my Ph.D is my already-in-progress dissertation.

Paul and I are headed out to celebrate by consuming vast quantities of delicious calories!

Hooray for me!
Hooray for me!
Hooray for me!

DANA JACOBSON AND TOUCHDOWN JESUS

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What's going on with all these religious pressure groups demonstrating all the time? [Editor's note: I am not for using foul language, I think it is a lack of vocabulary if you have to use the "f"-word and other swear words.] Could someone explain what a "roast" is and why it is common with this kind of behavior?



Read ESPN: A Classic Do-As-I-Say, Not-As-I-Do by Bob Parks and see if you agree with his angle against "liberal media bias"...

While she hasn’t been quoted as apologizing to Christians, or Jesus himself, it would appear Dana Jacobson has been “forgiven”, as she’s still employed, for now. She’s lucky she only went off on those intolerant Christians, because had she said the same thing about Muslims, she’d be in the Witness Protection Program today.

To think that an organization with as many liberal sports commentators as ESPN would even take such an action, instead of excusing it “free speech”, is notable. (Canada Free Press, 01/23/08.)

English posts that contain "Dana Jacobson" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Collectivism vs. Pseudo-Individualism

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Gina Cobb makes an interesting observation:

But the left is still missing the most important part of what conservatism has to offer. They've missed out on the optimism, the realistic hope, and the belief in the competency of individuals that is at the heart of conservatism.

(In the next paragraph, she destroys her argument by equating individualism with anti-abortion. More on this below.)

Hillary Clinton does try for optimism, but she thinks it comes from state intervention in the economy.

During the debate on climate change, that we finally got onto the floor thanks to Senators McCain and Lieberman, although we were only given three hours to debate climate change, I was struck by the pessimism and the fatalism from the other side. This was a problem that they either didn't believe existed, or if it existed, would somehow fix itself at the appropriate time, somewhere in the future. That has never been America's attitude. And when I was speaking on the floor that day, I said, you know, I can't believe what I'm hearing. There are, I suppose, still a few people left somewhere who believe that climate change is not a problem, but the vast scientific established opinion is that it is, and we should go about dealing with it now. And guess what? We can make money and create jobs if we do. That's the kind of can-do spirit that I was raised with, that I believe in. And it's that loss of spirit, as much as the loss of jobs, that deeply troubles me.

As I wrote about Clinton's equating the can-do spirit with collectivism:

She is equating the positive American sense of life that is a heritage of Enlightenment individualism with big government. She uses America's can-do spirit, which developed when America was a free country and when Americans were expected to be self-reliant, to defend the one thing that is destroying that spirit -- the welfare state! How's that for an example of the parasitic nature of evil?

It seems to be one of the most striking differences between liberalism and conservatism: liberals believe that individuals are metaphysically helpless and need to be controlled by the state for their own good, whereas conservatives believe individuals should be left free to pursue and achieve their own happiness. Liberals are collectivist; conservatives are individualist.

But are conservatives really individualist? Certainly, when Rush Limbaugh is at his best he extols individualism and talks about how everyone can better himself with initiative and hard work. Unlike Senator Clinton, Limbaugh understands that individual freedom, not the wretched welfare state, made America great.

So why is it that the nanny state has grown under every conservative president? Why did government double in size under Reagan? Why didn't Reagan at least dismantle the Departments of Energy and Education, which our country lived just fine without for 200 years until Jimmy Carter and saw a need for state meddling in these areas? Why did George H.W. Bush sign the Americans for Disabilities Act, one of the costliest nanny state measures of the last 30 years?

If conservatives believe individuals should be left to run their own lives, why did George W. Bush outlaw the incandescent light bulb? Shouldn't the individual be left to decide for himself what kind of light he wants in his home?

Conservatives talk individualist but govern collectivist. They're all hat and no cattle when it comes to individualism.

Conservatives think their religion supports individualism, because God creates every human with a unique soul. But that same religion undercuts individualism with its morality of altruism. God says the strong must sacrifice for the weak. When religious conservatives such as Bush or Huckabee get into power, they feel a duty to use that power to serve God. Morality trumps everything else; individualism is a hazy, abstract idea next to the moral imperative that people have a duty to help their fellow sinners. Individualism comes from pride; the humble Christian equates pride with the Devil.

To add to the confusion, conservatives betray individualism throughout the mixed economy, then appease their conscience by equating individualism with anti-abortionism (or what they call in an Orwellian twist of language, "pro-life"). They sacrifice an actual woman to a potential human and call that individualism because they believe their supernatural being has injected a soul into the fetus at conception. This metaphysical fantasy keeps them from seeing the contradiction between their morality and individualism.

So what is worse, the Democrat who believes collectivism is good and governs in accordance with his belief? Or the Republican who says individualism is good, but does not fully understand the word and betrays his belief the moment he acquires power?

Well, it's a hell of a choice, isn't it? Welcome to the 21st century.

Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The January/February 2008 issue of Foreign Policy points out that young students in France and Germany are being taught that capitalism and free markets are "savage, unhealthy, and immoral."

If I were a betting man, I'd sell Europe short. Assuming that I could find any economically-literate Europeans who'd take the other side of the trade...

Middle East Milestones: The Russo Turkish War (1768-1774)

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

An Odd Grey Area in the Law of Sex

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Here's a story from the Denver Post which raises some interesting issues about prosecuting children for having sex with one another:

Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act -- in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.

The Ogden, Utah, girl was put in this odd position because she was found guilty of violating a state law that prohibits sex with someone under age 14. She also was the victim in the case against her boyfriend, who was found guilty of the same violation by engaging in sexual activity with her. "The only thing that comes close to this is dueling," said Associate Chief Justice Michael Wilkins, noting that two people who take 20 paces and then shoot could each be considered both victim and offender. And Chief Justice Christine Durham wondered if the state Legislature had intended the "peculiar consequence" that a child would have the simultaneous status of a protected person and an alleged perpetrator under the law.

...State authorities filed delinquency petitions in July 2004, alleging that each had committed sexual abuse of a child, a second-degree felony if committed by an adult. The girl appealed the petition, saying her constitutional right to be treated equally under the law had been violated. Her motion noted that for juveniles who are 16 and 17, having sex with others in their own age group does not qualify as a crime. Juveniles who are 14 or 15 and have sex with peers can be charged with unlawful conduct with a minor, but the law provides for mitigation when the age difference is less than four years, making the offense a misdemeanor. For adolescents under 14, though, there are no exceptions or mitigation and they are never considered capable of consenting to sex.

I do agree with the general principle that children below a certain age cannot genuinely consent to sex with an adult. But I'm not sure what the proper legal approach should be for two such children who engage in sex with one another.

More Football

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

During this football season, Paul and I have taken to watching The NFL Channel if we have some extra time while exercising but nothing to watch on DVD. The analysis shows are reasonably good -- although we definitely prefer HBO's "Inside the NFL." The essentialized "NFL Replay" games are fun to watch, as are the significant games from past seasons. When listening to some lecture or fiction on my iPod, I'll often watch games on the NFL channel with the sound off, as that keeps my brain occupied enough to concentrate on the audio material.

A few days ago, I watched a portion of 1998's Superbowl 32: Denver vs Green Bay. (I was also listening to Onkar Ghate lecture on philosophy!) That's ancient history for me, as I only began watching football two seasons later.

When I began watching football, my goal was to be nothing more than a very casual fan. I thought I'd know which teams were doing well each season, enjoy watching a few games, but not much more than that. In fact, I even said that I couldn't imagine learning the names of players.

How times have changed! Of course, I recognized tons of players from this old game, most notably the very young-looking Brett Farve, but also McCaffrey, Davis, Sharpe, etc. The two head coaches were also familiar faces. I recognized the commentators: Phil Simms looks so much older today. However, what blows me away is that I recognized Ed Hochuli. He wasn't nearly so buff then as he is now. And he isn't the only referee I know on sight! Plus, I now have very definite preferences for in-the-booth commentators: I adore Chris Collinsworth above all others.

If someone had told me ten years ago that I'd be such a devoted NFL fan, I would have gotten a good chuckle from such crazy talk.

Oh, and... Go Giants!

CREATIVE CAPITALISM

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I think that creative thinking and capitalism goes hand in hand, but what is Bill Gates proposing? Check out Davos Conversation for more information.



UPDATE 01/25/08: Read Kendall J's post, Bill Gates - Apologist for the Welfare State.

Bill Gates - Apologist for the Welfare State

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ah, there are days when I pick up (or click into) the Wall Street Journal and just get infuriated by the first article I read. Today we have the richest man in the world arguing for something called "Creative Capitalism" to help the worlds poor. Bill Gates, Microsoft Founder and Chairman, gave a speech today at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland that is anything but a defense of capitalism.

"We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn't abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

In particular, he said, he's troubled that advances in technology, health care and education tend to help the rich and bypass the poor. "The rate of improvement for the third that is better off is pretty rapid," he said. "The part that's unsatisfactory is for the bottom third -- two billion of six billion."

Gates' first fundamental mistake is mistaking capitalism as purely an economic system. Proper laissez faire capitalism is first a political system, one based on individual rights. When viewed in that light the claim that capitalism has failed the poor seems tinny. Look at the world's poor in China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the entire African continent. Capitalism as a political system could hardly be said to exist here. Capitalism hasn't failed these people, but rather Communism, Islamofascism, and plain barbaric tyranny have. To lay that guilt at capitalism's feet is poorly placed blame, and this coming from one of the world's great capitalists.

As I've previously blogged, in pockets where enough basic individual rights exists, beginning with such things as private property rights, then the profit motive serves even the poorest of the poor effectively.The answer then is not to cast a new form of capitalism

With today's speech, Mr. Gates adds his high-profile name to the ranks of those who argue that unfettered capitalism can't solve broad social problems. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work providing small loans to the poor, is traversing the U.S. this month promoting a new book that calls capitalism "half developed" because it focuses only on the profit-oriented side of human nature, not on the satisfaction derived from helping others.

Here is Gates' other fundamental error, altruism. He plans to quote from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the pleasure man derives from taking an interest in the fortunes of others. What's Gates solution? It's nothing new, just the good old mixed economy of course.

Key to Mr. Gates's plan will be for businesses to dedicate their top people to poor issues -- an approach he feels is more powerful than traditional corporate donations and volunteer work. Governments should set policies and disburse funds to create financial incentives for businesses to improve the lives of the poor, he plans to say today. "If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world," Mr. Gates plans to say.

No, Mr. Gates, instead of calling capitalism a partial solution, and calling for a new kind of capitalism based on altruistic sentiments, you should be calling for the establishment of capitalism in the first place, where none exists.

Humanitarian Warfare

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Two news stories regarding recent events in the Gaza Strip and commented upon by The Wall Street Journal illustrate how the Arab world is using the moral code of the West as a weapon in its conflict with Israel.

Apparently, it is easy to play up a power outage to make Israel look bad -- by using candles in broad daylight -- when the news media are in the habit of presenting Israel as the aggressor. Only a few of the journalists noticed the ruse:

"They had closed the curtains in the rooms to create the impression that Hamas leaders were also suffering as a result of the power stoppage," one journalist told The Jerusalem Post. "It was obvious that the whole thing was staged."

Another journalist said he and his colleagues were told to wait for a few minutes before entering the chamber of the Palestinian Legislative Council so that each legislator would have time to light his candle. He said that when he saw that the curtains had been closed to prevent the light from entering, he realized that Hamas was trying to manipulate the media for political gain.

Hamas obviously has a low estimate of the capability for critical thinking of most journalists. Unfortunately, they are mostly correct.

Some in the media, being extremely altruistic, will knowingly and happily go along with such charades. In addition, the extreme altruism of some of the rest will cause them not to exercise their critical faculties. They will be so eager for any evidence that Israel is imposing hardship on the Palestinians that they will lap, up such stunts. It is as if the tent is really a building, and there is not alternative to artificial light within. In a sense, they will see what they want to see.

The Palestinians know this and intend to use this militarily. And the rest of the Arab world is in league with them, as noted by The Wall Street Journal (which also pointed to the account above). The Journal points to several stories that indicate that the Arab world is perfectly capable of caring for the Palestinians and that the swarming over the wall even suggests a solution for the conflict with the Palestinians: Resorption of these territories into neighboring Arab states.

But, notes the Journal:

This is of a piece with Arab dictators' attitude toward the Palestinians more generally, which is that it is best to keep them in "refugee camps" so that they may continue to serve as a tool to cudgel Israel--and to draw attention away from the Arab dictators' own misrule.

I think they're correct. All of this behavior is indeed "of a piece". It is a deliberate attempt to use the West's altruist moral code against it, by creating humanitarian crises, and either blaming the West for them or asking for its help to alleviate them, whichever best serves the goals of the moment. There is psychological warfare and then there is this use of the enemy's moral code as a weapon. Perhaps we should call it "humanitarian warfare".

Read the whole thing (Start by searching "Potemkin".)

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Dropped initial paragraph leading in with the Gaza Wall and made other editorial changes. As I had said, in part, "the existence of a wall between the Gaza Strip and Egypt was news" to me. Apparently, this shouldn't have been. Thanks (cough), Noumenal Self!

Pragmatism vs. Your Freedom and Time

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I seem to be taking issue with Glenn Reynolds a lot lately -- and linking to The Ayn Rand Lexicon quite a lot, as well....

What has me shaking my head over at Instapundit this morning is the following post:

READER TOM SARTIN WRITES:

Somehow, the following observation from Robert Heinlein seems quite apropos.

"If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong."

"If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires."

The more things change... [minor edits]

I'm not wild about it, but don't have huge problems with the idea of voting against specific measures when in doubt -- if your implicit premises are that (a) the government should be only in the business of protecting individual rights and that (b) most new measures proposed today will curtail that protection.

Regarding candidates, that bit of advice very quickly goes out the window. For example, I don't want socialized medicine or theocracy. Whom do I vote against in an Obama-Huckabee election? I see capitalism much more likely taking the blame for the inevitable disaster if Huckabee enacts socialized medicine than if Obama does.

So I vote for Obama, but I'm not really voting against socialized medicine because I can't (unless I also regard it as more likely to be blocked by Republicans in Congress under Obama). And, as I have mentioned before, I did not vote at all for President in 2000. So both "voting against" and voting at all are questionable rules of thumb.

It is really with the last paragraph I take issue. Again, as cracker-barrel wisdom, it has some surface plausibility since most political activists these days are waging a foolish and all-out (but often, well-meaning) war against freedom. But notice two things about the quote.

First, it supposedly requires an "enormous amount of time" to decide how to vote in an informed manner. Second, why must one necessarily seek advice on how not to vote from a "well-meaning fool". Why not solicit advice from some wise soul who has carefully considered the options available in a given election? This cynical quote makes it sound as if attempting to analyze politics by means of rational principles is a futile waste of time and, as such, beneath contempt.

While it is not necessarily easy to decide how to vote in today's elections, this situation is a result of cultural trends in our society at large and it is both abnormal for and dangerous to a free society. As I have argued before, the massive government involvement in our daily lives we see today -- a direct result of the dominance of altruism and pragmatism in the culture -- both over-complicates the decision process and reduces the importance of one's vote.

What is worse is that this needless complication functions much like the appeals to "science" by global warming hysterics in the sense that it distracts everyone from the only real political issue at hand, which is: "How can I vote in such a way as to best insure the protection of my individual rights?"

In other words, ordinary voters, already suspicious of principles due to the cultural penetrance of Pragmatism, are confronted by a mountain of minutiae each election, and advocates of increasingly loony and dangerous political crusades as examples of principled people. The temptation is well-nigh irresistible to throw one's hands up and vote in the cynical way prescribed by Heinlein, if at all.

This is too bad, for if there is one way to preserve freedom from "well-meaning fools", as well as to save time in evaluating mountains of data (often by deciding whether a given mountain is worth considering at all), it is by recourse to principles of political philosophy.

Heinlein has it half-right that figuring out how to vote requires an "enormous" amount of time. It does take time, it is true, to master the principles on which our nation was founded. However, once one does this, these principles greatly simplify how one approaches any subsequent election, even in today's context of massive government intrusion. Anyone who thinks that each election requires enormous amounts of study before one can vote intelligently does not understand the cognitive role of principles.

Ayn Rand very nicely sums up the time- and life-saving value of principles as follows:

A principle is "a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend." Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one's long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.

The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.

To make it more grotesque, that haggling is accompanied by an aura of hysterical self-righteousness, in the form of belligerent assertions that one must compromise with anybody on anything (except on the tenet that one must compromise) and by panicky appeals to "practicality."

But there is nothing as impractical as a so-called "practical" man. His view of practicality can best be illustrated as follows: if you want to drive from New York to Los Angeles, it is "impractical" and "idealistic" to consult a map and to select the best way to get there; you will get there much faster if you just start out driving at random, turning (or cutting) any corner, taking any road in any direction, following nothing but the mood and the weather of the moment.

The fact is, of course, that by this method you will never get there at all. But while most people do recognize this fact in regard to the course of a journey, they are not so perceptive in regard to the course of their life and of their country. ["The Anatomy of Compromise," Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 144, bold added]

There may indeed be a certain smug satisfaction one can feel for a moment after considering Heinlein's quote and sharing his contempt for a body politic riddled with "well-meaning fools". However, that satisfaction will quickly disappear when one considers that without principles of some kind, one cannot even tell who the fools are! Are those who would have the government ration fuel for the whole economy in the name of capping carbon dioxide emissions fools? Or are those who doubt whether global warming is happening? Or those who hold, as I do, that the government should not impose fuel rationing at all, regardless of what the science eventually says?

And as if that is not enough, consider that Americans have scorned politicians almost since the inception of the Republic. Heinlein's advice sounds like it could have come from straight from the mouth of Mark Twain or any other of a number of cynical literary figures who hated politics. Many of us have functioned on that level for generations. And yet, we are steadily losing our freedom with each election. Obviously, this approach isn't working.

So many of us are so busy feeling smug about leaving things up to well-meaning fools that we are suffering the consequences. I counsel that we take Heinlein's advice exactly one more time, and only just long enough to regard him as a well-meaning fool. I advise voting in the exact opposite manner as he: Learn about the principles on which freedom depends, vote in accordance with them and, just as crucially, help get these better ideas into the political mainstream.

-- CAV

Powell History Person of the Year for 2007, Part 4 (of 4)

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Brutal cold snap in Greenland

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

…a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.

Temperatures plunged to -25°C earlier this month, clogging the bay with ice and making shipping impossible for small crafts, according to Anthon Frederiksen, the mayor of the town of Ilulissat, where Disko Bay is located.

My point, as usual, is not to debate the facts of climate change, but to demonstrate the potential for a positive impact of a warmer climate for life on earth. A mayor in Greenland of all places, should be the first to welcome a warmer climate. Over 10 percent of the world’s land surface is permanently covered with ice, and much more is essentially lifeless due to seasonal ice. Imagine the possibilities if Greenland, an area slightly three times the size of Texas, and 81% ice-capped, was to actually become green.

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The Left-Wing “Conspiracy” of the Right

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

If one wanted an instance of how political power or the pursuit of it can, first, corrupt one’s epistemology, and then one’s moral judgment, consider this story from the British Daily Mail of January 17, “Government renames Islamic terrorism as ‘anti-Islamic activity’ to woo Muslims.”

“Terrorism by Muslim fanatics was yesterday re-named ‘anti-Islamic activity’ by Jacqui Smith.

“The Home Secretary said that rather than acting in the name of Islam they were behaving contrary to their faith.

“Her words were chosen carefully to reflect new Government strategy on the language used to describe fanatics….Security officials believe that directly linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory, and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion.”

A more thoroughly cowardly and covinous capitulation to the irrational would be hard to match. Change the terminology, or invert the identity of a thing, and, like magic, the thing changes into what one wishes it to be. (This is symptomatic of what Ayn Rand called the “primacy of consciousness," or the mind creating reality.)

Thus Islam, a barbaric political and theocratic creed whose fundamental nature requires complete domination of the individual and society by a theocratic state – and whose murderous record in Britain itself is ongoing, with its insular population of Muslims, its “no-go” areas in major British cities and towns, its home-grown, self-alienated Muslim youth ready to declare war on the country in which they were raised, the seditious, inflammatory preaching imams and the plethora of Muslim councils seeking to censor any criticism of Islam – becomes what its propagandists wish non-Muslims to perceive it to be, a “peaceful” religion ready and willing to coexist with other faiths.

Blanked out by government officials who do not wish to rock a leaky boat of their own making is the sorry record of Islam wherever it has taken root in the West, with its vociferous anti-reason tirades and threats, and its totalitarian nature and ends.

The “radicals” – also deemed “fanatics” or “militants” by the government and by Western apologists who do not wish to “offend” rank-and-file Muslim manqués – are what they are. Contrary to the notion that Islam is at root a “peaceful” religion, Muslims who practice their creed according to its fundamental dictates are the most consistent adherents to the creed. They are not acting “contrary” to the nature and content of Islam; they are implementing its nature and content. They cannot be “wooed” or persuaded to “integrate” into a secular society their creed and clerics tell them must be conquered and converted into a purely Islamic society, even at the cost of their own lives and the lives of others.

The anti-concept of “anti-Islamic activity” is as irrational a concept as would have been, for example, “anti-Nazi activity” or “anti-communist activity” to describe the actions of the Gestapo or KGB, serving to segregate so-called “moderate” Nazis or communists from the “fanatics” and “militants.”

What can match that kind of perilous evasion is the wish of the Democratic Party of the U.S. to discard the term “liberal” and replace it with the term “progressive.” It is a reverse form of epistemological corruption its advocates wish to foist on the American electorate. “The liberal brand is tarnished,” said Rob Glaser, a member of the Democracy Alliance, an organization of wealthy Americans that funds and provides ideological direction to a multitude of other organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, in a January 16 article in Human Events, “Billionaires for Big Government.”

Why is the label “liberal” tarnished? Why is the label so disreputable? It is chiefly because of the failure of astronomically costly social legislation that has never fulfilled and cannot deliver on its promise of “social justice” and a prosperous socialist society. The liberals wish to change the name but keep the collectivist philosophy that identifies it. It is as ludicrous a ploy as dubbing a gangster an “entrepreneur,” or a Nazi storm trooper a “militant social worker.” In this instance, it is statists advocating “anti-statist activity” by… statists.

What they are counting on is Americans not discovering that “progressivism” is just socialism by another name. They may get away with it. After all, who is there in politics, the news media, or the intellectual establishment to tell them?

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton once complained of a Republican “right-wing conspiracy” dedicated to foiling her political ambitions and to perpetuating a “conservative” political hegemony that did not fit her vision of a completely regimented country. (She recently charged that bout of paranoia to her “inexperience.”) Similarly, conservatives accuse most Democrats with being party to a “left-wing conspiracy” to transform the U.S. into a socialist country. Although the conservative charge is more credible – the U.S. is burdened with a variety of socialist and semi-socialist programs ranging from health care to employment to education – there is something flawed in the notion of a conspiracy.

In truth, though the Republican Party has been characterized as “conservative” (of what, I have never been able to determine) and nominally pro-capitalist, pro-freedom, pro-limited government, and so on, as I have remarked in another commentary, the Republicans have more or less partnered with the Democrats to expand government into virtually every realm of American life. It is chiefly because, ideologically, the party shares the fundamental altruist premises held by the “progressives”: to “manage” the country for the “greater good,” even if it means violating individual rights and rendering the Bill of Rights meaningless in practice, the “greater good” being any collectivist program, and it not meaning the preservation of individual rights, private property, and unregulated liberty, all of which would truly be a “greater” good.

Historically, it is the Republican Party that gave impetus to the Democrats and enabled them to acquire so much political influence and to advocate “social justice” legislation as the federal government’s moral imperative. To trace the ideological roots of progressivism one would need to go back to at least the Populism of the 19th century; its philosophical roots can be traced back even further, to Immanuel Kant, and ultimately, to Plato. But the watershed event in American history that can illustrate the connections between conservatism and progressivism is the 1912 Republican national convention.

William McKinley, a Republican who defeated the “Great Commoner” and Democratic candidate for the presidency, William Jennings Bryan, first in 1896 and again in 1900, advocated high import tariffs, increased customs duties, and greater regulation and control of business trusts. His vice president in 1901, Republican Theodore Roosevelt, assumed the office of president when McKinley was assassinated in September 1901.

Roosevelt, in a zealous enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, beginning with J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, initiated over forty actions against “big business” during his first administration, including against Swift and Company, Standard Oil, and the American Tobacco Company. These were prosecuted by Attorney General Philander Chase Knox (who “flirted” with advocacy of a federal income tax, and, who, as Secretary of State under Taft in 1912, declared it established after some states ratified the Amendment).

In 1904 Roosevelt ran for election and defeated the Democratic candidate Alton Parker, who campaigned for the “rights” of “big labor.” During his second administration he oversaw the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration, and expanded the regulation of railroads, signed “consumer protection” legislation, and sired the conservation movement for forests, parks, oil and coal lands.

Declining to run for reelection in 1908, he promoted and was succeeded in office by his Secretary of War, Republican William Howard Taft, who was no less zealous in his prosecution and persecution of “big business,” instituting over eighty antitrust suits, including one against U.S. Steel. (Ironically, trust-busting Philander Knox’s early career was as corporate lawyer for Carnegie Steel, which was bought by J.P. Morgan and absorbed into the U.S. Steel Company). Taft also defeated the Democratic candidate, Bryan. Taft empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission (created in 1887), expanded the civil service, and endorsed the direct election of senators (the 17th Amendment), a move that suborned the Constitution and opened the Senate to influence by populist or democratic movements, when it was intended to be a check on House legislation (as the House of Lords once served as a check on the House of Commons in Britain).

Most importantly, he supported a federal income tax on limited liability corporations as a solution to the tariff question. High tariffs were imposed on imported food and manufactures and were intended to protect the competitiveness of American businesses and farmers. “Social justice” reformers considered this an inequitable government policy that favored “rich” stockholders at the purported expense of less-wealthy Americans, who were “forced” to pay higher prices. Taft agreed with this thinking, and campaigned for the removal of the apportionment requirement on income taxes from property such as dividends, interest and rents. A personal income tax was enacted in 1862 and lasted until 1872, and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1894 because it was interpreted as a direct tax that ignored “apportioned” population representation in Congress.

Taft and Roosevelt, both Republicans, wished to see that requirement removed and a tax imposed on such income regardless of Congressional representation. In 1909, the proposed amendment to remove the apportionment requirement was passed overwhelmingly by the Senate and House, and sent to the states for ratification.

In 1912, Roosevelt opposed Taft’s nomination for the presidency because of Taft’s campaign for the independence of the judiciary. The Republicans nominated Taft. Roosevelt defected from the party and founded the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party. As a result, the Republican vote was split between “conservatives” and “progressives.”

Consequently, Taft lost the election to Democrat Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt the spoiler, and Taft, the losing incumbent, did not really “lose” in terms of their political philosophy. Shortly after Wilson took office, the 16th Amendment that legalized the income tax was declared ratified by Philander Knox, outgoing Secretary of State, which cabinet position was taken by Bible-thumping William Jennings Bryan.

So, Woodrow Wilson, the ultra-progressive, cannot be blamed for the income tax, though he certainly endorsed it. We can credit him, however, with the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system, the virtual nationalization of the railroads, laws governing working hours and conditions, the Federal Trade Commission, and a host of other socialist legislation, not to mention instituting ninety-two antitrust suits, and for endorsing the 18th Amendment, which gave the country Prohibition, the incubator of organized crime (aided and abetted by legislation that empowered the FDA to “police” the manufacture and consumption of food and drugs).

The questions to ask are: If Roosevelt had not broken with Taft, and if Taft had won the 1912 election, would it have mattered much to the general trend in American politics in the direction of government controls over the economy and personal lives? The same can be asked had Roosevelt out-maneuvered Taft within the Republican Party and won the election. Would the general drift towards the “socialization” of the U.S. have been arrested, but not stopped, or would it have been accelerated, as it was during Wilson’s administration? One cannot deny that Taft and Roosevelt were ardent and active statists. Theirs was an incremental move in the direction of total government control of the economy, while Wilson’s was a wholesale move.

No one in politics or the intellectual establishment has seriously questioned the trend or the direction or the fundamental premises of statism, not even succeeding presidents.

The questions are moot, but not irrelevant. From the advantage of hindsight, the Republicans would probably have won the 1912 election. Thanks to Roosevelt’s “spoiler” tactics, Wilson garnered the most votes in the Electoral College, which is based on Congressional apportionment, the very system condemned by Taft and Roosevelt in tax policy. He won by default as a consequence of policy conflicts within the Republican Party.

The conclusion to draw is: There were no conspiracies to vanquish the country, neither by the right or the left. From the end of the eighteenth century, shortly after ratification of the Constitution, the collectivists and “progressives” have steadily gained ground only by default of the defenders of individual rights and private property not grasping the value of their causes and defending them on proper grounds. For example, the Supreme Court declared an income tax unconstitutional on the specious grounds of apportionment, and not on the fact that it violated the right of a person to keep his property.

To illustrate how endemic is the idea even in academia that the “progressives” advanced in politics by virtue of their “superior” moral stance (as opposed to the greedy, selfish, avaricious, “immoral” stance of big business and private interests), Professor David C. Hanson, of Virginia Western Community College, wrote that the progressives “saw government not as only a protector of private property and individual freedom, but as an agent for social justice….Many progressives, like Theodore Roosevelt, possessed a fundamental conservatism, fearing that the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of private interests threatened the morality and stability of the nation. Roosevelt’s [and Taft’s, and Wilson’s] aim was not to restructure American capitalism but to protect it from its own excesses through prudent government intervention….”

Has it ever occurred to Hanson, or to anyone else, that government cannot both protect private property and individual freedom and also act as an “agent for social justice,” in the course of which it must violate private property and individual freedom? (And we are now hearing the Democrats claim to be active “change agents.”) Has any establishment academic, historian, commentator or pundit asked: Why would the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians be a less fearsome threat to the morality and stability of the nation than in the hands of the producers?

Someone might ask: Would the nation have fared any better if such power and wealth were retained without apology by the “barons” of capitalism? Possibly – had those barons a rational moral philosophy that would have completed the American Revolution. To my knowledge, they did not bother to seek one, either. To a man, they were infected by the viral moral code of altruism, which purportedly sanctioned their actions. For example, and without deprecating his achievements in productivity and in the accumulation of wealth, Andrew Carnegie explicitly subscribed to the policy of “giving back” to society. He was the original and the most prominent advocate of that policy, which has been emulated ad nauseam ever since by successful businessmen (undoubtedly motivated in his time and in his successors’ as a tax dodge; recall the tax and tariff issues of the 19th century).

Successful businessmen today are far more corrupted by that moral code – for example, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates – most of whom unabashedly advocate the dissolution of private fortunes and the redistribution of everyone’s wealth and who ally themselves with the worst elements of collectivism and statism in especially the Democratic Party.

On the subject of the impotency of evil, Ayn Rand wrote in 1966, in her essay, “Altruism as Appeasement,” that

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. The ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.”

Her hero John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, told a collapsed nation that

“When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by the scoundrels – and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.”

A better description of the current presidential contest cannot be written.

Evil, by its anti-life nature, is impotent. To credit the collectivists, the statists, and the nascent totalitarians in this country with a “conspiracy” is to concede that evil is powerful and can out-maneuver and out-think the advocates of reason. This is the principle crime of the Republicans and the conservatives, when one remembers that they have disagreed with the progressives and “liberals” only on the means to reach the same end. Is there any fundamental difference between the policies of George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, except in the speed with which they wish them implemented? Have the Republicans acted contrary to their political principles, just as Islamic terrorists are claimed to act contrary to their religious beliefs?

If there ever was a left-wing “conspiracy,” it was one of opportunism to exploit the weaknesses, oversights, loopholes, but most importantly the moral cowardice of the conservatives in politics. And the notion of a right-wing “conspiracy” is too fantastic: men who claim to stand for something do not conspire or plot to lose their causes, which is what the conservatives have done for the last century or so.

So, in the campaign for the presidency that is famously noted for the absence of any substantive issues, all the Democrats can think of doing is to relabel their platform from “liberal” to “progressive” in an attempt to deceive the electorate with a lot of rhetoric about the need for “change.” And all the Republicans can think of doing is to split their appeal to the electorate between a semi-secular and a semi-religionist image, much as they did in 1912 over the judiciary.

And we know what happened as a consequence of that conflict. If Americans see any “change” come November of this year, it will be a promise of the worst kind of change: a few steps closer to totalitarianism.

Will Americans fall for the “anti-big-government” line of the advocates of bigger government? The November election will tell. The best justice Americans can give the party that wins is to not give it a sizable mandate to further destroy the country.

Three Bourne Movies?!?

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Over the past week, Paul and I watched all three Bourne movies: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum.

In a sense, they weren't terrible. The plots were basically coherent. The characters were mostly consistent. Yet the movies added up to nothing but a series of totally forgettable zeros.

The action, particularly the all-too-regular chase scenes served no purpose, except to inadvertently suggest (1) that Jason Bourne wasn't terribly good at the stealth for which he was supposedly trained to perfection and (2) that for all his angst about his prior killings, Jason didn't mind killing and maiming commuters and pedestrians.

The characters were just puppets acting out their parts, without rhyme or reason beyond "that's just who he/she is." Heck, they weren't even interesting puppets. Jason Bourne is driven to uncover his past, whatever the cost, but without any compelling reason for doing so except some nightmares. His years-long love affair with Marie was absurd: two people meet accidentally then fall deeply in love for no reason whatsoever.

None of the movies had any theme or purpose or point whatsoever. They were just playing out the plot for its own sake. Basically, the movies consisted of very boring naturalism marginally spiced up by one chase scene after another.

Paul and I both regarded them as a waste of time. Honestly, I think I'd rather endure the active pain of watching The Last Samurai again than endure the numb boredom of watching the Bourne movies again!

BEARISH US ECONOMY

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Is the US economy going downhill? Here is an excerpt from the article, Desperate measures:

The deepening gloom about the economy may well warrant such an aggressive response. But the timing is puzzling. There is more than a whiff of panic about slashing rates little more than week before a scheduled meeting. The Fed statement issued with the decision rationalises the cut as a response to “downside risks to growth”—the phrase is repeated twice in six short paragraphs—and cites recent gloomy data on housing and jobs. Yet the economic news has not grown any worse in the past few days and, given the time needed before monetary policy affects spending, the added urgency seems odd. (The Economist 01/22/08.)

Recommending reading:

Are We the Greatest Threat to Global Prosperity? by Jonathan Hoenig of SmartMoney.
The "R" Word and Franchising by Joel Libava of the Franchise King Blog.

Have you read Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence?



Related: My post, MARKETS DON'T FAIL!

A Few Smoldering Embers of Liberty

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

My letter about Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's renewed effort to ban smoking on private property was published in the Newport News Daily Press January 17. Except for the term "imbecilic" and the Patrick Henry reference, which was an inexplicable but regrettable excision by the letters editor, the letter was run without further editing:



Editor:

The imbecilic grin of Governor Timothy Kaine, as he announced on January 7 his intention to endorse legislation that would arbitrarily ban smoking in all Virginia bars and restaurants, belies a malice for more than smokers and smoking. He represents a Leviathan that recognizes its own passion, which in this instance is currying favor with the vague forces of “social change,” most of which are anti-freedom and anti-reason. In the state in which Patrick Henry raised high the torch of liberty in 1765 and 1775, he wishes to extinguish the few smoldering coals of liberty left in the birthplace of American freedom. He seeks stale conformity and blind obedience. He wishes to bring Virginia into line with the dousing of freedom in Britain, France, Canada and other countries that have banned smoking in “public” (read private) places.



You see, it isn’t just about smokers vs. nonsmokers. The entire anti-smoking campaign is merely symptomatic of a more serious, national political phenomenon, which is collectivism. And one of the premises of collectivism is that we are all wards of the Leviathan state.

Sincerely,

Edward Cline

The Journey of a Successful Career

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I like looking for stories of admirable people. People to admire because their stories illustrate some interesting aspect of life or illuminate an important principle. This post's topic is the idea of purpose, and what it means over the course of a life, and the admirable person is: Sandra Bullock.

Forbe's July 2007 (so shoot me, it's been in my file for a while) article "Miss Practicality" is an illustration in how a career changes over time. Miss Bullock, cute and likable girl-next-door on screen, has parlayed that success into her own movie production company, which then branched into television as well as active real estate work, and even a restaurant chain. How do those all fit together? It's her management skills.

In films Bullock delivers an appealing and cute likability, but in showbiz she can be tough and fiendishly focused on micromanaging the minutest details of whatever occupies her.

By the time she had parlayed Speed into roles in a string of well-received films, she had developed a penchant for pitching in to scout locations, court potential investors and give the studio her opinions on which overseas markets might offer the best returns.

By combining her self knowledge of what she liked to and could do well, with opportunities that came her way, she's found reward doing many different things. In the process, she's increased her leverage and power so that she's able to direct her next steps as opposed to letting the market dictate her work.

"Producing gives business-minded actors the ability to create vehicles that are perfectly matched to their talent and their sensibilities. If you're simply waiting for the phone to ring, you're at the mercy of the marketplace."

This is a great illustration of how purpose develops within us over time. Few of us end our careers where we originally envisioned they'd go, and rarely in the exact type of job we envisioned. For most that is a good thing as it represents maturing desires, better knowledge about what satisfies us, and broader offerings in terms of suitable jobs. I for one, thought I'd be designing chemical plants; certainly never thought I'd go to business school, work in marketing, or aspire to run my own business unit some day. But that is the adventure that life takes us on, if we are willing to understand ourselves, and our inspirations, and look for unique and sometimes unthought of opportunities to practice those traits.

Fix the Damn Dollar

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Justice does exist in the world, whether people choose to practice it or not. The men of ability are being avenged. The avenger is reality. Its weapon is slow, silent, invisible, and men perceive it only by its consequences—by the gutted ruins and the moans of agony it leaves in its wake. The name of the weapon is: inflation. - Ayn Rand, Egalitarianism and Inflation

And the Republican administration is supposed to be a friend of capitalism? Steve Forbes has another great editorial, "Bush's Big Boo Boo" from this week's edition of Forbes. Boo boo is putting it mildly. The looming recession is a complete result of mishandled monetary policy, and another glaring reason why the free market should be running monetary policy, not the central bank.

In a thesis that Forbes has been pounding for over two years, he asserts that the Fed is creating inflationary pressure by injecting more credit into the economy. Voila, $100/barrel oil! Excess liquidity means speculation; voila, sub-prime housing market. Devalued assets means fire sales for foreign investors; voila foreign bank bail-outs in return for equity stakes. His best indicator for this phenomena the last few years? Gold. It's price has shot up more than two fold in the last two years. There is nothing else to explain this except inflation, pure and simple.

With it, oil has doubled from $50 to $100/barrel reeking havoc with more than just gasoline. My industry, the petrochemical industry, is heavily dependant on oil as a major feedstock, and this industry feeds all the major industries, plastics, construction, personal care, etc. Rising feedstock costs disrupt operations and throw supply demand balances out of whack causing diversion of time and effort simply to keep up pricing with costs.

Temporary stimulus packages such as the President is proposing will not do any good. There is only one solution and that is to slowly mop up the excess liquidity in the market and fix the currency. This is not a quick fix, but it is the only one.

If I had to choose at this point, I think a competent enemy is sometimes not as bad as an incompetent "friend" of capitalism. At least I watch the enemy closer and don't let him play with the really dangerous toys.

"Indeed" Indeed.

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Glenn Reynolds expresses his hearty agreement with a William Kristol editiorial that attacks conservative (and presumably all non-leftist) commentators for their justifiable disillusionment with this year's Republican field as follows:

INDEED: "You fight an election with the politicians you have."

Aside from its appropriateness to the holiday, I find the following excerpt from "Talk about Political Party" written in 1842 by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child to be a good launching point for a reply:

A.But you advise people not to vote for pro-slavery candidates, and not to join the liberty party; if this isn't non-resistance in politics, I don't know what is.

B. The difficulty in your mind arises, I think, from want of faith in the efficiency of moral influence. You cannot see that you act on politics at all, unless you join the caucus, and assist in electioneering for certain individuals; whereas you may, in point of fact, refuse co-operation, and thereby exert a tenfold influence on the destiny of parties. In Massachusetts, for instance, before the formation of a distinct abolition political party, both parties were afraid of the abolitionists; both wanted their votes; and therefore members of both parties in the legislature were disposed to grant their requests. All, who take note of such things, can remember how the legislature seemed to be abolitionized, as it were, by miracle. "The anti-slavery folks are coming strong this session," said a member to a leading democrat; "they want a hearing on five or six subjects at least." "Give 'em all they ask?" replied the leader; "we can't afford to offend them." When a similar remark was made to a whig leader, the same session, his answer was, "Concede everything; it wont do to throw them into the arms of the democrats." Now [that] there is a third party in Massachusetts, the two great parties have much less motive to please the abolitionists. Last year, the legislature of that State seemed to have gone back on anti-slavery, as fast as it once went forward. In Vermont, the system of refusing co-operation produced the effect of inducing both whigs and democrats to put up an abolition candidate, in order to secure the abolition votes; neither party was willing to give its opponent the advantage that might be gained by pleasing this troublesome class. Had we never turned aside from this plan, I believe the political influence of anti-slavery would have been an hundred fold greater than it now is. [Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader, edited by C. Bradley Thompson, pp. 99-100, bold added]

Child goes on to elaborate more on how the formation of an anti-slavery political party actually hindered the cause of the abolitionists and how it did so, stating at one point that, "Moral influence dies under party action," and noting that on top of moral principles being vitiated by political maneuvering within a party, the party itself ends up depriving its cause of allies.

[B]y what superior magic does the "liberty party" expect to keep its allies more closely rallied around her, in time of tempting emergency?Will the two-thirds abolitionized democrat, who has joined them to defeat a whig, stand by them when his vote is greatly needed to secure a triumph to his own party, at the polls? Will the half-abolitionized whig, who has been drawn into their ranks, pass safe though the fire of a similar temptaion? I trow not. (102)

How does this bear on the problem of a Republican field which is wholly unacceptable to the advocate of individual rights? In two ways.

First, those who favor individual rights and are able to see that the Libertarian party has already lost whatever better influence it might have had -- and so ally themselves with the Republicans -- are doing worse than making the mistake of joining the Libertarian Party. They are allowing themselves to see their values compromised by antithetical religious values when they are not being completely taken for granted and ignored by the Republican Party. And the Democrats write them off altogether. (The same diminution of political influence, incidentally, happens to blacks, because they bloc-vote for Democrats.)

Second, note that Child is speaking of advancing her goal, the abolition of slavery, precisely through "the politicians she has", as Kristol might put it. The genius of founding a nation of "laws, and not men" lies in the truth that the more constrained by the law our public officials are, the less able they are to victimize the people through their moral flaws and personal weaknesses. Similarly, the genius of not pledging one's support to a politician whose goals are at major odds with your own by joining his party, is that it makes possible a politics of "principles, and not men", as it were, when the "men" aren't principled. This is because most politicians by nature value power, which they know they need your vote to obtain. The moment you pledge your support to the man, you have lost whatever measure of power you once had to cause him to act to further goals in accordance with your principles.

Where would we be today if, instead of principled abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child, we had the likes of William Kristol telling everyone to pick a party, accept a candidate, and shut up their nit-picking about slavery already?

-- CAV

How many lives is a billionth of a degree worth?

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

According to GM, the new federal fuel requirements will costs four to ten thousand dollars per car, mostly to use more expensive weight savings materials. Some environmentalists might dispute the numbers or cheer anything that makes cars more expensive to own, in the hope that fewer people are able to afford driving. However, that will not be the only impact.

If the amount the average person is willing to pay for a car does not change, people will respond to higher prices in two ways: they will keep their existing cars longer and buy cheaper cars. Keeping existing cars will delay the introduction of more efficient and luxurious cars in the future. Switching to cheaper, more efficient cars will increase efficiency at the cost of both luxury and safety. More families will be forced to squeeze into Honda Civics rather than Toyota Camry’s. Money that would have been spent on safety improvements will be diverted to increasing efficient. Smaller cars are not inherently unsafe, but they are inherently less safe, and thus the cost of the new fuel efficiency standards can be measured in both dollars and human lives. The cost in human lives of traffic accidents is well known - about 42 thousand lives each year in the U.S. How many people will the warming from the unspent gasoline kill? Actually, the oil not burned in cars will even not be “saved.” More efficient cars will simply make that oil available for other uses, which may or may not be more efficient.

Just how many lives is a billionth of a degree of global warming worth? Can we look forward to a new “no blood for freezing winters” campaign?

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Poor Countries Don't Need Climate Change Welfare, They Need Capitalism

By Keith Lockitch from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Poor Countries Don’t Need Climate Change Welfare,
They Need Capitalism
January 21, 2008

The Tyranny of Confusion

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A trend I have commented on here recently is the misuse of scientific arguments by proponents of certain political movements to distract people from the political issues at hand. I have considered this point mostly in relation to global warming hysteria, but just yesterday, a couple of animal rights activists reminded me, by accident, of the constant hectoring from their camp to the effect that a vegetarian diet is better than the normal, omnivorous human diet. Even if such claims were true, they would have no bearing on the question of whether animals have rights, which belongs to political philosophy, or whether it we really ought to consume meat, which is a moral question.

My commentary on this trend so far has been mainly in the vein of the following advice from Ayn Rand's arch-villain, Ellsworth Toohey: "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes." In the case of global warming hysteria, those who push for such measures as government fuel rationing (so-called carbon emission caps), can, for example, more easily avoid questions about the propriety of doing so by involving their opponents in an endless debate over whether scientific evidence supports man-made carbon dioxide as a mechanism for global warming.

So far, so good. But might we be premature to stop our inquiry at what global warming hysterics or animal "rights" advocates hope to gain with a blizzard of scientific (or scientific-sounding) arguments? A fascinating article I encountered in Spiked! (via Arts and Letters Daily) this morning suggests that the answer to that question is "Yes."

Frank Furedi writes:

[W]hatever misgivings people have about science, its authority is unrivalled in the current period. The formidable influence of scientific authority can be seen in the way that environmentalists now rely on science to back up their arguments. Not long ago, in the 1970s and 80s, leading environmentalists insisted that science was undemocratic, that it was responsible for many of the problems facing the planet. Now, in public at least, their hostility towards science has given way to their embrace and endorsement of science. Today, the environmental lobby depends on the legitimation provided by scientific evidence and expertise. In their public performances, environmentalists frequently use the science in a dogmatic fashion. "The scientists have spoken", says one British-based campaign group, in an updated version of the religious phrase: "This is the Word of the Lord." "This is what the science says we must do", many greens claim, before adding that the debate about global warming is "finished". This week, David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, caused a stink by criticising extreme green "Luddites" who are "hurting" the environmentalist cause. Yet when science is politicised, as it has been under the likes of King, who once claimed that "the science shows" that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism, then it can quite quickly and inexorably be converted into dogma, superstition and prejudice. It is the broader politicisation of science that nurtures today's dogmatic green outlook.

Today, religion and political ideologies no longer inspire significant sections of the public. Politicians find it difficult to justify their work and outlook in the vocabulary of morality. In the Anglo-American world, officials now promote policies on the grounds that they are "evidence based" rather than because they are "right" or "good". In policymaking circles, the language of "right" and "wrong" has been displaced by the phrase: "The research shows..." [Americanized punctuation, removed footnotes, added emphasis]

Furedi is correct to note that science is being used to lend authority to certain moral and political beliefs. Our society, running on the fumes of the Enlightenment, still no longer takes religion seriously enough for it to serve as an inspiration or even a justification for radical policy changes. There remains a great respect for science as a means of reaching objective truth through the exercise of reason. And yet, thanks to the influence of modern philosophy, there are precious few other areas of human endeavor for which most people regard certainty as attainable. So science, as a sort of rump of the Enlightenment, ends up being used to bless off a conclusion as rational!

This is a very good observation, and Furedi is mostly correct in his further argument that the moralization and politicization of science endangers its objectivity. Two reservations I have about the piece are (1) that Furedi's initial example is far from a clear-cut case of using science as a moral authority and (2) that the term ("skeptical") he uses to describe the fearless inquiry of science implies that even science itself cannot yield certainty whether he intends it or not.

In so far as what bearing Furedi's observation has on taking Toohey's advice, it is this. Global warming snow job artists and their ilk are dishonest to be sure, but it is astounding how easily they are getting away with not arguing for why we should enact their political agenda. There must be a cause for this, and this cause must be addressed before political debate will become rational and constructive again.

That cause, as I have suggested, is that there is rampant, massive confusion about the fundamental philosophical ideas on which our advanced civilization depends. Neither science nor those who would misuse it have the power to establish tyranny, but the deep confusion sown by evil philosophers such as Immanuel Kant can. The purpose of his folly was to make many others possible.

-- CAV

Islamist Entanglement Course Update

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Eric Daniels on Capitalism

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Mark your calendars, New Yorkers:

The Morality of Capitalism

Who: Dr. Eric Daniels, speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute and visiting scholar at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism

What: A talk making the case that capitalism is the only moral social system. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Kimmel Center, Room 914, New York University, 60 Washington Square South, NY, NY 10012 Maps and directions: http://www.nyu.edu/about/virtual.html.

When: Wednesday, January 23, 2008, at 7 pm

Registration: Attendees must RSVP to nyu@objectivistclubs.org

Description: Despite the enormous success of American capitalism at producing material abundance and political freedom, critics continue their assault on the system, calling it immoral. In this lecture, Dr. Eric Daniels makes the case that capitalism is the only moral social system. He also examines the conventional defense of capitalism, which relies on the practical, economic argument, and illustrates why only a defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism can succeed.

Bio: Dr. Eric Daniels is a visiting scholar at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He taught for five years at Duke University, in the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace, and at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his doctorate in American history. He has lectured internationally on the history of American ethics, American business and legal history, and the American Enlightenment. Daniels's publications include a chapter in Abolition of Antitrust and five entries in the Oxford Companion to United States History.

Eric Daniels is one of my favorite speakers. So go, if you can!

Clouds on the Horizon

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What can we make of the South Carolina primary? As of this writing, McCain came in first with 33%, Huckabee second with 30%, Thompson squeaked into third with 16% and Romney got 15%.

The Republican nomination is still up in the air. It's a strange situation for the GOP, one that we have not seen before. After Florida we'll have a better idea of who will win, especially with regard to Giuliani. Super Tuesday looks to be moment we'll find out the leader -- unless, of course various candidates win states and the delegate counts are close.

Thompson looks dead. Why? Quick, tell me what he stands for. Unlike the other candidates, Thompson has never defined himself clearly so that one or two issues stand out in the voters' mind when they think of him. Maybe it's the old problem of having been a Senator instead of an executive. Maybe he is lost in the crowd of candidates.

Democrats have to be loving the Republican confusion. The CW seems to be that the longer it takes for a party to select a candidate, the weaker that nominee is.

I think the most significant result of the South Carolina vote is that 30% voted for Mike Huckabee, a welfare state theocrat. 30% of South Carolina's voters are already what Leonard Peikoff fears the Republican Party is becoming. Huckabee wants to rewrite the Constitution so that it conforms to "God's standards."

That 30% of South Carolina Republicans -- voters who value religion above economic freedom (or any kind of freedom), or who might even want bigger government with Huckabee -- those voters are a dangerous faction, if not the most dangerous. It is ominous.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY 2008

By Thomas Bowden from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY 2008
January 18, 2008

Irvine, CA--“Martin Luther King Jr. Day offers Americans an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to eradicating racism in all its forms,” said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Ayn Rand once wrote: “Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.” The essence of racism, she explained, is “the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced by his internal body chemistry, which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”

“Achievement of a truly color-blind society will require not only that private individuals reject racism but that government policies and programs cease to favor some citizens over others on the basis of skin color,” Bowden said. “The solution to racism in government does not lie in further race-conscious, affirmative action programs that generate de facto quotas, nor in multicultural education that locates personal identity in one’s ethnic group. Because such policies are themselves racist, they are part of the problem.

“A model of good government policy is President Truman’s executive order ending segregation in America’s military services. Issued 60 years ago, Executive Order 9981 declared ‘that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.’

“This official policy exemplifies a government’s proper attitude toward its citizens,” Bowden said. “Every law-abiding adult has an equal right to serve in government, provided he or she can satisfy the position’s objective requirements. In setting standards, government agencies must be forbidden by law from making irrational distinctions among citizens, as by favoring some soldiers over others on the irrelevant basis of skin color.

“In a famous speech, Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently envisioned a world without racism: ‘I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Americans should be proud of their nation’s historical achievements in ending slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregated schools, and many other forms of institutionalized racism. On this holiday, we should embrace the challenge contained in King’s eloquent remarks and recommit ourselves to the task of fully eradicating racism from this nation’s public policies.”

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NAME OF THE ROSE

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yesterday I went to Jonsered to meet a friend. We took a walk and then paid a visit to the home of the Franciscan Friars. We talked about the situation in the Middle East. I had brought Black & White World I & II as reading material. One of the brothers had read Atlas Shrugged and I gave him a copy of a pamphlet with Ayn Rand's essays on man's rights and the nature of government from the Virtue of Selfishness.

I asked about Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and if they have seen the movie, The Name of the Rose.

It becomes clear that the only remaining copy of Aristotle's Second Book of Poetics is somehow related to the deaths. William deduces, thanks to a scrap of parchment with hastily written notes, that all of those who died under mysterious circumstances had read the book. His investigations are curtailed by the arrival of Bernardo Gui of the Inquisition, summoned for the conference and keen to investigate the deaths. The two men clashed in the past and the zealous inquisitor has no time for theories outside his own: that The Devil is responsible – and torture will reveal the truth. (Wikipedia The Name of the Rose on Answers.com. Wikipedia Copyright © 2007 by Wikipedia. Published by Wikipedia.)

The International Physician Brain Drain

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

For some reason, far more physicians are choosing to come to the US from Canada, Australia, and the UK than the other way around:



From "The Metrics of the Physician Brain Drain", New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 353:1810-1818, Number 17, October 27, 2005. (The PDF version is here.)

The article does not state any conclusions about the factors that give rise to this result. Of course, my own guess is that the medical practice is relatively more free (i.e., less socialized) in the US than in those other three countries, thus making it a more desirable place for doctors to work and live.

Huckabee the Theocrat

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In his October 2006 his statement on the election, Leonard Peikoff urged voting for Democrats rather than Republicans based on an analysis of their respective driving philosophies. He wrote,

In essence, the Democrats stand for socialism, or at least some ambling steps in its direction; the Republicans stand for religion, particularly evangelical Christianity, and are taking ambitious strides to give it political power.

Socialism--a fad of the last few centuries--has had its day; it has been almost universally rejected for decades. Leftists are no longer the passionate collectivists of the 30s, but usually avowed anti-ideologists, who bewail the futility of all systems. Religion, by contrast--the destroyer of man since time immemorial--is not fading; on the contrary, it is now the only philosophic movement rapidly and righteously rising to take over the government. Given the choice between a rotten, enfeebled, despairing killer, and a rotten, ever stronger, and ambitious killer, it is immoral to vote for the latter, and equally immoral to refrain from voting at all because "both are bad."

He concluded his statement by saying that, "If you hate the Left so much that you feel more comfortable with the Right, you are unwittingly helping to push the U.S. toward disaster, i.e., theocracy, not in 50 years, but, frighteningly, much sooner."

In response, many people denied -- even scoffed at -- the possibility of theocracy in America.

Yet less than a year and half later, Mike Huckabee -- a devout fundamentalist Christian who explicitly promises to make socialist policy based on fundamentalist Christian faith that drives his decisions -- is a serious contender for the Republican nomination for president. As if that's not telling enough, in a prepared speech in Michigan, he said:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the Living God. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

Here's the video:



Even if Mike Huckabee doesn't win the Republican nomination, more explicit calls to entwine government with Christianity should be expected in 2012.

My point? In less than two years, the natural course of politics in America has proven Dr. Peikoff right about the prospects of theocracy in America, "not in 50 years, but, frighteningly, much sooner." Frankly, I wish the definitive proof offered by Huckabee's candidacy had trickled in rather more slowly.

(As for the much-asked question, "But shouldn't we vote for the better Republicans?", you can find Dr. Peikoff's reply to that and more in his fifth podcast, starting at 2:50.)

Global Warming Protest

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This is what a global warming protest looks like:

While ironic, this image does not prove anything. Except perhaps, that a weather few degrees below average can have a much more dramatic impact on human life than a few degrees above average.

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California wants to control your thermostat

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The 2008 proposed building standards issued by the California Energy Commission include a requirement that new air-conditioners have a radio-controlled thermostat that cannot be overridden by the owner. This allows the state to override your settings during undefined “emergency events.” The explicit goal of this “feature” is to prevent blackouts by preventing people from lowering their thermostat’s temperature during heat waves.

Some thoughts:

• The cause of environmentalism is one of the excuses being used to establish an increasingly totalitarian government in California and elsewhere.
• The public perception of “global warming” is that of a permanent state of imminent catastrophe, which, like the threat of terrorism, is likely to be used to justify a permanent state of “emergency.”
• The need for nanny-state thermometers is entirely a government creation. Environmental regulations have made it essentially illegal to build a new power plant in California for the last thirty years, and price controls have made it impossible for utilities to respond to changes in supply and demand.
• Shortages are entirely a creation of the interventionist state. Imagine Dell running ad campaigns asking the public to “stop buying so many computers!” or Starbucks asking customers to “please reduce your caffeine intake!”
• This development highlights the sad state of the American energy industry. While rapid advancement in technology allow amazing innovations such as remotely controlled thermostats, environmental regulations have made it all-but-illegal, prohibitively expensive, or legally uncertain to innovate in the energy sector, outside of a few, politically correct and subsidized technologies.
• The remote-controlled thermostats are a genuinely useful invention. However, the proper use of the technology would be simply to continually broadcast the current energy rate. The utility could then raise the rate during peak hours and let the customer decide how to automatically limit their usage. If energy prices doubled during heat waves, blackouts would be permanently eliminated. Unfortunately, in California, price controls currently mandate that politicians and government bureaucrats, not energy producers set energy prices.

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Quick Roundup 293

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Honesty in Astrology

You don't see this every day, so take a peek while you can!

We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of The Astrological Magazine will cease with the December 2007 issue. [bold added]

I guess they finally got it right with that one sentence! (HT: Hannes Hacker, who got this from Paul Hsieh)

Oliver Sacks' Latest

My favorite popular science author is Oliver Sacks, and Adrian Hester tells me that he has recently come out with the book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. My hopper's already overflowing, but anything by Sacks is guaranteed to be interesting, and just plain fun to read.

For regular readers of this blog who are unfamiliar with Sacks, I offered the following introduction some time ago:

[The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a] book of clinical tales from the frontiers of neurology was my introduction to neuroscience and to one of my favorite authors. A friend recommended it to me because Sacks often would explain the neurological deficits of his patients with philosophical analogies. Sacks does a masterful job in these explorations of showing what an amazing thing the human mind really is, while not letting us forget that his patients are human beings.

Sacks is a writer's writer. If you love good writing, you'll really enjoy his prose. And if a book about neurology sounds too dry or depressing for you, have no fear. His personal journals and books on botany are excellent reads. His Island of the Colour-Blind is the best of these and, is, I think, where the breadth of his intellect shines best.

I can't wait to read Musicophilia, but I'll have to anyway! Drat!

Miss Manners on Protests

I somehow doubt that the kind of people her questioner describes will take heed of Judith Martin's very good advice, but those of us who have more to offer to the public debate than to threaten it with faith and force would do well to consider what she has to say:

Dear Miss Manners: At the risk of sounding political, and that is the furthest thing I wish to do -- is protest mutually exclusive from etiquette? This dilemma has come up many times during the past few years, and it has caused some heated discussions with my friends.

My position, I could be very wrong, is that I don't mind protesting. Sometimes, I truly do not like the manner in which people choose to protest. For instance, with large graphic pictures and swearing; however, living in a free society, I've learned to accept this.

What I do have trouble with, and this is where my friends and I disagree, is how some protesters engage with the public. For example, giving children graphic pamphlets, telling children they have bad or abusive parents, calling individuals names, commenting on people's apparel, barring people from entering a facility and grabbing at people. I've seen all of these.

My friends say there is no room for etiquette in protest. I think when dealing with people in public one should at least try not to be rude to them. Who is correct?

Gentle Reader: Of course protest, like every other human activity, requires etiquette. Have your friends never heard of civil disobedience?

The saddest thing about using rude tactics is that they damage the causes for which they are used. Rather than the targets thinking that they are being shown a way in which the world would be improved, they focus on the immediate way in which they are being mistreated. These people may claim to want to make the world better, their victims conclude, but are actively making it worse.

Miss Manners would think it obvious that in order to persuade people about an issue of justice they had not considered, you must open their minds to your arguments. People who are humiliated shut down and turn defensive.

But when they see orderly picket lines or sit-ins, or hear speeches or read leaflets and articles by people who seem to be well-intentioned and reasonable, they just might stop to think. [bold aside from salutations added]

I have discussed the need for politeness in intellectual discourse in the past and mostly agree with this, although it is worth bearing in mind that ultimately, the merits of a cause can only be discovered by rational evaluation.

Having said that, I would, in addition, consider what Ayn Rand has said about those who resort to physical violence as a matter of course:

The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength -- i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes -- the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others -- loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow. [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 256, bold added]

Miss Manners is correct that physically violent protesters only damage their own cause, but this is true only to the extent that their cause has rational merit and this fact will deter them from being violent consistently only in the context of a fully free society. To the extent that a society tolerates physical violence, it runs the risk of its worst elements doing away with rational debate as a means of settling disputes.

Not only are the tactics discussed by Judith Martin rude, but trespassing, assault, and battery by protesters should be prevented or punished by the government, as such acts violate individual rights. Freedom of speech does not imply that others must provide a forum for ideas they disagree with or that those who disagree with a protester lack rights altogether.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Credited GeekPress for astrology link.

Quick Roundup 292

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Fake Tsunami?

Not too long ago, I commented on the Obama candidacy and a Christopher Hitchens column that declared the Illinois senator to be the "current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool" -- only to see him badly underperform all the predictions I saw to finish behind Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire.

Over at American Thinker, Charles Sykes has an interesting take on why this happened:

A central tenet of modern liberalism, after all, is the unshakeable [sic] conviction that white American [sic] is deeply and irredeemably racist. For three decades, America's white liberals have invested in the belief that American [sic] is so incapable of racial fairness that society needs a panoply of laws, preferences, quotas, set-asides, and remedial programs to ensure that black people are treated fairly.

...

It follows that many race-holding liberals will be among the last to believe that America will ever elect an African-American as president.

White liberals face this cognitive dissonance: if they decide that America is ready for a black president and back Obama they would also be forced to surrender or at least modify decades of convictions about American bias.

The euphemism for this is "electability," and it is one of the reasons why the race and gender cards are being played so aggressively among post-New Hampshire Democrats.

The spectacular failure of polling in New Hampshire may well be the first hint of how deeply the divide will affect the coming primaries. Notably, the polls for the Republican race were on target; but the Democratic polls drastically overstated Obama's support. Despite the initial wagon-circling denials of the media, the phenomenon is not new. In the past, other African American candidates -- Doug Wilder in Virginia; David Dinkins in New York, and Tom Bradley in Los Angeles - have done better in polls than at the ballot box, raising the possibility that white voters who wanted to look racially virtuous told pollsters they were backing Obama, but then actually voted for the white woman on the ballot. [bold added]

I think Sykes is on to something here, and it should be interesting to compare polls and primary results over the next few contests.

After all, if leftists are nervous about investigating the biological basis for intelligence because they see such as a threat to their egalitarian agenda, why would they greet evidence that such an agenda is no longer "necessary" with open arms or, worse yet, help create it?

Checking in on News Hounds So You Don't Have to

En route to something else recently, I encountered a smear of Fox News Business Contributor Jonathan Hoenig, who commented some time ago on our nation's (and Israel's) war policy. In addition to this, the news clip shows him taking a dishonest question from Alan Colmes that implied that the failure of oil prices to drop after Iraq was an indictment of the premise of going to war. Having already blasted our prosecution of the war, Hoenig correctly indicates that leftist policies at home are doing their share to keep fuel prices high.

News Hounds' take? To call Hoenig's response a "non-sequitor" [sic] and slam him because his opinion does not toe the line of that of the majority!

Hoenig's MIddle [sic] East strategy does not reflect the opinion of the majority of Americans. According to a CNN poll today, 39 percent think Israel should continue its military action "until Hezbollah can no longer launch attacks" (not exactly "levelling them with no mercy," as Hoenig wants) while 43 percent say Israel should agree to a cease-fire as soon as possible. But that viewpoint has yet to be expressed by a guest on Hannity & Colmes.

The last time I checked, the truth was not a matter of majority vote.

News Hounds' motto is, "We watch FOX so you don't have to." Have to what?

Think independently, from what I can tell.

The State vs. Saving Lives or Energy

David Veksler, commenting on Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's campaign against CVS opening private clinics has the perfect rejoinder to the mayor, who stated that, "Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong." He simply inserts another industry our lives depend on.

He also asks whether Bush Bulbs really save energy, and makes an interesting point.

-- CAV

Obama: Correct by Accident

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Barack Obama threatens, if elected, to introduce confusion about the meaning of the term "individual rights" to the highest level of the government of the freest nation on earth:

Democrat Barack Obama says he won't just be a president for the American people, but the animals too.

"What about animal rights?" a woman shouted out during the candidate's town hall meeting outside Las Vegas Wednesday after he discussed issues that relate more to humans, like war, health care and the economy.

Obama responded that he cares about animal rights very much, "not only because I have a 9-year-old and 6-year-old who want a dog." He said he sponsored a bill to prevent horse slaughter in the Illinois state Senate and has been repeatedly endorsed by the Humane Society.

"I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other," he said. "And it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals." [bold added]

Consider that last sentence in bold in light of the following episode in Zimbawe not too long ago:

Hungry Zimbabweans threatened to kill and eat a giraffe after it wandered towards the outskirts of the capital Harare, it has emerged.

Scores of people rushed to the scene after the adult giraffe entered Seke district from surrounding farmland. Police said several wanted to butcher the animal "for the pot", according to the state-owned Herald newspaper.

"We have to guard the animal," said one officer. "We have to remain here until it is taken to a safe place."

The incident comes as wild game increasingly falls victim to President Robert Mugabe's policies, with impoverished Zimbabweans turning to any possible source of meat. Poaching is reportedly rising rapidly, with two elephants recently killed in Hurungwe. [bold added]

When, as I summed it up before, "[s]tarving human beings are being forbidden at gunpoint to eat animals," the true meaning of Barack Obama's words becomes apparent.

While it is true that wanton cruelty to animals does reflect a poverty of spirit and can indicate psychological problems, to claim that animals have rights on a par with human beings is quite another thing. In fact, it is to claim that man has no rights.

"[H]ow we treat ... animals reflects how we treat each other."

Indeed it does. Just look at Zimbabwe, Mr. Obama.

-- CAV

Amazon Versus France

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Amazon.com is being punished by the French government for offering free shipping:

The Tribunal de Grande Instance (a French appeals court) in Versailles ruled back in December that Amazon was violating the country's 1981 Lang law with its free shipping offer. That law forbids booksellers from offering discounts of more than 5 percent off the list price, and Amazon was found to be exceeding that discount when the free shipping was factored in.

The company was told to start charging within ten days or pay a daily fine. It also owes €100,000 to the French Booksellers' Union for the court battle and for the losses it has apparently caused them. With the holidays over and the ten-day grace period over, Amazon has officially announced its plan to ignore the court order and pay the fine instead, according to the International Herald Tribune.

Amazon can do so for 30 days (€30,000), but after that time the court will review the fine. They could raise it, or they could lower it, but given that Amazon has chosen to flip the justices the bird, guess which outcome is more likely? At some point, if Amazon doesn't change its ways, the fine will probably be jacked up so high that the company has no choice but to comply.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, has taken to the virtual airwaves to rally the French public in support of Amazon's free shipping. He sent out a recent e-mail to French customers in which he claimed that "France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal." He then asked people to sign an online petition that has so far garnered more than 120,000 signatures.

I am glad that an American CEO is defending his company's right to engage in mutually voluntary rational trade (and in the process save money for his customers). I don't know whether Bezos is doing it in a principled fashion that gets to the moral fundamentals or if he's only making a pragmatic argument.

Is Senator Larry Craig's 'Wide Stance' Constitutionally Protected?

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The ACLU says so and I more or less agree with them. In an amicus brief filed with the Minnesota Court of Appeals, the ACLU makes the point that a law that seeks to punish the mere invitation to sex is overly broad and violates the First Amendment. After all, if one walks up to an adult and says, "hey, let's do the nasty," one has hardly violated anyone else's rights.

In contrast, if the airport had a "no flirtation in the bathroom" policy, they would have been within their rights to eject Craig from their facility--but that's a civil issue, not a criminal one.

But perhaps most of all, I simply love that the ACLU is defending Craig along privacy lines-lines that most conservative Republicans are loath to defend. It puts Craig in an awkward position because if he wins on the basis of the ACLU's arguments (and not his own "wide stance" argument) he's going to be the Republican Senator who got out of a public lewdness charge because the courts ruled that he had an expectation of privacy while tapping himself away in the airport men's room. And as we all know, if there is one thing the world likes, it's the taste of sweet delicious irony.

The Morality of Capitalism

By Eric Daniels from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Morality of Capitalism

Who: Dr. Eric Daniels, speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute and visiting scholar at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism

What: A talk making the case that capitalism is the only moral social system. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Kimmel Center, Room 914, New York University, 60 Washington Square South, NY, NY 10012
Maps and directions: http://www.nyu.edu/about/virtual.html

When: Wednesday, January 23, 2008, at 7 pm

Registration: Attendees must RSVP to nyu@objectivistclubs.org

Description: Despite the enormous success of American capitalism at producing material abundance and political freedom, critics continue their assault on the system, calling it immoral. In this lecture, Dr. Eric Daniels makes the case that capitalism is the only moral social system. He also examines the conventional defense of capitalism, which relies on the practical, economic argument, and illustrates why only a defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism can succeed.

Bio: Dr. Eric Daniels is a visiting scholar at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He taught for five years at Duke University, in the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace, and at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his doctorate in American history. He has lectured internationally on the history of American ethics, American business and legal history, and the American Enlightenment. Daniels's publications include a chapter in "The Abolition of Antitrust" and five entries in the "Oxford Companion to United States History."

For more information on this talk, please e-mail media@aynrand.org

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Supreme Court Rejects Right to Life of the Terminally Ill

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Supreme Court Rejects Right to Life of the Terminally Ill 
By David Holcberg (January 16, 2008)

It is disgraceful that the Supreme Court declined to consider whether terminal patients have a right to use drugs not yet approved by the FDA.

The purpose of the Constitution is not to grant government the power to regulate our lives, but to protect our rights by limiting the power of government.

Terminal patients--indeed any patients--have a moral and constitutional right to try any medicine or therapy that they believe would alleviate their suffering, improve their health or extend their lives. To deny this right is to deny the right to life and liberty, and amounts to a death sentence to thousands of terminally ill individuals who could benefit from experimental drugs.

The government should have no power to keep drugs off the market and no right to forbid us from exercising our judgment and taking a drug we believe would benefit us.

Hopefully the U.S. Supreme Court will consider this life-and-death issue in its next opportunity. Real lives are at stake, and for many, time is running out.

Liberate, Don't Stimulate, the Economy

By Alex Epstein from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Liberate, Don't Stimulate, the Economy
January 16, 2008

Irvine, CA--Fearing a recession in the wake of the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and other economic problems, factions in Washington are competing to offer "stimulus packages" to come to the rescue. Some favor Fed interest rate decreases, while others want some sort of immediate tax cut, while others want an outright giveaway to lower-income Americans.
 
But, said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "We don't need the government to 'stimulate' the economy with some new intervention; we need it to liberate us from all its destructive economic intervention that put us in this situation.

"We need liberation from environmentalist restrictions on oil drilling and energy production. We need liberation from Sarbanes-Oxley, which treats businessmen as guilty until proven innocent and increases the cost of doing business for every publicly traded corporation. We need liberation from the government's pervasive regulation and semi-socialization of the health-care market, which have artificially driven up the costs of health care. We need liberation from the intervention of the Federal Reserve, which is destroying our savings by inflating the currency. And we need liberation from countless other forms of government spending; if spending does not decrease, then any 'stimulus' tax cuts are simply tax increases for the future.

"We should not regard Uncle Sam as an economic Doctor Sam, whom we need to stimulate the heart of the economy with his defibrillator. When the government violates our right to produce and trade freely, it is an economic cancer that needs to be removed from the economy."

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The School of Hard Knocks

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This morning The News & Record, a newspaper covering south-side Virginia presented a devastating portrayal of the situation at Founders College. The article describes a deeply demoralized institution that is unable to retain staff and faculty, honor its many promises to students and is seemingly floundering in a sea of financial debts. If this story is accurate (and I see no reason to doubt its veracity) the very idea of Founders College appears to be in grave jeopardy.

This is tragic news. I feel obligated to report it here because in my conversations with Founders' students and faculty, I was told that my earlier posts here on the College helped influence their ultimate decision to matriculate or teach. As such, I feel the responsibility to insure that my name is publicly associated with a full representation of the situation at the College. In my view, while I hope that Founders still has the potential to recover as an institution and fully deliver on its promise, those odds nevertheless appear to be long and future students and faculty should be aware of what Founders is currently up against and make their decisions accordingly.

And lest any of the College's past detractors feel any glee over the recent turn of events, I'd like to share an anecdotal story that I think might help to put the situation in perspective. Last spring I spent about a week on the Founders campus as a trial marketer. While I was disappointed that the job never panned out (the running gag among my friends is that I was an unpaid intern with non-transferable college credit) I still saw enough behind-the-scenes to be able empathize with the huge load that the college's principals had taken upon their shoulders. My visit came before the College had closed on its property and I was in Founders' president Tamara K. Fuller's suite as she negotiated with financiers for the funds the College needed for settlement. The personal burden of this responsibility weighed heavily upon her and I could clearly see it in the weariness of her face; the picture was so striking that I resolved not to forget it so that one day, when the College had earned its success, I could recount the story and share just a slice of what it took to make such a dream possible.

Later that evening, I walked with Tamara on the grounds of the Berry Hill estate and she shared her reasons for taking on such a burden, one that for her to be successful would demand that all her past achievements and assets be put upon the line. She spoke of a passionate faculty and a curriculum that would present students with the core ideas they would need to succeed in any endeavor of their choosing. As if reciting a sacred prayer, she said for her to achieve that, it would all be worthwhile.

Reflecting on my own dispiriting struggles in higher education, I remarked that it seemed she simply wanted to clear the road for those our world seems most determined to barricade. Tamara jumped at the analogy and said she would use it in her speech celebrating the College's opening semester. A few months later, she did just that and I was deeply satisfied; not all payments for services rendered are made in dollars.

Nevertheless, as the news story unfortunately indicates, decisions have been made in the subsequent months that from my (albeit distant) perspective seem neither wise or even just. Yet I would be lying if I said I didn't feel heartache over Founders' troubles, even though I have no real relationship with the school beyond being an early supporter. The reason for this is simply that education is a beautiful thing; it is the process by which people can come into their own as human beings and to be involved with it is a deeply honorable endeavor. It speaks simultaneously to reason and hope, knowledge and achievement, passion and joy. Founders' trials are certainly proving to be baptism by fire, yet in these trials, I hope the institution and its people can recover and come to endure.

Why? Because Reardon Metal is good. It is figuring out how we fully live up to it that is often the hard part . . .

Tom Cruise, Scientologist Nut

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

"We are the authorities on getting people off drugs, we are the authorities on the mind, we are the authorities on improving conditions. We can rehabilitate criminals, we can bring peace and unite cultures."

Oh, and only a Scientologist can really help at the scene of an auto accident.

Yup, that's what Tom Cruise says in this leaked Scientology video interview. It might not be available for long, so I'd recommend watching it sooner rather than later. It's definitely ... um ... interesting.

Some terminology: An "SP" is a "suppressive persons" or critic of Scientology. KSW refers to L. Ron Hubbard's letter "Keeping Scientology Working" that demands accepting Scientology beliefs and practices wholesale, as dogma.

Disparate Impact

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Thomas Sowell has some interesting insights about how environmental regulations have altered the demographics in certain parts of California, including the following:

The financially ruinous powers of delay that these and other laws and institutions can impose on anyone wanting to build anything can be illustrated by a current legal case involving a developer who has for 15 years been prevented from building in the coastal California town of Half Moon Bay.

A judge recently awarded him $36 million in damages but that decision has been appealed. Anyone familiar with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals knows that anything can happen there -- including more years of delay.

Someone once said that the ability to tax is the ability to destroy. So is the ability to delay. [bold added]

Sowell sums that up very nicely, and in so doing underscores a way that massive government entanglement in the economy injures us above and beyond the financial burdens and other restrictions on our freedom that go with it. Indeed, even apart from such forced delays as application processes, any delay due to something that has to be processed by a bureaucracy (that wouldn't be in a free society) falls under this category of injury.

As valuable as this insight is, it was not the focus of Sowell's article. That was a near-miss of something that could have been a brilliant point. Sowell's main point was that left-wing environmental laws are violating left-wing "civil rights" requirements that business policies and various governmental measures not have a "disparate impact" on minorities. True enough, but he merely ends up grousing that:

[T]he same liberals who applaud that approach when it comes to businesses would be appalled if the same standard were applied to their own environmentalist restrictions that force vast numbers of blacks out of their own upscale liberal communities.

Nor do black "leaders" who are quick to cry "discrimination" and "racism" in other contexts. Apparently it all depends on whose ox is gored.

Yes. Leftists, once again, are seen to be hypocrites, but that is not the essential problem with land-use laws or other laws that interfere with the economy. The problem with such laws is that they interfere with the rights of what Ayn Rand once correctly identified as "the smallest minority": the individual.

Seen in that light, not only are "civil rights" regulations on business activity wrong, but the "lofty and pretty talk" about preserving nature and "open space" that Sowell decries may indeed be "ugly", but it is hardly "selfish".

For any alleged "benefit" anyone gains by passing a law that violates the rights of other individuals is more than offset by the precedent for his own rights to be violated later by another law. This goes just as well for minorities who "benefit" by hiring quotas as well as wealthy people who use the law to keep others from being able to build near their homes.

(I suspect that Sowell agrees that civil rights legislation affecting businesses is wrong, but I would have liked to see this connection made explicitly. Of course, if one justifies support for capitalism on altruist grounds as Sowell seems to here, this would not be a natural conclusion to reach.)

Furthermore, while some laws may indeed injure some demographic groups more than others, shouldn't our focus be more on the fact that the law is injuring anyone at all?

One day, when our public again makes such a connection as a matter of course, we will no longer be in danger of being tyrannized (equally or not), but within reach of having our individual rights protected equally under the law.

-- CAV

LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS AWARDS

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Fallaci category: General David H. Petraeus.
Fiskie category: Keith Olbermann.



For more information, read Charles Foster Johnson's post, The 2007 Fiskie and Fallaci Winners!

Do compact fluorescent lights really save energy?

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Earlier this month, Congress passed a law which will essentially force the public to switch to compact fluorescent lights. (CFLs)  Environmentalists and light bulb makers joined forces to boost power and profits, and perhaps sue the competition out of existence.Some people object to the narrow light spectrum and toxic Mercury content of CFL lights, but I don’t care about those things.  I have replaced most of the incandescent lights in my apartment, and plan to eventually replace the rest.  What I question is not the usefulness of CFLs, but the premise that switching to them will “save energy.”

As with most goods and services, the price of a utility influences the quantity I am willing to pay for.  When the price of gas doubles, I reconsider taking road trips, and try to be more efficient with my driving.  Likewise, when the price of electricity falls, I am more liberal with my power consumption.   Compact fluorescent lights lower the cost of lightning in two ways: they use one quarter of the energy, and they last ten times as long.  These innovations encourage greater usage of lighting.

I have a spiffy IKEA lamp behind my couch, but because I don’t have a light in my ceiling fan, it needs to be extra bright.  Furthermore, the geometry of my living room makes it annoying to walk behind the couch every day to turn it on.  By switching to a compact fluorescent light, I was able to get a 100 watt equivalent light in a 60 watt socket, and thanks to its efficiency and long life, I just leave the light permanently on.  I am enjoying greater convenience, but I don’t know if I am saving any energy.

If the average consumer’s monthly lightning budget is fixed, they might compensate for the higher efficiency and lifespan of CFLs by increasing their lightning usage to completely offset any energy reduction.  This would be especially true if consumers are forced to switch to CFLs by legislators rather than a desire to save energy costs.  Much as auto safety regulations can lead to reckless behavior, forcing consumers to switch to more efficient lights might actually increase their energy usage.

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Fiat Theocracy: House Resolution 888

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Too often bad news swirls into one’s consciousness as abruptly as thousands of sparrows descending on an open field. Over the last week several newsworthy events occurred that demanded my attention, and at first it was difficult to decide which subject to address.

Should I dwell on Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, who announced the need for national identification cards to combat illegal immigration and terrorism? The cards would be the capstone of a “security” system that is largely a sham and an outrageous and costly public relations ploy that dishonestly “assures” traveling Americans that their government is on the alert for terrorists. Giddy with the power of punishment he and his agency have over ordinary American citizens, who are presumed guilty until proven innocent by a privacy-violating frisk at airport checkpoints, he warned in the staccato tones of a drill sergeant at a news conference that residents of states that do not “cooperate” in the federal program would no longer be able to use their driver’s licenses at airports as valid ID.

Why is Chertoff insisting now on creating a federal database to keep track of everyone? It is probably because he does not expect to be head of Homeland Security much longer, and wants to stick it to the country before a new president dismisses him.

Should I focus on Hillary Clinton, whose “teary moment” in New Hampshire last week was transparently calculated and orchestrated to win sympathy votes to jump-start her sputtering campaign for the White House, and who has just proposed a $70 billion federal “stimulus” package to rescue the housing market? Her political ambitions discount the fact that Federal “stimulus” packages of any nature are about as life saving for the economy as an injection of diluted arsenic is for a stroke victim. This is aside from her obsession with imprisoning everyone in a national health care plan, which would cost many more billions, and which maybe, just maybe, might be as efficient and efficacious as that of Great Britain, Canada, and of other semi-socialist countries.

Daniel Pipes, in his January 10 Jerusalem Post review of a new book that corrects the standard political spectrum and puts fascism where it actually belongs, as a necessary and inevitable partner or socialism, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg, cites the author’s chronology of that secret history. It begins with Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism policies (which gave us the Federal Reserve system and the income tax) and ends with Clinton hoping “to insert the state deep into family life,” which Pipes correctly interprets as an essential step of totalitarianism. State involvement in family or personal life was standard policy in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperialist Japan, and Soviet Russia. It is still so in Communist China and all Muslim countries.

Pipes writes of Goldberg’s book:

“To sum up a near-century of history, if the American political system traditionally encouraged the pursuit of happiness, ‘more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.’” True enough.

Or do I then fault Pipes for his interpretation of “conservatism”? He writes in the same review that in contrast to fascism, “conservatism calls for limited government, individualism, democratic debate, and capitalism. Its appeal is liberty and leaving citizens alone.” Perhaps that characterization of conservatism might have been accurate over a century ago. The “conservatism” practiced by Republicans in Congress, however, has been, ever since Wilson’s time, more or less in partnership with progressivism’s social legislation, which has never been seriously challenged either in Congress or by the Supreme Court.

Looking around at our culture, where can one find that “limited government,” or the “liberty,” or the government “leaving citizens alone”? Republican conservatives are as much to blame for the creeping totalitarian socialism in our lives as are the Democrats. They have consistently refused to discard the altruist element in their political philosophy, and consequently can only second any proposals to fit the nation into the straightjacket of statism. One must ask: What is it that “conservatives” wish to “conserve,” if not the status quo, which, ever since at least Teddy Roosevelt’s administration, has been anything but?

And while Pipes is perceptive enough to appreciate Goldberg’s thesis, his perspicuity does not extend to distinguishing between “democracy,” which is mob rule (debates or not), and the principles of individual rights, which our now much-emasculated republican form of government was supposed to protect against the populist assaults of democracy without any debate on the matter.

(But then, Pipes, a leading authority on the Islamic jihad against the West, unfortunately believes that our salvation lies in “moderate” or “reformed” Islam, which is much like believing that Andy Hardy could single-handedly repel a Nazi Tiger tank offensive during the Battle of the Bulge.)

I swore to myself that I had finished discussing God and religion, but something perilous has come to my attention: a subtle but sleazy attempt to make Christianity the official state religion of this country.

One of the most enduring but pernicious myths about the United States is that it was founded as a specifically and exclusively Christian nation. The fallacy is not the monopoly of evangelicals, or of politicians such as Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, or Barack Obama. It is an unquestioned and undigested fallacy that is simply passed on to the average American without any thought, qualification or insight, much as was the assertion of divine right of kings to rule in Europe, most of whom presumed to act as “God’s stewards” (now it is unelected European Union bureaucrats).

Few politicians and establishment pundits challenge the fallacy, or dare to. It ignores the fact that when America declared its independence from Britain, it was solely on the grounds of political freedom, whose philosophical, intellectual roots were fundamentally secular in nature. That political freedom was established in the real world, and had nothing to do with God.

If God was mentioned at all in the course of the country’s founding, it was a God that the founders understood did not interfere in human affairs and played no part in their political endeavors. Many of the founders were tactfully agnostic or were discreet atheists. The concept of God and the morality of altruism, which is the basis of Christian faith, to the most intellectually active of them, such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were not compelling issues, neither to refute nor to impose as dogma on the American people. Religion was a private matter.

House of Representatives Resolution 888, sponsored by Virginia conservative Republican J. Randy Forbes (Chesapeake) is in effect an attempt to repudiate the Enlightenment and the secular political principles championed by the Founders and incorporated into the country’s original political documents. It is an endorsement of medieval morality and intends a de facto establishment of one of the things that the Founders feared and fought a war to prevent from coming about: a state church or state religion.

The resolution, cosponsored by thirty-one other representatives, including two others from Virginia, was referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on December 18, 2007. Its preamble reads:

“Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as “American Religious History Week” for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.”

One would need to be a fulltime scholar with a hefty advance from a publisher or a foundation grant to take the time to answer each historical “whereas” in the resolution. Each of the seventy-four conjunctions requires setting a context, which the resolution glibly neglects to do.

The conjunctions comprise a tossed salad of citations of historical events, such as inaugural ceremonies, of engravings or images on public buildings, or of quotations from some of the Founders, past presidents, and Supreme Court opinions about God and the Christian faith, God’s presence in mottos and coinage, and so on, which are all somehow supposed to add up to: a Christian nation!

A few of the more ludicrous ones should be mentioned here. Number sixty-six points to “the top of the walls in the House Chamber,” on which “appear images of 23 great lawgivers…but Moses (the lawgiver, who – according to the Bible – originally received the law from God,) is the only lawgiver honored with a full face view, looking down on the proceedings of the House.” Doubtless looking down with approval, as that Chamber betrays, sells out, and whittles away American freedoms.

Number seventy-two states that “in the Library of Congress, The Giant Bible of Mainz, and The Gutenberg Bible are on prominent permanent display and etched on the walls are Bible verses….” Well, I have a Bible in my reference library, together with some prayer books. The presence of these in my home do not make me a Christian, anymore than my owning a copy of Das Kapital or Mein Kampf makes me a communist or a Nazi.

Number three claims that “political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible.” Not true. The most frequently cited sources in that period by political theorists and philosophers were ancient Greek and Roman political tracts, together with Enlightenment political thinkers.

Number seven cites the Declaration of Independence and its four references to God. Of course, Forbes and his cosponsors would never explain that the chief reason for that is that British political philosopher John Locke, in whose language the Declaration was written, ascribed political rights in men to the work of a “retiring” God. He was wrong about that one thing, and right about just about everything else. But, that was the spirit of the times. Men were focused on elucidating the ideal conditions for living on earth, not on refuting a hand-me-down mythology with its promise of an afterlife.

Perhaps the most offensive in its implication to me was Number twenty-eight, which states that “…in 1853 the United States Senate declared that the Founding Fathers ‘had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us an irreligious people…they did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and the whole public action of the nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistical apathy.’” Anyone who has read my commentaries here knows that I am neither dead, nor revolting, nor apathetic.

Forbes’s resolution has met with voluble opposition. According to a Daily Press (Newport News, VA) article of January 13, “Forbes seeks official nod to religion,”

“…[C]ritics – ranging from atheists and Wiccans to mainstream civil rights groups – have accused Forbes of offering a distorted historical record and trying to use government authority where it isn’t needed.”

“’We don’t need the government to tell us that religion is important,’ said Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s program on freedom of religion and belief.”

“’I don’t think Congress should embrace false history,’ said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.”

Gunn and Lynn are missing the point on two counts. Forbes’s resolution is intended to establish religion as official federal policy – what else could it be if it were approved by an elective body? And “false history” – or fabricated “facts” or contextless assertions about facts (see “Hoary Old Chestnuts”)—never checked or overruled a religionist’s emotional fervor.

Forbes, smarting from criticisms he obviously did not expect, according to the Daily Press article, countered, “The essence of what they believe is that God is a myth. Why is it that these people become so venomous when you talk about God?”

They wouldn’t, if he refrained from trying to force religion and that myth down their throats, and in the bargain make such critics political outcasts. “No legitimate person can say faith and religion haven’t played an enormous role in the history of this country,” said Forbes. Legitimate persons? Is he implying that a person who did not believe in God or acknowledged the over-emphasized role of religion in American history or who objected to rewritten history is illegitimate? That is, a non-person in the spirit of Michael Chertoff’s national ID standard? And the venom is in his imagination, to judge by the few calmly worded criticisms that were reported in the press.

One of the Founders’ objections to the British Crown’s policies was the plan to establish in the colonies an episcopate or bishopric of the state Church of England, which, as it did in Great Britain, would have had all authority over religious matters, and have been supported by taxes levied directly on the colonists, regardless of their religion. The state church in America, as it did in Britain, would have “tolerated” faiths other than the Anglican, but not permitted them their own churches – only chapels – and have probably required, as it did in Britain, that all political and military offices be filled with men who were of the Anglican faith and who took the “test oath,” subscribing to the rites and articles of the Anglican Church. The political implications of “packing the court” with Crown appointees, judges, legislators and functionaries all amenable to all oppressive Crown policies, should be obvious.

It was obvious to the Founders, and also to many American, non-conformist, non-Anglican ministers, most of whose Sunday sermons throughout the pre-Revolutionary period up to the Declaration of Independence were actually political disquisitions against the Crown and eloquent appeals for political liberty. In lieu of a 100,000-word book on the political stance of these clerics in answer to the allegations in Forbes’s resolution, I offer a few excerpts from their sermons, which can be found in Franklin P. Cole’s They Preached Liberty, a collection of statements by New England ministers, chiefly of Massachusetts, published by Liberty Press in Indianapolis.

“Those nations which are now groaning under the iron scepter of tyranny were once free; so they might probably have remained, by a seasonable precaution against despotic measures. Civil tyranny is usually small in its beginning, like ‘the drop of a bucket,’ till at length like a mighty torrent or the raging waves of the sea, it bears down all before it, and deluges whole countries and empires. Thus it is as to ecclesiastical tyranny also – the most cruel, intolerable, and impious of any….” Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, 1750.

“Arrogant pretenses to infallibility in matters of state and religion, represent human nature in the most contemptible light.” Samuel Cooke of Cambridge, 1770.

“The great and wise Author of our being has so formed us that the love of liberty is natural.” John Tucker of Newbury, 1771.

“Our danger is not visionary, but real. Our contention is not about trifles, but about liberty and property.” Gad Hitchcock of Pembroke, 1774.

“The God of nature has taught us by the situation and uncommon advantages of this place, that it was designed for extensive business: and here our fathers planted themselves, that they and their posterity might prosecute those branches of trade and merchandise which give riches and strength to nations and states.” John Lathrop of Boston, 1774.

“No man denies but that originally all were equally free. Men did not purchase their freedom, nor was it the grant of kings, nor from charter, covenant, or compact, nor in any proper sense from man: But from God. They were born free.” Samuel Webster of Salisbury, 1777.

The focus, as one can see in these examples and in numerous quotations throughout They Preached Liberty, was on political liberty, not on God. If a God existed, these men were of the position that he left it to men to achieve their freedom and happiness on earth. Observable nature, they thought, commanded men to contrive the best way to live with one another, not an unobservable supreme being. Their political thinking was as distant from the crude, barbaric dictates of the Ten Commandments as Pluto is from the Sun.

Representative Forbes, however, wishes to fabricate American history in the spirit of the Bible, which itself was woven from whole cloth. To paraphrase Jonathan Mayhew, perhaps the most “worldly” and consistent of the Massachusetts ministers, Forbes’s resolution is a “drop of the bucket” which, if not opposed by Americans, might portend the establishment of ecclesiastical tyranny.

Ezra Levant

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

We all know what evil looks like in totalitarian states. The Soviet KGB or the Nazi SS knocking on the door and taking an innocent person away in the night for expressing an opinion the state does not like. But how does evil come in western welfare states?

Take at look at these videos of Ezra Levant defending himself before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for publishing anti-Muslim cartoons. His defense is brilliant and inspiring. These videos are must-viewing.

Look at how normal and nice it all is: the bland bureaucrat and the average conference room. No dungeons, no torture apparatus, no goose-stepping guards. But behind the polite bureaucracy lie the guns of the state, the same force used by the KGB and the SS. This is how we lose our freedom.

I want to shake people awake, to make them see that the way things are -- the welfare state bureaucracy -- is a violation of individual rights. It is incremental tyranny. It is immoral. I hope these videos showing the obscenity of an individual having to justify to the state his ideas will open some eyes.

UPDATE: More at Ezra Levant's blog.

IQ by Profession

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I have no definite opinion of IQ tests. The simple bubble-type tests are too narrow in scope to be of much value, I suspect. Some years ago, I was given an individually-administered WAIS-III test. I was impressed with the wide range of cognitive skills that it tested. I've never made any serious study of the subject though.

So with that proviso, I offer the following fascinating graphs of IQ distributions of various professions. (Click to view the full-size version.)

Figure 11. Wisconsin Women's Henmon-Nelson IQ Distributions for 1992-94 Occupation Groups with 30 Cases or More

Figure 12. Wisconsin Men's Henmon-Nelson IQ Distributions for 1992-94 Occupation Groups with 30 Cases or More

(I originally found that on Neatorama, but it's actually from Hauser, Robert M. 2002. "Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success." CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev). Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. The PDF from which the graphs are taken is available here.)

The "Market Failure" Fallacy

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The "Market Failure" Fallacy
Jan. 8, 2008

Who: Dr. Brian Simpson, associate professor and chair of the Department of Management and Marketing at National University in San Diego and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute

What: A talk and Q & A arguing against the notion of "market failure" and defending the moral and productive value of capitalism

Where: Hilton Costa Mesa, 3050 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa, CA  92626

When: Thursday, January 31, 2007, at 7:30 PM

Admission is FREE.

Description: In contemporary economics textbooks there is typically at least one chapter devoted to the topic of "market failure," where it is claimed that capitalism leads to undesirable results, such as the creation of monopolies, harmful environmental effects, and an unjust "distribution" of income. In this talk, Dr. Brian P. Simpson attacks the notion of "market failure," arguing for the moral and productive superiority of capitalism, the immorality and destructive economic consequences of environmentalism, and the need to integrate economic analysis with Ayn Rand's revolutionary moral theory of rational egoism in order to properly defend capitalism.

Bio: Dr. Simpson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Management and Marketing at National University in San Diego, where he has been teaching economics since 2002. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, made presentations at scholarly conferences, and created a minor in economics with a focus on free-market economics and Objectivist philosophy. He is the author of the book Markets Don't Fail!

For more information on this talk, please e-mail events@aynrand.org.

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DDT Foes Disregard Human Life (Washington Times)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Blame Environmentalism for Malaria Deaths
By David Holcberg (Washington Times, January 6, 2008)

Environmentalist opposition to DDT has never had any basis in science: for half a century DDT use has been proven safe to humans and deadly to mosquitoes. The use of DDT against malaria-carrying mosquitoes could prevent the infection of hundreds of millions of people every year and save millions of lives. The fact that environmentalist activists have opposed--and still oppose--the use of DDT indicates that they have little, if any, concern for human life.

The Meaning of New Year's Resolutions

By Alex Epstein from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Meaning of New Year's Resolutions
By Alex Epstein

Every New Year's Eve millions of Americans make New Year's resolutions. Whether the resolution is to get out of debt, to spend more time with loved ones, or to quit smoking, these resolutions have one thing in common: they are goals to make our lives better.

Unfortunately, this ritual commitment to self-improvement is widely viewed as something of a joke--in part because New Year's resolutions go so notoriously unmet. After years of watching others--or themselves--excitedly commit to a new goal, only to abandon the quest by March, many come to conclude that New Year's resolutions are an exercise in futility that should not be taken seriously. "The silly season is upon us," writes a columnist for the Washington Post, "when people feel compelled to remake themselves with new year's resolutions."

But such a cynical attitude is false and self-destructive. Making New Year's resolutions does not have to be futile--and to make them is not silly; done seriously, it is an act of profound moral significance that embodies the essence of a life well-lived.

Consider what we do when we make a New Year's resolution: we look at where we are in some area of life, think about where we want to be, and then set ourselves a goal to get there. We are tired of feeling chubby and lethargic, say, and want the improved appearance and greater energy level that comes with greater fitness. So we resolve to take up a fun athletic activity--like tennis or a martial art--and plan to do it three times a week.

Is this a laughable act of self-delusion? Hardly. If it were, then how would anyone ever achieve anything in life? In fact, to make a New Year's resolution is to recognize the undeniable reality that successful goal-pursuit is possible--the reality that everyone at one time or another has set and achieved long-range goals, and profited from doing so. Indeed, not only is it possible to achieve long-range goals, it is necessary for success in life. To make a New Year's resolution is also to recognize the undeniable reality that rewarding careers and romances do not just happen automatically--that to get what we want in our lives, we must consciously choose and achieve the right goals. We must be goal-directed.

Unfortunately, a goal-directed orientation is missing to a large extent in too many lives. It is all too easy to live life passively, acting without carefully deciding what one is doing with one's life and why. How many people do you know who are in the career they fell into out of school, even if it is not very satisfying--or who have children at a certain age because that's what is expected, even if it's not what they really want--or who spend endless hours of "free time" in front of the TV, since that's the most readily available form of relaxation--or who follow a life routine that they never really chose and don't truly enjoy, but which has the force of habit?

Too often, the goal-directedness embodied by New Year's resolutions is the exception in lives ruled by passively accepted forces--unexamined routine, short-range desires, or alleged duties. It is the passive approach to happiness that makes so many resolutions peter out, lost in the shuffle of life or abandoned due to lost motivation. More broadly than its impact on New Year's resolutions, the passive approach to happiness is the reason that so many go through life without ever getting--or even knowing--what they really want.

It is a sad irony that those who write off New Year's resolutions because so many fail reinforces the passive approach to life that causes so many resolutions--and so many other dreams--to fail. The solution to failed New Year's resolutions is not to abandon the practice, but to supplement it with a broader resolution--a commitment to a goal-directed life.

This New Year's, resolve to think about how to make your life better, not just once a year, but every day. Resolve to set goals, not just in one or two aspects of life, but in every important aspect and in your life as a whole. Resolve to pursue the goals that will make you successful and happy, not as the exception in a life of passivity, but as the rule that becomes second-nature.

If you do this, you will be resolving to do the most important thing of all: to take your happiness seriously.
 
Alex Epstein is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on business issues. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

                                                                                                                                             

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Taxpayers Shouldn't Be Forced to Subsidize Farmers (Los Angeles Times)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Taxpayers Shouldn't Be Forced to Subsidize Farmers
By David Holcberg (Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2007)

Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize farmers or anyone else. The idea that one person's needs are a moral claim on the assets of others has been used to justify countless redistribution schemes, from farm subsidies to welfare handouts to foreign aid.

But this idea is unjust. Individuals have a moral right to what they earn--not to what others earn.

The government should protect our property from those who would steal it--not steal it from us and give it to those who did not earn it.

Environmentalist Ideologues to Blame for Malaria Deaths (Herald Community Newspapers)

By Keith Lockitch from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Environmentalist Ideologues to Blame for Malaria Deaths
By Keith Lockitch (Herald Community Newspapers, December 20, 2007)

Dismissing my arguments concerning Rachel Carson, Scott Brinton suggests that insecticide resistance is the primary reason DDT is no longer used for malaria control ("Rolling Back America's Environmental Legacy," Dec. 6, 2007).

It is certainly true that resistance is a factor that public health experts must take into account, and those who argue for DDT do take it into account. But a glib reference to insect resistance does not change the following facts: (1) DDT is still the most effective agent of mosquito control, (2) many countries that depend on funding from U.S. and European aid agencies do not use DDT because those agencies ideologically oppose its use, and as a result, (3) one in 20 children in sub-Saharan Africa die of malaria each year.

I stand by my argument that the toll of preventable human suffering and death wrought by this disease can be blamed on environmentalist ideologues such as Carson.

To Save Lives, Legalize Trade in Organs (Daily Mail, UK)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

To Save Lives, Legalize Trade in Organs

By David Holcberg (Daily Mail, UK, December 21, 2007)

Thousands of individuals waiting for transplants have died through the years because the law forbids the sale of human organs. To significantly increase the availability of organs, this murderous law must be scrapped and the trade in organs decriminalised. If the law acknowledges our right to give away an organ, it should also acknowledge our right to sell an organ. And if the law recognises our right to pay for a life-saving medical treatment, it should also recognise our right to pay for a life-saving organ for transplant. Individuals able to pay for organs would benefit at no one’s expense but their own. Those unable to pay would still be able to rely on charity.

 

The Price of Labor (Wall Street Journal Europe)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Price of Labor
By David Holcberg (Wall Street Journal Europe, January 2, 2008)

The minimum wage constitutes government coercion against both employers and employees. By mandating a certain level of wages, the government violates the rights of both employers and employees to reach a voluntary agreement based on their own independent judgment of what is in their best interest.

Those who provide jobs have a right to set the wages they are willing to pay. And those who are willing and eager to work for relatively low wages--either because they are unskilled, inexperienced or would rather have a low-paying job than no job--have a right to do so.

In a capitalist system, the price of labor (i.e., wages) is determined in the same way as all other prices and as it should be: by the individual judgments and voluntary decisions of buyers and sellers.

To Save Lives, Legalize Trade in Organs (Daily Mail, UK)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

To Save Lives, Legalize Trade in Organs
By David Holcberg (Daily Mail, U.K., December 21, 2007)

Thousands of individuals waiting for transplants have died through the years because the law forbids the sale of human organs. To significantly increase the availability of organs, this murderous law must be scrapped and the trade in organs decriminalised. If the law acknowledges our right to give away an organ, it should also acknowledge our right to sell an organ. And if the law recognises our right to pay for a life-saving medical treatment, it should also recognise our right to pay for a life-saving organ for transplant. Individuals able to pay for organs would benefit at no one’s expense but their own. Those unable to pay would still be able to rely on charity.

Bush Signs Automobile Fatality Act

By Keith Lockitch from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Bush Signs Automobile Fatality Act
Dec. 21, 2007

Irvine, CA--The energy bill that President Bush just signed into law is a significant victory for environmentalists, who have long pushed for such measures as expanded ethanol production. But the centerpiece of the bill--for which environmentalists have been agitating for years--is a major increase in automobile fuel economy standards, the first such increase since 1975.

The law forces auto manufacturers to increase the average mileage of cars, SUVs, and light trucks to 35 mpg by 2020. Currently, the standard is 27.5 mpg for cars and 22.2 mpg for SUVs and light trucks.

It might seem obviously beneficial to decree that cars must use less fuel. But according to Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, "The new mileage standards will make cars more expensive and more dangerous and will cause many more traffic fatalities.

"Compelling automakers to achieve higher mileage forces them to compromise automobile safety. To achieve fuel economy, they are forced to make vehicles lighter and smaller. But lighter, smaller vehicles are much more dangerous in an accident. Because the car absorbs less of the crash impact, the passengers absorb it instead.

"The original Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, imposed in 1975, have already led to a substantial increase in traffic fatalities--an additional two thousand traffic deaths per year, according to a 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences. With the new standard, manufacturers will be forced to downsize even further all cars, as well as SUVs and light trucks. But these vehicles will still be sharing the road with buses, delivery trucks, and massive commercial trailer trucks. One shudders at the thought of how much greater a risk Americans will face. Nevertheless, environmentalists have continued to fight for higher fuel economy requirements, consistently and cavalierly dismissing the risks and the tragic consequences.

"Despite the drumbeat of constant assertions to the contrary, it is far from a settled scientific fact that we face catastrophic dangers from climate change. Yet, under the guise of protecting us from the alleged dangers of global warming, environmentalists force upon us the very real, provable dangers of increased auto injuries and deaths. Clearly, what they value is something other than human well-being."

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Making Money in Medicine Is Moral

Ayn Rand Institute:

After the Massachusetts Public Health Council announced new rules that will allow CVS and other retailers to open in-store clinics designed to treat minor ailments, Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino declared that the decision "jeopardizes patient safety. Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong."

"These clinics will not be ‘making money off of sick people,'" said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "they will be making money by helping sick people become well.

"Mr. Menino wishes us to think there is something morally suspect about retailers requiring payment for providing medical services. Does he expect them to give away medical services for free? By his logic, it is unjust that farmers make money off the hungry, gyms make money off the unfit, and newspapers make money off the uninformed.

"Contrary to Mr. Menino's insinuations, businesses do not profit by exploiting consumers, but by offering them life-enhancing values--whether a loaf of bread, a miracle drug, or a cutting-edge surgical procedure. The farmers, doctors, and businessmen who create and supply those values have a moral right to be compensated for their efforts. The attack on profit in medicine is an attack on profit as such--and on all the goods and services profit makes possible. We should oppose Mr. Menino's attack on profit and welcome expanded freedom in medicine."

Huck’s Army

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The January 13, 2008 New York Times has an interesting article on the split amongst evangelical Christians as to whether to support Mike Huckabee for president ("Huckabee Splits Young Evangelicals and Old Guard").

In particular, most of the older leadership of the evangelical Christians have chosen not to endorse Huckabee, instead dividing their support amongst the other Republican candidates:

While Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins remain on the sidelines, many in the old guard are actively backing Mr. Huckabee's rivals: Pat Robertson is for Mr. Giuliani, Gary Bauer for Fred D. Thompson, and Paul Weyrich, a founder of the movement, for Mr. Romney. The few national conservative Christian political advocates who have rallied to Mr. Huckabee say they are dismayed by the reluctance of their best-known leaders to do the same.

These are the ones that have some fading attachment to capitalism, even though it conflicts with their explicit Christian philosophy.

In contrast, many of the younger evangelicals are fervently drawn to Huckabee precisely because of his support for the environment and his "populist" economic views. At some level, they recognize that these positions are more consistent with their altruist Christian philosophy:

...Rick Scarborough, an aspiring successor to the previous generation of conservative Christian leaders... recently argued that his allies were wrong to balk at Mr. Huckabee’s turn toward environmentalism and "social justice."

"Can you imagine Jesus ignoring the plight of the disenfranchised and downtrodden while going after the abortionist?" Mr. Scarborough wrote on the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com.

Brett and Alex Harris, the young evangelicals who created the online network of Huckabee supporters "Huck's Army" explained:

...[H]e believed in a Christian obligation to care for prenatal "life" and also education, health care, jobs and other aspects of "life." "It is a new kind of evangelical conservative position," Brett Harris said.

Huckabee's appeal has crossed over to many Catholics, for similar reasons:

..[T]he Web site Catholic Online, a hub for dedicated church members, prais[es] Mr. Huckabee’s opposition to abortion rights and his empathy for the poor as consistent with the social teachings of the church.

Although mainstream conservative publications like the Wall Street Journal have correctly categorized Huckabee's views as "religious left", that's entirely all right with these young evangelicals. The NY Times quotes one of them as saying, "Huckabee is a change for the conservative Christian movement, and a welcome one."

This is yet another instance of the playing out of the principles identified by Ayn Rand in her classic essay, "Anatomy of Compromise" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal:

In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.

...When two men (or groups) hold the same basic principles, yet oppose each other on a given issue, it means that at least one of them is inconsistent. Since basic principles determine the ultimate goal of any long-range process of action, the person who holds a clearer, more consistent view of the end to be achieved, will be more consistently right in his choice of means; and the contradictions of his opponent will work to his advantage, psychologically and existentially.

Psychologically, the inconsistent person will endorse and propagate the same ideas as his adversary, but in a weaker, diluted form and thus will sanction, assist, and hasten his adversary's victory, creating in the minds of their disputed following the impression of his adversary's greater honesty and courage, while discrediting himself by an aura of evasion and cowardice.

Existentially, every step or measure taken to achieve their common goal will necessitate further and more crucial steps or measures in the same direction (unless the goal is rejected and the basic principles reversed) thus strengthening the leadership of the consistent person and reducing the inconsistent one to impotence.

The conflict will follow that course regardless of whether the basic principles shared by the two adversaries are right or wrong, true or false, rational or irrational.

In other words, the less-consistent older evangelicals who still support some diluted form of capitalism, because they (erroneously) believe that their economics follows from their Christian philosophy will eventually lose to the more-consistent evangelicals who (correctly) recognize that their Christian altruist ethics will require government redistribution of wealth, "universal health care", environmentalism in the name of "Christian stewardship", etc.

Even if Huckabee does not win the Presidency in 2008 (and I do not believe he has quite enough support to do so), his candidacy will have seeded the ground for a future Christian president much like Huckabee, but who is even more explicit and consistent in his opposition to capitalism and individual rights due to his Christian philosophy. And that is the real danger that Huck's Army poses today.

Quick Roundup 291

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Creeping Paternalism I

California, whose environmental regulations have prevented any new power plants from being built there for about twenty years, has finally learned its lesson!

Add thermostats to the list of private property the government would like to regulate as the state of California looks to require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year.

Or not.

Economists and libertarians, upon learning such news, will discuss how foolish it is to use even more government interference in the economy to "solve" a problem ultimately caused by government interference in the economy and they would be right -- except that in California, the commonly accepted purpose of the government moved from "protection of individual rights" to "protection of Gaia from man" long ago.

No degree of intelligence can save a polity whose dominant philosophy places other considerations above the protection of individual rights. It is tempting to dismiss Californians as idiots, but their problem is bad philosophy, something economists and libertarians refuse to see. (HT: Michael Gold)

Creeping Paternalism II

Meanwhile, in Great Britain, anyone with his wits about him will wish that the only thing Big Brother had his eye on at the moment was his thermostat:

Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

...

But patients' groups said that they were "totally opposed" to Mr Brown's plan, saying that it would take away patients' rights over their own bodies. [bold added]

This has been going on in other countries (e.g., Austria, France, and Portugal) for some time, and some have even floated the idea of doing the same thing in the United States. My reaction upon hearing about this for the first time bears repeating:

American defaults could "just" be flipped around? That's my body, asshole, and possibly my life you're talking about like it's a damned toggle switch! Whether I part myself out is up to me. The "difference" between the United States and "parts of Europe" is not so much that "the defaults" are different, but why they are different: In the United States, the government is designed to protect individual rights by default, not infringe upon them. The argument against the government applying "libertarian paternalism" in cases like this, and in getting it away from more benign instances like the one I cited above, is that the government should respect individual rights.

As Mike N put it recently, "[T]o surrender any responsibility for our own survival is actually a surrender of our freedom and those to whom we surrender that freedom will necessarily control that part of our lives."

Anyone who, at the same time he demands cradle-to-grave care from the government and feels violated by having Big Brother operating his thermostat or yanking organs from his lifeless (?) body should check his premises. To such a person, I would offer the following hint: It is correct to feel violated.

Dim Bulbs at the New York Times

In an article with the unintentionally ironic title, "Any Other Bright Ideas?" Julie Scelfo of the New York Times discusses how lousy the light from a selection of Bush Bulbs tested by the Grey Lady's staff turned out to be.

One idea that was never so much as brought up in passing was the most obvious one to me: Calling for a repeal of the law that is going to make Edison Bulbs illegal in a few years.

I guess the freedom to illuminate one's home as one pleases doesn't really mean that much to the staff of the Times.

Good New, Bad News

As a certain self-described "secular conservative" might put it, the "good news" is that Rudy Giuliani was endorsed some time ago by Pat Robertson.

[T]he religious right is preparing itself to settle for a kind of bare minimum from the Republican presidential candidate. It is preparing itself to subordinate its religious agenda to a secular agenda. I don't mean that Republicans in general, or religious voters in particular, will become atheists or drop their religious beliefs, but rather that they will accept that their political preferences are--and should be--driven primarily by the secular concerns of war and taxes.

I have one word to describe this development (at best): hudna.

But setting that aside for the moment, the bad news is that among evangelicals, hypocrites like Robertson are a dying breed.

Even if Huckabee does not win the Presidency in 2008 (and I do not believe he has quite enough support to do so), his candidacy will have seeded the ground for a future Christian president much like Huckabee, but who is even more explicit and consistent in his opposition to capitalism and individual rights due to his Christian philosophy. And that is the real danger that Huck's Army poses today.

Or perhaps, rather than just "bad news", we should color that as a "silver lining". The sooner the opposition to capitalism and individual rights of the religious right becomes apparent, the sooner it can be opposed more easily as inimical to these values by those of us who hold them.

The Story of the iPhone

Reader Dismuke pointed me to an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how Steve Jobs made the iPhone happen:

It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone. According to Paul Roth, AT&T's president of marketing, the carrier is exploring new products and services -- like mobile banking -- that take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities. "We're thinking about the market differently," Roth says. In other words, the very development that wireless carriers feared for so long may prove to be exactly what they need. It took Steve Jobs to show them that. [bold added]

I don't own an iPhone, but one of the great things about such innovations is that they end up benefiting even non-customers.

Goin' Back to New Orleans

For Christmas, I got a two-CD set of classics by Dr. John called Dr. John: The Definitive Pop Collection and have really enjoyed it. Here's a YouTube video of one of the songs.


And here is his official web site.

-- CAV

Allowing restaurants to make money off hungry people is wrong

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Statism doesn’t sound as great when it comes to other fields, does it?

Mayor Thomas M. Menino embarked on a highly public campaign yesterday to block CVS Corp. and other retailers from opening medical clinics inside their stores… “Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.”

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Aristotle on Anger and Laughter

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

An interesting tidbit from Aristotle's Rhetoric:

The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. We must arrange what we have to say about each of them under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. The same is true of the other emotions.

Aristotle's subsequent dissection of anger is particularly interesting for its view of proper and improper humor. (I've added some paragraph breaks to the online text to make it more readable. And yes, it's well worth reading in full.)

Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one's friends. If this is a proper definition of anger, it must always be felt towards some particular individual, e.g. Cleon, and not 'man' in general. It must be felt because the other has done or intended to do something to him or one of his friends. It must always be attended by a certain pleasure--that which arises from the expectation of revenge. For since nobody aims at what he thinks he cannot attain, the angry man is aiming at what he can attain, and the belief that you will attain your aim is pleasant. Hence it has been well said about wrath,

Sweeter it is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetness,
And spreads through the hearts of men.

It is also attended by a certain pleasure because the thoughts dwell upon the act of vengeance, and the images then called up cause pleasure, like the images called up in dreams.

Now slighting is the actively entertained opinion of something as obviously of no importance. We think bad things, as well as good ones, have serious importance; and we think the same of anything that tends to produce such things, while those which have little or no such tendency we consider unimportant.

There are three kinds of slighting--contempt, spite, and insolence. (1) Contempt is one kind of slighting: you feel contempt for what you consider unimportant, and it is just such things that you slight. (2) Spite is another kind; it is a thwarting another man's wishes, not to get something yourself but to prevent his getting it. The slight arises just from the fact that you do not aim at something for yourself: clearly you do not think that he can do you harm, for then you would be afraid of him instead of slighting him, nor yet that he can do you any good worth mentioning, for then you would be anxious to make friends with him. (3) Insolence is also a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved. (Retaliation is not 'insolence', but vengeance.)

The cause of the pleasure thus enjoyed by the insolent man is that he thinks himself greatly superior to others when ill-treating them. That is why youths and rich men are insolent; they think themselves superior when they show insolence. One sort of insolence is to rob people of the honour due to them; you certainly slight them thus; for it is the unimportant, for good or evil, that has no honour paid to it. So Achilles says in anger:

He hath taken my prize for himself and hath done me dishonour,

And

Like an alien honoured by none,

meaning that this is why he is angry. A man expects to be specially respected by his inferiors in birth, in capacity, in goodness, and generally in anything in which he is much their superior: as where money is concerned a wealthy man looks for respect from a poor man; where speaking is concerned, the man with a turn for oratory looks for respect from one who cannot speak; the ruler demands the respect of the ruled, and the man who thinks he ought to be a ruler demands the respect of the man whom he thinks he ought to be ruling. Hence it has been said

Great is the wrath of kings, whose father is Zeus almighty,

And

Yea, but his rancour abideth long afterward also,

their great resentment being due to their great superiority. Then again a man looks for respect from those who he thinks owe him good treatment, and these are the people whom he has treated or is treating well, or means or has meant to treat well, either himself, or through his friends, or through others at his request.

It will be plain by now, from what has been said, (1) in what frame of mind, (2) with what persons, and (3) on what grounds people grow angry. (1) The frame of mind is that of one in which any pain is being felt. In that condition, a man is always aiming at something. Whether, then, another man opposes him either directly in any way, as by preventing him from drinking when he is thirsty, or indirectly, the act appears to him just the same; whether some one works against him, or fails to work with him, or otherwise vexes him while he is in this mood, he is equally angry in all these cases.

Hence people who are afflicted by sickness or poverty or love or thirst or any other unsatisfied desires are prone to anger and easily roused: especially against those who slight their present distress. Thus a sick man is angered by disregard of his illness, a poor man by disregard of his poverty, a man aging war by disregard of the war he is waging, a lover by disregard of his love, and so throughout, any other sort of slight being enough if special slights are wanting. Each man is predisposed, by the emotion now controlling him, to his own particular anger.

Further, we are angered if we happen to be expecting a contrary result: for a quite unexpected evil is specially painful, just as the quite unexpected fulfillment of our wishes is specially pleasant. Hence it is plain what seasons, times, conditions, and periods of life tend to stir men easily to anger, and where and when this will happen; and it is plain that the more we are under these conditions the more easily we are stirred.

These, then, are the frames of mind in which men are easily stirred to anger. The persons with whom we get angry are those who laugh, mock, or jeer at us, for such conduct is insolent. Also those who inflict injuries upon us that are marks of insolence. These injuries must be such as are neither retaliatory nor profitable to the doers: for only then will they be felt to be due to insolence. Also those who speak ill of us, and show contempt for us, in connexion with the things we ourselves most care about: thus those who are eager to win fame as philosophers get angry with those who show contempt for their philosophy; those who pride themselves upon their appearance get angry with those who show contempt for their appearance and so on in other cases. We feel particularly angry on this account if we suspect that we are in fact, or that people think we are, lacking completely or to any effective extent in the qualities in question. For when we are convinced that we excel in the qualities for which we are jeered at, we can ignore the jeering.

Again, we are angrier with our friends than with other people, since we feel that our friends ought to treat us well and not badly. We are angry with those who have usually treated us with honour or regard, if a change comes and they behave to us otherwise: for we think that they feel contempt for us, or they would still be behaving as they did before. And with those who do not return our kindnesses or fail to return them adequately, and with those who oppose us though they are our inferiors: for all such persons seem to feel contempt for us; those who oppose us seem to think us inferior to themselves, and those who do not return our kindnesses seem to think that those kindnesses were conferred by inferiors. And we feel particularly angry with men of no account at all, if they slight us. For, by our hypothesis, the anger caused by the slight is felt towards people who are not justified in slighting us, and our inferiors are not thus justified.

Again, we feel angry with friends if they do not speak well of us or treat us well; and still more, if they do the contrary; or if they do not perceive our needs, which is why Plexippus is angry with Meleager in Antiphon's play; for this want of perception shows that they are slighting us--we do not fail to perceive the needs of those for whom we care. Again we are angry with those who rejoice at our misfortunes or simply keep cheerful in the midst of our misfortunes, since this shows that they either hate us or are slighting us. Also with those who are indifferent to the pain they give us: this is why we get angry with bringers of bad news. And with those who listen to stories about us or keep on looking at our weaknesses; this seems like either slighting us or hating us; for those who love us share in all our distresses and it must distress any one to keep on looking at his own weaknesses.

Further, [we feel angry] with those who slight us before five classes of people: namely, (1) our rivals, (2) those whom we admire, (3) those whom we wish to admire us, (4) those for whom we feel reverence, (5) those who feel reverence for us: if any one slights us before such persons, we feel particularly angry. Again, we feel angry with those who slight us in connexion with what we are as honourable men bound to champion--our parents, children, wives, or subjects. And with those who do not return a favour, since such a slight is unjustifiable. Also with those who reply with humorous levity when we are speaking seriously, for such behaviour indicates contempt. And with those who treat us less well than they treat everybody else; it is another mark of contempt that they should think we do not deserve what every one else deserves. Forgetfulness, too, causes anger, as when our own names are forgotten, trifling as this may be; since forgetfulness is felt to be another sign that we are being slighted; it is due to negligence, and to neglect us is to slight us.

The persons with whom we feel anger, the frame of mind in which we feel it, and the reasons why we feel it, have now all been set forth. Clearly the orator will have to speak so as to bring his hearers into a frame of mind that will dispose them to anger, and to represent his adversaries as open to such charges and possessed of such qualities as do make people angry.

Just consider the contrast: in our modern world, expressing any anger in response to insolent remarks suggests the grave moral defect of failing to laugh at yourself. What a horrible package-deal that is! To laugh at one's own trivial, silly errors is a far cry from laughing at one's most precious values. Yet so many people fail to see the difference -- or refuse to do so.

The Internet through the Crystal Ball

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The below video, which I encountered at Snopes.com, is a remarkably good projection from the mid-1960's of certain aspects of how computers would eventually be used on a daily basis in America.


Regarding the general accuracy of the predictions, the urban legend site states that:

[A]lthough the technological concepts expressed in the video may be familiar to us, the specific forms used to realize them are somewhat different than their common modern implementations. [For example, t]he bills and tax forms the husband works with are scanned images of paper forms rather than electronic forms. [my bold]

One thing not mentioned at Snopes pops up at the tail end of the clip, which names an Orwellian-sounding "communal service agency" -- Was I supposed to capitalize that? -- as being in charge of the whole network.

One thing these prognosticators sound like they completely missed -- just like all the science fiction programming that confidently projected us all as socialists by now -- was that it would be capitalism that would bring the potential of computing to fruition and that increased government involvement in the day-to-day running of the Internet looms as a very serious threat to everyone who wants to take full advantage of this spectacularly useful means of communication.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added time at which the video was made.

When A Crocodile Really Cries

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A lot of conservatives such as Mike Gallagher think that Hillary Clinton's tears were fake. Neal Boortz writes,

Throughout the entire Clinton presidency Hillary's husband waved a succession of his girlfriends in front of her face. Did she ever cry in public? Not that I can remember. But let someone ask her how a campaign is affecting her and here come the tears. Don't you ladies realize how phony she is?

I think the tears were real and unplanned. As an actor, I know that tears do not always come when you want them onstage. I don't think Clinton is that good an actor.

Hillary Clinton was expressing self-pity because she might lose an election. Why is it hard to believe she would shed a tear over that? Power is a high value to her, if not the highest. If she doesn't win the presidency, she'll cry a river. You bet she will.

Boortz is completely wrong, unless by "phony" he means the Clinton marriage. Hillary Clinton would not cry over Bill's philandering. Obviously, they have made some arrangement in their marriage that allows Bill to screw around. At most she would get pissed off because his idiotic recklessness threatens the couple's pursuit of power.

I know it's hard to believe anything happens by coincidence to a Clinton. Hillary has been caught planting questions in this campaign. And then there was that moment on the beach at Normandy during the Clinton Presidency when Bill was walking along and happened to see a pile of stones that he rearranged into a cross (gag me). Of course, it turned out that the stones had been preset on the beach by aides; the whole thing was staged.

Furthermore, Hillary's tears apparently turned the New Hampshire election for her. Some Democrat women that would have voted for Obama came back to Hillary after she cried. The tears were precisely what Clinton needed to gain some sympathy. They worked. How then, could they not have been purposeful?

As with all conspiracy theories, people attribute too much intelligence to the players involved. Democrats do this when they credit every coincidence that helps Bush to Karl Rove's brilliant foresight. If some genius in Hillary's campaign had said to her, "You need to shed a few tears," some other genius would have argued, "Are you nuts? Do you remember Muskie in New Hampshire?" After all the arguments and phone calls with consultants the last thing Hillary Clinton would have been able to do is cry spontaneously at the right moment as she did.

Sometimes people just get lucky.

She cried because she might have been thwarted in her fight for power and that made some women vote for her. It's a lesson Hillary won't forget: the path to power is to show you really care about getting it.

Hoary Old Chestnuts

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

“Ever tried going into St. Paul’s and offering to re-write the Bible?” – Lily Pepper to George Pepper, married vaudevillians, on his refusal to drop their act's stale joke material, in “Red Peppers, an Interlude with Music,” from Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 (1935)

I rarely bother to beat dead horses. God is a dead horse, although religion is not quite as dead as most atheists believe, because it is alive and snorting and being harnessed to contemporary American politics. That is religion’s special danger; churches of all stripes and sects are enlisting their congregations in the army for various welfare state, environmentalist, and collectivist crusades. Their primary object is to resurrect the country’s alleged “Christian” values and rid that “Holy Land” of the infidel, the atheist, and incidentally clean up the earth, stop global warming, and herd everyone into a welfare state corral. It is God’s will, they say, to take care of the lame, halt and poor by impoverishing the healthy, the independent, and the industrious.

At least two presidential candidates earnestly want to recapture the land in the name of God: Mike Huckabee, uncharismatic Baptist preacher, and Mitt Romney, practicing Mormon, who said he wishes to banish atheists from the country. Neither questions the morality of the secular application of his altruist creed in any fundamental way: the welfare state. The other presidential candidates bring God into their rhetoric only when they think it prudent. Each wishes to subdue the kind of atheist who does not believe in the mystical benefits of collectivism and involuntary servitude, to indenture him to them against his will for the sake of “giving back” to the national community, and thereby create a legacy for the candidate of being the “savior” of the “public good” and promoter of “social justice.”

In the book I discuss below, I encountered one unattributed statement that aptly sums up the character and mentality of each of the current crop of presidential hopefuls. In a revealing description of the many fantasies of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and Gestapo, the author remarks: “But one of his characteristics was much more widely shared – his mind had not been encouraged to grow. Filled with information and opinion, he had no critical powers.”

And he certainly harbored an animus for them, did not welcome them in others, and counted on their absence in others – from Hitler down to the German populace – to sustain his totalitarian powers of life and death. To exercise one’s critical powers in Nazi Germany was to risk a death sentence. For all their blather about the need for undefined “change” and the value of dubiously boasted “experience,” each of the presidential candidates wears that double stigma on his forehead – an absence of critical powers and the insidious hope that no one else possesses them, either.

But, I digress. A friend gave me a Christmas present, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, selected and introduced throughout by Christopher Hitchens (Philadelphia: De Capo Press, 2007, 499 pp.), author of the notoriously successful bestseller, God is Not Great, which exhaustively recounts the evil of religion and the imbecility of the idea of God under his various aliases.

I should state here that I became an atheist at a very early age, when I questioned the credibility and existence of Santa Claus. That is, I could not accept as a truth or even as the remotest likelihood a being who could somehow fly through the air from the North Pole, pulled in a sleigh by eight tiny reindeer, the rumble seat top heavy with presents for every child on earth, circumnavigate the globe in one evening, and return to the Arctic undetected even by Norad. I was aware that there were millions of children like myself around the world, and that not all of them could boast of working chimneys in their houses for Santa to squeeze into and shimmy down into what should have been roaring fires on cold winter nights. Also, I had observed that the roofs of most houses were too small to accommodate eight reindeer, regardless of their size. Further, most of the brightly wrapped presents it was claimed he hauled in his sleigh came in manufacturers’ packaging.

Had I been able to intelligibly formulate them then, questions lurked in my mind that I could have asked my nominally Catholic foster parents: “Did the companies give these toys to Santa Claus to pass out to children? Or did they outsource their manufacture to his own shop, where his elfin helpers assembled them? Did his sleigh have retractable wheels that allowed him to land on roofs in places where it didn’t snow? How would he know I had been naughty or nice in the year, unless you told him?”

You see where this was leading me: ultimately to comprehensive disbeliefs in not only Santa, but in tooth fairies, the Easter Bunny, Heaven (especially when I first saw a photograph of the Andromeda galaxy), Hell, Limbo, Purgatory, angels, Satan, saints, ghosts, goblins, and every other kind of supernatural entity. One by one, the spirits, idols, and otherworldly realms fell victim to my loyalty to reality. Logic, according to the OED, is “the science of reasoning, proof, thinking, or inference.” More fundamentally, logic, wrote Ayn Rand, is “the art of non-contradictory identification,” and “rests on the axiom that existence exists.” (The Ayn Rand Lexicon) The purported, magical attributes of the beings and realms contradicted the evidence of my senses and abused my logical mind. End of argument.

Until I applied logic to religion itself, I innocently subscribed to the delusion that my “soul” was a kind of ectoplasmatic representation of my torso, and that my two tummy freckles were the marks of indelible sins, one of them presumably “original.”

So, God, the master wizard cum bogeyman of them all, had ceased to be a moral adviser and a vengeful threat long before I entered high school, simply because I knew he was not and could not be real, no more real to me than the volitional brooms unleashed by Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. (For many of the same reasons, I never developed a liking for the device of talking animals, either, animated or otherwise.)

And, while I refuse to argue with anyone about the existence or non-existence of God, Jahveh, Allah or any of the other one hundred and ninety late gods and deities listed in H.L. Mencken’s “Memorial Service” (one of the shorter essays in The Portable Atheist, and anything but funereal in sentiment), and have always been reluctant to waste time composing a rebuttal to such an absurd idea (that is, anyone who still needed convincing that there was no God, may as well still believe in Santa Claus), it was a breath of fresh air to read forty-seven essays and chapter excerpts penned by writers endowed with critical powers and bedeviled enough by the issue to perform the task.

For an incorrigible atheist like myself, these essays are both edifying and amusing. They begin with Lucretius’s (96-55 BC) “On the Nature of Things,” a poem that scuttles belief in gods – and pre-Christian gods, no less – and ends with Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “How (and Why) I Became an Infidel,” an account of how she left Islam, which she damns in its entirety, seeing nothing in it that lends itself to “reform” or “moderation,” and refused to accept a substitute religion, as Christians apparently pressed her to do.

It is hard to choose the most illuminating essays in this collection. One thing a reader is sure to come away with after reading, for example, Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and Ibn Warraq’s “The Koran: The Totalitarian Nature of Islam” and Sam Harris’s “In the Shadow of God” is the knowledge that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all religions that were knocked together from various pre-history pagan and tribal lores and barbarisms, sewn into their separate textual quilts over millennia by plagiarists, monks, scholars, imaginative tongue-in-cheek scribes and anyone else who derived sanctimonious pleasure from putting one over on the ignorant and credulous, which, beginning with the collapse of the Roman Empire and ending with the Enlightenment, was just about everyone. (It was news to me, for example, that one could be burned at the stake for owning a Bible that was in one’s local language; one was supposed to rely on clerical authority about what the Bible actually said, and not commit the sin of seeing it for oneself.)

The reader will also learn, if he did not already suspect it, that the Bible and Koran especially were works-in-progress for about 1,500 years, and underwent constant emendations, corrections, excisions, deletions, revisions, additions, fraudulent attributions, and mistranslations in order to make them conform to preferred dogma or to make them “relevant” to the angst of the era. Neither the Bible nor the Koran of a millennium ago would be recognizable by modern day Christians or Muslims.

Neither religion can claim to be original even as “revelation,” that is, as a direct communication from God or Allah, for both cadged the practice of Bronze Age shamans, witch doctors and holy men, that the not-to-be-doubted-or-questioned “Word” was ideally received by persons eminently lacking in critical powers, such as the bandit Mohammed and that ambitious camp-follower and prototype anti-Semite, St. Paul, both of whom laid the groundwork for the future and ongoing prejudice against and persecution of Jews.

Speaking of Jews, Sam Harris, in his chapter “In the Shadow of God," from his book, The End of Faith, devotes many pages to their demonization by Christian doctrine and superstition (not that there is much of a difference between them).

“But for sheer gothic absurdity nothing surpasses the medieval concern over host desecration, the punishment of which preoccupied pious Christians for centuries. The doctrine of transubstantiation was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council…and thereafter became the centerpiece of the Christian (now Catholic) faith….Henceforth, it was an indisputable fact of this world that the communion host is actually transformed at the Mass into the living body of Jesus Christ. After this incredible dogma had been established, by mere recitation, to the satisfaction of everyone, Christians began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the hands of heretics and Jews. (One might wonder why eating the body of Jesus would be any less of a torment to him.) Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again [Christian dogma alleges that the Jews betrayed him because they did not believe he was the Messiah], knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime.”

I laughed out loud when I reached “defenseless crackers.” I recall kneeling at the communion railing and having that tasteless, cardboard-like wafer plopped onto my tongue, and then nearly choking on it while trying to swallow it (we were cautioned not to chew it; that would have been “disrespectful”!). It was shortly after my “first communion” that I began to associate the whole ritual with cannibalism by proxy. It made no sense and the idea and ritual of the Eucharist became repugnant to me.

(I also laughed out loud when I read a December 30th column by Jeremy Clarkson, “Unhand my patio heater, archbishop,” in The Sunday Times (London), which ought to be included in a second volume of The Portable Atheist, in which he upbraids Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, for being a daft, yeah-saying hypocrite.

“Then we must ask how much old Rowan really understands about the implications and causes of global warming. He thinks that taking a holiday in Florida and driving a Range Rover caused the flooding in Tewkesbury this summer. But then he also believes it’s possible for a man to walk on water and feed a crowd of 5,000 with nothing more than a couple of sardines.”)

Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God is Dead” essay is one of the best indictments of the Bible that I have ever read. Posing the conundrum of why God (or Allah, or whomever) is considered to be the be-all and end-all of morality – originating morality and rewarding it and punishing its delinquency – she writes:

“Consider first God’s moral character, as revealed in the Bible. He routinely punishes people for the sins of others. He punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth, for Eve’s sin. He punishes all human beings by condemning them to labor, for Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:16-18). He regrets his creation, and in a fit of pique, commits genocide and ecocide by flooding the earth (Gen. 6:7). He hardens Pharaoh’s heart against freeing the Israelites (Ex. 7:3), so as to provide the occasion for visiting plagues upon the Egyptians, who, as helpless subjects of a tyrant, had no part in Pharaoh’s decision. (So much for respecting free will, the standard justification for the existence of evil in the world.)”

I am willing to bet that somewhere, at some time, some preacher or priest has latched onto the tale of the Great Flood and charged that it was God’s punishment for the prehistorical episode of anthropogenic global warming, doubtless ascribing the phenomenon to all those atmosphere polluting, pre-industrial age fires that baked men’s bread and kept them warm and allowed them to live. That, of course, would cast Al Gore in the role of prophet, a role to which he has proven to be amenable.

Anderson similarly exposes just about every book of the Bible and the enormity of its absurdity and of its obscenity as a handbook for ethical guidance, particularly because she demonstrates that God, as he is represented anywhere in the Bible, is a certified, psychopathic fruitcake. One cannot help but conclude that it is God who ought to be punished for his callous brutality, inhuman crimes, and blatantly irrational behavior.

Ibn Warraq’s essay on the pitfalls, fabrications, contradictions, and immorality of Islam is long but absolutely priceless. On the subject of miracles, which Mohammed was not supposed to be able to perform because he was a mortal, for example, she relates how he miraculously fed thousands from a single lamb kid. Doubtless this tale was snitched from the one of Christ’s feeding 5,000 people with his miracle of the loaves and fishes (“a couple of sardines”) and adapted to inflate the Prophet’s importance.

Unless I am mistaken, one point that none of the contributors to The Portable Atheist dwelt on was the fact that the three religions that have tortured the West for millennia – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – share a common geographical origin: the Mideast. There might be some significance to that fact. That is where each creed’s initial population of believers first appeared, grew in number, and spread to Europe and North Africa. Perhaps the climate contributed to the phenomena, or perhaps it was that combined with the nature of the region’s topography, flora and fauna.

Another subject I would like to have seen discussed in greater depth was God’s ostentation, coupled with his apparent shyness. He has appeared to no one but Moses, and that was as a burning bush. Both Christianity and Islam predict that he will make a Second Coming, announcing himself, or Christ announcing himself, with a “shout” (shouting what?). For a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and frankly narcistic, he curiously finds it necessary to put on a big show of his Second Coming with blaring trumpets and resurrecting the dead and making everyone who ever existed (including Cro-Magnon men?) stand in line to hear his sentencing to heaven or hell – according to what is recorded in a big book. Well, why would this omniscient being need a written record? Would he not know who has been naughty or nice, and just be able to snap his fingers and send one on his predestined way without all the show-offy pageantry?

A few contributors only touched on the subject of what I would call God’s self-esteem deficiency. Why does he need to be worshipped? Does he derive some joy in having people grovel before him in a quivering funk? Is he a sadist? Does he not feel complete unless someone is sweating bullets over the nature of his eternal reward or punishment? This nasty character and psychological profile of God differs in no fundamental from that of a common neighborhood bully or dictator, or even from that of any of the current presidential candidates.

These and other questions about God’s psychological and moral makeup apparently have never occurred to theologians, priests, rabbis, mullahs and their ilk. But then again, these creatures have a vested interest in keeping God’s profile and his purposes inscrutable and exempt from rational scrutiny. That makes these mortals accomplices to an unprecedented scam.

I end this foray into atheism and religion with a memorable quotation from an equally refreshing article in the April/May issue of Free Inquiry, Gerd Lüdemann’s “What Really Happened? The Rise of Primitive Christianity, 30-70 C.E.” In summing up the reasons why Christianity was able to spread through the untiring machinations of St. Paul of Tarsus, he concludes:

“…[T]he success of Pauline Christianity reflected its accord with the spirit of the time. The world had become weary of thought. People wanted a convenient way to secure their immortality, and one of the most popular was by initiation into mysteries, two examples of which were baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Let us be blunt: Paul’s brand of Christianity – which became the movement’s normative form – constituted a spiritual reaction against the Greek Enlightenment at the same time when state law, customs, and even forms of greeting came to be dominated by authoritarianism. The quintessential freedom of ancient Greece was throttled along with the constitutional spirit of the Roman state. Prerogative replaced research; faith substituted for knowledge; independence of the human spirit gave way to humble subordination to an all-powerful deity in the sky; and slavish observance of divine commandments supplanted natural human morality. When Paul’s work was done, the downfall of the vibrant, ancient culture that had grown up out of Hellenism was complete.”

Substitute a few of the subjects in Lüdemann’s lament, and it could very well be a description of our own time. And comical Lily and George Pepper, bickering and washed-up hoofers and purveyors of “hoary old chestnuts,” might have been surprised had they gone into St. Paul’s and offered to re-write the Bible.

It had been done many, many times before. Why not again? They would have been as qualified as anyone else to undertake the task. All they would have needed to come up with was new material, keeping it clean, fresh and fragrant.

Cold Weather? I Blame Global Warming

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There's been a fair amount of extreme cold weather recently around the world. Of course, many environmentalists are attributing this to global warming. Geophysicist David Deming notes:

Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.

Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri are just emerging from a destructive ice storm that left at least 36 people dead and a million without electric power. People worldwide are being reminded of what used to be common sense: Cold temperatures are inimical to human welfare and warm weather is beneficial. Left in the dark and cold, Oklahomans rushed out to buy electric generators powered by gasoline, not solar cells. No one seemed particularly concerned about the welfare of polar bears, penguins or walruses. Fossil fuels don't seem so awful when you're in the cold and dark.

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up.

Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

Lights Out!

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since first hearing about the Energy Bill provision outlawing incandescent light bulbs by 2014, I have seen an explosion of grumbling on the web about the proposed replacement to the traditional light bulb, the CFB (Compact Fluorescent Bulb). People are complaining that the quality of light is inadequate, that the mercury inside CFBs poses serious health risks if they break, that they can cause migraines or even seizures in some people, that they don't work well with dimmers or three-way lights, etc. While I agree with this assessment of fluorescent light bulbs, I don't see the philosophical justification for all this whining.

If we as a nation have sanctioned the altruistic ideology prosthelytized by Greenpeace, Earth First, Al Gore, and the rest of the Greeninites, then we have nothing to complain about. Is one man's personal pleasure at all relevant to ethics or politics? Environmentalists, the church, and altruists around the globe say "No." By what standard can you complain about your own selfish convenience? You have an altruistic duty to serve society, and our Big Brother has determined that CFBs are best for the greater good. One man's quality of life is nothing compared to the good of society, or the good of the earth.

We should be grateful that we have this opportunity to exercise our moral agency -- that we have the opportunity to sacrifice. Isn't sacrifice the standard of morality? Consider: what would Jesus do in this situation? Assuming he would lower himself to such earthly pleasures as housing and artificial lighting, we can be certain that he wouldn't lament the necessity to sacrifice his quality of life for the good of the whole. He would embrace such a sacrifice.

If people thought that fluorescent bulbs were truly superior to incandescent lighting in most respects, then it wouldn't be a sacrifice to make the switch . Nor would the government have to mandate such a change. If left to their own devices, the free market would choose whichever form of lighting they thought best for their self-interest. It's a good thing we have the State to decide what is in the best interest of society, and then to impose that choice on everyone else. Otherwise, some individuals might refuse to sacrifice their judgment and personal interests to the greater good.

My advice to those now complaining about the enforced change to CFBs: go read the bible, or any major newspaper opinion page, or the political platform of any major candidate in this year's election. If you can discern any semblance of a philosophy from these sources, you will find that -- by far -- the dominant ideological trend in our culture is the worship of sacrifice: to the church, to society, and to Mother Earth. If you sanction this cultural trend, if you are a part of it, then I say: stop your whining! Be a good Little Brother, do your duty, screw in your shitty light bulb, and shut the fuck up.

And next time, be careful what you wish for...

--Dan Edge

Faith and Xenophobia

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Cal Thomas recently wrote a column about the rise of "no-go" zones in Britain -- Moslem enclaves where a de facto rule by Islamic law exists due to a failure by the government to protect individual rights throughout its territory. This failure is due in large part to the influence of multiculturalism on politics in Britain, as well as that of pragmatism on the part of many of its politicians.

Where there are large concentrations of Muslims in England, "no-go" zones are being established and, according to the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church of England's Bishop of Rochester, non-Muslims who "trespass" in such neighborhoods risk attack.

This is depressing, but it's pretty old news. Where things get more interesting is the next paragraph:

Nazir-Ali, a native of Pakistan and convert to Christianity, writes in The Sunday Telegraph that a spiritual vacuum in Britain, along with its indifference to the rise of Islamic extremism and a growing "multi-faith" society, is robbing the nation of its Christian identity and putting its future in jeopardy. He is not alone. A poll of the General Synod -- the Church's parliament -- shows that its senior leaders also believe that Britain is being damaged by uncontrolled immigration. [bold added]

Although England does have a national church, unlike the explicitly secular United States, its government, like that of the U.S. and the rest of modern Europe, has (until fairly recently) better protected individual rights, including the right to profess whatever religion one wishes. The fact is that Moslems who take to threatening non-Moslems are violating their individual rights and they should be stopped on that basis. Your right to practice your faith ends where my nose begins.

Whatever Christian roots religious toleration might have, they arise from the fact that religious leaders who hold political power tend to persecute or kill members of other religions, and enough Christians began to catch on once Christianity began splintering into multiple sects. Tolerance certainly does not spring from the basic epistemological method of religion, which is faith. In other words, religious tolerance is, to the religious, a necessary evil.

Thomas approvingly cites the Bishop's claim that the Bible teaches "that we have equal dignity and freedom because we are all made in God's image", but not before he promotes the false notion that only religion can lead to the truth:

Multiculturalism, globalism, and an emphasis on "inter-faith" (which is really inter-faithless because in this view Truth does not exist) are contributing to the decline of the West just as paganism, hedonism and greed undermined past empires. Rather than learn from their mistakes, the West thinks it can engage in such practices without consequence. [bold added]

I don't have time to refute Thomas as fully as he deserves here, but even the most cursory glance at one past empire, the Roman Empire, will show that it was pagan during its ascent and peak, and fell after it adopted Christianity. A more thorough analysis will show that Christianity contributed greatly to its collapse.

Having shown by example that Thomas is wrong about the "need" of great civilizations for Christianity, I will note that his contention very nicely explains the inordinate fear of immigration shown by the Bishop in England and so many American conservatives here. For if religion is the basis of individual rights (which it isn't), there can be no way to make a rational case for individual rights and thereby persuade those not of one's faith of the benefits of respecting the rights of others.

Or, as Ayn Rand once put it in her 1960 essay "Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World" (as reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It):

Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when mean deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, persuasion, communication, or understanding are impossible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. [bold added]

This is why religious persecution exists in the first place and it is why Bishop Nazir-Ali and Cal Thomas, ignorant or evasive of the actual nature of individual rights, seek to restrict immigration to the West rather than make the sorely-needed case for its governments to start protecting individual rights from religiously-motivated infringement.

In their better moments, they don't see how to make the case for individual rights. In their worst moments, they see religious hegemony as a normal, desirable state of affairs, and want their religion to be the one doing the dominating.

The solution to the "voluntary apartheid" of the Moslem enclaves that Thomas decries is for Britain to begin consistently protecting individual rights again -- not to turn itself into an even bigger Anglican or Christian enclave.

Isn't it funny how the faith of Moslem and Christian alike results in the same end result: A political system devoted to excluding those not of the same faith and enforcing religious law?

-- CAV

PS: Pursuant to a comment, I realize that one thing I should have made more explicit about Britain's woes is that its problems are twofold. First, its own citizens do not generally grasp the nature of individual rights well enough to insist on the proper course regarding these enclaves by the government. (Otherwise multiculturalist politicians would not have a prayer of being elected.) Second, the government is not protyecting individual rights.

Neither Thomas nor the bishop understand or advocate individual rights and, since both want Christianity involved in government, they would likely oppose the full protection of individual rights by their governments if they knew what that entailed. Such a prospect would preclude religion dictating government policy.

Finally, The bishop does have a point, but as I indicate in my reply to the first commenter, the blame lies not with immigration, but with the failure of the British government to enforce individual rights, including the fact that it runs a bloated welfare state.

Updates

1-9-07: Added a PS.

Did Christianity’s underdog origins allow the success of Western Civilization?

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

It’s interesting to note that with the exception of Christianity and some schools of Buddhism, every other major world religion were created as a means for the ruling regime to justify its grip on power as an expression of divine will. The divine hierarchy of the Old Testament’s angelic pantheon reflects and perpetuates the rigid social hierarchy of the ruling elite of its society. The god of the Old Testament demands taxes (sacrifices) accepts no competition (he murders over two million unbelievers) or critical questioning of the law, and presents a facade of voluntary submission (convert or face annihilation).

The New Testament on the other hand, was written before Christianity transformed to an institution of theocratic dictatorship. It presents a personal rather than collective choice (submit or you will burn in hell, as opposed to your tribe/descendants.) This subtle distinction may be responsible for the success of Western civilization, as secular rulers did not feel personally threatened when reason eroded the power of the church. (Of course, that did not stop the church itself from butchering secularists for as long as it could.) This is still not possible in the Islamic and Confucian world, where the secular and divine authority is united in a single institution. The attempt to introduce Aristotelian philosophy by Ibn-Rushd in particular, was wildly successful in the West, but because rational questioning was a threat to current regime, it was snuffed out by the institutionalization of doctrines such as the taqleed.

In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, Mahayana Buddhism has allowed a similar erosion of divine authority, creating the “Asian Tigers.” In this light, Communism can be seen as an attempt to preserve the union of divine and secular authority.

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Hoary Old Chestnuts II

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

“All ‘scriptural’ pseudo-scholarship is a strenuous attempt to make things come out right and to square a circle,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to another essay in The Portable Atheist, Martin Gardner’s “The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming.”

In light of the recent release by the National Academy of Sciences of its “final” word on creationism and “intelligent design,” Science, Evolution and Creationism, I thought it apropos to add some notes of my own that I made in the course of composing my January 3 commentary. This is not an exercise in beating a dead horse, as I denied wishing to do in “Hoary Old Chestnuts,” but rather a brief anatomical examination of some of the corpse that is religion – or, as Hitchens might put it, the shedding of some light on why a circle cannot be squared.

For the longest time, when the news media reports on the latest clash over the teaching of evolution and creationism or “intelligent design,” the reportage, especially in TV news, is usually accompanied by pictures or footage of various animals and natural phenomena, that is, by strictly benign images of things God purportedly “created” or “designed.” These as a rule include zebras, polar bears, tigers, and other photogenic wildlife, together with vistas of the Rockies, of rivers, forests, and the like. Never in my experience have I seen in such coverage pictures of things like flies, locusts, mosquitoes, plague bacilli, rats, boll weevils, hornworms, and other destructive life forms, or the devastation caused by earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, volcanic eruptions, droughts, and forest fires. Nor have I ever seen God credited with a pack of lions feasting on a downed wildebeest, or a polar bear ripping apart a seal, or a jaguar pouncing on a deer.

Nor have I ever seen God associated with living human skeletons, whether they are in Nazi death camps or in present day, famine-reduced Africa, nor the faces of emaciated children covered with flies or the deformed bodies of the inmates of state-run institutions in Eastern Europe.

All this is God’s doing – or so the priests and mystics claim.

If all these images were employed in TV reportage – particularly images of plague bacilli, rats, locusts, mosquitoes and any other parasite that can destroy but play no other role in their destructiveness or in the preservation of anything but their own parasitical existence – the question might be asked: Why did God create them? An advocate of “intelligent” design or creationism cannot credibly defend their existence, except to assert they are all part of God’s “plan.” And what is that “plan”? The advocate can only answer one of two ways: that they are a punishment for man’s disobedience or the like, or that the “plan” is inscrutable and beyond human comprehension. We do not even have the assurance that God will reveal the purpose of his “plan” when he stages his “Second Coming.”

But either answer sends the argument beyond reason and beyond debate into the spinning wheels of circular argumentation. Reason and debate, however, are not the favorite means of communication of the mystics, but rather preaching and appeals to emotion and an insistence on belief in defiance of human epistemology and a way to sanctimoniously “flip off” metaphysics.

All those non-benign things and more presumably adhere to God’s “plan,” and are products of his “creativity” and “intelligent” designing. One might be tempted to ask: What’s so “intelligent” about disease-carrying flies and mosquitoes? When man creates a new software program or vaccine, does he also concoct viruses or bacilli that would cripple the program or compromise the vaccine? No. But, God does, which is why I would characterize him as a psychopathic fruitcake.

Intelligence, however, is not a synonym for rationality. A villain can exercise intelligence. The key distinction between the terms is whether the intelligence is rational and pro-life, or irrational and anti-life. God, Allah, and all the other monotheistic supreme beings are in the same ward as Hannibal Lector.

When the theological notions of God’s plan, his omniscience, and the notion of man’s predestination encounter the concept of free will or volition, a multiple vehicle collision occurs from which only the concept of volition emerges unscathed.

If one possesses genuine volition, not only in regards to moral issues, but to everyday thinking and action, it would conflict with a supernatural “plan.” However, if every one of those attributes is claimed to be God’s “plan,” then it cannot be free will or volition that one possesses.

If God is omniscient, it presupposes that he knows in advance everything one will think and do. Again, this cannot be free will.

The same logic applies to the notion of predestination. If one is predestined from birth in all one’s thoughts and actions, then the concept of free will is superfluous. If one’s life, actions and end are predetermined by God, then the concept of free will is meaningless and a sham. Further, on the premise of predestination, if one commits a sin or a crime, why would God hold one accountable, if the sin or crime were predetermined? And if one performed a good action, or had no immoral thoughts, how could one be given credit for it by God, and rewarded? The notion of predestination obviates the concepts of reward and punishment.

The concept of free will or volition cannot be reconciled with any divine power or attribute. Nor can reality “square” with the idea of a supreme being. Moreover, it is fruitless to claim that God created man and the universe, and then retired from the scene as an impartial observer. On that premise, what would have been the point of creating anything?

The National Academy of Sciences report, however, asserts that science and religion – that is, reality and faith, or facts and wishful thinking – are not necessarily natural antagonists. It claims that “attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.” The presumably stellar panel that produced the NAS book, which concedes a place for the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in public schools, has reduced itself to the intellectual level of Rodney King. It effectively pleads, “Can’t science and religion just get along?”

No. One must destroy the other. Reason, the foundation of science, must dislodge faith, whose foundation is the unreal, from its role as a moral or “spiritual” guide.

The same book, reports the Times, “also denounces the arguments for a form of creationism called intelligent design, calling them devoid of evidence, ‘disproven’ or ‘simply false.’” “Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world,” states the book.

One step forward, two steps back. That is a retreat borne of compromise. It is also an instance of what Ayn Rand called the “soul/body dichotomy.” The panel members could not conceive of a metaphysics that did not admit the “disproven” and the “false,” nor of a limitless, reason-governed epistemology that rejects the unprovable and the fanciful and maintains a recognition of and loyalty to reality.

“In 1984 and again in 1999,” reported the Los Angeles Times on January 4 in an article, “Evolution Book Sees No Science-Religion Gap,” “the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most eminent scientific organization, produced books on the evidence supporting the theory of evolution and arguing against the introduction of creationism or other religious alternatives in public school science classes.” The 2008 report makes a fatal concession to religion, doubtless from political pressure from religious groups and perhaps also from a fear of “offending” those groups and consequently risking the Academy being embroiled a controversy it is reluctant to ignite, or more crucially, lacks the confidence it could argue and win.

But any concession by science to faith and mysticism means, ultimately, an abandonment of truth and reality. Faith and mysticism acquire the attribute of being “real,” while the truths discovered by science are shunted to the realm of subjectivism, allowing, for example, million year old fossils to be offered by religionists as proof of God’s “handiwork,” and not of evolution.

In her January 6 review of Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the Enlightenment in The New York Times, Ayaan Hirsi Ali applauds the book but has this reservation:

“Harris…fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.”

Romanticism or the Romantic movement was a cultural phenomenon spanning the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th. The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia aptly describes it as a movement which “emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental….Among its attitudes…was a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect….”

“Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism),” observes Ali, “are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.”

She could just as well be speaking about Christianity and its votaries when she remarks,

“Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and its moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism.”

Western leaders – and I am thinking of intellectual leaders as well as political ones – writes Ali, “must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.”

And that is not what the National Academy of Sciences has done. Although Science, Evolution and Creationism faults creationism – and by implication any species of mysticism, anti-reality, or anti-reason – within the same document it claims that science and religion can work together as partners.

Speaking of political leaders not allowing reason to prevail over sentiment, not many readers may be aware of Congressional House Resolution No. 888, referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on December 18, 2007, whose full title is: Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as “American Religious History Week” for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith. I will shred this presumptuous and wholly erroneous nonsense in a future commentary. Thanks to Mel McGuire, who was responding to “Hoary Old Chestnuts,” for bringing this perilous proposal to our attention.

In The Portable Atheist, one will read of numerous attempts by Christian and Islamic scholars and religious authorities to square their pet circles. It is thanks to the efficacy of reason that they have been found out.

Ibn Warraq’s “The Koran” discusses not only the invention of the Koran and the development of Islam, but also the invention of Christianity, as well, for the two are intimately linked to each other and to Judaism. One thing that might be noted is that the fabricators of Christianity and Islam were dishonest. As Warraq demonstrates in his essay, they invented biographical accounts of the lives of Christ and Mohammed in order to patch over holes in their separate dogmas. These in turn over time became unverifiable myths rife with miracles, and the myths in turn were seized upon by believers who wished them to be true.

In the course of his exhaustive but excellent essay, Warraq makes a number of interesting observations.

“Despite the fact that there were approximately sixty historians active during the first century of the Roman world, there is remarkably little corroboration of the Christian story of Jesus outside the Christian traditions. What there is, is very inconclusive and unhelpful – Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, the Younger Pliny.”

“The letters of [St.] Paul were written before Mark’s Gospel, and yet rather surprisingly they do not mention many of the details of Jesus’s life that we find in the Gospels; no allusions to Jesus’s parents, or to the Virgin Birth, or to Jesus’s place of birth; there is no mention of John the Baptist, Judas, nor to Peter’s denial of his master. As G.A. Wells points out, ‘they never refer to his trial before a Roman official [Pontius Pilate] nor to Jerusalem as the place of his execution. They mention none of the miracles he is supposed to have worked….’”

Warraq comments,

“Just as we find that the early Christians fabricated details of the life of Jesus in order to answer doctrinal points, so we find that Arab storytellers invented biographical material about Muhammad in order to explain difficult passages in the Koran.” Later, he writes, “Where Christianity arose from a fusion of Judaic and Greco-Roman ideas, Islam arose from Talmudic Judaic, Syriac Christian, and indirectly, Greco-Roman ideas.”

One will not hear that stated in any Sunday morning sermon or any Friday evening exhortation in a mosque.

I do not wish to make a career of arguing against God, religionists, creationism, and other supernatural fantasies. But, aside from The Portable Atheist and all the similar works cited in it, other books have been written that might be of interest to anyone fascinated by the subject. Dr. John A. Henderson alerted Rule of Reason to books he has written on God and religion and how they have had a deleterious effect on just about everyone, including politicians: A Deity for the New Millennium, Fear, Faith, Fact, Fancy, and the co-authored Judging God. His website is: www.johnhenderson-god.com. Mr. McGuire, cited above, also recommended Chris Rodda’s Liars for Jesus, the first title of a projected trilogy on religion, excerpts of which can be read at www.liarsforjesus.com. I have not read these latter books, and so cannot endorse them, but if Dr. Henderson and Mr. McGuire were encouraged by my last commentary on the subject of religion, I cannot imagine there would be any serious objection to recommending them.

And that is as much as I plan to discuss religion for a long while.

Trusting Computers?

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Here are some funny stories:
First, "The Register" reports: "The driver of a £96k Mercedes SL500 had a lucky escape after her satnav directed her down a winding track and straight into the River Sence in Sheepy Magna, Leicestershire..."



Next, we have the 78-year old man who's GPS told him to "make a U-turn immediately", when he was on a highway (an 80 MPH speed limit type).

Now, we have a guy in upstate New York, who was driving across a railroad track when his GPS told him to turn right. So, he turned right, onto the tracks, making like he was a train! The car got stuck -- probably those damn horizontal sleepers and troublesome ballast stones, so car unfriendly! He got out and the train smashed his car. According to other reports, not only did he wreck the car, but this ended up holding up the line for 2 hours.

Any lessons from this? Are these just funny stories to be forgotten, or is there a lesson from them? I don't know, but I wonder. The apparent stupidity is some type of mistake. Is it "trusting computers too much"? For example, if another human was sitting beside them and had given them the same instructions, would they have followed blindly?

Why do people have this type of trust in computers? After all, some person put the data into the computer. Is there something about getting instructions from a device that lulls some people into forgetting what is metaphysical and what is man-made?

Paul's Chickens Come Home

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

It was with no small measure of amusement yesterday that I learned that Ron Paul, the Republican presidential hopeful (and winner of the Gus Van Horn Dumpster Queen contest), is in hot water for allegedly racist comments he made (or allowed to be made in his name) in his old newsletter (PDF), The Ron Paul Political Report. Reactions among libertarians and other Ron Paul supporters -- being a radical for capitalism, I am neither -- has ranged from a shifting of support away from Paul, through claims that Paul's lapse has "nothing to do with the 'Paul Revolution'", all the way to attempts at a defense.

One reaction I looked at yesterday leads to the proper perspective:

I'll accept for the sake of argument the notion that he didn't know that this stuff was in the newsletter. But I can't imagine a responsible person permitting a publication under his name without reviewing it occasionally. I also can't imagine a responsible person permitting a publication under his name without vetting the editor/publisher sufficiently to keep out the sort of whackjobs who would publish stuff like this. How can you expect anyone so careless with his own "brand" to be any more careful with the country's "brand"? [bold added]

Except that the problem lies far deeper than mere "branding".

Libertarianism, as Peter Schwartz so ably showed in Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty, is a political movement based on the incorrect idea (and it is an idea) that philosophical ideas are irrelevant to the cause of freedom -- that there are many equally valid paths to laissez-faire capitalism.

On this score, a couple of quotes from the Schwartz piece are germane. First, he quotes none other than Murray Rothbard holding out the absence of intellectual standards inherent in the movement as a virtue:

... Libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner of philosophic (or nonphilosophic) positions, including emotivism, hedonism, Kantian a priorism, and many others. My own position grounds Libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology and metaphysics. But although those of us taking that position believe that only it provides a satisfactory groundwork as a basis for individual liberty, this is an argument within the libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding of Libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself. [Schwartz's emphasis]

With such a lack of standards, the motley collection of nut cases -- again, described by a libertarian (and long before the Paul campaign) -- who are attracted to the movement should surprise no one:

[Libertarianism] allows for an amazing diversity.... We've seen priests, monogamists, family men as the fellow-Libertarians of the gays, the sado-masochists, the leather-freaks, and those into what they call "rational bestiality".... Only Libertarians could gather together the homosexual motorcycle gang, the acid-dropper fascinated by the price of silver, and the Puerto Rican nationalist immersed in the Austrian school of economics.

Far from having "nothing to do with" the blind rebellion called the "Ron Paul Revolution", these kooky newsletters are a direct result of Paul's own contempt for the need to possess and spread into the culture a coherent political philosophy before attempting to halt our nation's headlong decent into anarchy or tyranny.

If fundamental ideas are not important, why bother putting out a quality newsletter? And why bother to take responsibility for something so inconsequential as a discussion of political ideas?

If Ron Paul weren't so busy distorting what capitalism means, my enjoyment of this scandal would be unblemished!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

New Hampshire: Night of the Living Dead

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Iowa gave us the shiny, happy people: Obama and Huckabee. New Hampshire gave us the grumpy old creeps: Clinton and McCain. Both Clinton and McCain had been pronounced dead, but the dead have come to life.

Perhaps New Hampshire's Democrats thought twice about Obama and decided they didn't want an empty suit -- or should I write an empty skin? Because in our multiculturalist culture his skin color is about the only concrete thing Obama has going for him. He'll be the first black president! The rest is a rhetoric of floating concepts meant to inspire, empty words such as hope, change and uniting America.

Republicans throughout the land breathe a sigh of relief and praise their supernatural deity. Thank you, Lord, for not taking Hillary from us; in thy name we will burn this witch in November. They had a bad few days as they watched Hillary Clinton's meltdown come 10 months too early. She cried in New Hampshire, but her fate is not to be Muskie's; she's still around and she will be the Democrat nominee.

I don't think John McCain has a chance of winning, but if he does win, it will be a disaster for America. This is a man who believes Americans should sacrifice for something greater than self-interest. If he is elected, I believe we will have mandatory national service -- two years of slavery to the state for every young person -- by 2012. John McCain will assault liberty more than Hillary Clinton could ever dream of doing with her high "negatives" and Republicans in Congress who only oppose the big government Democrats propose.

John McCain has suffered much in service to his country. Now he wants to make the rest of us suffer.

Tonight the ghouls clawed their way out of the grave. Now they trudge toward us moaning, "Brains... brains!"

Yaron Brook on Health Care

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Forbes.com has just published the following excellent opinion piece by Yaron Brook on health care:

The Right Vision Of Health Care
Yaron Brook 1.08.2008

With the primary season in full swing, the presidential candidates are fighting over what to do about the spiraling cost of health care--especially the cost of health insurance, which is becoming prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans.

The Democrats, not surprisingly, are proposing a massive increase in government control, with some even calling for the outright socialism of a single-payer system. Republicans are attacking this "solution." But although they claim to oppose the expansion of government interference in medicine, Republicans don't, in fact, have a good track record of fighting it.

Indeed, Republicans have been responsible for major expansions of government health care programs: As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney oversaw the enactment of the nation's first "universal coverage" plan, initially estimated at $1.5 billion per year but already overrunning cost projections. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who pledged not to raise any new taxes, has just pushed through his own "universal coverage" measure, projected to cost Californians more than $14 billion. And President Bush's colossal prescription drug entitlement--expected to cost taxpayers more than $1.2 trillion over the next decade--was the largest expansion of government control over health care in 40 years.

Today, nearly half of all spending on health care in America is government spending. Why, despite their lip service to free markets, have Republicans actually helped fuel the growth of socialized medicine and erode what remains of free-market medicine in this country?

Consider the basic factor that has driven the expansion of government medicine in America.

Prior to the government's entrance into the medical field, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market--no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.

Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans' rising productivity would have allowed them to buy better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn't for food or clothing.

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a "right," an unearned "entitlement," to be provided at others' expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

Today, what we have is not a system grounded in American individualism, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. For every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out-of-pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%.

The result of shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them was an explosion in spending.

In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a "right," demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.

As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the "right" to health care. And Republican politicians--not daring to challenge the notion of such a "right"--have, like Romney, Schwarzenegger and Bush, outdone even the Democrats in expanding government health care.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a "right" to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a "right" to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services--no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a "right" to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

So long as Republicans fail to challenge the concept of a "right" to health care, their appeals to "market-based" solutions are worse than empty words. They will continue to abet the Democrats' expansion of government interference in medicine, right up to the dead end of a completely socialized system.

By contrast, the rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights would provide the moral basis for real and lasting solutions to our health care problems--for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the government incentives that created our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Such sweeping reforms would unleash the power of capitalism in the medical industry. They would provide the freedom for entrepreneurs motivated by profit to compete with each other to offer the best quality medical services at the lowest prices, driving innovation and bringing affordable medical care, once again, into the reach of all Americans.

Yaron Brook is managing director of BH Equity Research and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

You can post comments in response to this op-ed on the Forbes web site. (So far, most of the comments are negative.)

Penn vs Stevenson - "Keys to the Fight"

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The UFC website posted a "keys to the fight" analysis yesterday on the upcoming Lightweight championship bout between BJ Penn and Joe Stevenson here.

From that article: "...Penn is so talented that the outcome of a fight rarely depends on what his opponent does in the ring. He doesn’t need to key off any one Stevenson weakness. He doesn’t need to worry about avoiding any particular Stevenson strength."

Considering Joe's Lightweight record and his dominant performances in the UFC, I'm surprised that the UFC website writers consider Penn to be such a heavy favorite. I mean, Penn "doesn’t need to worry about ... Stevenson['s] strength[s]"?

If Penn is as intelligent a fighter as he seems, I'm sure he is not taking this perspective. One can be sure that Penn is busy in the gym working on a game plan with his trainers to deal with Joe's considerable strengths, and exploit his relative weaknesses. If Penn takes the attitude that he can just come in and impose his will, without taking Joe's heavy hands and grappling skills into account, then we're in for a very short fight.

Fortunately for fight fans, I seriously doubt that Penn is taking Joe lightly -- which means that we're in for an exciting bout that could go the distance.

I hesitate to make a prediction since I'm such a big Joe "Daddy" fan, but I'll do it anyway. If Penn pushes the pace early and spends most of the first two rounds on top of Joe, then I'd have to give the advantage to Penn. But if Penn is unable to maintain a dominant position for the first two and a half rounds, I don't think he will have what it takes to go the distance with Joe.

My upset prediction: Joe "Daddy" Stevenson wins by unanimous decision after five rounds of exciting MMA action.

--Dan Edge

Obama and Soft Bigotry

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This morning, I pointed to an optimistic assessment of what an Obama presidency might look like and concluded that it was perhaps the first "ray of hope for something less than a disaster (short- or long-term) so far out of this contest." Today, Christopher Hitchens, in a column that asks lots of hard questions that have needed to be asked for quite some time, implies that there might not be quite so much cause for short-term optimism.

First, the hard questions:

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters -- most especially the white ones -- sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive. ...

... Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought. ... [bold added]

Thank you, Mr. Hitchens!

We will know that racism is no longer just on life support, but good and dead, when the mere fact that someone being "the first [fill in the minority du jour here] [fill in the occupation here]" stops being treated as newsworthy. Or, as a "first" I knew in my childhood put it when asked about being such a "first": "I don't think it's a big deal." The reporter at least had the integrity to quote him on that score.

But Hitchens isn't done yet. He digs around in Obama's background a little and finds that he is a member of a racist, creationist, church:

Sen. Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. I recommend that you take a brisk tour of its Web site. Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as "flamboyant" -- a man calling himself the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. -- this bizarre outfit describes itself as "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian" and speaks of "a chosen people" whose nature we are allowed to assume is "Afrocentric." Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch -- the name is surmounted with a halo in its logo -- which announces cheerily that "Every time you search or shop online! Our Church earns money." [Goodsearch, which I use as well, is configurable. Use it here and the Ayn Rand Institute makes money. --ed] Much or most of what Trinity United says is harmless and boring, rather like Gov. Mike Huckabee's idiotic belief that his own success in Iowa is comparable to the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes, and the site offers a volume called Bad Girls of the Bible: Exploring Women of Questionable Virtue, which I have added to my cart, but nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.

...

The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension. [The phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" comes to mind. --ed] [bold added]

"Amen, brother!" so to speak.

Not only that, but Hitchens also jogged my own memory of a very different assessment of what an Obama presidency would look like -- what life might be like if a big pal of Jim Wallis were in charge:

It is quite likely that our next presidential election will be a race between two candidates who each wish to impose socialized medicine, neither of whom will fight the current war the way it ought to be fought (if at all), and neither of whom is exactly a huge defender of freedom of speech. At least Obama would not surrender while claiming to wage war or pretend that elements of socialized medicine (or carbon taxes for that matter) are compatible with capitalism. And at least his conservative opposition will be more likely to oppose restrictions on freedom of speech with a Democrat in the White House. Best yet, Obama would openly tie his uniformly horrendous policy positions to his Christian faith, reminding many Americans, through his results, of the danger posed by injecting religion into politics. [bold added]

At first, I thought I would add that if this did not hasten a realignment of Christian conservatives behind the Democrats, then they would at least find themselves out of power -- until I realized that perhaps this is a significant part of what Obama means when he speaks of "reaching out" to conservatives. Yes. Barack Obama might conceivably surround himself with religionists. But even so, at least religious goals would have stopped masquerading as capitalism on his watch.

And whose assessment of Obama was that in April? Mine. (I called it, " White Guilt, Meet Religious Left".) Obama's charisma, Hitchens' "tsunami of drool", and (as I pointed out in April) a dose of white guilt, are poised to sweep Obama into power. This is not necessarily bad in and of itself, but if opponents don't stop drooling sooner or later, Obama, sans significant opposition, will be able to do much more short-term damage than he should.

I recommend reading the entire Hitchens piece and reviewing mine. (And I don't do the latter that often.)

-- CAV

Eco-Insanity

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

(Note: I meant to post this entry a few weeks ago, but it got lost in the queue. It's still relevant, however.)

Well, it's hardly a loss to the world that some eco-freaks refuse to reproduce:

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years [Toni] was sterilised to "protect the planet". Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal. "Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35. "Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

...

Mark adds: "Sarah and I live as green a life a possible. We don't have a car, cycle everywhere instead, and we never fly. "We recycle, use low-energy light bulbs and eat only organic, locally produced food. "In short, we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. But all this would be undone if we had a child.

"That's why I had a vasectomy. It would be morally wrong for me to add to climate change and the destruction of Earth. "Sarah and I don't need children to feel complete. What makes us happy is knowing that we are doing our bit to save our precious planet."

I doubt that organic-buying soccer moms will be rushing to sterilize themselves anytime soon. That's one reason why I don't regard the ecological movement as a long-term threat anywhere in par with religion, as dangerous as it might be in the short-term.

In its most consistent form, the ecological movement is nothing better than nihilistic destruction of human life. That's not true of its mass base, however. Most ordinary-folk "environmentalists" are moved by the worry that we're destroying the environment in ways that will be ultimately harmful to human life. They're wrong in that embrace of environmentalism, as real as environmental destruction can be, but they're not nihilists ready and eager to sterilize themselves for the sake of the planet.

To put the point in the standard terms of environmental philosophy, most ordinary folk describing themselves as "environmentalists" are fundamentally anthropocentric (i.e. human-centered) in their reasoning. They think that preserving and protecting the environment is necessary for human well-being. In contrast, the ideological leaders of the environmental movement disdain all such anthropocentric thinking. They regard nature as valuable for its own sake. It's not just living beings (including rats, slugs, and deadly bacteria) that have such intrinsic value, often rocks and rivers to too. Humans are also intrinsically valuable. So we count for something, albeit much in the same way that the individual counts for something in utilitarian calculations with a global population of billions. Actually, we're not even all that, since humans do so much damage to other species and environments without contributing anything good in return. (For a prominent example of this general view, see Paul Taylor's well-known article "Biocentric Egalitarianism.") The explicit purpose of environmental ethics is to de-humanize ethics, i.e. to remove humans from the forefront of ethical concern.

In contrast, no such disconnect between the ideology of leaders and mass base can be found in religion. The ideology is not nihilistic. Instead, religion promises all the wealth of values that the faithful might imagine in the afterlife. That can motivate mass fervor and mass sacrifice in this life. It is a possible basis for centuries of unquestioned darkness, destruction, and ignorance -- as the history of Europe shows quite clearly.

So as dangerous as environmentalism is on a policy level, I do not see it as a possible driving force for some new world order. Although it has broad support, it does not have deep support necessary to make "eco-topia" the goal of more than a few man-hating nutters.

The Lame Candidacy

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Politico has several striking items about the Clinton campaign. First, Ben Smith reports Clinton was on the edge of tears at an appearance.

And with audible frustration and disbelief, she drew the contrast between her experience and Sen. Barack Obama's that suggests that her campaign's current message -- the question of who is ready -- matches her profound sense that she alone is ready for the job.

Second, Roger Simon reports that Obama is mesmerizing his crowds while Clinton is boring them.

Obama delivered a compelling, almost mesmerizing, speech, did not talk about any issue in detail and took no questions. His event lasted just over half an hour.

Clinton talked about issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail and answered question after question in an event that lasted more than an hour and a half.

Both drew large crowds. But Clinton’s crowd was much smaller at the end of her speech than at the beginning.

I agree with Alexander Marriott's assessment of Clinton's campaign:

What a lame candidacy. Her only claim to fame, that which led directly to her senate seat and all of this vaunted experience she now claims is so vital, is that she was a former President's wife. Big deal. Under that logic, Laura Bush should become President, she has the most relevant reservoir of recent experience to impart to the job. Seven years in the Senate however, actually constitutes legitimate experience that should not be entirely discounted, but her opponents also have Senate experience (Obama nearly three years, Edwards six) not to mention prior local political experience in the case of Obama. This is mostly irrelevant anyway, "experience" in holding prior offices has never been an accurate judge of competency in the presidency.

The more I think about it, the more "experience" looks like a foolish thing to put front and center in a campaign, even by statist standards. What are some of the things people look for in presidential candidate?

What do you believe in? What are your ideals? What are your values?

What is your vision for America?

What are the two or three big things you want to do?

The answers to these questions excite and motivate people. Obama excites his crowds because, though his rhetoric is vague and without meaning, he speaks of ideals. He thrills young people especially. Experience speaks to none of this; it is merely a job qualification.

Clinton seems to be making the same mistake Dukakis made in '88 by focusing on competence and boring people with wonkish policy details.

Clinton's problem is the Democrat Party's main problem since the McGovern debacle of 1972: they cannot honestly campaign for their ideals because American voters, when they understand the left's ideals clearly, do not want them. Americans do not want more government spending, higher taxes and a foreign policy of appeasement. The Democratic Leadership Council was created to help Democrats find ways to moderate their ideals and trick Americans into voting Democrat.

(By coincidence McGovern published an editorial today urging the impeachment of George W. Bush. Is it a secret plot by Karl Rove to keep McGovern in the news, reminding voters of everything that is wrong with the Democrats since the rise of the New Left?)

From what I understand, political campaigns spend a great deal of money having ideas "focus grouped." I would guess some highly paid expert came back from the focus groups and advised Clinton to run on experience. Little did she know she would be up against a rival Democrat who thrills crowds with idealistic, floating rhetoric sans meaning. Apparently, Clinton didn't realize that the trick is to talk about ideals without actually saying what they are. She did not understand that Democrats are now dumb enough, after decades of government education, to hoot and holler over empty platitudes.

There is an ethical-epistemological principle we can draw from this: Dishonesty makes you stupid.

There is no disconnect between reality and what an honest man says. An honest candidate would quickly see what needs to be done -- without spending a dime on consultants -- and just speak "from the heart." An honest candidate would talk about his ideals and how they will make America free and prosperous and strong.

Instead, Hillary Clinton is reduced to repeating in "frustration and disbelief" and on the verge of tears her focus-grouped mantra of "experience."

SHOWDOWN WITH IRAN

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

After watching the documentary, Showdown with Iran, my view is still pessimistic about the situation in the Middle East and I agree with the report that the "U.S. efforts to install democracy in Iraq have served to strengthen Iran's position as an emerging power in the Middle East."

Have you watched the countdown clock lately? [Editor's comment: I think it is time for shock therapy...]


Five Minutes to Midnight

Related: My post, IRANIAN ANIMATED NUKE MOVIE.