Why Reform Lost in NOLA

Recall the following from Robert Tracinski's spot-on analysis of the man-made disaster Hurricane Katrina uncovered in New Orleans last year.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them. [bold added]

The story goes on, and, sad to say, in the same vein. Nicole Gelinas of City Journal reports the following reason why New Orleans failed to elect a mayor who would spearhead a much-needed reform of its criminal justice system.

The New York Times unwittingly summed up the attitude of the candidates and of New Orleanians in general in its election wrap-up: "Mostly unspoken was the larger reality: that the federal money destined for the city, as much as $10 billion that would perhaps arrive by late summer, would have far more influence on its recovery than the actions of any mayor," the paper noted Sunday.

Gelinas, whose reporting on Katrina has been superb overall, then misses making a profound point, saying, "New Orleans needs that federal money of course." Yeah. Like I need another hole in my head.

With the unprecedented, humongous federal bailout of New Orleans in the offing, the federal government is going to do to all of New Orleans what it previously did only for a significant portion of its poor: It is going to debilitate the city even further by insulating it from the consequences of its past mistakes and future actions!

This is already happening now. The criminals who have been giving Houston such headaches are beginning to return, tired of being arrested and actually doing time for their misdeeds.

When one is protected from the consequences of his own stupidity, one fails to learn from said stupidity. New Orleans was effectively told by the feds that it need not learn from past mistakes in order to survive. And so it isn't learning.

All living things -- and it is useful to think of New Orleans as a living thing here -- are confronted with life or death at all times, and must do certain things to achieve the former and avoid the latter. Just as an overindulgent parent fails at child-rearing by cheating a child out of the opportunities to learn that his inevitable mistakes represent, so is our federal government failing New Orleans.

There is no way to prevent another major hurricane from hitting New Orleans again -- but why should it worry about at least blunting the effects of such an event with better storm protection or evacuation planning if Uncle Sam will cover for it? And there is no way to prevent all crime -- but why should New Orleans prevent barbaric behavior from compounding the tragedy of a storm when the feds will ship its criminals out wholesale, and release them on other unfortunates without warning them first? The feds have done all of these things in the past and have just promised to do them again.

Our great federal bailout of New Orleans, far from bringing it back, is a hindrance to any meaningful recovery in the same way decades of welfare made its poorest citizens even more destitute rather than raising them from poverty. The government cannot live a citizen's -- or a city's -- life for it. It can feed and sustain it physically to some degree, but in the process, it will destroy its soul -- and in this sense, the government takes its life.

-- CAV

Reader Poll: Video Clips

Last night, I took some time off from the Home Computer Upgrade From Hell to do some housekeeping for my blog. The latter involved adding syndication feeds for about the last 20 blogs or so I've added to my blogroll to my feed reader and rearranging things there. (I'd have no time to do anything else if I actually visited all the blogs I like to keep up with.)

In the process, I came across two amusing video clips at other blogs to go along with a third a reader emailed me about. What to do? They're all good. Why not have a poll?

Here are the entrants.

1. Reader Hannes Hacker informs me of the following scene that had been deleted from Star Wars.

2. Bruno, who blogs at The Simplest Thing, passes on a clip about how they keep their shirt sleeves rolled up in Japan. (And if this had been around back in the 1980's, when everyone was convinced Japan was going to eclipse us, I'm sure this would have ended up being a staple of office attire.)

3. And finally, Myron gives us something to ponder. Or is it cogitate? What is the word I am looking for?

My favorite is the last. It made me laugh out loud. One vote per customer in the comments below.

-- CAV

Forced "Conversions": 600/Year

Via Ummah News Links (HT: The American Thinker) comes the following news from Pakistan.

The same Islam that pronounces death for conversion to another religion, forces women married to Muslims to become Muslims too. Forced conversions figures reach between 500 to 600 people a year in Pakistan, although "national media report only 100 such cases" that police and the courts "treat prejudicially". This was the most significant conclusion of a meeting on "Forced Conversion of Women and Minorities Rights in Pakistan" held on 26 May in a hotel in Lahore.

In reading the article, I was at first struck by the fact that no one at this conference roundly denounced this barbaric practice or its close cousin, execution for apostasy, which, if it is not actually legal in Pakistan, apparently might as well be legal. The following passage makes both of these points.

In Pakistan we do not have any law against forced conversion and converting from Islam to any other religion means death. To change this state of affairs, we must consider the issue as a struggle for democracy and invite Muslims as well to these meetings, so they can help us to better understand all points of view of the argument. [bold added]

What is there to understand? That the followers of Mohammed are all about telling other people what to do, their rational conclusions and actual wishes be damned? What else would a forced "convert" do for the unholy cause of Islam, but to have the scimitar for "apostasy" hanging over the "convert's" head? Islam is as much as a movement against the free exercise of the intellect as it is an intellectual movement.

But a possible explanation for this reticence, not to mention at least some of the the reluctance of the government to do anything about the problem comes later in the article.

Kalyan Singh, a Sikh participant said one of the toughest challenges to overcome was the "subjection of judges to Islamic clerics. Judges do not manage to deal with such cases neutrally because they are scared of the revenge of religious extremists."

Joseph Francis, of the Center for Legal Aid, Assistance and Settlement took up this argument. "Our organization has dealt with hundreds of forced conversion cases. Not even the judges of the High Courts deal with such cases objectively. Parents are not allowed to talk to their daughters and many forcibly converted girls are made to be prostitutes."

In conclusion, participants "forcefully and unanimously condemned forced conversions" and called on the government to "abolish personal laws and to punish those who indulge in such practices". [bold added]

Hmmm. Makes me wonder about the veracity of this recent claim, by an official of the Pakistani government. You know, the one "allied" with us against the Islamist Axis.

With this context, the attendees of this conference strike me as quite brave under the circumstances.

-- CAV

A Gem from Miss Manners

Judith Martin is not only the foremost authority on etiquette. She is the funniest.

Dear Miss Manners:

I was involved in an event that was a little funny and at the same time a little aggravating. It was like the joke where the guy goes into the dressing room and thinks the person in the next booth is talking to him, only to find that that person is talking on a cell phone.

While I was in a restroom stall of a very busy office building, a man went into the stall next to mine and started a conversation. At first I was close to answering him, but fortunately I quickly realized that he was talking on his cell. Then I realized that I was about to make noises that should only be heard in a privy. Now I'm starting to feel embarrassed and a little angry at the thought of being broadcasted to who knows where.

I was at a loss. I didn't go to the restroom to listen to others conducting business on the phone.

I've always been a little shy in public restrooms, and the idea of his call going to a meeting where the other party may be listening on a speakerphone did nothing for my confidence.

So I just sat there hoping he would leave so I could finish in private.

Is it wrong for me to flush and make other noises that may disrupt his call?

Why do you feel that you would be the one to bear the embarrassment? Has it not occurred to you who the caller's listeners will imagine created those noises?

Miss Manners assures you that etiquette is contextual. What you did was not improper in a restroom; what the other person did was.

I have little to add but to chortle, and say that this is a caller who deserved a Bronx cheer!

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 62

Grill it outside the husks....

After wrestling with a software install (to use the term charitably) yesterday that might have me looking for a new Linux distribution, I took some time off to fire up the grill in celebration of Memorial Day. I can think of worse ways to kill an evening than to sip some Dogfish Head Raison d'Etre while reading from Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics and tending my grill.

It had been awhile since I tried grilling corn on the cob. Last time, I was unhappy with the results of grilling it in foil, so I decided to try Steve Raichlen's method of grilling it directly, basting with a butter sauce. Very good. I'll tweak the sauce a couple of times and it will be spectacular!

Hmmm. I sound like some backwoods, distant relative of Hugh Akston here.... Why couldn't I have thought of "Bubba Akston" for a blog name?

Done: An Army of Davids

After reading a few pages here and there over the span of a month or so, I have finally finished reading Glenn Reynolds' book, An Army of Davids, and will comment on it at length some time in the near future. The quick and dirty is that this book vacillated between exciting and excruciating. Reynolds does a great job of showing the scope of the amazing technological innovations that have occurred in the past few decades, and how they can significantly change our lives for the better. But then, he'll fall short of some really good point because he is indifferent to (or unclear about) the principles that make freedom -- and such innovation -- possible.

It's worth a read, but be prepared, especially if you're familiar with the works of Ayn Rand, to gnash your teeth a few times when he misses a point that ought to be obvious, or contradicts himself.

Why is this a problem?

The New York Times has a long story on how the over-eagerness of credit card companies to extend credit is making identity theft easy.

[T]he real problem, many officials and consumer advocates say, lies elsewhere. In recent years banks have campaigned energetically to extend more credit to more people with fewer hassles, and retailers and consumers have embraced instant, near-anonymous access to credit.

Last year a group of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and security executives from banks and credit card associations met to discuss ways of curbing identity theft. The group had plenty of ideas, including PIN numbers or fingerprint verification for all credit card purchases and a ban on mailings that include blank checks.

But all ran counter to the promotional campaigns of banks and, banks say, to the desires of consumers. [bold added]

The article goes on to discuss "credit freeze" legislation and other attempts to fix the problem. Another, older article describes legislation that goes after small business owners if they do not keep personal information of employees sufficiently secure. All of this strikes me as the kind of superfluous, pandering legislation we already see too much of these days.

The Times article also describes a service to which one can subscribe to prevent identity theft.

Though like most consumer victims the Harrises did not have to pay the bogus charges, they now pay $220 a year to LifeLock, a protective service that started last September in Phoenix.

The company's core service is simple: Whenever a bank or other business requests to look at a LifeLock subscriber's credit history, the company gets a fraud alert asking to confirm that the customer applied for credit. Federal law empowers consumers to get these alerts on their own, but they must reapply regularly to one of the three companies that issue credit reports.

I have a wee little question here. Why does federal law -- and by implication, state and local law -- apparently "empower" credit card companies, by default, to open accounts in my name so easily? Why do we have to either pay (or regularly go through a hassle with a credit reporting agency) to achieve what should be the default condition -- that the bank should confirm that we have applied for credit? And doesn't that ability, whims of the general public notwithstanding, violate my rights?

"Default permit" is as stupid in banking as it is in computer security (HT: Ian Hamet). The real question isn't "What can I do to prevent it?" but "Why do I have to worry about this in the first place?" I am far more careful than most people with my personal information. No one had to tell me to get a shredder. And yet I still have to worry about having a credit account opened in my name?

I will admit that I haven't thought very much about this. Your input is welcome.

Update: I found that this article lent some good perspective on the Times's numbers for the incidence of identity theft. In sum: It happens far less often than the Times indicates and about half of the victims have identities stolen by "friends" and relatives.

Comments Galore

I enjoyed the discussion generated by Friday's post on "Philosophy in The Simpsons" over the weekend.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added update to ID theft section.

Happy Memorial Day!

I'm usually out of town on the short holidays, but with my wife transitioning back into medical school and myself having just started a new job, we've decided to stay in town this year. Today, along with a few other tasks I've had to put off for awhile, I'll be doing a long-delayed and much-needed upgrade of the main computer at home. Considering the fact that there is invariably something that goes awry with those and the fact that I plan to celebrate Memorial Day by at least firing up the grill this evening, I may or may not post again today.

In the meantime, I have finally gotten around to reading the Alex Epstein piece on "What We Owe Our Soldiers" that I keep running into on the other Objectivist blogs. It is omnipresent for a good reason: It is quite good and brings up some issues that sorely need to be aired today.

First, Epstein reminds us why the American soldier fights.

For an American soldier, to fight for freedom is not to fight for a "higher cause," separate from or superior to his own life--it is to fight for his own life and happiness. He is willing to risk his life in time of war because he is unwilling to live as anything other than a free man. He does not want or expect to die, but he would rather die than live in slavery or perpetual fear. His attitude is epitomized by the words of John Stark, New Hampshire's most famous soldier in the Revolutionary War: "Live free or die."

And second, after reminding us that the soldier just as much deserves the freedom we enjoy because of his efforts, Epstein addresses two related issues that have bothered me for a very long time: The misuse of our military for missions unrelated to our self-defense, and the crippling rules of engagement our soldiers are needlessly constrained by.

In addition to being sent on ill-conceived, "humanitarian" missions, our soldiers have been compromised with crippling rules of engagement that place the lives of civilians in enemy territory above their own. In Afghanistan we refused to bomb many top leaders out of their hideouts for fear of civilian casualties; these men continue to kill American soldiers. In Iraq, our hamstrung soldiers are not allowed to smash a militarily puny insurgency--and instead must suffer an endless series of deaths by an undefeated enemy.

I have little to add, except to recommend this essay if you haven't already read it. If our soldiers are willing to risk their lives in defense of freedom, then we should ask them to risk their lives only for that purpose and we should make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish this purpose.

My thoughts are with our troops on this Memorial Day.

-- CAV

Former Nurse Stops Shysters

Over at Jewish World Review, the Medicine Men reminded me that a story that has been developing over the past couple of years in Houston is making the rounds again. They summarize what a former nurse-turned-Federal Judge in Corpus Christi found when more than 10,000 silicosis cases from Mississippi ended up in her court.

Judge [Janis Graham] Jack, a former nurse, couldn't understand how a disease that caused fewer than 200 deaths annually in the entire United States could have resulted in 20,000 claims in Mississippi and surrounding states.

The diagnosis of silicosis was made in 99% of more than 9,000 plaintiffs by the same nine doctors. One admitted that he didn't even know the criteria for diagnosing the disease, but had simply included a paragraph supplied by the screening company in each of his reports. One doctor had his secretary fill out patient diagnoses on blank forms, while another analyzed 1,239 patients in 72 hours.

The judge also found that more than 65% of the silica plaintiffs had also been plaintiffs in a previous asbestos suit, with the diagnoses made by the same doctors. She stated that statistics alone should have shown the lawyers that their case defied "all medical knowledge and logic," and that by bringing the suit they had shown a "reckless disregard of the duty owed the court."

Not that you would necessarily have had to be a nurse to become a little suspicious of the above....

One news story detailed the litigation factory that had been cynically assembled:

How were so many "victims" found so quickly? The answer lies not in luck or previous medical oversight but in a well-oiled litigation machine run by an aggressive band of entrepreneurial lawyers. Operating in the shadows of the civil justice system, the machine's sole purpose is to turn people like Carl Thomas into case numbers.

Like the best machines, the marvel of this one is its simplicity. The law firm hires a medical screening company. The screening company hires a doctor. The two go to work, one bringing people through the front door, the other stamping them as sick. At the end of the day, a clerk at a law firm fills in a few blanks, punches a button and produces a lawsuit.

It's the job of the screening company to connect with workers. It owns a mobile van, maybe several, that shows up in parking lots to conduct X-ray sessions. By the time the van arrives, thousands of potential claimants have been reached by direct mail, fliers put up in union halls and ads placed in hundreds of small-town newspapers and occasionally on television.

The X-rays are done at no cost, with the understanding that the results are given to lawyers for the purpose of litigation. The screening company receives a set fee per person tested, as does the doctor who receives the X-rays along with a brief work history of the potential client.

The goal is volume. In May 2003, Lloyd Criss, owner of defunct screening company Gulf Coast Marketing in La Marque, sent a promotional letter to lawyers that emphasized one thing.

"Our marketing efforts have brought thousands of new cases to plaintiff law firms," the letter stated. "Prior to the year 2000, Lloyd Criss was employed by the Foster and Sear law firm, and in a one-year period approximately 7,000 new cases were added to that firm's inventory." [bold added]

To the corporations whose pockets were about to be rifled, the enormous number of cases looked like "asbestos all over again". Is it any wonder that Judge Jack took the unusual step of fining one law firm in Houston, or that she wrote the following blistering rebuke as part of her 249-page decision?

This small cadre of nontreating physicians, financially beholden to lawyers and screening companies rather than to patients, managed to notice a disease missed by approximately 8,000 other physicians -- most of whom had the significant advantage of speaking to, examining and treating the plaintiffs ... In the majority of cases, these diagnoses are more the creation of lawyers than doctors. Conversely, virtually all of the ... diagnosing doctors seemed to be under the impression they were practicing law rather than medicine.

We could use a few more Judges like Janis Jack on the bench!

-- CAV

Philosophy in The Simpsons

Via Arts and Letters Daily, I have encountered an interesting analysis of the popular cartoon series, The Simpsons called, "The Simpsons as Philosophy". Julian Baggini, its author, makes several very good points in his essay, but his overall picture is fundamentally flawed.

I have always been ambivalent about The Simpsons. On the one hand, the cartoon is often brilliant satire. On the other, I have always found its portrayal of the Simpsons insulting because the family is clearly meant to portray the fundamental nature of its audience. The general feel I get from this is not even the occasionally appropriate message, "Don't take yourself too seriously." Instead, it's "Never take yourself seriously at all." Why? Because we're all a bunch of incompetent boobs, and our ideals are nothing better than rationalizations for our true, and very banal, motives. Sorry, but I refuse to think of myself as Homer Simpson.

On the points that the Simpsons is sometimes brilliant philosophical satire, and that its message is that we are an absurd species living in an absurd world, Baggini fully agrees with me. He states these points in reverse order early in his essay, because he is hoping to make the latter point himself.

We now know we're just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.

The Simpsons does this brilliantly, especially when it comes to religion. It's not that the Simpsons is atheist propaganda; its main target is not belief in God or the supernatural, but the arrogance of particular organised religions that they, amazingly, know the will of the creator.

For example, in the episode Homer the Heretic, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way: by watching the TV, slobbing about and dancing in his underpants. [bold added]

Where Baggini and I differ is on this point: He agrees that life and humanity are absurd to the point of reveling in the absurdity, whereas I disagree.

The origin of this difference of opinion lies in the fundamentally different philosophical outlooks Baggini and I hold. And while I have never heard of Baggini before, and would not have been able to say anything at all about his philosophical views off the top of my head, his essay is unusually frank for something from the popular press. Baggini very conveniently spells out his epistemological beliefs for us!

Baggini's views on epistemology become apparent when he attempts to explain what he calls a "rich philosophical worldview":

Revealing simple truths about simplistic falsehoods is not just a minor philosophical task, like doing the washing up at Descartes' Diner while the real geniuses cook up the main courses.

For when it comes to the relevance of philosophy to real life, all the commitments we make on the big issues are determined by considerations which are ultimately quite straightforward.

Pointillist paintings, such as this by Seurat, use thousands of tiny dots. A rich philosophical worldview is in this sense like a pointillist picture - one of those pieces of art in which a big image is made up of thousands of tiny dots (see Seurat image, right). Its building blocks are no more than simple dots, but the overall picture which builds up from this is much more complicated.

Yet we need reminding that the dots are just dots, and that errors are made more often not by those who fail to examine the dots carefully enough, but those who become fixated by the brilliance or defects of one or two and who fail to see how they fit into the big picture. [bold added]

This will sound very reasonable to most readers because it assumes and alludes to the inductive nature of human knowledge, that we can neither just make baseless, arbitrary statements to the effect that we know the will of God (or that there is one), nor deduce the whole of an objective worldview from first principles. (These are the two most common fundamental philosophical errors out there, and many, including perhaps Baggini, seem convinced that we are forced to choose between these two false alternatives.)

However, "commitments" on "big issues" are not insignificant parts of a greater whole, like the dots on a Seurat painting. A consistent thinker will see that the implications of any such "commitment" will affect his notions on other things. An inconsistent thinker will not -- but he has already decided a fundamental issue for himself: that he does not have to think in order to live. The rest of his life will be lived on the whim of the moment or based on premises absorbed passively from those around him (really the same thing, in effect). The pieties he mouths, consistent or not, will not really count as parts of a "worldview" since he will not really understand what they mean.

The butchers of September 11, 2001 made a "commitment" on the "big issue" of whether there is a God, and on what he thought they should do. They were consistent and they acted on it because the answers they reached on fundamental issues affected the whole picture for them. On the other hand, slothful bumblers like Homer Simpson appear to be inconsistent. They muddle through on whim and on premises absorbed passively from others. Fundamentally, the murder-bombers and Homer Simpson represent two fundamental types: someone who seeks knowledge through faith, and someone who views knowledge as unattainable at all. Both fail to ground their worldviews on objective reality. And both see the entire course of their lives affected by their "commitment" on the "big issue" of epistemology! Some dot.

The notion that the various and mutually contradictory views the Homers spout represent a rich -- much less coherent -- picture is wishful thinking at best. As Ayn Rand pointed out in Philosophy: Who Needs It, whether one chooses to be consistent or not, he will live in accordance with a philosophy -- and whether he can explicitly name his fundamental premises or not.

And so, in stating the point that answers to major philosophical issues are irrelevant, Baggini has stated his allegiance to a subjectivist viewpoint, and to the notion that systematically considering ideas is irrelevant. Unsurprisingly, this leads him to the following nihilistic conclusion.

Another reason why cartoons are the best form in which to do philosophy is that they are non-realistic in the same way that philosophy is.

Philosophy needs to be real in the sense that it has to make sense of the world as it is, not as we imagine or want it to be. But philosophy deals with issues on a general level. It is concerned with a whole series of grand abstract nouns: truth, justice, the good, identity, consciousness, mind, meaning and so on.

Cartoons abstract from real life in much the same way philosophers do. Homer is not realistic in the way a film or novel character is, but he is recognisable as a kind of American Everyman. His reality is the reality of an abstraction from real life that captures its essence, not as a real particular human who we see ourselves reflected in. [bold added]

Note that Baggini "richly" contradicts himself in the first two sentences of this quote. According to him, this should not make us doubt that his philosophical conclusions about reality, even though he himself regards philosophy as "non-realistic". And what does he regard as "non-realistic"? Abstraction, which is what man's conceptual faculty does. If you wanted a more explicit rejection of man's ability to reach the truth through reason, you just about couldn't ask for one.

But Baggini is on to something when he says the following.

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can.

This is, in fact why Ayn Rand presented much of her philosophy in the form of novels. Man's mind does not exist in a vacuum, nor does he live in one. To reach objective truth, even -- the adverb is for Bagginis's benefit -- in philosophy, requires a process of abstraction, integration, and the formation and testing of further conclusions against reality -- of induction. And so, as a presenter of a philosophy, Rand did not merely present arguments. She provided examples in support of these arguments.

So Baggini is correct that this cartoon is good at presenting philosophical ideas to an audience by concretizing them. But then, it is a cartoon, where each episode is independent of the others, and the long-range and real-world consequences of much of what goes on do not obtain. Instead, we "reset" with each new episode, just as Wile E. Coyote would get up every time he fell off a cliff or blew himself up chasing the Roadrunner every Saturday morning when I grew up.

In other words, if you want to convince someone that they can't think, make fun of brazen mistakes day in and day out -- to generalize the notion that all "commitments" on "big issues" are absurd -- but magically bring the Simpsons back as they were before on the next week to keep your viewer from wondering how these boobs manage to remain alive at all -- to see why they must think. Compare this to the time scale of years in another work of art, Atlas Shrugged.

And so art can be used to make a philosophy easier or harder to understand (to the extent that it does or does not name principles honestly and explicitly), and easier or harder to absorb (via induction) for its audience. Ayn Rand's novels explain and make it easier for their readers to understand and absorb Objectivism, a philosophy that champions reason as a means of truly understanding the world and of leading one's life. Matt Groening's The Simpsons foists nihilism on its audience by explicitly lampooning specific beliefs, but implicitly lampooning man's rational faculty.

I found Baggini's essay both thought-provoking for its insight into the ability of art to communicate abstract principles and fundamentally flawed for its own support of the incorrect ideas implicitly advanced by The Simpsons. Baggini seems to argue that philosophical ideas should not be evaluated like points ripped out of context, but yet this is precisely what he argues we should do, as evidenced by his anaology of Pointilism.

A more accurate analogy would be that certain "big issues" are not single points, but the materials -- like canvas, paint, and the artist's own effort -- that make the art possible at all, and that a bad decision about any of these can ruin the whole picture. Indeed, Baggini's own decision to use this analogy, far from being a little dot in an otherwise good essay, trandforms his essay into a monstrous attack on reason disguised as a puff piece on a popular show. In the process, he has inadvertently demonstrated that his overall point is completely wrong.

The bigger lesson is that in the marketplace of ideas, as in any other, Caveat emptor.

-- CAV

Around the Web on 5-25-06

Happy Birthday, Martin!

Today is Martin Lindeskog's birthday, and May 7 marked his fourth year of blogging at Ego.

And yesterday, he started an online store for his new business.

Book Review: They Made America

And while we're speaking of businessmen, Jennifer Snow reviews what sounds like an excellent book on the history of American innovation.

In great dramatic style, [Harold] Evans tells the stories of dozens of people that have truly turned America into what she is today. They are not all inventors, although some, like Edison, are renowned for their inventions, but they are all innovators: people that had a new idea and through courage, canniness, and sheer unadulterated drive, used their idea to rattle the nation.

Jennifer is right to start off with the Ayn Rand quote about businesmen she did: Many in America take the great achievements of its innovators and the freedom that makes their achievements possible for granted. This places many of us in grave danger of not being sufficiently motivated to defend either.

An Interesting Idea

The Software Nerd goes for an oil change, and says, "There's a guy under my car!"

Strikes me that the job of the downstairs guy could easily be automated. The crux of his job is finding the right location for the nut that he unscrews. If a machine could do this -- with some positioning-help from the guy upstairs -- the rest of the automation would be simple enough.

This post -- of someone's thoughts after an oil change -- may seem mundane, but it is a snapshot of something we Americans too easily take for granted: the creative approach to practical problems that so many of us take.

It is so common for people do this here that it seems normal or even inevitable, but it is not. This -- this willingness to take a critical look at long-established practices -- is how the phrase, "Yankee know-how" came about. And it would explain stories I've heard to the effect that American expatriates, reputed to have a highly practical bent, are often asked by their neighbors for help with things like plumbing and electrical problems.

Mikes Eyes like what they see.

Mike N. takes a look at Ellsworth Toohey's method of attacking the good and compares this with promoting the good.

To paraphrase Toohey:

Want to destroy the hero? Don't attack the hero. Enshrine the anti-hero, the zero, and you have destroyed hero. Want to destroy individual rights? Don't attack individual rights. Enshrine needs over rights (by moving the context of rights from the individual to the collective and declaring these needs to be group rights.) This process can be used to destroy any good.

But this technique can be used in reverse. Want to destroy collectivism? Enshrine individualism. For example, want to destroy diversity? Enshrine peoples' similarities not their differences. But I don't want to be misleading. There is a difference. Toohey wanted to destroy the good not to enshrine any particular evil but to create a void which he would fill. The rational man doesn't seek to destroy anything. He creates the good which blocks the existence of evil. That is why Tara Smith and Gideon [Reich] are right is saying that it is more important to enshrine the good than to just oppose evil. [bold added]

That is an excellent point, which was inspired by Mike's reading of the next post I mention in this week's roundup.

Journal Review: The Objective Standard

Gideon Reich has been posting quite actively lately, and it has all been very good reading. But if you read nothing else of his, read this full review of the first issue of The Objective Standard.

I have commented on the new journal The Objective Standard (TOS) briefly on a previous occasion but it deserves a more thorough review. So following in the footsteps of Mike of The Primacy of the Awesome blog, here are my comments on the premiere issue of TOS. I will begin by repeating my earlier comment that "the issue clearly represents a new milestone in Objectivist publications in every aspect." The professional look of journal deserves high praise -- finally an Objectivist publication that does not look like a pamphlet or newsletter. But let me focus on content as that is what's most important. Here there are five excellent essays and I'll take them each in turn.

If you're on the fence at all about subscribing to The Objective Standard, then you will find yourself with two thngs to do today. (1) Read Gideon's review. (2) Subscribe.

(Tangentially-related note: When I read the VanDamme article on education, I became curious about a children's story she mentioned, Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden", because it made me think of something from my past. The entire story is available online.)

Gideon also points out a fascinating discussion of the book The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark over at The Forum for Ayn Rand Fans.

Film Capsule: Goal! The Dream Begins

I recently mentioned a Scott Holloran review of this soccer movie and concluded that it was probably good, but not quite up there with Bend it Like Beckham. Alex Nunez gives it a positive review.

And you know what? None of it [i.e., the usual sports movie cliches] detracts from the film. It's an absolute blast, even though you kind of feel like you've been there before.

The cast is top-notch, and largely made up of actors who won't be familiar to American audiences. I think that this helps immensely, because that lack of familiarity makes the characters feel more authentic. You look at the actors faces and think only of their characters' names.

As I said, the storyline pretty much follows the standard sports movie formula. You know what the film is working toward, and on the way, director Danny Cannon (CSI) does an excellent job of keeping you interested with some fun little side plots that keep things moving and add some good humor to the proceedings.

I suspect I will still come away liking Bend it Like Beckham better, but now I'm a lot more likely to see it at the theater.

Backwards Movies

As has become customary, I'll end the week's roundup on a light note. Paul Hsieh recently uncovered the ruminations of someone who asked, "Ever wondered what happens when you play a film backwards?" and ran. The best of these was Star Wars.

A rather large moon-sized spaceship suddenly appears in the vast depths of space and, to prevent it from disappearing again, a nice young man called Luke extracts a bomb from its central chambers. The space station re-assembles a disintegrated planet, saving its occupants, and slowly begins to dismantle itself as a group of rebels become more and more disorganised. The young man goes home to his farm.

-- CAV

Google Finds Another Boot to Lick

I have frequently excoriated Google and other American companies here for their self-destructive enthusiasm for aiding enemies of freedom. Most recently, I discussed this trend in general, after Borders Books earned the dubious distinction of being the first (and may it be the last) American book store to side with Islamofascists by agreeing to stock the Koran only on the top shelf.

Not content to be bested in the realm of collaboration with thugs, Google has seen Borders's useful infidelity and raised it a blood money fine. In a story that has been developing for some time, Google has reportedly "cut off its news relationship with a number of online news publications that include frank discussions of radical Islam".

Here's an excerpt from an article categorized by Google in a letter to its site owner as "[an] article ... expressly promoting [a] hate speech viewpoint". This is, by the way, not the same thing as ruling out a news source for editorializing too much, with which I would have no problem.

Have any of you noticed over the past few years that page after page in your daily newspapers is filled with the latest dysfunctional happenings caused by - or as a result of - the seemingly maniacal Muslim world? Honestly, I cannot open a paper or turn on the television without seeing mobs of Muslim savages celebrating in front of burning embassies, a school, a restaurant or those stupid tires they seem to think are so impressive to burn . And, don't you just love those scenes of men in black ski masks, racing through the streets, shooting guns in the air or standing behind some terrified captive getting ready to be-head him or her?

Yes. This is clearly written from an anti-Islamofascist point of view. But it portrays actual events and fairly well represents what it is like to be a consumer of news these days. And the author does refer to the perpetrators of some of the nonsense he describes as "savages" at one point. So?!?!? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

Are we not supposed to evaluate a religion or its followers when our lives are daily marred (or even threatened outright) by its followers? What will Google do next? Filter out stories about rabid dogs if their authors imply that proximity to same might be a tad bit unpleasant? Start censoring its own blogs?

I had been using Google News quite frequently when blogging. But it is no longer, apparently, a reliable search engine. I wonder what else this company is busy doing to compromise its products and my freedom. This is very disappointing news.

-- CAV

HT: The Resident Egoist

Two Little Reminders

Two different columns cover a topic, capitalism, that has taken a beating in recent years in addition to apparently having been mostly forgotten by the Republicans -- when they have not been busy destroying it.

In the first, James Bartholomew notes how much capitalism has improved everyone's standard of living generally. Although he seems about to justify capitalism on altruistic grounds at any moment for much of the essay, that shoe never drops. He does not make the bold case for egoism that an Objectivist like myself would like to see, but his central message is that capitalism has improved the lot of everyone generally. That is a good thing to see in the major media. I'll take it.

What is the biggest benefit that the relatively poor have experienced over the past two centuries? It is surely the terrific reduction in the cost of food. Two centuries ago, food was the biggest part in a family's budget. It was hard for a poor family to get enough to eat. If there was a shortage, there could be a famine, resulting in thousands of deaths. Even in the 1920s, people on average spent a third of their income on food.

Now they spend only a tenth. Look at any chart of the price of the basic foodstuffs, such as wheat, barley and milk, and you will see almost continuous and deep falls. What has caused this massive benefit to the poor? A series of government regulations? A good-looking politician with an easy smile and a "vision"? No. Capitalism.

No single individual did it. Thousands, or millions, did it. They were not directed by any central agency. They just operated in a capitalist system. They invented farm machinery that replaced many men and therefore made food much cheaper. Farmers deployed these machines. Others created ships that could carry grain cheaply, quickly from faraway lands where food was grown more cheaply. Others still distributed the food in ever more cost-efficient ways, by rail and by road on newly created and deployed trains and lorries.

They did this, each of them living his own separate life in his own undirected way.

Bartholomew, in his defense of capitalism from its detractors, reminds the reader how much he has benefitted from it, and in the process makes him feel awe at the great achievements made possible when men are free to exercise their own best judgement for their own benefit. How often did the kings of old get to kick back and watch a DVD? Exactly zero.

And then John Stossel writes about that hero in times of disaster, the so-called price gouger, taking as his point of departure the folly of Mississippi jailing a man who attempted to sell generators -- the scoundrel! -- to Katrina victims. To my home state of Mississippi, all I can do offer the following left-handed compliment: "Thanks for inspiring such a great article!" Stupidity such as that routinely causes the state to have a brain drain, and to be the butt of comments like, "Mississippi is a great place to be from."

John Sheperson is a hero. When Hurricane Katrina struck, he turned on the news and learned that people in Mississippi had lost electric power. They desperately needed generators. He decided to help them, while helping himself.

He borrowed money, bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul and drove it 600 miles to Mississippi, where he offered to sell the generators for twice what he paid for them. Eager buyers surrounded his truck. "People were excited," he said.

So did the generators go to hospitals? To nursing homes? Did they save lives? Did Mississippi officials give Sheperson a medal?

Nope. Instead, they locked him up -- and his generators, too.

"Nobody got any use out of them," said Sheperson.

Who needs William Faulkner to make Mississippians to look like a bunch of backward yokels when their officials do such a fine job? As for the "price gouging", Stossel hits that one out of the park. "Taking advantage of someone's extreme need means meeting someone's extreme need and getting fairly compensated for the unusual effort you had to make in order to do it."

The fact that Mississippi took the trouble to lock the generators up is especially, albeit unintentionally, symbolic of what all "anti-gouging" interventions by the government do: Such actions keep people from getting the goods they need when they need them. Good going, boys!

So the next time you think of price-gouging, think of your power being out and some hick padlocking a perfectly good generator you could really use.

Read both of these in full. They are excellent.

-- CAV

Because They Say So

There is an editorial in the New York Times by self-proclaimed ex-skeptic of global warming and former used-car salesman Gregg Easterbrook that proclaims that global warming is no longer scientifically controversial. (Yes, his past life is irrelevant here, but I couldn't resist delivering a well-deserved cheap-shot.)

This (non-climate) scientist begs to differ. Consider Easterbrook's idea of a definitive argument in favor of man-induced global warming.

That research is now in, and it shows a strong scientific consensus that an artificially warming world is a real phenomenon posing real danger:

The American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society in 2003 both declared that signs of global warming had become compelling.

In 2004 the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that there was no longer any "substantive disagreement in the scientific community" that artificial global warming is happening.

In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences joined the science academies of Britain, China, Germany, Japan and other nations in a joint statement saying, "There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring."

This year Mr. Karl of the climatic data center said research now supports "a substantial human impact on global temperature increases."

And this month the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."

Case closed. [link added]

So the liberal media, already known as a giant echo chamber, has now adopted, to bolster its appeals to authority, the argument, "If it weren't true, it wouldn't be so loud."

A layman can be forgiven for taking the word of a scientist or, in this case, a bunch of organizations that purport to speak on the behalf of so many scientists.

But someone who hangs a shingle out as an expert on "global warming" cannot. He has a responsibility to determine whether there really is such a consensus and on what scientific facts that consensus is based. He should furthermore report these very things, laundry lists of organizations with impressive names be damned.

And if there is not a consensus, or it is not based on scientific fact, such an "expert" risks becoming part of the real story -- a massive fabrication -- by failing to report that.

I haven't time to investigate every last institution and person in the above litany, but I know offhand that the AAAS, as the parent of a prestigious journal, Science, is, as such, suspect when it says anything about global warming. I blogged about this awhile back.

(One question: If a view is explicitly backed by 1% of all papers and is implicitly backed by a third, how is it a "consensus" view?) So Peiser contests findings published in Science. Fair enough. Science should at least give him a hearing, right? And if he's right, shouldn't these results be published?

Dr [Benny] Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been "widely dispersed on the internet".

Let's grant that the findings could be described as "widely dispersed on the internet." But the other results have the credibility of publication in a major peer-reviewed scientific journal, while Peiser's can be dismissed as "junk from the internet" until they are subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny. Furthermore, since scientists generally depend upon data vetted by their peers rather than "junk from the internet," rejection of this study on such flimsy grounds is a disservice to those scientists who read the contested article in Science. They will remain under the mistaken impression that Oreskes is correct until Peiser is published.

So at least one of Easterbrook's authorities is probably not quite being honest. Would it be too terribly surprising if other major associations of scientists have also placed political goals over objective truth? How many non-leftist scientists, exactly, are there? (Creationists do not count. They're not scientists.)

And as to Easterbrook himself, consider that just yesterday, I blogged about how ABC shouted from the rooftops that, "[A]ll but a handful of hurricane experts now agree this worsening bears the fingerprints of man-made global warming," while a real live expert calmly laid out facts and arguments plainly to the contrary. Would it be too far-fetched to believe that Easterbrook is doing basically the same thing? Not to me. Not when his "evidence" consists of appeals to authorities of whom at least one is known to be non-objective about the very issue he is writing about.

-- CAV

Pluralism Isn't Islamic Law, Either.

Via RealClear Politics I have come across an interesting article by a former president of Indonesia who argues that "Extremism Isn't Islamic Law". Although I appreciate his sentiment favoring religious pluralism, even to the extent of allowing Moslem apostates to leave their faith peacefully, I must indicate that his central argument, which is to say that religious persecution is "against" Islamic law is not the way to the reformation of Islam that so many of us in West hope will eventually occur.

Consider the following passage.

[T]hroughout much of Islamic history, Muslim governments have embraced an interpretation of Islamic law that imposes the death penalty for apostasy.

It is vital that we differentiate between the Koran, from which much of the raw material for producing Islamic law is derived, and the law itself. While its revelatory inspiration is divine, Islamic law is man-made and thus subject to human interpretation and revision. ...

In the case of Rahman, two key principles of Islamic jurisprudence come into play. First, al-umuru bi maqashidiha ("Every problem [should be addressed] in accordance with its purpose"). If a legal ordinance truly protects citizens, then it is valid and may become law. From this perspective, Rahman did not violate any law, Islamic or otherwise. Indeed, he should be protected under Islamic law, rather than threatened with death or imprisonment. The second key principle is al-hukm-u yadullu ma'a illatihi wujudan wa adaman ("The law is formulated in accordance with circumstances"). Not only can Islamic law be changed -- it must be changed due to the ever-shifting circumstances of human life. Rather than take at face value assertions by extremists that their interpretation of Islamic law is eternal and unchanging, Muslims and Westerners must reject these false claims and join in the struggle to support a pluralistic and tolerant understanding of Islam. [bold added]

Among all the divine fiats and mere human interpretations, there is no concession to objectivity save the weak-kneed "in accordance with circumstances". That phrase would, I am sure, carry great moral weight with Westerners, who implicity as a whole, value life on this earth as an end in itself. Westerners would take this to mean that religious dicta must change with the times to accommodate human needs.

By contrast, the phrase would carry great tactical weight to just about anyone whose highest ideal is the implementation of what he feels to be Allah's will. Many Moslems would, I am sure, take the phrase to mean that different strategies to spread Islam must be taken, depending on the changing circumstances. Why else would we have suicide bombers?

And more to the point, why would someone who values his feeling of what the divine wants over his own life make the "mistake" of allowing an apostate to walk away from his religion peacefully, and straight into the maw of hell? And, worse still, why would he permit Allah's will to be thwarted?

This is the problem with attempts to base pluralism on religion. Religion causes its followers to regard otherworldly, unprovable -- in a word, imaginary -- notions as more important than their own lives, and by extension, those of others. And one's highest ideal sets his lower priorities by an inexorable logic. If eternal perdition is "real" harm, then how does bodily death injure an apostate? And might the apostate's death protect others from his unholy influence? And, in the meantime, how would threats harm him if they could cause his return to the One True Path? I don't see much room for pluralism here....

When laws are made admitting of any element of the arbitrary -- er, "divine" -- of course they are going to conflict with the worldly requirements of man's life on earth any time someone has the temerity to run afoul of whatever element that is. And while it might feel good to denigrate the barbaric "interpretations" of the unwashed fanatic as "mere interpretations" of the "divine", anyone who does so in the name of interpreting his religion differently ipso facto opens himself up to the very same criticism!

What the Islamic world needs instead of some fatwa mandating tolerance is what the Christian world got during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and still has to a lesser extent today -- a recognition that there exists a law independent of alleged divine fiat and claims of inspired knowledge. Moslems need to accept in some meaningful way that their own lives on this earth are valuable in and of themselves, and so recognize that the surest way to protect their lives is to live in accordance with natural law. Most importantly, they must permit natural law to supercede religious law as unprovable and open to the wildest of interpretations. And if they love their lives, they will, because they will understand how the "divine law" espoused by others can ruin their lives or end them altogether.

Religion, in the sense that it unleashes the most brutish fanatics upon their fellow man, is the arch-enemy of life and liberty, and it must be kept from forming the basis of the law in any society. This is what we learned in the West, and this is what the Moslems must learn, even if we must teach them -- incidentally, and for the sake of self-preservation -- in the most unpleasant way.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 61

Veterans Take Note

From The New York Times:

Thieves took sensitive personal information on 26.5 million U.S. veterans, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, after a Veterans Affairs employee improperly brought the material home, the government said Monday.

The information involved mainly those veterans who served and have been discharged since 1975, said VA Secretary Jim Nicholson. Data of veterans discharged before 1975 who submitted claims to the agency may have been included.

It sounds to me like someone schlepped home with a laptop and then got robbed -- which is exactly the sort of thing policies against taking such things home are designed to prevent. Heads should roll over this.

With this looking like a crime of opportunity rather than an outright attempt at massive identity theft, there's probably not a whole lot to worry about. But I went ahead and made the five-minute call to Equifax to have a fraud alert placed on my credit report. (Call any of the three credit reporting companies and they will forward your request to the other two.)

The Times provides some helpful links within its story and a quick google of "identity theft" will also get you some good information.

An Idea that Deserves to be Deep Sixed

An article at ABC news reports that "scientists" are considering adding a new hurricane category. After grabbing our attention, the piece shows itself to be yet another pro-environmentalist puff piece.

[H]urricanes around the world have sharply worsened over the past 30 years -- and all but a handful of hurricane experts now agree this worsening bears the fingerprints of man-made global warming.

In fact, say scientists, there have already been hurricanes strong enough to qualify as Category 6s. They'd define those as having sustained winds over 175 or 180 mph. A couple told me they'd measured close to 200 mph on a few occasions.

200 miles per hour! You don't say? What a blood hound! Compare that story to this one, emailed to me by reader Michael Gold, that offers only arguments and boring evidence instead of compelling informal polls of acquaintances and hard-hitting anecdotes.

Over the last few decades, hurricane climate experts have largely eschewed linkages between global warming and increases in the number or strength of hurricanes. That is, until late last summer, when a series of highly publicized papers claimed otherwise. The papers pointed out that sea-surface temperatures (SSTs), the essential fuel of hurricanes, have been increasing in the primary hurricane-development regions pretty much globally since 1970 (the start of global satellite hurricane track and intensity records). Over that time, hurricane intensities have also been on the rise. And since global warming causes SSTs to rise, that must be the cause of the recent spate of strong hurricanes.

The problem with this logic is that hurricanes require a very specific environment to flourish. High SSTs are a necessary but not sufficient condition to spin up strong storms. It is also important that there be very little change in the winds with height; that near surface winds blow in such a manner to cause moist air to gather near the storm's center; and that temperatures decline rapidly with height to promote a very unstable atmosphere, among other factors. One criticism of the studies from last summer is that the focus was almost entirely on SSTs only. In order properly to link hurricane trends to SSTs (and global warming), you need to discount trends in these other, critical variables.

Author Patrick Michaels tosses in a graph or two, as well. Might as well bookmark the article now. Hurricane season is upon us, and that means lots of hot air will be blowing from the environmentalist left.

The whole idea of a "Category Six" hurricane is unnecessary and clearly meant to stir panic about a non-crisis and provide free publicity to the environmentalist movement. This is a blatant call for the politicization of science.

New Orleans Chooses Chocolate

Ever since the tough-on-crime candidate lost out in the primaries, leaving Mitch Landrieu as the last man standing to oppose the inept Ray Nagin in the mayoral election in New Orleans, I have been indifferent to the outcome.

Landrieu, who outspent Nagin by a wide margin, seemed to suffer on at least two fronts, political observers noted. He failed to distinguish himself clearly enough from Nagin on most campaign issues, including education, housing, rebuilding neighborhoods, jobs creation and economic growth. Both men are Democrats, with Nagin occupying the more conservative wing of the party and having many Republican supporters.

Landrieu is often cited as more liberal than Nagin, but the two were basically the same candidate as far as I could tell. With there being no compelling reason to choose one over the other, the election basically came down to race.

[An] unusual coalition of voters ... returned Nagin to office -- conservative whites and progressive African Americans[:] ... about 80 percent of black voters and about 20 percent of white voters....

New Orleans desperately needs to make fundamental changes in how it is run. Unfortunately, this election seems to have been like Seinfeld: a show about nothing.

Blogroll Additions

I have added the blogs of Objectivism Online regular "The Inspector" and of fellow submariner Myron Howard to the blogroll.

Call me crazy, but judging from the frequency with which he posts about automotive performance over at The Intellectual Watchman, I suspect that it might be on the safe side to say that the Inspector might prefer fast cars. I especially enjoyed this post on hybrid backlash. He quotes the Los Angeles Times.

"There's a mentality out there that we're a bunch of liberal hippies or we're trying to make some statement on the environment," said Travis Ruff, a real estate agent from Newbury Park who drives a Toyota Prius. "People are a lot less friendly than when I drove a Mercedes."

Heh! Sounds like Travis Ruff has met the mentality, and it is his....

Not liking to burn money, I value fuel economy, but have long been skeptical about the claims of fuel efficiency -- based solely on emissions -- made on behalf of hybrids by the EPA. I also find the smugness and devotion to pseudoscience of most hybrid drivers very annoying. Otherwise, I'd consider a hybrid if I thought it might actually save me a few bucks.

Of course, my stinginess and the beater I drive -- an old, but reliable Honda Accord -- will probably earn me a fair deal of ribbing from the good Inspector....

And then there's the alliteratively named Myron's Mind Meanderings, which reminds me a little of Bothenook's blog. Myron posts frequently about submarines, and has served on a pair of diesel boats. But it was this post that caught my eye. (Hint: If your cursor lands on top of the picture as mine did the first time around, back off or the title won't make as much sense!)

And if you liked that, you'll love this video clip sent to me by reader Michael Gold.

-- CAV

Shame on Borders

Awhile back, Amit Ghate took on the task of defending Borders -- or at least considering whether its refusal to carry copies of an issue of a magazine carrying cartoons of Mohammed after the cartoon riots might be an understandable position. On that score, he said the following:

[F]or those who still think Borders et al. are culpable, please remember that: the Danish cartoonists are still in hiding while those who place bounties on their heads are out in public (and surrounded by adulating mobs); Ayaan Hirsi Ali has to be guarded 24 hours a day, and is often moved to army barracks just to be kept safe; Theo Van Gogh is dead; Iran has very recently reconfirmed the Rushdie fatwa against all those who are involved in publishing his book, etc. etc. Yet no Western government takes the steps necessary to remove those threats. How can you fault Borders for acknowledging that fact and acting accordingly?

Barring further evidence to the contrary, I thought when I read this -- and still do -- that he had a good point.

Unfortunately, there is now evidence to the contrary, and Borders definitely does deserve our unequivocal condemnation for joining the shameful ranks of American companies that are perfectly willing to endanger their own freedom to earn a quick buck.

After not stocking Free Inquiry magazine because it contained the Mohammed cartoons, Borders Bookstores went a step further. Last month, the Little Green Footballs blog posted a letter from a Borders employee reporting that, in response to complaints by Muslim customers who found Korans stocked anywhere other than the top shelf, the book chain now stocks the Koran only on the top shelf. JihadWatch had this follow-up:

"Maybe this is a clue as to why the Qur'an must not be stocked below the top shelf at Borders? 'Borders(R) and Al Maya Group Sign Memorandum of Understanding for Borders Franchise in United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Cooperation Council Countries,' from Yahoo! Finance:

"'Borders Inc., a subsidiary of global book, music and movie retailer Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE: BGP - News), announced today that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Al Maya Group, a diversified corporation headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, to establish a franchise arrangement under which Al Maya will operate Borders stores in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.'" [bold added]

Columnist Julia Gorin also does a good job recapping how several computer companies have aided Chinese censorship of the Internet.

But she didn't get around to mentioning the oil companies who both enable and suffer from the theft of their own property, most recently in South America. Let's not forget them.

Many experts say oil firms are willing to pay more for access to Venezuela because most of the world's oil is off-limits.

...

James Mulva, the chief executive of ConocoPhillips, said that the company is studying the new tax structure and that he would soon meet with Ramirez, the oil minister, in Caracas. Statoil of Norway said it would accept the new terms, while ExxonMobil released a statement saying the company "continues to have a long-term perspective of its activities in Venezuela."

...

Although some foreign oil executives are concerned that Chavez may one day confiscate their companies' assets, Poleo says that PDVSA's lack of expertise and investment stands as the best argument against nationalizing the oil industry.

"They can't nationalize," Poleo said of Chavez's government, "because they don't have the money or the knowledge."

And I find it very ironic that so many Americans echo this same pattern by calling for increased regulation of our energy sector, and investigations into "price gouging" -- which could ruin that industry just to save a few bucks at the pump.

As Gorin point out, by quoting Lenin: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Only in the sense that such men possess money and business acumen can they be regarded as capitalists. But they neither know nor care about the conditions necessary for their continued success, as the metaphor of the rope makes so clear. Philosophically, these men are not capitalists at all.

As long as we are free, we can always make new opportunities to earn money, but we cannot so easily bring back freedom once it is lost.

-- CAV

An Innovation I'd Like to See

Yesterday, I had what I thought might be a decent idea for a longer piece after reading up on the continuing campaign by the left to close Gitmo. In the process of reading, I'd gathered what I thought to be a good critical mass of information and had gotten a whiff of an interesting approach. All I needed to do was read Leonard Peikoff's lecture, "A Picture is Not an Argument" and I'd be set.

I'd done the research in my office because the cable was out at home. Thinking I had the essay in my bound set of The Intellectual Activist, I merrily drove home.

That's when I realized that the volume I was thinking of covered the wrong time period. Worse still, I had no idea of where my back issues were, and I could not recall whether I'd subscribed back in 1999 anyway. I looked everywhere I could, including the Internet, and came up empty.

I want the essay and plan to buy it. Here is a list of my choices.

• Audiotape, Ayn Rand Bookstore: $21.45
• Audio CDs, Ayn Rand Bookstore: $25.25
• In newsletter, single back issue of The Intellectual Activist: $4.00
• In newsletter, set of back issues, TIA (volume 13): $44.00
• In newsletter, set of back issues, TIA (1991-2001): $160.00
• In bound set, back issues, TIA (1979-2001): $199.00
  
• In digital format, CD of back issues, TIA (1979-1991): $48.00

My shipping options with the Ayn Rand Bookstore probably include some kind of next-day air via UPS. This is good, but since I am writing, I really don't want to have to go through an audio format to dig for quotes. TIA probably also has a next-day shipping option as well, but you have to all but purchase to find out.

For my money and purposes, the CD-format back issues of TIA look great but for one catch:

Due to digital licensing constraints, the CD-ROM does not include three articles by and an interview with Leonard Peikoff. Those articles are included in the printed bound volume.

Hmmm. I can't even buy this on-line and be sure of getting what I want! If I call and find this to be the case, my choices are down to: (a) a book I will have to think long and hard about purchasing, (b) a pamphlet I'll probably misplace, or (c) a whole bunch of pamphlets I can have fun keeping track of. Great.

But let's say the CD set had everything. There's still a problem. This was on a Sunday, and both stores are doubtless small operations. I didn't try, but I bet I would have gotten a phone message at either place informing me that the time to place orders is during normal business hours.

Furthermore, I am not sure when I'll have time to sit down and think about this topic at length again. The time I really wanted this article was yesterday. What I really would have liked is to be able to order the article electronically in PDF form, or otherwise viewed it online.

I am a little surprised that there is apparently only one way -- if that -- to purchase this lecture in electronic format, and even for that I'd have to wait for a package to be shipped to my home.

Given that many, if not most, students and adherents of Objectivism are college-aged or in academia, and so strapped for cash (And time -- see also the comments.) for Objectivist publications, it would seem to me that selling articles, lectures, and even book chapters online would significantly improve the availability of lots of Objectivist material by reducing the expense of these materials in terms of money and delivery time. It might even improve sales of some of the bound journals, anthologies, and books. I, for example, am already familiar with TIA and so am predisposed to buy the CD collection at the end of the above list. But suppose I weren't. If I could first read several articles at a dollar or two a pop, I might decide to buy the set later on.

I see that some Objectivist publications, like TIA, The Objective Standard, and the now-defunct Axiomatic do (or did) offer electronic subscriptions or access to back issues.

The question is: Why only them?

-- CAV

Our Friends, the Saudis

Via RealClear Politics, I have learned of a timely article about the depth of the Saudis' self-proclaimed friendship with the United States. Reporter Nina Shea of The Washington Post reports that, promises and a publicity campaign to the contrary, the Saudis have not cleaned up the numerous incitements to religious persecution for which their textbooks deserve to be famous.

Saudi Arabia's public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other "unbelievers." But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis -- that was all supposed to change.

A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom's religious studies curriculum "encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the 'other.' " Since then, the Saudi government has claimed repeatedly that it has revised its educational texts.

Well, there's no need to use the scare quotes on my account, but since anyone who dares question Islam "enrages" Arabs, I'm honored to be included with the Christians and the Jews nonetheless.

In any event, the Saudi embassy, which has shouted proclamations of friendship with the Great Sat-- I mean, the United States from the virtual rooftops, must really be serious this time. It " is also distributing a 74-page review on curriculum reform to show that the textbooks have been moderated."

As it turns out, this bout of bragging on the part of our Saudi friends amounts to screaming, "'F' is for 'Fantastic'!" So let's take a peek inside some of those nice, new textbooks, shall we?

FIRST GRADE

" Every religion other than Islam is false." [Remember: This is a public school. --ed]

...

FIFTH GRADE

"Whoever obeys the Prophet and accepts the oneness of God cannot maintain a loyal friendship with those who oppose God and His Prophet, even if they are his closest relatives."

"It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and His Prophet, or someone who fights the religion of Islam."

"A Muslim, even if he lives far away, is your brother in religion. Someone who opposes God, even if he is your brother by family tie, is your enemy in religion."

...


"Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swine. Some of them were made to worship the devil, and not God, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help, and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship the devil, and not God."

"Activity: The student writes a composition on the danger of imitating the infidels."

NINTH GRADE

...

"Muslims will triumph because they are right. He who is right is always victorious, even if most people are against him." [Contrast this with the cultural relativism many children in the West grow up with. Or compare this to the fundamentalism others are getting. --ed]

TENTH GRADE

The 10th-grade text on jurisprudence teaches that life for non-Muslims (as well as women, and, by implication, slaves) is worth a fraction of that of a "free Muslim male." Blood money is retribution paid to the victim or the victim's heirs for murder or injury:

...


TWELFTH GRADE

"Jihad in the path of God -- which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it -- is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God."

And there are plenty more samples where these came from....

So tell me again why we're supposed to pretend that it was coincidental that so many of the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities were from Saudi Arabia, where Islamic studies in the public schools take up something like a third of the time. Unless, of course, it's because the Saudis have a death grip on so many Islamic schools worldwide....

Saudi Arabia also distributes its religion texts worldwide to numerous Islamic schools and madrassas that it does not directly operate. Undeterred by Wahhabism's historically fringe status, Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as the world's authoritative voice on Islam -- a sort of "Vatican" for Islam, as several Saudi officials have stated-- and these textbooks are integral to this effort. As the report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks observed, "Even in affluent countries, Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools" available.

And we can count the United States among the "affluent countries" where Wahhabis control a large proportion of Moslem schools.

This is what most children in some Islamic countries (and some even in America!) are being fed on a daily basis. And it should come as no surprise that the violent ideals of Islam are taught by instructors who are violent themselves.

Our Urdu teacher was once talking to a few students in the front of the class. A few rows back, a student was causing a ruckus. The bearded teacher told him to shut up and he piped down for a few minutes. The teacher called him by name the second time and again he was quite for a short while.

Finally, the teacher had had enough. He got up. The entire class went silent. He went over to the student and started slapping him. The student covered his face. The teacher started to slap and punch him on the neck and the back with each hit more forceful than the last. The kid sitting next to the student got up from the desk. The teacher kept on brutally beating the student. The student started crying and fell to the ground within the desk. The teacher grabbed the front of the desk with his left hand and the back with his right. He now started to kick the bawling student. He kicked the student for about 20 seconds. He then went to his desk while swearing. No one said a word.

It amazes me that anything even remotely human could emerge from -- or, more accurately, in spite of -- such a system. [Note: I do not definitely know that the above account is about a Wahhabi school, although it was in Saudi Arabia, and it was a Moslem school. Narrator Isaac Schroedinger continues, "It is no secret that Muslim parents themselves hand out medieval punishments in the home. ... A teacher could be cruel to his pupils for decades without as much as a telephone complaint." Update: See below.]

Clearly, a society engaged in such a thorough campaign of mental and psychological mutilation of its own children cannot remotely hope to win against the West -- unless we in the West doubt the superiority of our culture and, in so doing, allow them to win. Such a victory can only come if we fail to confront them with the choice to reform or die, and if we fail to transmit our culture successfully to our children. Both failures can be averted only if we rediscover our greatness as a civilization, and its root, reason.

-- CAV

Updates

5-23-06: Issac Schrodinger emails the following.

For the record: I went to a Pakistani school in Saudi Arabia. The curriculum in that school was roughly based on the material that kids learn in the Province of Punjab, Pakistan. Thus, it wasn't a Wahhabi school.

In Saudi Arabia, the Arabic term for a school is a madrassa but in the West we only refer to a purely Islamic / Islamist school as a madrassa. In that sense, I went to a non-madrassa. My education (I use that term loosely) was relatively tame compared to the brutality that visits the students who attend an authentic religious school.

Note that students in a madrassa are told to memorize the entire Quran. Most of these student, such as the ones in Pakistan, don't even understand Arabic. The Quran is often beaten into them. [my bold]

I thank Isaac for the clarification. In addition to my gratitude, he has my sympathy and my respect!

Pfabulously Pfunny Pfriday

Everyone's a comedian, it seems today. Here's what made me laugh....

Churchill's Chickens


Of course, Cox and Forkum are always comedians, but this one, on Ward "Cherokee" Churchill, made me laugh out loud, and I'd somehow missed it the first time they posted it.


WWMD?

No! That wouldn't be, "What weapons of mass destruction?" the rallying cry Bush handed to the anti-War left!

It's "What would Mohammed do?"

Issac Schroedinger thinks that he'd, "make this haram." "This haram", of course, being the official cheerleading squad of the blog, Gus Van Horn.

And if that remark seems cryptic, click on the link above, and then go here.

Mike's Eyes Roll

Mike asks the following question. "[I]sn't almost 6 years into Bush's two term presidency a little late to start acting like Republicans?"

Toyota Everyday

Craig Ceely quotes the Richards Lederer and Dowis on a once-ubiquitous ad campaign by Toyota:

The Toyota people goofed. Every day styled as two words, is an adverb that means just what it says, as in "Every day in every way we get better and better." Everyday, squished together as one word, is an adjective meaning "commonplace, ordinary," as in, "an everyday occurrence." Did the Toyota hucksters really want to say that their products are commonplace and ordinary? We don't think so.

Those ads drove me nuts. And the grammatical error escaped my notice because, I guess, the annoying song clip had me scrambling for the mute button every time. [Now that I think back on it more, I realize that the grammatical error did not escape my notice. It just made the ads all the more annoying. I was too focused on how such a stupid slip could get by so many people that I missed the comedic possibilities raised by the meaning of "everyday".]

Too bad. I would could have taken some solace in seeing Toyota insulting their own product at the end....

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added the Ceely link and writeup. And updated it.
5-20-06: Fixed typos.