Fat Cat

During a visit this weekend, my mother caught the below snapshot of Miss Maple -- who has a knack for making the most of photo opportunities -- holding court next to a pillow my wife's mother gave us after a visit. Mom emailed the picture to me this morning with the following commentary: "The picture says it all."


Miss Maple is part Persian, so her fur and her short, stubby build both emphasize her girth, which has increased since we shifted the cats over to Science Diet Feline Senior on the advice of our veterinarian.

Jerome, now eighteen years old, was beginning to suffer from bladder infections -- a common problem in very old cats like him that this formulation is designed to address. I am happy to say that the Senior knocked Jerome's bladder infections out cold, which is good since giving the old boy pills for them is similar to the fifteen-step process described here.

Concerned about Miss Maple already, since her bullying, Jerome's thinness, and our schedules pretty much force us to feed the cats ad libitum, we asked our vet about this. "Go with the greater need," was his reply. So for now, Jerome gets to be healthy, Miss Maple is enjoying unlimited access to the food dish, and we humans enjoy a reprieve from the inevitable test of wills that will ensue when we switch Miss Maple to Science Diet Light Formula Feline Maintenance and twice-a-day feedings.

-- CAV

Around the Web on 5-31-07

No. My regular "Around the Web" feature didn't die with the new year. It simply became irregular!

Some time around my annual Christmas blogging hiatus, I decided that I'd let myself get into a rut with the feature and that I would take a vacation from it for awhile and then reevaluate. The year got very busy and stayed that way. And then I heard from Martin Lindeskog as he was gearing up for his own vacation from blogging.

He asked whether I would I like to guest-blog at Ego again. I told him I'd be glad to, despite my own hectic schedule and decided to go ahead with at least one of these while he is away since I'd always cross-posted these big roundups to his blog and he liked them.

How I feel after I write this will go into the "reevaluation" hopper, but it will be a moot point for the foreseeable future. Things at work seem like they might be getting interesting (scientifically, which is good, and scheduling-wise, which may be very bad, at least for blogging) and I am hoping to finally work on a couple of interesting non-blogging pieces soon.

That said, here goes....

Oops! Not so fast! First, allow me to wish a belated happy birthday to Martin!

Face of a Movement Disappears from View

Via Glenn Reynolds, I found that the following comment on Cindy Sheehan's recent decision to return to private life treated the subject with about the right degree of dignity and respect:

[I thought about posting a fictional c]onversation between Cindy Sheehan and Billy Jack. Punchline: something having to do with Sheehan's being the "face" of a movement, with a possible play on "movement." Or "face." or "Jack."

Myrhaf thinks that Sheehan will soon resurface. I agree. He also makes some good comments about how the whole story illustrates the left's feeling that reason is impotent. Dismuke also makes some interesting comments, the first from a psychological angle.

Market Forces and Organ Donors

"Captain" Ed Morrissey -- even as he argues for a more capitalistic method of organ transplantation -- unwittingly demonstrates why patients in desperate need for an organ donor are mercilessly subjected to long, terrifying, and potentially deadly waits by an inefficient system of rationing.

[W]hat do we do to save the lives of everyone else on the list? The simple fact is that we have a rationing system that does not work, as Dr. Satel explains. We have a demand that far exceeds the supply, and we have put in place regulations that artificially keeps the supply low -- for noble reasons, but those noble reasons are costing thousands of lives every year.

...

I'm not suggesting a kidney bazaar, where the highest bidder gets the organs and only the rich can find transplants. [How would this be the case if we increased supply? --ed] However, we have to find a system that generates a much larger supply for organs than the one we have now, and we have to move away from the old methods of rationing if we want to save lives. Satel's proposals put us on the right track. It's certainly less disturbing than grinding up embryos to find elusive treatments for diseases, and much less ethically objectionable. [bold added]

For what "noble reasons" do we artificially keep supplies low? Altruism, as Sally Satel explains:

We need to move beyond the idea that organs must be relinquished as gifts. The altruistic motive is deeply noble and loving. But relying upon it as the sole legitimate reason for giving an organ is causing too many unnecessary deaths.

Both Morrissey and Satel agree that altruism is impractical, but both make the fatal error of failing to ask whether it really is "noble" or "loving", or even moral for that matter. But to do that to any meaningful extent, each must become willing to apply reason not just to the logistical and legal aspects of organ donation, but to the moral issues concerning organ donation as well.

The reason we don't already have a market in live organs is because our culture, inheriting the morality of self-sacrifice from its religious past, damns the profit motive as evil. To the extent that someone honestly questions this morality, he will see that it has no basis in reason and he will reject it. To the extent that he fails to apply reason, he will continue to accept it.

We see this with Morrissey, who starts out by making a strong, this-worldly case for freer organ donation, but ends by proposing some restrictions of his own to the supply of organs for transplantation. What is so "ethically objectionable" about embryonic research -- or an organ market, for that matter? (Even with his arguments, Morrissey has qualms about using capitalism to save lives in the context of organ transfers between consenting adults.)

Until we ask deeper questions across the board, we will continue sacrificing human lives for ideals whose alleged nobility exists in the same realm as their justification: the imagination.

Bush vs. Capitalism (and Safe Beef)

[Update: Jim May indicates that this story is more complicated than the news report I blogged indicated. The company here intended to test cattle before they could develop the Mad Cow disease, meaning its testing would result in too many false negatives. Follow the link he provides for more detail.]

And speaking of ways we should be unleashing the power of the free market to save lives, Isaac Schrodinger points to the latest anti-capitalist outrage by the Bush administration:

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry. [bold added]

That last paragraph is plainly an excuse. What company in the business of selling meat is going to scare off customers with a false positive? A moment's thought would show that one would take reasonable precautions and then perform some kind of follow-up testing if a sample popped positive.

Lives would be saved by any company that really did detect tainted beef and kept it away from the market, and such action would instill confidence in any company that made such a move. Instead of allowing the innovative portion of the beef industry to take this step, however, the Bush administration would apparently prefer to gamble with our lives in order to protect short-sighted companies which deserve to go out of business.

Furthermore, since customers will not have the recourse of buying meat from companies that do test all their meat, Bush is ensuring that should a confirmed case of mad cow arise, the entire beef industry will fall under suspicion. This will adversely affect our diets and potentially lay waste to huge swaths of that industry as the public, knowing that mad cow is out there, but that almost all meat goes untested, panics.

It is immoral to prevent someone from doing his job, which is exactly what Bush is doing by forbidding a company from taking a common-sense measure to ensure the safety of its customers. Not only that, it is impractical on every level, including the implicit goal of "protecting" an industry vital to the economy!

Chavez Closes Private Television Station


Cox and Forkum nail it, as usual. See their blog for the story.

This weekend, I was in a conversation with a leftist, who was making the standard complaint that Fox News "controls" "too much" of the news in America. She then proceeded, by way of enumeration (of just television outlets, naturally), to show how "few" sources for news we had. Sensing that she was about to make a point that this meant we "needed" government intervention, I pointed out that Chavez is busy making sure that there is only one source of news in Venezuela.

I didn't get to finish that conversation, but I suspect that my point would have still been a hard sell since, you see, the government isn't "polluted" by the profit motive and in any event Pragmatism is so ubiquitous in our culture that I would have probably been told that the lessons -- if any -- from Venezuela wouldn't apply to America anyway.

Still, at least the conversation has caused me to consider such objections, so it was worthwhile to me.

The Scoop on John Lewis

Fellow fans of John Lewis, who recently appeared on the Mike Rosen show to discuss his recent talk at George Mason University will be interested to know that he will be working to complete a new book, Nothing Less than Victory: Military Offense and the Lessons of History, over the next year. Diana Hsieh also blogs about some other major changes for him, and provides links to an audio of his GMU talk as well as to two posts about it at Rule of Reason.

And for more, stop by Michael Caution's blog to learn about a recent review of Lewis's Solon the Thinker.

Color Me "Heretical"!

Mike N. has retitled a series of posts on global warming hysteria....

My readers may have noticed that I changed the title of my series from "Why I'm Pro-Skeptic" in Pt.1 to "Why I Side With the Critics" in the rest. I don't like the words skeptic or denier or doubter. The proper name for those who disagree with the establishment notion of global warming is critic. That's what they are, critics.

I have no respect for anyone who uses those terms whether they are reporters, editors or even scientists. Those words are nothing but euphemisms for "heretic."

He's right. And he reminds me.... In another conversation with the same leftist I mentioned above, I was "corrected" when I used the term "global warming" and told to use "climate change" instead. So I countered that I would do so as long she called me a "heretic" rather than a "skeptic".

The Unjust Imprisonment of Jack Kevorkian

Thomas Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute hits the nail on the head.

[E]ach individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing -- not forced -- to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way."

Read it all.

Toiler's New Abode

Acid Free Paper has moved! Update your links. I just did.

Hugh Hewitt on "Bigotry"

Myrhaf makes some good comments on something I ran across the other day, but didn't have time to blog. One conservative pundit, Mike Gallagher has run afoul of another, Hugh Hewitt, for raising perfectly legitimate questions about Mitt Romney's religion.

Hewitt saw early on that Romney's Mormonism would produce questions such as Gallagher asks and decided the best strategy would be to label the questioners as bigots the way the New Left calls anyone who questions multiculturalism a racist. Hugh Hewitt is happy to ape the left and degrade the national conversation a little more if it helps to elect a Republican. [bold added]

I couldn't have said this better myself. Myrhaf also goes where Gallagher didn't go, pointing out that the same sorts of questions should be extended to all religions.

Galileo Defends "Price-Gouging"

Here is how he ends a very good post on the subject:

With the anti-gouging bill, the House of Representatives is grandstanding at our expense. In an effort to curry votes from ignorant voters, the House lays the groundwork for new gasoline shortages. Moreover, it diverts attention from the party responsible for high oil prices, themselves.

If you don't check in on his blog frequently, you're missing out.

A Few More...

1. Darren Cauthon on "How to gain support for net neutrality":

I wish that net neutrality advocates would openly explain their position, but they know better than that. It is probably easier to get someone to sign an online petition or state that they want "fairness" on the internet (leaving it to the net neutrality advocates to explain what that means later) than it is to convince them that the government should seize control of someone’s private property. And it is your "support" that they after, not your actual agreement with their entire position. They claim to have over a million and a half signatures and the support of their first GOP presidential candidate, so why would they change anything now?

2. The "One-Minute Case for Sweatshops"....

What? You want me to excerpt something you can read in one minute?

3. A blogger sees her column on "The Che Paradox" translated into Polish!

That's all folks!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo. Sorry, Darren!
6-6-07: Added update to BSE section.

A "Carelessness Preserve"

If you have any doubt that environmentalism is an anti-reason movement, an ibroglio in Laredo, Texas should remove it.

In the impassioned fight to save a wetland here from a developer's ambitious blueprints, the contenders agree on little except for how the piece of land was formed: carelessness.

More than 10 years ago, the growing city built a retention pond at Laredo International Airport as part of its drainage infrastructure. But the man-made pond was not properly maintained, and over the years it evolved into a lush habitat nearly indistinguishable from a naturally occurring one at neighboring Lake Casa Blanca State Park.

...

[Some] defenders of the project say the critics are confusing the public to make them erroneously think that the nearby state park will be built on. [bold added]

Chalk up a first for the annals of environmentalism! As one "secular conservative" might put it, the "good news" is that the environmentalists have stopped damning everything man does for a moment. The bad news is that the essential characteristic of this action is that it did not involve the use of that species' natural means of survival, reason, or promote its survival.

The environmental movement ignores the fact that change occurs constantly in nature whenever it damns man for changing his environment to further his own survival. The environmental movement furthermore treats as sacrosanct every other change wrought by living beings as they try to survive -- except when man makes changes as he tries to survive. And the environmental movement exempts from moral evaluation the means by which every species survives -- except Homo sapiens, for whom the exercise of reason is (at best) the new Original Sin.

The fight to save this "wetland" -- this man-made swamp -- strips bare the absurd notion that the environmentalists are sincerely interested in "preserving" nature. If they were, they'd have tried to make the City of Laredo "remediate" the erroneously-created swamp long ago.

This fight also exposes as fraudulent the oft-repeated claim that environmentalism is a crusade to keep the earth habitable by humans. Otherwise, why would some moist piece of ground be treated as more sacred than even a single one of the 1300 life-giving jobs the development that would replace it would create?

So man changing nature isn't bad, after all, so long as it isn't done on purpose. If you, gentle reader (and fellow human being), appreciate the fact that your own happy life is your only purpose, and that you must use your mind actively to achieve it, you will appreciate that it is not damage to nature, but precisely your mind and your life that the environmentalists are warring against.

This piece of land, if "saved", will be neither a nature preserve nor a park. It will be a "carelessness preserve", a monument to the utter contempt for human life that provides the animus for the environmental movement. A monument to how little they care about us.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 199

Good Article and a Case to Watch

George Will writes an article -- well worth reading in full -- about the economic distortions brought about by government regulation of the number of cab drivers through licensing schemes in such cities as New York and Minneapolis. He then mentions a rare victory in the cause of removing government interference from the economy.

But all this is merely en route to his describing a very interesting and important legal case that has been filed as a result of said victory.

In response, the [state-created taxi] cartel is asking a federal court to say the cartel's constitutional rights have been violated. It says the cap -- a barrier to entry into the taxi business -- constituted an entitlement to profits that now are being "taken" by government action.

The Constitution's Fifth Amendment says no property shall be "taken" without just compensation. The concept of an injury through "regulatory taking" is familiar and defensible: Such an injury occurs when regulation reduces the value of property by restricting its use. But the taxi cartel is claiming a deregulatory taking: It wants compensation because it now faces unanticipated competition. [bold added]

So poor is the general appreciation of the concept of individual rights that it is the abolition of a special favor granted by the government -- and not the government's being able to take property in the first place -- to which objections are raised! Needless to say, this is a case to watch, and I am grateful that George Will brought it up.

It is worth noting further that, in addition to the economic distortions wrought by this government trampling of rights, the very laws Will discusses are among those that made possible the recent attempts by Moslem cab drivers in Minneapolis-St. Paul to impose their religious beliefs on others by refusing service to anyone who wanted to bring alcohol on board their cabs.

As Software Nerd pointed out in a comment, "[T]hey should abandon the tag system altogether, and let the muslims refuse service if they want." Indeed. Under capitalism, riders would have many other options available to them -- like refusing money to superstitious, control freak cab drivers who won't carry alcohol.

A Round of thanks ...

... should go to the unsung heroes in a story (image from the Associated Press) I read about yesterday morning in San Antonio.

Heavy rains caused a Greyhound bus to hydroplane on a freeway, nearly causing the bus , loaded with passengers, to plummet straight into the flood-engorged Guadalupe River. Amazingly, everyone lived and there were no major injuries.

The focus of this news story was on the weather and the terror of the occupants before they escaped from the rear windows of the vehicle. In fact, an official is quoted as saying that, "They were very lucky. The river was right underneath them."

But this wasn't dumb luck! This was an example of human genius in action, but the clue was mentioned only in passing: The bus "broke through the railing of a bridge." That railing impeded the bus enough to save all on board, and the engineers who designed it never came up. Were it not for the men who thought about how to make that highway as safe as it turned out to be, that bus would have plunged into the river and we'd have been reading about fatalities.

We owe those men a word of thanks -- and especially since their effectiveness is so much a part of our daily lives as not to be regarded by most as newsworthy.

An Example of "Soft Paternalism"

From time to time, I see various pundits, including libertarians, floating the notion that it is somehow okay for the government to enact Orwellian programs so long as they are sneaky about it.

Now, via Matt Drudge, I see that this concept is being put into practice.

The federal government is undertaking the most ambitious set of studies ever mounted under a controversial arrangement that allows researchers to conduct some kinds of medical experiments without first getting the patients' permission.

The $50 million, five-year project, which will involve more than 20,000 patients in 11 sites in the United States and Canada, is designed to improve treatment after car accidents, shootings, cardiac arrest and other emergencies.

The three studies, organizers say, offer an unprecedented opportunity to find better ways to resuscitate people whose hearts suddenly stop, to stabilize patients who go into shock and to minimize damage from head injuries. Because such patients are usually unconscious at a time when every minute counts [for whom? --ed], it is often impossible to get consent from them or their families, the organizers say.

The project has been endorsed by many trauma experts and some bioethicists, but others question it. The harshest critics say the research violates fundamental ethical principles. [bold added]

The article goes on to discuss how difficult it would be to obtain informed consent under the conditions during which one might become "eligible" for the study, and ends with the following quote from Myron Weisfeldt, one of the organizers of this "study":

Some people object to the whole concept of doing any study whatsoever without permission. We try to explain all the layers of approval we've gone through and that this is the only way we can do the kind of research that could save many more lives in the future. [bold added]

No mention is made, as the "difficulty" of obtaining consent is used as a distraction, of how "difficult" it might be for a loved one to lose someone who might have lived had he been able to avoid one of the experimental treatments. Furthermore, Weisfeldt seems particularly hopeful that his "layers of approval" will disguise the fact that the crucial one is still missing: that of the Guinea pig -- I mean, the patient!

Even without disentangling the state from scientific research and medicine, I can come up with one very simple (if inconvenient) way to get informed consent for these studies: by asking in advance. By, say, cooperating with insurance companies that might offer rate discounts as an inducement to study participants (who might have to wear an ID bracelet or anklet or even an embedded microchip), it would be possible to avoid making you or me into a laboratory animal at a time when, as they say, "every minute counts".

To "save lives" by attacking individual rights is a contradiction in terms. I find it quite disturbing that such blatant violations of our rights cause little indignation, while being discussed in completely nonessential terms.

-- CAV

Happy Memorial Day!

Posting will be irregular and probably light until about Wednesday, so I wish you a happy Memorial Day holiday now.

And, since I am relieved not to have the question I started yesterday's post with gnawing at the back of my mind over the long weekend (and because the quote is so good), I post the answer here.

The Inspector points out that quote I mentioned at the start of the post was in fact by Ayn Rand, but it appears in Leonard Peikoff's lecture "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand" (which can also be found in print at the end of The Voice of Reason).

The essence of a con-man's lie," she began, "of any such lie, no matter what the details, is the attempt to gain a value by faking certain facts of reality."

She went on: "Now can't you grasp the logical consequences of that kind of policy ? Since all facts of reality are interrelated, faking one of them leads the person to fake others; ultimately, he is committed to an all-out war against reality as such. But this is the kind of war no one can win. If life in reality is a man's purpose, how can he expect to achieve it while struggling at the same time to escape and defeat reality?"

And she concluded: "The con-man's lies are wrong on principle. To state the principle positively: honesty is a long-range requirement of human self-preservation and is, therefore, a moral obligation." [Inspector's bold]

Family obligations and some travel would have kept me from looking for this at least for a couple of days, although another commenter would have had me on the right track. (And another provided a more elaborate formulation of what is wrong with lying which is worth reading.)

-- CAV

An Elaborate Ruse

No sooner do I hear about and blog an amazing research tool than I wish I already had it at my disposal! I recall from somewhere that Ayn Rand very succinctly summarized the case against lying and it is driving me crazy that I can't remember exactly how she put it or where she said it. So I'll have to summarize....

When one lies, one sets himself up in opposition to the honesty and ability of anyone one hopes to deceive due to the fact that the way men discover the truth of a proposition is through gathering all available evidence and integrating it by means of logic with the rest of their knowledge. Thus, one ends up having to construct other lies to corroborate the initial one, remember to whom one said what and when, and so on, "waging", as I think Rand put it, "a war against reality", because one cannot just confabulate a free-standing lie and expect not to get caught.

I thought of the Objectivist case against lying this morning because I encountered, through Arts and Letters Daily, a link to a New York Times story about a propaganda effort that makes Michael Moore seem like a piker, and something its author found quite bemusing: a Creationist "Museum":

It is a measure of the museum's daring that dinosaurs and fossils -- once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible's creation story -- are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah's flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.

...

There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah's flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God's glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.

Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the "Jaws" and "King Kong" attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection. [bold added]

When one considers the actual nature of the Christian story of creation, the fact that this story caused me to think about the argument against lying should seem odd at first. Why? Because this creation myth, being arbitrary (i.e., asserted in the absence of all evidence), has even less relation to the truth than an actual lie. In other words, the story of Genesis can not (and need not) be disproved. It should, like any other baseless claim, be rejected out of hand because the burden of proof lies with the person who makes a claim.

The various purposes of this museum, as the last line of the above excerpt would indicate, strike me as darkly interesting to contemplate, but I think the central one is to enable Creationists to pretend that there somehow is "evidence" for their wild claims about the universe being created in six days only a few thousand years ago.

In a sense, it is heartening that some Christians saw a need to make such elaborate efforts to "back up" their cosmological views. This provides us with some evidence that the influence of the Enlightenment on our culture, though waning, remains strong enough that they do not feel able to get away with just demanding blind acceptance of their myth or, by extension, of their religious views.

On the other hand, this "museum" is also a staggering display of willful ignorance and an implacable hostility to reason. It is, in fact, so staggering that author Edward Rothstein seems unable to fathom its actual evil:

In the museum's portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses? [bold added]

He makes a good point, but he is wasting his time if he thinks he is going to give pause to any Creationists out there. Nobody capable of creating such a museum would be concerned with its approach constituting a "slippery slope" because it was precisely his intention to build a slippery slope!

To comprehend the full evil of this institution, one must recall the purpose of a real museum -- education through the presentation and some synthesis of evidence -- and its target audience. America, although becoming more religious, is still a society that respects reason. It is also a society that has, for several generations now, been poorly-educated in terms of material and, more importantly, method (i.e., how to think).

Although most Americans remain implicitly rational on some level, the ability of many to think on a very abstract level at all has been severely stunted. To such adults -- and to many children who have not yet learned how to think and perhaps never will -- this museum's overload of sensory data and facile explanations plausibly linking a few facts together might seem convincing.

The payoff, of course, is that, in the same manner Christians have done for centuries, this perceptual "evidence" will succeed in eliciting obedience and support for the various religious dictates packaged with it.

Once again, it pays to recall the words of the Fountainhead's arch-villain Ellsworth Toohey: "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes." This museum is no attempt to win an argument. It is an attempt to pretend that there is an argument behind Creationism at all, an attempt made in the hope that the American public is finally dumbed-down enough to fall for it.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected some typos.
5-26-07: The Inspector saves the day, perhaps two or three, in fact.

Quick Roundup 198

Downsize Me My State

Instapundit reader Wagner James Au, whom Glenn Reynolds excerpted from email, mentions the medical costs associated with obesity, and claims that "one of the biggest costs on US health care is... people like Michael Moore." Reynolds follows up with a quip: " Maybe Moore's next film can be called Downsize Me!"

I am just as happy to make fun of Michael Moore as the next guy, but this post has things just as backwards as Michael Moore himself does. For the sake of argument, let's supersize Au's estimate of the costs associated with obesity and say that his figures underestimate the costs associated with obesity by half.

But what difference would this make to me if I didn't have the state reaching into my pockets -- be it through taxation or regulation of industries related to medicine -- every time someone who didn't take care of himself needed medical care. Indeed, I would suspect that without the implicit assumption that there is a social safety net -- which might falsely appear to many to be capable of infinite expansion -- that more people would be far more careful about their own health. These costs would shrink overall, and would be borne only by those who incurred them.

Obesity -- like any number of other myriad risk factors in personal health -- is "our" problem only because the bloated welfare state is making it into anyone else's problem besides that of the afflicted individuals. The solution isn't to increase government involvement in the medical sector of the economy or to have the government dictating to us what to put into our own mouths. It is for the government to stop separating us from the effects of our own actions by underwriting -- and hence rewarding -- everyone's shortsightedness.

Having said that, it is useful in many contexts to consider medical costs in aggregate. The problem arises when we forget that, like any other tabulation, we are looking at the economic behavior of numerous individuals.

Rachel Carson's Genocide

Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute has a fitting thought for how we should commemorate the centenary of Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring.

But Carson's centenary is no cause for celebration. Her legacy includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded--discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.

...

In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a "necessary" component of a "vibrant biosphere" and seeking a "reasonable accommodation" with them.

Rachel Carson's birthday should be commemorated, not with laudatory festivities, but with the rejection of the environmental ideology she inspired. [bold added]

If only half the people who read Silent Spring would read this editorial, we'd be far closer to undoing the damage to our habitat accomplished by the banning of DDT.

Texas Close to Allowing Courses on Religious Texts

The Texas legislature is not done by a long shot with this year's assault on freedom in the Lone Star State. The latest bad idea that will probably soon be codified into law is a provision that will permit groups of students to demand the teaching of courses about religious texts at government expense.

The Senate easily passed and sent to the governor a bill Wednesday to teach Bible classes to high school students, but lawmakers immediately disagreed on whether the measure would make the courses mandatory.

Legislative leaders differed on whether school districts may offer the religion studies course, or whether they are obligated to do so if 15 or more students sign up for it. Both "may" and "shall" show up in different sections of the House bill that the Senate passed 28-2 without changing.

Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, sponsor of the legislation in the Senate, said his legislative intent clearly is to require school districts to offer the Bible course if at least 15 students sign up for it. [bold added]

And if you wonder why the "secular" Democrats were AWOL, blame pragmatism and multiculturalism:

However, Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, noted that the House Public Education Committee specifically removed "shall" from the original legislation, House Bill 1287, which, he said, allows local school districts to decide whether to offer the course, intended to give students a fuller appreciation of religion's role in society.

...

Estes and other supporters got little disagreement from critics that people could benefit from more knowledge about Hebrew scripture, the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran.

"People need to know both the good things and bad things that have happened in history in the name of religion," Estes said. "There's lots on both sides to go around, and an elective course like this is a wonderful forum to discuss those issues."

And it would be nearly impossible for students, he said, "to understand the writings and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." without a basic knowledge of the Bible.

Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, asked Estes whether the legislation would obligate school districts to offer a study of the Quran if at least 15 students requested such a course.

Yes, Estes answered, explaining that non-Muslim students may want to study the impact of the Quran "because of the present problems that we have with the war on terror because of people's misrepresentation of the Quran." [bold added]

Notice the Republican -- they're pro-victory, right? -- shamelessly pandering to the pro-Moslem left in that last paragraph so he can have the Bible introduced into public schools.

There is nothing inherently wrong with teaching courses about religion. In fact, I agree that some study of religion is a necessary compliment to the study of history and of philosophy. The problem here is the obvious potential for these classes to become indoctrination sessions coupled with the fact that the state should not promote religion.

We see, once again, another reason to get the state out of education entirely. If some parents want their children to have religious instruction, fine. Just don't make me pay for it or make me send my children to a school where they might feel pressured to take such classes. Unfortunately, this bill opens the door wide open for both such abuses and, in doing so, once again exposes the Republicans as enemies of capitalism, who are willing to sell out freedom whenever the opportunity to promote religion arises.

Searchable Ayn Rand Archives

Via HBL, I learned of a commercially-available CD compilation of the published works of Ayn Rand packaged with a browser and search software. Harry Binswanger is quoted at the site's information page:

Phil Oliver has made and is selling a CD-ROM containing all of AR's published writings, Dr. Peikoff's two books, plus Journals of Ayn Rand and Letters of Ayn Rand. I have been using his "beta-test" version of the CD for a couple of years, with great pleasure, and I have now installed the commercial version, which I highly recommend. At last--the entire corpus of Ayn Rand's writings, including the novels, on one CD. Through a super-speedy search facility, I can find any half-remembered quote in about two seconds. For instance, where is that passage in which Dagny reflects about the clarity of a thought named in words? I searched for "thought named in words," and, within a second, I had the page of Atlas on-screen, with the key-words highlighted"She did not know whether he understood it with that full, luminous finality which is a thought named in words; but she knew that what he felt in that moment was understanding."And, at the top of the screen it shows the source--in this case Atlas Shrugged, Part II, Chapter 1, The Man Who Belonged on Earth. The page number (347) of the paperback edition shows up in brackets in the text. Another example is there any discussion of philosopher Willard v. Quine in the Objectivist literature? In two seconds, I found the only reference page 284 of The Ominous Parallels. Or where is integration discussed in relation to the subconscious? Just searching for "integration" would give far too many hits, mostly about conscious conceptual integrations. So I searched for subconscious NEAR integration, and came up with hits from Journals of Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, The Art of Nonfiction, and The Ayn Rand Letter. This CD is a "must have" tool for anyone seriously interested in Ayn Rand. [minor formatting changes]

Related, be sure to stop by Noodle Food for Diana's announcement regarding a treasure trove of materials recently made available online by the Ayn Rand Institute.

-- CAV

Spencer on Turkey

FrontPage Magazine has an posted interesting article by Robert Spencer on the threat to secularism in Turkey and more importantly, what, exactly Turkish secularism is.

[B]ecause most of the participants in these pro-secularist rallies are nominally Muslims, they illuminate certain important aspects of the way forward for opposition to Islamic Sharia rule in Islamic societies. Onur Oymen of the secularist Republican People's Party recently denied that the secularist ralliers represented "moderate Islam." He declared: "You can't have democracy without secularism. The notion of moderate Islam to check radical Islam is nonsense. This idea being promoted by certain countries should be abandoned."

At first glance Oymen's distinction between secularism and moderate Islam may seem to be a distinction without a difference. Wouldn't a secular government in Turkey, and a movement in favor of that secularism, be essentially a movement of moderate Islam? After all, almost all of those who are protesting against Islamic rule in Turkey would identify themselves as Muslims.

However, identification as a Muslim is one thing, and acceptance of the principles of political Islam is quite another. All over the world today jihadists are targeting peaceful Muslims in their recruitment efforts, and presenting themselves as the exponents of "true" and "pure" Islam, including -- as the title of a widely-circulated publication had it -- jihad, "the forgotten obligation." Part of this presentation centers on a reassertion of political Islam. Cultural Muslims who have no desire to live in an Islamic state nonetheless have been able to formulate no response on Islamic grounds to the jihadist challenge. The only response that has ever gained traction in the Islamic world has been not just a de facto laying-aside of Islam's political and social character, but a self-conscious elimination of that character -- and Ataturk's Turkey has been the site of the greatest success of this approach. Ataturk realized that there would be a recrudescence and reassertion of political Islam whenever there was a revival of religious fervor. Thus Kemalism presented itself not as "moderate Islam," nor as an Islamic construct at all, but as an explicit rejection of political Islam in favor of secularism. That is, it was never presented as an Islamic construct or justified by Islamic teachings, but was an explicit rejection of certain traditional aspects of Islam. [bold added]

Note the echoing of a point made by John Lewis about our current war -- a point which was understood by our leaders as we were occupying Japan: that freedom requires a separation of religion from the state.

Despite the rising threat to secularism in Turkey, the fact that Turkey has been secular for so long is something we should think about more deeply. Why? Because Turkey's history shows that even a society where a followers of Islam form a majority can be free of Islamic law.

What the trouble in Turkey shows us is that the public must generally want the advantages of secularism. Some of these advantages would be far more apparent were the West far less tolerant of the malfeasance that is part and parcel of Islamic theocracies.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 197

Denial is Not a Strategy

Caroline Glick is, as usual, devastating in her analysis of the ineffectiveness of the Israeli government in the face of the latest round of attacks by its hostile neighbors.

[And then t]here is the issue of the goal of the current campaign. As was the case last summer towards Hizbullah, today the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government has not set for itself the goal of defeating Hamas. Rather the goal of the current operations in Gaza is to send Hamas a message. Like last summer, today the government hopes that by killing a sufficient number of Hamas terrorists, it will induce the organization to stop attacking Israel.

But of course, by limiting its goal in such a way, the message that Israel is sending is not that Hamas should stop attacking Israel. By refusing to fight to victory, Israel is telling Hamas that it cannot lose, which is to say, it can go on fighting forever.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the government's refusal to understand the lessons of the last war and to apply them in the current battle is that Israel has far more options for defeating its enemies in Gaza than it had in Lebanon.

Gaza is a small territory and in contrast to Lebanon, Israel has the ability to take control of ingress and egress from the area. So too, Israel's intelligence capabilities are far greater in Gaza than in Lebanon. Then too, in Gaza, the enemy Israel confronts is not as well-armed or well-trained as Hizbullah.

Aside from all that, Israel controls Gaza's economy. Israel sells Gaza its water and electricity. Were Israel to decide to stop selling water or electricity to Gaza, its enemies would be hard-pressed to function.

All of these relative advantages that Israel can bring to bear in Gaza would enable Israel to cause long lasting damage to all of its enemies operating in the area while minimizing losses to its forces and civilians. But to take proper advantage of any of its strategic and operational assets, the government must first learn the proper lessons of the last war. Its refusal to do so bodes ill for the future.

This is, in microcosm, the whole problem with the way the West is "engaging" its Islamofascist enemy: We have forgotten what war is and, perhaps, never fully grasped what it is for. The goal of a war of self-defense is to do whatever it takes to remove an enemy people as a threat. Glick hints at what could and should be done in the case of Gaza: Completely blockade it and attack it mercilessly until its people die or unconditionally surrender.

Good Luck, Coach Graham!

Rice Baseball Coach Wayne Graham first came to my attention several years ago when Rice won the College World Series. I particularly remember thinking that he was exactly the kind of crusty old man I hope to become some day, when having been ejected from one of the games for, I believe, disputing a call, a television film crew caught him watching the game from what looked like a broom closet somewhere in the stadium.

Graham, who coached at the Junior College level before taking the helm at Rice, has never had a losing season in 25 years of coaching and was honored as "Coach of the Century" by the National Junior College Athletic Association. He is thoroughly familiar with the feeder schools in Texas, and once said that he liked coaching Rice players because "they're smart". Two years ago, at the age of 68, he was signed on for another six years at Rice.

Coach Graham was in form Sunday, when my wife and I watched the final game of the regular season, which the Owls were winning handily 7-2 until they got a little sloppy defensively and let Memphis back into the game with two runs. Then a Memphis batter made a couple of funny steps after a bad pitch, and the catcher immediately started pointing at him and saying something.

The officials conferred and walked the batter, who the catcher was claiming deliberately stepped into the pitch. I have no idea whether this was a good call, but Coach Graham stormed out of the dugout to go toe to toe with one of them after the call. I think that seeing their coach sticking up for them reminded them to focus on winning the game again. That team perked up immediately afterwards, and rest of the game was basically a formality.

So why am I suddenly taking about baseball here? Well, I like this article on Graham's coaching philosophy from the Houston Chronicle preceding today's start of its Conference USA title en route, I hope, to another appearance in the College World Series.

A student of myriad subjects beyond baseball, Rice coach Wayne Graham recited a quotation to reflect the perspective that reserve players should embrace when playing time is scant and patience wears thin: "I will study and prepare and perhaps my chance will come."

That bit of wisdom, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, caused Graham to harken back to his playing days and condemn his own impatience, a condition that perhaps cost Graham a lengthier stay in the big leagues. In retrospect, Graham (who appeared in 30 games with the Phillies and Mets in 1963-64) wishes he'd have utilized this Zen-like approach, which is why he shares that perspective with his players.

"I learned it from my own experiences as a player, because if I had made myself more useful in general -- in other words tried to have a perfect attitude towards whatever my role was that day -- I'd have probably played longer in the big leagues," Graham said. "So that's where I learned it. I realized I had made some mistakes from the other angle, from being the player, so I tried to share my reasoning with the players as a player in that position." [bold added]

These aren't just platitudes for the former major leaguer. He's practicing what he preaches. What's he doing every time he gives such advice to one of his players?

Not that you need it, Coach, but good luck, anyway!

Societal Evolution and Tipping Points

Bill Whittle makes some interesting points, using gaming theory (specifically, the Prisoner's Dilemma) as his point of departure, about how society in general can evolve. A glaring deficiency is that he does not discuss the role of philosophical ideas in motivating individuals, but I found it worthwhile as far as I read, which is where he started talking about something he calls "the Remnant". (HT: Rachel Lucas)

Weird Fatwa

About the only thing that can be said for Islam is that it is sometimes entertaining. Little Green Footballs quotes from the Jerusalem Post:

Ezzat Attiya ... issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together.

In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers. It means the child could not marry the nursing woman's biological children.

Attiya - the head of Al-Azhar's Department of Hadith, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammad - insisted the same would apply with adults. He argued that if a man nursed from a co-worker, it would establish a family bond between them and allow the two to work side-by-side without raising suspicion of an illicit sexual relation.

Ooookaaaay!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

A Fitting Symbol

Over at the web site of The Houston Chronicle, I found the photograph at right, along with the following caption:

Red light cameras catch Metro, school buses -- Photos released under the Texas Public Information Act show police cars and school buses among the vehicles caught running red lights.

Needless to say, this image and similar ones of public transit buses being caught by our city's new red light cameras are rightly causing an outrage in some quarters.

What I find interesting, though, is the limited scope of this outrage, whose object is on such a low level of abstraction as to be barely beyond the perceptual level. Of course it is appalling that a school bus driver would be so careless as to run a red light at the risk of so many children on board, but where is the outrage for the other, even more reckless acts by our government that have made this picture possible in the first place?

Consider where many of our children are being sent -- increasingly doctrinaire schools which fail to help them develop the capacity to think rationally. Such schools turn out children who lack the skills essential to survival in an advanced capitalist economy, much less an understanding of the ideals and institutions that make one possible.

And consider whether it is really a good idea for our government to start installing surveillance equipment all over the place, especially given that it is already trying to force some private property owners to do so. Many, if not most people, thanks to a public "education" and years of dependence of one kind or another on the government, naively trust it to do the right thing at all times rather than look upon it as the dangerous tool that it is. In this respect, it is like fire: good for some purposes, but dangerous for others, and always to be ignored at one's own peril.

And speaking of the welfare state generally, we even see the same thing when some people attempt to "do something" about it. Such grassroots efforts as "Pork Busters" form when enough people become outraged at such things as that infamous "bridge to nowhere" -- and yet nobody challenges the massively larger larceny cum vote purchasing that is the welfare state, and which makes such relatively penny-ante outrages possible at all.

In all of these cases, people generally are unable to apprehend these greater outrages as outrages, if they are able to grasp them as anything other than immutable facts of their existence at all! This is in part because many have been trained to turn their minds off when they are informed that the impractical is the "moral" (having been taught that the morality has nothing to do with practicality) and in part because many can barely think at all (after being subjected to a Progressive education).

A man unable to think in abstractions will not see much in that picture beyond a careless school bus driver. A man unable to question the altruist morality parroted by everyone else around him will not be able to ask why his children are being sent -- at his expense and regardless of his wishes -- to have their minds slowly destroyed. A man who expects the government to take care of him will not worry about it watching his every move.

We're all on that school bus, boys and girls. Fortunately, as long as we remain alive, there is some hope of getting off. Part of that hope lies in each of us thinking for himself, questioning the morality of altruism, and working for a government that once again, respects individual rights.

-- CAV

Chavez to Enslave Louverture's Ghost

In an irony so blatant only generations of "Progressive" education could hide it from the general public, Hugo Chavez -- the man who has essentially transformed Venezuela into a giant plantation -- is backing a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led an 18th-century slave revolt in Haiti.

President Hugo Chavez hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression.

...

The project could mark a breakthrough for Villa del Cine, a new government-funded studio outside the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, which is part of Mr Chavez's effort to combat what he sees as American cultural hegemony.

...

Toussaint Louverture is a towering figure in the region's history. A freed slave of African descent, he led thousands of slaves in successful campaigns against British, Spanish and French troops before being betrayed, captured and exiled. He died in 1803, just before his followers succeeded in establishing the island's independence. William Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about him.

Glover said he wanted to educate the US about the story. "It's been essentially wiped out of our historic memory, it's been wiped clean." [bold added]

To summarize: A studio operated with funds expropriated from Venezuelans will make a film about a man who joined a slave rebellion -- in the name of rousing world opinion against the only civilization in human history, the West, to have abolished slavery!

To top that off, the black American director who plans to help him is not just oblivious to the irony, but is showing through his own actions so far that something more fundamental than Louverture's story has been "wiped clean" from our "historic memory": the difference between freedom and slavery.

It may be true that most Americans do not know about Toussaint Louverture, but I would wager that just as many are unaware that it was largely through the efforts of the British Empire during the nineteenth century that slavery -- a nearly universal practice all the way up to that time -- was essentially abolished throughout the globe. Andrew Bernstein makes just this point in The Capitalist Manifesto:

The capitalist countries, under the self-same liberal principles that had given rise to their systems of political/economic freedom, led the global campaign against slavery. Britain, one of the world leaders in implementing laissez-faire principles during the early 19th century, conducted a global campaign to first stamp out the vile trafficking in human flesh and then to wipe out the institution of slavery itself. "The impetus for the destruction of slavery came ... from a moral revulsion against slavery which began in the late eighteenth century..." Religion was not unique to the 18th century. The Enlightenment was. (269) [bold added]

The notion that the story of Louverture's struggle for freedom is somehow an indictment of the West is possible only by a massive dropping of context, including not just that it was the West that abolished slavery in the first place, but that there are some, like Chavez, who want to bring it back, only calling it "freedom" this time.

Yes. Slavery was once practiced in the West, but this was a massive contradiction to the Enlightenment principle that men should enjoy the freedom to pursue their own happiness. In fact, it was eventually this better principle that won out.

Far from helping us to remember this important aspect of our history, Chavez would prefer, in a sense, to re-enslave Louverture in the service of his desire to promote the fiction that slavery -- and not freedom -- is the defining attribute of western civilization and that, by implication, the universal slavery of socialism -- in the forms of massive theft, censorship, and oppression -- somehow represents freedom.

Whatever the merits of this film, Chavez hopes to confiscate them in the service of his own anti-freedom crusade just as any past slave master would take the fruits of others for his own enrichment. The circumstances of this film's production represent a grave injustice to every slave who has ever fought to break his bonds, and to everyone in the West who worked tirelessly and sometimes against overwhelming odds to end slavery.

What would Danny Glover call someone who yanked a piece of black history out of its context for the express purpose of distracting people from the vital lesson it could teach everyone about freedom? "Uncle Tom" would be too good for such a person. And yet, this is precisely what he is about to help Hugo Chavez accomplish. Look in the mirror, Mr. Glover. And then tell the slave-driver who likes to be called "el comandante" to put down his whip or go to hell.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Minor edits. (2) Corrected a factual error.

New York's Public Madrassa?

New York, the same city that already sports a "social 'justice'" high school, may soon have what amounts to a publicly-funded madrassa, as Daniel Pipes reports in the New York Sun.

[An Arab-language school] appears to be a marvelous idea, for New York and the country need native-born Arabic speakers. They have a role in the military, diplomacy, intelligence, the courts, the press, the academy, and many other institutions -- and teaching languages to the young is the ideal route to polyglotism. As someone who spent years learning Arabic, I am enthusiastic in principle about the idea of this school, one of the first of its kind in America.

In practice, however, I strongly oppose the KGIA [Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12 --ed] and predict that its establishment will generate serious problems. I say this because Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage. Some examples:

Franck Salameh taught Arabic at the most prestigious American language school, Middlebury College in Vermont. In a column for the Middle East Quarterly, he wrote: "even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism."

Pipes cites other examples as well as the general expectation among many Arab language instructors that their students are interested in converting to Islam. He then discusses a few of the individuals involved in this new school, in particular, its designated principal.

"Arabs or Muslims, [Dhabah] Almontaser says, are innocent of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: "I don't recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims." Instead, she blames September 11 on Washington's foreign policies, saying they "can have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East, and the fact that it has not been a fair mediator."

At a community meeting with the New York Police Department commissioner, she berated the NYPD for using "FBI tactics" when informants were used to prevent a subway bombing, thereby polarizing the Muslim community. For Ms. Almontaser, it appears, preventing terrorism counts less than soothing Muslim sensibilities.

Rewarding these views, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a foreign-funded front organization, in 2005 bestowed an honor on Ms. Almontaser for her "numerous contributions" to the protection of civil liberties.

I have stated numerous times here my objections to public education, but the idea of forcing the people of New York City -- which was attacked by Moslem Arabs in 2001 -- to pay human refuse like like Almontaser to educate children there is particularly obscene. It seems that every time I think public education has bottomed out, it finds a new low.

The Sun includes other related articles here.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 196

Just a Minute

Via Galileo Blogs, where GB cross-posts his own very good "The One Minute Case for Unrestrained Profit", a group blog based on an interesting concept has come to my attention: The One Minute Case... .

The One Minute Case is a new collaborative blog which will present a brief argument about a controversial issue that can be read in under a minute. The goal is to publish one case per day. You can read the cases to learn something new about an issue or use them as a source for longer arguments of your own.

Each one minute case has also so far included a short list of references appended to the end for further reading. Topics already covered by the new blog include Abortion Rights, the Case against Antitrust, Open Immigration, and Atheism.

As an aside, I laughed at this exchange between a Bible-thumper speaking up for his imaginary friend and the blog's administrator after the entry on abortion rights. The reply starts off with,"The Christian God is NOT pro life", and just gets better and better. It had never occurred to me that the Bible could be such an effective way to slap down insolent fundies, when wielded by a thinking man! As Johnny Carson would have said, "I did not know that!"

Darwin's Letters on Line

Adrian Hester emailed me last week with the following interesting news:

The Darwin Correspondence project has existed offline since 1974. It has so far published 15 volumes of the scientist's letters as books.

An agreement with the publisher of the books means the new website will offer digitised versions of the texts freely available to anyone four years behind the hard copies.

Nearly 5,000 pieces of correspondence will be fully searchable when the site launches on Thursday 17 May. [link added]

The site complements Darwin Online, which is in the process of posting Darwin's complete works -- minus his correspondence -- to the Internet.

Related: I haven't seen it all yet, but Michael Caution recently posted a video (with his commentary) of Brown University professor Kenneth Miller demolishing the notion of Intelligent Design Creationism.

Socialism, not immigration, is the problem.

Mark Steyn echoes a point about the immigration debate that I have made here and here, among other places. As quoted by Glenn Reynolds:

[I]f you wanted to construct the perfect arrangement for modern life, it would be to acquire:

a) just enough of an official identity to be able to function - open bank accounts, etc - and to access free education and health care; but

b) not enough of an official identity to attract the attentions of the IRS and the other less bountiful agencies of the state.

The present "undocumented" network structures provide this. For these Z visas to "work" (in Washington terms), they have to be attractive enough to draw sufficient numbers out of "the shadows". Right now, "living in the shadows" is a pretty good deal. Somerset Maugham famously called Monte Carlo a sunny place full of shady people. Undocumented America is a shady place full of sunny people.

Instead of attempting to draw the undocumented out of the shadows, it might be fairer to allow the rest of us to "live in the shadows", too. My suggestion is that, on the day this bill comes into effect, all 300 million US citizens and legal residents should apply for a Z visa.

I agree, except that if we were to do this at all, it should be not as a protest against illegal immigration, but against the welfare state, which is making the lives of all but the illegal immigrants difficult, and without which many of the problems associated with illegal immigration would cease to exist.

Giggle Maps?

If you want to find out how to get from New York to Paris in just shy of 30 days, just consult Google Maps! (HT: Adrian Hester)

Those Clueless Libertarians

Had I been pressed for time, I could have posted a decent roundup based solely on recent email from my good friend, Adrian Hester.

He also sent me to a link where a Libertarian demonstrates a total misunderstanding of the nature of rights in general and intellectual property rights in particular. I'll let Hester sum up the article:

[C]heck out this bone-headed libertarian arguing that plagiarism in the public schools should not be considered fraud or a violation of any honor codes since the children are forced to be there and are not getting paid for their work and so on. Oh yeah, and intellectual property doesn't exist since the author still has his words even after they've been stolen by the plagiarizing punks.

Where to begin? By Daniel Macintyre's own arguments:

1. A murder committed in prison wouldn't be a murder since the inmates were forced to be there and they can always claim to be trying to "subvert a coercive authority".
2. Any attempt to discipline children (i.e., coerce or threaten them for not doing something) at all is contrary to the requirements of a free society.
3. The concept of property applies only to tangible goods.

The common denominator behind all these errors is the failure to realize that the concept of "rights" stems from man's nature as a rational animal, his need to use his mind in order to survive, and the fact that the primary threat to his doing so stems from threats initiated by other men. Using force in retaliation to threats (which is what a proper government does) is good because it protects individual rights.

Thus, to quickly rebut the above three egregious errors:

1. To voluntarily initiate force against another person is a crime. Being forced to be somewhere is not the same as being forced to commit a crime.
   
2. Children have not yet fully developed the capability to think rationally and so have more limited rights than adults. Forcing them to do things for their own good is an integral part of helping them become rational adults. In fact, failing to do so can even result in their violating the rights of others (as by plagiarism). Viewed in the latter context, it can be seen that failing to control children is at least as much a threat to the rights of others as failing to control an animal one owns, and for many of the same reasons.
3. The expression in language of the fruits of one's intellectual efforts is not identical with the intellectual effort itself, but it can transmit the fruits of that effort to others, sparing them from making such efforts. To use a more concrete analogy: If I take money from a rich physician, I haven't made him unable to make a living. So, since I just took his money, and he still has his skills, I haven't "stolen" from him, right? Wrong!
   

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is part of why I make damn sure that people never mistake me for a Libertarian.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor editorial changes.

Censorship Mania at the Post

Yes. The title of this post is a bit of a riff on the one ("Internet Hysteria Strikes The Post") used by "Captain" Ed Morissey when he blogged this Washington Post column by Tom Grubisch earlier in the week.

The column came to my attention only today, when it was reprinted in today's Houston Chronicle, and Captain Ed's posting showed up when I searched Grubisch's name on the Internet in an effort to find a permanent URL for his column, since the Chronicle has the unfortunate practice of posting its material to the Internet only for short periods of time.

Captain Ed and one of his commenters make some good points, and the post is worth reading, but I am playing off his post title for a reason that I'll get to soon enough. Let's consider the WaPo piece first, though.

Grubisch starts out his column with the claim that "we want 'transparency'" -- whatever that is -- "in all institutions, even private ones", and then helpfully suggests that the Internet is one glaring example of a place where this undefined, but universally-desired "transparency" does not exist.

Now, in case you were wondering what "we all want", Grubisch cheerfully tells you in the next few paragraphs:

Imagine going to a meeting about school overcrowding in your community. Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending. "Get rid of the bureaucrats, and then you'll have money to expand the school," he says, shaking his finger at the surrounding faces.

You notice his nametag -- "anticrat424." Between his sentences, you interject, "Excuse me, who are you?"

He gives you a narrowing look. "Taking names, huh? Going to sic the superintendent's police on me? Hah!"

In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see. [bold added]

Got that? "Transparency" is the freezing-out of the "civic problem-solving process" of anyone who will refuse to identify himself to any busybody who can't just ignore (or complain to a proper authority about) someone he finds obnoxious or who deems what he says to be "hate-mongering". In other words, we should censor anyone on the Internet who will not openly identify who he is. (I set aside two other blatant problems with this example: (1) It is far easier to ignore a stupid Internet posting than it is to ignore someone at the podium during a meeting; and (2) Whether someone is allowed to speak at a meeting anyway is up to the organizers of that meeting, not some random gadfly who gets offended.)

And if you think my criticism of Grubisch is overblown, consider the following paragraphs, which he writes after discussing the ways that some Internet sites have already cut down on the noise from actual flame-wars, while helpfully indicating that (1) "many sites are [still] unwitting enablers" at which "Mr. anticrat424 could still find a well-amplified podium", but that (2) "one concern common to all sites is whistle-blowers".

Online pioneer Vin Crosbie suggests that sites -- whether personal blogs, community sites or major news providers -- should be flexible enough to grant pseudonyms to users who want to blow a whistle. This would require sites to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. How often would such intervention be required? Not enough to require most sites to hire extra staff.

A site that grants a pseudonym would have to know the poster's real name as well as some facts that back up any accusations. The site wouldn't have to cave in whenever it was slapped with a subpoena. Courts have ruled that both anonymous and pseudonymous posters have "qualified privilege" under the First Amendment that protects their identities and puts a high legal bar in front of subpoena seekers.

...

If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it's merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn't want that? [bold added]

(Nice argument from intimidation there, at the end, Grubisch. I love you, too.)

Notice first that Grubisch is well aware that if sites wanted to cut down on flame wars, they already have the means at their disposal to do so. Furthermore, he realizes that some do and some do not. He tosses in, casually, that "personal blogs ... should be flexible enough to grant pseudonyms to users" [my emphasis].

So does he mean that Gus Van Horn should show this "flexibility" -- or that Google's Blogspot is actually the "personal blog"? This is important, because Grubisch thinks that for an author to use a pseudonym, he should have to identify himself to someone else or prove to that person's satisfaction that he is a "whistle-blower" -- with an air-tight case. Somehow, I don't think he wants to leave that decision to me. Or Google, either, for that matter.

The facile (and false) equation of what Grubisch finds a fringe viewpoint with a rude method of delivery, and his false dichotomy of the motives for wanting to remain anonymous -- between a desire not to be accountable and a desire to expose a specific case of wrongdoing -- are both bad enough, in that they plant some very serious misconceptions into the minds of his readers.

But the clincher is Grubisch's use of the concept of "transparency" in the context of "even private" institutions. This is a clear allusion to the onerous Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was passed not so long ago in the name of "transparency" and has proved to be a major burden on corporate America (an objection he seems to anticipate by assuring that most content providers would not need to "hire extra staff").

Grubisch makes this allusion for a reason: If some content providers performed as he wished, those who wish to remain anonymous for reasons Gubisch has not listed would go elsewhere. The only way to achieve the Internet "transparency" Grubisch wants is by government force. There is no other way to achieve the goal that Grubisch presumes we all want except to somehow make sure that all "private institutions" comply. That "somehow" is government force.

There are many reasons -- many legitimate ones -- besides wanting to become a drive-by flamer or a whistle-blower for one to want to use a pseudonym. For example, has Mr. Grubisch ever considered that, outside his own line of work, it can often properly be considered unprofessional (and very rude) to bring one's political views on the job?

This is the case for me, and I avoid the problem by keeping my blogging identity separate from my professional one. This furthermore allows me to control when my opinions arise at work. The alternative is to potentially allow a coworker who has it out for me and has found out about my blog to make the decision for me by following my blog until I say something he knows will offend someone important, and then bringing up what I said at a very inopportune time.

Or consider Grubisch's own example: whistle-blowing. Suppose that I had evidence that government funding of education -- oh, I don't know -- led to poor schools, promoted wasteful spending, and posed a threat to freedom of speech. The logical outcome of my "whistle-blowing" would, among other things, include a call to eliminate the education bureaucracy. I might even feel strongly-enough about this course of action to put off someone not familiar with my evidence.

So, knowing that most people favor public education because they have not thought about this as much as I have, I have to tell someone, probably a stranger, who I am, present my entire case, and hope said stranger doesn't just decide that he has been handed the equivalent of a fifty-page Klan manifesto -- or simply claim authorship of what I wrote after he determines that I have to worry too much about keeping my own job to blow the whistle on him!

But, no. I am afraid Grubisch is not so obtuse as to have failed to realize that there are more than two reasons to want to remain anonymous when posting one's opinions on the Internet. Nor is he so naive as to really believe that making people unable to post anonymously will allow "spirited online debate [to] continue unimpeded".

No. Tom Grubisch is well aware, that with the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress now, and possibly the Presidency in the relatively near future -- the same Democrats who are trying to revive and extend the "Fairness" Doctrine -- that there is a strong chance that it will be possible to quash public debate by making people like me have to choose between shutting up or giving out our real names to total strangers.

And this brings me to my last point. Although Ed Morissey made excellent points in his own post, he would be wise not to so easily dismiss Grubisch as a hysteric -- though he clearly wants to sow hysteria. We who value our freedom of speech should take the Tom Grubisches of the world very seriously. They aren't nearly so funny when they get their way.

-- CAV

Updates

5-21-07: One minor edit.