Quick Roundup 317

Cutting to the Chase

A Jehovah's "Witness" left a pamphlet in my front door a few days ago that gave me a good chuckle.

After only three paragraphs and two biblical references, the pamphlet got right to the point:

You are invited to a special Bible talk entitled "Who Is Qualified to Rule Mankind?" which will be given at the time and place shown below. [bold added]

At least anyone who goes will know what he's getting himself into....

How to Run a Cult

Over the weekend, a news story surfaced about yet another doomsday sect whose followers holed themselves up for the apocalypse on the word of their "prophet".

Nothing new there, but I was both startled and amused by the degree of personal autonomy its congregants had forfeited to their pastor:

He reportedly told followers that, in the afterlife, they would judge whether others deserved heaven or hell.

Followers were not allowed to watch television, listen to the radio or handle money, Russian media reported. [bold added]

I frequently comment here on the power of the philosophical ideas one holds to affect his actions, and yet even I am amazed from time to time at what some people are willing to forfeit in favor of otherworldly considerations.

This is one of those times.

Every Hour is "Earth Hour" in North Korea

Jim May pointed me to this news story, which mentions Google's annoying part in this anti-capitalist crusade:

From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to the Sears Tower's famous antennas inChicago, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change.

The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.

The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun.

The bulk of the rest of this mindless article is a long litany of cities -- not including my own, I am happy to say -- that took part, but I did find the following noteworthy:

"What's amazing is that it's transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody."

...

"There's a widespread belief that somehow people in the United States don't understand that this is a problem that we're lazy and wedded to our lifestyles. (Earth Hour) demonstrates that that is wrong," Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climate change vice president for WWF, said in Chicago on Saturday. [bold added]

Count me as someone for whom this does not "resonate" and please explain to me why being "wedded" to the technologically advanced "lifestyle" natural for my species is somehow wrong.

Revealingly, North Korea, which resolutely keeps its lights out all day, every day, as seen in the satellite image to the right, is left completely unmentioned.

Oh. But that might have distracted everyone from the equivocation that dismissive words like "lifestyle" are meant to encourage. Man survives by using his mind to alter the environment to better suit his needs. When we start treating untouched nature as inherently good, we are renouncing our own means of survival. "Earth Hour" is meant to make these contradictory objectives -- preserving nature untouched and our own survival -- seem compatible long enough to get people to buy into the green agenda.

In fact, man needs electricity and the freedom to use it as he sees fit. The environmentalists want to take both from us, but know that they will not convince us to accept their agenda if it is advocated openly.

I don't like to waste money by burning lights that I do not use, but such waste illustrates on a concrete level that capitalism brings abundance and that men are free to use it. To make a point of turning out as many lights as possible is a powerful symbol -- but not a positive one.

-- CAV

My Second Home Town

Via Matt Drudge comes a really good article about a town I did not want to go to at first, but which the years have caused me to regard as my second home town, Houston Texas.

The article holds, and rightly so, that Houston is well on its way to becoming one of the world's great cities.

First appearances -- then and even now -- often didn't help. Early visitors were struck by the settlement's largely shack-like housing. And in those days, long before air conditioning, there was the Houston weather, which often combined scalding temperatures with soupy humidity. "Heat is so severe during the middle of the day that most of us lie in the shade and pant," wrote a doctor, Ashbel Smith, in 1838. Yet the Allen brothers had not really chosen so badly. Houston possessed powerful assets. It sat on an enormous fresh-water aquifer, which today guarantees a water supply in a way that other growing cities, such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, can only dream about. The area also abounded in natural resources such as timber and rich soil that was ideal for growing cotton. And when oil drillers hit a gusher in Spindletop, about 90 miles from Houston in East Texas, in 1901, Houston suddenly found itself positioned as the nearest city to some of North America’s richest oil and gas reserves.

None of this, however, adequately explains Houston's ascendancy. Other cities enjoy better locations for shipping, richer agricultural resources, or similar proximity to oil fields. The answer, I have come to understand as I have worked in Houston as a reporter and consultant, echoes something that the late Soichiro Honda once told me: "More important than gold and diamonds are people." This critical resource, more than anything, accounts for Houston's headlong drive toward becoming not only the leading city of Texas and the South, but also a player on the global scene: it is emerging as one of the world's great cities.

It took a certain type of settler, back in the 1830s, to look at a sun-blasted, humidity-drenched, mosquito-infested flatland far from any major river or port and think: "Here is where I'll make my success." That tradition of hopefulness and determination can readily be found in the city to this day. As Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg notes, roughly 80 percent of Houstonians, according to his annual local surveys, consistently agree with the proposition that "if they work hard, they can succeed here." [bold added]

The article is a very interesting read and touches on some things I have written about before, like Houton's peaceful, capitalistic transition away from segregation in the 1960s and the fundamental differences between it and the Gulf Coast rival it eclipsed some time ago, New Orleans.

If I could live anywhere I felt like, it would be Houston. New adventures aside, I will miss this place. I have enjoyed spending the past fourteen years here.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 316

Hillary Rodham Clinton Costanza

One of Seinfeld character George Costanza's more memorable quotes was, "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it." Apparently, this is advice to live by for the distaff member of our field of presidential candidates:

When a politician accepts the premise that in politics appearance is reality, it can be dangerous to his mind. The words he says do not necessarily have to stay connected to reality. Just think of how this false premise could wreak havoc with a person's epistemology. Over time a person would become less sharp and more vague in his thinking. He would not examine his words against reality but against the standard of political pragmatism. Do his words help his poll numbers that afternoon? Then they become reality.

And be sure to read the comments.

Myrhaf also seems to be working on a series of "problem" posts. First, there was "Obama's Problem", then "Hillary's Problem". I hope he concludes with "McCain's Problem" before the election or we'll be living with "America's Problem" when all is said and done.

On second thought, that's what we'll get no matter what in this election.

Objectivist Carnival

I've been too swamped to notice the submission deadlines lately, but the weekly Objectivist roundups are going strong. Kendall's hosting this week. I read Dan Edge's entry yesterday and found it very insightful -- but you'll have to stop by the roundup to see what I'm talking about.

Limping for a Few Days

If you had any idea how busy I've been lately, you'd see the humor in this....

I was online checking my email at home Tuesday night when my screen suddenly went blank. After testing my monitor on an obsolete computer we still have around and swapping out video cards, I have to conclude that the motherboard went bad. This means that the time frame for upgrading my desktop just got moved from "some time in the next few months" to "within days".

In any event, I'm getting by on our laptop, but I am now frantically looking for a decent, cheap desktop. I've had too many problems with Dells at home and at work, so I'm avoiding them. I am comfortable swapping out components, but don't have the time or patience to build something entirely from scratch. I know that there are decent, new, fairly stripped-down models out there for a few hundred smackers.

With the laptop, I can wait a short time for delivery.

Has anybody out there an online computer merchant he can recommend, or any other advice for someone in my situation?

More on McCain's Authoritarianism

Yesterday, I linked to an article by Matt Welch on McCain's war against the individual and criticized its author for not being more explicit about the danger McCain represents to freedom.

I have since learned of a lengthier and more alarming piece by the same author. Here's a sample, with a disclaimer and link following:

If you're beginning to detect a rigid sense of citizenship and a skeptical attitude toward individual choice, you are beginning to understand what kind of president John McCain actually would make, in contrast with the straight-talking maverick that journalists love to quote but rarely examine in depth. For years McCain has warned that a draft will be necessary if we don't boost military pay, and he has long agitated for mandatory national service. "Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it live a half-life, indulging their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect," he wrote in The Washington Monthly in 2001. "Sacrifice for a cause greater than self-interest, however, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause. Americans did not fight and win World War II as discrete individuals." [bold added]

Although I stand by my fundamental criticism of Welch for subscribing to libertarianism, an anti-intellectual political movement that poses a grave threat to the cause of individual rights, I must now concede that he does understand the danger McCain represents better than I'd given him credit for -- although still not enough to quit aiding and abetting the Libertarian Party.

I wince and hold my nose as I link to Reason Magazine, but the facts regarding McCain contained in this article want very wide dissemination.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.
4-1-08: Added hypertext anchors.

Maverick -- or Mad Cow?

It is by a libertarian, but this New York Times article on John McCain's "decade-long attack on the individual" is worth reading both as a short introduction to the topic of "What's wrong with John McCain?" and as an example of "What's wrong with libertarianism?"

Regarding McCain, the article briefly touches on the following quote, which Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute also cited in his recent piece on McCain's threat to freedom of speech.

I would rather have a clean government than one where quote "First Amendment rights" are being respected that has become corrupt.

But whereas Brook immediately notes that, "a government which strips us of our right to free speech is by that very fact corrupt," Matt Welch continues on with McCain's lame (and completely irrelevant) excuse for restricting freedom of speech, and without any real sense of alarm.

Be aware that McCain does not even regard freedom of speech as a right! I, for one am damn worried.

One might protest that I am nitpicking, and that this article is not focused on McCain's attack on freedom of speech. However, its whole tone is off because it never raises a serious moral or practical objection to McCain's anti-individualistic policies.

Why is a prohibition of any kind on speech that does not violate the rights of another individual bad? On what basis is freedom of speech a right? How might curtailing freedom of speech be at odds with the whole purpose of government? These issues never even come up.

Instead, McCain -- for his plain antagonism to individual rights and the grave danger this might pose to the Republic (and therefore, our lives) -- merely comes off sounding like an authoritarian prospective stepfather and the individual a flowering, sensitive adolescent whose whims might get hemmed in enough to cramp his style should Mommy decide to marry him.

It can be a bracing approach when his issues line up with yours -- I, for one, would welcome President McCain's unilateral wars on pork-barrel spending and waterboarding -- but it's treacherous territory for those of us who consider "the pursuit of happiness" as something best defined by individuals, not crusading presidents-to-be. [bold added]

(For the record, McCain's stand on waterboarding (also) endangers individual rights and his preoccupation with pork-barrel spending is a distraction from protecting them at best.)

Never mind that the moral purpose of man's life is "the pursuit of happiness", that the government's whole purpose is to protect our inalienable right to do so, or that both of these things can be objectively demonstrated.

Never mind that a candidate's core principles (as illustrated by a long track record like McCain's) imply that he is implacably opposed to individual rights.

Never mind that in such a case, one ought to suspect his motives any time he "lines up with" some cause or another, even if his stand looks good, taken out of that context.

Nothing McCain wants to do can be "bracing" -- unless one is oblivious to the life-and-death importance of the principles held by an individual as guides to his actions.

McCain does indeed have a record of antagonism towards the individual and he will have greater means to put that antagonism into practice if he is elected. But this is a much bigger problem than a reader of Welch's column will come away with -- if he doesn't leave thinking something like, "pursuit of happiness is too important to be left up to flaky individuals to define".

McCain represents a grave threat to individual freedom. Now is not the time for moral relativism. Not in the face of evil.

-- CAV

Gushers Come from Somewhere

Via Arts and Letters Daily, I have come across a book review that any commentator on environmentalism will want to consider, "Heard the One about the Farmer's Ethanol", by William Grimes, who reviews Robert Bryce's Gusher of Lies.

The book's subtitle, "The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence", seems to speak to one of my biggest annoyances with environmentalism: How it is now being sold as good for our economy and self-defense. (It is neither.)

But, as I said, it seems to. (More on that in a moment.) The book nevertheless might be worthwhile, as Grimes indicates, for its close examination of the specific types of arguments used to advance the causes of the various specific "alternative" fuels, as well as its bringing to light facts that their various advocates happily sweep under the rug. Take ethanol:

... Ethanol, in particular, drives [Bryce] wild. Fuel derived from corn has channeled billions in subsidies to Midwestern farmers and agribusiness, he writes, despite glaring shortcomings. It is expensive to produce and requires enormous amounts of water when irrigation comes into play. It produces much less energy than gasoline while emitting more pollutants into the air.

Detroit loves ethanol because it can use it to inflate fuel-efficiency ratings on their cars artificially. The mammoth Chevy Suburban, produced as a flex-fuel vehicle capable of burning both ethanol and gasoline, magically boosted its fuel efficiency to 29 miles per gallon from 15, since under federal rules only a vehicle's gasoline consumption need be factored into the equation. Ethanol, in other words, has allowed American car manufacturers to produce more gas guzzlers and contribute to increased imports of foreign oil.

The problem with corn and other alternative fuel sources boils down to cost and output. Fuel made from switch grass, another potential solution to the energy problem, costs a lot to produce, delivers a lot less energy than petroleum and would require, like corn, vast areas of farmland to meet a meaningful percentage of current energy needs. [bold added]

Yes. The problem with many fuels is their high cost, and this is why oil remains the best of the alternatives. (I'd love it if the petroleum industry had enough moral backbone to begin a huge PR campaign against ethanol and called oil something like "the alternative of choice".... Please, oil executives, use this idea! It's free.)

But that's the problem with most of these fuels, except nuclear power (which the Greens are using to go after coal). I fear, based on Bryce's reported advocacy of the federal government steering scientific research towards building a "superbattery" for solar power, that he may remain blind to the source of all this lying: Government interference in the economy.

Would Detroit be so eager to build cars that burn ethanol were it not for the government's silly rules on how to report fuel efficiency? Would so many farmers devote so much acreage to corn for ethanol without government "incentives"? Would promoters of ethanol get caught in such transparent lies even as their industry mushrooms if they didn't get so much help from the government in their pursuit of money? (I was about to say "energy profits", but that would have been at least two mistakes.)

No. One further question indicates why: Did oil become so big in the first place because the government, in its infinite wisdom, finally jawboned enough people into giving up their "addiction" to other fuels? Of course not.

I suspect that Bryce's book might be an invaluable resource concerning the relative merits of the various fuels touted as "alternatives" to the so-called fossil fuels, but that it suffers from a similar malady that many books focused on economics do -- a failure to consider the proper purpose of government.

A proper government does no more and no less than protect the individual rights of its citizens, which means that it allows each one of them to exercise his own judgement regarding the various choices -- including the economic ones -- he is confronted with throughout his life.

Such a government would do nothing to promote or retard any industry, allowing each to rise (as oil did) or fall (as fuel ethanol should) on its own merits as measured by how well it serves the needs of its customers. Individual customers would judge service by price, which ultimately reflects "cost and output", and thus saves every Tom, Dick, and Harry from having to become an energy expert.

But our government has taken up the immoral and quixotic crusade of setting the world's thermostat (HT: HBL) by artificially influencing or dictating how we judge the sources of the energy that we need to live our daily lives. On top of interfering with our ordinary method of making decisions by cost, this crusade demands of us, as voters, levels of expertise we don't and can't have about energy. This is where all the lies are ultimately coming from. Any con man worth his salt preys on ignorance.

In the short run, knowing that many overhyped fuels are actually lousy alternatives to oil and coal will be valuable in stalling the progress of government controls over our economic lives. But in the long run, plugging up gushing holes in the dike will not solve the real problem, which is that we face drowning in a flood of government regulation. To save ourselves, we must reinforce that dike in the only way possible -- by insisting that our government protect individual rights consistently.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 315

Yaron Brook on Campaign Finance "Reform"

Yaron Brook's editorials in Forbes Magazine are outstanding not simply on the merits of what he says, but also because he invariably discusses things that ought to be far more prominent in the public debate than they are.

Recently, he took a look at campaign finance reform, explaining how it threatens freedom of speech:

Sen. McCain was once asked whether McCain-Feingold abridges freedom of speech. He implicitly admitted that it does: "I would rather have a clean government than one where quote 'First Amendment rights' are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government." We should tell Sen. McCain and those who agree with him that a government which strips us of our right to free speech is by that very fact corrupt. [bold added]

Quite true. If we cannot openly discuss the merits of a given policy, political proposal, or candidate, how can we make rational, informed decisions at election time?

Any threat to freedom of speech is a dire danger to the Republic.

Anyone wondering why I will not under any circumstance vote for John McCain need look no further.

Read all of this, and recommend it to anyone you know who may appreciate its significance.

Guidance and Inspiration

Someone I hold in very high regard recently took the time to point out the existence of an abridged video of Professor Randy Pausch's now-famous "Last Lecture" on the off-chance I hadn't heard of it.

I hadn't, and I needed to hear it.

However, when time to watch the video came, I'd forgotten about this being the shortened version, simply googled for it, and ended up finding the full-length lecture. Happy chance. Here's the embed:

It's about eighty minutes long, and it may seem a little on the corny side at first, but make the time to watch this. You will not regret it.

My thanks again for that email.

Open Animosity Would Be Preferable

Over at Principles in Practice, John Lewis discusses yet another Islamist demand for censorship cloaked in the language of victimhood. As a bonus, this is being promoted as part of a "declaration against terrorism".

How should this "grip of fear" by Muslims be ended? The declaration demands that the Indian government shift the fear onto anyone criticizing Islam, by forcibly banning freedom of speech for critics of Islam.

And if you think governments in the West are going to stand up to this on their own, you have another thought coming.

Incidentally, you should stop by Principles in Practice and just start scrolling. Lots of good stuff there lately.

-- CAV

Bean Town

Mrs. Van Horn's match results arrived at noon yesterday and we were really thrown for a loop at first.

Boston.

Boston?!?!

For reasons related to the fact that we are a two-career couple -- with me trying to change careers -- this was our fourteenth choice. Neither of us seriously considered it as the place we'd end up.

And yet, that is where we will go.

I like Boston. I have several old friends there, including the one who first introduced me to Mrs. Van Horn. I have noticed that I'll probably get to make some new friends there through blogging. The place has lots of employment opportunities for someone like me.

Having said that, Boston was one of the last places I wanted to end up.

There is little one can do to control where one matches beyond interviewing only in places that might work well in the long run (which Boston can), ranking them accordingly, and sacrificing a fatted calf. The first two of these proved only slightly more effective than the last, and yesterday, I found myself, a little dazed at first, and thinking things like, "Well, I do have my health."

And that's nothing to sneeze at.

Yes. I may have to rewrite my whole post-match strategy from scratch. I have to leave behind some good friends and lots of good memories in Houston. We will be far from our families in the South. The high cost of living is going to make it much harder for me to transition from scientific research to something that will give me more time to write.

But these are obstacles, and I have learned through experience -- I initially lost Mrs. Van Horn to a rival -- that some obstacles are blessings in disguise and that others can be turned into new opportunities.

Time to start working on some alchemy!

-- CAV

Obama's Pragmatism

Dick Morris, an excellent political handicapper, describes how the prevalent influence of the philosophy of Pragmatism on American culture might help save Barack Obama from the electoral consequences of his long association with the racist Jeremiah Wright and his own failure to make a principled stand against him:

As the controversy continues, Americans will gradually realize that Obama stuck by Wright as part of a need to get ahead. They will chalk up to pragmatism why he was so close to such a preacher. As they come to realize that Obama doesn't agree with Wright but used him to get started, they will be more forgiving. [bold added]

I am afraid that Dick Morris is on to something here....

The philosophy of Pragmatism, in a nutshell, holds that the sole criterion for deciding whether to take an action is whether it "works" in the range of the moment. This approach is severely limited in ways that Leonard Peikoff presents in The Ominous Parallels:

By itself, as a distinctive theory, the pragmatist ethics is contentless. It urges men to pursue "practicality," but refrains from specifying any "rigid" set of values that could serve to define the concept. As a result, pragmatists -- despite their repudiation of all systems of morality -- are compelled, if they are to implement their ethical approach at all, to rely on value codes formulated by other, non-pragmatist moralists. As a rule the pragmatist appropriates these codes without acknowledging them; he accepts them by a process of osmosis, eclectically absorbing the cultural deposits left by the moral theories of his predecessors -- and protesting all the while the futility of these theories. (128) [at "Pragmatism" link, search "twentieth-century" and read preceding entry]

When you reject the whole idea of a clear definition of "what works", those who do not will happily set your terms for you.

Pragmatism makes it easier for the likes of Jeremiah Wright to set the terms of political debate. Many, many people will dismiss him out of hand as a blowhard, but fail to see the importance of opposing his ideas or the danger in leaving them unchallenged. Pragmatism thus removes the dangerousness of Wright's ideas from consideration.

This means that not just those who agree with him will be influenced by his ideas, but that even some who don't see their full implications and profess disagreement with him will also be under his influence. All, including Obama (whether or not he really feels disagreement with Wright), will put these ideas into practice.

In the meantime, the proper purpose of government -- the protection of individual rights -- is too abstract a notion for a pragmatist to ever consider long enough to see as anything other than a source of short-term frustration. Acquiring power, often for professed altruistic ends, is the name of the game, and sucking up to the likes of Jeremiah Wright is an obvious, easy way to acquire it.

This short-ranged and absurd conception of "practicality" is why Obama struck his devil's bargain in the first place and why he may get away with it long enough to become President of the United States. And then he'll be in a position to show us just how "practical" not thinking in terms of principles really is when he starts showing everyone in general that he does, indeed, use those foolish enough to help him.

Under the addling influence of Pragmatism, even a question like, "If Obama will use Jeremiah Wright, what will stop him from using me?" will be quickly forgotten the moment another question arises: "How will I use Obama?"

It is only when one appreciates the objectively practical role of abstract principles in guiding one's actions that one can understand that we really have no use for men like Barack Obama or Jeremiah Wright.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 314

The Paucity of Guts?

Caroline Glick, who grew up in the same part of Chicago as Barack Obama, cleans his clock regarding his bigotted, America-hating mentor, Jeremiah Wright.

I was 13 years old when I stood up alone to all my classmates and told them that I thought they should be ashamed of themselves for supporting an anti-Semite [i.e., Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson] for president. I was a child. But Obama came to Wright as an adult. And as an adult, he sat through 20 years of Wright's anti-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-American vitriol and said nothing. Indeed, until just a few months ago, he was honoring him as his spiritual mentor. What does that say about him?

...

It can be argued that there is a difference between how I reacted to black bigotry and how he reacted to black bigotry because I was an outsider and he was an insider. I wasn't trying to become a member of the black community. I was simply demanding to be treated with respect as a non-black by blacks who happened to be the vast majority of my classmates and teachers.

But then, here's another example.

...

I saw that the audience had given [Paul Williams, a speaker she vehemently disagreed with, but who was supposedly on her side] a standing ovation and so I began to wonder if I shouldn't simply return the check I had received from the organizers and leave. But I decided to stay and to challenge him.

And that is what I did. I quietly and forcefully explained why what Williams said was wrong, un-American, and in defiance of both Christian and Jewish values and approaches to human beings. And, as luck would have it, I received an even larger standing ovation than Williams did.

The point here is that I didn't nod my head to fit in, or treat him politely simply because we sat on a stage together. And I didn't surrender the floor to him. We were supposedly on "the same side," but his statements were so contrary to what I believe that it occurred to me that I'd rather be shopping with Nancy Pelosi than sitting through his hateful nastiness.

And I write all of this not to puff myself up. I don't think I did anything extraordinary by standing up to Williams or to my classmates and teachers in high school. I think that it is how people should behave particularly if they are smart enough to understand that ideas are important. And Obama is certainly smart enough to understand that ideas are important.

Obama's denunciation of Wright's bigotry amounts to too little too late. The time to stand up to him wasn't now, when his association with Wright is sinking his hopes for the White House. The time to have stood up to Wright was when Obama was just another member of his church. If he truly believes in what he says he believes, he should have walked out of Wright's church or grabbed Wright’s microphone and told his fellow churchgoers that Wright was wrong and that they mustn't hate. In twenty years of attending Wright's church, why didn't Obama once stand before his fellow church members and tell them that they mustn't hate their country and their fellow Americans? [bold added]

This needed to be said, and deserves to be widely publicized. (HT: LGF)

The best that could be said of Barack Obama is that he lacks the courage to stand up for his convictions. The alternative is that he agrees with Jeremiah Wright.

What Passes for Optimism

Regarding Obama's speech, Alexander Marriott has pronounced unity dead.

Fortunately, the American people, even the supremely gullible, are generally skeptical and disdainful, again generally, of hypocrisy. That Senator Obama, who claims to be a unifying leader who embodies every and all conceivable qualities which the great mass of the American people hold in common, is sitting by while his "spiritual mentor" accuses the government of the United States of unleashing biological warfare upon its own citizenry and the rest of the world, murdering "innocent" people without offering any context, and bringing the just fury of Islamic terrorists upon itself explodes his logic. Ironically, Obama has been wrapping himself in this man's coattails in order to appear sufficiently religious and pious. That goal was ridiculous. His call for unity is just plain dangerous (even in wartime, a loyal opposition is useful and necessary). Now one irrational desire is destroying another. And who says there is nothing good in American politics these days?

A disdain of hypocrisy speaks well of a people, but it will go only so far in carrying the day when the dominant morality is altruism. Obama's collapse will, after all, play into the hands of either Hillary Clinton or John McCain, both altruists, and the latter proudly so. In this race, we want the idiot or the cynic, but we look like we're going to get the "hero".

Pragmatism Making Altruism "Work": Exhibit A

Some time ago, I ran across this post, "Pigs Fly", heaping praise on the blogosphere for making "pork busting" a major congressional priority.

Progress is being made when all 3 remaining presidential candidates oppose earmarks.

Unfortunately, they are up against an entrenched and immovable object: Congress.

So what if all three candidates want to bust pork when all three support strangling the economy with global warming legislation and a big lurch towards fully socialized medicine? The desire on the part of Congress to fine-tune the vote buying pales by comparison to the huge new statist proposals our great anti-pork crusaders have in store for us -- and which Congress is likely enact in some form.

Reducing earmarks "works" to lower our national budget only if evaluated in the present moment, completely yanked out of the larger context of the government looting the economy on a massive scale. (Compare this pound foolishness to a recent proposal to "save money" by minting steel pennies.) That is to say, it does not really work as advertised.

But if a few fried pork rinds tossed into the air constitutes porcine aviation, I guess Don Surber has a point.

-- CAV

Updates

3-21-08: Minor edits.

Let's NOT Unite

RealClear Politics is loaded with links analyzing yesterday's Obama speech on race, although it is sprinkled with a few other things, including a column written by none other than the Republican nominee, John McCain. Too bad we'll be getting nearly the same thing no matter which color predominates the electoral map come November.

First, although I haven't heard or read the entire speech myself, indications are that it is as effective as such a speech can be coming from a conventional leftist. In other words, Obama seems intent on using race to advance his left-wing agenda.

One self-proclaimed "secular conservative" describes how Obama just slipped that race card out from his sleeve and played it: "His main theme is this: we have to set aside racial grievances and agree to a racial truce--so that we can unite across racial lines and work together to achieve socialism."

This would confirm the fears that several commenters have expressed here in the past and which a long-time association of an eloquent leftist with a racist makes completely unsurprising. Namely, this speech paves the way for all dissenters from Obama's leftist agenda to have to defend themselves against charges of racism. This is an opportunity for cultural activism in disguise.

I recommend looking at an Obama Presidency as the opportunity to de-couple, once and for all, the ideas of racial equality and egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is not the opposite of racism: Respect for individual rights is. Time to get the word out.

Thomas Sowell devastates Obama's attempt to plead ignorance of Jeremiah Wright's racism and hatred of America:

Spin number one is that Jeremiah Wright's words were "taken out of context." Like most people who use this escape hatch, those who say this do not explain what the words mean when taken in context.

In just what context does "God damn America" mean something different?

Spin number two is that Barack Obama says he didn't hear the particular things that Jeremiah Wright said that are now causing so much comment.

It wasn't just an isolated remark. Nor were the enthusiastic responses of the churchgoers something which suggests that this anti-American attitude was news to them or something that they didn't agree with.

If Barack Obama was not in church that particular day, he belonged to that church for 20 years. He made a donation of more than $20,000 to that church.

In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break!

You can't be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views. [bold added]

Indeed. And I also agree with Sowell that, "Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony."

I agree further with Sowell that it is "heartening that the country has reached the point where a black candidate for President of the United States sweeps so many primaries in states where the overwhelming majority of the population is white". That said, if we are to reach the point of true racial equality with Obama in charge, those of us who oppose the left will have to stand up to charges of being racists or being in league with them. The Republicans cannot be counted on to do this on their own.

And speaking of the Republicans, what alternative do they offer to Barack Obama's package-dealing of racial equality with socialism? Setting aside for the sake of argument McCain's disqualification as an enemy of freedom of speech, it is: A call for "unity". In other words, the same bet, but without the convenience of a race card!

Americans and Europeans share a common goal – to build an enduring peace based on freedom. Our democracies today are strong and vibrant. Together we can tackle the diverse challenges we face, whether radical religious fanatics who use terror as their weapon of choice, the disturbing turn towards autocracy in Russia or the looming threats of climate change and the degradation of our planet. [bold added]

McCain plays the "freedom from foreign threats equals socialism" card instead. He also touts his message as "the truest form of realism". He does not explain, however, how subordinating America's national sovereignty in order to impose, for example, a multinational fuel ration is "realistic", let alone moral.

Both candidates tout unity as an unlimited virtue in service of goals that are incompatible with individual rights. Obama plans to use unjust charges of racism as a cudgel to preempt or quash dissent while McCain has already demonstrated a willingness to outlaw it. Both are enemies of individualism. One will be our next president unless, by some miracle, yet another enemy of individualism, Hillary Clinton, wins out.

Whether one votes against McCain or leaves the presidential ballot blank, one has a sacred obligation to explain whenever appropriate that political unity for any purpose other than the self-defense of free individuals is anything but a virtue.

-- CAV

PS: Myrhaf has more on Obama's speech.

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected a typo. (2) Fixed wording in last sentence. (3) Added a PS.

Quick Roundup 313

A (Belated) Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Not being Irish and being long-removed from a childhood that usually included an Irishman as a parish priest, I'd usually forget about St. Patrick's Day. That was the case throughout my adulthood up until about eight years ago when I started seeing Mrs. Van Horn, who is third-generation Irish.

I let her take care of remembering St. Patrick's Day each year, but she was out of town today*. I probably would have forgotten, but someone mentioned the occasion on the radio as my clock alarm went off.

Since she has been out of town for a few weeks, this made me miss her enough to actually wear green today -- a pinstriped shirt.

No trip to the pub for me, though! Lots of work in the evening. When I got home, I poured a nice, refreshing Session over a drop of green food coloring, fired up the computer, and got to work.

I look forward to picking my wife up at the airport tomorrow evening!

Whether

In addition to yesterday being St. Patrick's Day, it was the "whether" portion of the long, drawn-out, and semi-random match process, whereby my wife finds out where she will do her medical residency.

I am told that the process resembles fraternity pledge week in that each interviewee and each institution compiles a ranked list. A process of list comparisons determines the match for each new medical school graduate.

We have computers now, and yet it still takes a month from list submittal to match day. I strongly suspect that the "human element" (read: procrastination by medical faculty) has a lot to do with it.

One wrinkle of the process is that it is possible for a recent graduate not to match at all! In such an event, it is common to "scramble" (i.e., frantically track down schools with empty residency slots and try to get into those).

In order to accommodate this possibility, students are informed whether they matched a few days before they learn -- if they matched -- where. (This way, if they don't match, they can still scramble before "Match Day" and celebrate with everyone else. I think. I am a little fuzzy on that part.)

Mrs Van Horn did, in fact, match, which is a relief. We now know have where we will live in a few months narrowed down to one of the below states -- assuming I haven't forgotten any of the places she interviewed!


Every possibility has significant upsides and downsides to me, even including a few more years in H-Town, which had been my top choice when we started talking about where she ought to try matching last year.

Wish us luck!

Some Good Tunes

Some time ago, good friend and fellow ska aficionado Adrian Hester sent a compilation CD of a third-wave act from Europe I somehow had never managed to hear about, Mr. Review.

Last week, I finally got around to opening it up and taking a listen, and I've been enjoying it during my commutes this week. Below is a live version of one of the songs, hosted on Youtube. The CD is called One Way Ticket to Skaville: The Essential Mr. Review, and the band was from the Netherlands. (Warning: The lead singer shouts an expletive right off the bat.)

And no, I don't know why the lead singer of a Dutch band playing in a West Indian idiom is wearing a kilt. He's pictured on the back of the album in a blazer and tie, with the kilt.

-- CAV

* "Today", meaning "yesterday". I wrote part of this post then, knowing I'd be busy during my normal blogging time. This means, of course, that I'll actually get to see my lovely wife "tomorrow", meaning "today", in its usual sense. Or something like that.

Updates

Today: Added a note.

America Offers "Moral Bailout"

Even as the clouds of a financial storm gather, brought on by the foolishness of "government bailout crack", our government is involved in a bailout of another, far more obscene kind: The moral bailout of the intellectually bankrupt Islamic faith.

In a recent summit held in Senegal, leaders of Islamic countries reaffirmed that their religion is at war with the West as they outlined a new tactic. In the process, they all but admitted that their religion has nothing constructive to offer to man, the rational animal.

[L]eaders of the world's Muslim nations are considering taking legal action against those that slight their religion or its sacred symbols. It was a key issue during a two-day summit that ended Friday in this western Africa capital.

The Muslim leaders are attempting to demand redress from nations like Denmark, which allowed the publication of cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 and again last month, to the fury of the Muslim world.

Though the legal measures being considered have not been spelled out, the idea pits many Muslims against principles of freedom of speech enshrined in the constitutions of numerous Western governments.

"I don't think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy," said Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade, the chairman of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference. "There can be no freedom without limits." [bold added]

Before I move on, the president of Senegal has it exactly backwards. One cannot have freedom of speech at all by imposing limits.

Given the all-encompassing nature of a religion such as Islam, that is nearly devoid of any influence from rational philosophy, one need not even consider the example provided in the story of what Islamic "limits" on freedom of speech would, by their nature, entail. And yet there it is: If these primitives had their way, we would be unable simply to draw or display a cartoon of their "prophet" (who is, incidentally, this blog's mascot).

And that's for starters. As the rational animal, man's tool for survival is his mind, which enables him to survive by discerning the facts of reality and acting accordingly for the sake of his own benefit. Freedom of speech directly benefits man by allowing him to pool cognitive resources with other men, be it by sharing truths, uncovering falsehoods, or even warning against arbitrary doctrines (such as Islam) that are, as Wolfgang Pauli would put it, "not even wrong".

The value of freedom of speech lies in its connection to reality, which any prohibition, however apparently innocuous, will sever. Having no evidence or proof that there is such a thing as Allah, I do not pretend that He exists. Is saying as much "blasphemy"? Marking paper and saying that the marks represent Mohammed is. Is openly defying some of this alleged being's commandments blasphemy? Is openly questioning the basis of the tenets of Islam blasphemy?

This last is an important question because the whole prohibition against blasphemy is rooted in the assumption that there is a God and this act displeases Him. (Incidentally, my use of capitals here is done only out of love and respect for English grammar. I have neither for Islam.) There is no other basis for this prohibition.

Acceptance of such a prohibition by any government, then, removes all objectivity from its legal system by smuggling in religious justification -- arbitrary commandments -- as a basis for preventing men from acting according to their own rational judgement.

Once we have accepted such a premise, the sky's the limit for what other laws can be introduced because in the course of arguing their merits, the fact that they are based on a religion we don't all follow will necessarily come up. And past a certain point -- as we saw with the Danish cartoons -- the Moslems will claim that the discussion is closed on the grounds that it has become blasphemous. Our freedom would not immediately end with a prohibition against blasphemy, but its demise will be all but assured.

This incompatibility between Islam and freedom of speech -- and hence the benefits of modern civilization -- should be manifest to all in the West. But it apparently isn't. At least not to some of those whose job it is to protect that freedom, officials from the government of the United States:

While the Muslim world worries about the image of Islam in the West, the U.S. envoy to the OIC attended the summit to try to tackle the thorny question of America's image among Muslim states.

Sada Cumber calls his campaign the "soft power" of the U.S. -- an effort to find common ground with Muslim nations by championing universal values the U.S. holds dear like religious tolerance and freedom of speech. [bold added]

In the objective sense that freedom of speech promotes man's life, it is a value. In the sense of being appreciated by all men, it is plainly not "universal". To pretend that America has any "common ground" with those who have pledged to attack freedom of speech is to betray that value. The fact that we sent an envoy to such a conference is bad enough, but the fact that our envoy apparently did not protest this declaration of war is a remarkable act of appeasement.

When I think I have a good idea to offer, I fight for it by marshaling evidence and arguments in its favor and submitting it to the rational judgement of someone I respect. If I am right and convince that person, we will benefit. If I am wrong and he corrects me, we still benefit. Were I to force someone else to accept my idea, we would act upon it even if it were wrong, compounding the crime of my violation of that person's autonomy.

The unique aspect of the government that these Islamic leaders hope to take advantage of is that it is holds a legal monopoly on the use of force that its citizens have to act in self-defense, but have delegated to it. These "leaders" hope to subvert that force from its proper purpose -- the protection of our lives and rights -- and use it to squelch dissent instead. That is, they hope to turn our governments against us.

This is not just a thinly-veiled declaration of war, it is also a startling admission of intellectual bankruptcy. If Islam is so great, present me with an argument. Present me with facts in its favor. Explain to me how following its tenets will improve my life on earth. ("Submit or die," doesn't count because a threat is not an argument.) If you are right and I am wrong, but don't buy into it, move on. The fact that these leaders haven't and won't speaks volumes.

Too bad that our government, rather than presenting them with an unambiguous refusal to yield on the principle of individual rights, is giving them the moral bailout of its sanction, by pretending that we have even one speck of common ground. They know that their words, unbacked by the gold of reality, are worthless, so they plan to use our government to make us accept them as legal tender.

Our government, by saying nothing now, has averted the collapse they deserve and effectively told them to to go ahead with their plan.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edit.

Quick Roundup 312

More on Spitzer

Myrhaf links to some further commentary on Eliot Spitzer's self-destruction and, along the way, comments on what Client #9's resorting to prostitution says about his outlook on existence:

Eliot Spitzer's public career was at war with reality because his ideals -- altruism, statism and collectivism -- are also at war with reality. They are an affront to justice, a massive con game in which the rights of the strong and able are violated in the name of the weak and disable.

The welfare state breeds creeps like Spitzer and Bill Clinton, who seek affirmation in the bedroom that they are above reality, that the rules don't apply to them, that they can get away with whatever they want. [bold added]

There are many aspects of this scandal that strike me as "teachable moments", as Jim May once put it, and this goes beyond just the fact that Spitzer is a consistent practitioner of the morality of altruism. He was so consistent, in fact, that he was, as Galileo Blogs pointed out yesterday, so petty and short-range in his thinking as to be barely more than a criminal.

If one says nothing else about Spitzer, it should be that was most definitely not a good man. Joseph Kellard does just that in a letter to the editor:

The problem with Spitzer's downfall is that [it] happened over a sex scandal and not for the dictatorial behavior he exhibited toward his real or perceived enemies, such as innocent businessmen like John Whitehead.

Here's a small taste of the kind of attitude we're up against from The Houston Chronicle's own capitalism-hating business columnist, Loren Steffy:

Spitzer's goal wasn't to win convictions -- it was to change behavior. At that, he proved adroit. [This is praise for trial by media backed by government threats, something that is underhanded and undermines rule of law. --ed]

He's not the only attorney general to use the tactic. In fact, a long line of AGs in New York and elsewhere have employed similar strategies in consumer protection.

But if he was effective at forcing changes in corporate behavior, he was far less adept at changing his own.

As governor, and as the state's former top cop, he has, in all likelihood, been caught in alleged illegal activity. So it's not just about sex, it's about breaking the laws that he was sworn to uphold.

Spitzer and those he prosecuted are linked by a common denominator in their undoing, a bond of conceit and hypocrisy. [bold added]

That last line takes the cake in the "obscene moral equivocation" department, but should be no surprise coming from someone who opens his column about such a sleazeball with the following gem of psychological projection: "When a white knight falls in the mud, we all seem to laugh a little louder."

If Eliot Spitzer is an evil man, commentators like Loren Steffy are worse because their moral praise gives his lot ample room to operate.

Get up to Speed on the Subprime Meltdown

Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute has recently written two must-read pieces on the subprime meltdown. In the first, he considers the real nature of government offers of "assistance" to the banking sector:

If an ordinary citizen proposed to the mortgage industry that it bail out borrowers through a widespread rate freeze and call it a "private sector effort," the proposal would be dismissed as a joke. But when the government proposes such an initiative to private industry, all participants know that it can do great damage to them if they refuse--and can grant them huge favors if they comply. Today's HOPE NOW and Project Lifeline participants, for instance, can be harmed by the passage of "anti-predatory-lending" laws, which would expose them to huge lawsuits by borrowers who claim to have been in the dark about the contracts they signed. These participants can also be helped with unearned handouts--with cheap Fed money, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taking risky mortgages off their hands, and with a bailout in the future if, say, they face bankruptcy because of sloppy lending practices. [bold added]

The sum of his two articles shows that this situation is analogous to some thug making you sample crack cocaine at gunpoint. He makes the crack analogy in his second article.

[A]s a Fortune cover crudely put it: "What were they smoking?"

A major part of the answer is: government bailout crack.

Read the whole thing to see how the promise of a bailout destroys long-range planning on the part of those whose job it is to do just that.

Government force intruding into the economy gets us coming and going, by making us afraid to do what we know is right, and eager to do what we know is wrong.

Israel on its Own

Several others have pointed to this already, but Scott Powell's take on the foreign policy implications of the upcoming presidential election cannot be advertised too much.

Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain

I have recently learned of a new organization in Britain whose time has definitely come, and its leader is on the ball. She shows a firm grasp of the danger and motivation of the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent advocacy of sharia.

[Maryam Namazie, head of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain] must have been shocked, I suggest, when the Archbishop of Canterbury said the introduction of some Sharia in Britain was unavoidable. No, she says; she wasn't even surprised. "It was quite apt, although he didn't expect the reaction he got. It was an attack on secularism really. It is, in a sense, to his benefit if there are Muslim schools and Sharia. It makes it less likely that anyone will oppose Christian schools and the privileged place of religion in society."

She is adamant, though, that no form of Sharia should be allowed here. "It is fundamentally discriminatory and misogynist," she says and is dismissive of the idea that people would be able to choose between Sharia and civil jurisdiction. Women could be railroaded into a Sharia court, she says. "This would hit people who need the protection of British law more than anyone else." [bold added]

The Christian religion offers no protection against the left or against Islamism. The sooner advocates of freedom understand this, the better.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.
3-12-08: Minor edits.

The Soul of a Tyrant

Via HBL, I came across a very disturbing portrait of Eliot Spitzer, who very fortunately ran afoul of the very type of law he should have opposed, but decided to wield instead:

Whether it was Spitzer's involvement in the Dirty Tricks and Internal Revenue scandals that targeted Senate Republican Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, his threats against Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and other Assembly Democrats, his undermining through rumor and innuendo of Lt. Gov. David Paterson, or his seemingly paranoid hostilities to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer's style struck many as so far out of line with his public claims of righteousness that many started using the jargon of abnormal psychology to describe him. [bold added]

The above passage is disturbing for two reasons. First, it describes a widely respected and admired man who actually held elected office in New York, and who had legitimate presidential aspirations. Second (and worse), it draws the wrong conclusion about the relationship between Spitzer's "claims of righteousness" and his megalomaniacal, controlling personality.

What did Eliot Spitzer do to be able to claim "righteousness"? He prosecuted citizens for victimless "crimes", some of which were forms of productive activity. The laws that made these acts crimes were legal codifications of arbitrary religious and altruist proscriptions against behavior that violated the rights of no one and, therefore, did not belong on the books.

In other words, Eliot Spitzer was not motivated by a desire to protect the individual rights of the people who elected him, but by a moral code that is incompatible with personal freedom because it calls for the sacrifice of individuals. Whether Spitzer was benevolent but misguided at first (which seems very unlikely to me) or a power-luster from day one is irrelevant.

In either case, his implicit ethical system condoned human sacrifice and the only difference would be whether that moral code demanded sacrifice of others for the "common good" (benevolent Spitzer) or his own aggrandizement -- and whether Spitzer's actual motivations stemmed from the source the public originally thought or were camouflaged by it. This is because his implicit ethical system (whatever it is) and his explicit one (what the public elected him on) are variants of the same theme, differing only by who Spitzer thinks is entitled to drink the sacrificial blood.

If you later start seeing some of the very actions Spitzer was once admired for being re-cast as evidence that he was "selfish" (which he wasn't) or merely crazy, it will be only because Spitzer drank of that cup himself, and not, alas, because he filled it in the first place.

Yes. Spitzer's personal behavior sounds like that of a disturbed man. But that fact makes him no less of an altruist, nor does it make him "inconsistent". He is gone, but the idea that man should be sacrificed to others remains at large, ready to empower others like him or worse through the mantle of undeserved respectability.

Spitzer will get only poetic justice, and his political demise will not save us from tyranny for long.

-- CAV

Taking My Own Advice

Recently, I advised fellow bloggers to "Use scripts and off-site content sparingly. These not only make your page load more slowly, but each one is a potential failure point that can make part or all of it not load at all." I made a big deal of this only to notice over the past few days that a site called "haloscan.com" was causing my blog to take forever to load.

Haloscan provided, via embedded Java code, the little-used trackback feature for this blog, something that Blogger's new automatic backlinking rendered somewhat redundant anyway. Since I was already thinking of getting rid of trackbacks, this annoying difficulty sealed the deal. The script apparently was attempting to obtain data from an unresponsive site.

Blog template changes are dicey and sometimes lead to odd, unexpected results. So if the blog acts strangely (other than loading much faster now), please let me know....

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 311

Return of the Steel Penny?

Our government's inflationary fiscal policies appear to have finally made stamping out fiat dollars one cent at a time cost more than it's worth:

A House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., convened a hearing Tuesday on a proposal to change the composition of both coins. Republicans and Democrats like the concept, particularly its promise to save taxpayers $100 million a year by using cheaper metals at the U.S. Mint. If the legislation clears the House and Senate and President Bush signs it, you could be plucking steel pennies off the street before year's end. [bold added]

Wow! A nationwide savings of one hundred million dollars a year! (Excuse me while I whistle through my teeth here.)

This is like Pork Busters for monetary policy in that it focuses on petty theft and turns a blind eye to grand larceny. I'd far rather spend an extra thirty cents helping Uncle Sam mint copper-clad zinc pennies next year if our lawmakers would focus less on navigating a bureaucracy they helped create and more on preserving the strength of the dollar in the short term. And I'd really love it if they'd consider exploring a way to return to the gold standard in the long term.

Instead, until more American voters demand protection of their individual rights rather than government handouts, Congress will continue to use the ability to print currency as a means of robbing my bank account behind my back even as they "demonstrate" with steel pennies that they want to save me money. Spit in my face and tell me it's raining....

I regard Ron Paul's refusal to insist on or acknowledge a proper intellectual defense of individual rights as treasonous to the cause of freedom. Nevertheless, if Polly does indeed want a cracker, even a parrot will sound like it knows what it's talking about from time to time. In a similar vein, Paul pretty well summed things up when he said, "[W]e cannot even maintain a zinc standard."

(Real) Money is good. (And inflation is deadly.)

The Resident Egoist actually found a decent comment about money over at Slashdot, which reminded him a little of Fransisco d'Anconia's famous "Money Speech" in Atlas Shrugged. And while we're on the subject of money and inflation, here's a good quote from Rand's essay, "Egalitarianism and Inflation" from the online version of The Ayn Rand Lexicon:

Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money. Gold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple barter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you'll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish. [bold added]

Consider what government printing of unbacked currency means in this light: Inflation not only robs you of part of your current effort by effectively reducing your income, it retroactively taxes the fruits of any past effort you have set aside. To the extent that this occurs, it is as if you hadn't lived a portion of your productive life at all.

Socialism or Slavery?

Alexander Marriott recalls an interesting discussion he once had concerning a very common and very unfortunate mistake: That capitalists haven't the moral standing to oppose slavery. He concludes:

It is no accident that societies built upon socialism resemble societies built on slavery in that the great mass of people are being sacrificed either to some smaller group of people or, theoretically, to each other. In either case, their lives do not belong to them but to others. The only real difference is whether one prefers being ground up in the sugar mills of an 18th century French plantation in St. Domingue (Haiti) or being pounded into the dust of some five year plan in Soviet Russia. Either way, you are just as sacrificed; either way, you are just as dead. [bold added]

The distinction between slavery and socialism is one that unfortunately masks their essential similarity.

Mere Poetic Justice for Spitzer

I share Amit Ghate's frustration that the only justice for Eliot Spitzer will be of the poetic variety. Excuse the obscene moral equivocations below, but it is impossible to find a news report devoid of them....

Eliot Spitzer knew how to catch bad guys by following the money. As attorney general, he once broke up a call-girl ring and locked up 18 people on corruption, money-laundering and prostitution charges. He ruthlessly investigated the pay packages of Wall Street executives and was so familiar with shady financial maneuvers that he rose to become the top racketeering prosecutor in Manhattan.

But in the end, it appears that Spitzer may have been done in by the same behavior he built a career out of prosecuting.

In fact, it seems he was tripped up by some of the very financial accounting methods he used so successfully against multibillion-dollar Wall Street firms. [bold added]

This man made a career out of using the apparatus of the state to go after people who, in many cases, were not doing anything that should have been illegal. He could have chosen to work to repeal such bad laws, but decided instead to enforce them ruthlessly. His semi-just desserts, while cathartic on some levels, will in fact be a legal travesty. I do not morally condone a married man using prostitutes, but the fact remains that prostitution should be legal.

Have Silver Lining, but Want the Cloud Back!

C. August and I are on the same page regarding paternalistic smoking bans: "So as much as I hate smelling like I rolled around in an ashtray upon leaving a bar, I say repeal the smoking ban!"

Particularly interesting is how proponents justified the ban in the first place. One would do well to consider how opponents in crusades like this can strengthen their arguments so that one can be prepared to respond. I am glad he talked about this.

How to Fix All of the Above

As I often mention here, significant political change for the better will not and can not occur without profound cultural change. Paul Hsieh and Rational Jenn both have recently said some very good things about how to bring this about. And Monica brings up something that sounds familiar to me:

I realized that oftentimes - not always, but oftentimes -- I am more interested in winning an argument than I am about the ideas. OR I am interested in the ideas and it sickens me to see people with the wrong ideas prevail, so I just end up avoiding the discussions altogether.

This is doubtless as common as it is counterproductive, and the fact that the false theory/practice dichotomy gets pounded into our skulls from every direction in our culture makes it almost impossible not to be afflicted with this urge to some degree, especially soon after encountering Ayn Rand. (And as I know from experience, it can take lots of time to get past this.)

I don't know how, specifically, to deal with this problem, but I suspect that it gradually goes away on its own as one integrates theory and action more fully on a subconscious level. Rational Jenn, for example, notes that before she became intellectually active on a more constructive level, that she "used to be frustrated to no end, 'debating' minutiae with people who were less interested in ideas and more interested in winning an argument." I went through a "silent period" of my own, and for similar reasons.

Ultimately, I think anyone who really values one's life and really understands having the right ideas as important to one's life hits this kind of wall and learns to stop beating one's head against it. Eventually, one's forays into the battlefield of ideas have the betterment of one's life as the motivation, and hence become much more effective and satisfying. Just noticing the problem is a good sign, in my opinion.

A Bleg

And now, after being so "helpful", I am going to turn right around and ask for some help. Despite my lower blogging output, I am in fact writing more than I used to, and it is beginning to take a physical toll on me. I want to nip that in the bud.

Does anyone out there happen to know of a good resource for work place ergonomics? Specifically, I am thinking of investing some money in a new computer desk and chair, and I don't want to waste it on something uncomfortable or likely to end up causing me physical harm from repeated stress injuries.

The chair is extremely important. (It's important enough for me to cast away mild embarrassment and admit that I'm on the bony side.) I've already whiffed twice on that.

I know that I could Google "egronomics" or other such terms, but getting a recommendation from someone with some experience with following such recommendations would probably save me lots of time and money. Especially someone else with an inefficient metabolism! If you don't wish to use the comments, email me.

-- CAV

Updates

3-13-08: Corrected spelling of "Eliot".

Green with Envy

The ideas that people hold guide their actions, and sometimes this plays out with such consistency that it could almost make a conspiracy theorist seem credible. Yesterday, for example, the news revealed that two major Christian sects on opposite sides of the world had officially accepted the leftist global warming package of guilt-motivated government controls as their own.

First, it was the Southern Baptists:

The signers of "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change" acknowledged that not all Christians accept the science behind global warming. They said they do not expect fellow believers to back any proposed solutions that would violate Scripture, such as advocating population control through abortion.

However, the leaders said that current evidence of global warming is "substantial," and that the threat is too grave to wait for perfect knowledge about whether, or how much, people contribute to the trend. [bold added]

For anyone who still thinks that religion is any kind of a bulwark against the left or socialism, please note the priorities given in bold above. The codified oral traditions of primitive tribesmen from millennia ago are to be obeyed even if they contradict minor aspects of this agenda, and yet they somehow know that this "threat" is "too grave" to worry about whether human beings really do contribute to global warming!

Translation: "Ignore what you rationally judge to be best and just do as we say." How often do religious leaders come so close to actually saying this? We can thank the global warming alarmists on the "secular" left for paving the way for this brazen display of contempt for science. (Who, after all, has been screaming all along that the sky is falling?) Capitalism requires freedom, which is anathema to men who want to tell you what to do. And men who do not think for themselves will not remain free for long.

(And before we go any further, I wish to point out that even if "the science" were true, that the question of whether or not we should adopt the various political positions global warming activists endorse remains a political question.)

Later in the day, the Catholic Church also jumped in:

Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of "new" sins such as causing environmental blight. [bold added]

Another report notes that these more modern mortal sins have a more collectivist emphasis than the older ones:

The "sins of yesteryear" - sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and pride - have a "rather individualistic dimension", he told the Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper.

The new seven deadly, or mortal, sins are designed to make worshippers realise that their vices have an effect on others as well.

"The sins of today have a social resonance as well as an individual one," said Mgr Girotti. "In effect, it is more important than ever to pay attention to your sins." [bold added]

I recall one Objectivist intellectual acknowledging that one positive cultural contribution (although couched in an inconsistent mystical context) Christianity had made to the West was the notion of man as an individual.

Individualism, which can be properly defended only by a rational, secular philosophy, had been much more widely accepted in Western culture, but has been under philosophic attack since the rise of Immanuel Kant and in cultural decline for some time, thanks again to his cultural spawn, the left.

Since Kant's goal was to save the morality of altruism from reason, it should come as no surprise that with the culture shifting to an elevation of the collective over the individual, that religious altruists are cashing in. If individualism has any intellectual roots in Christian soil, it would have eventually withered anyway unless transplanted, but Kant has hastened the process.

For a very long time, religion had been in retreat, especially in the face of scientific advances that cast doubt on such matters as the position of the earth in the universe. But now that science is being increasingly co-opted by altruists and collectivists, those who have trafficked in guilt and slavery for centuries, the religionists, have taken note. They will not be left out of the game of moving us all about like pawns on a board.

And, as I have noted before regarding the economic ruin that environmentalism can cause, "Environmentalism is not just a moral ideal.... Its destruction of capitalism is also a tactic." For what better context exists to declare that one man's purpose is to care for others than when as many people as possible are miserable and "in need"?

Reason and science, although both are under attack, still command respect by the people (and envy among mystics) in the West. By adopting the global warming agenda, the religionists can appear rational to those who see this as a foregone scientific conclusion. At the same time, they obviously see that reason and science are now on the defensive and they are moving in for the kill.

-- CAV

PS: Ari Armstrong has further thoughts on this subject.

Updates

Today: Fixed a typo.

Quick Roundup 310

When a Symbol Isn't a Symbol

Seeing parts of my childhood home town quickly succumb to urban decay, I have developed a morbid fascination with the decline of Detroit, which I indulge from time to time through the Internet.

Needless to say, I found the following image and commentary (via Marginal Revolution) highly compelling at first glance. This is what the book depository of the Detroit public school system looks like, after many years of neglect.

This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven't burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and "sadness" some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city's school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people.

Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the "ghetto palm" grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. [bold added]

What better symbol could there be of the failure of state-run education, right?

Wrong. The problem with this picture, so to speak, is that the fire happened before the supplies were abandoned. And yet, this obvious possibility and the commentator's use of the word "apparently" did not stop some "friends" of capitalism from picking up this soot-covered ball and running with it before further facts behind the history of this building came to light:

I have seen these photos and selections from my post appropriated by right-wing, racist, and libertarian bloggers to illustrate existing prejudices against black people, the city of Detroit, and the very idea of public education.

Let's set aside, for the sake of argument, whether this passage is meant to lump advocates of capitalism together with white racists and Republicans (or equating us with libertarians), as so often happens.

Suffice it to say that even without such an unfortunate smear, such carelessness played right into the hands of someone who, after taking the moral high ground ceded to him, was apparently just as quick to blame this sad state of affairs on capitalism, through the convenient surrogate of the building's absentee landlord. ("[T]he free market capitalist is the bad guy here....", he claims in a comment at Marginal Revolution.)

There are, as that blogger later admits, "a million other ways to go after the detroit [sic] public schools", (not to mention "the very idea of public education"), but this is indeed not one of them. A picture is not merely not an argument. It can, through carelessness, be made worth a thousand words to one's intellectual opponents! In fact, even if the original commentator had said nothing beyond elaborating on the circumstances behind the ruin he blogged, anyone who held it up as an example of the failure of public education would have undercut his position.

Such carelessness makes one look sloppy, and therefore, one's position look suspect.

Sowell on Writing

I can't believe I took so long to think of seeing whether Thomas Sowell (who is one of my favorite writers on economics) has a web page, but he does, and I learned when I found it that he has posted some interesting and entertaining thoughts on writing.

It's long, but worthwhile. He offers me and my fellow aspiring writers his condolences and some good advice -- and copy editors a thrashing!

From time to time, I get a letter from some aspiring young writer, asking about how to write or how to get published. My usual response is that the only way I know to become a good writer is to be a bad writer and keep on improving. However, even after you reach the point where you are writing well—and that can take many years—the battle is not over. There are still publishers to contend with. Then there are editors and, worst of all, copy-editors. [bold added]

Enjoy!

I like the name!

C. August, who recently left a comment here, has started his own blog, and has named it Titanic Deck Chairs:

What's with the "Titanic Deck Chairs" thing? Hopefully it's pretty obvious, but here's the thumbnail sketch. I hate talking about trivial crap. Sure, I may talk about working on my house or something, but when it comes to Ideas, I can't be bothered to discuss the surface issues at any great length. The only thing I get fired up about is digging to the heart of an issue and finding the fundamentals.

Thus, I refuse to "rearrange deckchairs on the Titantic" when there are icebergs out there.

He's got just a couple of posts up so far, but I can't wait to read more!

My Favorite Faulkner Quote

There's something about the way he said this that I really enjoy....

He got the job of postmaster at the University of Mississippi ..., but his duties began to interfere with his writing. His letter of resignation to the Postmaster General is one of the brighter items on file in Washington.

"As long as I live under the capitalistic system," he wrote, "I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation." [bold added]

... but my advice would be: "Do not attempt this -- unless your name happens to be 'William Faulkner'!"

-- CAV