Quick Roundup 389

One to Avoid

Jennifer Snow, whose movie reviews I always enjoy, has no plans to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still. Neither do I, but she makes a connection I hadn't thought of that may be worth remembering.

The basic premise seems to be that humans are "destroying" the earth and thus some super-powerful aliens have decided to get rid of humanity in order to "save" the earth. What are we doing that's so bad? Technology.

Now, here's where it just gets STUPID. How the hell did these aliens get the power to destroy us WITHOUT technology? We're being attacked by super-powerful HYPOCRITES? Wow, that's inspirational.

She also rightly describes the proper response to such a situation.

On the one hand, it is disturbing that Hollywood seems to have no lower limit on how lousy a movie it can put out. On the other, such a weak premise should be quite easy to demolish in a normal conversation. A great place to start would be to ask, "Why is it okay for aliens to use technology, but not man?" or "By what right should a human being be murdered simply for polluting?"

Huff Piece

I enjoyed the following reaction to what David Harsanyi called, "a brilliantly absurd piece, titled 'Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism,'" by Arianna Huffington:

Huffington argues, in effect, that communism and "laissez-faire" (minimal-intervention) capitalism are equivalent ideological extremes.

Sure, one of these philosophies spurred the murder and misery of hundreds of millions worldwide; the other promotes liberty, innovation and welcomes foreigners to lounge around in expansive mansions paid for by their former oil baron husbands.

So we can agree; there is no such thing as a flawless ideology.

(HT: Amit Ghate)

Explain Away, Blame Victim

Doug at Rule of Reason unearths an excellent blog posting by Caroline Glick that explains how multiculturalists aid and abet terrorism in no uncertain terms.

In the aftermath of the Mumbai massacres, it is hard to imagine that there is anything as pernicious as the jihadists who sought out and murdered non-Muslims with such cruelty. But there is. Their multicultural apologists, who enable them to continue to kill by preventing their victims from fighting back, are just as evil.

The whole thing, which Doug quotes from extensively, is worth a read.

Heroes of Capitalism

Galileo Blogs has encountered a blog that I plan to add to the sidebar (along with Caroline Glick's) some time in the near future.

I want to draw attention to a great new one I discovered, "Heroes of Capitalism." Each day this blog features a businessman who improved our lives. Actually, the last part of that sentence is redundant because a successful businessman in a capitalist economy always improves our lives by creating goods that we value and purchase from him in trade.

The blog credits Andrew Bernstein for its inspiration, and lists Eric Daniels of Clemson University among its contributors.

Fifty-Four Year Drought Ends!

I am happy to see that my alma mater won the Texas Bowl in impressive fashion!

-- CAV

Updates

1-9-09: Added hypertext anchors.

Book of Happiness

A fellow member of HBL recently posted on his very positive experience with maintaining a "book of gratitude", a technique I have heard of before. Jean Moroney of Thinking Directions describes the technique in a past issue of her newsletter.

Here's a daily practice I learned from Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness.

Once each day, write down three good things that happened in the last 24 hours. You can write them before going to bed or first thing in the morning. You can write them in a journal or in a calendar or on a Post-it. You can include important achievements such as winning a contract or simple pleasures such as eating a good meal. All that matters is that you write down three such items, every day.

As you can guess, the purpose of this practice is to reinforce a positive outlook and avoid feeling overwhelmed by negativity. Even on the worst of days there are a few bright spots, and bringing them to mind helps you maintain perspective.

Keeping such a journal, which I agree with Jean Moroney should be called something like a "book of happiness", intrigues me enough that I am thinking about doing it myself. Has anyone here tried it? I am interested in hearing about any practical suggestions or experiences with this technique.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 388

Back, Lightly

I'm still on vacation from work, but have returned to blogging, although it will probably be irregular this week due to my being on the road.

Blogging Etiquette Note

Sez Eric Siegmund of The Fireant Gazette:

I discovered the first instance of trackback spam on the Gazette earlier today. If you haven't run into this phenomenon yet, that's my term (perhaps someone else has a better one) for a blogger who sends a trackback ping to one of your posts, without actually linking to the post on his or her blog.

A variant made possible by Blogger's "create a link" backlinking feature we might dub "backlink spam". Someone helped me discover it by doing it several times recently, including the day after I went on hiatus, forcing me to log on to my account to remove the link.

Siegmund politely explains that trackback/backlink spam is a breach of etiquette, but he is being too generous. This blog is my property, and trackback spam (petty though it be) is a violation of my property rights. The sites I promote here are my business, and if you want to advertise, email me and we can discuss it.

The Leviathan Plate

The wife and I are in New Orleans, where we are celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary, whose date we share with her folks. Her dad took us all to Commander's Palace last night to celebrate. I ordered a redfish entree (pictured) whose name I can't recall, and we all laughed when they brought it to the table. I nicknamed the dish, the "Leviathan Plate".

Cultural Imprint

Via Alan Sullivan, I learned of the interesting map at the right. Click to enlarge.

As explained at Strange Maps, the colored portion of the map comes from a breakdown of electoral results in Poland, while the outline is Imperial Germany.

"Your map showing the electoral divide in Ukraine (#343) is quite interesting, and put me in mind of a similar one that I saw last year, that prompted me do a bit of map research," writes David G.D. Hecht. "If you look at the Wikipedia article on the Polish legislative elections of 2007, there is a map there similar to the Ukrainian one. I looked at this map and thought, hmmm... where have I seen this divide before? Looks very familiar. This isn't just some urban/rural, professional/worker, white-wine-and-brie/beer-and-sausages thing!"

Mr Hecht did some overlay work, and came up with this remarkable fit: "The divide between the (more free-market) PO and the (more populist) PiS almost exactly follows the old border between Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia, as it ran through Poland! How about that for a long-lasting cultural heritage?!?"

The voting patterns exemplify a central idea behind Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, in which he holds that philosophical ideas prevalaent in a nation's culture drive its politics.

Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's staunchest followers.

There is the Marxist interpretation of Nazism, according to which Hitler is the inevitable result of capitalism. This evades the facts that Germany after Bismarck was the least capitalistic country of Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic from the start was a controlled economy, with the controls growing steadily; and that the word "Nazism" is an abbreviation for "National Socialism." (20-21) [bold added]

It is fascinating to see this illustrated on such a map.

-- CAV

It's that time of year!

Annual Hiatus

Each year, around Christmas, I take a look back at my progress as a blogger and give myself about a week's rest. Typically, I am extremely busy, in a hurry to get wherever I'm going for the holidays, and dying for a break. This year, I was extremely busy only up until late yesterday, and have given myself a comfortable margin for the trip to the airport today. And, oddly, I am not really in the mood for a break from blogging.

Perhaps it was that I saw Bubblehead take apart a New York Times article on submarines -- or that I noticed my general busy-ness has kept me from updating my list of favorite posts for six months. Or perhaps I want to be around to welcome any new readers my appearances in The Objective Standard might send my way. I must confess that I am tempted to keep right on blogging through the holidays this year.

But I won't.

In the past, I have always found myself refreshed and writing with new vigor upon my return from hiatus, and readership always drops like a rock during the holidays anyway. We all need rest, and the time is right, so, just as I sometimes force myself to write on some mornings, I will force myself not to blog for a week, if the current mood persists and I find that I have to. I owe it to myself and my readers to take a rest.

Annual Blogging Writing Report

Perhaps my reluctance to break also comes in part from the fact that I find myself in the midst of several major transitions, and the routine of blogging feels like a life line, something "normal" and familiar. Even good transitions, like finally breaking through to print publication, come with their own demands for personal adjustments. Those I am eager to get on with. Why drop everything at a time like this? But I have already answered that question....

The fact that this has been a transitional year really hit me when I contemplated putting together my annual blog report. Creating a blog report seemed superfluous this year. I want to keep blogging, but it is becoming less central to my life as a writer.

That said, I collected the statistics, so I'll post them. The numbers are slightly down, but do not portray an accurate picture taken by themselves. For what they're worth, here they are: Sitemeter visits/month: 5,633; Technorati rank: 118,839; TTLB rank: 9,341; TTLB animal: Flappy Bird; and Blogshares valuation: 1,331,785.92. Last year's numbers are here. Well, okay. My Technorati rank is actually higher, but there has got to be something screwy going on over at Blogshares!

(And no. There is no table this year. My "Comcastic" Internet connection keeps going out and I have packing to do. Maybe this is an accidental favor....)

Traffic and inbound links are a little lower, but both are a direct result of my decision in the spring to drop down to one post a day most weekdays, and forgo weekend blogging almost entirely. In fact, both metrics dropped less than I'd expected them to, which is a pleasant surprise.

I decided to post less in part because personal circumstances have me spread thin, commuting between two cities as I finish up my scientific work in Houston and searching for employment in Boston, where I am preparing to move. Also, I figured that once the dust settles, I could use that time for other writing.

There's a saying to the effect that life is what happens when you're trying to make plans, and this year definitely has fit that description. The transition to Boston is taking longer than I'd anticipated, and yet my writing career, as if having a mind of its own, went ahead and advanced anyway!

Back in the spring, I figured I'd be in Boston by now, and starting a regular routine of other writing for submission to print outlets. Those things didn't happen, but yet I have ended the year with my first two appearances in a major print outlet (and in newsstands no less!). Those and a consultancy I landed earlier in the year mark my first jobs as a professional social commentator. Maybe the folks at Blogshares are right, after all....

What Next?

All things considered, I am happy with my progress as a writer this year. But what about next year? Major questions loom. I still do not have a job lined up in Boston, and its schedule will have a major impact on when (and for how long) I can write. Can I keep blogging, as I hope to, even as I work towards more exposure in traditional outlets? If so, what changes to my routines will I have to make? What new opportunities will I find?

As I noted earlier, blogging has been a break from the huge, looming question mark that 2009 is for me at the moment. Fortunately, I have recently gotten some very good new ideas (Thanks, again, R-E!) on how to find some of the answers I need, but implementing them may take some time, and will require me to get myself up to Bean Town as soon as I possibly can.

The holidays are a chance for me to finish writing up my research results, and flesh out a new, better strategy for the job hunt.

Season's Greetings!

Having said all that, I'll be away for a week starting in a couple of hours, and, still being on the road, possibly scarce or absent the week after that. Expect me back here as early as early as December 29, but no later than January 5.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

-- CAV

Religion, Fertility, and Values

A pair of interesting articles caught my eye this morning.

The first considers the fact that religious fervor correlates with increased fertility the world over, and notes that at least one researcher holds that something about having a large family may predispose a couple to become more religious, even as something about being religious predisposes a couple to have a large family.

Nobody knows exactly why religion and fertility tend to go together. Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, has suggested several ways in which the experience of forming a family might stimulate religious feelings among parents, at least some of the time. She notes that pregnancy and birth, the business of caring for children, and the horror of contemplating their death, can stimulate an intensity of purpose that might make parents more open to religious sentiments. Many common family events, she reasons, might encourage a broadly spiritual turn of mind, from selfless [sic] care for a sick relation to sacrifices [sic] for the sake of a child's adulthood that one might never see. [bold added]

Setting aside the determinism that saturates the first paragraph -- Sorry, but family size does not "make" someone religious. -- and the altruism that infects the second, there is an interesting point to be had here. Raising children is both very demanding and very rewarding. The decision about whether to have children is all about values.

Secularization brings with it, albeit inconsistently, the idea that one's life is one own, and an obvious corollary to that is a heightened sensitivity to the time and money commitments that are part of having children. Many women put off or forgo children in order to have rewarding careers, for example.

It is probably more straightforward to see how secularization might correlate with decreased overall fertility. (It does not cause it, but it allows us to understand the individual choices behind the trend.) Less straightforward is the connection (in terms of personally-held values versus religious dictates) between having many children and being more religious.

The second paragraph above, as well as an article about the emotional appeal of Barack Obama, of all things, help us see what might be going on here:

The researchers say elevation is part of a family of self-transcending emotions. Some others are awe, that sense of the vastness of the universe and smallness of self that is often invoked by nature; another is admiration, that goose-bump-making thrill that comes from seeing exceptional skill in action. [Dacher] Keltner says we most powerfully experience these in groups -- no wonder people spontaneously ran into the street on election night, hugging strangers. "

Keltner is an evolutionary psychologist who holds that such emotions serve a role in turning human beings into collectives, a view I disagree with, and which I think hampers our understanding of emotions generally, and particularly the higher emotions. Nevertheless, he is right to point out that higher emotions are very much entangled with various forms of collectivism. Why?

As I have noted before, the higher emotions are very commonly associated with religion. This is first because religion is a precursor to philosophy (historically and in the sense of intellectual development). Secondly, it is because so much of modern philosophy, being actively engaged in attacking values, plays right into the hands of religionists. who claim that only faith can allow man to have purpose, reach his highest potential, and be at one with the universe. (Just saying that last phrase will mark me as a loon to many ears for that reason, and because too many people let religionists define terms like "universe" for them.)

Emotions are, as Ayn Rand pointed out, instantaneous reactions to our values (which are ultimately shaped by our beliefs). Aside from religious injunctions such as "Go forth and multiply," deciding to have a child and raising him involve many higher emotions, and often, over a very long period.

If the only worldviews that promote higher emotions are the religious, this would make religion an even stronger motivation to have children. Similarly, if experiencing such emotions awakens a desire to do the right thing (as it ought), where will a parent turn? Some variant of nihilism -- or the religious "alternative"? Religion is wrong, but given such a choice, I do not blame a parent for making it.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 387

Oppressing the Smallest Minority

Andrew Dalton, who has been posting some good stuff lately, comments on a real travesty. The adoptive couple of a child whose drug-addled mother was declared unfit is being forced to send the child to foster care instead simply because he is 1/8 Amerindian:

If you read the comments, you will find a few Native American activists supporting the law and the legal action. Of all the various distasteful varieties of leftists, I have found this variety to be the most obnoxious -- soaked in tribalism, mysticism, environmentalism, and Noble Savage mythology (ironically, a colonists' invention).

My only quibble with Dalton is his use of the term "Native American", but I'll leave it in so search engines can help people learn of a more explicit individualist perspective when this more trendy term for "Amerindian" gets plugged in.

Having a fair amount of Amerindian ancestry, I became curious for a time some years ago about Amerindian culture, and went to a few events put on by some local Indian tribes. It was interesting, but I never felt so out of place anywhere in my life.

If treating individual human beings such as this child and his loving adoptive parents like mere tribal property is an example of the culture these laws are misguided attempts to preserve, then I must say that I am proud to have felt so little affinity for the culture at these events.

Waiting for the Lowest Bidder

President Bush claims that, "I didn't compromise my soul to be a popular guy." That declaration raises more questions than it answers, both on the matter of what he did compromise it for, whether he has one left, and, what he might be waiting for, after having compromised everything else.

Perhaps it means he hasn't yet heard that John Walker Lindh's parents have asked him for a pardon.

If Bush pardons Lindh, expect him to talk about what a great "virtue" forgiveness (search term: "moral blank check") is, and recall the true nature of sacrifice, the basis for his moral code:

"Sacrifice" is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. [Ayn Rand in "The Ethics of Emergencies," The Virtue of Selfishness, 44.]

To forgive this traitor would be perhaps the most morally obscene way Bush could end his Presidency, but it would symbolize it quite eloquently, from the half-fought War We Should Have Won Already, to the ban of the Edison Bulb, to nationalizing our financial sector after huge increases in federal spending.

If I had more time, I'd consider starting a betting pool on whether Bush issues such an obscene pardon.

Surrendering the High Seas

The United States easily has the most powerful Navy in the world. We could almost instantly wipe the Somali pirates off the face of the earth, and yet we have not done so.

It thus comes as no surprise that the Chinese are preparing to fill that power vacuum.

Interesting GTD Idea

I've been too busy getting things done to write a post on Getting Things Done lately, and I don't use index cards in my particular implementation. But I know that some of my readers might find this post intriguing.

As an advocate of David Allen's GTD practice, I constantly look for ways to improve my productivity and organize the million things around me. Inspired by Merlin Mann's hipster pda, I set out to create my very own version I called mind.Depositor. [links dropped]

This has superior functionality to the hipster pda and has the added, underappreciated benefit of looking professional, like my solution. I insert half-sized paper (or folded printouts with punched holes) inside what used to be a leather telephone directory from Blue Sky for my "analog interface".

Mr. Warren Goes to Washington

The left is about to learn just how religious Barack Obama really is on Inauguration Day:

Pro-life pastor Rick Warren will give the invocation at President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. It makes a whole lot of sense. Even though Warren and Obama disagree on the life issue, they do see eye to eye on many social justice issues. This move is also classic Obama because it is a signal to religious conservatives that he’s willing to bring in both sides to the faith discussion in this country. Obama has never shied away from that. [bold added]

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Barack Obama plans to "transcend" left and right: by adopting the worst elements of both.

But remember, McCain was basically going to do the same thing, although without at least being honest about it.

Market Success

Via Amit Ghate comes the following excellent point concerning market "failure": "If an x-ray machine detects a tumor, would this be an example of x-ray success or x-ray failure?"

The whole post is excellent. Go there!

Good Reading, Bad Foundation

Myrhaf makes some encouraging observations about Joe the Plumber. Notwithstanding, the following comes from the Plumber's new web site: "When Freedom of Religion somehow excludes One Nation Under God, the essence and ideals of our freedoms are seriously in danger." Whatever gains individualism makes will yield significant improvements, to be sure, but individualists will have our work cut out for us for quite some time. America was not founded on Christian principles, and it cannot survive if such principles become integral to its government.

-- CAV

Are Principles Optional?

Years ago, I read the book, Is Reality Optional?, by Thomas Sowell. Yesterday, President Bush, who must own stock in the companies that sell merchandise that counts down the time remaining in his term, reminded me of it by saying one of the most nonsensical things I have ever heard a man utter:

I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system to make sure the economy doesn't collapse.

To someone who understands the nature of principles, and hence their practical value, the only context in which this can make any sense is the explanatory.

What do I mean? As human beings, we are distinct from other animals in possessing the faculty of reason. This faculty allows us to make superior use of sensory data than other animals because it allows us to conceptualize this material, and able to use it effectively henceforth, including seeing complex relationships between existents to form higher-level concepts.

For example, where a dog or cat will be able to respond to and use illumination from a flashlight, the sun, or a fire, only man is able to understand, in part through the concept of "light" what each of these has in common. Knowing about, "light", man can both try to find alternate sources, and form higher-level, related concepts, such as "day", and "time", as he does when he considers the fact that the sun, a major light source rises and sets with regularity. Without reference to the concept of "light", one would be unable to guide an effort to obtain more of it when needed, much less explain what all his knocking about was for.

Principles are simply the highest level of abstraction, as Ayn Rand once explained in her essay, "The Anatomy of Compromise":

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

What, then would "free market principles" be? On the one hand, they would be a conceptual understanding of what, exactly, a free market is in both the positive sense of knowing what it is (and thus seeing that it requires the protection of the individual's right to form and act upon his best judgment in the course of his daily life), as well as in the negative sense of knowing what it isn't (e.g., socialism, fascism, slavery, or feudalism) and thus what would endanger or destroy it.

To take a lower-level example, if I own a dog, and know the principles of animal care, I will avoid letting Fido slurp up antifreeze, no matter how thirsty he is, because I know that antifreeze is poison, even though Fido, having only instinct and a perceptual awareness of reality, does not. Even apparent violations of such principles, such as letting a stranger wound Fido with a knife, are seen not to be such when we consider that the stranger is a veterinarian and he is conducting surgery. We are still, in that case, applying the principles of proper animal care, even though "don't cut Fido with a knife" would ordinarily apply.

Now, let's consider what Bush said. First of all, we do not live under capitalism, but in an economy that mixes free market elements with elements of state control. There is no "free market" to save. One can only move our (inherently unstable) economy towards having more or less freedom, whether one be actively doing so or attempting to muddle through the latest crisis caused by the statist elements of the economy. So Bush has just admitted that he does not even know what a "free market" even is. (Hint: If it is a "system" at all, it is self-organizing beyond the government apparatus necessary to protect individual rights.)

Bush does, apparently, realize on some level that he has been acting as a statist, for he finds himself having to excuse his administration's behavior over the past few months. (Actually, he should apologize for his whole term.) Although he does not really know what a "free market system" is, even he knows that what he has been doing entails government intrusion into the economy.

He knows that, but apparently does not realize that such government intrusions as such make the market less free and, therefore, less able to recover, because the individuals who make up the free economy are constrained by government regulation or rendered less effective because government distortions in the economy are making them badly-informed actors. In short, Bush is compounding the government's violation of individual rights for the expressed purpose of "saving" capitalism, and the implied purpose of protecting our individual rights!

This is different than, say, a pro-capitalist President who inherited the mess we now have, finding some temporary or one-time form of government intervention necessary to avert a financial disaster, and explaining that he does so only reluctantly, and that he will, in the meantime, continue to work to increase our freedom in any other way he can.

But then, a pro-capitalist would know what capitalism is, what it requires (full government protection of individual rights), and why statism and anarchy are inferior, and dangerous to the survival of the people he is sworn to protect. He would know these things because he would rely upon free market principles when thinking about the economy. And he would know that if he doesn't rely on such principles -- if he "abandons" -- them, he will have no way to decide what action is best for the discharge of his office.

But Bush is no pro-capitalist. He admitted as much yesterday, and furthermore, has confessed in word and deed that he just has some mild emotional attachment to some nearly meaningless conception of "free markets", which he regards as optional and, ultimately, unimportant. After all, if statism is so powerful (which it isn't) that it can "save" capitalism, why save it? Worse, he has also admitted that he sees no connection between principles and reality. To Bush, a principle is just something you pay lip service to when you want to look good to yourself or others.

This is not a concerned pet owner taking his beloved pet to the vet. This is a kid grabbing the nearest jug of antifreeze because he wants to feel good about "helping" the dog he should have watered first thing in the morning.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 386

Central Planning Snake Oil

Brad Harper emails me regarding the latest anti-capitalist screed that should include Alan Greenspan as co-author, this one posted by Donald Cohen of The Huffington Post. It is a long litany of anti-capitalist cliches that takes advantage of Greenspan's betrayal of principles at every opportunity.

No blow is too low for Cohen. He even implies early on that capitalism is racist, as if all "landmark civil rights legislation" were perfect -- or all capitalists opposed all of it, or doing a better job of protecting the rights of all individuals. Good thing most of us don't deal in stereotypes anymore....

I don't have time to discuss it in much depth this morning, but suffice it to say that I find his droning about "Free Market Fundamentalism" especially ironic, given the context in which we learn of Cohen's own proclivities, which he summarizes for us as follows:

Greenspan's awakening signals a turning point for American capitalism. It's the beginning of the end of the fundamentalist free market epoch, underlined by calls from Democrats and Republicans alike for greater regulation, far more government oversight and even public ownership of private capital. [bold added]

Perhaps Cohen was too busy sopping up -- confiscating? -- the saliva from his keyboard to notice that yesterday, on the same page as his piece, his own site listed the following feature: "Poll: 37% of Americans Unable to Locate America on Map of America". [Note: A couple of commenters help out a busy blogger by informing me that the article is a spoof. Nevertheless, I feel safe holding up the government education monopoly as an example of how things turn out when the government runs them.] Does Cohen think the government can do a better job running everything than it does education, or is a dumbed-down demographic simply his target audience?

And, more to the point, does Cohen never discuss why he favors the government violating individual rights because he is afraid of being known as the traitor to America that he is, or does he think he can get away with it, courtesy of generations of school children mentally crippled by government planning of what should have been their educations?

New Agriculture Site

Monica of Spark a Synapse has started a new web site, FA/RM, advocating a return to freedom specifically in the agricultural sector. In light of the above example of left-wing calls for even more government control of the economy right on the heels of its most recent demonstrated failure, I think her latest post at the blog of her new site is worth a read. It is a fictionalized account of how government might run the automobile industry, but it will sound familiar to anyone who has seen Donald Cohen and his ilk at work over the past century.

I have linked to the blog in the sidebar and the organization on the web link page.

Con Con Update

C. August emails me a link to a blog posting that explores the threat of a Constitutional Convention in more detail than the World Net Daily article I cited Friday. I haven't time to read it in detail this morning, but it looks worthwhile:

Fearing a tyrannical Congress would block the amendatory process, the Framers formulated Article V, wording it so as to fence off the Constitution from hostile or careless hands. They were careful to enumerate Three Forbidden Subjects:

1. Altering the arrangement known as slavery until 1808, a ban that has been lifted both by time and war.
2. Altering the arrangement of equal representation of the states in the Senate.
3. Writing a new constitution.

The last Forbidden Subject is implied, rather than explicit, like the first two. The Framers took great pains to avoid using the term "constitutional convention". Instead, the Founding Document refers to a "Convention for proposing Amendments...as Part of this Constitution". An Article V Convention is strictly limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of 1787, and it is forbidden to compose a new constitution. No matter what amendments may be proposed, the Constitution must remain intact, else the actions of the Convention become unconstitutional. Unless Article V is amended first to allow it, a Convention for Proposing Amendments can never become a true constitutional convention, i.e. it can never write a new constitution. And neither can Congress. [bold in original]

This is somewhat reassuring, at first blush, anyway.

Mike N and Myrhaf, ...

..., respectively (1) discuss why so many Americans seem to support statist policies, and (2) describe (among other things) how the hard left is still the Angry Left even after the election of The One and single-party government in Congress.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added note on spoof article.

Asking the Right Question

It may sound trivial, but one of the most valuable skills one can possess is to be able, in any given situation, to ask the right question. This is true whether one is working alone, learning from others, or working with others, trading on his specialized knowledge in exchange for that of other experts.

A couple of examples should illustrate what I mean.

In an article at Fast Company, Keith Hammonds considers the performance of human resources departments, starting off from an example of a particularly bad personnel decision:

A talented young marketing exec accepts a job offer with Time Warner out of business school. She interviews for openings in several departments -- then is told by HR that only one is interested in her. In fact, she learns later, they all had been. She had been railroaded into the job, under the supervision of a widely reviled manager, because no one inside the company would take it.

You make the call: Did HR do its job? On the one hand, it filled the empty slot. "It did what was organizationally expedient," says the woman now. "Getting someone who wouldn't kick and scream about this role probably made sense to them. But I just felt angry." She left Time Warner after just a year. (A Time Warner spokesperson declined to comment on the incident.)

Part of the problem is that Time Warner's metrics likely will never catch the real cost of its HR department's action. Human resources can readily provide the number of people it hired, the percentage of performance evaluations completed, and the extent to which employees are satisfied or not with their benefits. But only rarely does it link any of those metrics to business performance. [bold added]

Note that the management at Time-Warner evidently isn't (or wasn't) asking the right question of its human resources department, and was likely being blinded by a blizzard of facts driven by the wind of an implicit assumption behind what its human resources department was supposed to be doing. The metrics were there, but they were worse than useless because they did not address the right question!

Unfortunately for them, a filled personnel slot does not necessarily translate into a higher profit margin. Hammond takes a step back from the immediate problem, and asks the right question in the last sentence of the above excerpt. Note that even in a less extreme example, with a less "ethically challenged" HR department, asking the right question frames the criteria by which to judge the job performance of an entire department, and perhaps could have prevented the above scenario from ever happening at all.

Asking the right particular question is no less important than asking the right general question, as another example from the world of job hunting will show. (Yes, I've been doing some reading on the subject. My thanks go to the Resident Egoist for a tip that is going to pay off very well.)

Never agree to an interview until the employer confirms the title of the job you'll be talking about, the date the opening was created, the name and title of the manager you'd be working for, and the deadline for filling the position. Most HR recruiters will act appalled at your request for this information, saying it's confidential. Remember that you are about to invest several hours of your time to be interviewed, so insist on seeing a detailed copy of the job description before you agree to interview, and compare your interview to the documentation. This is a business transaction and you should expect both disclosure and good faith. If you believe a job has been misrepresented, politely but firmly insist on confirmation of the above information. [bold added]

It may sound shocking, but an emerging trend in employment recruiting is to advertise fake job openings in order to generate recruiting leads. Notice again how Nick Corcodilos gets to his implicit question and helps his readers integrate it into the rest of their knowledge: He focuses on the purpose of the job interview, and its nature. You are interested in landing a job -- and, he points out all the time, helping a future employer turn a profit. And an interview is both time from your life and a business transaction.

These examples illustrate several things. First, even for something as conceptually straightforward as a trade, the right question, general or particular, is not always obvious. Second, maintaining the correct context can help you formulate the right question, or at least evaluate what someone else proposes as the right question. Third, you can take advantage of the thinking of others in finding the right questions to ask.

The third point can save one an enormous amount of time, if one does it well. I first encountered this idea -- of seeking out expert advice -- stated explicitly in Jean Moroney's "jump start" Thinking Directions mini-course, where she recommends compiling lists of such questions as one goes along. I think the second point is the way one can best take advantage of what subject matter experts have to say. After all, like Time-Warner's management, they are fallible human beings.

One cannot expect to jump into a new field and immediately see what the best questions are, but one can profit from the past effort and thinking of others -- if those others are prioritizing their questions properly, namely by asking the Granddaddy Question of Them All: "For what purpose?"

It occurred to me as I was reading Nick Corcodilos's work last night that this is what I like about his career and job-hunting advice, and this is what makes it stands out above the rest. That question is always the backdrop, no matter what Corcodilos might be talking about in particular, or on what level of abstraction.

If you can't come up with the right question on your own, look for someone who thinks like him, see what he has to say, and ask yourself whether it integrates with the rest of what you know.

-- CAV

The LAST Thing We Need

According to the American Policy Center, the United States is only two states short of obliterating what is left of our government's policy of protecting individual rights:

A public policy organization has issued an urgent alert stating affirmative votes are needed from only two more states before a Constitutional Convention could be assembled in which "today's corrupt politicians and judges" could formally change the U.S. Constitution's "'problematic' provisions to reflect the philosophical and social mores of our contemporary society." [bold added, link dropped]

The message is, unfortunately, made to look ridiculous by its messenger, which warns not only of the legitimate threats to freedom of speech this could unleash, but also pretends that we do not (and should not) have separation of church and state. I would not want conservative theocrats holding such a convention any more than I would the socialists now in power.

Alan Sullivan, who notes that the left is suddenly talking about pushing for this in Ohio, comments that -- surprise! -- certain elements of the conservative movement helped push us to this brink some time ago: "[T]he Reagan-era drive to launch a new constitutional convention ... began with a revolt by disgruntled deficit hawks, who were horrified by Cold War deficits, and failed to get a balanced-budget amendment through Congress."

Let us hope that this does not occur, so that we can profit by this object lesson in substituting the point of a government gun for rational persuasion. The ultimate problem lies not with Congress, but with a public that is all too happy to accept trinkets in the form of welfare state programs from the government in exchange for little pieces of its freedom.

What were those fools thinking? That Congress would fail to find a way around their amendment if it was passed? Or that a nation that elected such a Congress in the first place would outdo the Founding Fathers as authors of a constitution?

-- CAV

Updates

12-16-08: Follow this link for a more detailed discussion of Constitutional Conventions.

Quick Roundup 385

The Real Obama

Charles Krauthammer takes a look at Barack Obama's centrist appointments and sees pragmatism:

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's. [bold added]

Pragmatism is a rejection of philosophical principles on principle in the name of expediency. But what is expedient? What "works"? Because a pure pragmatist will not have firm moral convictions, he will end up absorbing as worthy ends whatever other people around him regard as moral goals. Society's dominant moral code is altruism.

Obama's osmosis has taken place in such places as the Reverend Jeremiah Wrights pews, so those who are hoping to see his altruist-collectivist domestic ambitions blunted by his pragmatism may be in for a rude awakening. Like a Christian who is pious one day of the week, Obama may be hoping to be pious with one aspect of governing. It may take a witch's brew of continuing crises to distract him from implementing his domestic agenda -- but Krauthammer points out that even those could just as easily serve as an excuse for his agenda as a distraction from it.

What will it take for Obama to throw his agenda under the bus? That may be the question for those of us who realize that his agenda is to throw the protection of our individual rights there instead!

Interesting Article on Teasing

Via Arts and Letters Daily is a thought-provoking piece that indicates one way that misguided efforts to ban bullying in grade schools may be causing more harm than good:

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it's aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They're pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life's ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

Author Dacher Keltner raises lots of similarly good points in his essay, but they are undercut by elements of his personal philosophical views. For example, He notes at one point that when kids reach about 11 or 12, "you begin to see a precipitous drop in the reported incidences of bullying". This may be, as he says, because "[a]s children learn the subtleties of teasing, their teasing is less often experienced as damaging", because actual bullying drops off around that age, or both.

But here's his deeper explanation for the appreciation of "the subtleties of teasing":

[C]hildren become much more sophisticated in their ability to hold contradictory propositions about the world -- they move from Manichaean either-or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertory.

Note his metaphysical interpretation of the cognitive challenges of social life as reflecting the nature of the universe rather than simply the ambiguities of navigating complex relationships with people whose minds you can't read.

But reality is absolute, and existents (including relationships) have definite identities. To attribute our own ignorance of these identities to a flux-like metaphysics is wrong and will lead to losing the scent of this interesting line of inquiry.

Let's look at an example from Keltner's own life:

I still remember that day, as clear as a bell. Off to the side of the seventh-grade four-square game, Lynn, future high-school mascot, valedictorian, and my first love, approached me with hands coyly behind her back. She stopped unusually close, and with a mischievous smile framed by her cascading hair, asked, "Hey Dacher, wanna screw?" As I was in the midst of mumbling an earnest and affirmative reply, she held her hand open in front of me, a screw lying flat on her palm. "Just teasing" I heard amid the screeching laughter of the cabal of finger-pointing girls.

Had I trained my ear to discern the off-record markers of teasing, I would have detected subtle deviations from sincere speech in the artfully elongated vowels of Lynn's enunciation ("Hey Daaaacher, wanna screeeuuw?"). Had I read my Shakespeare I would have known to counter with my own provocation....

This is indeed a very ambiguous situation. Lynne, a young girl, may have been feeling some of her very first romantic stirrings, and may have been inexperienced enough with such feelings even to be aware of them as such. She needed room to explore these feelings. Teasing gave it to her.

And furthermore, even if she was sure that she was wild about Dacher, she can't read his mind. Teasing gives her a way to put romance on the table without necessarily putting Dacher on the spot. He is her friend, after all, and being too insistent might, if he did not have such interest, have endangered the value of continuing to have that friendship.

There is nothing self-contradictory or unknowable about reality at all here, but clearly, teasing is serving at least one useful function for two young human beings exploring their own values and trying to learn more about each other. This is very interesting stuff, but as I have noted before, modern philosophy is endangering the prospect of making further progress by altering how results are interpreted.

Teasing is not an acceptance of mutually exclusive possibilities at the same time. It is (at least in part) a means of learning which of several possibilities is true without costing oneself more than the knowledge is potentially worth.

Incidentally, Keltner edits a magazine based on the mistaken premise that altruism is good and that purports to support that contention with scientific evidence. Not too dismiss the value of studying animal behavior (or the psychological consequences of altruism), but ethics can apply only to beings with free will. The question of which ethics is proper is a philosophical one (and also necessarily assumes the existence of free will), and comes before science, which can lend insight into mechanisms that result in free will and how emotions arise, but cannot say anything about the matter of whether altruism is a proper morality for man.

Daily Dose of Reason

Rather belatedly, I have read an email announcing a new look for Dr. Michael Hurd's website, which now (or I am now aware) includes a blog. His Daily Dose of Reason is now accessible from the sidebar and, by coincidence, flows nicely from the above mention of altruism as a subject of study in cognitive science. His latest post briefly discusses the difference between short-term rapaciousness (which he calls "greed") and actual selfishness.

-- CAV

You Know You're in Houston

When snowfall makes the news!

Yesterday evening, as I was heading home from work, I got to witness something I've seen only two other times in my soon-to-end fifteen years in Houston: snow! (Read the news story while you can: The Chronicle likes to yank 'em off the web within a day or so. But I do see this made news in Chicago, too.)

Wednesday's brush with winter left some Houstonians less enamored with the snowfall, including those stuck in delays of up to three hours at local airports. Drivers unaccustomed to snow encountered difficulties on the roadways, and even getting into their cars.

Paul Ramirez spent several minutes digging through his truck Wednesday evening outside the Fry's electronics store on West Road, trying to find something he could use to scrape the ice and snow from the windshield of his truck.

"It's really coming down," said Ramirez, 33, as he tried dragging a large envelope across his window. "This is crazy. It's Houston -- we shouldn't need to keep ice scrapers in our cars." [bold added]

Chortle! I don't know about Paul, but where I come from, windshield wipers are sufficient for trivial amounts of snow like what I found on my car. (It was less than half an inch at its thickest.) That said, I do own a scraper, it's in my car, and I know how to use it!


Realizing I had a camera in my computer case, I whipped it out to snap a few pictures along the way to dinner.

My heat's out, and so I'd already decided to have dinner in a restaurant, in order to enjoy a warm place that wasn't work. The above shot (click to enlarge), taken from the lot of the 59 Diner, is as close as I could get to capturing the moment. You can see snowflakes falling and a palm tree in the background at the same time. Reminds me a little of a similar shot I took in Nafplion, Greece back in 1987, but have long since lost. That's too bad, because then, it was daylight, the snowfall was intense, and there was a small fortress on a hill behind the palm tree.

Inside the diner, everybody was all atwitter about the snow almost to the point of there being a festive atmosphere. All in all, it was a very pleasant change of pace.

But the heat's still out here in the house! My wife, in Boston, is warm, and I'm ... not! How screwy is that? On the bright side, I got to see what one of the sleeping bags we bought for camping, but hadn't used yet, could do. They're rated for temperatures down to 30 degrees, so I slept in one of those. Not too bad! All the same, I'm still looking forward to the heater repairs being finished today!

Hmmm. Maybe I should have titled this post, "Winter in Camp Houston"!

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 384

Government Distortion of Price Signals

Brian Phillips does a good job explaining how government interference with prices impairs our ability to gather objective information about supply for the goods we need.

When the government subsidizes some product, it is essentially saying that that product exists in a higher quantity than it actually does. For example, filet mignon is more expensive than hamburger because there is less of it. However, if the government subsidized filet mignon so that the consumer only paid $2 a pound, consumers would react as if it existed in the same quantity as hamburger. Consumers who never buy filet mignon would be dining on it weekly. But the supply would not have changed--only the mechanism that rations that supply.

This is on top of the fact that all such activity is wrong, because it violates our rights, and results in theft from the productive.

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute offer a novel solution to the housing glut caused by federal interference in the housing market. And Craig Biddle commented at length on the novel aspect of said solution some time back.

Dr. Lewis to Appear in Israel

If you are in Israel or know someone who is, mark your calendars: Dr. John Lewis will be making two appearances there.

First, he will speak on "The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism: A Proper Policy" at the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, December 14.

Dr. Lewis will also lecture on "Israel's Moral Right to Exist" at Tel Aviv University on Monday, December 15 at 6:00 p.m. for the Tel Aviv University Objectivist Students club.

Distraction? For Whom?

This news article on the repercussions of the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevic for attempting to sell Barack Obama's now-vacant Senate seat is missing something big:

However, the scandal, which Fitzgerald described as a "political corruption crime spree," threatened to be a distraction as the Obama team assembles a new administration. Some Chicagoans planning to move to Washington with Obama could find themselves facing continuing questions about what they knew about Blagojevich's attempted shakedown. [bold added]

To be sure, this will be a distraction for Obama, the governor's behavior is quite brazen, and it is disturbing that Obama is possibly tied to this, but....

Recall the Clinton years, and how fixated the Republicans were by Clinton's scandals. Consider further how some political pundits "moon over ... transparency initiatives" [link added] when they should be working to end the welfare state that is making such rampant corruption possible. Or who "become outraged at such things as that infamous 'bridge to nowhere' -- and yet [fail to challenge] the massively larger larceny cum vote purchasing of the welfare state."

Yes. We must get to the bottom (top?) of this scandal, but at the same time, we must be mindful of The Man Who Floats Above It All. The conservatives who don't support the welfare state outright are largely out of ideas, and will grasp at whatever straws Obama hands them to build a case against him, just as they did with Clinton. Such a case must be made, if there is one, of course, but not as a substitute for principled opposition.

Nor must it occupy too much of our attention or energy. A politician can do plenty of harm while he's dealing with accusations that he is corrupt.

0 for 2!

Drat! Two interesting links I came across yesterday aren't working. One I'll save for another day since it's a blog, and what's the point of trying to help someone out by linking to nothing?

The other was entertaining (HT: Elizabeth). You could -- and hopefully can once this post goes up -- throw in the URL for your blog and have a computer program attempt to guess your Myers-Briggs personality type. My blog came up as INTP, whereas I have tested strongly as INTJ twice, nearly ten years apart.

And speaking of web malfunctions, have you noticed that GMail, and anything to do with Google Ads has been acting squirrelly lately, often requiring multiple load attempts or taking a long time to load?

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on December 10, 2008.

Updates

Today: Added hypertext anchors.

That Sucking Sound ...

... is being caused by an intellectual vacuum, as a post by Megan McArdle demonstates (HT: Glenn Reynolds).

McArdle is reacting in The Atlantic Monthly to the charge that she is enjoying left wing disappointment over Obama's cabinet appointments. She is not, she assures us. In fact, not only did she support Obama herself, but she would, "personally be pleased to see Ingrid Newkirk appointed to head the USDA." McArdle has been mistaken for a conservative and she's setting the record straight.

So far, so good, so to speak.

It's when she explains why she feels some measure of equanimity about this situation (and, by implication, why her fellow Obama supporters should, too), that things get interesting. After first calling herself a libertarian, she names having a "radical agenda" as a commonality between libertarians and "progressive" leftists, along with "the lunatic belief that if only there were some structural change in the world, they'd finally get the opportunity to enact their agenda".

Politicians don't listen because progressive and libertarian activists are not pushing minor schemes to benefit themselves greatly at small cost to everyone else. They are pushing for radical change that will require radical fiscal medicine to effect. That fiscal medicine will not pass unnoticed, and hence, it does not happen. [bold added]

Let us set aside McArdle's claim that there is a libertarian "agenda", for what she is saying about radical agendas per se is the interesting point here: This is half-right and half-wrong, which is worse than simply being wrong, because the correct half makes the incorrect half look correct.

Yes. It is true that politicians don't like agendas (radical or otherwise) when people understand that such agendas imply consequences that they do not support. (e.g., "[T]hey want national health insurance and lower government spending, but, you see, not that way....")

But no. It is not true that politicians simply don't listen to radicals, or that popular opposition to radical changes is written in stone. History shows us that, for better or worse, politicians frequently do listen to radicals. This is directly because radicals frequently do effect fundamental changes in popular opinion. Otherwise, we would still have black slavery, but lack an income tax today.

What, then, is the nature of McArdle's error? Her closing paragraph says it all:

This does not make me happy. It does not make me happy that I can't privatize social security [sic] and eliminate the corporate income tax, and it does not make me happy that I can't have radical agricultural reform and a stiff carbon tax. But the universe is not here to please me.

Set aside the fact that her goals are contradictory (or even self-contradictory, as in the case of Social Security). Notice the magical powers she seems to attribute to politicians generally and Obama in particular. What would it take -- to use a truly pro-freedom example -- to phase out Social Security?

To listen to McArdle (or most leftists), it would seem to take some form of dictatorship. What other kind of "structural change", exactly, would it take to get popular objections to all that "nasty ... medicine" out of the way of these radical agendas? To her credit, she opts for resignation, instead, but she is still wrong.

And the nature of her error is that it is a confusion of the man-made for the metaphysically given. "[T]he universe is not here to please me." True, but as the case of slavery shows us, widespread sentiment is, unlike gravity, not a natural force beyond man's control. It can be changed.

The question is: How? Man, environmentalist fashion and centuries of religious dogma to the contrary, is a natural phenomenon. His mind is, and his opinions are. As with any other thing in nature that one wants to change, one must consider the nature of man and his mind before one can attempt to change popular opinion.

When one does so, he will realize that he cannot force a mind to agree, but that he can attempt to persuade other individuals of the merits of his position by offering sound arguments. This is what the "moral suasion" of the abolitionists was, and we see the results today. It sounds contradictory to put it this way since men have free will (and individual rights), but in political discourse, it is true: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

But McArdle, I would guess, despairs of achieving a radical agenda at least in part because she understands (correctly) that popular opinion will not change overnight. However, there is more to this picture. If persuading other people is the key to (eventually) enacting a radical agenda, what is required to do so? The one thing libertarians uniformly dismiss: fundamental philosophical principles. You can neither explain what freedom is or offer a convincing argument for why someone should support it (instead of, say, government handouts) without recourse to principles that correspond to the facts of reality.

Libertarians thus "tend to moon over" various free-sounding (but often contradictory) random stances but ultimately become resigned to politics as usual. This is because they refuse at the outset to arm themselves for the battle of ideas necessary to achieve (or even understand) the goal of freedom they say they want. In doing so, they leave the door wide open to those who will not shrink from the kind of "structural changes" needed to enact their radical agendas without popular consent.

Anyone who doesn't like this state of affairs, take note, and know that treason vs. resignation is a false alternative.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed wording of one sentence.

Quick Roundup 383

Forthcoming: The Objective Standard

Via Principles in Practice:

The print edition of the Winter issue of The Objective Standard is at press and will be mailed shortly; the online version will be accessible to subscribers beginning December 20. For promotional purposes, "Capitalism and the Moral High Ground" and "Reason or Faith: The Republican Alternative" are available early and to all.

The contents of the Winter issue are:

From the Editor
Letters & Replies

ARTICLES

"Capitalism and the Moral High Ground" by Craig Biddle
"Reason or Faith: The Republican Alternative" by John David Lewis
"Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet" by Raymond C. Niles
"Bubble Boy: Alan Greenspan's Rejection of Reason and Morality" by Gus Van Horn
"The Assault on Energy Producers" by Brian P. Simpson
"Demystifying Newton: The Force Behind the Genius" by Gena Gorlin
"Errors in Inductive Reasoning" by David Harriman

BOOKS REVIEWED

New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton Folsom Jr. (reviewed by Eric Daniels)
Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 by Adam Fairclough (reviewed by Gus Van Horn)

If you have not yet subscribed to TOS, you can do so online or by calling 800-423-6151. And the Standard makes a great Christmas gift for your active-minded friends, colleagues, and relatives. Everyone concerned with the future should be reading this journal today.

It hasn't even arrived yet and it's already my favorite issue!

67 Years Ago Yesterday

Pearl Harbor was attacked. What better way to remember than to recommend John Lewis's "No Substitute for Victory" to a friend?

Review of The Deniers

Over at Capitalism Magazine, there is a thought-provoking review by Jay Lehr of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud, by Lawrence Solomon, a "longtime environmental activist" who wondered why so many scientists were disputing the global warming "consensus" and began interviewing them. This book was the ultimate result.

Global warming has become a critical question for citizens who must decide whether the cures being bandied about are not in fact worse than the disease.

In matters of health, most intelligent citizens seek a second opinion before undergoing a serious medical procedure, but in the case of global warming, a second opinion is exactly what global warming activists do not want you to seek, for fear it will reduce the effectiveness of their fear-mongering. Therefore, we are treated to a continuous drumbeat of the words, "the science is settled."

All the scientists Solomon interviews in his book are prominent in climate science and are not just nitpicking over the interpretation of some small piece of data. Throughout the book Solomon artistically includes boxes of highlighted quotes from his subjects, taken from their own publications. [bold added]

Lehr, author of Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, of which I own a copy, raises a very good point, and his many examples from the book will cast serious, much-needed doubt on the often outrageous claims coming from global warming fear-mongers. I'll probably put this one on my Christmas wish list, but I suspect that, like this review, the book will have failed to challenge the premise in this debate that really demands challenging: the notion that the government has any business interfering with the economy period, global warming or not.

Nice Parody

Via Adrian Hester comes the following parody of "The Way I Are". You needn't have any familiarity with the original to enjoy this!

And if you like that, there appears to be plenty more where that came from at HotForWords, whose author explains, "Who is HotForWords? Her name is Marina Orlova, she's 27 and she's a philologist!"

-- CAV

Bushobama vs. Your Health

The religious right and the socialist left could potentially deliver a one-two punch against your health by putting government guns behind the irrational beliefs of certain medical workers.

The outgoing Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new "right of conscience" rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other [medical] workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable, including abortion and possibly even artificial insemination and birth control.

This rule would bar "any entity" that gets federal money (e.g., private companies that happen to be funded in part by a grant) from disciplining any employee, including one "whose task it is to clean the instruments."

If this rule is not dropped by the Obama Administration, which has plans to further (if not complete) the process of nationalizing the medical sector, it could very well end up forcing patients to accept care from superstitious zealots who want to withhold from them a full range of treatment options.

If liberal commentators, reporting their own Obama-Rorschach test results, think that "their man" will likely repeal this rule, it will be because they are forgetting that (a) he is very religious, and (b) the left has been pandering to certain religious minorities for years through various misguided (at best) laws aimed at ending discrimination, such as "hate crime" legislation.

And we might as well throw in a (c): In a sort of mirror image of the global warming (agenda) "debate", everyone on the left will be myopically focused on the excuse for this rule, whose purpose is plainly to give religious conservatives a way to prevent some women from taking the "morning after pill". (The Slate article inked above focuses on the falsehood being used to lend a scientific "case" against this pill, for example.)

If leftists really didn't want to be under the knife of fundamentalist doctors, they would support freeing all medical care from government control, and then take advantage of that freedom to boycott such physicians. Likewise, if conservatives really valued freedom of conscience for physicians, they, too, would begin working to get the government out of medicine. They could have whole hospitals that didn't practice abortion! (But then, they would have to give up on their dream of forcing everyone else to abide by their arbitrary dicta.)

In fact, neither side values freedom, and we already have another precedent to back my claim: In education, where the precious minds of children are entrusted to their teachers for hours a day, every day, leftists will not have the state monopoly of education challenged in any way, shape, or form (despite its disastrous results), and religious conservatives, far from opposing it, simply try to co-opt it -- in order to deprive developing minds of the care they need on religious grounds. Creationism is just the most prominent example.

As with education, so it will be with medicine: Two anti-freedom sides will haggle over small swaths of control, with victory by neither being a victory for individual rights. Americans must repudiate both left and right, and demand the freedom to live according to their own best judgement. As a corollary, Americans must also renounce all attempts to use government force to get others to do their bidding. If we do not respect the rights of others, how can we hope for reciprocation?

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 382

Will Obama be a Centrist?

The burning question, now that America has elected Barack Obama President, is (still!) how he will govern. In one sense, this should come as no surprise, since this election came down, at least on the party primary level, to who could get away with saying the least. This is a particularly dangerous implication of the prevalence of pragmatism in our culture, for it both removes debate from the equation in elections and leaves us open to nasty surprises: We won't know what we have until after the swearing-in.

Tony Blankley pretty well summarizes this state of affairs -- although he does not see its cause -- at the start of a column that takes Obama's rather centrist-looking cabinet appointments so far as his point of departure.

There is something degrading about serious, prominent political people of the left or right (to say nothing of the broader public) being forced to play policy hide-and-seek with the president-elect of the United States. And there is something presumptive about a president-elect who is very satisfied to keep the public guessing about what he stands for and what he plans to do. It is redolent of the most cynical of 19th-century European politics. But if he wants us to play the guessing game, I'll play.

Blankley cautions us: "Do not take too much comfort from his appointees. Brace for the change you do not believe in."

More Speculation on Obama ...

... is to be found at the group blog, The New Clarion, which Bill Brown and Myrhaf launched just before I broke for Thanksgiving. Specifically, Myrhaf is "in search of the big O", as he puts it himself.

I found the following, which he quoted from Commentary magazine, especially interesting:

It was Michelle [Obama], [David] Axelrod remembers, who stopped the show. "You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this?” she said directly. “What are hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?" Obama sat quietly for a moment, and everyone waited. "This I know: When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently," he said. "And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently."

This reminds me of a quote I recently tried (unsuccessfully) to unearth to the effect that Obama hopes, as a politician, to "make everyone happy". In any event, even Obama's not being as hard left as he could be will not necessarily help us. As Myrhaf notes, "All Obama has to do is continue Bush's policies to take America toward socialist hell."

You can find The New Clarion in the sidebar from now on

Even the Democrats Fear Her

Via Matt Drudge:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) moves since the November elections have shaken up some of her colleagues, with some looking over their shoulders and others worried about how the Speaker will lead her expanded majority in 2009.

...

Pelosi's effort to make some Democrats anxious could be a calculated maneuver as she seeks to maximize the effectiveness of her caucus heading into 2009. Pelosi's hard-charging tone and decisions over the past month have sent a message to her colleagues: Don't get too comfortable.

...

The seniority system that tempers the power of the Speaker is teetering, having received a body blow from Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-Calif.) coup at the Energy and Commerce Committee.

When chairmen aren't flinching at the possibility of a challenge from a junior member, they can look forward to being bounced by term limits in four years. That's a change that Pelosi quietly endorsed in the 2007 House rules package.

...

Few members clash publicly with Pelosi. Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who were at odds with Pelosi over the last few years, were stripped of their top committee posts.

Centrists are grumbling that their growing ranks aren't represented in the leadership team that Pelosi shaped through back-room arm-twisting. The so-called Blue Dogs, while publicly celebrating President-elect Obama's commitment to "pay-go," are wondering when the stimulus balloon stops expanding. [The use of a term so similar to "bubble" was non-ironic, as far as I can tell. --ed]

Will the "Blue Dogs" stand up to Pelosi, or compliantly roll over?

Our liberty is at the mercy of the answers to such questions as whether Obama is a pragmatist or an even emptier suit; and whether today's so-called centrists will have the cajones to stand up to a lipstick leftist -- if they actually want to, that is -- thanks to the wholesale abandonment of principled thinking in America today.

A Crisis for Talk Radio

An interesting article by conservative talk show host Michael Medved comes close to naming a far greater crisis for conservative talk radio than even the threat of the effective return of the "Fairness" Doctrine. (Both censorship and the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement are crises for individual rights.)

Talk radio led the opposition to the Clinton juggernaut (and flourished mightily in the process) as a mass audience medium that appealed simultaneously to all dissenters from the Democratic drive for domination. The great power of the medium involved its ability to change minds -- but that requires drawing significant numbers of listeners who don't already agree with you. [bold added]

Unfortunately, as a religious conservative, Medved espouses a philosophical approach to ideas that cuts the "ability to change minds" off at the knees. If the best argument you can give for your views ultimately amounts to "because" (i.e., you base your whole worldview on faith), you will be by that very fact unable to do anything more constructive than report news and point out obvious flaws in your political opponent.

"Why on earth should I listen to Micheal Medved?" Is a fair question, and he can't answer it. The field is thus wide open for a real, rational alternative to left-wing socialism and right-wing theocracy. Thanks for the tip, Michael.

-- CAV