NY 20: No Referendum

A special election in a Republican-leaning New York congressional district is being mistaken for a referendum on Barack Obama's economic policies by some in the media and political establishments. In fact, it is no such thing, and the cynical Republican candidate deserves to lose by double digits. Why? Because he is running on exactly the opposite message he should be, although it may not be obvious that he is doing so.

The article correctly notes that Republican Jim Tedisco stands to profit from outrage at Barack Obama's lurch towards fascism:

... Peter Holderied, whose family owns the Golden Arrow Hotel in Lake Placid, said he was dismayed by Obama's economic stimulus bill, passed by the Democratic Congress in February.

"It's unreal," he said, shaking his head. "People are just getting wind of what this is going to cost us."

The article also, unsurprisingly for a mainstream media outlet, is quick to note both that Tedisco's victory is far from assured and that a Tedisco victory would not necessarily be a seismic event.

But Tedisco's campaign isn't much of an insurgency. [Now-Senator Kirsten] Gillibrand's win here in 2006 was viewed as a major upset. The district has a solid Republican majority; the late Gerald Solomon, a popular Republican, held the seat for 20 years.

That should make Tedisco the favorite. For much of this brief campaign, he was, but that seems to have changed.

The latest poll, released Friday and conducted by nearby Siena College, showed Murphy up by 4 points. Tedisco led by 12 points in the same poll a month ago.

So Tedisco is running in a GOP district and his lead has been slipping even as Obama has become even more blatantly statist in his handling of the economy, most recently (and very inappropriately) micromanaging General Motors by "firing" its CEO.

The Los Angeles Times is right about the Tedisco campaign not being "much of an insurgency", but for entirely the wrong reason. The real story here is that this race is even as close as it is. Tedisco ought to be poised for a blowout victory, and yet he's probably going to eke out a win of a percentage point or two. Why? Because he's not really running against Barack Obama at all.

Tedisco, who has served in New York's General Assembly for 27 years, has ridden that populist, anti-Wall Street message hard, painting [his opponent, Scott] Murphy, who made millions as a venture capitalist, as an out-of-touch creature of the financial sector.

In essence, the dynamic that existed during last year's election cycle has been stood on its head. The way Tedisco portrays it, two months into Obama's administration, Democrats are now the overreaching party, a friend to big business. Republicans like himself are the grass-roots fighters, trying to bring change.

So it's not that Barack Obama is trampling over our rights, or that one man can't possibly know enough to run an economy as huge as America's, or even that he's killing the Golden Goose by reducing the incentives for good performance by CEOs and taxing the hell out of what's left -- it's that Obama hasn't jawboned Wall Street enough. The last thing America's persecuted minority needs right now is for someone from the supposedly pro-business party to jump onto the pile.

If Tedisco is any indication, the GOP has learned exactly the wrong lesson from its resounding defeat in November, and has begun me-tooing the Democrats. This is why Tedisco is not exactly trouncing his Democratic opponent. What does he offer to voters genuinely opposed to Obama? More of the same, at least to the ones who are paying attention. And what about voters who are impatient with Obama for not having already nationalized everything? Tedisco is a good protest vote because, if he wins, he'll probably squeak by, he won't have anything of substance to say against Obama, it's just one vote, anyway, and other GOP candidates fundamentally opposed to big business will be emboldened.

In immediate terms, the cause of freedom has already lost in this election. The GOP candidate deserves to get trounced, and voting against him is the best way to ensure that the Republicans learn that the best way to win against Obama is to beat him, not to join him.

The best way for this to happen in this race is for Tedisco to lose by a narrow margin, and for genuine friends of freedom to protest that he failed to offer a real alternative to Barack Obama's meddlesome policies.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 417

Will End the Fed end the Fed?

Amit Ghate points to a debate in the Wall Street Journal that Harry Binswanger says, " was in response to Alan Greenspan's unintelligible WSJ piece of March 11, 'The Fed Didn't Cause the Housing Bubble.'" [link added]

Ghate asks whether "we can realistically hope for a dismantling of the Fed in the not so distant future." His question is well-founded since two of the six writers brought up the idea of abolishing the Federal Reserve.

Interestingly, there even seems to be some popular support for the idea. Sunday morning, while at the grocery store, I spotted a guy wearing a tee shirt whose front read, "End the Fed", and whose back read, "Sound Money for America." Being in a hurry, I did not stop to talk to the man, but later, I was able to find the web site for an advocacy group (called "End the Fed" -- what else?) that appears to be backing a measure to abolish the Federal Reserve.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, based on my skim of the web site, the organization is not founded on philosophical principles that are compatible with capitalism. For example, the site complains at one point that the Fed is "about as Federal as Federal Express." It also complains that the Fed acts without Congressional oversight. Do we really want to put Nancy Pelosi in charge of that? Another complaint by End the Fed is that despite the fact that it is a "private corp.", the Fed doesn't pay taxes. In laissez-faire, there is no taxation at all.

Most ominously, End the Fed "contingents" have been participating in anti-war rallies marking the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. While it is true that sound money would put the brakes on such attempts to export the welfare state, left-wing anti-war activists are not enemies of the welfare state and would support ending the Fed only if they thought doing so would harm America. They certainly are not friends of freedom or capitalism.

This last also causes me to wonder whether End the Fed really understands what it is doing. If ending the Fed really would make our country stronger (and I am sure it would), why not attempt to persuade real patriots that it is a good idea? And if capitalism is good -- which it is -- what's wrong with a "private monopoly" on money? The real answer is "nothing" -- but then the Fed, being a government creation is not really a private monopoly.

The difference between a good (i.e., private) monopoly and a bad (i.e., government-enforced) monopoly is that a good monopoly can exist only so long as it earns the confidence of the market. Calling a federal creation a private monopoly is wrong and creates confusion about the difference between government coercion and individual freedom.

End the Fed appears to be -- at best -- an ad hoc group desperately in need of intellectual ammunition. Whatever it is, though, the real thing that needs to end is confusion about the proper role of the government, including belief in the charade that a nominally private entity created by the government like the Federal Reserve Bank, or Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac is really a private entity.

Although I favor ending the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold standard, I cannot support this group.

Questioners and Answerers

Jennifer Snow has been blogging pretty actively lately, and has an interesting post on how people approach the fact that they don't know everything:

I realized that when people don't know something, most fall into one of two approaches to dealing with it. Some immediately start asking questions of whoever or whatever is available, while some sit down, summon up all of their relevant knowledge, and try to think through it themselves. I call these two types (obviously enough) the Questioner and the Answerer.

She has lots of interesting insights about each type.

I'm an answerer, but I can't help ending this with a question: Which type are you?

Card Check in Check -- for Now

Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal reports what passes for good news these days, but correctly notes that it will probably be fleeting:

The business community is dancing a victory jig over Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's announcement that he'll provide the crucial vote to stop Big Labor's top priority, the "card check" bill. Fair enough, though the real test of corporate America is yet to come. [link added]

Later, she continues: "[L]ate last week ... news leaked that the CEOs of three companies -- Whole Foods, Starbucks and Costco -- were breaking with the rest of the business world to support some sort of compromise."

This unprincipled skirmish on the part of American businessmen has been a holding action at best. And yet many persist in decrying principles as "impractical." This issue won't go away until people start making the case that such restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of association are morally wrong and contrary to the proper purpose of government.

Netbooks and Data

Over a year later, I remain happy with my netbook, which has been invaluable during my travels between Boston and Houston. (Those have certainly gone on for far longer than I initially expected.)

An article in the New York Times describes four market leaders in that laptop category. Of the four, the HP MINI seemed like the least attractive to me, but not due to its "small" 60 GB hard drive. Is it just me, or is that not a ridiculous amount of data to keep on a secondary computer which could easily be lost or stolen?

And speaking of data, do you maintain good backups? Regular backups of important data also happen to be one way of combating "data rot," a problem I have been aware of for some time.

Edison Hour -- or "Human Achievement Hour?"

I was happy to see that many people in my own neck of the virtual woods celebrated Edison Hour -- Rational Jenn even posted a photo -- but I was ecstatic to learn that some other pro-capitalists are competing with us via "Human Achievement Hour" (HT: HBL).

Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes:

We have no problem with an individual (or group) that wants to sit naked in the dark without heat, clothing or light. Additionally, we'd have no problem with the group holding a pro-green technology rally. That's their choice. But when this group stages a "global election" -- enviros are asking the world's citizenry to vote Earth by switching off our lights with the express purpose of influencing government policies to take action against global warming -- we have every right as individuals to express our vote for the opposite.

If our Human Achievement Hour is at all a dig against Earth Hour, it is so only by the fact that we are pointing out what Earth Hour truly is about: It isn't pro-Earth, it is anti-man and anti-innovation. So, on March 28, I plan to continue "voting" for humanity by enjoying the fruits of man's mind."

Human Achievement Hour" is a fine name, but I find "Edison Hour" catchier -- and the man's name is virtually a synonym for human achievement, anyway.

Let's outshine HAH next year!

-- CAV

Freedom down the Drain

Too busy laughing at the hoops some people are having to jump through to notice the real danger an all-intrusive state can be, The Houston Chronicle places an AP story about detergent smuggling in the "News Bizarre" section of its online edition.

The state of Washington has, on environmentalist grounds, banned dish-washing detergents containing phosphates in Spokane County. It will make the ban statewide next year unless a few husbands decide to stand up for their wives and oppose the move.

This not only violates individual rights, it has led to the following predictable result:

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.

But strike that last sentence. The hard water problem had been solved -- by phosphates -- until the state invaded the kitchens of private citizens and forced them to stop using detergents that actually worked. The real culprit isn't hard water, but the government.

The government is supposed to prevent us from having our lives hindered by thugs who want to order us around, and force us to act contrary to our own best judgment. Instead, it is arbitrarily and sanctimoniously sentencing citizens to easily-avoidable, time-wasting drudgery.

Washing dishes may seem like a small thing, but it is part of an alarming pattern that has included everything from people being threatened with jail for washing cars and having to screw in inferior light bulbs to taking on enormous amounts of undeserved financial burdens.

When I turn on every light in my house this evening at 8:30 p.m., I'll be sure to run a load of dishes and a load of clothes. And I'll make doubly sure I'm using phosphates when I do.

-- CAV

PS: For a discussion of how a proper government might deal with legitimate issues concerning the disposal of chemicals harmful to humans, please refer to the comment thread here.

Quick Roundup 416

Edison Hour

Don't forget to crank up the illumination this Saturday at 8:30 p.m., local time. And swap out any Bush Bulbs beforehand or you'll short-change the man in the wattage department.

Objectivist Roundup

Stop by Erosophia for your choice from about two dozen of the week's best posts by Objectivist bloggers.

Breaking the Ice

As Bubblehead put it so well:

I think that surfacing through the ice is one of the coolest things Submariners do that we can talk about publicly. One of my main disappointments in my submarine career is that I never made it under the ice. What's your favorite story from operating in the Arctic?

I never got to do that either, but I'm enjoying the pictures he points to as well as the comment thread he started.

Crackin' a Grin

Matt reminded me this morning of a video I was unable to view yesterday morning.

Seeing and hearing that did me a lot of good!

Obama to the contrary, there is hope for the world.

One for Dad

When my dad died a little over eight years ago, my baby brother put together a CD of some of his favorite songs. This post by Myrhaf reminded me of one of them, which you can see below:

He, who once thought of Queen as a "Led Zeppelin wannabe," goes on:

Queen's homosexual sensibility completely eluded me in the '70s. But then, it was not until years later that I realized I was one of the few straight male high school thespians. All those other guys were flaming gays, and I never realized it.

Another thing I never realized was how sexual a lot of lyrics were. I'm stunned now that our parents let us listen to this music and play it in our garage band. For instance, take the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman."Another thing I never realized was how sexual a lot of lyrics were. I'm stunned now that our parents let us listen to this music and play it in our garage band. For instance, take the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman." [bold added]

Myrhaf, I think you just answered your own question!

The Context-Dropping Left

Writing for the Huffington Post, Ed Kilgore -- tacitly admitting that he shares the same morality as the more consistent religious conservatives in the process -- "warns" the rank-and-file against being too quick to "go Galt":

What I'd like to do as a public service is simply to remind folks tempted to "go Gault" [sic] or to gush ignorantly about the subject in blogs or on Fox that they are flirting with a philosophy that is profoundly and expressly hostile to anything that could remotely be described as "conservative." And before anyone even thinks of offering the "you-don't-have-to-be-a-fascist-to-love-Ezra-Pound's-poetry" defense, it's important to understand that John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, and their creator Ayn Rand represent a remorselessly unified and logical world-view that can't be sliced and diced into bite-sized portions you can take or leave. ...

The following are a sprinkling of quotes from Rand's work that ought to make any self-conscious conservative think twice about scribbing [sic] "Who is John Galt?" on the nearest whiteboard.

The quotes are all pulled from The Ayn Rand Lexicon. Then, after quoting Whittaker Chambers, whose "review" of Atlas Shrugged demonstrated that he never really graduated from collectivism, Kilgore adds:

So make up your minds, conservatives: check out of your jobs and take to the hills, leaving God, the Republican Party, family values, and everything else behind but your sovereign self. If you're not ready to do all of these things, then please, for the love of Rand, stop talking about "Going Galt." You're just embarrassing yourself.

On one level, Kilgore is correct: Rand leaves no room for faith, sacrifice, and collectivism. But on another level, he is being profoundly dishonest. While he does quote Rand on a number of points, he glosses over the whole reason she presented her philosophy in novel form.

The events in Atlas demonstrate how the ideas that men hold have real-life consequences. Rand was no left-wing nihilist who attacked Christian ideals just for the hell of it. She attacked them because they're demonstrably immoral and have exactly the kind of consequences we're seeing today.

Any conservative reading Kilgore's "warning" should read the real one between the lines. Why is this left-winger suddenly so much a fan of "God, the Republican Party, family values, and everything else?" Maybe it's because he sees them as fellow enemies of capitalism and your life.

Maybe it's time, as Ayn Rand so often put it, to, "Check your premises."

-- CAV

Obama's Budget: CME to the GDP?

Via Matt Drudge, I learned of a type of solar event called a coronal mass ejection (CME), which could wipe out modern civilization under the right conditions. Such conditions existed in 1859, before we became dependent on the power grid that would get knocked out. During the eight-day "Carrington Event", named for the British astronomer who made the connection between the solar storms he observed and events on earth:

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Another source elaborates on the "severe disruptions":

[T]elegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.

That was nothing compared to what such an event would look like in today's much more electrified world, according to a team of scientists who have been considering the problem.

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

The article, oddly enough, attempts to place a dollar estimate on the damage caused by our electrical infrastructure getting fried and the sequelae of the immediate, yet protracted and near-universal blackout for the most productive parts of the country:

Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

The last sentence is all I need to hear about this. If money can't buy anything because nobody can make anything, price tags become meaningless and all is lost.

Fortunately, the natural conditions that could cause such a catastrophe obtain only about once every 500 years and there are ways to prevent or mitigate much of the damage discussed in the articles. (One not mentioned is the introduction of freedom to the utility industry. Specifically, decentralization as described in the penultimate paragraph of Raymond Niles' "Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid" would, I suspect, contribute to a sort of "natural immunity" to such a disaster.)

But what struck me was the $2 trillion dollar estimate of the damage, as well as the time frame projected for the recovery (if any) of the United States. Consider also that Obama's own nominee for Commerce, Judd Gregg, has said that his ten year, $3.6 trillion "financial plan" would bankrupt the country. I think that this scenario is a good way to visualize what this means, as I shall explain.

There is a photo essay making the Internet rounds of what $1 trillion in $100.00 bills looks like. More relevantly, I once computed that government confiscation of $1 trillion amounted to "about $3,000 [taken from] every man, woman, child, and infant alive today." Making the outrageously generous assumption that half of that number could and would engage in productive activity, that translated to $6,000 per productive individual.

I was computing how much a mere $1 trillion financial "bailout" would affect an average working American -- before the "bailouts" snowballed with Bush and Obama's eager assistance, and before Obama proposed his Ten Year Plan.

Just to make things simple, let's pretend that the bailout is only a $3 trillion dollar, government-forced liability for the producing public. (I suspect that it's closer to $10 trillion.) And let's further ignore the estimated $9.3 trillion in projected government deficits over the next decade. That still leaves us with everyone who works for a living being saddled with at least 6.6 times $6,000 of debt not his own, or nearly $40,000 over the next decade.

I can't even afford a new car as it is. What does Barack Obama hope I'm going to forgo next in order to make his redistributionist scheme work? What does "work" even mean to Obama? This is a man who has never held a real job, clearly has no idea of how free market economies work, and has spent his whole life surrounded by leftists who do not want America to succeed -- so I wouldn't count on him being on the same page regarding the term "work" as any ordinary American.

(And to think that I haven't even touched all the new regulatory hoops he wants producers to jump through as they attempt to work with such a leech sucking from each jugular!)

How all this is supposed to "work" is an important question, no matter how hard everyone tries to avoid it. The coronal mass ejection that could bring the modern world to its knees in 90 seconds would certainly "work" as a means of destroying civilization. It would "work" faster than Obama's budget, but when the material means that people need to produce (and hence survive) are sufficiently depleted, people become unable to produce, to trade, or to survive. Sure. Obama might collect or print the amount of money he blithely quotes as a "price tag", but what if it can't buy anything?

Picture Zimbabwe without Western aid.

Picture America after a coronal mass ejection at just the wrong time, but perhaps in slow motion at first, until things snowball.

Now, if you value being alive, renounce the creed of self-sacrifice and work to stop Barack Obama. More important, learn what freedom actually means, and work to reestablish it in America.

-- CAV

A Taste of Texas

Well, as I thought I might, I find myself with oh, about twenty minutes of blogging time this morning. So, without further ado, I present you with the recipe for what I fixed for my wife this morning, so she'll be able to come home to a taste of Texas when she returns home from work late this evening.

This recipe is one of several I have added to my repertoire at her request. Despite my having lived in Texas for over half of my life, I had never heard of it (or had forgotten that I had) and, if I had ever had it, it was because she made it for me ages ago when we were just dating.

The recipe is based almost entirely on a munging-together of two that I found here. The black beans, not traditionally a part of the dish, were her idea and, after having made the dish each way, I think they're a fine addition. Also, if I recall, the original recipes might have called for cilantro. (No time to look now.) Regardless, I plan to try adding that and may alter the recipe to include it if I like the results.

For my newer recipes, I have taken to listing all ingredients first, and all steps in preparation, including simple things like dicing, next. This is in part because I am absent-minded and in part an effort to save time. I love to cook, but I don't love to spend any more time than I absolutely must to do so. (And I hate being surprised mid-stream to learn that I'd forgotten to prep one ingredient or another.) So when I encounter a new recipe, I visualize myself following it, and think of things like how long each step will take, and whether some things can be done in parallel.

Although an experienced cook can do such things naturally, I find that it helps me assimilate new recipes more quickly to think through timing rather than come up with all of it through trial and error.

I hope you enjoy this if you try it and, if you have any suggestions for interesting variations or improvement, feel free to leave a comment. (I fly most of the day, so don't be surprised if I take a while to moderate anything you might post today.)

***

King Ranch Chicken

Preparation Time is about 1 hour.

Ingredients

shortening
celery salt to taste
pepper to taste
1 chicken bouillon cube
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp chili powder
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 cup of olive oil
2 tsp lime juice
1 can Ro-Tel
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 can black beans
1 onion, diced
1 bell pepper
10 corn tortillas
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (8 oz, store-bought)
1 1/2 lbs of chicken, without skin and bones

Directions

1. Mise en place celery salt, pepper, 1 tsp cumin, the garlic, lime juice, the bouillon cube, the cans of soup, Ro-Tel, cheese, black beans (drained, rinsed, and in a bowl), chili powder (in sauce bowl), and casserole dish.
2. Pour one cup water (for bouillon) into small saucepan.
3. In parallel with the next steps, prepare chicken broth by bringing water to a boil and dissolving bouillon cube. Turn off heat.
4. Cook the chicken in the olive oil on medium, adding 2 tsp lime juice. Also, add half of the cumin, and pepper and celery salt to taste on each side. Turn about once every five minutes.
5. Chop the onion and set aside in a bowl.
6. Chop bell pepper and remove seeds. Set aside in a bowl.
7. After about 15 minutes, add 1/4 of the onion and the garlic to the chicken.
8. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
9. Prepare sauce by combining soups, broth, Ro-tel, and chile powder. Blend until smooth.
10. Grease casserole dish and set aside.
11. When chicken is done (in about another 5 minutes), shred with two forks in casserole dish. Spread evenly.
12. Add layers of: tortillas, black beans, onion, bell pepper, cheese, and sauce.
13. Repeat step 12, ending with cheese.
14. Bake uncovered for 30 minutes or until brown and bubbling.

Enjoy!

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 415

Two all-day flights in two days await me, starting soon after this auto-posts. I'll have a tight schedule in between. Fortunately, I've been experimenting in the kitchen lately with some good results and can slap up a recipe if I'm really pressed for time tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some items that merit your attention...

Mark Your Calendars! Flip Those Switches!

Last year, I said, "I ran across Kindredist, by a Michigander named Amy as I was catching up on 'Edison Hour' festivities. I wish only that I'd thought of the name first!" I then quietly entered the time of Edison Hour into my calendar with the intent of getting the word out and celebrating the occasion if nobody else did.

This Saturday, March 28, 8:30-930 p.m., please be a responsible and grateful Industrial Revolutionist and TURN ON YOUR LIGHTS -- join Edison Hour on Facebook.

It's good to see that Amy has already gotten the word out.

Good Poem

I really like this poem by LB, which was inspired by John Keats’ The Human Seasons.

Pinched for the Right Reason

I meant to link to Joseph Kellard's piece on St. Patrick's Day last week. Here's an excerpt from "Celebrate Individualism, Not Ethnicity:"

It's high time for Americans to shed their false racial "pride" -- and should stop championing essentially race-based pseudo-ideals such as multiculturalism -- to pursue universal values beneficial to all men, no matter their biology or background. Identifying primarily with one's physical genetics or racial heritage, and the eventual irrational divisions, wars and mass killings this tribalism has ultimately caused throughout history, is nothing to be proud of.

And be sure to read what a commenter there went through at work when he spoke up against multiculturalism.

Out of the Woodwork

With all the publicity Ayn Rand's works have been getting lately, it was only a matter of time before the usual confederacy of dunces would rise up to be heard.

Leading the charge is -- who else? -- National Review, which explicitly stands by Whittaker Chambers' glaringly inaccurate review of half a century ago. After that lead-in, we have a "symposium" consisting mainly of lame, willfully ignorant put-downs that make the talking stain sound erudite. (They can only envy its relative effectiveness.)

In that context, I found the following quote from the tail end of probably the "friendliest" words spoken about Rand particularly ironic:

Still relevant in the Age of Obama? With all due respect to Whittaker Chambers, if we didn't already have her, we'd have to invent her, double-quick. [bold added]

Ah, but they did invent her -- or at least whoever it is that they are attacking. Starting with Whittaker Chambers, National Review has invented a grotesque caricature of Rand, which they have pilloried, and attacked what they imagine her ideas to be. Fittingly, the author of that quote, Leo Grin, "was twice nominated for a World Fantasy Award."

As I put it before the last time I encountered commentary on Rand of a similar quality, "Let Ayn Rand speak for herself. She does a much better job than anyone who tries to do it for her." Oddly enough, nobody at National Review advised readers to read the books, be it to see for themselves what is wrong with the ideas or even in the snarky vein of sampling the horrible prose just for kicks.

Huh! I wonder why.

Why not gold?

First Russia, and now China, have called for something else to replace the American Dollar as the primary international reserve currency. That's understandable, but notice that it isn't gold. I explained this desire to have one's cake and eat it too in a different, but relevant, context:

Recalling some recent congressional testimony, and quoting himself, Greenspan said that "monetary policy should make even a fiat money economy behave 'as though anchored by gold.'" If that is the case, why bother with fiat money at all? Because without fiat money, the government would be unable to confiscate property and redistribute wealth via inflation...

Amusingly, the president of Kazakhstan also pushed for such a currency, to be called the "acmetal". The name was a portmanteau of "acme" and "capital," and yet it could just as easily been one of "acme" and "metal" -- which would have described gold!

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on March 24, 2009.

"Going Over" Their Heads?

The Sunday edition of the Houston Chronicle kicked off its unnamed lifestyle/leisure section with the following headline: "Who makes $250,000? And how do higher taxes go over?" Given where the article resides and its folksy aimlessness, it would be easy to dismiss it merely as a puff piece. It is a puff piece, of course, but it is thought-provoking for a couple of reasons.

First, puff pieces are meant to flatter, and newspapers frequently place "human interest" stories in their leisure sections. With its solicitations of the opinions of six of the "richers" Obama is about to persecute with higher taxes, the article is clearly meant to flatter, but why?

Second, with "tea party" style protests breaking out all over the country, why was the noun, "right" entirely absent from this story? Perhaps, feeling that readers are in no mood for controversy on a Sunday morning, Claudia Feldman (or an editor) swept a real malcontent or two under the rug. (None of the six spoke of "going Galt", even if to dismiss the idea.) Or perhaps Feldman did not find even a single richer willing to speak up for his right to the fruits of his own labor.

Considering that a quick search of the archives at the Chronicle for the phrase "tea party" yielded no news results (although I know of at least two being planned here), I lean towards the former explanation, which fits in with the purpose of writing a leisure section puff piece about the likely future victims of a government-organized mass theft, rather than a stinging editorial call-to-arms in their defense located in the opinion section.

Human interest stories often attempt to draw the reader's attention to the humanity of someone else he may not have otherwise given a great deal of thought about. The subject may be obscure to most readers or, alternatively, a great deal of recent news coverage might have made the subject seem distant to the average reader. Properly done, a human interest story helps readers understand why they should care about a given item of news. One can easily imagine, during the Jim Crow Era, human interest stories concerning discrimination helping an average white reader stop for a moment and think something like, "You know. These are human beings who are getting threatened and beaten just because they want to vote! This really is important."

Here, we certainly see the human side of the six richers being interviewed, and we even get dissenting opinions from some of them, although on the flimsiest, pragmatic grounds. None contends against the assumption that the government can take from them whatever it wants, and all agree with the altruistic moral premise behind the welfare state. The whole "debate" is mere quibbling over how much the government should take. One richer who does not want his taxes raised cites as his proudest achievement, "Setting up a leadership program for area teens called Youth Leadership America."

The clear impression one gets from the piece is that these richers our government keeps talking about in the abstract are real human beings -- and that they really care about their fellow man, as evidenced by their having no moral objection to what the government is about to do to them. In so far as the article is also a puff piece, it is also directing kudos to any richers who decide to read it.

Unfortunately, taxation is not voluntary, and no matter what some of its victims might think about its propriety, the fact remains that it is a violation of property rights. This article is an attempt to excuse massive theft by the government -- the entity that is actually supposed to prevent it -- by giving the impression that the richers don't really mind, and that stealing the fruits of their labor is for the best, anyway. As icing on the cake, its altruistic back-patting might cow a few of the uppity troublemakers from their ranks into shutting their traps about rights and opening up their checkbooks at tax time. Rights, after all, aren't even a blip on this human interest radar.

And that's a pity, for if there is one thing of urgent human interest, it is rights, including the right to property. As Ayn Rand once put it so succinctly, "Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."

Rand's argument hinged on a revolutionary view about morality, but our society is reaching the point where her view will soon be the only one that can make sense out of what our government is preparing to do. If stealing is wrong, by what right does the government do it? There is no such right, and it is appalling that a "human interest" story about six hapless richers would fail to mention that.

-- CAV

When Outsourcing Isn't

The Chronicle of Higher Education features a fascinating article about students who "outsource" their college writing assignments -- sometimes including dissertations! -- overseas to essay mills. Most of the article focuses on the shady nature of one such mill in particular, how orders are processed, and what might motivate the participants in such a transaction.

Needless to say, the article finds more than one parallel to the economic phenomenon of outsourcing, particularly as made possible by the great efficiency of today's electronic communications across the globe. In fact, it holds out these essays-for-hire as examples of outsourcing: "Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work."

But are they?

According to one dictionary, to outsource means, "to obtain goods or services from an outside source." The usual understanding for the motivational context of the term comes from business, but it certainly applies to individuals, as indicated by another definition of outsourcing: "To send out (work, for example) to an outside provider or manufacturer in order to cut costs."

The term, which verges on the superfluous, ends up in practice simply describing any recent application of the law of comparative advantage. Its main utility seems to be in pointing out just how well recent technological advances have created new opportunities to do this.

So, in a literal, context-dropping, and short-sighted sense, one could certainly say that the students are outsourcing their essays. They don't have adequate time for the immediate assignment (or, worse, to learn the research or writing skills they need in order to do the work), but they have money on hand to pay someone who has, to produce the essay. They save on time by paying the essay mill money that they value less than this time.

But the comparison to outsourcing breaks down when the legitimate purpose of the course work is considered, and that is precisely for the student to acquire skills in writing and research, not to mention experience thinking about the material of the course. This is ideally the whole reason a student is attending the class, and it is something that, by its very nature, cannot be outsourced. It is this fact which demolishes even the best legitimate-sounding reason to use an essay mill I saw in the article, which is, "to use it to get ideas." You cannot pay someone to acquire skills and experience on your behalf. Most or all of the students participating in these transactions are cheating themselves.

Having said that, and still not to excuse this practice, one issue driving the growth of modern essay mills remained unmentioned, although the article brushed very closely with it: What is an education for?

But [Notre Dame Associate Professor Susan D.] Blum points out a more fundamental issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of talking to students about what college is about and why studying -- which may seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential -- actually matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she says. "We need to convey that to them."

Thanks to progressive education and credentialism, which feed off one another, students are too focused on the marks they will get for an assignment or a course, rather than the vital improvements to their minds that they will get out of a course. And often, many are accustomed to getting very little of the latter. To that extent, the urge to "outsource" is understandable.

The "progressives", by setting education against the process of fostering the rational faculty, have severed it from its proper, selfish role to the student in more ways than one. (e.g., Even if you can get the students to appreciate thinking about one course in particular, you won't necessarily get them to generalize the lesson to all disciplines. They won't necessarily know how to generalize.)

Pragmatic credentialists finish the job of making a time-wasting joke out of education by attempting to bypass the work of evaluating how well any given individual has mastered his material and can apply it to the tasks he needs to perform in order to help a future employer and thus to make a living.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 414

First, a word from my favorite source for cultural commentary....

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Ranking the Punters

Don't be fooled by the title, which only sounds like it could refer to the ravings of a particularly hard core fantasy football player who can't wait for fall to return....

Scott Powell continues his series of Presidential rankings with an installment on the "punters."

The pressing problem of the Era of the Growth and Decline of the Union that required presidential leadership, but instead met with default and evasion, was slavery. Every year that passed made this point clearer, and every time that presidents "punted" on this issue only made the situation worse. Consequently, one might be inclined to say that the difficulty level of each successive presidency got higher as the nineteenth century unfolded, and that this should be taken into account when judging the presidents in question. However, the issue is moot, because not one of the presidents in question ever did anything particularly impressive that would allow someone who is ranking them to even consider how hard it was for them to do the right thing.

Among the punters is the tenth President, John Tyler, who, I recently learned, has two living grandsons. Yes. Grandsons.

Red State Blues

Texas regularly votes for Republican presidential candidates and is generally regarded as pro-capitalist, but anyone familiar with its legislature would wonder where that reputation comes from. Every session churns out ridiculous headlines, like one I ran across yesterday over lunch pertaining to a proposal to regulate the tanning industry, of all things:

"In the United states and Texas, we don't allow our teens to purchase cigarettes until after they are 18 because it is a carcinogen," said Rep. Burt Solomons, R-Carrollton. "Yet we don't do that for tanning beds, which can expose teens to the same risk for cancer."

The bill would require anyone under 18 years old to get a doctor's note before using a tanning bed and would require a parent be with them in the salon. Supporters and detractors said this would be the strictest legislation any state has passed on teen tanning.

Notice the party affiliation of Burt Solomons, as well as his facile use of one bad law as an excuse to pass another. You get bonus points if you recall that many, many things can increase the risk for cancer. What will they restrict or outlaw on that basis next? Your guess is as good as mine.

In the meantime, even slight moves in the direction of greater freedom are greeted with resistance, like a proposal to allow the sale of liquor on Sunday. Brian Phillips explains:

The fact is, if a business wishes to open on Sunday, it is not appropriate or moral for the government to prohibit it from doing so. And it is no less immoral if most of the businesses in that particular industry support such prohibitions. The decision to open on Sunday should be left to the discretion of each individual store owner, not politicians or industry lobbyists.

Later in the same post, he also makes some salient comments on the recent bust of a huge prostitution ring in Houston.

The government does not exist to protect my health. It does not exist to make me able to loaf on a given day of the week. It doesn't exist to prevent consenting adults from buying or selling sex, no matter how distasteful the very idea. It doesn't exist to help my gang run your life or yours run mine.

It exists to protect individual rights, and this protection necessarily precludes it from doing any of those other things.

Heroes of Capitalism Celebrates March

Specifically, you can learn more about James Naismith, the father of March Madness, and Arthur Guinness, the real patron saint of Ireland. Or would that be one of the descendants of Nicholas O'Murphy? I may have to -- erm -- think about that one for awhile.

Houston Rankings

Recently, a virus knocked out the computers at Municipal Court for at least a week, including the day I came to settle a parking ticket. So I settled the ticket by mail. Of course, I never heard anything back, so I ended up having to go online to check on whether the city would permit me to take driver's ed or whether it simply took my money.

My visit to the city government's web site came with a silver lining. I noticed a link to various top ten rankings achieved by the city in recent years. Here are just the top rankings Houston has racked up. Most of them reflect well on the city.

• Top Metro in the Nation Site Selection Magazine -- March 2009
• Best City to Live, Work and Play Kiplinger's Personal Finance -- July 2008
• Best U.S. City to Earn a Living Forbes.com -- August 18, 2008
• Best City for Your Job BusinessWeek -- June 12, 2008
• Best City to Buy a Home Forbes.com -- July 14, 2008
• Best City for Recent College Grads Forbes.com -- June 26, 2008
• Hottest Labor Market Bizjournals.com -- September 8, 2008
• Fastest Job Growth (12/07 to 12/08) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment -- February, 2009
• Lowest Cost of Living Among Major Metro Areas ACCRA Cost of Living Index -- Third Quarter 2008
• Largest IT Service Economy Onforce, Inc. (VoIP Monitor) -- December 5, 2008
• Top U.S. Manufacturing Cities Manufacturers' News Inc. (as reported in the Houston Business Journal) -- May 30, 2008
• Most Accessible City for the Disabled The National Organization on Disability -- February 14, 2008
• Top Local Government Green Power Purchaser Environmental Protection Agency -- July 2008
• America's Best Hospitals -- Cancer, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center U.S News & World Report -- July 2008
• Highest Population Growth in the Nation U.S. Census Bureau (as reported in the Houston Business Journal) -- July 10, 2008

Compiling such lists isn't a proper function of the government, but the entire list is here.

-- CAV

Updates

3-20-09: Added missing hyperlink to Powell's "punter" post.

Intellectuals and History

Writing for City Journal, Adam Kirsch reviews Charles Kurzman's Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, which examines the role of intellectuals in ultimately unsuccessful attempts by six nations -- Russia, Iran, Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, and China -- to establish Western-style democracies.

His conclusion should provoke thought among those wondering about the fates of more recent revolts, from the the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, to Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, to the current "Tea Party" movement in the United States.

[T]hese six revolutions are not remembered as a glorious chapter in history. In each, pro-democracy activists scored dramatic initial successes, only to surrender quickly to infighting, resentment, and apathy, setting the stage for counterrevolutionary coups.

...

[T]he revolutions of 1905–1915 failed because intellectuals overestimated popular democratic support and underestimated the challenges that democracy presented. Kurzman writes acerbically about these intellectuals, repeatedly suggesting that such liberal values as a free press and universal education were just parochial interests of the class that writes and teaches for a living. But are democracies' enthusiasms for these values really just examples of "hegemony" in the Gramscian sense, as Kurzman argues -- "the acceptance of the interests of the ruling group as though they were the interests of the whole society"? If so, it's hard to understand why, as Kurzman acknowledges in his concluding chapter, these rights became the goal of the post-1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe -- which were led not by intellectuals but by labor movements like Solidarity. The intellectuals of 1905–1915 were, Kurzman amply shows, deluded about their peoples' readiness for democracy. They were ahead of their time, a misfortune not just their own, but their countries'.

Kirsch sounds, in his critique, closer to the truth than Kurzman, but I think that stopping with the conclusion that the intellectuals are "ahead of their time", as perceptive as it is, misses a larger, crucial point.

Why were they "ahead of their time," if they were at all? Later democratic movements may have striven for similar values, but history is not preordained, either, as the failure of Iran to overthrow the mullahs by now shows us. Why has this not happened? And what, ultimately, causes society to change for the better, anyway?

Kirsch and Kurzman are getting warm when they look at intellectuals; for abstract, philosophical ideas clearly play a role in changing society. They are also right to wonder whether the societies these intellectuals functioned within were ready to implement their ideas. But two more things merit attention from anyone genuinely concerned with preserving and expanding freedom: (1) whether the ideas of such "revolutionaries" are consistent with freedom, and (2) how well-accepted they are by the population at large. A revolution can fail because the ideas of its leaders are not really compatible with freedom, because such ideas do not already permeate the culture, or both.

The notion that a people may "not be ready" for freedom more obviously touches on the second of these, and Bush's attempt to bomb and rebuild Iraq into freedom is often seen as futile for this reason. But this notion also touches on the first. The tenets of Islam -- the dominant ideology of the Iraqi people, as well as the acknowledged source of law in its new constitution -- are incompatible with freedom. This is why the Iraqis are not ready for freedom.

And what of the revolutionary? If we take Bush, the architect of this "revolution" as an intellectual leader for the sake of argument, we see that his acceptance of theocracy is an idea incompatible with freedom. (Nor has he, needless to day, attempted to introduce the Iraqis to a coherent political philosophy supporting individual rights.) Bush is no intellectual to be sure, but what he tried to do is no different than what any band of intellectuals is attempting to do by staging a political revolution without first winning minds to their side. Thus, as a theocrat, or at least someone tolerant of theocracy, Bush has the wrong ideas, and this caused him to fail to challenge the wrong ideas already held by the Iraqi people.

No matter how modern Iraq's new infrastructure looks, be that infrastructure the bridges we built or Western-looking parliamentary elections, freedom cannot prevail without the population generally favoring individual rights. The ideal of total obedience to Allah contradicts a proper conception individual rights.

Putting the last differently, unless the intellectuals succeed in changing the overall outlook of the larger society in favor of ideas consistent with freedom, attempts to cause fundamental political change will be premature and will eventually fail. Why? Because the people will ultimately demand policies and institutions in line with their personally-held views. (Would our government's forming an Islamic morality police be tolerated in America?) In fact, in order for lasting political change to occur, an intellectual revolution is necessary first, as Yaron Brook recently pointed out on Pajamas TV regarding the "Tea Party" movement. (He gets to this around 16:30.) To succeed in bringing about freedom, intellectuals must have ideas that lead to freedom when put into practice and influence society enough that those ideas can be put into practice.

Ayn Rand, writing in her essay, "For the New Intellectual," discusses how intellectuals who want freedom must work to achieve that end.

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the "ivory tower" of the philosopher to the university professor -- to the writer -- to the artist -- to the newspaperman -- to the politician -- to the movie maker -- to the night-club singer -- to the man in the street. The intellectual's specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called "humanities," but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man's means of knowledge sad makes an other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. A free society has to be an informed society. In the stagnation of feudalism, with castes and guilds of serfs repeating the same motions generation after generation, the services of traveling minstrels chanting the same old legends were sufficient. But In the racing torrent of progress which is capitalism, where the free choices of individual men determine their own lives and the course of the entire economy, where opportunities are unlimited, where discoveries are constant, where the achievements of every profession affect all the others, men need a knowledge wider than their particular specialties, they need those who can point the way to the better mousetrap -- or the better cyclotron, or the better symphony, or the better view of existence. The more specialized and diversified a society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge; but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time profession. A free society has to count on the honor of its intellectuals: it has to expect them to be as efficient, reliable, precise and objective as the printing presses and the television sets that carry their voices. (For the New Intellectual, pp 26-27) [bold added]

Unlike in Iraq, many of the ideas necessary for a free society are widely held by many in the general American population, although often only implicitly and in inconsistent form. The job of the intellectual is, relatively speaking, much easier here than elsewhere, and our political situation is less dire. Nevertheless, political revolutions do not happen without philosophical revolutions -- and turning an anti-freedom political tide cannot occur without a turning of the philosophical tide. We elected Obama because many Americans favor the welfare state, which is incompatible with freedom.

What's next for the Tea Party movement? Third party futility at best, unless intellectuals who understand the philosophical roots of freedom notice that the public is on their side this time, and carry the day.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 413

Sixty Years Ago Today

Ludwig von Mises' Human Action was published. Debi Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute quotes a letter of Ayn Rand's on why the book is still relevant today:

As to your statement that "laissez-faire" capitalism is the cause of depressions-this is an issue of economic fact and is simply untrue. The cause of depressions is government interference into economics. For proof, I refer you to such books as Capitalism the Creator by Carl Snyder, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, How Can Europe Survive by Hans Sennholz, and the works of the great economist Ludwig von Mises.

That recommendation should strike a chord with the public. As I write, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged ranks third in sales at Amazon.

Black Boy American Hunger

For about a year, I have been slowly working my way though Always in Pursuit, a collection of essays by Stanley Crouch. In one of his shorter pieces, I encountered the following interesting revelation about a book that was part my high school literature curriculum:

Wright's actual struggle is usually misunderstood. As Black Boy shows, he realized early on that color preceded his essence as a human being. He was a Negro in the skin but intended to become a man of his own making. What he really wanted was to be a writer whose work could stand up next to the best.

Because of decision at his publishing house, Wright's original title for his autobiography, American Hunger, was changed and the second half of it was removed. That vital second half was set in the North and pulled the covers off the urban Communist movement. Now, in its full form, the book is remarkable.

The reader can feel the sweat, the bruises, and the cold, and understand the dreams as the boy fights the Southern restrictions imposed on him by the Negroes as well as the whites. When Wright comes North, he isn't overly impressed by the black or the white people nor is he taken in too long by the communists, who have no use for his intellectual probings and his desire for individuality. His insights into the totalitarian techniques of dominating mass thinking are as good as anyone's. [bold and hyperlink added] (115)

Or perhaps I should have said, "half a book" in reference to Black Boy.

Human Action, Atlas Shrugged, and American Hunger: That's three books I wish the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could have read before he took office. But I'll settle for millions of voters discovering the second of these.

For once, ...

... the Texas legislature might pass a semi-good law! As quoted by Kingsport TN Government:

As College Station is expanding its red light camera program, a state representative is trying to stop it.

A Lubbock legislator has filed a bill that would end red-light cameras in Texas, and a local driver is offering help.

Lubbock did away with its red-light cameras last year when the citizen group that oversaw the cameras, determined the cameras hadn’t made Lubbock’s streets any safer.

At that time, the cameras also hadn't made Lubbock any money. A College Station man is supporting that Lubbock legislator; he says money is what the cameras are all about.

I say "semi-good" (which may still be generous) because I don't know all the details of this law, and banning such cameras would not really be the right step to take. It is the use of such cameras by government entities to generate ticket revenue, and probably also for general surveillance, that should be banned.

While the use of such traffic cameras might be legitimate and useful in a society in which all roads were privately-owned, they are little more than automated bandits in our current context. (And, based on my experience of passing by one of them on my usual route to work each day, the "little more" consists of encouraging dangerous, sudden stops in heavy traffic, even when the roads are slick.)

Why do I hold that there is a difference?

A private road owner who abused such devices in order to cheat customers out of money would face bad publicity, boycotts, and litigation. This is because, in a free society, the government is delimited only to the task of protecting individual rights. Nobody would be forced to deal with such a business and anyone who did would have recourse to government protection if a business did attempt to resort to force or fraud.

On the other hand, the government, as the sole legal wielder of force in our semi-free society, is able to codify such abuses as law and is, therefore, all but immune to such corrective measures. As a further effect of the government illegitimately owning roads, the element of choice is guaranteed to be absent with its monopoly. (This does not mean that monopolies as such should be illegal: just government-created or -enforced monopolies.) The existence of competition alone would discourage the misuse of these cameras, while also encouraging their use in situations where having a camera around might actually promote better driving.

Fun with Math

En route to something else, I stumbled across a collection of humorous, mathematics-themed bumper stickers. My favorite was, "Alcohol and calculus don't mix Never drink and derive."

-- CAV

Sevens Again

Well! I've never actually been tagged with a meme that I recall, so I guess I'll do Sevens again. My taking on the challenge is no guarantee that I'll always accept tagging, however....

***

Seven (More) (Possibly) Interesting Things about Me

1.I still own the teddy bear I had as an infant. He normally sits on my dresser in the bedroom.

2. On a recent visit to Mississippi for my younger brother's fortieth birthday, I went to a park to watch my youngest brother's sons play. I'm about seven years older than that brother. He's athletic, a regular jogger, and of a somewhat competitive bent. I walk quite a bit, but I am otherwise sedentary.

He watched some eleven-year-old-girl navigate a row of monkey rings, and then decided to try it himself. He -- and then his wife -- dropped like flies. After observing this from the picnic table where I was sitting, I got up, walked over to the monkey rings and unceremoniously showed 'em how it's done. Mom was there, too, and got a good laugh out of that. She emailed me a picture of it later.

Disclaimer: Being of slight build and stronger than I look helps.

3. My current default beer rotates among Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, St. Arnold's Elissa IPA, and Shiner Bock. Two thirds of that will change when I finally move to Boston since the last two are Texan beers, neither distributing to the Northeast

4. About once a year, I get the urge to smoke. Usually, it's a cigar, but sometimes, it's a cigarette. Invariably, my mouth tastes so foul the next morning that I'm repulsed from doing so again for about another year. I have never smoked out of habit.

5. I got to get up even earlier than everyone else when I was enrolled in Naval Officer Candidate School. For remedial swimming lessons. In Rhode Island. In the %*&^ f-f-f-f-fall! I needed the lessons in part because I am negatively buoyant.

6. Of course, my swimming might have been better had my childhood swimming "instructors" not mindlessly enforced the requirement that I be able to do the "belly float". Yeah. Let's kick out the guy who arguably needs to learn how to swim more than anyone else in the class!

Dogpaddling came before the belly float and I figured out for myself easily enough how to swim underwater.

7. Like Abe Lincoln, I wear a beard pursuant to advice from the fair sex. (But no, not the same kind of beard!)

In my case, I sought the advice. Making my comeback after a divorce during grad school, I asked for advice from a classmate. She had seen a picture of me with the goatee that I'd grown on deployment while in the submarine force, remembered it, and told me I looked better with the beard. Now, my wife -- a good friend of my advisor, by the way -- will never let me shave it off! Hmmm.

And yes, I did stroke my beard when I said that.

***

And I guess while I'm breaking tradition, I'll tag any Bostonian who happens by and reads this. If you have a blog, do the sevens there. If not, leave a comment.

For those of you who like memes, feel free to consider yourselves Bostonians for a day!

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on March 16, 2009.

Updates

3-17-09: LB and SB answer the call! As SB actually did, I almost stopped at six, except that just as I was about to publish, I noticed that I'd skipped a number and coughed up a seventh.

Obama vs. the Unknown Ideal

Leading up to the election, I ran across material from the Obama campaign that spoke volumes about his contempt for debate and for the opinions of the American people. I concluded that:

[T]his is likely yet another taste of how Obama intends to govern. There will be no debate, but we will be hounded day in and day out about how "important" his agenda is. And Obama will be manipulating the guilt-strings from afar, equating his left-wing agenda with what our kids (or the disadvantaged) need by means of the widespread acceptance of altruism in our culture.

And then, shortly after the election, I ran across another story describing how and why the Lord of the Gadflies, as I called Obama last November, might be poised to reactivate his network of grass roots supporters. The news story relays the mind sets of his supporters and his campaign.

Many are eager. "I'm going to be sitting at the phone, asking, 'What do you want me to do next? I'm ready,' " said volunteer Courtney Hood, 37, a mother of three from Owings, Md.

...

Joe Trippi, the Internet politics guru whose computer geeks made Howard Dean a contender in 2004 and who went on to design Obama's socially networked campaign machine, offers a provocative and educated guess.

Trippi predicted that Obama would use his forces, first and foremost, to intimidate congressional foes of his agenda, rally his allies and forge "one of the most powerful presidencies in American history." [bold added]

"What comes next" turns out to be Obama budget, which is giving even some members of his own party heartburn.

Beginning Sunday, the White House will harness every part of the Democratic Party's machinery to defend President Obama's budget and portray Republicans as reflexively political, according to party strategists.

A participant in the planning meetings described the push as a successor to Democrats' message that Rush Limbaugh is the Republican Party leader. "We have exhausted the use of Rush as an attention-getter," the official said.

Needless to say, Obama never debated Rush Limbaugh on the merits of his agenda, and this latest tactic is also intended to avoid debate:

Democratic strategists explain that the message [war] is designed to accomplish three things:

-- First, it could deflect attention from the size of Obama's budget and blunt attacks on the ambition of his agenda.

"It helps change the conversation from their criticism of the president's plan," a top Democratic official said. "If they want to say he's going to raise taxes in the middle of a recession or he's got socialist tendencies -- none of which we agree with -- one of the easy things for us to come back with is: We have tough choices to make right now, and you have nothing to offer." [bold added]

If the Republicans had been honest defenders of actual capitalism all along -- rather than the welfare state misbranded as capitalism -- they could easily demolish this cowardly and dishonest tactic.

-- Second, by painting Republicans as politically motivated, the conservative House Democrats known as Blue Dogs may be less likely to side with the GOP.

"As long as they're seen as reflexively political -- saying 'no' to everything -- the Blue Dog Democrats can say, 'I don't agree with everything the president proposes, but at least he has a plan, an outline of what we should be working on,'" the official said. [bold added]

This follows from the first part, and is made possible, again, by the unprincipled -- and therefore inarticulate and spineless -- Republicans. What's especially galling is that in the sense that "politically motivated" means "unconcerned with the actual merits of the Obama agenda", it is the Democrats who are even more guilty of being politically motivated.

--Third, Republicans could look like they're playing politics in a time of crisis, rather than disagreeing based on substance. [bold added]

Note the concern with appearances. If Obama's plan is so great, it should be a cinch for him to explain why America needs to set a record federal budget deficit and expand the very government that caused the financial crisis. But that is the one thing missing from the Democrats' plan, and that shows that it is really about grabbing power.

Back in November, I said the following of Obama's Army of Gadflies:

Who knew that one day, every annoying neighbor you ever had, every jackass who ever yelled at you at work for putting a soda can in the trash (where, by the way, it belongs), and every yokel communist who ever started spamming you with left-wing "news" links would one day be harnessed like this? This is clever, amusing in a way, and chilling all at once.

Obama does not yet feel that he can ramrod his agenda down our throats with impunity, but he senses that, with so many Americans unaware of the true nature of capitalism -- which our country does not have now and has never had -- that he can wear down the American people by relentlessly pushing it until we give up just so he will shut up. Now is not the time to let the most annoying person you can imagine have his way for the sake of momentary convenience.

Obama intends to start with the path of least resistance: the unprincipled politicians. It is ... incumbent ... on those of us who know enough to value freedom to make it clear to them that caving in to his agenda is not what we want, and that we will remember this come election time.

Obama is betting the farm on a very low estimate of the intelligence of the American voter and the ability of other politicians to gauge it. Let's make sure he loses. Vital to the effort is making clear what too many Republicans can't or won't: that the choice isn't between Obama's welfare state and welfare state of the status quo, but between statism and freedom.

-- CAV

"Saved" in Translation?

Considering a book called God Wants You Dead, Eric Raymond recalls some interesting facts about early Christianity, including a couple I'd never heard. These two are rather amusing when one considers that the entire New Testament was written in Koine (i.e., common, post-classical) Greek due to the original, Aramaic-speaking founders of the sect having been all but wiped out:

3. In other Aramaic sources roughly contemporary with the New Testament, the phrase "Son of God" occurs as an idiom for "guru" or "holy man". Thus, if Jesus refers to himself as "the son of God", the Aramaic sense is arguably "the boss holy man".

4. The Koine Greek of the period, on the other hand, did not have this idiom.

Now, imagine a Koine speaker reading the lost Aramaic source documents of which the Gospels are redactions, with only an indifferent command of the latter language He does not know that "Son of God" is an idiom...

Yes, that's right. I'm suggesting that Jesus got deified by a translation error!

Mild chuckles aside, I suspect that some non-religious people (I am not suggesting that Raymond is one of them.) will see this historical curiosity as buttressing their position, much as they did awhile back when news reports circulated to the effect that the remains of the historical Jesus had been unearthed, amid crowing that Christianity had, finally, been sunk. Nevertheless, as I said then:

[A]ny arbitrary claim, by its nature, has no evidence for or against it. Whether we have found the skull of Jesus or not [or his supposed divinity is due to a mistranslation] makes precisely zero difference in our evaluation of him as divine, on the question of whether he turned water into wine, or whether he rose from the dead. Whenever something earthly is taken as "evidence" for or against such claims, one will find that the person is guilty of perpetuating, or has fallen for, a package deal, an indiscriminate lumping-together of things that differ essentially in some way. [hyperlink and bold dropped]

This means two things. First, there is no need, based on epistemological grounds, to entertain arbitrary claims. And second, the real joke is on anyone who accepts as truth arbitrary, unprovable claims -- and then goes on to base his entire worldview and life around them.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 412

Salmieri on Atlas Shrugged

Via HBL, I have learned that the blog of Rowman and Littlefield, the parent of Lexington Books, has featured a post by philosopher Greg Salmieri about the current wave of popularity of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in anticipation of its upcoming release of Robert Mayhew's collection, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, by Lexington.

It's a short post, and excerpting it can't do it justice, but here we go anyway:

Most of the recent discussion of Atlas has focused on its political themes, creating the impression that the novel is essentially a condemnation of government intervention in the economy. However, its scope, its relevance to the current crisis, and the reasons for its enduring appeal go much wider and much deeper than this. Galt goes on strike not simply against high taxes and unjust regulations, but against the morality of altruism, which Rand identifies as the cause of such measures, and against the world-view of which this moral code is an expression -- a philosophy that denies the efficacy of reason and the absolutism of reality.

With amazing word-economy Salmieri succeeds in both describing the deeper significance of Atlas and building even more interest in the novel. Read the whole thing. I especially like how it ends.

Admin Note: Blogroll (and Other Sidebar) Updates

Yes, it's been a busy year, but no, I'm not letting that stop me from updating my blog. In this installment of a few long-delayed maintenance tasks, I have updated the blogroll, adding more than thirty new blogs, and removing about a dozen retired or abandoned blogs, for a net increase of about twenty.

In quieter times, I prefer to introduce each new addition by highlighting a post, but the large backlog and my time constraints prohibit my doing so today. This time, I'll highlight just three of the new additions, one from each group of blogs I have added.

First, from a small group of blogs I've been following for awhile, but just haven't gotten around to adding, is fiscal conservative Alan Sullivan's Fresh Bilge. Sullivan is a weather buff and, blogging in that capacity during hurricane season, he has become a well-respected hurricane blogger. It was during the run-up to Hurricane Ike's landfall in Houston, where I live, that I made a habit of checking in on his blog each day. I still do, and I frequently find interesting news there that others miss, such as who the next Republican target of the Democrats will be.

Second, and from the bulk of the new additions -- promising, (mainly) Objectivist blogs that have recently come to my attention -- is Rajesh's Objective Extrospection. In fact, I first learned of his blog just yesterday. Go there for a look at India's recent past -- and the future Obama has the unmitigated ... audacity ... to wish on America. His post is titled, "Living under Socialism":

One of my jobs was to check with the local govt. office if our quota of pig iron had come. I had to go to the office which was on the outs kirts of the city on my puny scooter between rashly driven trucks (big rigs) since nobody would tell you anything on the phone even if you somehow got through. ...

The staff was indifferent at best of times and outright hostile at other times. All the offices were dull, dusty, drab, dreary and every time you entered one your heart sank a little at the prospect of dealing with people who didn't even bother to look at you and were deliberately dismissive. If you persisted they would snap at you like a rabid dog and it was almost physically painfull when you had be very polite and use deferential tone even when you wanted scream at them and ask them if they were human before grinding there faces in the pile of dusty files in front of him.

He also got taunted in school -- by his teachers -- for being the son of a businessman.

And I thought the caste system was on its way out over there....

Third, from the group of bloggers I'll call "the big guns" for their general interest and broad popularity, I note this hipster PDA key chain from Life Hacker. It's too aesthetically-challenged for my tastes, but it has me thinking of using a small container made for key chains-- a pillbox, perhaps -- with an emergency paper scrap inside. That and a space pen should keep me from ever catching my mind churning at some weird time, but unable to capture the results.

Please take a look at the blogroll, if you were on it before and remain active. If your blog is now inactive, you will find it here, instead. Drop me a line if you are not listed in one of these places. Updating the sidebar was a big task, and I would not put it past myself to make a mistake here or there. If your blog has changed names at any point in the past year, you should find it listed under its new name now, if it wasn't already. For example, Rick MacDonald's blog is now listed as Doc MacDonald, rather than as SSN 687 and Friends.

Usually, I highlight only the last ten additions to the blogroll with the word "new", but at least until the next update, I'll have all these latest additions highlighted.

One last thing: I have removed most advertising from the sidebar. That will return only when I have time to figure out how to make the ads for Amazon change easily and the ads from Google pay!

Happy Blogiversary!

Stephen Bourque has been blogging at One Reality for a year, and has taken the occasion to explain origins of the name.

Greenspan's Latest Mumble

C. August reacts to Alan Greenspan's latest attempt to curry undeserved favor with anyone who will listen just long enough to throw up his hands and assume that the gnome must know what he's talking about.

The old dog is back to his old tricks. The right regulations are the ones that Alan thinks are right, and despite his and statism's (not the free market's) spectacular failure, he clings to the idea that if someone is just smart enough, with enough data, they can "fix" everything. And it sounds like Alan thinks he still has the right stuff. I'm sure Geithner has him on speed-dial for when things get really tough.

Brad Harper had emailed me about the Wall Street Journal piece a couple of days ago, too, but I never got around to it. That may be, in part, because Alan Greenspan had already answered himself decades ago. (More on that from me here, and from a former professional associate of Ayn Rand's here.)

Objectivist Roundup

Finally, if I recall correctly, Titanic Deck Chairs will host the next Objectivist Roundup some time in the very near future.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a blog name in the body of the post (HT: Burgess Laughlin), as well as another typo.