Moving Hiatus

Finally, my protracted move to Boston is nearing completion.

Next week, I will be on the road with my father-in-law to drive most of our belongings up to Bean Town for a few days, and then setting up our new apartment for a few more. Then, I fly back down to Houston to tie up a couple of weeks' worth of loose ends at work.

I will show up here on a somewhat irregular basis to moderate comments and, possibly, to finish this morning's update of my list of favorite posts, which now includes material up to the end of last August.

Blogging will most likely resume on Monday, June 1, but possibly as early as Friday, May 29 or as late as Tuesday, June 2.

In the meantime, I wish you a happy Memorial Day!

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 435

Bowden on Judicial Review

With Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick impending, ARI's Tom Bowden does a good job explaining how both the left and the right are wrong about judicial review, and why we need judges who hold a proper conception of individual rights.

On this basic question conservative and liberal judges alike are locked into a crucial error about America’s bedrock constitutional principle: individual rights.

The error consists in regarding rights as gifts from society that can be revoked at will, through the political process.

One of his example quotes is a real whopper from Judge Scalia.

Tom Lehrer on YouTube

At some random moment yesterday, I thought it would be fun to listen to a little Tom Lehrer during my upcoming drive to Boston. I'm not sure how that happened, as I already have plans to listen to John Adams and haven't heard Lehrer's music in years.

In any event, I found his humorous songs all over YouTube this morning. Many, including one of my favorites of his, "New Math," (embedded below) are accompanied by extraneous video, including lip-synching.

Along those lines, here's a re-working of "New Math" I'd never heard of, wherein the mathematics professor explains the intricacies of decimal currency to the British, who were decimalizing the Pound Sterling at the time. This is footage of Lehrer himself on The Frost Report.

Objectivist Roundup

I believe Amy Mossoff will host this week's Objectivist Roundup today or tomorrow.

In the meantime (or in addition), just go there and start scrolling. It looks like she has a succession of very good posts over there. Topics include: whether children should have cell phones, whether students should use the Internet for research, "tantrums and principles," and several posts featuring pictures of Mexico.

Look quickly ...

... before it disappears! I was pleasantly surprised to see my blog mentioned yesterday on the opinion web page of The Houston Chronicle. From a posted list, it looks like Live Oaks has also been mentioned there before.

-- CAV

The Fantasy and the Reality

Off and on, I have used the term "dictator fantasy" to refer to a type of context-dropping I see time and time again on the left and the right:

[P]eople who dream of imposing their will on others through force [are] short-sighted at best. Why? Because one moment's thought would indicate that, aside from the inherent difficulties (i.e., opposition from others) to such a goal, there is the inconvenient fact that one is quite likely himself to go under the yoke of an alleged ally or someone one has had to dupe along the way.

Related to this fantasy is the notion that ethical ideas held, untested against and untied to reality as floating abstractions, will somehow lead to paradise on earth. A tale from the sixties that popped into my head recently illustrates this point quite well.

We [commune-dwellers] were supposed to be heroes, you know, and a hero is not supposed to get jealous because somebody is f-- your old lady, or upset because somebody has left the sink a greasepit. The day-to-day, quotidian stresses and tensions -- exacerbated by having 20 people in a one family house. That wore thin.

The very ideals of our narrator -- and 0f the current administration -- have already been been tried and found wanting, at least in terms of leading to an enjoyable and fulfilling life. But a moment's thought could have told you that: If you're supposed to subordinate your self to the collective, the question is not whether you will lose a major value like your partner or your ability to sleep at night, but when. (Or, perhaps, how often.)

And this leads us to another lesson.

If you look at all the political agendas of the 1960s, they basically failed. We didn't end capitalism, we didn't end imperialism, we didn't end racism. Yeah, the war ended. But if you look at the cultural agendas, they all worked. There's no place in the United States you can go today where you can't find organic food, alternative medical practices, alternative spiritual practices, women's issues and groups, environmental issues and groups. All those things got injected into the culture on a very deep level. My feeling is, and my hope is, that those things will eventually change the politics. The politics, obviously, are influenced by huge historical forces and a lot of base human impulses. [bold added]

This passage immediately followed the last! Our hippie has lived through his ideals being put into practice and even been honest enough to admit that they have failed very unpleasantly, and yet he still supports them, and hopes they will continue to shape the world.

Why on earth would he ever wish for that?

He is impervious to evidence because he has decided that he will never call altruism into question. The best he ever did was choose hypocrisy occasionally in order to keep on living while paying lip-service to an ethics that would kill him if carried out consistently.

The idea that collectivist restraints are good, and yet also meant for the hoi polloi has exactly this as its basis. This is why so many nominees and officials in Obama's idealistic kleptocracy are tax cheats.

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on May 20, 2009.

Quick Roundup 434

Wikigooglia Killer?

I've seen excited references to Wolfram Alpha popping up quite a bit lately, particularly in Objectivist circles. But color me skeptical. A post at HBL reminded me of one of the first news accounts I encountered about it, and even -- by mentioning the unusual verb "curated" -- reminded me of the very passage that has me looking at it with a jaundiced eye:

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths. [bold added]

Great. So which "experts" will curate information on global warming -- I mean climate change?

I, too, would love to see the information on the Internet made even more useful than it is now, but all information must be evaluated against the context of other knowledge at some point. An expert may have more training in a given area, but if his cognitive methods or normative principles are wrong, he will evaluate the information incorrectly. (Numbers fail to protect against this if certain kinds of errors are widespread. They will only lend credibility by anointing a common mistaken conclusion as a "consensus.")

A pretty good recent example of this would, according to a recent review, be the book Fool's Gold, which attempts to blame the financial crisis on a lack of regulation. Brian Phillips excerpts part of the review:

Ironically, Ms. Tett's reporting describes not an out-of-control free market but one tragically distorted by government regulation. If she struggles to reach a logical conclusion, then, she still does an excellent job of assembling the facts necessary to form one.

If Wolfram Alpha fails to live up to the excitement, blame bad philosophy.

And Speaking of Wikipedia and Bad Curation ...

Via forwarded email, I have learned that Wikipedia has recently purged all references to James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics due to its not being a "reliable source."

Here's an excerpt:

QUOTE (Wikipedia editors)
Proposed removal of references to James Valliant and The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics

Following several discussions calling into question the work of James Valliant as a reliable source (e.g. 1, 2.., 3), I propose that all references to it be removed from Wikipedia until such time as it is shown to satisfy the criteria for reliable sources. If there is consensus to do so, I will begin in one week's time. Skomorokh 15:15, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I'm in favor of removing them. J Readings (talk) 18:12, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Please do.KD Tries Again (talk) 18:32, 11 May 2009 (UTC) KD Tries Again

By fire be purged. TallNapoleon (talk) 22:17, 11 May 2009 (UTC) [formatting removed]

There were no hyperlinks within the email, but the email implies that they can be found at "'Cross-Talk for Ayn Rand and Objectivism Articles' on the Wikipedia site."

I don't dabble in Wikipedia and don't know where to find this, so if anyone out there does know where to look for this "cross-talk" and can leave the link in the comments, I'd be grateful.

Interestingly, The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barabara Branden, who clearly has an axe to grind, is referred to, and "James Valliant" redirects to "Objectivist Movement," where his name fails to appear even once within the body of the article.

Hmmm. On second thought, at least if Wolfram Alpha makes poor expert choices, perhaps it would be easier to know up front who they are, and what we could expect.

A Generic Recipe

Always on the lookout for interesting recipes, I found this generic casserole recipe over at Life Hacker.

What do those categories mean, exactly?

The main ingredient is the protein, meat or otherwise. The second ingredient is a vegetable or secondary protein, like hard-boiled eggs. The starch, seasoning, and topping should be pretty self-evident, and the "goodie" can be whatever you'd like, while the "binder" is something thick and saucy, like sour cream, pureed foods, or, yes, even canned soup.

Is it just me, or have the same "bourgeois bohemians" who hate Wal-Mart recently started preening against canned soup? This is at least the third time recently that I've seen the phrase "canned soup" tossed in like some sort of verbal shibboleth, by an author whose eybrow was undoubtedly arched as he wrote it.

On the other hand, it could also be purism or culinary machismo speaking, but I see nothing wrong with canned soup when convenience is the goal. It's a casserole for Pete's sake.

Ghosts in the Courtroom

Paula Hall notes that the Michigan Supreme Court may soon allow Moslem women to keep their faces covered while tesifying in trials.

What's on the line for a Muslim woman if she removes her niqab? The ghost she believes in might get upset. What's on the line if the ability of a court to judge a witness's credibility is compromised because her face is hidden? The life and property of a defendant.

The true individual right at stake here is the right of an accused to confront witnesses against them. If you've been hauled into court and your property or life is now at stake, it is wrong to allow someone's irrational beliefs to violate your right to defend your property or life. [minor edit, bold added]

Creeping dhimmitude continues to lurk in the shadows of our government's more visible war against our individual rights. (But at least the latter is no longer being called "capitalism" due to its being perpetrated by a Republican administration.)

-- CAV

Pausch on Time Management

I am intermittently working my way through the book version of Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture." Some time this weekend, I encountered his advice on time management and found it particularly worthwhile.

Curious as to whether he had anything further to say on the subject, I was delighted to find that Pausch had delivered an hour-long lecture on the subject at the University of Virginia. As I will from time to time over the next few weeks, I am noting it here in part to remind myself about it later on when I have more time for it. I look forward to it, and have no doubt that it will be good.

UVA Today reviewed the lecture and, in the process, recapitulated some of the points I remember Pausch making in his book. I particularly enjoyed his advice regarding telephone calls, and am always impressed with his value-driven approach to any subject he considers:

Urging the audience to balance work and family life, he said people with partners and children are often good models for time management, because they have a more immediate sense of the cost of time.

Pausch, a father of three, talked about how to set goals, how to avoid wasting time, how to delegate and how to deal with stress and procrastination. One of his goals for passing along this advice, he said, is to allow time for having fun.

A master multi-tasker, he said a speaker-phone is a must to free up your hands, as are two or three computer screens -- it's the big desk you need, he declared. His latest time-saver is making necessary phone calls while riding his bicycle for exercise, talking via a headset.

If you can't pull off that feat, make calls right before lunch to help keep them short. "You may think you're important, but you're not as important as lunch," he said.

...

Pausch told the audience to "find your creative time and defend it ruthlessly." [bold added]

Through a link to Pausch's web page late in the UVA Today article, I was able to find PDFs for the lecture transcript and slides hosted at the web site of his friend, Gabe Robins.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 433

The Worst of Both Worlds

As John Marshall once put it, "The power to tax is the power to destroy." (Too bad he did not apply this wisdom with any degree of consistency.) Every government tax reduction in the name of "saving" an industry or "incentivizing" economic growth is a tacit admission of this fact, as well as a desire by voters to have their cake and eat it, too. Otherwise, there would be demands for permanent tax and spending cuts across the board.

The practice of many politicians of pretending that such measures are capitalistic cedes the whole premise of property rights and muddies the vital debate over the proper role of government. This is bad enough, but at least the public remains free to debate. Enter Washington State to endanger that freedom with a tax cut:

Gov. Chris Gregoire has approved a tax break for the state's troubled newspaper industry.

The new law gives newspaper printers and publishers a 40 percent cut in the state's main business tax. The discounted rate mirrors breaks given in years past to the Boeing Co. and the timber industry.

The similarity of the tax cut to that for Boeing is a red herring, and it obscures an essential difference between the industries in question. Boeing is not in the business of publishing news or opinion.

As I noted in January when I heard the first whispers about newspaper "bailouts" coming from Frank Nicastro, a Connecticut lawmaker:

Certainly, if Nicastro thinks the papers should start making changes to how they report the news, he has them where he wants them: by the purse-strings. Nicastro is, perhaps (and at best) well-intentioned, but suffering from the "dictator fantasy", and needs help imagining just how much worse his idea is than doing nothing, and allowing the papers to fail.

Along those lines, I would first suggest that Nicastro imagine a hated political opponent succeeding him and leaning on the papers to make sure he looks good. Second, I would remind him that we already have examples of government "encouragement" of media tempting officials with having a say. For an example of this, note that Phil Berger, a counterpart of his from North Carolina, recently proposed to have the government review movie scripts before "incentivized" cameras could roll in his state.

And, on top of all of this, there is the question of what constitutes a newspaper (and therefore qualifies for the tax break. This is a losing proposition for freedom of speech as well: The government will end up (a) deciding that certain outlets aren't "real" newspapers and taxing them fully, to their relative detriment, or (b) regulating what they can and cannot say, in the name of making sure the tax breaks are properly implemented, or (c) some combination of both.

This measure not only does nothing to advance economic freedom, it is very bad news for freedom of the press in particular and freedom of speech generally.

Not surprisingly, the Feds are already considering a "Newspaper Revitalization Act."

Our Court-Jester-in-Chief Cuts up again

No sooner do I comment on Barack Obama's unspoken message of contempt for the rulers of his country does he prove me right. He has apparently taken to lecturing us on indebtedness right on the heels of "throwing trillions down a rathole," as Instapundit puts it.

Cultural Note

Regarding my use above of the phrase "cutting up:" That comes straight from my arrival at work the morning I wrote a post concerning Obama's obvious pleasure at Wanda Sykes' distasteful "jokes."

As I passed a group of people chatting, someone saying, "Boom!" at the top of his lungs caught my attention, and it was immediately obvious that this was about the White House Correspondents' Dinner. "Wanda Sykes cuttin' up wit' de President!" was the last comment I could make out as I walked by.

Idiots.

"Cuttin' up?", I thought. "I haven't heard or used that phrase since approximately middle school." The whole idea of five grown men having a conversation about politics while assuming a schoolyard subtext with Obama in the role of favorite teacher was momentarily jarring. People like this vote, and they are impervious to reason.

Yep. That's about the demographic Obama's aiming for. To the extent that he regards people with this mentality as his constituency, his contempt for voters has a basis in fact.

Properly, one interested in cultural change writes off such flotsam and works to persuade thinking adults. And one shrugs such incidents off, and considers why there is cause for optimism in that regard.

Tap Your Own Brilliance

My schedule is highly unfavorable for this, but Jean Moroney is offering a very interesting-looking teleclass in June:

In my class, Tap Your Own Brilliance, I teach you exactly what to do if you feel overloaded, confused, conflicted, or blank. At such times you may feel like your brain has stopped functioning and has nothing to offer, but that's not true. I guarantee there is crucial information in your mental databanks that could help right at that moment. In my course, I'll teach you what to do. We'll cover one issue in each of four sessions:

1. Picking Someone's Brain (Yours!): Learn how to get helpful, relevant information flowing from your databanks at the first sign of problems.
2. Lassoing Runaway Thoughts: Find how to capture the good ideas when you're feeling overloaded, confused, or overwhelmed by emotions.
3. Resolving Hidden Conflicts: See how to easily uncover and resolve conflicts that are causing you to flounder.
4. Triggering New Insights: Discover a reliable way to prod new, helpful ideas from your subconscious when it feels like you've run dry.

I will present a tool, explain what it is, how it works, and when to use it. Then you'll get to try out the tool, on an issue of your choice. You try the tactics on a real-life problem, in an in-class individual exercise. Each exercise is fairly short, usually only a few minutes, but they are long enough for you to see how powerfully the tactics focus your attention on top issues and help you zero in on answers. Plus, immediately after trying the technique, you'll have a chance to ask questions, hear other people's comments and questions, and get help and clarification.

The class will take place over four ninety-minute sessions and will be limited to 15 participants.

Objectivist Roundup

This week, Try Reason! is hosting. Enjoy!

-- CAV

Updates

5-16-09: Corrected a typo.

First, "Access." Now, "Excess"

The first time I heard the term "access" used as a euphemism for theft, I played hooky from work, endured a long wait for the pleasure of seeing a government official of the Virgin Islands texting, and got to hear a union thug in a Hawaiian shirt say, "we have the rocks." In other words, I was present for "testimony" at an "unofficial hearing of the House Judiciary Committee" regarding HR 676, aka the "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act").

The poor, as they claim, lack "access" to medical care. The implied solution, government insinuation in and control of medical care necessarily involves stealing from physicians, as put so well by the character Dr. Hendricks in Atlas Shrugged (HT: Doug Reich):

I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind--yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it--and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't." (687)

And now, from the very same people who are proclaiming that they'll take care of you comes the following admission that they will "take care of" you:

Treasure the tax benefits from your health savings account? Some experts say the accounts encourage "excess consumption" of health services -- and committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) agreed they're worth a look. Money in the pot: $60 billion over 10 years.

That's right: If you obtain more medical care than John Conyers, Barack Obama, or Donna Christian-Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) feel like allowing you to have, that's "excess consumption."

I suppose that one way to get around your constituents not having "access" to medical care is to effectively make it illegal.

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on May 14, 2009.

Quick Roundup 432

Series on Government without Taxation

I'm writing up some scientific findings even as I prepare to move, so this is just as much to remind myself to read this later on as it is to bring it to your attention.

That said, head on over to Live Oaks, where Brian Phillips has written a series on how to finance the proper functions of government -- without the government stooping to theft.

• Introduction
• The Size of Government
• The Police And Military
• The Courts
• Other Revenue Sources
• Final Thoughts

Rave reviews so far!

Admin Notes

Mike Bahr's House of Exuberance blog has moved, and I have added Powell History to the "Sponsored Links" section. I also have several new blogs to add to the sidebar, but they'll have to wait a little bit longer.

Green Indoctrination

I recently had to take Driver's Ed -- which, luckily, I could do cheaply and at my convenience using the web -- in order to have a very dubious traffic citation not count against my record. It had been at least five years since I had to do this, but wow, what a difference a few years can make! A significant part of this "safety" course was devoted to the environment. I am not making this up. At one point, we were even urged to "do our part" by reminding local government officials that a clean environment is a high priority.

But at least I'm an adult, and I can recognize propaganda and inappropriate government marching orders when I see them.

LB tells of much more -- and much worse -- directed at children.

The New York Times reports "Story of Stuff" is the next big thing in environmentalist propaganda in the classroom. Of course, they don't report it that way; the Times actually calls it "cheerful" as its simple drawings and friendly presenter are accessible to even the very young. I don't think that the shaking, desolate line-drawn individuals standing on their little piece of destroyed earth – who have no alternative but to work in nasty factories and poison their own babies through their toxic breast milk because you had to have an iPod – is "cheerful" even if the presenter refers to it in scare quotes as the "beauty” of the system.

Public "education" must be abolished.

Theological Conundrum

My mother recently sent me a hilarious series of photos taken of an exchange that took place via the announcement signs of two churches across the street from one other.

I was even more delighted to see that the entire series appears in order on a blog. Enjoy!

[Update: The exchange apparently did not actually happen, but as a commenter at Silicon Valley Watch points out. Still, quite funny. And, as a former Catholic, I plead Poe's Law.]

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on May 13, 2009.

Updates

Today: (1) Added note to end of last section. (2) Corrected two typos.

Sticks and Stones

"So here I am -- Comrade Sonia -- ready to serve you all! Comrade students! We've got to stand up for our rights. We've got to learn to speak our proletarian will and make our enemies take notice. We've got to stamp our proletarian boot into their white throats and their treacherous intentions. Our Red schools are for Red students." -- Comrade Sonia in Ayn Rand's We the Living, p.64

The latest egalitarian to raise her combat boot for the purpose of planting it firmly on the throats of American citizens is Representative Linda Sanchez of California, who has introduced a bill, HR-1966, which is ostensibly to prevent "cyber--bullying," but which -- like a Texas bill that literally bans marriage -- is so vaguely written that it can be construed to criminalize a wide array of ordinary Internet activities. (Note that my link to the bill differs from that on page 2 of the Network World article cited by Ars Technica: Thomas, the web presence of the Library of Congress, seems to have a case of amnesia as I write this. OpenCongress, on the other hand, is working. Remember this the next time you hear some official complain that private enterprise can't be depended upon to get information out to the public.)

Here is the text of the bill pertaining to cyber-bullying, as quoted by Network World:

(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

The article goes on to elaborate:

The bill defines "communication" as "the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received."

Electronic means" is defined as "any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, Web sites, telephones, and text messages."

HR 1966, formally an amendment to Title 18, "Crimes and Criminal Procedure," of the U.S. Code, does not define any other term, including "severe emotional distress," "hostile" or even "behavior."

"The law, if enacted, would clearly be facially overbroad (and probably unconstitutionally vague), and would thus be struck down on its face under the First Amendment," wrote Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, and blogger in chief at The Volokh Conspiracy, an online legal blog.

Volokh offered six quick sketches of the kinds of activities that could be prosecuted if HR 1966 becomes law, including trying to pressure a politician, organizing a boycott against a company with whose policies you disagree, or even sending angry e-mails to an unfaithful lover.

Network World also notes that this bill has gotten very little attention so far.

Nevertheless, we have a Congress that passes foolish legislation unread, and I am not so happy about our judiciary's track record of ruling laws void for vagueness. We should keep an eye out for this one.

We live in interesting times -- made morbidly so by widespread confusion over the nature (and evil) of the initiation of physical force (and the proper role of government as an agent of retaliation against same). Mere words are being used as justification for real, unwarranted intrusions of force into the lives of people who merely want to exchange ideas.

And thus it is that the real bully poses as a champion of the oppressed.

-- CAV

PS: I just remembered that "linda" is Spanish for "nice" or "pretty." As Fred G. Sanford might put it if he were an Objectivist blogger, "Beauty may be skin deep, but irony goes clear to the bone."

This may be a cheap shot, but I do not deserve criminal prosecution for it. Nor has the government any right to to impose it upon me.

Updates

Today: Added a PS.

Quick Roundup 431

Bowden on Chavez

Tom Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute manages to put Tweedledum and Twee-- I mean Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama -- to very good use in the lead-in to the following question:

Capitalism needs defenders. Who's willing to join us?

And he did it without even having to raise the nettlesome issue of whether Obama is stupid or evil...

Obama's Playbook

In a stray moment yesterday evening, I indulged a twinge of curiosity I've had for some time by looking up Saul Alinsky on Wikipedia. Alinsky is probably best known to most Americans as having been a major influence on Barack Obama as a community organizer. The article excerpts the following overview of Alinsky's strategy from his work, Rules for Radicals:

There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default. [bold added]

If Obama realizes that his foreign and domestic policy decisions have been uniformly bad for America's self-interest, perhaps this strategy serves as his motivating purpose.

This is a strategy for making people ready to be ruled, instead of being masters of their own fate. If America has enough of its soul left, enough of a backbone, this strategy will massively backfire.

The Court Jester of King Barack the Mild?

Poe's Law holds that, "real fundamentalism can also be indistinguishable from parody fundamentalism." Elaborating on that point after considering an example, I noted that:

Past a certain point, Poe's Law doesn't just describe a resemblance between the words of a "fundamentalist" and a jokester, but an identity: Depending on how well a given pronouncement is crafted to "fit in with" the overall mis-integration of a system that incorporates the arbitrary, the only difference between a frank statement and a joke will be in who is making it.

Given the following "joke" delivered by Wanda Sykes at the White House Correspondents' Dinner -- and Obama's obvious approval, perhaps a codicil is in order:

This is what [Sykes] said: "Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails, so you're saying, 'I hope America fails', you're, like, 'I don't care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq'. He just wants the country to fail. To me, that's treason.

"He's not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight."

She then concluded: "Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that's what he needs." Obama seemed to think this bit was pretty hilarious, grinning and chuckling and turning to share the "joke" with the person sitting on his right. [bold added]

The Codicil: What a leftist will laugh about and what he will make illegal depend entirely on who is saying it and about whom.

The Telegraph's Toby Harnden sums it up quite well: "And Obama laughing when someone wishes Limbaugh dead? Hard to take from the man who promised a new era of civility and elevated debate in Washington."

But there's more going on here than a bad night by unfunny comedienne (to put it too charitably), or mere hypocrisy on the part of Obama the Mild, and it directly pertains to who the jester really is in this court. (Hint: My calling Obama "King" is merely rhetorical.) Ayn Rand had an interesting thing to say about that:

This what I would call the "court-jester premise." The jester at the court of an absolute monarch was permitted to say anything and to insult anyone, even his master, because the jester had assumed the role of a fool, had abdicated any claim to personal dignity and was using self-abasement as his protection. [bold added] ("Apollo and Dionysus," in For the New Intellectual, p. 116)

This whole event was held out to be tongue-in-cheek (although, obviously, what went on would be very well publicized), and Obama himself joined in with a self-effacing teleprompter shtick of his own. Incidentally, it made light of the recent flyover of New York that caused such panic.

The message I got from America's court jester as he cavorted about on the television screens of the actual rulers of his country was, "I don't care about your safety, welfare, or opinions, and I think you are too stupid to notice."

If more of us keep failing to notice, we won't remain rulers for long.

Flowers

Thanks again to Amit Ghate, I can end this post on a pleasant note: This orchid is particularly stunning.

-- CAV

Objectivism on the Internet

This week, we were all over the place!

Voices for Reason, the blog of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, reports several appearances by Yaron Brook on PJTV last week. On top of that, other writers for the Ayn Rand Institute are starting to show up there, as well.

You can see Harry Binswanger on YouTube after his appearance on Glenn Beck:

Fellow bloggers Paul Hsieh and Amit Ghate each got editorials published by Pajamas Media. Respectively, they were "Health Care Reform vs. Universal Health Care" and "Questioning the Value of Regulation."

Closer to home, Houston's own Brian Phillips received an Instalanche after using a very interesting statistic to illustrate a point about the relatively free economy America's fourth-largest city enjoys.

Last but not least, Titanic Deck Chairs is hosting the ninety-fifth weekly Objectivist Blog Carnival. We're now approaching two years of solid roundups on a weekly basis. Back when I started blogging, I don't think there were even as many Objectivist blogs as there are features to this week's roundup.

That's good progress, and I'm not sure I would have believed it possible back in 2004 to have come so far so fast.

And now? I'm wondering whether I've left anything out! If so, feel free to leave a comment.

-- CAV

From Fifth to Forty-Second?

Warner Todd Huston discusses a report that ranks personal freedom by state. Apparently, I will be moving myself from the fifth-freest state in the union to the forty-second later this month:

According to a new study released by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, some of our most liberal states rank at the bottom in a measure of personal freedom. "Freedom in the 50 States, an index of personal and economic freedom," finds the most free states to be first New Hampshire, then Colorado, followed by S. Dakota, Idaho, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia and N. Dakota.The bottom ten least free states in the U.S. are (in descending order) Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and bringing up the bottom is New York.

Huston cites the excerpt about New York, the least-free state in the union according to the study, to give us a feel for what went into the rankings:

New York is by far the least free state in the Union (#50 economic, #48 personal). One of us lives in New York and can attest to the fact that few New Yorkers would be surprised by such a finding. Sadly, equally few New Yorkers seem to believe that anything can be done about the situation. New York has the highest taxes in the country. Property, selective sales, individual income, and corporate income taxes are particularly high. Spending on social services and “other” is well above national norms. Only Massachusetts has more government debt as a percentage of the economy. Government employment is higher than average. On personal freedoms, gun laws are extremely restrictive, but marijuana laws are better than average (while tobacco laws are extremely strict). Motorists are highly regulated, but several kinds of gambling are allowed statewide (not casinos, except on reservations). Home school regulations are burdensome, but asset forfeiture has been reformed. Along with Vermont, New York has the strictest health insurance community rating regulations. Mandated coverages are also very high. Eminent domain is totally unreformed. Perversely,the state strictly limits what grassroots PACs may give to candidates and parties, but not what corporations and unions may give.

On page 5 of the PDF, available at the link, the criteria for the rankings are made more explicit. In part:

We rank all fifty states on overall respect for individual freedom and on components of freedom: "Fiscal Policy," "Regulatory Policy," and "Paternalism." Our approach in this report is to weight policies according to the number of people affected by the policy, the intensity of preferences on the issue, and the importance of state policy variation. However, we happily concede that different people value aspects of freedom differently. Hence, we provide the raw data and weightings on our website...

It should come as no surprise that I learned of this study through a conservative-leaning web site, RealClear Politics or that Huston writes for a blog called The Next Right. Indeed, Huston even headlines his entry, "New Study: America's Most Liberal States Rank Least Free." At long last, the ailing conservative movement has something to crow about.

Or has it?

Having grown up in Mississippi and lived over half my life in Texas, I am all too familiar with the theocratic tendencies of some of the "redder" parts of the electoral map. Blue laws weren't off the books in my home town until just as I was leaving for college, nor did I ever see an entire commercial for wine until I'd left for college in Texas. Much later on, a friend in Texas who was considering a run for public office (and wanted to allow grocery stores in his city to sell wine) told me about the unbelievable pressure various local ministers were placing on him to forget about that part of his platform.

And then, of course, my adopted state has fairly recently passed sloppy, theocratically-motivated legislation that makes it possible to charge some physicians who perform abortions with murder and arguably bans marriage. And, oh yeah, a theocrat -- same link -- was talking about charging soon-to-wed couples a fee for not taking a marriage counseling course. This is the fifth-freest state in the union? This is Texas?

To be fair, Huston links to the study, which openly admits not weighing certain things, like abortion and capital punishment:

Our definition of freedom presents specific challenges on some high-profile issues. Abortion is a critical example. On one account, the fetus is a rights-bearing person, and abortion is therefore an aggressive violation of individual rights that ought to be punished by government. On another account, the fetus does not have rights, and abortion is a permissible exercise of an individual liberty, in which case government regulation of abortion would be an unjust violation of a woman’s rights. Rather than take a stand on one side or the other (or anywhere in between), we have coded the data on state abortion restrictions but have not included the policy in our overall index.

Another example is the death penalty. Some would argue that a murderer forfeits her own right to life, and therefore state execution of a murderer does not violate a basic right to life. Others contend that the right to life can never be forfeited or that the state should never risk taking away all the rights of innocent individuals by mistakenly executing them.

The authors of the study claim to view freedom in terms of individual rights, but they sidestep the issue of whether a fetus has rights. At least they admit doing so.

This does not make their work useless, but as an advocate of individual rights, I will not play into the hands of theocrats by uncritically spouting these rankings, nor will I sit idly by while religionists (and their "battered wife" secular allies) use them to sweep under the rug the vital, fundamental issue of what constitutes the basis for individual rights. If a fetus has rights, states that attempt to restrict abortion are more free. If not, then such states are less free. I think that the latter is the case, because fetuses are only potential human beings, not actual human beings.

So when conservatives start talking about how the "red states" are not just freer in economic terms, but in terms of personal freedom, remember the qualifications stated in this report. The odds are good that someone is pulling a fast one -- or being duped into helping someone else do the same.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 430

Worried Sick?

Over at Junkfood Science is an interesting post about a category I'd never heard of before of psychological phenomena to which I suspect "medical student's disease" might belong:

[Stuart Blackman's] article, "Why health warnings can be bad," began by describing the nocebo effect. That's the powerful phenomenon of developing the most extraordinary physical symptoms when we believe or fear that something is bad for us. It's the negative stepsister of the placebo effect and the full significance of both isn't understood by many people. The nocebo effect is behind the confirmation for most food fears, for example. People who've been taught to believe certain foods are bad for them actually feel sick, experiencing such things as headaches, chest pain, nausea and indigestion, rashes, cough, congestion, weakness and fatigue, and even paralysis when they believe they've eaten them. It's the stepsister of the placebo effect, at work when we feel healthier after eating foods or taking dietary supplements we believe are healthy.

I would not be surprised to find that some statists grasp this, if not explicitly, then on the level of low cunning or at least or opportunism. The Financial Times article notes:

"It's quite remarkable how the illnesses that are increasing at the moment are not the big, killer diseases, grounded in real, physical pathology," says David Wainwright. "It's the subjective problems of everyday life that are becoming medicalised, where there's no actual evidence of any physical illness. "Even hassles at work are interpreted through the medicalised category of work stress rather than political or industrial relations issues" – a practice that Wainwright says is promoted by government agencies. "Health policy is promoting this belief that we're all at risk from absolutely everything we come into contact with, and that just encourages us to feel more vulnerable and to interpret our normal experiences as health problems. It's all just amplifying this epidemic of non-specific illness, which has incredibly disabling effects on people." [bold added]

Perhaps as the Obama Administration attempts to speed us down the primrose path to socialized medicine and nanny-state paternalistic hell, it should consider revising its de facto motto of, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," by adding, "or pass up the opportunity to cultivate a fake one."

Top Ten (Paper) Notebooks

Both my new Levinger's Pocket Briefcase and the Pulse Livescribe "smart pen" Martin Lindeskog favors made this list of "10 Great Notebooks Productive People Love over at Lifehack. There are some other interesting options there I'd never heard of before, too.

So far, I like my Pocket Briefcase, but as with my All-Ett, I'm taking my time getting used to it. In this case, it isn't that I'm ambivalent about it. I definitely like it, but I am trying to figure out how best to use its limited space and how to integrate it into the rest of my personal productivity system. It's like I'm trying to decide whether I have a low-tech PDA, an "outboard brain", or an auxiliary wallet, if that makes any sense.

Texas Trio

Dismuke has brought three interesting items about Texas to my attention recently:

• Some policemen operating out of Teneha, Texas may be using drug law as a pretext to commit highway robbery. I seem to remember stories like this popping up about a decade ago from East Texas and southern Louisiana.
  
• The original recipe of Dr. Pepper, which was invented in Texas, surfaced recently and is being put up for auction. As it turns out, an antiques buff bought the recipe -- and discovered he had it -- quite by accident.
• Dismuke, on hearing that our Secretary of State seems to recognize Texan independence, jokes that, "Perhaps this means we don't have to pay Federal income taxes anymore!"

To that last, I say, "Shhh! Someone might get wind of that and decide to make Texas the 58th state!"

The "Uncanny Valley"

Some time ago, I read a piece concerning the question of whether cloned Neanderthals would have rights. The piece framed the question badly, but it did at one point introduce me to an interesting idea from the field of robotics, the "uncanny valley hypothesis:

"[Masahiro] Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

From my own experience, I remember always being puzzled by the popularity of that creepy -- to me, anyway -- "dancing baby" that seemed to be all over the Internet a decade or so ago. (Yes, some people are still making animations of it.) I think my reaction to the baby would qualify as an "uncanny valley" type of experience.

The ensuing discussion at Wikipedia is littered with modernist misconceptions like "instinct", but I think that Mori on to something interesting: If an emotion is an automated response to one's value judgments, then how does one respond to something one apparently can't successfully categorize automatically?

-- CAV

Sunbelt Blues

Yesterday, I noted of Texas that:

Our elected leaders enact policies -- obviously demanded by the body politic -- that destroy prosperity and yet people who have to live under such policies find that they cannot and leave. [minor edit]

Within the context of a story that described a huge disparity in price between renting a U-Haul truck to move to Austin, Texas from San Francisco versus the other way around, I was alluding in part to migrants from blue states tipping the scales towards more intrusive government here after wrecking their own states. (Not that the natives here are blameless.)

Immigration from big government blue states is not a big problem in Texas, but it's a huge one for the three Sunbelt states of Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, the first two of which have all but become appendages of California, as Nicole Gelinas of City Journal elaborates in gory detail:

The political culture of the three states seems to be transforming, too, making them friendlier to the "spending lobby," as [Byron Schlomach, director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Goldwater Institute] calls it. Arizona, the only one of the three states with an income tax, now seems to have plenty of supporters for raising that tax. One unscientific poll in the Arizona Daily Star found a majority of respondents in favor of such an increase, including an Albany-style tax hike on the "rich" -- those making more than $150,000 annually. And Florida has seen Albany-style organized protests against even modest education cuts.

Both [Geoffrey Lawrence, a fiscal-policy analyst at the Nevada Policy Research Institute] and Schlomach believe that demography has a lot to do with this shift. "The biggest risk is Californians moving here," says Schlomach. "They are fleeing California, but they don't have any notion of why it's expensive to live there." They don't realize that part of the reason it's still "not super-expensive here" is the relatively small extent of government services, he adds. Echoes Lawrence: much of the population increase into Nevada is from California, and "they're taking their voting culture with them." [bold added, minor edits]

Read the whole thing.

Our economic crisis will not end until most people begin to realize that their own wallets fund the government, that nothing is cost-free, and that there must be spending cuts before we will see a meaningful trend of economic improvement and greater personal freedom. This is both an issue of grasping simple economic facts and interpreting them according to rational economic, moral, and political principles.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 429

Voting with Their Feet

Before noting that Houston's leaders are working to kill the goose that lays its golden eggs, Brian Phillips cites a very interesting statistic:

When comparing California with Texas,U-Haul says it all. To rent a 26-foot truck one way from San Francisco to Austin, the charge is $3,236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399. Clearly what is happening is that far more people want to move from San Francisco to Austin than vice versa, so U-Haul has to pay its own employees to drive the empty trucks back from Texas.

Our elected leaders enact policies -- obviously demanded by the body politic -- that destroy prosperity and yet people who have to live under such policies find that they cannot -- and leave.

This reminds me of Cass Sunstein.

This difference between the altruistic morality that people profess (and attempt to make others abide by through law) and the selfish one they actually live by (if with imperfect consistency), lends surface credibility to Sunstein's Platonic notion (summarized by Doug Reich) that:

Sunstein relies on a distinction between what he calls the "consumer" and "the citizen" arguing that our behavior as consumers differs from our behavior as "citizens". In other words, as "consumers" we act selfishly and might indulge in the inane mindlessness of "infotainment" or "sports" news whereas when we act as "citizens" we adopt the high minded aspirations of the thinker busily considering such monumental topics as "environmental protection" or "antidiscrimination". Note the Platonic separation of the world into a sort of "imperfect" realm of immediate, brute reality which we approach as a "consumer" and the higher, idealized realm of "the citizen"...

Of course, Sunstein disdains selfishness, and so focuses on things like "infotainment." As an altruist, he sees nothing wrong with this state of affairs. As a pragmatist and collectivist, he wants to use this to promote a state that forces people to act more in line with how they should, according to altruism. And as a determinist, he thinks the state has to do this.

At the end of his post, Reich points to web site focused on stopping Sunstein from being confirmed as Obama's "Regulatory Czar." And that may not be the only post we have to be concerned about. Sunstein's name is already appearing on "short lists" of possible replacements for David Souter, who recently announced plans to retire from the Supreme Court.

Fascist Thuggery

From several sources I am reading ominous reports of thuggery by the current administration on behalf of its efforts to "fix" our economy. Via Amit Ghate is a link to blog post that reproduces the following unsubstantiated story about an encounter between the "Car Czar" and the manager of a hedge fund owning some Chrysler debt:

Who the fuck do you think you're dealing with? We'll have the IRS audit your fund. Every one of your employees. Your investors. Then we will have the Securities and Exchange Commission rip through your books looking for anything and everything and nothing we find to destroy you with.

Sadly, Respice Finem also produces ample documented accounts that collectively make the point that such an encounter is well within the realm of possibility.

Glenn Reynolds notes that Jake Tapper has been looking into this matter.

A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration's Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration's Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation.

The White House and a spokesperson for the investment bank in question challenged the accuracy of the story.

Tapper is a senior White House correspondent for ABC News.

As Amit Ghate puts it, "I strongly suggest you make your voice heard before it's no longer possible."

Caspar Milquetoast

After listening to Tom Waits' song. "The Piano Has Been Drinking" (a somewhat "cleaner" version from a seventies television appearance of his can be seen here), I looked up "Caspar Milquetoast" and found a blog that has posted several examples of the comic strip (The Timid Soul) that has given us the idiom.

Some of [these cartoons] are more wry observations, some laugh-out-loud funny. We all know a Caspar Milquetoast. Sometimes Webster used subtlety, as in the drawing where the census taker asks, "Are you the head of the household?" Caspar's sidelong glance at his wife tells us all we need to know.

Yes, I might want to buy myself a copy of The Best of H.T. Webster, after seeing these.

Past - Present - Principles

Dianne Durante has set up a blog which she describes as a "trial run for a website I'd like to produce that would offer short essays on major events in American history, with suggested readings from Ayn Rand and Objectivist scholars." It's called Past - Present - Principles and she's looking for advertisers. You can also find Past - Present - Principles linked from Forgotten Delights, as well.

-- CAV

You be serious, and ...

... I'll be frank.

Through the twitter feed over at GeekPress, I got wind of a very good article (at National Review Online, of all places) about John Allison, the retired CEO of BB&T and an Objectivist philanthropist known for working through the "BB&T charitable foundation [to donate] millions of dollars to dozens of universities to establish academic programs devoted to [Ayn] Rand's philosophy."

On the second page of the article, the following passage piqued my interest:

[During his a presentation, Allison] relates the following anecdote about Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who had portrayed a lack of housing as the source of all evil: "I had an interesting conversation with Barney Frank -- he's the bad guy in my opinion because he’s a very smart guy. I said to Mr. Frank, 'Housing's a good thing, but if it's so good as you describe without any kind of constraints, the next time someone commits a crime instead of putting them in jail, why don’t we give them a house?'" The crowd of college students erupted in laughter, and Allison went on: "You laugh, but he thought I was serious. It was scary." [bold added]

"Hmm. That reminds me of Poe's Law," was my immediate reaction. I'd recently encountered the notion randomly, probably as a tag line to someone's comment at a blog or on a forum somewhere.

Poe's Law, according to RationalWiki (a site that doesn't strike me as particularly rational):

... relates to fundamentalism, and the difficulty of identifying actual parodies thereof. It suggests that, in general, it is hard to tell fake fundamentalism from the real thing, since they may both espouse equally extreme beliefs. Poe's law also works in reverse: real fundamentalism can also be indistinguishable from parody fundamentalism. [link removed]

Barney Frank is not, of course, a fundamentalist, and this entry's modernist distaste for "extremism" -- an anti-concept Rand thoroughly demolished in "Extremism: The Art of Smearing" within the very book Allison calls "the best defense of capitalism ever written" -- actually makes it difficult to identify the grain of truth beneath the original quip by the man who gave this "law" its name.

Why is it that Barney Frank fell for Allison's absurd suggestion? And how come it can sometimes be so hard to tell the difference between fundamentalism (for example) and parodies thereof? Part of the key lies in the very framing of Poe's Law within the entry at RationalWiki as a phenomenon pertaining to "extreme beliefs," which is a package-dealing of rationality (manifested as a healthy suspicion of arbitrary assertions) and the philosophical skepticism that so permeates secular culture (manifested in part in the belief that any firm conviction is, ipso facto, arbitrary).

If one believes that the whole realm of philosophy is outside the realm of facts and logic (i.e., of objectivity), then of course one will regard any consistent application of any particular philosophy as ultimately absurd. Such a person will see such "extremism" as a vice and the fast track to gullibility. One will also necessarily believe that it is impossible, through reason, to reach the truth.

But the joke is on the skeptic, for he misses an interesting point. It is not how consistently ("extremely") one applies a philosophical system that poses a problem, but the fact that a person has allowed himself to integrate the arbitrary -- the "not even wrong" -- into his thinking. The elephant in the room that nobody talks about is that almost every major philosophical system and every religion out there is riddled with arbitrary, thought-destroying notions. As an example, just consider the contortions so many Creationists go through to explain away the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of evolution.

The same is true of Barney Frank, whose ethics are so altruist and whose politics are so collectivist that he never asks why we are "supposed to" redistribute wealth or, as recent events indicate, how our country is supposed to survive economically by doing so on a massive scale. Allison didn't nudge Frank over an ideological cliff and Frank didn't "fall for" anything in that exchange: Frank jumped off that cliff long ago.

When one turns one's mind off, silly things can happen. All belief not based on sensory information and logic is by nature arbitrary, and any such belief that that does not accidentally resemble a truth discoverable by reason is absurd and, by nature, indistinguishable from an absurd joke.

Past a certain point, Poe's Law doesn't just describe a resemblance between the words of a "fundamentalist" and a jokester, but an identity: Depending on how well a given pronouncement is crafted to "fit in with" the overall mis-integration of a system that incorporates the arbitrary, the only difference between a frank statement and a joke will be in who is making it.

-- CAV