Quick Roundup 443

The Pros and Cons of Parenthood

Over at Try Reason!, John Drake lists the good and the bad of being a dad. He concludes with the following.

There's no question I'm happy I had children. They can be trying at times, but I'm quickly realizing that the biggest issues I have with fatherhood usually stem from failures on my part to live rationally. If anything, they challenge me to be a better person. And this, along with their unconditional love, are two of the greatest things that come with being a dad.

He also jogged my memory about a post by Amy Mossoff from about a week ago concerning the book A Baby Maybe, by Elizabeth Whelan. Mossoff begins straight away with the aspect of the possibility that happens to give me the most pause:

When Adam and I got married we were both undecided about having children, and I think we both leaned towards the negative. The first thing that started steering us in the other direction was a vacation we took with our close friends and their 18 month old son. We spent a week in the Bahamas with them and saw firsthand how they were able to integrate their child into their lives and continue to do fun, adventurous things, even if it did mean lugging around a lot more stuff. We thought to ourselves, "We could do that."

And then she explains why the book was so helpful with her and her husband's decision -- because it indicates three major aspects of the decision that make it so different from so many others one makes in life.

Saucy Salmon

As an added bonus, The Little Things has probably also saved me from having to hunt down a good salmon recipe. Remembering how my family usually had fried fish on Friday nights for a while as I grew up, I mentioned to my wife my desire to learn/tinker with fried fish.

She likes salmon -- which is good, but not what I had in mind -- and told me she'd like to do that from time to time as well. This recipe uses a creole seasoning we just happen to have on hand, sounds relatively easy, and is described as "no fail." That sounds like three good reasons to try it out to me.

One down, one to go. I'll get the fried fish recipe from my Mom on a future phone call.

A Very Small Window into a Very Small Soul?

Matt Drudge reports the following, which I reproduce in whole since he does not archive material originally posted to his site. The image is one of four from a montage also posted at the above temporary link.

As the summer begins, White House watchers have spotted a new look by President Obama: The Evil Eye!

Staffers have joked about the menacing glance, which comes when the president meets with world leaders who are not aligned with his progressive view.

White House photographers have captured the "evil eye" in recent weeks, during sessions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Colombia's Alvaro Uribev.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got hit with the commander's malocchio last week in the Oval office.

And at least one White House reporter has been on the receiving end of the daggers during a press conference.

Developing...

I am not well-versed about microexpressions, but I wonder if this is what Drudge is really talking about here. If so, that might explain why it took so long for someone to capture this "new" expression of malevolence. I put scare quotes around the word "new" because I and many others have wondered aloud whether Obama is stupid or evil. (Another blogger draws an intriguing parallel between another Obama Administration official's somewhat similar expression and that seen on Jim Taggart when he was introduced in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.)

Recently, Myrhaf successfully predicted that Obama would choose the wrong side in the so-called coup in Honduras and afterwards, Alan Sullivan commented that Barack Obama had joined the Axis of Evil. But from the looks of this, Obama has not merely effectively been a member of the Axis of Evil, but has lived there, emotionally at least, all along.

Central Planners

C. August has made a valuable connection about the unit-economy and unambiguity -- rare in today's muddled political discourse -- of the above phrase.

-- CAV

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Financial Prohibition?

Yahoo! Finance reports that some "world bankers" at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) are making the following pernicious argument:

Financial products should be treated like medicines and sold to consumers only when they are certified safe to prevent a repeat of last year's financial meltdown, the world's central bankers said on Monday.

Later, the article elaborates on this position, although not to the degree that it should have.

The BIS was alarmed by how a collapse in the value of opaque and complex securitised products propelled the world's financial system into crisis. It said in its annual report all financial products should be registered like medicines.

The safest instruments would be available to everyone, a second tier only to people with authorization, like prescription drugs, and a third tier to a limited number of pre-screened individuals and institutions, like experimental drugs are.

A final tier would be securities deemed illegal. [bold added]

Too bad the authors allowed themselves to be fooled by the paternalists of the BIS into focusing on what they say they want the government to treat like what. In fact, the BIS is proposing that governments treat private citizens like children regarding their own finances, much as they currently do now regarding their health.

This is outrageous on many levels, most obviously at that of the practical consequences, which stems from the deeper, moral level.

First, consider the consequences of drug prohibition...

Something doesn't go away just because the government decrees it illegal. It simply goes underground. Then a black market creates worse problems. Since sellers cannot rely on police to protect their property, they arm themselves, form gangs, charge monopoly prices, and kill their competitors. Buyers steal to pay the high prices.

In the context of financial products, if you judge a given product worth the risk of your own money, you will have the "choice" of passing up that opportunity and obeying the law -- or assuming the newly-added risks (e.g., of legal troubles, having to deal with criminals, and having no government protection of any contracts you might ordinarily make) that come with illegal activity.

And then, there's regulation of medicine. We'll confine ourselves to just the first four items of a top ten list of ways the FDA threatens or injures our health in the name of protecting it:

1. The FDA adds billions to the development cost and price of new drugs.
2. The FDA delays the availability of new drugs for years.
3. The FDA prohibits the use of new drugs that treat conditions for which other drugs are available, regardless of how much better they might work for some patients.
4. The FDA withholds new drugs -- even those that passed initial safety tests -- from terminally ill patients, in the name of preserving safety. When one of these patients wins access to the drugs by going to court, the FDA, apparently in a relentless effort to protect the health of the dead, appeals the ruling until the patient dies, at which time the appeal is of course dismissed.

Do we really want the same kind of "protection" for our financial health?

And next, consider the fox being proposed as guardian of this hen house. Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, writing about the financial meltdown about a year ago, begins answering a crudely-put question by Fortune Magazine.

"What were they smoking?"

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

For decades our government has had a semi-official policy that large financial institutions are too big to fail--and therefore must be bailed out when they risk insolvency--a policy that creates perverse incentives for them to take on far more risk than they otherwise would. "Too big to fail" is implemented through a network of government bodies that protect financial institutions from the long-term consequences of their decisions at taxpayer expense--a phenomenon we can observe right now. [bold added]

If we're going to draw an analogy between financial products and pharmaceuticals, the least we should do is draw the right one. The government has been playing the part of dope dealer and, by that simple observation, anyone should be very leery of any proposal to expand its involvement in our personal finances!

But the outrage hardly ends there, although that might be enough to give most people pause. The real outrage is that the proper function of government, the sole social entity that can legally wield physical force against individuals, is the protection of individual rights, and that the calls by the BIS for the government to restrict how we spend our own money are direct calls for the government to violate our property rights instead.

Man is the rational animal, and reason is his tool for survival. The government is supposed to ensure that each man is able to exercise that faculty to the fullest extent that he wishes, so long as he respects the rights of other men to do so. This is why it is wrong for the government to dictate the behavior of individual men. This is why when it does so, it ultimately leads to results inimical to our survival.

The bankers of the BIS might argue that poor financial decisions multiplied across an economy millionsfold are harmful to individual investors, and they would be correct. But were they to look further, they would see the hand of the government at every step of the way. Government policy has encouraged and even mandated foolish financial behavior on the parts of countless individuals. And government bailouts compound the injustice and slow the economic recovery by taking money from the responsible in order to insulate the irresponsible from the consequences of their own actions.

The government depriving people of opportunities is not the solution to the problem of the government encouraging people to take unnecessary risks. The solution is to get the government out of the financial sector altogether.

-- CAV

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Google Zombies

The good news: My blog saw a single-day record number of hits (1,594) yesterday. The bad news: The extra hits came from people looking for news about the sudden death of pop star Michael Jackson.

Specifically, they were using the search term, "Michael Jackson, RIP," for which this blog entry was, when the news broke, the third- or fourth- highest ranking Google search result. Yes. It was in trying to figure out why I was getting such gaudy site statistics that I learned that Michael Jackson -- that Michael Jackson -- had died.

Waves and waves of them came, despite the fact that even the following short summary indicated that what I wrote was clearly about someone else:

Michael Jackson, RIP. I learned today with sadness, that Michael Jackson -- also known as the Beer Hunter -- died of a heart attack at the age of 65 on ...

The closest blogging slang I have heard of for such an onslaught is "tourists." This would denote people who are coming by, but not for the usual reason the author writes, and who will, therefore, probably not return as regular readers.

But that term usually applies when some A-list blogger takes a passing fancy to some post one happened to write about something of momentary interest. The tourists do, in fact, want to visit your home on the web, but they do not, as it were, want to "live there" (How's that for a strange search result?).

Another term, similar in its non-applicability, is "Google juice."

In this case, though, it's more like my "visitors" weren't even really here.

Kinda reminds me of an army of zombies from a famous music video a while back by a kid whose name reminds me of a favorite British beer critic.

As if in keeping with the horror genre formula of having a false ending, yesterday wasn't the end of it. New commentary on the death of that Michael Jackson has pushed my eulogy to "the other" Michael Jackson down to about the third or fourth page of results, stemming that particular tide.

A second wave of Google zombies arrived this morning.

This time, they're looking for images of Michael Jackson. Well, at least according to Google, I have a few of those, too! As of now, I clock in at the first and fourth positions in Google's image search engine for "Michael Jackson, RIP."

The Internet is a really screwy place sometimes!

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 442

More than You'd Ever Want to Know ...

... about pressure cookers.

I was in the process of simplifying this recipe for chicken pot pie recently when it occurred to me that a pressure cooker I unpacked earlier in the day could speed up cooking the chicken, if only I knew how to use it.

So I googled something like "how to use a pressure cooker" and stumbled upon Miss Vickie's site. There's a wealth of information there on how to use these devices, probably including how to blog with one if you were to look hard enough.

I was able, in pretty short order, to test mine and find a problem without ruining dinner. (See "beginner basics" at the top menu and proceed to "test drive" at the bottom of the left sidebar. If you've been reading for the past few days or know about my past professional background, you'll see why I am a big fan of testing gadgets before using them.)

Once I replace a defective overpressure relief on said cooker, I'll be back: The recipe came out really well, but I would really like to eliminate the twenty minute lull that came with having to boil the meat in a normal pot. Then, my total preparation time will clock in under an hour and I will be occupied throughout.

Leftists Never Kill Leftists?

Via HBL, I learned of a leftist blogger getting into a tizzy over a recent appearance of Harry Binswanger on the Glenn Beck Show. He concludes his post with, "Leftists hellbent on killing leftists--the Nazis were special that way."

Yeah. That never happens. And the national socialist variety of socialism is fundamentally, opposite-end-of-a-spectrum different from Communism, too.

Nor could it possibly ever happen. Wikipedia summarizes the approach of President Obama's mentor for achieving leftist goals as, "the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends." How reassuring!

Or maybe Steve Rendall always agrees with Barack Obama, and thinks that anyone who disagrees with him is, ipso facto, not really a leftist.

Better Living through Blogging/Desktop Update

I have often had commenters here come through with helpful advice when I have found myself in some kind of bind, as was most recently the case with my computer.

Now, I've had a question I was pondering recently preemptively asked and answered by someone in the industry over at Rational Jenn's. I was leaning in the direction he indicated already, but learned through his answer of a way to save more money on a land line than I thought we could. (I'll file that idea away for now as it turns out that we have free basic phone service in our new place.)

As for the computer, the troubleshooting was not as straightforward as it could have been. But the advice I got both helped me do the troubleshooting and to think of other things I could look into, like BIOS beep codes. I was unable to determine the exact set of beep codes for my particular BIOS, but I am fairly sure the problem is probably with the motherboard or the power supply, as I'd feared. I'll start making phone calls about it this morning.

Oddly, with only a RAM stick, the hard drive, and the video card installed, I can get as far as the boot loader. Once. (I don't want to boot all the way until I fix this.) If I power off and try again, no boot loader at all. Without RAM, I get a continuous beep and nothing else. In any other case, I get one beep and either progress to the boot loader or no progress at all. There is the further option of buying a PC board diagnostic test card, but I don't think I'm going to learn anything new with one.

Objectivist Roundup

This week, Rule of Reason is hosting.

Obama Kills a Bug

No, he didn't bomb Iran overnight. He literally killed a bug about a month ago, and PETA is fulminating.

As Dismuke puts it, "What was considered a COMIC ABSURDITY in 1930 is now taken seriously."

The above clip, from a 1930's movie about the future, presents the song as funny even by the Anthem-like, every man's a number standards of its fictional society.

-- CAV

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Second-Hander

The Atlantic has published a glowing eulogy of William F. Buckley by Garry Wills which I highly recommend -- but with the proviso that one read the following passage from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead shortly before or after:

Isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison . . . . They're second-handers . . . .

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don't ask: "Is this true?" They ask: "Is this what others think is true?" Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. (605, and more here) [bold added]

Wills praises Buckley in turns for such exploits as using "big words" he does not know the meanings of, beating a CIA polygraph test, being let off the hook as a favor by the police at a traffic stop, defying other Catholics in political squabbling over papal encyclicals, attending Spanish Masses with his servants, and habitually riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Wills marshals all these things in an attempt to portray a man of physical courage, moral strength, and common appeal. Too bad that the real common thread is an elevation of the perceptions of others over all else, including the facts of reality.

Revealingly, Wills praises Buckley for being "basically egalitarian" "[d]espite [sic] his religious and ideological preferences" -- and then goes right along with Buckley's lack of concern for facts (and hypocrisy) with the following passage under the heading of "Ideological Snob?"

By the time of his death, even Bill's earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racist and fanatical traits earlier embedded in it. He distanced his followers from the southern prejudices of George Wallace, the anti-Semitism of the Liberty Lobby, the fanaticism of the John Birch Society, the glorification of selfishness by Ayn Rand (famously excoriated in National Review by Whittaker Chambers), the paranoia and conspiratorialism of the neocons. In each of these cases, some right-wingers tried to cut off donations to National Review, but Bill stood his ground. In doing so, he elevated the discourse of American politics, making civil debate possible between responsible liberals and conservatives.

Buckley's egalitarianism apparently went out the window when he thought his "preferences" might not be deemed "respectable." I hold no esteem for egalitarianism and think ideas far too important to relegate to the realm of whim, so I leave it to Wills to explain the above discrepancy. Intellectual standards cannot be based on whim and, as such, cannot coexist with egalitarianism. Buckley and Wills's deliberate injustice towards Rand bears this out. History is also bearing this out: Read on.

It is of interest that, other than advertising links to books, the above hyperlink is the only one in the article. The fact that the Whittaker Chambers piece is a review in name only speaks volumes about Buckley's (and Wills's) "concern for facts" and reveals that Ayn Rand understood him far better than he understood her or, I hazard to guess, cared to understand himself.

But yes, I'll grant that Buckley was selfless. Fortunately, if relative book sales figures for God and Man at Yale and Atlas Shrugged are any indication, it would appear that the facts of reality so blithely flouted by Buckley and his boy Wills are vindicating Ayn Rand, and leaving Buckley's intellectual legacy where it belongs: in the same ash heap to which his followers continue trying to consign her.

Wills devotes an entire article to debunking the charge that Buckley was a snob, going so far as to address three distinct types of snobbishness: social, ideological, and intellectual. Nevertheless, Buckley was a snob, but more important, his snobbishness is rooted in his second-handedness. Wills might not see this, and Buckley's other admirers might not see this, but anyone with an independent mind will, as soon as he spends any time with the man through the verbiage he left behind.

Egalitarianism, as an intellectual fashion, often goes hand-in-hand with snobbishness, and a truly selfish man who understands the potential value of other people will not be a snob. Nor will he read Buckley and fail to see either the egalitarianism or the snobbery.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 441

A Fitting Symbol, Indeed

The below quote from a comment at The Volokh Conspiracy describes my memories from elementary to middle school almost perfectly:

I remember this as one of those horrifying anecdotes you got tossed in social studies class in middle school. (By the end of the 60s, pollution was so bad that one river actually caught on fire!) Granted, I was in middle school at the end of the 70s, when this sort of thing was at its peak. But the lesson was always that pollution (and every other aspect of "man's footprint on the earth") was getting ever worse and worse, and only desperate action could reverse the trend.

As it turns out, rivers catching fire were already becoming a thing of the past by the time the Cuyahoga River caught fire (HT: Glenn Reynolds) in Cleveland in 1969.

As one of the kids who learned this particular "history" lesson, I am encouraged to see that forty years later, there remains at least enough freedom politically and respect for facts culturally that some of the truly filthy details about this story can finally come to light. Time magazine's "photo" of the event, for example, was actually from a fire seventeen years earlier.

But one fact remains undiscussed, as far as I can tell. Another commenter at the Volokh Conspiracy exemplifies what I'm talking about.

The environmental movement had been in place before the Cuyahoga Fire. It spawned the Crown Jewel of the Environmental Movement The Clean Water Act. Innumerable rivers that you wouldn't want to stand beside are now swimmable and fishable. It worked.

Nearly a half-century later, everyone around is too green to need such apocalyptic fairy tales and too pragmatic to care that it was their freedom that got torched that day and has been burning unabated since. In fact, many people are happy about the way the government stepped in.

Government action here was appropriate, but not this kind of government action. Let me explain: Government interference in the economy, specifically, its wholesale abrogation of the principle of private property where rivers are concerned, is what made this fire, its predecessors, and numerous other similar problems before and since possible in the first place. In other words, we have, as a solution to a failure of the government to protect our rights, inappropriate government interference in the economy, rather than improvement in the government's execution of its proper role of protecting individual rights.

Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute put this very well back in 2000:

Under a pure capitalist system, as described in philosopher Ayn Rand's works, everything is privately owned. As a consequence, nature is preserved only to the extent that it benefits man. Companies cannot dump waste into rivers at whim, because those rivers are the property of someone else. The same applies to any other form of pollution that is harmful to man -- nobody wants to pollute their own property, and no one is allowed to pollute anyone else's, so waste management is handled in a very clean fashion.

I would expect the greens to make much anticapitalist hay out of this anniversary. But don't be fooled. Capitalism did not pollute the Cuyahoga River. Our government's failure to treat rivers as private property did. (I understand that this failure was motivated in part by a desire to stimulate industrialization, but cannot find a source at the moment.) Government-mandated cleanups may appear to treat some of the more visible symptoms of the underlying disease, lack of freedom, but they really are helping the disease go merrily on.

This anniversary should not spur a celebration of environmentalist government policy, but a rededication of the American people to the principle of individual rights, and especially, the right to property.

The burning of the Cuyahoga River is no symbol of the alleged "excesses" of capitalism. Rather, it is a fitting metaphor for the destruction of our individual rights.

Don't Be This Guy

This Onion satire (HT: Craig Ceely), aside from being very funny, reminds me a little bit of my collegiate days, back before my spine calcified.

I really like you. I do. You're so nice, and sweet, and you listen to all my problems and respond with the appropriate compliments. But, well, I don't really see a relationship in our future. It would be terrible if we let sex destroy this great friendship we have where I get everything I want and you get nothing you want. Don't you think?

The scenario is so common, in fact, that it has its own entry in Urban Dictionary. (Having said that, I would not accuse any of the friends from that time of being manipulative. I wasn't that pathetic!)

How does one avoid it? The explanation that finally made things click for me was that women bond differently with men and with female friends, and that men who are too "there" emotionally for female friends they are romantically interested in end up being seen like women on an emotional level. Once seen in that way, you are out of the game.

As with many cultural matters, I think there is a mixture of our culture's dominant philosophy with legitimate issues that would always obtain anyway. Here, the attraction that many women have for less-than-worthy men stems, I think, from a common confusion of emotional indifference with independence. There's nothing you can do about someone with that problem. (Or with someone who just doesn't like you romantically, for that matter.)

But where is "this guy" going wrong? Essentially, and for whatever reason, by being a doormat. Past a certain point, if you've made your interest easy for her to grasp, and she's not being anything other than a friend, move on. (Yes, remain friends if you want, but take her at her word, and devote no more attention to her than you would a male friend.)

Vendor Lock-in, Meet Poor Customer Service!

Amazon Kindle fan Megan McArdle teaches me something else I never considered about the issue of vendor lock-in:

We were thinking of becoming a two-Kindle family. Now I'm rethinking the one I've got. I'm a total supporter of hard DRM. But if I have to wipe my Kindle, or upgrade to a new one, I don't want to find out I have to buy all my books again.

Then I saw the update. Apparently, the limits are on simultaneous devices, not downloads. Except, apparently, Amazon customer service reps didn't know that.

Nice.

A Bleg

Yes. Something screwy has befallen me on every last aspect of this move.

This time, it would seem that the word "Fragile" was confused by employees of both Southwest Airlines and UPS with a big, fat bull's-eye. UPS dropped the box containing my printer and my scanner, breaking it and rendering both items inoperable. I can get by without those for quite some time without much trouble.

More distressing, I packed my desktop in its original box and packing material, and it, too, arrived inoperable. The flat-screen monitor, which I packed myself and placed in a suitcase was what I expected might break. It's fine, and I'm using it and my Eee PC netbook to blog for now. I need the desktop to work and to prepare for a very difficult exam that may have major implications for my future career. I need it back as soon as possible. That is why, mistaken or not, I included it as part of my checked luggage.

To secure my data, I removed the hard drive from the PC tower before packing it. On arrival, I tested it separately (using this and the netbook), and it's fine. The computer powers on, but does not boot, even from DVD. (And yes, the hard drive cables are connected.) I suspect that either the motherboard or the power supply for the hard drive and the DVD drive got jarred enough to fail. I plan to test the power for these with a voltmeter some time today.

The question is this: Is there anything else I am missing? As a bonus, are there any Bostonians lurking around here who know of a cheap, reliable place for computer repair, if it comes to that?

Merci beaucoup.

-- CAV

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Pajama-Clad Again

Or: In the Hub, but out of the Loop

About 7:00 a.m. on June 16, 2009, I took one last look around the house in Houston, placed the keys on a shelf for our landlady, and left for good. With the click of the door as I shut it, fifteen memorable years in the greatest city in America drew to a close for me as did my twenty-four years as a citizen of the Lone Star State.

A variety of unforeseen circumstances ranging from the absurd to the excruciating ate up huge swaths of valuable time during my remaining two weeks there. On the Monday of my return, the impossibility of opening my email while at my old job eventually led to my discovery that an administrative glitch had prematurely ended my employment there.

An old childhood injury, not to be outdone, saw that headache and didn't just raise. It went all in. I discovered two days later that I am now a member of an elite fraternity: Those who have had dental implants fail. Depending on where I look, that happens with between one and ten percent of all dental implants. At least the failure became evident before the prosthetic and crown were installed. I am grateful that my oral surgeon will be installing a replacement free of charge in a few months, after I heal.

So there would be no grand round of final visits to favorite haunts on that last week. Too, my plans for a photographic retrospective of Houston to be posted automatically here, as I attended my class last week, went by the wayside.

In lieu of the photographic retrospective, at least for now, I commend my readers to Brian Phillips's series of five posts, "Houston: The City I Love," over at Live Oaks. Allow me to flesh out one highlight from the second of these:

[W]here land-use controls and other regulations on building are most restrictive, housing is more expensive, and often outrageously so. The consequences of these controls are not limited to home ownership -- they impact the cost of doing business, and indeed the cost of living.

Remember that house I left behind in H-Town? Three bedrooms and a ten to fifteen minute drive for my wife to work. Our apartment in the Hub of the Universe allows her a subway commute of similar duration, but it is a tiny two-bedroom and costs us over two and a half times as much. And yes, I sold off both cars. It would cost more than the monthly payment on a new car just to park one here.

Most people would say that Boston has a higher cost of living than Houston, but that's a cliche that allows people not to think too much about the underlying causes. I have been aware of this discrepancy ever since my Navy days, when I was stationed briefly in a couple of blue states. Since then, I have always put it more like this: "Boston has a lower standard of living than Houston."

Having said all that, the class went well, although I don't plan to discuss exactly what it was about any time soon, and for all its intrusive government, Boston does promise to be a fascinating and enjoyable place. But I do need to solve a topological conundrum before too long: It's called "unpacking!"

-- CAV

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Now you see me, ...

... now you don't!

Blogging will be terse and at very odd times, if at all this week. I complete the move to Boston on Monday and Tuesday, and then will be taking an intensive course from Wednesday until Sunday. As class starts at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 6:00 p.m. -- and has homework -- even I may not find time to blog!

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on June 15, 2009.

Updates


Today: Corrected some late night typos.

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Castro Needs Spies?

It isn't news to me that Fidel Castro has legions of sympathizers among the American left, but even so, Humberto Fontova's recent piece (HT: Dismuke) on the Walter Myers spy scandal is upsetting.

To highlight that difficulty in catching Castro's spies that bedevils U.S. spy-catchers, let's play a game I've titled, "Castro Spy or Democratic Official? Who Said It?"

"Fidel has lifted the Cuban people out of the degrading and oppressive conditions which characterized pre-revolutionary Cuba. He has helped the Cubans to save their own souls. Cubans don't need to try very hard to make the point that we have been the exploiters."

If you answered, "Castro spy Kendall Myers, from his diaries," you're right.

"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime…"

If you answered, "Democratic President of the United States John F. Kennedy speaking to French Journalist Jean Daniel in Nov. 1963," you're right again.

No less of a challenge to the spy catchers -- or to my stomach -- has been the high demand in "high" society for Fidel Castro that Fontova describes on top of that.

Castro has huge numbers of aspiring spies and little need for them for precisely the same reason: The dominant code of morality in our society is altruism, of which communism -- as preached and practiced by Castro and his Soviet mentors -- is a consistent political expression.

Now that we've seen a very ugly rip here, what to do?

Keep after the spies and fight against "improving" American relations with Cuba to the extent possible, of course. But there is also a more effective long-term solution available: Repair our social fabric by arguing for a superior moral code or supporting those who do. With an improved culture in America, sympathy for communism here will, like Castro's decrepit body, inevitably wither away.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 440

Wow!

Via HBL, I learned of a remarkable column by Joseph McHugh in The American Chronicle regarding William F. Buckley's unjust treatment of Ayn Rand.

McHugh starts out with comments about his son, Christopher's just-published memoir, but that is only a point of departure. The real strength of his article is that it considers the elder Buckley's long, ignominious record of unjustified, personal attacks on Rand on as well as what other intellectuals influenced by Rand have had to say about the matter. The piece ends:

Rand made the case against the welfare state root and branch. She was the first to make a secular case against Communism and Socialism, and the first to make a fully secular defense of American values. The fact that her ideas were shut out by Buckley hurt the entire cause of Americanism.

These days people are flocking to read Atlas Shrugged. They are not burning a hole in their wallets to buy God and Man at Yale.

And that's a good thing. [minor edits]

It is refreshing to see journalism like this, and frustrating at the same time, because (a) I wish I'd written it myself, and (b) I want to quote the whole thing here, verbatim. McHugh says several things that have needed saying for a very long time.

I will indulge myself one more quote, though: "... Buckley made a career out of trashing Rand personally, not intellectually, and one cannot help but feel justice at his public bubble being burst."

Amen! (So to speak.)

Another Satisfied Customer

I am delighted to see that Paul Hsieh is enjoying his new Asus Eee PC 1000, and, owning one of the older models, find myself slightly jealous at the same time. Fortunately, thanks to an earlier post of his on the same subject, I can at least upgrade my operating system soon. I hadn't had time to look into that, and was reluctant to do so anyway while bouncing back and forth between cities so much over the past year.

Working from Home

I will be working from home for awhile once I return to Boston for good next week, so I found this post (and the ensuing comments) over at Noodlefood on the subject to be of interest. (I'd swear I have encountered the wonko.com post before, but I'd forgotten about it.)

Also, I am considering a career change to a type of work that, in a few years, I could make into an at-home occupation. A major issue with such a move is setting clear boundaries between work and leisure.

A History Primer for Barack Obama

Via Ron Pisaturo, I see that there is a nice refutation of Barack Obama's unjust praise of the Islam for the cultural achievements of the ancient Arab world over at The Charlotte Capitalist.

-- CAV

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A New Way to Fail

Around a decade ago, when I was in grad school, a column I'd written in a student newspaper -- quite contrary to my pessimistic expectations -- helped a Libertarian, as he put it, "see the light." Said recovering Libertarian and I subsequently engaged in a back-and-forth correspondence that he initiated with "You'd make a good Libertarian," and ended with his saying, "Chalk one up to pamphleteering." Enjoying the exchange, but finding my time at a premium, I finally ended up recommending Peter Schwartz's Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty, and letting him read my copy.

I was on the verge of asking for him to return it after quite some time when I finally did hear back from him. Also, to my great surprise, he went on to found a campus Objectivist club which even had decent regular attendance. There wasn't a club before? I and a good friend were, I thought, the only two Objectivists on campus, and didn't see the point. My lesson on the importance of holding correct principles was more than repaid with one on the importance of communicating them effectively.

I recall this story, because something I encountered this morning at the web site of the New York Times reminded me of an email one of the members of this club once sent me about a libertarianesque scheme to build artificial islands in the middle of the sea and, with them, fully free societies out of whole cloth. That fantasy has never really died down and, thanks to new technology, it seems to be growing new legs.

Such dreamers aren't alone, or the first, as several articles note (links below). "For decades, an assortment of romantics and whack jobs have fantasized about fleeing the oppressive strictures of modern government and creating a laissez-faire society on the high seas," Wired observed earlier this year. "Over the decades, they've tried everything from fortified sandbars to mammoth cruise ships. Nearly all have been disasters."

True, but one difference today is improved knowhow, as The Futurist notes -- be it in the design of floating utopias or built-up artificial islands (the latter a specialty of Dubai, above).

The pertinent question here is "Disasters? By what standard?" Certainly, technology makes us able to create artificial land more readily, but a society is much more than the land it sits on. I have argued repeatedly here that technology is no substitute for a rational culture (or thinking for oneself) among the denizens of any such society.

At this point, the casual reader might think I am making the same pessimism-inducing mistake I was making years ago by discounting this movement, but he would be wrong on that count. It is, in fact, the people who want to build such island-states who are the pessimists: They are the ones not developing a solid understanding of the theoretical basis and justification for freedom so that they can make its case to the rational people in their very midst. (They do exist.) The island-builders are the ones giving up without a fight (of the intellectual variety).

They are, in fact, deliriously and recklessly pessimistic.

One moment's thought about the viability of such islands as states should make the point. Even assuming one achieves a capitalist society on such an island, which is no trivial feat, what of self-defense? How would one stop the pirate island ten miles away from enslaving or laying waste to his? With weapons? Purchased from where? The now-socialist United States one fled? Before or after the pirates strike? Before or after Obama invades your island instead, seeing it as a threat to hope and change? You started out with nukes? How nice: So did the pirates. And Obama.

When dealing with other men, we all have two fundamental choices that technology will never change: reasoned persuasion or force. The island builders aren't even giving reasoned persuasion a chance, and are defaulting to force, and with a poor strategy at that. That is, if they aren't guilty of an even greater sin, which is basically pretending that conflict will pass them by if they pretend that other men don't exist.

Certainly, freedom must be won by guns, as the American Revolution demonstrated, but it cannot exist at all within a society that does not understand and value it -- as the same war and our misguided and fruitless occupation of Iraq both make clear. This is why it is important to make the case for freedom in America, and, incidentally, why fleeing to an island really isn't a guarantee of having freedom even there for very long.

Principles are like maps. If I had to flee an oncoming hurricane, I'd take a good map and a working Model T over a blindfold and a Lamborghini any day. The island-builders are spending too much time ogling fancy technology and ignoring the theoretical basis that makes it -- and their lives as free men -- possible.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 439

Rand Gets the Last Laugh

Via HBL is an interesting, mostly positive, book review of Atlas Shrugged which focuses on the story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, drawing parallels between its theme of false hope and the election of Barack Obama, as well as between that company's downfall and that of General Motors.

And so the workers voted overwhelmingly to follow the new plan, which would mean that no worker would fall through the cracks -- everyone would take care of everyone else. "We thought it was good," the tramp says wearily. "No, that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good."

And so begins this experiment in "modified" capitalism. As the worker explains it, "The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need." Of course, in the long run, "modified capitalism" turns out to be socialism or worse, and as Rand points out with brutal logic, it leads inevitably to a system that encourages laziness and lying and punishes success. [bold added]

Reviewer Frank Miele does accuse Rand of unspecified "excesses" once or twice, and, similarly to an issue Diana Hsieh raises regarding a recent Amity Shlaes column on the same novel, his appreciation of the novel is mainly at the political level. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to see wider acceptance of Rand as a serious commentator among a growing number of intellectuals after the savaging her work often got in the past.

And Speaking of Bankruptcy

A Rasmussen poll indicates that fewer than half of all current owners of GM cars would buy from the same company again.

That figure includes just 30% who are Very Likely to do so. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 43% of current GM owners are not likely to buy another GM car, while 16% are not sure.

My wife and I will be able to make do with the occasional Zip Car, now that we're in Boston, but as far as cars go, I am a Honda man.

That said, I was about to say something cute like, "If you put a gun to my head and made me buy an American car (That was only a figure of speech, Barry.), I expect that it would be a Ford."

Of course, as Frank Miele pointed out:

Pity poor Ford Motor Co. which was the only one of the Big Three automakers in the United States that was healthy enough to pass up government bailout money last November. Now, instead of owing money to the government, they actually have to compete AGAINST the government (the new owner of GM) selling cars.

And remember, the government has the improper power of regulating that industry, setting the terms by which Ford will "compete" with it and, not to put too fine a point on things, holding a gun to our heads and making us buy from GM. So, actually, Barry is poised to hold a gun to my head and make me buy GM, only his pal Cass Sunstein might call that "nudging."

I haven't driven a Ford lately, but perhaps, instead of "Fix Or Repair Daily," we could come up with a new pseudo acronym.

I propose, "Free OR Die."

Clean Air Standards vs. Biodiesel

When I first encountered this story about how hippie regulations have made it impossible to run 100% hippie fuel in diesel engines, I laughed out loud:

Until two years ago, all diesel engines were [compatible with pure biodiesel (aka B100)]. Then standards set by both the Environment Protection Agency and California Air Resources Board, phased in for 2007, required all passenger vehicles to meet the same, stricter emissions. That meant diesel manufacturers had to reduce emissions of NOX and particulate matter to meet those of gas-powered cars. These standards were created with good intentions -- to look out for our health by improving the air that we breath. (After all, particulate matter is a known carcinogen.) But the way most manufacturers did this created a setback for those of us trying to use biofuels. [link dropped]

As a bonus, get a load of how slavishly loyal to the government the author is. The government, which improperly bullies everyone around nowadays, is doing so "to look out for our health." But the manufacturers who have to design engines around its arbitrary regulations are villains because this means that if you buy from some of them, you might have to (gasp!) adulterate your fuel by 2% with fuel stolen straight from Mother Earth's veins.

Somehow, I would not be surprised if, pressed on the matter, this man would exhibit other symptoms of "Vitamin F deficiency" and demand that diesel particulate filters be outlawed.

Stop to Smell the Flowers

It's been a while since I've done so, but this morning's visit to Thrutch was richly rewarded with no less than three picture sets of the latest of his stunning orchids! I especially like the last of the three.

-- CAV

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Probably Not

Glenn Reynolds asks,

CAN MITCH DANIELS SAVE THE GOP?

If you aren't from Indiana, you might well stop asking, "Who is John Galt," long enough to shrug and ask, "Who is Mitch Daniels?"

He's the governor of Indiana, and at least by today's mixed economy standards, he has an impressive-sounding resume:

There's no doubt Daniels is an intriguing prospect [to head the 2012 GOP ticket]. A former corporate executive and foundation head, he was George W. Bush's first budget chief, serving from 2001 to 2003. Going home to Indiana, he not only was elected governor on his first try, but won a second term last November by 18 points -- at a time when a Democratic presidential candidate won Indiana for the first time in 40 years. In victory, Daniels attracted a lot of Democratic votes, and 20 percent of the African-American vote. He inherited a deficit and turned it into a surplus. And he has a huge job approval rating -- almost 70 percent.

Daniels' stock with the national party began rising as the full extent of last November's damage began to sink in. His reputation has gone up still more as his performance with Indiana's economy continues to shine amid national financial calamity.

Clearly, Daniels can get reelected. He seems, at first blush, to have some inkling of fiscal restraint. He can connect with a broad cross section of the voters, including Democrats. These have all been glaringly absent from his party in recent years.

But then, for those of us who want a meaningful alternative to the Democrats, the other shoe drops.

Then came May 10, when Daniels gave the commencement speech at Butler University in Indianapolis. Facing graduates born in the late 1980s, Daniels delivered a roundhouse condemnation of the selfishness of the Baby Boomer generation and a call for today's young people to live more responsibly than their elders.

"All our lives, it's been all about us," Daniels, who recently turned 60, said of his generation. "We were the 'Me Generation.' We wore t-shirts that said 'If it feels good, do it.' The year of my high school commencement, a hit song featured the immortal lyric 'Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today.'" [bold added]

Yes -- and this wasn't just another journalist giving a sloppy summary of someone else's words -- Mitch Daniels condemned selfishness. In fact, he places it at the lowest rung of the hell of short-range moral dereliction:

As a group, we have been self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish.

To be completely fair, Daniels's speech is inconsistent about the meaning of the term, confusing (or package-dealing) it with legitimate vices, but the fact remains that his words are at odds with those of John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (which is prophetic for a good reason). In a time of crisis such as this, there is a dire need for moral clarity.

John Galt was clear that actual selfishness is anything but short-range or whim-driven and, most importantly, not sacrificial -- of self to others or of others to self. Consider Galt's Oath, taken by the strikers in the novel:

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. (675)

The Baby Boomers certainly did their share of asking everyone else to live for their sake, which is actually anything but selfish. But the course taken to be the opposite (and too frequently equated with "responsibility" today), sacrificing oneself to others, is also wrong. It is also -- like that of the Baby Boomers -- the very morality of altruism to which the GOP has succumbed, and which has driven it to become the other big government party rather than a proper government party of freedom and individual rights. Mitchell is certainly a proponent of this morality, as evidenced by a favorite government program of his.

If there is one major change America needs post haste, it is to pull back from the current orgy of human sacrifice. There is an alternative to being a moocher versus being a sucker, and that is to choose to be neither, to be an individualist. Daniels, by condemning the only morality that supports such a choice, has made it clear to me that he doesn't have the big moral guns needed to point the GOP in the right direction, much less save it.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 438

Lard: The New Fashion-Food

Ignoring sensationalist reporting about food on principle and having a Southern cultural background anyway, I've never had a problem with lard. I even stunk up my apartment in grad school once rendering it. (Heed step one. You have been warned!)

I guess I was ahead of my time:

Wait long enough and everything bad for you is good again. Sugar? Naturally better than high-fructose corn syrup. Chocolate? A bar a day keeps the doctor away. Caffeine? Bring it on. [links dropped]

Except that when Crisco etc. are eventually "vindicated" and lard re-damned, I'll continue to use it if I please -- and remain free to do so.

Two other things amuse and intrigue me about this article from a cultural perspective, on top of its being interesting in its own culinary right.

First, we have the obligatory modern elevation of the rustic to the trendy, even rising to the status of sacrament in the Church of Gaia:

That environmental consciousness [sic] coupled with competitive cooking has resulted in the nose-to-tail trend set off by British chef Fergus Henderson. Walk into any high-end restaurant these days and pork chops are less prevalent than pig's ears, trotters, and jowls. The salumi/charcuterie craze has also been great for enhancing lard's profile, particularly thanks to lardo-pork belly cured Tuscan-style with wine and herbs and served in thin slices over warm bread or on pizza. If Mario Batali says it's good, diners everywhere listen. [links dropped]

And second, food writer Regina Schrambling's initial comment on this made me laugh:

Peasant food has cachet only if you are not forced to live on it.

I guess now, rather than being hectored by leftists for frying bacon, I can look forward to being praised.

Wait a minute: That's even worse!

The Confederate Battle Flag Revisited

The above indirectly reminds me of an interesting question my father-in-law -- second-generation Irish from New York, but a long-time resident of New Orleans -- asked me as we drove the furniture up to Boston through Louisiana.

He asked me what the deal was with Confederate battle flags. I never display them myself, and have very mixed feelings about them, but basically, I told him that I thought them more symbolic of cultural pride in the South, and not necessarily (or even usually) of racism. I do, of course, also have mixed feelings about the culture this flag represents, but am quickly annoyed by the blanket condemnations it receives from people who know next to nothing about it.

On that score, I just now recalled one of the few Ann Coulter columns I really like. It includes, as a bonus, an interesting bit from Colin Powell. (My previous comments on it are here.)

It is pride in the South -- having nothing to do with race -- and its honorable military history that the Confederate battle flag represents. It is a "battle flag," after all, and represents defiance not unlike the "Don't Tread on Me" flag.

The matter of my native state of Mississippi choosing to keep its flag a few years back, despite its incorporation of the battle flag, came up. I told him I thought that most saw the change as being proposed for the wrong reasons, and that the rejection was more an expression of sovereignty than anything else. "Yes," I eventually agreed with him, "I'd call that a polite, and mostly healthy, 'Go to hell.'"

[Clarification: Pursuant to some private email, I wish to be clear that this post is about what I think the Confederate flag means to the current generation of southerners. The fact remains that the flag has stood for racism in the past. This is why I do not use it myself. Whatever virtues I see in the South, I do not condone racism and do not use symbols that can be taken to mean that I do.]

Objectivist Blog Carnival

Stop by Erosophia for this week's installment.

A Snapshot of Tyranny

I wonder whether free assembly will eventually be replaced with something like this under Barack Obama:

Although there were visitors from three continents, the authorities took aim particularly at those from Latin America. Four of us were detained at the airport, in my case for three hours, and told to refrain from making political comments. We were followed by the secret police--known as DISIP--in cars with no license plates, and a hostile mob was sent to the main venue. Agents masquerading as journalists were instructed to provoke us. The president and his ministers took turns insulting us on TV from dawn to dusk.

We already have the hostile mobs.

Fellow supporters of individual rights, take heed.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added a clarification to the second part.

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When Will We Abolish This?

Writing at City Journal, teacher Marc Epstein blows out of the water all illusions of reform of the New York City public school system since Chancellor Joel Klein's adoption of a "business model" of "accountability and results."

There are so many gory details -- like universal promotion -- within his piece that I'd just about have to reproduce its entirety here to do it justice, but the most important one just about says all that needs saying:

For years now, schools have been switching to "annualization" of their course offerings. Under this structure, students who fail the first semester of a sequential course (say, English 5 and 6) can get credit for both terms if they pass the second semester. The practical effect of this change is to destroy the work ethic of those students who've figured out how to game the system. By their junior and senior years, they know that they can blow off the first term and, with some effort in the second, get credit for the full course. For the schools' part, annualization obviates the need to create costly, inefficient "off-track" spring sections of sequential courses for students who failed the fall section. This helps cut down drastically on night school and summer school, and also sends graduation rates skyward. Under this flawed model, teachers face inexorable pressure to get their numbers up in the second term, however they can. [bold added]

One of the metrics Klein's "business model" employs happens to be graduation rates.

Too bad that in the real business world, customers who have not been pickpocketed before entering the free market would not be confronted with a single huge, heavily-subsidized, inept (but apparently cheap) competitor and an army of small, expensive ones. And too bad that in a free market, it is the customer who sets his own standards for what constitutes an acceptable return on his investment.

In a free market, parents would have to spend actual, hard-earned money on their children's education, and might not be placated by simply having a piece of paper with "diploma" stamped on it in Gothic lettering shoved at them after their child has been coddled for several years. They might look at things like how successful a school's graduates were at such things as winning gainful employment or entering college. The inflationary, statistical expedients of publicity-hungry career politicians would no longer be able serve as a pretty facade for the mass disfigurement and extermination of young souls (See item 4.) that is happening at their parents' expense.

"But how would the poor go to school?" the whining will go. Hustling in the streets would be preferable to the above in many respects. The whole idea behind public education is that everyone needs and ought to have education, because education helps prepare children to survive as adults. Everyone ought to have two arms, too, but if the state started sending children to "public gymnasiums" to have one or both of them crippled or removed, there would be a massive public outrage and a loud call for the immediate abolition of the practice.

I see no essential difference between this and what is going on in many public schools today. Again, I call for a freeing of the educational sector from government control. New York should stop toying with cheap, toxic models from communist countries and use the real thing to educate its children.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 437

Details (Really Do) Kill

I would appear that indeed, as Tom Daschle once put it, "Details kill." Specifically, the very system of medical coverage he supports results in not only higher higher mortality, but poorer health, as a nice chart from Investors Business Daily indicates below.


Oh, and while we're entertaining invitations by the left to compare the semi-free business milieu for medicine in America with socialized medicine, where's Arnold Kling? Not only do we not need to try socialized medicine for ourselves to see whether it will work "this time," we don't need to follow his advice on the score of collecting any further data. (HT: C. August and Paul Hsieh)

Real Access to the Beach

Brian Phillips provides an update on a story I have touched on here before, and it's good news. There will soon be a chance for Texas voters to secure beach front property rights.

[T]he Texas Open Beaches Act (TOBA), which defines the area between the permanent vegetation line and the water as "public property". As a result, when storms and erosion move the vegetation line, private home owners can suddenly find themselves living on "public property" and they are forced to vacate their homes.

Texans will soon have a chance to put scenarios like this behind them.

Snow Rollers

Shortly before I moved last week, I saw the fascinating picture at right posted at Fresh Bilge:

[Snow rollers] are rarely seen so large and perfect. The biggest of these are about two feet high. They formed on March 31 in a field near Lewiston, Idaho. It was a very long, cold, and snowy winter in the interior of the Pacific Northwest this year.

From Watts up with That? is the following explanation:

[Such] snow rollers ... are extremely rare because of the unique combination of snow, wind, temperature and moisture needed to create them. They form with light but sticky snow and strong (but not too strong) winds. Some snow rollers are formed by gravity (i.e. rolling down a hill), but in this case, the snow rollers were generated by the wind.

More pictures there.

Have your laptop call home.

Over at Lifehacker is the following description of an interesting software program:

When your laptop goes missing Prey scans for open WiFi connections. When it can connect, either via WiFi or a hard line it will send you a report including the status of the computer, which programs are running, the active connections, a run down of the network location, a screenshot of the desktop, and if your laptop has an integrated webcam you'll even get a picture of the person sitting in front of it.

There are versions for Linux, Windows, and MacIntosh.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edit.

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Public Funding vs. Education

I almost never listen to talk radio anymore, but if I did, I bet I'd hear this story get beaten like a dead horse today:

A kindergartner's mother cannot read Scripture during show and tell, even if the Bible is the boy's favorite book, a U.S. appeals court said Monday in the latest challenge over religion in public schools.

The Marple Newtown School District in suburban Philadelphia told plaintiff Donna Kay Busch in October 2004 that she could not read the Bible passages during her son's "All About Me" program. The school did permit the boy to discuss a poster that included references to his church as well as his family, pet and best friend.

The reasoning behind the ruling is sound: A mother was attempting to proselytize and the state, having no business promoting any specific viewpoint, had to forbid the activity from taking place in a forum intended for education and paid for with public funds.

Within the context of this case, the judge did well. What's interesting about the case is the context in which it occurs, and the questions about government funding of education it quickly leads to.

Why should the state not be in the business of promoting one ideology or another? (And yes, theocratic protests to the contrary, Christianity is an ideology.) Because government's modus operandi is the deployment of physical force against individuals. Properly, this force is retaliatory in nature, and employed only for the protection of individual rights. In short, the government makes us safe to live our lives as we see fit.

Since life does not come with an instruction manual, a crucial part of this freedom involves the free examination and exchange of philosophical views. Should the government give even the remotest appearance of taking sides in such a debate, that debate is stifled, if not ended outright. That is precisely why the Founding Fathers wrote religious freedom into law and why America is under attack on all fronts from religious totalitarians today.

This case is an example.

Even if the Bible really were this child's favorite book, no one had any business reading from it at a government function. [Note: Except students. See first two comments.] (We'll get to the question of whether this should be a government function shortly.) But later in the story, that assertion is cast into doubt. The boy's mother apparently reads it to him every day and, being an evangelical Christian, also seems to feel that her mission is to do exactly what she was doing, preaching to the captive audience this event provided her.

Conservatives on talk radio and elsewhere -- and not even particularly religious or zealous ones at that -- will pooh-pooh this, asking what harm a little Bible story can do to a child. They will hold this decision up like a leper's shroud as a blatant example of "the left-wing agenda" gone mad. They will be right that one story might be harmless, but wide off the mark about the important point, and especially so if they complain that freedom of speech has been abridged.

That point would be that the government should not be telling us how to educate our own children, and the conservatives will be wrong because freedom of property was abridged first. Were the education system completely private, parents like Donna Kay Busch would be perfectly free to read Bible verses to their children all day in kindergartens run by like-minded individuals or, failing that, within their own homes. But they would not be free to force this on the children of other parents who do not agree that pounding Bible verses into the skulls of children all day is the best way to educate them.

If most rank-and-file conservatives appreciated the danger to property rights posed by public education, they would not support it. And if theocrats were sincerely interested in freedom of speech, they would also fight against public education because they would realize that every attempt on their part to inculcate their values in a school setting would, at best, end up in court and that other values will necessarily end up being taught. (Read on.) But they find the opportunity to preach at captive audiences too great to resist.

And it is these "other values" that "will necessarily end up being taught" that make this case really interesting. Like America's Founding Fathers (but for different reasons), leftists will insist that we must have public education so the citizenry will have the skills and knowledge necessary to function as responsible citizens of a republic.

This is true, but how do we decide what skills are appropriate or what constitutes knowledge? Should children be taught to obey the alleged word of an alleged god? Should children be taught to question all assertions? Should they be taught the scientific method? Should they be trained to accept any and every "consensus", so long as it is held by men who claim to be scientists?

Ultimately, the question of what constitutes knowledge is a philosophical one, and any educator, state-sponsored or not, will end up having to take a stand on it. In other words, public education, by its very nature, involves government interference in the realm of public debate. Specifically, public education forces anyone who has to pay for it, to promulgate ideas one may or may not agree with. This is always wrong.

So the left is also wrong here. While the conservatives mouth pieties to freedom of speech while ignoring the fact that nobody is keeping Ms. Busch from reading the Bible to her own child, leftists will, for example, hide behind the "scientific" "consensus" while ignoring the fact that environmentalism is an ideology, is not scientifically sound, and would not equal political guidance even if it were.

Freedom is of a piece, and violating part of it eventually endangers all of it. Stealing property by government force, even for a good purpose like education, lands people in court for things they ought to be free to do on their own, and obscures the proper political solution, freedom, from view.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added parenthetical note.
6-3-09: Corrected typo, HT: Jim May.

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Quick Roundup 436

Ugh! Good to have that cross-country move out of the way! My wife's dad and I logged nearly 2000 miles in four days of driving and we somehow managed to get almost everything into our new apartment and a 10'x10' storage unit. That wouldn't have happened nearly so quickly or easily without the help of the in-laws, who are very seasoned cross-country movers.

I'll be slowly recovering from a near-total news and blogging blackout over the next few days. That move took up nearly all of my time and Internet access was not yet available at the new place, anyway.

So here's a mixture of moving memories and a couple of things that struck me as interesting on my first morning back...

Moving Quote

Wife: Honey, with your assistance, I could move this stack of boxes.

Me: Okay. What do I need to do?

Wife: Move those boxes.

"Diesel" is NOT German for "Gasoline"

Somehow when picking up the truck, my wife's dad got the impression that it ran on gasoline. That seemed odd to me, given the size of the truck, but I'd used one that was one size smaller from the same company for a previous move, and it did use gasoline. I was primed, so to speak, to believe him. I remember saying at one point, "It sounds a little like a diesel engine." But so did the other one.

So we took turns putting gasoline into the tank the first day, and noticed very sluggish performance as the day wore on and especially on the morning of the second day. I filled first. I'll plead "warning label fatigue", but wish I'd had the presence of mind to pursue my earlier uncertainty further. Yes, flooring it to get 15 miles per hour is somewhat like "driving a turtle." We took it to a truck stop to get it looked at, but everyone was off.

Luckily, we managed to find just the right guy to solve our predicament. We learned, while on the horn with him, that the truck was diesel when we went to check its year of manufacture per his instructions and saw a poorly-placed warning sign about which fuel to use. The cap was not green or otherwise marked regarding proper fuel.

So the mechanic drove out to meet us, dumped the fuel filter, and employed a few tricks to get the engine to start again -- and we very quickly refueled with the engine running. We were out about 300 bucks, but we were back on the road.

The truck almost immediately started running well again. We decided not to turn it off at all until our last stop of the day. The truck started and ran perfectly well the next day. Except for a little iffy-ness just after the mechanic got it re-started, we had no further trouble at all from the truck.

I certainly wouldn't recommend doing this, but it looks like The Straight Dope got the question of what happens when you use the wrong fuel partially wrong.

Those Swedes think of everything. Almost.

In the process of going through the parts list and instructions for a wardrobe from IKEA, I noted a very important deficiency, which I quickly rectified with a five-minute walk to the grocer across the street.

Specifically, there was no mention of a crucial tool (pictured at right) necessary for the performance of any such task.

Otherwise, I was happy. All the parts were there and the instructions were very clear. This was in marked contrast to a bathroom storage unit whose unclear pictograms caused me to make three assembly mistakes before I decided to ignore them and just go by the illustration on the box.

Tara Smith on Judical Appointments

I thought Tara Smith made several excellent points in an editorial (HT: HBL) that recently appeared in The Houston Chronicle. I especially liked this:

The rhetoric of "activism" notwithstanding, the proper interpretation and application of our law cannot be reduced to a purely mechanical process. If it could, we would be replacing Justice Souter with a computer.

I'll remember this analogy the next time I find myself in a conversation with someone who carelessly bandies about the term "qualified" pertaining to any public office and see where things go after that.

Heh!

Keith Lockitch of ARI notes that the silly "green" shopping bags I keep seeing in Boston really are green. Here is a part of his excerpt from Canada's National Post:

... 64% of the reusable bags tested were contaminated with some level of bacteria and close to 30% had elevated bacterial counts higher than what’s considered safe for drinking water.

Further, 40% of the bags had yeast or mold, and some of the bags had an unacceptable presence of coliforms, faecal intestinal bacteria, when there should have been 0.

And yes, the environmentalists probably will object to the detergents necessary to clean them.

-- CAV

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