12-23-10 Hodgepodge

Yearly Break

Each year, during the holidays, I take about a week off from blogging. Due to travel, I'm starting my week a day early -- tomorrow morning. I expect to be back here by January 3 at the latest.

In the meantime, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Weekend Reading

"This ongoing Avastin travesty pits a cancer-fighting drug against a drug-fighting cancer -- an out-of-control federal agency whose mission unashamedly includes choking off patients' access to vital drugs." Tom Bowden -- in "The Avastin Travesty," at PajamasMedia (HT: Amit Ghate)

"Investing isn't like burying a time capsule. You shouldn't entomb your investments on Jan. 1, [and] dig them up a year later to see if anything worked out." Jonathan Hoenig -- in "Punt the Predictions and Focus on Today," at SmartMoney

"In the quiet moments of this holiday time, it can be helpful to stand back and take a look at what's important (and not so important) in your life. In fact, this sort of self-reflection can and should be a part of your everyday life..." Michael Hurd -- in "Examine Your Priorities!," at DrHurd.com

My Two Cents

In the Bowden piece, I particularly liked his discussion of how rational individuals make personal health decisions: based on their informed judgement and priorities, not on what others feel or imagine they should do. This process is what socialized medicine disrupts.

The Hoenig and Hurd pieces both remind me of one aspect of my youthful annoyance with New Year's resolutions. "Why think about such things just once a year?" is basically what I would think. I never abandoned that basic premise, but eventually came to appreciate the usefulness of reconsidering things each year from a long-range or beyond-the-usual perspective. One sometimes can find a need to make a big change. I still don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do look back each year and make whatever changes I think I need to make.

Another thing that would annoy me about New Year's resolutions was the fact that often, the very people who made the biggest production out of them were both obviously fishing for approval and most likely to break their their own promises. While there can be a benefit to making big goals public, I find lip service to self-improvement to be the lowest imaginable form of hypocrisy.

Independence

Myrhaf has an interesting post up on the virtue of independence over at New Clarion. The video there shows in lurid (to me, anyway) detail how easily the desire for approval from others can cause some people not to form or express their own judgment.

Three for the Road

1. Via ARI, I have learned that the Brewmaster of one of my favorite breweries, Dogfish Head, has two things in common with me: He was an English major as an undergraduate -- I doubled that with math. -- and admires Ayn Rand. My favorite beer from their line is 90 Minute IPA.

2. Out Christmas shopping most of the day yesterday, I got whatever gifts I could wrapped at the store. I have many talents, but wrapping gifts is not one of them! While watching the wrappers, I recalled a classic Dave Barry column about gift wrapping.

"And the paper WAS festooned with pictures of Frosty the Snowman.

"And Joseph WAS going to throweth it away, but Mary saideth unto him, she saideth, 'Holdeth it! That is nice paper! Saveth it for next year!'

"And Joseph DID rolleth his eyeballs.

"And the baby Jesus WAS more interested in the paper than, for example, the frankincense."

But these words do not appear in the Bible, which means that the very first Christmas gifts were NOT wrapped. This is because the people giving those gifts had two important characteristics:

1. They were wise.

2. They were men.

I laugh every time I read that thing.

3. Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal gives ten reasons for not wanting an iPad for Christmas. I think iPads are kind of neat, but have to agree with all but the last. (The folks in Cupertino do have intellectual property rights...)

-- CAV

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The Cult of the Gaps

There is much I disagree with in his article, but New Humanist writer Michael Bywater asks a very interesting question about what he calls "the last really successful religion ... since Islam:" How did its science-fiction-writing founder pull it off?

[The] first [book] hits the perfect pitch of laying out mumbo-jumbo in just clear enough terms for people who think they're terribly significant but who aren't that bright (there are a lot of movie stars in the lists, wouldn't you say?) to think that they're grasping something terribly important which actually makes sense. And, secondly, it doesn't pose a Creator. Just a bunch of clever aliens. Whom we can turn back into if we have enough money.

Among the things I strongly disagree with about this article is Bywater's eagerness to dismiss many of the followers of this religion as simply stupid. Hard-working is not a synonym of smart, nor is a lack of philosophical sophistication the same thing as a lack of intellectual ability. The full use of one's intellect requires effort guided by proper philosophical guidance. Omit either and even a genius can look (and might as well be) stupid.

But Bywater does have a point, however obscure he makes it, and it is related to the notion of the "God of the Gaps," which Wikipedia describes as, "a view of God as existing in the 'gaps' or aspects of reality that are currently unexplained by scientific knowledge, or that otherwise lack a plausible natural explanation." (In addition, our culture's philosophical chaos makes many philosophical matters (especially normative abstractions) look to many people like they fall into such a "gap.")

Bywater has a tenuous grasp on how, referring to, "Apotheosis without the Theos," but there's more to his point than that. Earlier in his article, he notes that:

We may think that supersymmetry or, even more scarily, M-theory are somehow truer or more real but that's because most of us can't see that mathematics is another language for telling stories in -- indeed, stories in which the most important thing, just as in Athenian tragedy, is not that they are necessarily true but that they are internally coherent.

Bywater precedes this by nihilistically (and wrongly) calling basically everything (including, for example, gravity!) "bollocks," but yet he manages to come close to identifying a strand in the culture that predisposes otherwise intelligent adults to accept the quasi-scientific religion he describes. To the extent that many people respect science more than religion, and yet don't really grasp science, they will be susceptible to, shall we say, "cargo cult science ... cults."

In addition to holding a proper respect for science, most people have enough common sense to demand "internal coherence" of new ideas that they examine. That speaks well of our culture compared to more primitive times, but it is adherence to reality, not just internal coherence, that is the standard by which a belief system ought to be judged.

And so, we have an implicitly rational culture where science is revered, but which is also rife with confusion about philosophical issues. In such a culture, it is no longer enough to tell people that a message has come from on high. It has to look logical and scientific, at least up to a certain point even to fool people with poor training in science.

And so, into a gap perhaps being vacated by God, move other assertions whose quasi-scientific and coherent character manage, in today's culture at least, to mask their arbitrariness just enough to fool some of the people all of the time.

-- CAV

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A Hastening Descent

Hugo Chavez, faced with stronger opposition in a new legislature and other rumbles of popular discontent, is quickening the pace at which he consolidates power. Venezuela's lame duck congress has given Chavez a year and a half to rule by decree, bypassing their newly-elected counterparts. In the name of combating severe flooding, Chavez plans to do the following (as quoted by Ron Radosh), among other things:

• Media and Telecommunications. The modification of the Media Responsibility Law and the Telecommunications Law place severe restrictions on the Internet, centralizing access under the control of a government server. They re-categorize the airwaves as a "public good" and set in place harsh penalties for arcane and obtuse violations of the law. The laws require TV stations to re-apply for their licenses and for the owners to be in the country (a clear reference to Globovision, whose owner, Dr. Guillermo Zuloaga, is in political exile in the United States).
• Electoral Reform. The reform of the Political Party Law establishes the crime of electoral fraud. Fraud would be committed if a politician changed parties, voted against legislation that was "ideologically represented" by their "electoral offer" (on file when they registered their candidacy with the National Electoral Council), or if they make common cause with ideas or people who are not ideologically akin to their electoral offer. Sanctions are the expulsion from parliament and inability to run for public office for up to eight years. This law is meant to protect against individuals or political parties turning against Chavez, as happened with the opposition parties of PODEMOS (We Can) and PPT (Fatherland for All).
• Economy and Governance. Chavez is pushing through a block of five laws: Popular Power, Planning and Popular Power, Communes, Social Control, and the law of Development and Support of the Communal Economy. These laws establish the commune as the lowest level of Venezuelan economy and government. They set in place the Popular Power, which is responsible to the Revolutionary leadership (Chavez) for all governing (eliminating the municipalities and regional government's constitutional mandate). To facilitate the creation of this new governance model, the Assembly is approving the Law of the System for Transferring the Responsibilities of the States and Municipalities to the Popular Power.

The extermination of rational political debate is the clear purpose of all of these new laws, a point hardly lost on the author of the anti-Chavez Devil's Excrement blog:

Imagine that! a Bill basically saying that if you vote what you feel or think, you can be impeached for treason to the party slate you were elected on!

... [I]f everyone has to vote in the same way, why have a Parliament at all? Just calculate the percentage of Deputies for each party and for four years, say each Bill sent by Chavez down was approved by 61% to 39% or whatever the outcome of the election was. No discussion, no arguments, just have the party send the Bill, we will process it and we are done.. Why even pay the Deputies! They can build housing for example.

Interestingly, the Radosh piece likens Chavez's methods to those of the Nazis, and notes as well that at least one Obama associate will probably welcome the news:

Bill Ayers, who is on record as extolling Chavez's educational system as the one he wants imposed in the United States, must be elated today after learning that university autonomy will be abolished, and that the university will now require "teaching courses on Popular Power and communes, and [that it] focuses the pedagogy around revolutionary principles."

Too bad the parallels are neither just historic, nor just overseas: The FCC is likely to expand government power over the Internet this morning, one of Obama's closest advisors has advocated a "notice and takedown" law on Internet postings, and his Attorney General sounds perilously close to forgetting the that there is a difference between dissenting speech and incitement.

"The ability to go into your basement, turn on your computer, find a site that has this kind of hatred spewed ... they have an ability to take somebody who is perhaps just interested, perhaps just on the edge, and take them over to the other side," [Holder] said.

Why not (really) go after the terrorists and their nation-state sponsors, rather than our ability to access information?

One common thread in the above is the notion that because humans have free will, they therefore cannot be trusted. Would-be dictators use this notion to sow fear (and gain approval from the still-free) at first, and then to excuse their more obvious power-grabs later, when it is almost too late.

It isn't too late for us here in America, but it is, or soon will be, in Venezuela.

-- CAV

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Political Opinion?

Some time this weekend, an Instapundit link to a Hot Air story about a leftist "fact" site caught my attention. It looked promising, but was very long, so it remained unread in a browser tab until this morning, when I decided to read it. Unfortunately, and like many conservative pieces of its kind, it led off with quite a few useful facts, but then completely blew it in terms of analysis.

Here is a sample of the good stuff that hooked me into reading the whole article, which describes a dishonest attempt to promote ObamaCare:

Let's start with the straw man that "a 'government takeover' conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees." By this measure, there has been no government takeover of healthcare in countries like France or Switzerland. Even in England, most doctors, dentists, optometrists and other providers of local healthcare are self-employed, and contract their services back to the NHS. If PolitiFact wants to invoke the "European approach" to healthcare, it might help if they could accurately describe it.

I am sure that many opponents of ObamaCare were unaware of this "debunking" of the (correct) assessment of ObamaCare as a government takeover of the medical sector. Upon reading the above, I recalled one of Ayn Rand's discussions (third excerpt) of the "differences" between fascism and socialism:

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it -- at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens ...

Given the recent increase in interest in Ayn Rand, I became curious (and half-hopeful) as to whether something like this kind of analysis was about to be brought in to complement the above disingenuous characterization of European health care arrangements.

Not only was such an opportunity wasted, the blog posting embraced a particularly dangerous fallacy used daily by the left!

The point here is not that PolitiFact's claim is a lie, or that PolitiFact is biased (although the latter is fairly obvious). Rather, the point is that the question of whether ObamaCare is a government takeover of the healthcare system is one of political opinion, not a simple question of fact. Indeed, the difference in opinion between those whom PolitiFact labels as liars and the CBO is a percentage point or so.

Accordingly, PolitiFact's Biggest Lie is the one left unstated -- that a political judgment call can be easily labeled as a "lie" in the first instance. However, for practical reasons, I do not condemn that lie. After all, the establishment media -- of which PolitiFact is a part -- is still in the business of trying to manufacture consent to a center-left political narrative. PolitiFact exists largely as an attempt to deligitimize [sic] certain political opinions. We now know which political opinion most bothered the establishment in 2010. That is a valuable service to everyone. [link dropped, bold added]

Any argument about whether a given government measure protects individual rights or not will rely on the normative abstractions of political philosophy; and it may indeed be complicated to argue on such a basis that certain aspects of ObamaCare are illegitimate intrusions of the government into the economy. But neither complexity nor reliance on abstractions will necessarily sever such a judgment from reality as the above passage implies.

Or: ObamaCare is a government takeover of medical care because (and to the extent that) it replaces individual decisions in the medical marketplace with government orders. But you can make such a clear statement only if you have some confidence that your abstractions (aka "opinions") actually have a basis in fact.

Often, such conservative exposes present an array of facts that damn a leftist position, only to follow up with a flimsy argument that isn't really built up from those (or other) facts. Here, it's much worse: The damning facts are followed by a dismissal of applying abstract principles as such, which is to say, an adoption of the very premise the piece should be vehemently attacking. The end result is that facts end up getting tossed out altogether!

The real pity is that facts (and objective arguments, not just "opinion") are on the side of freedom in medicine. This is because the ideal of political freedom has an objective basis in man's nature as a rational animal, and particularly in terms of how he can best obtain what he needs for survival.

Any opponent can look at the squalor or waiting lines in a socialist or fascist health care arrangement and ask whether we want the same over here. But only abstract principles can explain why such systems yield such results or help us discern whether some "repeal and replace" scheme is really just more of the same. To dismiss abstractions (and the difficult work of formulating them objectively) as mere indulgence in whim is to forfeit a life-and-death battle.

-- CAV

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12-18-10 Hodgepodge

Right Reaction, Wrong Target

Regarding FIFA's recent decision to permit Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, Ann Killion is right to be indignant about it.

But am I expected to cover my head, arms and legs -- while working in 120 degree heat? And what about my friends who would face five years in prison by attending the World Cup. That's the penalty for homosexuality, which is illegal in Qatar.

However, she is wrong to sloppily blame capitalism or Western values as the bases for such an absurd decision.

The 22 men on the FIFA Executive Committee apparently don't care that Qatar isn't exactly a leader when it comes to human rights. They were wowed by imaginary stadiums, the impact of petrodollars and president Sepp Blatter's apparent desire to take over the world.

Blatter's decision regarding Qatar fits right in with holding this year's tournament recently in South Africa (while pointedly doing nothing to quell the annoyance of vuvulzelas) and his strong desire to have China host one in the future. For one thing, none of these countries is exactly a soccer hotbed and for another, he decries the "arrogance" of the Western world since its fans want the games held in places where there is a strong appreciation for the game and in which they are free to behave as they usually do.

I have always regarded Blatter as either a multiculturalist or a pragmatist hoping to take advantage of multiculturalism. It is almost amusing to see leftists so upset about the choice of Qatar since so many of them are also such ardent multicultural apologists for Islamic totalitarianism when it sees expression as the Iraqi "insurgency" or courtroom maneuvers to undermine individual freedom throughout the West.

Rather than smear capitalism -- government petrodollars would not exist under actual capitalism -- or western civilization -- this non-leftist, secular, pro-Western man would have broken ranks with Blatter had he a vote -- Killion ought to check her own premises and reconsider the whole idea of multiculturalism (aka cultural relativism) now that she has had a sneak preview of it being put into practice.

Weekend Reading

"If a cupcake stand can't survive more than a few hours' exposure to bureaucracy, what happens to real businesses?" -- Dana Berliner and Jeff Rowes, in "Discouraging Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs" at Investor's Business Daily (via HBL)

"[P]rices might temporarily rise as a result of a speculator making massive bullish bets, but because the investor has to eventually sell to someone, and because nobody is bigger than the market, prices inevitably end up quickly correcting long before the operator can capitalize on the scheme." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Why Cornering a Market Doesn't Work" at SmartMoney

"Psychologically speaking, the biggest problem with the holidays is that too many people approach it as a duty or as drudgery." -- Michael Hurd, in "Stress-Free holidays" at DrHurd.com

"Personal responsibility thus presupposes that an individual has the freedom to make his own decisions and to enjoy -- or suffer -- the consequences thereof." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Beware Counterfeit 'Responsibility'" at Pajamas Media

"Sorry, kid, your business can wait: some guy you don't know wants cheaper insurance." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "The Irresponsible Individual Mandate" at Forbes

Working While Standing

I am loath to buy office furniture since my thinness quickly makes a mockery of almost any chair I use for any length of time. I have also had, as a result, an on-again, off-again interest in working standing up. I have played around with it a few times, but found nothing really workable in terms of ease-of-use.

Basically, I do at least know that I hate just standing even more than just sitting. The ideal arrangement for me would enable me to alternate easily between the two. Via John Cook, there's an excellent page about just such a solution. This, or something very much like it, is where I will go once I have more space and the money to sink into decent furniture. I will experiment a lot more before buying furniture, though.

Actually, now that I think about it, this reminds me a lot of how my Dad set up the studio for his watercolor hobby.

The Herd Mentality

Related to a point I made last week, Michael Hurd has an interesting blog post about "groupthink."

Individuality and reason require a lot of thought. The person who succumbs to group think is surrendering the responsibility to think -- i.e. to ask and answer the kinds of questions I just asked, in these examples. Each and every time he surrenders this responsibility, he "gets off easy," but, in another sense, makes life harder for himself. How? Because, by evading his responsibility to think for himself, he goes through life dependent on the appraisals of others.

Just because everyone around you is saying the same thing doesn't make them (or you) right.

The Death of Sports Writing?

Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated writes an amusing (and somewhat self-refuting) piece on computer-generated sports reporting.

[N]ow the robots have come for me. A new media company called StatSheet operates 345 college basketball websites, one for every Division I team. Each site -- they're all accessible through statsheet.com -- is chockablock with game stories. And every one of those stories is written not by a human being, but by a malevolent piece of software intent on killing sportswriters.

Here's a verbatim sample:

Rice is definitely firing on all cylinders. On December 16th at home, the Owls beat the Trojans, 65-55, in the Las Vegas Hoops Classic.

A note about this matchup: The RPI ranked Arkansas-Little Rock higher, #89 to #159.

The game came down to a big separation between Rice and Arkansas-Little Rock in shooting and a somewhat smaller one in assists..

The Owls shot 51% while the Trojans struggled against a good defensive effort with only 35%. Rice beat Arkansas-Little Rock with assists, 21 to 12, and facilitated more balanced scoring. A highlight for Rice was the 21 assists, which was way up above their 13.1 season average.

Arsalan Kazemi led all scorers against the Trojans with 15 points on 75% shooting in 31 minutes. Kazemi also contributed a game-leading 9 rebounds.

Rice put a hurting on a very good Arkansas-Little Rock team. The Owls are now 5-4 and we look good early in the season. Our record against RPI Top 100 teams (Arkansas-Little Rock #89) improves to 1-2.

Rushin quotes Leigh Montville on sports writing as saying that, "It's not really sports, and it's not really writing." Certainly, if people aren't catching things like the Engrish version of "put the hurt on" in the passage above, then Montville is right, as far as game summaries are concerned. I'd also note that such a treatment would not do justice to a really important or memorable game like a human could.

Here's my take. Computers are freeing sports writers to report on really interesting things or to write more commentary. And while computer-generated summaries might mean fewer low-level jobs for aspiring sports writers, how useful would it be for someone to spend very much time on such assignments? If he's any good, he won't be doing them for long, and if he isn't any better than this, he ought to consider another career.

-- CAV

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Dirty Rice

I got the urge earlier in the week to make my own version of yet another Louisiana dish, named above, and got it right on the first try. (Of course, that's relatively easy to do when you don't have seventeen different authentic versions to choose from -- or average out on a spreadsheet!)

At some point in the process, I learned a bit of trivia about Louisiana cuisine that I hadn't known before: A common combination of ingredients -- onion, celery, and bell pepper -- in that cuisine is called the "holy trinity."

As a culinary term, the holy trinity originally refers specifically to chopped onions, bell peppers, and celery, combined in a rough ratio of 1:2:3 and used as the staple base for much of the cooking in the Cajun and Louisiana Creole regional cuisines of the state of Louisiana, USA. The preparation of classic Cajun/Creole dishes such étouffée, gumbo, and jambalaya all start from the base of this holy trinity. Similar combinations of vegetables are known as mirepoix in French cooking, refogado in Portuguese, soffritto in Italian, and sofrito in Spanish. [links dropped]

I don't stick to the ratio mentioned above, nor have I seen it mentioned (except in Wikipedia) or otherwise noticed it during my occasional tinkering with Louisiana cooking. All the same, I have grown to appreciate the combination, and see that it forms the backbone of a favorite cuisine of mine for a good reason.

Until I made this, I never was particularly wild about dirty rice: Other factors than just my own tastes -- I often refer to one of those "factors" here as "Mrs. Van Horn" -- caused me to consider making this. All the same, I wanted to be able to enjoy this as much as possible. My usual go-to site yielded five candidate recipes, of which I slightly modified the fourth to get the below recipe, which I like enough that I'll probably decide to make it on my own occasionally, down the road.

Bon appetit.

-- CAV

***

Dirty Rice

Preparation Time is about an hour.

Ingredients

water, 2 cups
olive oil, about 1/2 cup
rice, 1 cup
ground beef, 1 lb
ground pork sausage, 1 lb
bell pepper
onion
celery, 3 stalks
minced garlic, 1 tbsp
Tony Chachere's, 1 tsp
pepper, 1/2 tsp
cayenne, 1/4 tsp
parsley, 1 tbsp

Directions

1. In parallel with the remaining steps, add water for rice and a dash of olive oil to small pot and set to boil. Upon boiling: add rice, stir, return to a boil, take heat to low, cover, and cook for 25 minutes.

2. If necessary, thaw meat and sausage.

3. In parallel with the next step, chop onion, celery, and bell pepper. Place together in a large bowl.

4. In a large pot, saute ground beef and sausage in 1/4 cup olive oil until brown. Drain and set aside.

5. Add 1/4 cup olive oil to large pot and "sweat" the vegetables and garlic over medium-high heat, covered for five minutes. Stir, then cook, covered, for another five minutes. Remove from heat.

6. Once rice has finished cooking, combine it and all other ingredients in pot containing vegetables, mixing thoroughly.

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Who Needs Sharia?

It seems that an Austrian man was recently fined 800 Euros for yodeling as he mowed his lawn. The grounds, as far as I could gather, weren't something legitimate like, "disturbing the peace" (perhaps exacerbated by a motive to mock or disturb an assembly), but "defamation of religious symbols" and "prevention of religious worship." (I wish to emphasize here that someone could get fined under a proper legal code for disturbing a religious service -- but on grounds independent of the fact that it is a religious service. I haven't seen any other commentator consider this possibility.)

Apparently, his Moslem neighbors asserted that his yodeling was a mockery of the call to prayer that they regularly blare over loudspeakers installed outside their house, so they hauled their neighbor into court. The judge, informed by a legal code that is apparently not intended to protect individual rights, meted out the punishment.

This story exemplifies a common problem in the West that conservatives dislike, but seem almost completely impotent to address: Moslems understand that many already-existing, illegitimate laws can easily be commandeered to enforce their religious dicta. Conservatives, almost all without convincing arguments against such laws (and quite a few being would-be theocrats who would behave similarly, if given the chance) end up becoming angry at Moslems which, although justified, is not alone an effective response.

Just as the West will not defeat Islamists militarily by fighting a limited war or negotiating with state sponsors of terrorism, it will not continue to enjoy freedom by pretending that the government exists for any purpose other than to protect individual rights. Barbarians who wish to kill or enslave us for not following their religion are only as dangerous as we permit them to be.

To end on a positive and motivating note, I recommend the above embedded video.

-- CAV

Updates

12-17-10: A commenter points me to a recent post on a related topic by Paul McKeever.

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Not Always a Lie

The first chapter of a book about cartography a good friend gave me some time back begins with the following passage.

Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it's essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality. As a scale model, the map must use symbols that almost always are proportionally much bigger or thicker than the features they represent. To avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality. There's no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.

And it ends with this.

Where a deep distrust of maps reflects either ignorance of how maps work or a bad personal experience with maps, this book can help overcome an unhealthy skepticism called cartophobia. Maps need be no more threatening or less reliable than words, and rejecting or avoiding or ignoring maps is akin to the mindless fears of illiterates who regard books as evil or dangerous. This book's revelations about how maps must be white lies but may sometimes become real lies should provide the same sort of reassuring knowledge that allows humans to control and exploit fire and electricity.

Based on the rest of the chapter and on the quality of past recommendations from this friend, I am sure this book will be quite good on balance. Nevertheless, it is worth considering several dictionary definitions of the word, "lie." I'll go ahead and present them for both the noun and the verb.

noun

1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.
2. something intended or serving to convey a false impression; imposture: His flashy car was a lie that deceived no one.
3. an inaccurate or false statement.
4. the charge or accusation of lying: He flung the lie back at his accusers.

verb (used without object)

5. to speak falsely or utter untruth knowingly, as with intent to deceive.
6. to express what is false; convey a false impression. [minor format edits]

Author Mark Monmonier clearly distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate "lies," but the real question is why he feels compelled to call the legitimate abstraction and the (equally legitimate) selective re-creation of the cartographer "lies" at all.

As Monmonier himself indicates (and rightly likens to other forms of communication that we all use), an informed context on the part of the map reader will include the knowledge that such abstraction and re-creation had to occur, as well as some idea of what other information one should acquire or summon from memory in order to understand what the map is intended to convey, as well as to judge its veracity. To the point, the relevant distinction isn't between "white" and "black" lies, but between truth and falsehood -- and I don't think Monmonier is so enamored with his clever book title to want to carry such trite word play through his entire book. Nor do I think he completely endorses the notion that the standard for truth is some obviously impossible criterion like, "Reproduction of reality in every single, minute respect."

The paragraphs remind me of the following critique of the widespread and nefarious influence of a certain German philosopher:

The "phenomenal" world, said [Immanuel] Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man's mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man's conceptual faculty: man's basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled "categories" and "forms of perception") which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man's concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are "limited," said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason's validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the "noumenal" world. The "noumenal" world is unknowable; it is the world of "real" reality, "superior" truth and "things in themselves" or "things as they are" -- which means: things as they are not perceived by man.

Even apart from the fact that Kant's theory of the "categories" as the source of man's concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man's consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes -- deaf, because he has ears -- deluded, because he has a mind -- and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them. (Ayn Rand, "For the New Intellectual," For the New Intellectual, 30.)

I took a look for Kant's name in the index. It doesn't appear, but that doesn't mean that Monmonier's peculiar use of the term "lie" isn't an example of Kant's pervasive cultural influence, either.

You might claim -- as most people do -- that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? "Don't be so sure -- nobody can be certain of anything." You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: "This may be good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice." You got that from Plato. Or: "That was a rotten thing to do, but it's only human, nobody is perfect in this world." You got that from Augustine. Or: "It may be true for you, but it's not true for me." You got it from William James. Or: "I couldn't help it! Nobody can help anything he does." You got it from Hegel. Or: "I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality." You got it from Kant. Or: "It's evil, because it's selfish." You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: "Act first, think afterward"? They got it from John Dewey. (Ayn Rand, in "Philosophy: Who Needs It?")

It is, of course, too early for me to tell whether Monmonier really regards the practice of his profession as "lying," and it is quite possible that I won't be able to tell definitively even after I have read the entire book. But it would not surprise me, given some of the bizarre philosophical ideas I have seen espoused by -- or holding sway over -- other people of similar educational and professional attainment.

As, perhaps, a further example of the pervasiveness of the influence of modern philosophy, a commenter yesterday reminded me that many people, scrupulously rational in their professional lives, can accept the most outlandish notions without question when they fall beyond their area of expertise. Does Monmonier rebel against the idea that mapping is lying -- and yet at the same time fail to challenge the notions that thought is delusion and communication is deception?

And so it is that my already-interesting book has the bonus of a philosophical "subplot."

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edit.

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Soft Lysenkoism

Daniel Sarewitz of Slate grapples with the fact that most scientists are Democrats and, to his credit, finds that fact a "problem." Unfortunately, his analysis is limited by aspects of the very vicious circle he is, in fact, unwittingly observing and commenting on. Discussing an upcoming appearance by Barack Obama on Mythbusters, where he hopes to "reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality," Sarewitz considers the correlation between sides of the global warming debate and political affiliation. You are getting warm, Mr. Sarewitz, and it's not due to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Sarewitz correctly notes that, "evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth," and that these anti-capitalist policies have caused many conservatives to become "suspicious of the science."

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence -- or causation? Now this would be a good case for Mythbusters.

Thank you, Mr. Sarewitz. Also, you are getting red hot.

Sarewitz also gets points for acknowledging the fact that the monolithic political culture of modern science endangers its credibility with the public, but he gets no cigar. His stab at a solution is something of a Band-Aid, and an attempt to reverse cause and effect. Simply (somehow) having more Republican scientists might indeed lend more surface credibility to science, but having more would likely require fixing the "something" that is "going on that is as yet barely acknowledged, let alone understood."

I agree that there is something going on that is barely acknowledged (at least as a problem), and which is encouraging Democrats to become scientists, rewarding scientists who favor leftist policy reactions to scientific findings, and causing certain areas likely to cause enormous expansion of state power to become "hot" prospects for funding. But that something is actually well understood: It is state sponsorship of scientific research.

One need only revisit one of the darkest examples of state "encouragement" of science and use a little imagination to understand what is going on.

Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko's methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin's death. [bold added]

This example is less crude and is closer to home than one might think. Leftist ideology favors redistribution of wealth -- and already practices it in terms of deciding which topics and which scientists receive funding expropriated from private citizens via taxation and inflation. Grant proposals come by nature from ideas deemed likely to generate new data in support of a given theory. Many scientists have pet theories to which they have devoted entire careers -- and some of them are in charge of reviewing grant proposals.

If the government starts becoming concerned that global warming is a problem (i.e., is already predisposed to believe positive results), starts funding research to determine the extent of the problem, and has "experts" committed to the theory of anthropogenic global warming reviewing the grant proposals, which scientists are going to become encouraged, and which discouraged? And what of those dissenters who go to private funding sources instead, but practically have to label their articles as advertisements since only the government is supposedly free from bias. (As if the self-interest of a private donor or even a corporation completely divorces someone from wanting to know the truth. And as if the government can't possibly become a less-than-objective arbiter of which ideas deserve research funds.)

The fact that the government might make drastic policy decisions in reaction to a scientific verdict that there is man-made global warming is bad enough -- and confuses the debate among laymen. Whether there is man-made global warming and what to do about it are two separate questions from two separate spheres (science and political philosophy). But setting aside the attraction that some "fringe" (or incompetent or not-really) scientists might hold on some conservatives, state interference in science can -- without full-blown Stalinist repression -- compromise and politicize the scientific process.

I think that the fact that so many scientists are Democrats is primarily a cultural phenomenon stemming from the kinds of philosophical ideas that predominate our culture (and particularly the universities that educate our scientists), but state funding of science reinforces that tendency and entrenches the worst offenders, as I have indicated above. By the time we see a meaningful number of prominent non-leftists in science again, other cultural changes will have had to occur. And that -- helping such changes along -- is where the most fruitful efforts will take place.

-- CAV

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Two Snapshots

Articles about two completely different subjects demonstrate the urgent need for cultural change in America. A common thread the two share is something like this: "What should we do differently, in the political sense, than we did before?" Unfortunately, the answer in each case is, "Have the government run things more efficiently," rather than, "Start getting the government's nose out of our daily affairs."

Our first example comes from City Journal, where Nicole Gelinas takes a look at the political climate in New Orleans five years after Katrina.

It turns out that instead of looking for a heroic potentate to work miracles from on high, New Orleanians were making smaller-scale, bottom-up changes that would truly help their city. Beginning in the same election [that saw Ray Nagin reelected], voters reshaped the city council: today, only one of the seven council members is a pre-Katrina holdover. More important is that the members' résumés are subtly different from those of the old days. Fewer have community-organizing or social-services backgrounds; more have had careers in law, real estate, and management. These new members are likelier to view government as a provider of efficient public services than to consider it a weapon for social justice or a dispenser of jobs. They know, too, that city voters are paying attention in a way that they never have before. As new councilwoman Susan Guidry puts it, the biggest change in the electorate is "the level of citizen involvement" in day-to-day issues. [bold added]

This is a concrete improvement over what had been in place, but not the fundamental change that New Orleans would need for substantial or lasting improvement.

This problem is hardly isolated. Here's an elaboration on what some conservatives mean by, "repeal and replace."

End Medicaid's open-ended entitlement and start treating beneficiaries like American citizens rather than wards of the state. Make the competitive advantage of private insurance available to them through vouchers, and leave the open-ended entitlement for disabled individuals and those with serious chronic illnesses. [minor format edits]

In each case, we are seeing people respond to the obvious harm that "big government" causes by "reforming" it or reigning in its "excesses" -- as if it is possible to fix the inherently broken welfare state.

It is as if someone whose circles included lots of murderous acquaintances came to the realization that this wasn't good for him -- and chose to start hanging around with thieves instead. It may be an improvement in terms of buying time, but the nature of the problem -- that all criminal behavior comes from the same basic cause -- means that such a "solution" is far from enough.

The problem isn't big government, but government functioning outside its proper scope. Until more Americans begin to see this, we will see only half-measures as reforms -- half-measures that, at best, would look like the first steps towards proper government we really need. Does anyone remember school vouchers?

-- CAV

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12-11-10 Hodgepodge

Fox News on Stuxnet

Over at Voices for Reason, I learned of an interesting article about a topic I haven't thought about much lately: the Stuxnet worm. It's an oldie but a goodie.

[Computer expert Ralph] Langer argues that no single Western intelligence agency had the skills to pull this off alone. The most likely answer, he says, is that a consortium of intelligence agencies worked together to build the cyber bomb. And he says the most likely confederates are the United States, because it has the technical skills to make the virus, Germany, because reverse-engineering Siemen's product would have taken years without it, and Russia, because of its familiarity with both the Iranian nuclear plant and Siemen's systems.

I agree with Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute, who ends his blog post as follows: "Is sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program enough to safeguard us? It buys us time — and that's a good thing -- but we must remember that the threat from Iran is broader than just its nuclear ambitions."

Weekend Reading

"For years, I have recommended that people keep a journal. ... It's one of the hardest things to motivate somebody to do, and yet once done, one of the most effective." -- Michael Hurd, in "Write It Down" at DrHurd

"[W]hen we feel it, in our bodies or in our investment portfolios, we have two choices: acknowledge the pain and make a change, or ignore it and hope it goes away. I'm not one for wishful thinking." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "When a Trade Hurts, Don't Ignore the Pain" at SmartMoney

My Two Cents

Regarding Michael Hurd's advice above, I'd further recommend -- based on how social media sometimes seem diabolically designed to make people less introspective -- making such a journal entirely private. I say this even though most people do not fit into the stereotypes lampooned in the above links.

For one thing, we all are affected to varying degrees by the corrupt culture that surrounds us. For another, I think social media can make it particularly easy to fall prey to some of the thinking traps I mentioned yesterday, particularly the one I used as an example. Of course, this only appears to be a technological problem: It's ultimately a philosophical one.

Creative Crosswalks

Creativity makes the prosaic entertaining and profitable. Who would have imagined crosswalks could be such fun?

-- CAV

Updates

12-18-10: Corrected a hyperlink.

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Outside the Box

Tuesday this week, I had a morning appointment to keep in an unfamiliar part of town, so, since I could, I made a dry run Monday morning around the same time. I found where I needed to go, as well as a quiet coffee shop I could use to wait in case I got there inordinately early. As it turned out, I needed the coffee shop: There was nowhere to sit inside that office building, and the place I was headed was still closed when I got there. (I was only a half hour early!) As often occurs, I enjoyed the unusual excursion, but one image -- of a statuesque woman using a walking stick -- stands out in particular. That image, for its example of thinking outside the box, inspires the rest of the post.

The Walking Stick

I was returning home from the scouting mission I mentioned above and, from a trolley, barely got a glimpse of a woman walking up to the building she was about to enter. Tall and fashionably dressed, she was using a walking stick. It wasn't clear to me whether she needed the stick for balance or support, but what struck me in any case was how well she carried it off.

I vaguely recall the walking stick appearing to be metallic, perhaps copper-like in color, but not gaudy, and perhaps jointed, like bamboo. This was no ordinary cane, and yet it did not plead for attention. I was looking at someone with a remarkable sense of style who, if she did need the cane, had turned an inconvenience into an asset. I actually thought for an instant something like, "If I ever have to use a walking stick, that's the way I would want to do it."

(Walking sticks are, by the way, much more interesting than you might think. Some people collect them. Just looking at the Wikipedia article about them was almost enough to make me want one...)

Artificial "Needs"

To continue my theme, but from nearly the opposite angle, John Cook presents an interesting idea: Might you sometimes need something because you have it?

Some people need to work because they work. A family may find that their second income is going entirely to expenses that would go away if one person stayed home.

Or, to put it in slightly different (but less memorable) terms, might one imagine that one "needs" something because of an unexamined premise that appears to necessitate whatever it is?

Ten Thinking Traps

And, to go further, from making lemonade out of lemons, through tossing out the lemons, all the way to not buying them in the first place, I enjoyed this post on ten thinking traps.

You feel the stock market will be going down and that now may be a good time to sell your stock. Just to be reassured of your hunch, you call a friend that has just sold all her stock to find out her reasons.

Congratulations, you have just fallen into the Confirmation Trap: looking for information that will most likely support your initial point of view -- while conveniently avoiding information that challenges it.

That's part of the description of the "Confirmation Trap." Here's part of what to do to avoid it.

Don't ask leading questions. When asking for advice, make neutral questions to avoid people merely confirming your biases. "What should I do with my stocks?" works better than "Should I sell my stocks today?"

The confirmation trap is a favorite of mine since I discovered myself falling into it many years ago and trained myself to avoid it. Ever since then, I have always sought out advice from multiple sources when making important changes. The above excerpt improves on that rule.

Knowing one's limitations allows one to overcome them.

-- CAV

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Reverse Frog?

Some time back, before I got consumed with the endeavor that took me away from blogging earlier this week, I skimmed over an HBL posting whose title (repeated above) was a riff on the parable of the boiled frog. The basic point was that cultural change can occur imperceptibly, and that, over a span of decades it is possible to discern some improvements to American culture.

An article from Jewish World Review indirectly reminded me of that point because the prospect of gleaning some indication of cultural change is what induced me to read it. That didn't happen, though: There are many reasonable explanations, good and bad, for such a decision on a personal level, and nothing jumps out at me as a dominant cultural reason to draw a conclusion one way or another.

Still, the fact that fewer sixteen-year-olds are applying for driver's licenses lately is interesting. Among the good reasons for putting off this rite of passage that could be a sign of positive cultural change (if it were widespread enough) reminds me of myself when I was a kid:

Melody Hornbeck, 17, of Pembroke Pines, Fla., said she wasn't ready to get her permit at 15.

"I was mature enough to tell myself I wasn't mature enough to drive," said Hornbeck.

She said a friend of hers rear-ended another car while fiddling with a cell phone headset.

I saw too many kids ahead of me in school start driving and stop doing well in class, and I didn't want to get caught up in all the distractions that seemed to go with driving. So I waited a year, although that put me in the driver's seat at sixteen anyway, since the driving age in agrarian Mississippi was 15 in those days.

On the other hand, I am concerned that this trend could be an indication that people are starting to undervalue the independence that driving symbolizes. Part and parcel of such a trend would be that it reflects an upswing in worst-case thinking.

"A lot of teens are very scared to drive," said Craig Emerson, owner of Abbott's Florida Driving School, which offers lessons in Palm Beach and Broward counties. "We haven't seen a complete drop-off but more are waiting."

Fortunately, part of this concern seems to stem from the unfortunate habit many people seem to have developed of texting while at the wheel, so there is some hope that we aren't raising a generation of "safety" ninnies.

I see the article as inconclusive on its own, but still worth a look.

-- CAV

PS: Oh, yes. The endeavor I mentioned above was, by all indications, successful. But I'll have to leave it at that for now.

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Jacoby on "Islamophobia"

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe comments on an issue of Time whose cover asked whether America is "Islamophobic" and offers up the following analysis of "hate crime" statistics:

Of course not. Even one hate crime is one too many, but in a nation of 300 million, all of the religious-based hate crimes added together amount to less than a drop in the bucket. This is not to minimize the 964 hate crimes perpetrated against Jews last year, or those carried out against Muslims (128), Catholics (55), or Protestants (40). Some of those attacks were especially shocking or destructive; all of them should be punished. But surely the most obvious takeaway from the FBI’s statistics is not that anti-religious hate crimes are so frequent in America. It is that they are so rare.

Not to discount the importance of motive in the comission of a crime, but I will note here that I am still setting aside major problems with the whole idea of "hate crime" being penalized more than "ordinary crime." Jacoby's analysis is nevertheless at once instructive and provocative. It is instructive in the sense that it shows that cries of "Islamophobia" are shrieks of hysteria at best. It is provocative in another sense, in that it brings up indirectly the fair question that is the elephant that the mouse of "Islamophobia" is distracting us from: If the motive for committing a crime is so important, what is wrong with asking whether Islam motivates terrorism?

Regarding those fanning the flames of hysteria about Islamophobia, it is worth recalling the words of the Fountainhead's arch-villain Ellsworth Toohey: "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes."

-- CAV

Updates

12-11-10: Holy mixed metaphors, Batman! Elephants, I am pretty sure, weigh far more than 800 pounds. I have changed the phrase "800-pound elephant" accordingly.

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12-4-10 Hodgepodge

A Brief Word of Thanks

For the past several years until very recently, the former blogger known as "Resident Egoist" provided web hosting for the non-Blogger portion of this site (e.g., things like the "About" page). For his convenience, and because Blogger's gradual improvements over the years have mostly eliminated my need for that service, this site is now entirely hosted by Blogger.

I would like to take a moment now to thank Resident Egoist for his help during that time.

A Brief Note to My Readers

Opportunity has come a-knocking, but to answer the door, I have had to clear my calendar for the next few days. I'll be around to check comments and email, but I probably won't make a proper blog post again until next Wednesday.

From the Vault

About four years ago, I had great fun with a post I wrote entirely in haiku -- as did all the commenters!

Weekend Reading

"[I]nvestments are not people. They're not girlfriends, family members or close confidants to whom you owe any loyalty. When it's time for a change -- whether it's because of a shift in your portfolio, conviction or investment goals -- the only approach is that of a hired assassin: Do it quickly, move on and don't look back." -- Jonathan Hoenig in "In Investing, It's Tough to Make a Clean Break" at SmartMoney

"Life wasn't always easy. Our way of life in our country came about because of the suffering people were willing to endure in order to have freedom from tyranny." -- Charlotte Cushman in "The Tale of the Pilgrims -- Why It Needs to Be Taught" at American Thinker

"Letting go in certain situations says nothing about the control you can exercise in other areas of your life. In fact, letting go of what you can't control leaves mental and psychological 'room' for achievements in areas over which you DO have control." -- Michael Hurd in "Control and Serenity Don't Mix" at DrHurd.com

Cui Bono?

Apparently, an atheist group imagines that deliberately and indiscriminately antagonizing people with whom one disagrees is a productive form of activism. At least that's the impression this atheist gets from the billboard pictured below that recently went up in New Jersey.


Perhaps this will do some good, in the sense that bad publicity can be better than none at all. (But still, how much good can merely railing against a specific position really do, when one offers no positive alternative? Even mentioning reason fails here, as many Christians regard reason and faith as perfectly compatible -- and many "atheists" are philosophical skeptics, anyway.)

Many atheists will probably get a chuckle or feel a momentary jolt of satisfaction about such a sign becoming so prominent. But I think that the billboard is bad on balance, playing, as it does, directly into an unjust, but understandable, stereotype of atheists as obnoxious nihilists.

Leonard Peikoff once noted that the holiday of Christmas (as America celebrates it) is essentially secular. If some atheist group is going to spend money on billboards, why not turn the whole notion of atheists-as-sourpusses on its head with something like a simple, "Merry Christmas!" in large lettering, followed by a smaller, "from [Name of Atheist Organization Goes Here]"?

That said, I think that the question of whether there is a God is neither the most important philosophical issue facing our culture, nor often the most productive place to start a debate -- even on many issues affected by religion, such as separation of church and state. In short, I think that founding an organization solely on that negative premise is a bad idea.

-- CAV

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One for the Stocking

Yesterday, I took a gander at a book I saw recommended by an HBLer and liked what I saw. Its title? I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous.

Although it isn't accurate to call me a conservative, I might as well be one for the purposes of this book. For one thing, my political views, particularly on economic matters and national defense, certainly make me stick out like a sore thumb among leftists when I choose to express them in such company.

And then there's the whole matter of living a "double life" among people one disagrees with as a matter of daily survival. (This I have also experienced among religious conservatives, particularly in college.) I am pretty sure, though, that I am more prone to express dissent than many conservatives since: (1) Saying nothing can sometimes too easily look like acquiescence; (2) I am interested in ultimately changing the state of affairs depicted in the book; and (3) Unlike many conservatives, I have confidence that the right ideas, if aired often enough and effectively enough, can eventually cause such a change.

That said, here is an excerpt from the introduction.

While ... most every conservative getting by in the alien environment of Blue State America is blessed with independent judgment and a fair amount of backbone, a working sense of humor doesn't hurt, either. How else to deal with the stuff that at any time can put a crimp in an otherwise fine day -- the angry old lady with the anti-war sign affixed to her walker, the PETA zealots from the nearby campus, or the random leftist idiot at a dinner party, waxing self-righteous and quoting George Soros?

...

The fact is, in key ways, those of us living and working among such people often know them better than they know themselves. Unable as we are to avoid the media they take as gospel -- NPR, the networks, The New York Times or its local equivalent -- we're on intimate terms with their most passionately held beliefs and convictions. We know who they admire and who they despise; we know in advance how they'll react to every controversy, every utterance by a public figure; we anticipate, politically and public policy-wise, their sighs, their frowns, their ups, their downs.

If you would like more, there is a sizable-enough sample of the book to get a good feel for its style and content at Amazon.

What I think the book can provide in some measure is the relief of knowing that, despite what can sometimes seem like orchestrated efforts to make it appear that way, one really isn't alone in having to navigate daily the bizarre cultural milieu of Blue America. Other independent people, too, experience life among second-handers who pay lip-service to such "liberal" ideals as independent judgment and freedom of speech -- and yet seem oblivious to the fact that any number of Toohey-esque figures are in fact goading them in the opposite direction. Despite an occasional whiff of conservative defeatism -- Harry Stein bemoans the failure of an earlier book about his ideological graduation from the left to gain converts -- I look forward to the feeling of camaraderie that this collection of war stories promises.

Well, Mrs. Van Horn was looking for gift ideas...

-- CAV

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Government by Regulation

If Obama achieves nothing else -- and I hope that is the case -- he will have at least made the dangers of the welfare state much clearer to many Americans by the end of his term. One such danger is the circumvention of both the will of the people and certain checks and balances by the Executive Branch, specifically by machinations of established bureaucrats, including administrative tacitcs by the President.

I have my differences with Phyllis Schlafly, and there are things I disagree with in her latest column, but she outlines quite a few examples of the danger I just mentioned. In addition to discussing new EPA regulations, aspects of ObamaCare, and card check (which I mentioned here recently), she lays out the following stunner regarding treaties:

The Obama administration is also toying with a plan to substitute administrative regulations for treaties. Several years ago, the Council on Foreign Relations fingered the treaty provision of the U.S. Constitution as its most objectionable section, and now an ex-Clinton administration State Department bureaucrat, James P. Rubin, has floated a New York Times op-ed suggesting that treaties are not "worth the trouble anymore," and we should substitute domestic regulations.

...

This frustration broke into print because there are not enough Senate votes to ratify the New START Treaty that Obama signed with Russia. Rubin's solution is to ditch the ratification process and substitute executive agreements and pronouncements.

How we got to this point illustrates the power of a bad precedent (i.e., what can happen once a rational principle is violated):

Rubin reminds us that after it became clear the Senate was not going to ratify a climate-change treaty, Obama just used EPA regulations, and so we can do likewise with arms-control treaties. Let's just ignore the Constitution and let Obama bureaucrats make all important decisions.

Only the problem is deeper than ignoring the Constitution, which can be changed, anyway. The problem is that we long ago "chucked aside," as President Bush might have put it, the idea that the proper purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and with it, the notion of government having a proper scope.

For all the good connections Schlafly makes in her article, she herself illustrates the pervasiveness of this problem when she refers to the EPA's "overregulation." For most of its stated mission, there is no such thing as a proper amount of regulation. It should be abolished.

Our problem isn't that the government is too big, or that the wrong big-government party is in power. It's that too many of us accept things it has no business touching at all as part of its job.

-- CAV

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The Loyal Opposition

Dear Uncle Gus,

What's your opinion of Wikileaks and its publication of classified government documents? Maybe I'm being sloppy, but isn't it ironic that Uncle Sam is getting a taste of going through the nudie scanner?

Signed,

Sloppy Joe

Dear Sloppy,

While I can understand, perhaps, a very brief smirk directed at the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I wouldn't indulge it for very long. I haven't been able to spend much time following this story, but three things really stand out to me about it.

First, many of the most scandalous things that are coming out are things that anyone with a reasonable degree of curiosity might have known about or strongly suspected, anyway. Iran smuggled weapons, via ambulance, to the Party of God in Lebanon? What a surprise. Many people know things like this are going on. The real question (and scandal) is why our diplomats like to imagine that nobody does.

Second, we are seeing confidential documents being published. While it may be hard to believe with Barack Obama running things, there are many proper reasons for the government to keep certain kinds of information concealed from the general public. (One that keeps coming up is the kind of evidence that would have to be used to win convictions in court, were we to make civilian trials of foreign combatants a policy. Much of it is obtained by individuals working under cover, and whose lives would be at risk were the source of that information known.) I am a little too alarmed about the fact that so few people seem concerned that confidential information is coming out like this to entertain any sense of "irony" for very long.

Third, on top of all this, depending on the nature of a given document, it can be both immoral and properly illegal to release it. I am not one to cheer about something that strikes me on its face as immoral and anarchic -- and as something that people are probably going to get away with.

I recommend that you think about this in terms of a concept from parliamentary government, the "loyal opposition," which Wikipedia elaborates upon well enough:

[The term] indicate[s] that the non-governing parties may oppose the actions of the sitting cabinet -- typically comprising parliamentarians from the party with the most seats in the elected legislative chamber -- while maintaining loyalty to the source of the government's power.

I vehemently oppose Barack Obama in no small part because of the damage his policies present to my country. How constructive is it for him to look bad if what it took to do so was harmful to America?

My pleasure at seeing Obama and Clinton's ox being gored is more than eradicated by the knowledge that the way it occurred in this case is potentially very damaging to my country, and thus to me.

-- CAV

If you'd like to ask a question, just type it into the box at the upper right labeled, "Ask Uncle Gus."

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