There were over 60,000 spam messages in the comments on this blog.

Instead of killing them one-by-one, I destroyed all the comments, including the good ones.

Sorry, but I just wasn't going to do all the work required.

Now, I hope sometime this week I can find time to upgrade the software to preclude spammers from taking over my site.

A lot of people get worked up over email spam; I don't. It's easy to kill. But Web spam is harder to kill, and I do get upset about that. People who construct programs and robots to litter other people's sites with extraneous, off-topic links and messages won't get defense from me.

The new Brad Bird flick from Pixar/Disney is as fine a film as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., or The Incredibles, though with one difference: I doubt that little children will like it as much. This is, really, an adult film. Or, perhaps, an adult film for the whole family, one in which the children might enjoy but only at the expense of not understanding huge chunks of it. After all, it's about gourmet cooking, which is not exactly a kiddie fixation, like toys, monsters, or super-heroes.

Call me romantic, but what could be better? Paris! Cooking! Rats! A youngster realizing his individuality at work!

Besides, this has the best onscreen kiss since . . . Hot Shots, Part Deux.

I was watching and listening to some YouTube videos, and suddenly the sound went off. So I switched to Safari. Nothing. No sound. I fiddled with the Sound panel, switching from my G4 Gigabit Ethernet (Snakebite) PowerMac's speaker to my Logitech headset. No sound.

So I restarted.

I tried again. Nothing. Camino, Safari, Foxfire, all sound is gone.

But the sound works just fine coming from iTunes. Alan Hovhaness's "Tzaikerk" plays just fine from an AAC file. I just switched to my Radio365 player, and my favorite station, and it comes through just fine (playing, as if anyone cares, Einojuhani Rautavaara's music).

And the system sounds, the beeps and so forth, come through.

So I checked video.google.com. And the audio for those videos work! What's up?

So what happened to YouTube? Yoo-hoo! What's up?

Sheldon Richman concludes a good review with a not-so-good aphorism from Swift: It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Except, of course, that it is quite possible to reason people out of views they adopted as children, when they didn't know better. One effective method is to shame them, to make them feel shame for holding goofy opinions. It will radicalize some, but basically erode the beliefs of others.

For instance, I changed my opinions on several matters as I grew through my teenage years, matters on which I'd settled opinion in part through inertia. Neither of my parents was a libertarian. But I adopted the ideology.

Why did I change my mind on politics? Well, a number of reasons:

• I saw that some of my factual beliefs were just plain wrong.
• I saw that liberty better fit with my other moral beliefs.
• I saw that some previously held norms and commitments were embarrassingly perverse in their effects.

No one person argued these points with me. But over time these and other concerns weighed heavy enough on me to make me change my mind.

Simple enough, really. If a person is really interested in helping the poor, learning something about the causes of economic growth changes one's mind about quite a few policies. But, as Sheldon Richman relates, having just read the new Bryan Caplan book, it's not in most people's interest to seek out anomalies and others challenges to their notions.

Which is why in-your-face challenges are important.

Also: declarations of alternate commitments might work. When others can see your passions, and those passions don't seem nuts, then they are more apt to be sympathetic.

So it's important to show passion as well as reason.

In Some Forms of Realism: A Critique of Representative and Presentative Realism, Celestine N. Bittle mounts a concise attack on two forms of realism. I'll have to go back to this, but comparing his discussion of Spencer's transfigured realism, as expounded in Spencer's Principles of Psychology, and Bittle's characterization of it, I see . . . inadequate representation!

For what it's worth, I think my form of realism would best be described as neither presentative (like Epicurus's and Bittle's) nor representative (like most others'), but, instead, as performative realism. I see the truths in both presentative and representative realism as mere sketches on the way to the development of performative realism.

Yes, I've been influenced by pragmatism.

Bittle dubs his own doctrine as Critical Presentative Realism, which I take to be a mirror to George Santayana's critical realism, which is a form of representatiionalism (though hardly naive, since he doesn't regard the intermediaries between our minds and existent things as icons, but as sometimes rather arbitrary signifiers, thus moving close to my position, that the representations must not pretend to mirror reality — pace the late Richard Rorty's bâte noir — but provide maps that help us navigate it).

It turns out that North Cove, Washington — a town not far from where I live, a mere hour-or-so's drive — is the home town to one of the great politicians of the last generation:

The politician? Well, the man who said this:

"All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."

I refer, of course, to Pat Paulsen.

The Wikipedia entry on Paulsen lists his home town as South Bend. But on his first album, Pat Paulsen for President, it is stated as North Cove. And if you can't believe a politician's campaign material, what can you believe?

The answer may be Yes. Reasons for this are ably given by Henry Jenkins in his appreciation for/explanation of the critics' near-unanimous thumbs-down to the third Pirates of the Carribean film. Actually, Jenkins trots out several interesting ideas. Here's one off the main thesis:

Watch a film with a group of critics and it is a rather chilly experience, each trying to suppress signs of their emotional response for fear of tipping their hands to their competition. They don't laugh at comedy; they don't cry at melodrama; and they don't know how to engage in fannish conversation around film franchises, which means that their professional conduct cuts them off from the shared emotional pleasures that are so much a part of how popular culture works its magic on us. For that reason, I trust film critics far more when they are writing about art films which demand distanced contemplation than popular films which desire an immediate emotional reaction.

Hat tip to Jesse Walker, who (in his post to Film Flam) calls attention to Jenkins's well-crafted first sentence:

As a rule, one should never trust the opinion of an established film critic about a movie with a number after its title — and one should multiply the level of distrust for each number over 2.

Theocons of the world, unite! That's the title of Cathy Young's great little article in the June Reason. She does a fine job of showing just how traitorous some on the right can be about freedom:

In Christianity Today, managing editor Mark Galli urged a strong stand against terrorism but also sounded a startlingly sympathetic note toward the Islamic militants' anger at the hedonism, materialism, and secularism the West was exporting into their cultures. In October 2004, in the same magazine, Watergate felon turned evangelical minister Chuck Colson warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States would help radical Islamic terrorists by making our kind of freedom abhorrent to Muslims.

Meanwhile, in May of that year, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan asserted in his syndicated column that on such issues as homosexuality, conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.

Chiding Bush for urging Muslims to embrace a version of liberty that includes the freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, Buchanan wrote, If conservatives reject the equality preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?

Well, not allowing people to publish books is illiberal and repressive. Equality, as preached by leftists, is largely a matter not of freedom but coercion. But of course, some parts of the equality preached on the left is liberty, and should be embraced because of it. Buchanan is, once again, showing conservatism's true color: hatred of the left for being the left, not anything positive.

Conservatives, like Muslim whackos, have a problem with liberty. If they disagree with something allowed by liberty, they somehow think that they are being dragooned into supporting it. Hey: if you don't like Salman Rushdie's novels, don't buy them, and bad-mouth them at every chance. Both your boycott and your protest are allowed by liberty. Suppressing the book, on the other hand, isn't.

To suggest that we not defend the right to publish blasphemy, or smut, or whatnot, is quite a suggestion. But the theocons have troubles not making that suggestion. As everybody knows, at the very soul of conservatism is the censor's fire.

Cathy Young rightly parses the conservative excuse, as an ostensible support for liberty and a simultaneous opposition to its abuse or freedom's excesses:

In effect, D'Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company agree with the familiar sentiment that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. Their conclusion, however, is that those freedoms should be curbed — though they would say that they are talking not about freedom itself but its excesses. According to D'Souza, those excesses include the notion that men and women should have the same roles in society or that freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous.

But of course freedom of expression does include publishing both Playboy and Live from Golgotha, as does freedom of contract, freedom of association, and the like. It follows from the idea of freedom that you may not attack those who peacefully go about doing their thing, even in ways you find offensive.

Offense is one thing. Taking offense another. And using your offense as an excuse to attack another a completely different thing.

Young is right to pillory the American conservative numbskulls and their silly misalliance with the Islamic bigots:

Yet there is no reason to believe that Islamic radicals or even most Muslim traditionalists oppose merely the excesses of, say, women's liberation rather than the basic notion of female equality. The Enemy at Home includes a sympathetic discussion of Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb's critique of America's moral decadence, but D'Souza neglects to mention that this critique was based on Qutb's stay in the United States in the notoriously licentious period of 1948 to 1950.

Radical Islamists' ire is directed not just at The Vagina Monologues but at beauty pageants, and they have often responded violently even to moderate steps toward the emancipation of women. Nor does D'Souza say much about the hostility not only toward secularism but toward other religions that is prevalent in the Muslim world today.

Young errs towards the end. She seems to confuse the true with the politically useful. But otherwise, this is a fine polemic.

Young people tend to recklessness. They haven't realized their own limits. That's why many do risky things.

As you get older, you are supposed to learn what your limits are. And accept them, or work hard to push them further out.

Trouble is, as you get older, the limits come crashing in. Parts of the body, well, they just start to give out.

Young people find this funny. Old people, well, we — uh, they — don't laugh so much.

But we should take it all in stride. This is life. If all goes according to the ideal stretch, you vigorously climb up the hill of your life, then carefully navigate the downside, knowing that, in the end, you are going to fall.

This ancient truth came to mind while reading about a misstep made by Judge Robert Bork.

You may remember him. He famously failed to enter the Supreme Court after President Reagan nominated him. Always a critic — in his heyday, of monopoly law, now nearly of everything (he's one of those who claim the culture's going to heck in a handbasket of our own making) — he now appears before us as a plaintiff. He's suing Yale Club for more than a million bucks.

It seems that he was invited to give a speech at an event for the New Criterion magazine a year ago. The dais didn't have a rail, or even normal steps. And Bork was in his 80th year of life. He didn't leap up to give his speech in a single bound. Instead, he tried to step onto the dais . . . and fell backwards. The injuries he suffered were serious, say his lawyers, and Bork's own complaint mentions injury to a leg and his head.

Now, normally I'd have sympathy for the man. I mean, I can't say I've been in his predicament, but maybe one day I will. (And hey: I did fall down a flight of steps last year, and my right hand still hurts.) But, this is a man who's been griping about current tort law for years, arguing that the huge figures demanded have no place in a reasonable system of civil law. He talks about irresponsible juries, runaway justice, that sort of thing.

And now he's charging the Yale Club with gross negligence. The club should've provided a handrail. He's asking for punitive damages, of all things. In a case that should be pretty straightforward.

Well, I wasn't at the event. But we know good and well that Bork himself would have pooh-poohed any similar such suit, years ago, had the fall happened to anyone else. His hypocrisy has been widely noted.

The thing is, he saw the dais. He accepted a risk simply by trying. Now, had he acknowledged his own limitations, when it came time to step up he would have looked up and said something like this: You expect me to climb up there, eh? Who do you think I am, Tenzing Norgay?

After a public chuckle, a few younger men would have offered him a hand.

Perhaps pride prevented him from asking for help. Well, we know what pride goeth before.

An idiotic lawsuit.

My office just lost one of its tenants: a mouse. Perhaps it was a rat. I noticed it last week, scuttling across the floor at night. I was mildly freaked.

I left cheese out for it on the floor.

The next day, I left cheese out for it on a trap.

The critter got the cheese in both cases, with precisely the same result: food, no springing of trap.

I tried peanut butter last night. This morning? Dead vermin. The trap had sprung. I'm pretty sure that the critter didn't suffer much. That was one flattened mini-rat, the head squished under the pressure of the snapped trap.

The annoying thing about all this is the queasiness I get. Yes, even from killing vermin.

I would not make a good flunky at an extermination camps.

Ron Paul has been comporting himself pretty well on various chat shows and interviews. I am agreeing with him now more than I did in the '80s, when he often talked about political economy with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. (Things were always so certain for him, outcomes to policy changes utterly predictable. And yet, they weren't. His prophecies of runaway inflation proved wrong.)

But nothing illustrates Ron Paul's principled libertarian approach to conservatism better than his No vote for honoring Ronald Reagan:

AWARDING GOLD MEDAL TO FORMER PRESIDENT AND MRS. RONALD REAGAN IN RECOGNITION OF SERVICE TO NATION

Statement of HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS

[Page: H1655]

• Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 3591. At the same time, I am very supportive of President Reagan's publicly stated view of limiting the federal government to it's proper and constitutional role. In fact, I was one of only four sitting members of the United States House of Representatives who endorsed Ronald Reagan's candidacy for President in 1976. The United States enjoyed sustained economic prosperity and employment growth during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
• I must, however, oppose the Gold Medal for Ronald and Nancy Reagan because appropriating $30,000 of taxpayer money is neither constitutional nor, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan's notion of the proper, limited role for the federal government.
• Because of my continuing and uncompromising opposition to appropriations not authorized within the enumerated powers of the Constitution, I would maintain my resolve and commitment to the Constitution--a Constitution, which only last year, each Member of Congress, swore to uphold. In each of these instances, I offered to do a little more than uphold my constitutional oath.
• In fact, as a means of demonstrating my personal regard and enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan's advocacy for limited government, I invited each of these colleagues to match my private, personal contribution of $100 which, if accepted by the 435 Members of the House of Representatives, would more than satisfy the $30,000 cost necessary to mint and award a gold medal to Ronald and Nancy Reagan. To me, it seemed a particularly good opportunity to demonstrate one's genuine convictions by spending one's own money rather that of the taxpayers who remain free to contribute, at their own discretion, to commemorate the work of the Reagans. For the record, not a single Representative who solicited my support for spending taxpayer's money, was willing to contribute their own money to demonstrate their generosity and allegiance to the Reagan's stated convictions.
• It is, of course, very easy to be generous with the people's money.

This is, I tell you, one of the most delightful statements by a Congressman on a piece of legislation in our country's sad and goofy history. For this alone, forget Paul's age. Vote for him for the presidency.

My cat is colored like an orca:

Now, the Orca seems, to me, nicely colored, for protection . . . or, more likely, for stealth. Light on the bottom, it would blend into the background, when seen by fish and other prey from below. Dark on the top, it would blend into the background, when seen from above.

My cat, alas, does not inhabit the ocean. Instead, she tends to rest on dark carpets . . . and not on her back, either. So I've stepped on her more than once.

No element of natural selection could explain this inconvenient coloration — this unprotective coloration — since feline coloration is largely a matter of past artificial selection, or perhaps random variation in environments where protective coloration is largely irrelevant.

I've leaned toward critical realism for some time. By this I mean that there is not one level of reality, but many; that ideas have a reality, but not of existence in the same sense that matter and energy have existence; and that ideas themselves not only mediate existent objects and our subjective selves, but they are, themselves, mediated by signs, which have a different kind of reality (a socially and intentionally constructed reality) than either things, persons, or ideas.

Another, better term for ideas, here, is what Santayana called them: essences.

Meinong's theory of objects comes even closer to the truth, perhaps.

What a critical realist must come to understand, in my opinion, is not that ideas have reality, but that ideas can be in error, and be mere fantasies, or mere (mere!) useful contructs.

The reason to place the word critical before realism seems to be that many theories of realism were anything but realistic. They ascribed the wrong kind (or even too much!) reality to ideas. They did not accept that the objects of our thought can belong to several distinct levels of reality:

• existence
• subsistence
• givenness

That any object of thought can be valued

• positively, either highly or lowly, in this context or that
• considered inutile
• negatively, either lightly or darkly opposed

and that these values have a reality, too, but cannot be said to simply exist, but are reifications of functional relations between subject and object. Though we can say truthful things about these values, values are a different matter than truth; a value-relation is a separate relation from truth-relations.

And it gets very complicated.

Which is why putting the word critical in front of realism seems so responsible.

There are more things in reality than were dreamt of in earlier philosophies.

I cannot imagine that any of this is important for your average person. But most people come across arguments the effectiveness of which depend on not keeping the separate categories of reality distinct. The Ontological Argument, for example, is based on category errors, and among its several assumptions is the notion that essence implies existence, that a conception must refer to something real.

But of course, existence is not implied by essences, which can be fantasies (unicorns), or merely useful conceptual tools (numbers).

Of course, the fact that I use (misuse?) the term critical realism does not mean that I agree with everyone else who adopts that term. I feel free to use the terminology and basic materialistic perspective of George Santayana, add in the complexities of Alexius Meingong, interpret it using the semiotics of C. S. Peirce, and broaden up the domain of thought with the values theories of Ehrenfels, Perry, and the afforementioned Meinong, but with careful attention to the context of economics, with the ideas of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, F. W. Taussig, Ludwig Lachmann and others thown in for good measure.

The question of BEING suggests many levels, to me:

1. existents




2. signs




3. the functions of signs (essences)



4. relations between concepts (allowing for truth)



5. valuations of any object of attention (values)

and you see how complicated reality gets. The list of separate levels of reality doesn't stop there. I didn't put up subject and object, for instance.

I would not be shocked if my view of reality does not fit in with modern-day critical realism. Metaphysics really ain't my bag. And yet it keeps drawing me back in.

Over the years I've collected a number of xeroxed articles and manuscript essays . . . and even books. For instance, while at Liberty, a few authors wrote for help and suggestions. Jack Boulogne, a gentleman from Canada, sent me his Hand Book of Practical Morality, and I hope I encouraged him in his enterprise. Unfortunately, it was not right for Liberty, and I didn't see an easy way to edit it down to a manageable essay for the magazine.

The writing of treatises and the writing of magazine articles are often very different things.

When I left Liberty, Boulogne's mss. stayed in my possession. Inadvertantly, perhaps. Or perhaps because I thought that it would just never again be looked at by anyone there.

Now, as I index my whole library onto a database, I begin wondering about Mr. Boulogne's book. Did it ever get published?

Well, here's something: The Moral Code: A Catechism, by Jacob Boulogne. Almost certainly this is what his handbook became. The subtitle, A Catechism shows a pleasing independent streak. (It's not in to write catechisms these days, is it?)

I am thinking of buying the book. Bernard Gert's work — on which it is based — is not quite up my alley, in ethics, but Boulogne is right to admire Gert's low-nonsense attempt at setting something in fixity, a few rules. Further, Boulogne makes little pretense of originality. His aim, I think, has been consistent: to follow Gert, and improve on Gert's understanding of everyday, commonsense morality, in part by upgrading the concept of liberty.

Gert's own work on the subject is well worth reading anyway, and I should get back to it soon.

The best thing about Gert is his realization that, when it comes to justifying rules, one cannot demand any kind of perfection as a source for the rules' salience, but merely aim to get rid of some bad things. Gert is a moralist who's studied his Hobbes. It's by opposing evil, and not enshrining The Good, that morality gains any hope and hint of universality.

Amazon's computer emailed me today, offering for my consideration a book I'd never heard of before: The Craft of Modal Composition, by Thomas Benjamin. The author instructs readers on how music before the High Baroque style worked, most especially sacred music by folks such as Palestrina and earlier.

Which brings back memories.

In high school Music Theory class we were instructed (briefly) on classic theory, and given the assignment of an old hymn to set in four-part harmony. I set it as if I were Josquin, apparently; the teacher said I should've been born in the Renaissance.

Not long after I was composing piano music in a post-tonal, neo-modal style, where melodies and harmonies flitted around on keys rather than in them. It was only recently that I figured out the mechanisms of the classical style. This, despite my love of Haydn!

Perhaps my love of neo-classical music, with its do-it-wrong-on-purpose procilivity, infected me too early. I went from 1580 to 1920 just without much trouble.

In the mail today a number of books came in. One, I believe, came courtesy of Amazon. Here they are:

• Invariances, by Robert Nozick
• The End of Barbary Terror, by Frederick C. Leiner
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

How many are for work, and how many for pleasure? All three are for both, of course.

Jeffrey Sachs argues against Hayek about the redistributive state. A tendentious short version of the article is up here:

The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology
  Are higher taxes and strong social "safety nets" antagonistic to a prosperous market economy? The evidence is now in
By Jeffrey D. Sachs

I haven't read the whole article; I'm no longer a subscriber to Scientific American, a magazine whose quality has plummeted in recent years, as it tries to be more popular.

The evidence Sachs refers to are a number of statistics, but cross-cultural comparisons are so difficult that we expect a little more humility of those who make them. And recognition of basic differences, such as immigration levels and cultural uniformity.

The first thing that struck me about his article is how he gets Hayek wrong. In The Road to Serfdom Hayek did not argue against redistribution (he defended it). He argued against planning, against central direction of business, heavy price controls, and the like. The strategic investments that Sachs defends are something that offends modern libertarians, sure, but not the Hayek of the 1940s. At least, not in the book I read.

This kind of scholarship is precisely the kind I expect from Sachs. I'm assuming others have taken on his statistics and his reasoning about those statistics. And others have mentioned the fact that the Nordic countries have slid backward from pure dedication to the social welfare using the coercive power of the state, with high taxes and elaborate subsidies.

The business about how Nordic countries took to the digital revolution strikes me as odd, too. Most of the support for this came from business and customers, no? Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps Nokia and Erickson couldn't exist without government help and direction.

But I doubt it.

Dead now about a week, Charles Nelson Reilly was in life important on TV if not in cinema. From Wikipedia:

In the 1990s Reilly made guest appearances on The Drew Carey Show, The Larry Sanders Show, and most notably, as eccentric writer Jose Chung in the television series The X-Files ("Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"") and Millennium ("Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"). Reilly was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1998 and 1999 for his performances in The Drew Carey Show and Millennium, respectively.

Because I so admire the above-cited work, I can't really agree with the title thesis of this article:

Charles Nelson Reilly played himself better than anyone
by Charles McNulty

I have long admired Leland B. Yeager, economist and social philosopher. But I really don't know much about him, despite having met him once. I'll have to go back to this article, The Yeager mystique: The polymath as teacher, scholar and colleague, to learn more.

When I have time.

But it doesn't look long, does it?

It's quite acceptable to hate hate hate Songs from Liquid Days, a pop-minimalist fusion album of songs composed by Philip Glass. The music doesn't fit into normal and accepted parameters. It's as if a space traveller explained rock and roll and other popular American music to an alien on a distant planet, sang a few songs with air guitar accompaniment, and then that alien composed songs to obscure poetic texts from the distant planet he'd never visisted.

Alien: Is it difficult music?

Earthman: No. It's simple music! Just a few chords.

Alien: Rhythmically?

Earthman: Make syncopation integral to the music, and you've got it.

Alien: What instruments do you use?

Earthman: Well, use whatever you like. For pop music you just mic them closely and they can sound electric.

Alien: So that's all I need to know?

Earthman. So that's all you need to know.

The texts, of course, are not quite so simple. They are by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Paul Simon (maybe others; I've forgotten). The title song cryptically speaks of a couple undergoing the woman's menstrual period (yes, liquid days). It's sequel, Open the Kingdom, continues the sexual references in the form of a religious parody, sung full get-out by classical singer Douglas Perry, but about the end of said menstrual period. You figure it out, what this kingdom is, and how it can be opened.

The first song on the album, Changing Opinion, has fantastic lyrics by Paul Simon, and great singing by Bruce Fowler.

The song Freezing is, for me, the gem. A brief sad epigram sung beautifully by Linda Rondstadt, accompanied by the Kronos Quartet.

The whole thing is sui generis. Most people will chortle in incredulity. It is not pop. It is not classical. What the heck is it?

As one friend of mine put it, I have no trouble with simple; but this is simple-minded! Well, maybe. But simple-minded is really nothing more than a pejorative for simple. As I see it, The Arkansas Traveler is also both simple and simple-minded, and still a lot of fun to sing. Or, perhaps more in a minimalist spirit, think of Rolling Over the Billows.

The world has a lot of room for a lot of different stuff. Stuff to fill our heads and our lives and chill the spine a myriad ways.

Freezing chills my spine even today.

Even today, listening to the album on my old LP.

Even even today, listening. To the album. To the songs. On vinyl. An old LP. Repetitive? Yes. But not too.

Mr. Brooks was given a fairly positive review by Richard Roeper. So I went to see it. I had been feeling sick all day, and needed a distraction.

Mr. Brooks was not the right distraction.

It's not that I don't enjoy seeing the occasional splatter of blood.

It's just that I want my thrillers to feel a little more aesthetically challenging and centered than that classic soft-core late-night Showtime spectacle Body of Influence, and, if at all possible, a little less lurid.

But the new film does have an A-list cast: Costner, Hurt, Demi Moore. The fact that Demi Moore has trouble making a convincing character brings it back to Body of Influence level.

Really, there's nothing here to see, folks; move along. Next movie.

Oh, sure, Costner and Hurt have fun. But that fun barely passes to the viewers. The kitchen sink gets passed, along with nearly every other plot element you can think of, but not the proverbiel good time.

Think pieces and ideas reporting in major news media can be quite weird. Take the BBC story Misery: the secret to happiness. It's basically just a common-sense admonishment that striving for perfection in relationships will only bring grief. Wow. The idea that this could be news strikes me as weird. But, we live in weird times, and obvious truths and strategies can seem quite out-of-the-ordinary.

But it gets really weird when Buddhism is brought up:

The authors recommend using mindfulness, a Buddhist meditation technique, to help cope with family suffering.

The technique requires individuals to focus on their present thoughts and actions, and is already used by some psychiatrists in the UK.

They say although Buddhism is considered a major religion, the technique is taken from Buddhist psychology which could be useful aside from Buddhism's spiritual beliefs and practices.

I'm tempted to suggest the Buddhist teaching that life is a cycle of pain and death and rebirth amidst pain — in short, Life Is Suffering . . . and that the trick is to get off of this cycle — as apropos here.

Applied to relationships, a parallel wisdom might be: marriage is a cycle of pain and struggle and suffering and the trick is to get off the cycle. Divorce and never remarry.

See? The key to happiness.

I've been musing a long time on this, though have come to no productive answer. It is obvious that the Saudi government has worked against the United States and its people in a number of important ways, especially by encouraging radical Islam in schools. Most of the 9/11 suicide skyjackers were Arabs from the holy soils of Saudi Arabia.

After 9/11, the attack upon the Taliban was probably a good idea. Get the trainers and the supporters of those trainers who set up the Al-Qaeda network, members of which attacked two sites in America.

But beyond that, what should have been done? The Iraqi war was a misstep, at the very least. Wrong enemy.

I have discussed on this site and others one strategy: declaring war on Saudi Arabia. Not attacking it, but sending notice to the Saud government that, if America is attacked again, the U.S. government will take it out on Mecca, drop a dirty bomb there and let the Muslims die on Hajj.

I have also discussed what's horrible about this strategy: it embraces total war, it is genocidal in intent and consequence, and it is treats honestly and in public the chief problem of our time: the radically uncivilized nature of fundamentalist Islam.

This option is surely not an option that any peace-loving person would want. But here's the point of bringing it up again: our current president has so botched Mid-East policy that we may be heading for this policy even if we don't want it.

The preferred policy is something that blow-hard militant American demagogues don't want: strategic disengagement in the area, limited defense of Israel, and retaliation against those networks of terrorists that attack us . . . and the states that harbor those terrorists. But the main thrust has to be strategic disengagement. Withdrawal. Let the Arabs misrule their own deserts.

Iraq didn't figure in this, and doesn't, even, now, though of course most Americans are so unhinged on the subject they can't make the distinctions necessary.

Basically, we need to remain as hands-off as we can in the area, giving Muslims as little cause as possible to hate us, to switch into terrorist mode. Our present policies of nation-building in Iraq do just the opposite, and so qualify as the greatest blunder in American diplomatic history.

Why this policy? Very simple: we need to allow time for material progress and liberal civilization to corrupt the Islamic faith of the Arab (and other infected) populations. (The Islamic faith is not wholly evil, of course, but does indeed have a rotten element at its core, a sort of religious imperialism that we in the West cannot and must not accept. We must resist it. To do this effectively, we must carefully wait until Muslims in general abandon it, like Christians abandoned their Augustinian practice of torture and slaughter for doctrine's sake.)

If we respond to terrorist attacks as narrowly as possible, we echo the ideas of justice found in the Koran, and Muslims cannot in principle object. But if we begin attack and rule vast tracts of land around Mecca, and vast hordes of Muslims, then we run afoul of basic Islamic principle, and stir up a hornet's network of trouble.

Only fools suggest the latter.

That is, most Republicans, of course, one of the two big Fool Parties dominating American life at present.

Still, this is one area where I prefer not honesty but a kind of dissimulation as official diplomatic stance. We pretend that Islam is a good religion, and we kill our Muslim radical enemies as we must, and declare them bad Muslims. We freely trade with non-terrorist-supporting Muslim states, and we allow Muslims from those states to enter our country . . . if they sign a document that foreswears any plan on their part to establish Sharia in America.

This plan of dissumulation is unfortunate, and galls me. And yet, I can't help but judge it the superior official policy. And, in my ironist's heart, I happily note that it mirrors an aspect of Islam: Taqiyya.

All in all, I don't think that a declaration of war on Saudi Arabia is a good idea. I don't think that we've reached the point of threatening Mecca. But if we keep electing idiot demagogues to the White House, it might just come to that.

Whatever we do, we must not submit to Islamic hegemony.

The other day I wrote this:

Of course, how much more fitting is it to see life as it is and explain it with non-personal causal and random factors!

Have you noticed that creationists almost always characterize evolutionary processes as random only? They never mention causal factors in evolutionary processes. And yet, these two, are part of the mix that explains how life can arise from non-life, and how life can grow more complex.

Of course, evolutionists, too, stress random factors. Why? Is the truly random key? Well, yes and no. In part, they fix upon random factors because such factors most dramatically fly in the face of teleological processes. And they want, as much as possible, to avoid any such taint. Cause-and-effect seems too teleological for some. And so it's shunned.

This is a mistake. The random factors important to natural selection are random in various limited ways, and must be understood in terms of causality to grasp the full nature of those processes.

And remember: sexual selection is not very random at all, not from individual actors' points of view, anyway.

One of the more pleasant extraneous things about going to an orchestral concert — far more pleasant than dressing up or sipping champagne from plastic glasses — is listening to the warming-up period, before the performance, and during intermissions. I like the tuning-up sound clouds, too. It's a pleasant sort of cacaphony, like a frog chorus or cicada gamelan.

Now some guy's recorded a whole bunch of these, and calls them his compositions. Oh, well . . . if John Cage can claim four minutes and a few odd seconds as his own. . . .

Is it unreasonable to think that more people should give up procreating and just raise apes, instead?

It might be a much nicer world were we to see apes walking around with their guardians in the street, signing away, taking care of their own pets (cats and dogs).

I know some people who should never have procreated. But they might have been fine guardians of apes.

For one thing, the fact that apes could kill an irrational guardian suggests that the guardians would likely be less irrational than they are with their children.

I generally am unimpressed with arguments for animal rights (except of a very limited sort), but rights for the apes seem to make sense to me.

Not long ago I insisted that the horse/donkey/mule distinction revealed a case of an evolutionary transitional species in common knowledge — in this case, the donkey is transitioning from the horse. Now, that same case could be applied to the problem of speciation dredged up by Sam Brownback's public pronouncements on a subject he knows little about, microevolution and macroevolution. Here's John Derbyshire on his argument:

Under Brownbackian evolution—micro yes, macro no—this can't happen. They can't go on diverging. They can only get so different, no more. The divergence must slow down and stop. But... what stops it? What's the mechanism?

Perhaps this is why we need a God . . . to prevent small changes in speciation from adding up to major changes!

It's obviously why Brownback needs one. For his argument.

Hours ago I wrote about the maleficiaries* of minimum wage laws. I looked for secondary effects, on track of values forgone.

This kind of reasoning applies to price rises of any basic good, really, any good that people tend to treat as a necessity. Take gas price increases. If one finds oneself paying more for gas, one can decrease driving. But most won't decrease driving down to nothing. It's other purchases they will forgo. Gas prices rise? Then maybe it's pizzas that won't be bought, or . . .

Health insurance.

Everyone values present goods over future goods to some degree. It's only with increased wealth that one can afford to sock a little away for the future and for eventualities. So of course buying health insurance is lower on the list than feeding yourself or going to work, or even keeping one's spirits up with the occasional movie or whore.

So, ever wonder why so many people don't buy health insurnace for themselves? Because prices of other things are rising . . . in part because government

1. regulated goods to increase prices and




2. encourages a policy of inflation in the banking and monetary system.

Want people to buy health insurance? Well, be more wary supporting government policy that raises prices in general, usually in the name of helping this person here and that person there.

The ones most hurt by price rises are the poor and the retired.

* I didn't spend a lot of time looking this word up. I hope it means a recipient of action or intention that is harmful. A beneficiary gets good things; a maleficiary gets bad things. No?

Everyone knows, or should, that the primary losers of a minimum wage raise are the poor who lose their jobs because they have been priced out of the market, the poor who won't get hired in the future for the same reason, and those who move from full or over-time work to part-time work, because their employers are trying to cut costs, costs imposed by minimum wage laws.

But the secondary losers are harder to keep track of. For example, in the nearby town, let's say that demand for fast-food product remains high, because, well, everybody has to eat, and this is a handy way to do so. So, stretch one's imagination a bit and say no one gets fired, at least not immediately, and no one loses hours, either. McDonald's just raised their prices, to compensate for the losses. And because dining at fast food is inelastic compared to other purchases, people continue to flock to McDonald's.

What happens then?

Forget unemployment. Think indirectly competitive businesses. In the town nearby, the business hurt most may be the CD music store. The businessman there has no employees. But the poorer people who shop at his store will have less to spend every month; they've spent that extra at McDonald's. They may very well choose to cut down on recorded music purchases.

So, the chief secondary loser from minimum wage laws is very likely the businessman who can't afford to hire anyone in the first place!

In the July 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ray Vukcevich ably tackles a staple of magazine sf, the short short. Fredric Brown was the master of this. Vukcevich, in this entry, Cold Comfort, adds an amusing example to the literature.

OK, maybe it's not a short short, but just a short — it's three pages long. Whatever its designation, it explores the idea of the Turing Test in an amusing way (a way I wish I'd thought of), and, were it not for the last sentence, which lays on false piety too thickly, it would be a classic.

Ask some kids to take a test, and they'll give you the finger. Yes, this truly is "the digital age":

Mea­sure­ments of chil­dren’s fin­ger lengths ap­pear to pre­dict their scores on math and lit­er­a­cy tests, re­search­ers have found.

The study might raise anew the con­tro­ver­sial is­sue of wheth­er boys and girls have dif­fer­ent in­nate abil­i­ties, sci­en­tists said. This is be­cause fin­ger length is pro­posed to be re­lat­ed to dif­fer­ences in hor­mones re­spon­si­ble for de­ve­lop­ment­al dif­fer­ences in boys and girls.

In a study to ap­pear in the Brit­ish Jour­nal of Psy­chol­o­gy, re­search­ers com­pared the fin­ger lengths of 75 seven-year-old chil­dren with stand­ard­ized test scores. They found what they called a clear link be­tween math and lit­er­a­cy per­for­mance and the rel­a­tive lengths of their in­dex and ring fin­gers.

The researchers said the link is thought to stem from dif­fer­ent lev­els of the hor­mones tes­tos­ter­one and oes­tro­gen in the womb. Tes­tos­ter­one is be­lieved to pro­mote de­vel­op­ment of brain ar­eas “often as­so­ci­at­ed with spa­tial and math­e­mat­i­cal skills,” while oes­tro­gen may do the same for ver­bal abil­ity, said study lead­er Mark Bros­nan, head of the Un­ivers­ity of Bath, U.K. psy­chol­o­gy de­part­ment.

“In­ter­est­ingly, these hor­mones are al­so thought have a say in the rel­a­tive lengths of our in­dex and ring fin­gers. We can use mea­sure­ments of these fin­gers as a way of gaug­ing the rel­a­tive ex­po­sure to these two hor­mones in the wom­b.” Tes­tos­ter­one and oes­tro­gen are al­so re­spon­si­ble for the de­vel­op­ment of male and female sex­u­al char­ac­ter­is­tics, re­spec­tive­ly.

The re­search­ers meas­ured chil­dren’s fin­gers and di­vid­ed the length of the in­dex fin­ger by that of the ring fin­ger. The in­ves­ti­ga­tors found that a smaller ra­tio—that is, a long­er ring fin­ger with res­pect to index finger—was linked to bet­ter scores in math com­pared to lit­er­a­cy. This fin­ger con­fi­gur­ation also sig­nals great­er pre­na­tal tes­tos­ter­one ex­po­sure, they said.

There's more.

Nick Gillespie, on Hit and Run, quotes from articles about the new Creationist museum in Kentucky (allowing the title Kentucky-Fried Creationism). This is the killer paragraph:

"Before man's fall," according to one exhibit, "animals were vegetarians. In a 'very good' creation, no animal would die, so there were no carnivores."

This statement, if it really were a key point of the creationist theory would be reason enough to dismiss it without further thought. Does anyone really think that tigers, barracuda, spiders, etc. were designed to be vegetarians?

To believe this one has to discount nearly everything we know about structure and function in the animal kingdom.

Or else it means that creationists believe that God, so pissed off at Adam and Eve for eating a piece of fruit, recreated his creation to put killing and eating into the warp and woof of it.

A more reasonable view for creationists is that God likes death, and set the whole of life as a huge circle of killing, eating, digesting, dying, decaying, etc., because he thought it symmetrical, neat, and therefore designed human beings that way, too. As an elementary lesson, though, he put Adam and Eve in a special place just so rigged to keep them from seeing or understanding the import of the nasty stuff until they make a motion to oppose him. When they ate, they got the message, and were let out of the compound so that they could understand reality as it really is good: a deathfest forever.

That most Christians and religious people in general don't see God this way — as a complex being with no firm commitment to benevolence — just shows how poor readers they are of Genesis . . . and Job.

Of course, how much more fitting is it to see life as it is and explain it with non-personal causal and random factors!

Bubbles aren't so bad, according to a new book:

Read This: 'Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy'

Daniel Gross. HarperCollins. 232 pages. $22.95.

Investment crazes aren't all bad, argues Daniel Gross in Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy. Gross, a business journalist who writes for Slate.com, makes the contrarian-but-persuasive case that irrational exuberance and its aftermath have transformed the U.S. economy into a juggernaut. The dot-com bubble and the recent real estate craze are fresh in readers' minds, but Gross finds that American-style investment frenzies haven't changed much since the 19th century.

-- Cox News Service

Should readers expect a creative destruction argument? The explanatory theory that comes to my mind hails from the mind of Ludwig Lachmann.

A few minutes ago I wrote in favor of term limits for U.S. Congress. The reasons for this are many. But Mr. Term Limits, Paul Jacob, in his column this weekend, gives a simple rationale for them:

Almost any citizen can become corrupted by systems of power. Philip Zimbardo's prison experiments and recent book The Lucifer Effect do more than suggest this.

We have to realize that power corrupts — whether in Abu Ghraib or . . . Anytown, USA. We must keep prison guards and senators (and even dog catchers) on a short leash. They should be reprimanded when they do bad, and they should know that abusing their positions just doesn't pay. They need limits. Rules. Term limits, even. . . .

But I went to U.S. Term Limits site and couldn't find what Jacob's organization favors for U.S. Congress. What limits, precisely?

It seems to me that these term limits make sense:

• A lifetime limit of two six-year terms for U.S. senators.
• A consecutive limit of three two-year terms for U.S. representatives. That is, a politician may serve a maximum of three full terms in a row.
• A representative may run for and serve in the U.S. House again, after serving three full terms, if three years intervene between his or her departure and the beginning of his second stint in office.
• No senator or representative may run to renew a position in either house of Congress if that position was obtained by appointment to fill a vacancy.

These seem to me to be reasonable limits.

Senators would be subject to lifetime restrictions on service, as is the Presidency, now. The difference is that senators would be allowed to serve four years more than the president.

Representatives would suffer no lifetime restriction on limits. That is, it would be possible to serve, say, 24 years in the House, so long as at least nine years (but more likely twelve years, because of the two-year staggering of elections) were spent outside of this service. So, a 36-year career in the House is quite possible, only it would have to endure interruptions. Interruptions that would help erode the incumbency privilege, and also erode the temptations for corruption.

Of course, the reason many people oppose term limits for representatives is that they support the policies that never-ending incumbency inculcates: ever-growing government. The politics of policy is pretty clear. The longer one is in office, the more you tend to support increases in regulation, taxation, redistribution, what-have-you. This is why you are more likely to find a Republican than a Democrat supporting term limits. And libertarians more than Republicans.

Mitt Romney is one of those who now oppose the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations, and the whole idea of same. His Townhall column of last month marshals his reasons.

The Washington Post, which has a firm policy of loving this sort of regulation Romney opposes, notes that Romney himself, when Massachusetts governor, had supported similar regulations in his state.

But the editorial doesn't really deal in evidence, study and argument. It's just assertion, and nothing more:

No doubt, the current campaign finance system is flawed; no doubt, some spending has been shifted into areas exempt from disclosure. But if Mr. Romney thinks the system was less corrupt when lawmakers were able to phone up special interests and ask them for seven-figure checks, he is wrong. If he thinks the system was less corrupt when corporations, labor unions and wealthy individuals could spend unlimited amounts on campaign commercials barely disguised as issue advertising, he is wrong about that as well. Massachusetts Romney had it right.

Well, the simple fact that these regulations limit the freedom of citizens rich and poor indicates a strong reason to oppose such regulation. So what about corruption? There's an easier way to cut this back: term limits. Lobbyists hate term limits. The same lobbyists who invest in politicians really hate term limits. Why? Because those limits really put a crimp on the value of their investments. In an incumbency-heavy system, one can spend bribe money well, and rationally. You can rent politicians' time and ear for a long time, get a lot of ear-time, which is what they want most.

But with term limits in place, lobbyists have a higher degree of uncertainty, and get less bang for the buck.

And that's good for the corruption angle.

Of course, going the next step and limiting the purview of legislators, making them less target for lobbying, would be even better. But that would mean getting rid of most government, and America is probably not ready for that.

Doug Giles's column this weekend is the usual in-your-face, belligerent Christendom/Christendumber rap, this time directed towards atheists.

I assume that even many Christians can see what's wrong with his logic. In case it's not obvious to some, I'll see if I can offer a friendly parry or two to his unfriendly thrust.

He has a great title, I think: Hey, Atheists . . . get your own moral code. It neatly summarizes his point.

The problem I have, however, with the atheists and their goodness and their morality claims is that all your ethical codes of conduct sound strangely similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions. As a matter of fact, it seems as if you have bellied up to the Bible and are treating it like a buffet . . . passing up on the worship of the person and work of God, while taking second helpings of His moral principles, you duplicitous, little, evolved monkey, you.

Aside from the pronoun trouble here (and let's not call too much attention to it; we all fail in grammar sometimes, don't we?), the main charge is that modern atheists, when they attempt to behave morally, pick out the secularizable commandments and such, leaving the obvious religious ones. And then they pretend they . . . well, what's wrong with that, before I go on? Let me consult Giles:

If I were an atheist and I believed that God didn't exist, that the Bible was a bunch of weird bunk written by religiously deluded men several thousand years ago, that Jesus was an apocalyptic, sandal-wearing, hippie forerunner of David Koresh who went around spitting out cheeky clichés who needed not to be heeded, but straight-jacketed or at least ignored — I sure as heck wouldn't be borrowing any tidbits of His wisdom to navigate my life's glide path.

Ah, there it is. He believes that the value of a maxim (or rule, or idea) derives from its source, not from its utility. That is, the maxim Do not kill innocent people (containing a definition of murder, or wrongful killing, and a modification of the vague Thou shalt not kill prohibition) gets its value, Giles implies, from those who adopted it before me, not from the fact (and this is pretty close to a fact, not a mere conjecture) that a society that did not promote the maxim and live by it as much as possible would be one that reduces to conflict and chaos too easily, which would be good, perhaps, only for those not only very good at, but positively enjoying, the act of killing innocent people.

My point is that it doesn't matter to me at all who formulated a maxim. Or supported it.

Take vegetarianism, for example. I'm not a vegetarian. But I might be talked into it. How would I decide whether vegetarianism would be better than an omnivorous diet? Well, it wouldn't be by investigating the biographies of past vegetarians and comparing them to carnivores. Hitler, after all, was a vegetarian. Would that dissuade me? Should it? No. Only numbskulls decide things for that kind of reason.

To decide on a diet, I might study medical research. I might consult my conscience about killing furry and unfurry animals. There are a lot of things I could consider. But putting Hitler on one side and Jerry Falwell on the other isn't going to decide this issue. (Even if, at present, I side with Jerry Falwell for other reasons than his late omnivorousness.)

It's no surprise that Giles brings up Nietzsche:

Nietzsche came to the conclusion that if there is no God — or God is dead, as he put it — then he's not going to live as if God is alive and His moral principles mattered. Yes, brass-balled Friedrich said that the opposite of how the Bible says to live is the way we should live.

Well, not across the board. Nietzsche may have urged a transvaluation of all values, and regarded the slave morality of allegedly altruistic Judeo-Christian ethics as perverse and anti-life and all that, but it's just simply not the case that he chose the opposite on principle.

He picked and chose, according to his values, according to the way he thought the world worked.

But Nietzsche is an apt strawman for Giles. For Nietzsche also believed that value comes from its source, and not from its use, or utility. Lester H. Hunt marshaled the evidence for Nietzsche's position on this expertly, leaving little room for doubt.

And this was a great error. For value has its origin in the usefulness of the object for a subject, in a context of competing objects and competing subjects for those objects. Economists are right; Nietzsche wrong.

So, an economist will not blush if he finds that one maxim he favors came from the acolytes of Ashtaroth, will not be the least ashamed to learn that Zoroastrians supported another of his prize precepts. These things are not important. It does not matter where a valuable things come from, to determine its value. It depends on use and context. The history of an object or a maxim may be very interesting. And it may affect the characteristics, of course. But those characteristics are what's important. Not the alleged unitary source for it.

This is so basic, all should see it. But I guess theologians and proselytizers for religion are so weak in their faith that they have to load their morality with ammo most apt to go off in their face. When you go for the big explosions, which make the biggest noise, you take your chances.

Further, of course, Giles shows himself to be unaware of the antinomies and ironies of his position. Many, many Judeo-Christian ethical positions were earlier advocated by Atenists, Zoroastrians and even worshipers of Ishtar. Does the argument then apply against them?

Of course, as a matter of history, our civilization does come, in part, from Hebraic sources. So of course the flavor of a contemporary atheists' values are going to have more than a tinge from that Hebraic past.

But Hellenism is also a source for our civilization, and it was a polytheistic world-view that morphed into some vague (and not so vague) theisms and atheisms of a philosophical bent. Does the morality of today's atheistic humanists look more like the morality of a Hellenistic Athenian or a Judean Essene? The question almost answers itself: even modern Christians behave more like the Athenian than like the Essene . . . or the Pharisee, for that matter.

Going through the Ten Commandments, of course the first batch are going to be rejected by an atheist, or any modern humanist. But what of the rest, the ones following the Sabbath injunctions? Let's consider:

1. Honor thy father and thy mother . . . Well, this is an honor-culture injunction, and this one encompasses quite a lot of values and virtues in it, values and virtues that most modern preachers wouldn't even know are hidden in it. Still, I bet most humanists would agree that, modernized a bit, the principle here is good, though the content of the honor system has understandably changed since the days of herdsmen at the edge of a desert.




2. Thou shalt not kill . . . This means, surely, Kill no innocent human beings in your social world. The proscription of murder is indeed an important part of any good ethic, eh? So of course humanists and atheists would adopt it and promote it.




3. Thou shalt not commit adultery . . . Well, breaking contracts is a bad idea, and its double bad when the contract is the basis of a family. But the idea that every marriage has the same contract is long past. Further, the sexual immortality notions in the Judeo-Christian history are nothing like the sexual morality notions now dominant . . . even among Christians. Premarital sexual activity is now not merely assumed, it's even encouraged by those of a humanist mind set. Why? For a number of reasons. Good reasons.




4. Thou shalt not steal . . . Most everybody knows that theft must not be encouraged. A view of the social world that really took the prohibition seriously, though, might be radically different than the one most Christians and most atheists now support.



5. em>Thou shalt not bear false witness against the neighbor . . . The most important of the Ten Commandments for the working of law. No rational person approves of lying as a way of life. honesty is key. It is good policy. More important, though, is not to lie on grave matters concerning other citizens. The legal system depends on rare instances of false witness. There's no reason to go back to an ancient text to see why.



6. Thou shalt not covet . . . This rule has fallen a bit by the wayside, in modern times. Its meaning in our culture is no longer clear. But its meaning, though, is not clear to Christians as well as humanists. And this lack of clarity has nothing to do with its origin in something a man named Moses allegedly wrote into stone. The murkiness is a result of the very different cultures of today compared to hard-scrabble living yesterday.

Humanists of today pick and choose from the ethical ideas of all the past and present. They are bound to no one notion, source, or context. They are free, so to speak. They are not limited by any ancient text. If a humanist finds one notion from Plato, another dozen from Aristotle, and a few good pointers from Epicurus, he's not doing anything unexpected or shameful or inconsistent. And if some of those resemble the principles that Jesus preached, that's no skin off anyone's nose.

It's not a matter of consistency to origins:

So what's it going to be, my obstreperous amigos? Are you going to continue to blather on about there being no God and then live like there is one and that His word and will matters? Get consistent, why don't 'cha? Don't live by the Ten Commandments. Don't live by the Golden Rule. Don't do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's our stuff. That's the Judeo-Christian way. Get your own commandments that are logically deduced from the no God hypothesis, write your own unholy book and form your own civilization. Then let's see how appealing it is, how it betters the planet and how far you'll get.

Principles should be consistent. Indeed, one might inquire of a belligerent Christian like Giles whether he really thinks he's living by the Golden Rule when he argues in this manner.

More importantly, humanists should ask the guiled Gileses what makes them pretend to a monopoly on near-universal notions, like opposing murder, theft, and fraud.

And, besides, Giles . . . humanists already revised their morality, and set up a civilization. This one. The Enlightenment changed a lot, and led to the formation of the United States of America, with very secular roots. The Ten Commandments was not recognized in that document of law, nor was a deity even mentioned. And a staple of religious rulership from time immemorial, the idea of religious tests to hold public office, was expressly forbidden.

So, Mr. Giles, how do you like living in the world that humanists have helped recreate?

It really bothers you, doesn't it?

But do you have to bear false witness against the founders of modern civilization, in rants like yours?

I define a politico as someone interested in a political position or candidate enough to lie, to spew whoppers for the cause. Here's an example. On Bill Maher's HBO website, an innocent little Web poll asks the simple question, Of the Republicans listed, who do you think will get the GOP's nomination nod in '08? And a whopping majority of respondents chose the least likely candidate, Ron Paul.

I took the poll and chose Giuliani, because I believe a majority of registered Republicans are indeed stupid enough and morally corrupt enough to choose this vile excuse for a human being. Yes, even over good-looking Mitt Romney and expert politician John McCain.

But Ron Paul's supporters leapt to the site and voted for him, in droves:

Politicos!

Now, in another poll I would have voted for him too. I prefer him to the others. But he doesn't have much of a chance of winning. Do his supporters really believe he does?

Some days I just hate politics. The lying that goes on reaches down from the loftiest perch of the presidency and into the soul of the grubbiest, least significant voter.

Of course, the only hope Paul has is for people to lie like this, and other people believe that he has a chance, and then actually consider him, and then vote for him, in a mass domino cascade of copycat preference falsification. It's a slim chance. The slimmest. And it can only begin with a lie.

The Firebird is the first work by Igor Stravinsky I heard as a rational being. (When I was a kid, my older sister played The Rite of Spring on the old hi-fi; but I barely remember such sessions. I was not of the age of reason, yet, and not ready to accept either Apollonian or Dionysian music for what either are worth.) Now I'm listening to Stravinsky's first ballet again, in a performance conducted by Ernest Ansermet.

Two things:

1. This is very odd music, the whole ballet. The suites constructed from the complete ballet are more sylistically uniform.




2. This performance is excellent.

It's good to get back to the beginning and re-experience delights one first had when young.

The thing about global warming, what makes it such an interesting issue, is that most people have non-scientific attitudes towards the hypothesis, towards the evidence, and towards how we should judge both.

This puts it in the category of religion and politics-as-usual. Which makes it a fun topic. A topic with which one can annoy nearly everyone, if one works it right.

It's interesting to see the deniers now getting good coverage. One such, Zbiegniew Jaworowski, makes one of the best and most effective attacks on the evidence for global warming: his attack on ice core sample data:

1. Ice is not stable




2. The trapped gases inside Antarctic ice are not stable




3. Carbon dioxide in particular degases faster than nitrogen and oxygen



4. These things being the case, we should expect fairly level amounts of CO2 year after year, which we do see




5. These levels remain level, interestingly enough, even during the Little Ice Age




6. Other indicators of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere show widely varying amounts of the gas through history and prehistory

All suggesting that we should discard ice core samples!

If true, this is important. But, interestingly enough, the scientist couldn't get funded for research on this topic. The potential funders cited moral reasons!

Ah, corruption that Al Gore said he'd witnessed, but applied against his enemies, not against his friends.

Hat tip to Erik Anderson.

On internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner writes:

The Republic of Estonia is under a massive cyber onslaught that apparently is targeting government servers in a broad-based distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Quantitative data points the finger at a broadly based attack, but speculation is rampant that the Russian government is behind it.

He calls in an expert, Jose Nazario, who is a software and security engineer for the Arbor Networks Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS). It's a distributed botnet, he says, and there is also evidence that there are different attacking groups and it's not just one botnet behind it, which makes it harder to take down.

This is something that doesn't require a government . . . though one gets the strong feeling that the Russian government is, in some way, behind this. Whether Putin has been in on it, I've no idea. It's the kind of thing that might start out as a policy initiative but then takes control of itself, like a distributed terrorist network.

This may be the nature of the next attack upon America from Islamic extremists, by the way.

I'm nicely surprised by the performance by L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under the baton of Ernest Ansermet, of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. Lighter touch than usual. It almost feels of a kind with the Sixth Symphony, an affinity I hadn't noticed before. (I had previously bought into the idea that this symphony was enigmatic and daring and all that; not pastoral!)

I've just started listening to the new box set, Ernest Ansermet: Decca Recordings 1953-1967. The Sibelius follows performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, also not bad. (The first disc featured a Bach piece, a brisk-but-elegant performance of Haydn's Philosopher, and a well-directed but not quite well-performed rendition of Beethoven's great Fourth Symphony. I'll be listening to this disc a lot, I'm sure, despite its flaws.)

I cut my Stravinskian teeth on Ansermet's interpretations of Stravinsky masterworks, on LP, years and years ago. Now it's interesting to hear Ansermet again, eons later. I can hardly wait to crack open another Decca set I just got, an eight-CD box set of Ansermet doing Stravinsky classics.

Why buy this set too? Because I just can't get enough Stravinsky? (Close.) But the answer is a bit different: I've never heard the one-act opera Mavra, and it's included. Still, I'll be keeping that as a treat; I've a lot of music to go through before I get to that final CD.

Besides, I would have to take Sibelius's Fourth off my queue long enough, wouldn't I?

Yesterday I quoted a bizarre bit of legislation from Oregon, which aimed to zone development around the Oregon Trail out of bounds. But I didn't comment on this bizarre clause:

SECTION 3. This 2007 Act being necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is declared to exist, and this 2007 Act takes effect on its passage.

An emergency? A real zoning emergency?

I contacted Steve Buckstein, who wrote about Oregon Trail legislation on the Cascade Policy Institute site. He had astutely drawn out the pioneer spirit question. So I asked him about this odd clause regarding emergency. He confirmed my suspicion:

The emergency clause is attached to many bills just because it can be. Almost none of these bills are truly emergencies, it just seems to be a way for legislators to say we want this, and we want it now.

Apparently, once you are a politician, stretching the meaning of language is no stretch at all.

Erik Anderson, the man behind Epicurus.info (you didn't think it was Epicurus himself, did you? — he's dead), has started a Wiki about Epicureanism. I stopped by today, and went to the epitome of Epicureanism, the Tetrapharmikon:

Don't fear god,
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.

I'm new to the site, so I hesitate to polytheize (nice word, huh?) the translation. The fourfold cure, in my memory, goes like this:

Do not fear the gods;
Do not fear death;
Good things are easy to get;
Suffering, easy to endure.

My take on Epicureanism can be seen by my renovation of the cure:

There are no fearsome deities;
Death is not worth fearing, either, though death is real cessation and not mere illusion;
Do not fear boredom, or leap to distraction, for there are always important things to learn, beautiful things to experience, and valuable acts to perform;
To fear suffering is to scuttle the best salve to pain before the pain arrives.

Of course, there's a fifth fear that Epicurus himself fell for: the fear of disappointment, the fear of failure. This led him to overreact, to flee from some complexities that are best neither fought nor flown from.

That, in fact, is my main response to Epicureanism: the four fears must be fought, but so also must this fifth fear. The simple life is not the whole of the philosophical life. Some complexities are worth striving for. Since all things fail in the end, and all things die or come to destruction, it does not therefore follow that all things must be avoided. Quietism is not the answer. Even living inconspicuously may not be the answer (after all, Epicurus did not quite manage it). The answer is cautious engagement, and sometimes confident resistance.

I've something in my eye.

I just bought Blink by Malcolm Gladwell yesterday. And today I pick up a Time magazine from 2005, and there Gladwell's interviewed, saying the darndest things:

I'd like to make a distinction between change and progress. . . . [T]echnology related to golf has improved and will continue to improve dramatically. Golf clubs are way better today than they were 10 years ago, and will be way better 10 years from now. Golf scores, however, have remained absolutely stable. . . .

The explosion of choices on the internet — the fact that I can get 100,000 songs on iTunes as opposed to 1,000 songs &mdis that progress.

He means the answer as No. I answer Yes.

Gladwell, at the second elipsis, had interuupted an interlocutor expostulating on choice, stating this: But most of this falls into the category of giving me more of things that I don't need.

The iTunes example was inapt, though, no?

When iTunes had only a few thousand songs, I couldn't get Tibor Serly's Rhapsody for Viola and Orhcestra. I could get a bunch of pop songs I didn't want. Now, with thousands upon thousands of downloadable musical works available to me, I have purchased music composed by Martinu, Stravinsky, Benda, Stamitz, Haydn, Griffes, Bolcom, Russo, Gershwin, Schuman (yes with one n), and many others.

Did I need the music by these composers? Well, I needed them more than I need music I didn't buy, and wouldn't, when iTunes had less music to offer.

Is Gladwell's remark as elitist as it sounds? I don't know if he's attacking our wants in general, or some particular wants. Were we supposed to be content buying stuff we didn't like because there didn't used to be many options? Is he actually denying value pluralism?

I like diversity in society, because then I'm more likely to find people and things to my taste. When we're stuck with only the people at hand, and their limited talents, we're stuck with a lot of substandard people and stuff.

That's just simply the case.

Yes, there's change that's mere change. From my perspective, the move from woman-bashing rap to man-bashing rap is mere change. But change to a greater diversity of options that enables me to find music that bashes neither women nor men — is just very good music, with or without commentary — is progress.

No winking. I'm serious.

Oregon's legislature is considering a strange form of honor. The target? The Oregon Trail. The method? Prohibit development near it.

So, to get this straight . . . to honor the pioneer spirit of people in the past, all future progress in the area of their endeavor should be prohibited?

74th OREGON LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY--2007 Regular Session

A-Engrossed
Senate Bill 823

Ordered by the Senate May 7 Including Senate Amendments dated May 7 Sponsored by Senator AVAKIAN; Senator ATKINSON, Representative BONAMICI SUMMARY The following summary is not prepared by the sponsors of the measure and is not a part of the body thereof subject to consideration by the Legislative Assembly. It is an editor′s brief statement of the essential features of the measure. [Authorizes State Historic Preservation Officer to restrict or condition] Prohibits public body from approving development along route of Oregon Trail. [Requires public body that receives application for development to submit application to officer for review.] Declares emergency, effective on passage. A BILL FOR AN ACT Relating to development along Oregon Trail; and declaring an emergency. Be It Enacted by the People of the State of Oregon:

SECTION 1. As used in section 2 of this 2007 Act, "Oregon Trail" means a pathway for early emigrants to the State of Oregon and a practical corridor to the western United States as identified on the 1959 Oregon State Highway Department map of the Oregon Trail in 10 sections, identified as "T.E.D. Draw' g No. 6138" and on file with the State Historic Preservation Officer.

SECTION 2. A public body, as defined in ORS 174.109, may not approve an application for a permit under ORS 215.402 to 215.438 or 227.160 to 227.186, or an application for any other development approval to change a present use, including construction or remodeling of structures, at a location within 100 feet of the route of the Oregon Trail.

SECTION 3. This 2007 Act being necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is declared to exist, and this 2007 Act takes effect on its passage.

Richard Shickel, a journalist who sees himself as a critic, took offense at one expression of a benign view of the decline of bookchat in newspapers:

THE MOST grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers.

The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.

"Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."

Anyone? Did I read that right?

His argument, following this windup, is nicely expressed in in his commentary's blurb:

Sure, anyone with a blog can express an opinion about a book, but true criticism is more than just an opinion.

This is true so far as it goes, but two caveats are worth noting:

1. There's nothing to preclude a blogger from engaging in true criticism, and

2. The bookchat published in newspapers almost never qualifies as criticism.

Indeed, this last point makes hash of pretty much the whole of Shickel protest. And yes, it's obvious that Shickel knows this, since he admitted both points in the essay. But his concentration on what reviewing ought to be proves nothing more than a waste of column inches.

He trots out three names for our consideration: George Jean Nathan (supercilious and bad), and Edmund Wilson and George Orwell (both excellent). It should be obvious to anyone who is not himself a critic cultist that these latter two critics are not unassailable. Wilson was, as Nabokov sagely argued, too fixed on sociological and moral interests to catch the great literary fire. Wilson easily missed the point of authors grinding different concerns in a very different mill . . . Tolkien for example.

Still, it's always fun to recall, say, Wilson's characterization of The Lord of the Rings as a children's book that somehow got out of hand. This is extremely funny, if not at all just or even perceptive. It's merely funny. Which reminds us why we read critics: for entertainment.

Perhaps Oscar Wilde's Critic as Artist should be required reading for journalists who aim to comment on criticism in the newspapers.

Great criticism is in short supply these days, and under attack, I agree. But the problem isn't the democracy of the blogosphere. The problem has been — for scores of years now — the dominance of the professors in English departments whose words haunt us like a spoiled enchilada, coming up dyspeptically hours and days later, and the ubiquity of reporters and shills in the newspapers whose words we can't remember a minute after reading them.

The newspaper world is itself a vast wasteland. Not as bad as the Academy, but bad nevertheless. That Shickel worries, instead, about a purely democratic literary landscape that he sees as the real wasteland, shows, perhaps, more concern for his paycheck than his critical faculty. To assert that the Internet (for that's what we're talking about, no?) exists without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight is so ignorant that we can disqualify it without much more argument.

Of course, there are some in the blogosophere who will dissect his assertions and evidence down to the last comma. Fine for them. I'll go back to reading books. Without benefit of Shickel.

The bottom line on Shickel's column is this: It is no better, and in fact much worse, than a hundred blog entries written every day by bloggers both famous and obscure.

In his essay The Claims of Philosophy, A.J. Ayer divided philosophers into two categories: journeymen and pontiffs. He was one of the former, and proud of it. One of the interesting things about both styles of doing philosophy, though, is that both rub up raw against our expectations of philosophers:

Surely, the business of the philosopher is to make clear the meaning of life, to show people how they ought to live. Call him a pontiff or a journeyman, according to his method of approach; the distinction is not of any great importance. What is important is the message that he has to give. It is wisdom that is needed, no merely scientific knowledge. Of what use to us is the understanding of nature if we do not know the purpose of our existence or how we ought to live? And who is to answer these supremely important questions if not the philosopher?

Good points, this challenge to the philosophical status quo. But hey: Ayer has an answer:

The reply to this is that there is no true answer to these questions; and since this is so it is no use expecting even the philosopher to provide one. What can be done, however, is to make clear why, and in what sense, these questions are unanswerable; and once this is achieved it will be seen that there is also a sense in which they can be answered. It will be found that the form of answer is not a proposition, which must be either true or false, but the adoption of a rule, which cannot be properly characterized as either true or false, but can nevertheless be judged as more or less acceptable. And with this the problem is solved, so far as reasoning can solve it. The rest if a matter of personal decision, and ultimately of action.

Though I think things are a bit more complicated than Ayer makes out, this, too, is my position.

But really, the idea that philosophers qua philosohers should only concern themselves with truth, and (by manifest technique) nothing else, strikes me as his strangest limiter. Solving the problem of actions and rules, by reasoning of various sorts, is quite a task, and even if truth is not the ultimate goal (co-ordinated felicity, perhaps, is), those other goals are worthy of a philosopher, and philosophers surely have important things to say about them. Even in proposition form.

I have many of these, holding paperbacks, mostly. These interlockable boxes make for very efficient paperback shelves.

But I do put things other than paperbacks in them. Smaller hardbacks, such as my Classics Club set, for instance.

I bought mine for a buck a piece at a local Dollar Tree store. I highly recommend them.

For those few of you who are interested in the minutia of my life, here's an update: my move to the [slightly larger] office next door is nearing completiong. It's all over but the harpsichord. And the cleaning of the old room. And the final arrangements of this one.

I obviously own too many things. Books numbering in the thousands. Computers in the dozens. Printers, too (most of them not working).

So, no surprise: I'm driving the truck to the dump today.

And on Saturday.

It is pleasant lean back in my chair at my computer, and look up to see an elegant Feininger print, framed and hung on the side of two back-to-back bookshelves. It's great to have a usable kitchen.

What's more, and most shocking? I believe I have enough bookshelf space. This may be the first time in seven years that this can be said.

If you've read Jesse Walker's writing, you know how good it can be. So you really should read his appraisal of the late Jerry Falwell; it's very good. Here's a snippet, with a great parenthetical remark contained inside:

The programs on those stations were an odd mix of the old and the new, like someone had crossed an Elmer Gantry tent revival with the Johnny Carson show. Ecstatic spiritual outbursts rubbed elbows with jovial celebrity interviews; angry political rants mixed with constant pleas for the viewer's money. (For the benefit of my liberal readers: The latter resembled a PBS pledge drive, except you didn't collect your tote bag until you died.) Falwell ran one of the quieter shows. It would almost merit the "old time" label in its title, if it wasn't being broadcast over a strange new medium, if it wasn't using that medium to build a strange new sort of a congregation, and if it wasn't using that congregation to flex Falwell's political power.

I just came across this, an early (ancient) play on an old theme:

Gala wants me, Gala wants me not.
Because she wants and wants me not,
To say what Gala wants, I cannot.

Amusing, no? Good recreation by Donald C. Goertz.

I had to turn this televised Face Off off pretty early. Kirk Cameron may be a nice guy, but he's no Aristotle. His pal Ray Comfort presented an Argument from Design as a proof of the existence of God . . . an absurd position. I didn't believe this argument when I was nine, so I think of it as extremely childish. I clicked off the TV when Cameron began yammering about evolution, and how no transitional species had ever been found, etc., a common creationist mistake. This one has an easy answer:

horse + donkey = mule

The ability of horses and donkeys to mate shows a relation; their offspring's inability to produce offspring by mating with similar such offspring* shows that donkeys are a transitional species away from horsekind, or the other way 'round, no?

Suffice it to say, had Kirk Cameron actually read Darwin's most famous work, he wouldn't be making such absurd statements. Variations are found throughout nature, in such abundance that transitional species are a dime a dozen.

By the way, a horse or donkey itself isn't proof of a maker. They came into being by sexual reproduction. They are not like paintings at all. When I see a horse, I don't immediately ask about its creator. I ask about a sire and a mare. Beyond that obvious question, things get complicated.

The Argument from Design is designed to simplify those complications in a hasty and rather deceitful way.

* The rare cases of mule reproduction all occur when a female mule mates with a male horse.

As information about global climate shift increases, the number of scientists who deny a recent warming trend has decreased. But the theory that global warming is of anthropogenic cause — that is, man-made — is distinct.

Trouble is, how would one falsify that explanation?

Here's a possibility: discover that global warming is occuring on another of our solar system's planets:

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.

There could be other explanations (Martian wobble), but the scientist who promoted the data set and the explanation of increased solar radiation remains adamant, and offers a prediction:

Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store.

"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."

Now, there's something to test.

Chris Sciabarra often features a song of the day on his Not a Blog blog. Today I'll echo his program, featuring one of my favorite songs, Es sang vor langen Jarhen, by Arvo Pärt. I've nothing really to say about it, other than that it is very beautiful.

I don't listen to songs much. I usually prefer music without voices. As I type these words, another Pärt piece hits my ears via headset: Fratres. It is even better than the song.

I've been sick this week, and have busy for longer. So: almost no blogging. What have I been up to? Well . . .

I just ate a really good banana.

Oddly, it took me several minutes before I realized that some people would make a joke out of this fact. (One shouldn't hazard, under normal circumstances, to admit of eating a very good banana. Orange, yes. Mango, yes. Persimmon, surely. But not a banana!) But what would Yoda say, had he eaten a good banana?

A really good banana, I just ate.

    Which OS are You?

This is somehow a scandal: government employees are taking their sick leave benefits as rolled over retirement or health care benefits:

A Journal Sentinel review of 67 Milwaukee area municipalities and school districts found that 36 of them allow employees to take cash payouts for unused sick days, subject to a cap.

I don't really understand why this is a problem. If your employment contract specifies sick leave, and you don't get sick, that means . . . what? That you just leave the benefit? The incentive for that would mean people would call in sick (or treat minor ailments as worth avoiding for) to take their benefits when they can.

Not a good idea in establishing long-term contracts.

Much better would be to convert unused sick leave days into wages and have them accrue into a retirement fund or, as happens in a few of these stories, medical insurance. I favor the former.

So, tell me, why is this bad?

One of the things not stressed enough in the book Moral Minority, which I briefly reviewed here a few days ago, was the main reason for the Enlightenment: war.

The Enlightenment occurred after a long series of religious wars in Europe. These wars were long, internecine, and bloody. Though spurred on by religious differences, it was obvious to most observers that another chief problem was who ran the states. Because only a few people ran the states, and they were beholden, in a sense, to almost no one (except the religious figures they were allied to and subjected themselves to), the incentives for them to behave at variance with the interests of their people was very, very great.

So the idea of a union between church and state — a very old idea — became generally discredited by anyone who thought at all independent of some dominant group.

As a result, the Englightenment caught on like wildfire. To espouse a union of church and state during this period seemed anachronistic, like a person advocating Stalinism today.

And yet there was one major difference: hordes of religious people.

Many of whom also wanted a separation of church and state.

Is this idea a Christian notion?

The many Christians (mainly dissenters) thought so, or at least recognized that the idea was very compatible with Christian teaching. But it did not derive from religious teaching but, really, from experience. It was just common sense.

To the freethinking people, the people like Ethan Allen who found traditional religious doctrines utterly absurd (and they grew in number at that time, in large part because of the unconscionable manner in which self-proclaimed Christians had acted), this new liberal idea was not Christian at all, but part of the new thought developing in Europe and America. It was not based on any scripture. It was based on reason and experience. It was, in effect, an anti-Christian notion, since it was designed to keep Christians in check. After all, Christians are the ones who had gone mad with killing. And tyranny.

This all changed, though, as memory of the wars of religion dissipated, new memories and new contexts arose. The fear of secularism became a big thing as the 19th century commenced. And a number of Enlightenment ideas started to receive concerted opposition.

Still, throughout that century a wall of separation between church and state was erected in state after state. All the established religions were torn down, disestablished.

This gave further impetus to a multiplicity of active Christian denominations, of course. Freedom does tend to lead to diversity. And by the end of the 19th century rising tides of ecumenical activism began to demand more and more state power. The Hygiene movement, in particular, coupled with teetotalitarians amongst the evangelicals, put a series of regulations of psychoactive drugs, and then ushered in Prohibition, one of the great disasters in tyranny in America. This further eroded the sense of Constitutional limits, and helped erect the tyrannies of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations, and the welfare-warfare state we lumber under today.

The people I admire at the Founding period most, regarding support for the separation of church and state, are not the Enlightenment figures. It's easy to wish a separation of church and state if you think that most churches are nuisances at best. But the people to admire are those who believed deeply in their religions but still supported church and state.

Think about it. They believed their religion could save mankind. They had the answers. And yet the understood that it was best if they did not have power, and did not use the monopoly power of the state to force their answers on others.

It's easy for a modern liberal environmentalist, for example, to support the First Amendment. He likely has no respect for any established religion. Doesn't believe that nonsense. So of course not laboring his government with extraneous doctrine is just fine by him.

But what about the things he cares about? Wilderness, recycling, etc. That he will demand the government not only allow but enforce, force down people's throats.

A modern liberal environmentalist expects the government to force everybody to pay for the upkeep of natural habitats and to forcibly compel people to conform to any pet notion that he thinks will help the natural world. Further, he expects governments to subsidize massive recylcing, not because it is economical to do so, but because it seems more nature-friendly to him.

He has no sense of limits on what government may provide. He's nowhere near as admirable as the 18th century Christian who supported a separation of church and state.

Did that Christian understand that by setting limits on the way he can conduct himself he was actually ensuring that good things may happen? Maybe. The economics of coöperation was just beginning to gain some foothold in the climate of opinion. Mainly he supported it because he couldn't trust himself or others with too much power.

The modern liberal environmentalist, or liberal (read: prodigal) social activist has few such thoughts. He only applies it to Republicans in power. When his own folk are in, you rarely hear a peep out of him. After all, with his own folk in power, stifling opposition, he's more apt to get his pet projects into the policy niche.

The limits that liberty places on power, on fraudulent activity, on (even) externalities like pollution, are often very unpopular. And are mostly forgotten by the bulk of today's intelligentsia, even after thirty years of libertarian intellectual efforts.

We've a long way to go, a long way to peel back the state and the state of public opinion.

We now, even, have to peel back encroachments onto First Amendment rights, not too long ago felt to be pretty secure.

The Naked Economist clothes his agenda in a mildly clever way:

When I was a kid, I remember being captivated by The Book of Lists. The title was appropriate, because it was, well, a book of lists — the American presidents, the world's longest rivers, the oldest living humans, and so on. It was a fun book, and even instructive in some ways.

Since I occasionally get queries from people looking for more information on economics, I thought it would be interesting to create my own list for economics.

He is right. His list is interesting. But I take his list and offer my own, here:

• My Favorite Economist: Gary Becker . . . Carl Menger. Wheelan gives some good reasons to admire Becker, but I can't help but put Menger on the top of the heap. Carl Menger's careful analysis allowed me to understand the leading economic concepts. Without Menger, I would not have quite grasped marginal utility. And Menger did this without using the term marginal utility! The term, after all, is a translation of Grenznutzen, coined by Menger's follower Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser.

Further, Menger placed economics in a broad context, and did not narrow it down. Wheelan admires Becker for taking economics out for a spin, applying it to families and crime and racial discrimination. Menger provided just a basic analysis, and put that rather Aristotelian analysis in the context of an evolutionary framework. Further, his leading conceptions, such as his marginalism, were not tightly wedded to unrealistic assumptions, such as perfect knowledge. Most of the great mistakes of 20th century economics he thus bypassed; many of the neceessary innovations of 20th century economics (such as monopolistic competition) appear, in a Mengerian context, to be half-steps back to his fine first course. That is, they are corrections that only go halfway to solving the problems caused by the undue influence of Marshall and Walras (especially the latter).

Many admirers of Menger prefer Ludwig von Mises. I do not. Mises strikes me as having added an unnecessary rigid element to the theory of human choice and action. Menger had a more fluid approach . . . or, at least, a more fluid approach is compatible with his explanations.

Menger's writings were not perfect. And they did not go as far as some of his competitors' and followers' work. But, as far as they went, they started the reader on the right track, and ushered the reader to fewer dead ends than any of the other marginalist revolutionaries.

• The Best Economics Writer: Milton Friedman . . . David D. Friedman. As an admirer of Milton Friedman's writings about economics and policy, and public advocacy, the idea of striking him off the list does seem strange. Stranger yet may be choosing his son, David, as a replacement. David is nowhere near as famous. But since reading his charming and provocative little book Machinery of Freedom, I've been a fan. His subsequent books are even better.

There could be many alternatives. I greatly admire Thomas Sowell, and have learned a lot from him. But I disagree with him enough, especially in his columns — particularly regarding foreign policy, in which he usually impresses me as something of a simpleton — to take away the prize.

The authors of Freakonomics are popular these days, as are some of their imitators. Apparently, the popularity of this book has overshadowed its precursors. We should remember, this sort of book is quite old hat in the field. I have in my collection an earlier attempt to popularize economics this way: Abortion, Baseball, and Weed. There are many others. David Friedman's The Hidden Order is the best example, and much better than Freakonomics.

Going back over the years, a number of writers like Wicksteed and William Smart come to mind as very good writers on economic theory, who were also, mainly, popularizers.

But, here I am, choosing David Friedman over the towering giant in the field, Frédéric Bastiat! What can I say about that?

As Stigler and Becker might respond: De gustibus non est disputandum.

• My Greatest Economics Frustration: The tendency to swim in schools. I confess, freely, that my favorite economists tend to be of the so-called Austrian variety, so called because of the origin of their school in Vienna. But a lot of good work has been done in the main stream of the science, that the tendency of Austrians to reject huge rivers of thought, out of hand, vexes me.

The narrowness of the Austrian stream is particularly frustrating. Almost no good work has been done within the school on the subject of externalities. Menger did not extend his theoretics of the general theory of the good to public goods, and the Austrians are belatedly trying to catch up, now. Unfortunately, reverence for Mises strikes me as stumbling block. Mises was just simply wrongheaded on this theory, and Austrians need to go back to Menger and develop a refined, process-oriented version of externality theory.

Unfortunately, this is not the only area where Austrian theory is deficient.

Worse yet, the habits of economists in the main stream are as blind to their own faults as Austrians are bigoted towards theirs.

• My Favorite Economics Blogger: Gregory Mankiw . . . Bryan Caplan. He's a non-Austrian who argues with Austrians as well as pushes the envelope of theory and explanation. EconLog, which Caplan shares with Arnold Kling (whom I also much admire), is a great blog.

• My Favorite Obscure Economics Concept: Seignorage . . . This is a toughy, since my favorite economic concepts are pretty obvious and central. My favorite obscure economics term is marginal vendibility (or marginal marketability), but that's just simply the demand/supply schedule repackaged by F. W. Taussig . . . a terminological coinage that never caught on. I like it because, with it, you can explain the formation of prices so much easier, as flowing from individual valuations.

So, today I'll go for another Taussig term: the penumbra. In his fine, and, alas, neglected essay, Is Market Price Determinate?, Taussig took on the standard, neoclassical equilibrium theory of price and compared it actual prices in actual markets, which seem much more fluid and chaotic. He suggested that price determination, because of incomplete and dispersed information and the fallibility of human expectations, did not fix on any one price in real-world markets. To the extent that we can talk about determination, all that can be determined is a range of prices.

I'm actually not stating his position with complete accuracy. Hey: this is a blog. If you want Taussig's essay, ask me; I might be able to send you a copy.

I find the Taussig Penumbra fascinating because it is an alternative way of looking at the most basic theory set of economics: supply, demand, and price formation. Rather than abandon determination theory entirely, in favor of a more Austrian formation approach, Taussig suggested thinking in terms of ranges instead of points. And, the more you think about it, the more economic theory veers into fuzzy logic and vague sets and the like.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Economics may shine a great deal of light on our world, but that doesn't mean there aren't shadows. The very light itself casts shadows.

• My Favorite Economics Book: The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers" by Robert Heilbroner . . . can I just say that I am utterly dumbfounded by Wheelan's choice, here? Heilbroner? Really? Egads.

My favorite economics book? Well, I should choose one by Menger or Friedman, no? Otherwise my whole selection would seem contradictory, a good example of preference falsification, no? (Preference falsification would be another candidate for obscure economic concept, though I'm not at all sure how obscure it is.)

But obviously, in lists such as these, one goes for variety. I won't.

• The Biggest Economics Charlatans: The supply-siders . . . advocates of the expansive welfare state. Let's get real, here. I've never seen a decent economic justification for taking money from the bulk of the population, sending it through state and federal capitals to be strained by politicians and bureaucrats and others of the functionary class, and then given back to the people in trickles. Welfare state advocates are among the least honest and most dense theorists I know. Repeatedly they attack free-market policies and low-tax regimens as trickle-down economics, and yet they're the ones who are most addicted to trickle effects. They want to put as much of the population on a trickle diet, from the state, which they then direct.

It just don't see the sense of it.

Marxists used to be the most obnoxious economics charlatans. But Marxism is dead, except on college campuses. The welfare state, on the other hand, is very much alive in govenment and politics around the globe, as well as in the economics profession. Supply siders? Sure, they're wrong, usually. But they've done far less harm than the advocates of unrestrained spending on social programs and pork.

The economists who align themselves with the Democratic Party are especially pushing charlatanism. Rather than insist on a few limited social programs, they give aid and comfort to unlimited spending. That's just simply what they do, because that's what Democratic politicians want, and a huge chunk of modern constituencies think they want, given their political options (which have been rigged for them).

It's disgusting in its dishonesty.

I'm not saying their economics work proper is dishonest. i'm saying their economic policy work is, to some degree. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.

• The Greatest Economic Challenge of Our Time: Reconciling the tradeoff between a decent safety net and the bad incentives that it creates. . . . Getting politicians and voters to confront the danger of just this tradeoff. The political system is rigged to encourage ever-increasing amounts of government intervention in the lives of its citizens. At its very best, the two-party system perennially frames the choice as a trade-off between one set of interventions and another. But neither set makes much sense, the whole system is rigged to . . . well, you get my drift. Somehow, we've got to get to a more constitutional outlook, where basic limits to political machinations get asserted, and trade-offs become a matter for private citizens as actors in communities and markets rather than as rent-seeking grifters in the political realm.

So that's my list.

The blog software I use has its problems. I need to update it, for one. Hundreds of criminals* litter this site with thousands of pseudo-comments, while an actual reader, Roderick Long, couldn't add a comment to my recent post, Spenceriana. Here's what he emailed me, after failing to post at this site:

Back when I had a run of Spencer articles online, several different
people emailed me to ask if I could track down the source of the Spencer quote that occurs in the Alcoholics Anonymous book. Alas, I can't now remember whether I succeeded in identifying the source or not. But when I saw Spencer book of interest to alcoholics I knew it would have something to do with that quote, and sure enough when I clicked on the link I saw that it did.

Admittedly this doesn't do much to resolve the puzzle, though. For why would the mere fact that a putative quote from Spencer occurs on p. 570 of an Alcoholics Anonymous book be sufficient reason for an alcoholic to want to plow through the entire Data of Ethics?

Indeed.

I gather that some eBay sellers will take any hook to sell their wares.

But once again Spencer is placed in the weirdest of contexts by people who just don't bother to read or appreciate.

. . .

* I call anyone who litters someone else's property for their own convenience, a criminal. I don't really care about the law in this designation. I'm in the good libertarian camp, now, calling criminals criminals according to my judgment, not according to positive legislation.

Has Thomas Sowell's awesome (terrible?) mind gone to waste? Has he written too many columns? Should he have spent more time on On Classical Economics?

I think so. It's a fine book, in its way, and includes a lot of great material. But still, his fascination with Marx doesn't impress me any longer, and the great chapter on Sismondi could have been mirrored by great chapters on Say, Malthus, and Nassau Senior.

Oh, well. I shouldn't complain. I always find something of huge value in a Sowell book. In this case, his reinterpretation of Mill's On Liberty. Which now I have to read again.

I'm in a strange position. I admire his first book, Say's Law, far more than anything else I've read by him. The much-ballyhooed Knowledge and Decisions struck me as too popular. Sowell is smart enough, surely, to have done greater work. Instead, like Mill and Keynes, he's spent too much time thinking about the issues of the day and not enough about economics.

Tthose of us who research Herbert Spencer's philosophical and scientific writings will likely find this especially amusing:

Vintage Herbert Spencer Book Of Interest To Alcoholics

Talk about a reach! Why Spencer's Data of Ethics would be of special interest to alcoholics is, well, tenuous at best. Strangest eBay advertising I've seen in some time.

I'm glad I'm not an educator. Trying to teach kids while at the same time nanny them in accordance with the bigotries of the parent population — as interpreted by administrators — would wear too heavily on me. Take this story:

At issue is whether Chase's opinion column advocating tolerance of homosexuals was suitable for a student newspaper distributed to students in grades 7 through 12 and whether newspaper adviser Amy Sorrell followed protocol in allowing the column to be printed.

A kid writes a column advocating tolerance, and her supervisor gets fired. Oh, that's almost funny.

Of course, this kind of nannying is precisely what you have to expect in schools, especially public schools. Which makes this point seem risible:

"This is a real threat to quality student journalism if an adviser can be removed for not having censored a perfectly legitimate story that there was no legal reason why it shouldn't have been published," said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Virginia.

What is quality student journalism? I'm not sure I've seen it.

I'm not suggesting that public schools shouldn't censor student journalism. Why not? Institutional self-censorship happens to journalists all the time. Might as well prepare the little blighters for the real world of blight.

Still, that doesn't mean we can't protest every instance. Why? Because these instances all originate in other people's protests. So, the public (especially the government-run) sphere must be and always will be a contentious one.

But in this case, the whole thing appears more idiotic than usual: Tolerance can't be tolerated. That seems to be the upshot.

Of course, little children, no matter how hairy their crotches, must be protected from mere mention of homosexuality. They may see it on the tube and hear about it (and see it) in the halls . . . and experiment beneath the bleachers. But let's not let the school paper address it!

When I was in school, I knew I would some day work as a writer. But I avoided student journalism for the same reason a sane man avoids a madhouse. Yes, it has something to do with the matter at hand, but it undoubtedly teaches more bad habits than good.

My friend Don H. is now a teacher, but in high school he worked on The Comet. This student newspaper was as forgettable as any, but the one issue that had some hope of being lively was confiscated by the principal. I never saw it. Why? Because Don interviewed my friend Naki, who was heavily into hard rock. In the interview, Don asked about the prevalence of drugs in rock 'n' roll. Naki responded by saying that he thought it was too often overdone, but in moderation . . .

Oh, that opinion (and a mere opinion, at that), was too much for me to read. The fact that I already knew Naki's opinion (after all, anyone in the small school could do the same as I: just talk to the lad) didn't matter. I was not alloweed to read it. And thus it was not allowed to be debated.

That's how administrators and teachers make of student journalism a cesspool of inanity and pabulum. Nothing else is allowed. A real debate? On a controversial matter? Where young people are encouraged to think? Not allowed. Not in our schools!

The principal in question was much admired in the community. In that same year he came into my World History class and gave a little speech. It was about how the job of the school wasn't to teach, but to help us learn how to learn, as he put it.

I almost chortled aloud.

I had been in school over eleven years at that point, and I had indeed learned how to learn. But did I learn this at school? Well, in the first grade, perhaps, when I started reading encyclopedias, and when my teacher had me lecture on solar astronomy. More important, though, was Sunday School, provided not by the taxpayers but by tithing Christians, where we read good literature (the Bible) and discussed (if not debated) interesting concepts, and where I was encouraged to read church history and apologetics. And on my own, as I read perhaps hundreds if not thousands of books by the time I listened to the principal lie to me and my classmates.

Few of my fellow students could learn a damn thing without help. They had not learned how to learn. And their best chance, that year, was suppressed by that very same educator. A real debate of interest to them? Nope. They had to be protected from that!

I often think about the suppression of our school paper. As bad as teachers often are, I remind myself that they are ruled by administrators doing an often impossible task: trying to corral students and teachers in a system most useful for purposes other than education.

What purposes? You know, such high-minded purposes as babysitting and indocrtrination into the sports culture.

High concept: Heavenly Creatures meets The Stranger meets River's Edge. Bored teenagers do the darndest things. And will (I hope) be done to, damning, back.

I've now finished Brooke Allen's Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, and can offer a verdict:

This simple and well-researched book provides all the evidence you need to show that the American government and its Constitution were not founded on Christian principles. The author demonstrates the essential Enlightenment methods and ideals of founders Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and the rather vile (my judgment) Realpolitic of Alexander Hamlton, who used religion as a political tool, but spent most of his life in flagrant violation of Christian teaching and community. Then the author puts the thinking of these men in the wider context of their times. We've come a long way from the time when Baptists and Methodists could prefer an alleged atheist for president to a suspected Presbyterian! This long way has not been good. We can see how badly America has progressed under the onslaught of a series of disastrous spiritual awakenings.

There are a few problems with the book, however. The author seems to be a little too trusting of the what Alexander Hamilton wrote. The man was a player, and the letters she quotes from him were almost certainly carefully worded to the point of deception. It was sort of embarrassing to read her brief analysis of Hamilton's strange last letter, the letter that exonerated him in the people's mind, and condemned the man who sought to duel with him, Aaron Burr.

Further, her coverage of Tom Paine strikes me as woefully inadequate and not altogether trustworthy. Not including Paine in her list of founders was, I think, a mistake. Frankly, had she incorporated her wider history of the Enlightenment in a chapter on Paine following the chapter on Hamilton, it would have been a much better book.

But still, it is a very good book.

That being said, what I like best of the book is her quotation from Seneca: Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. I had forgotten this little gnome, and I am quite happy, now, to have it in my permanent repertoire of maxims. Seneca, in one elegant sentence puts religion in politics in the clearest light.

I saw two very well-made films this weekend, Fracture and Disturbia. Both are stylish big studio productions, and show Hollywood polish to good advantage. Both films could be categorized as suspense, the former being a courtroom drama, the latter being a thriller. Both treat of crime: cold-blooded spousal murder and serial killers, respectively. Fracture features old hand (hack? master?) Anthony Hopkins chewing up the screen as the bad guy, as only he can, set against comparative newcomer Ryan Gosling as his prosecutor; Disturbia features a young actor, Shia LaBeouf, playing an 18-year-old under house arrest, suspecting neighbor David Morse of murder. Each film adds a love interest, and each has moments of white-knuckle suspense. Both did very well this weekend at the box office. And yet only one of them strikes me as worth recommending. It is not the one I expected.

What I expected was that Disturbia would be a somewhat vexing remake of Rear Window. Yes, the set-up is similar to the Hitchcock classic, and the nature of the suspense is similar. But there's enough originality here that I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. Though, yes, I knew that the David Morse character was going to turn out to be a truly bad guy.

The Anthony Hopkins character is convicted in the viewers' eyes from the get-go. And he does indeed murder his wife. The crime in question is not a whodunnit, but a willhegetawaywithit. Or perhaps a howwillhegetawaywithit. The trouble with the movie is very easy to state: the key plot device of the character's own plotting, though kept from view, was obvious to me. I figured it out as the crime scene unfolded. So it was somewhat vexing to watch the Ryan Gosling character not figure it out.

Of course, the subplot regarding the prosecutor's new cushy private-sector position, and the consequent romance with his new boss (this, I tell you, seemed not wholly realistic), was there to both explain how this ace lawyer could miss the truth and add a red herring for audience pleasure.

Still, it was fun watching the case unravel, and it was fun watching the beleaguered prosecutor put it back together again, after all seemed lost.

The love interest in the film, played by Rosamund Pike, might be one of most strikingly beautiful white women working in film today. She is fun to watch, and it is satisfying, in its own way, to see her relationship to the hero go through an arc, not merely up the predictable staircase to happily-ever romance.

In Disturbia the love interest is played by Sarah Roemer, whom I'd never seen before. Cute and sexy, there are a number of lingering sequences where the camera lingers over her bikini-clad body. More cute than beautiful, in some ways, and not used as exploitatively in the plot climax as I would have suspect . . . a refreshing element in the film, really, almost a classy pull-back of the opening gambit, featuring (as it does) lust and danger in equal mixture.

It may be that this late-teen thriller, this rear-front-and-side window voyeurism exercise bares less than thought than Fractured, but the thought that it elicits does not hurt the film, whereas that's precisely the problem in Fractured.

Indeed, the only reason Fractured works at all is Hopkins. He so fills up the screen that he helps distract the viewer (or, I suspect, most viewers) from the problems in the plot. Ryan Gosling's acting, on the other hand, is itself distracting in the opposite way. I've never seen an actor touch his face so often onscreen . . . that is, other than the zombies in Grindhouse, who pop their pustules for the sake of mass infection.

Both Fracture and Disturbia prove variants on the classic romance, as defined by Jack Woodford: boy meets girl, girl gets boy into pickle, boy gets pickle into girl. In each case, in these modern storylines, it is the boy who gets himself into the pickle. And in each case, the other pickle finds its natural end. To show that Fractured is the more adult of the two, the latter pickle action takes place in the development of the main-pickle plot. To show a more standard storyline, the final pickle placement in Disturbia takes place offscreen as the credits roll, in the traditional happily-ever-after realm.

When a kid bullies you, crowding you — yes, you, a grown, adult human being &mdas; it's probably best not to push 'im over. That could lead to a lawsuit.

The blurb is an important form of advertising. It characterizes the thing touted in such a way as to encourage purchase. Or at least attention.

I have in my possession a book I'd like to read. It is called The Atonement, and it appears to be a scholarly treatise explaining why the central conception of Pauline Christianity is not nuts. I would like to see such an argument. So far, the best I've come across is C. S. Lewis's implied argument in Till We Have Faces. But that's hardly a philosophical position upon which one could rationally build a philosophy.

Of course, religions have a much lower bar!

Anyway, I'd really like to read the book. But I have a problem. I find it difficult to take the book seriously. Why? Because of the blurb. Here is the blurb on the front cover, placed right below the book's title:

A heartfelt & clearly reasoned discussion of the significance & necessity of Jesus' death.

What could bother me?

That word, heartfelt. I have some trouble reading books so earnest that they wear their earnestness on the cover.

I don't care the depth of the earnestness with which the author approaches his subject. Not on this subject, anyway. I care about the clarity and persuasiveness of the argument.

The blurb was written, of course, to coddle Christians. It was placed there to encourage them to read an old book — from 1860, no less! — reprinted in the edition at hand. In general, Christians do not want well-reasoned argumentation. They want something heartfelt. Well, ick.

Bethany Fellowship, the publisher in question, reprinted this old book ostensibly with people like me in mind. The book is, after all, written for careful, serious thinkers. The first chapter seems to be quite up front about the philosophical problem of the Atonement.

But by including that blurb, it cast a pall of gooey emotionalism on a book that probably doesn't deserve it.

The desire to meet audience expectations can turn the art of blurbcraft into a form of mendacity. I had plenty of such experience when I worked for a little magazine, years ago. I was a very imaginative and concise blurbist. For many years, I wrote the bulk of them. And yet, sometimes the publisher, in his desire to push this piece or that, would take control and ruin things.

He once switched the genre labels we placed over articles, simply because the one I'd placed over my comment was the most arresting, and he thought that the more philosophical piece written by another commentator could use a boost. Forget, though, that the cool word salvo fit my piece but not the other. It was a cooler word, had more blurbish potential, and thus would encourage readers to read a piece that might otherwise be neglected.

This kind of thinking can backfire, of course. It gave me additional reasons not to write for the magazine I helped edit (something the publisher expressed others some apparent concern to avoid). And in the case of this book in my library by Albert Barnes, it's led me not to read it and comment on it, which might have increased (just a bit) interest in the book and its message. Which is something you'd think the Bethany Fellowship would want.

Go figure.

Why object to heartfelt? Why does it bother me so?

Well, when we encounter the word, we know we are being presented with something more than clear reason, but also rhetoric especially tuned to convince, even where reason fails. There's nothing wrong with heartfelt writing, really, but by putting this forward, a flag goes up, and cautious readers like me take extra caution, while incautious readers feel pleased.

It's a signal, then, of a major element of in-group/out-group (esoteric/exoteric) affiliation and recruitment.

A person in philosophy often doesn't want to be recruited. He simply wants to understand. For a philosopher, affiliations take care of themselves. First comes knowledge.

Of course, in other writings, non-philosophical writings, the heartfelt and the prophetic and all the rest are utterly appropriate. I engage in them all the time. But I do so mainly when I have reason to expect agreement on the value or commitment upon which I rest my case.

I long ago gave up on the Atonement as making any sense. So an argument that is heartfelt about it will simply not speak to the values I do have. What values are those? Virtue as excellence through balance, justice as responsibility attributed in a context of liberty, and reasoning as a process of finding the best reasons for believing . . . by evidence and logic. I have no idea whether Albert Barnes could satisfy these demands of mine, because, so far, I've let a bad little blurb prevent me from giving his book a chance.

I'm reading through Brooke Allen's Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, and I'm learning a few things.

Before reading the book, I knew that George Washington was tight-lipped about religion and probably not a Christian at all; I hadn't known that he made sure he didn't go to church on communion days! (Early on he had left his wife at church for communion, and made the carriage come back for her. When the preacher remonstrated him for leaving church before communion, he accepted the criticism and made a point of not showing up on Communion Sundays.)

I knew that Ben Franklin was latitudinarian and more interested in science than religion; I had forgotten that he expressed, at the very end of his life, doubts about the divinity of Jesus, and did not accept the doctrines espoused in the New Testament, believing Jesus' message had become corrupted.

I knew that Thomas Jefferson had argued that Jesus' message had been corrupted by his besotted admirers, and had even pared down the gospels to a manageable set of sayings. Further, I knew him to be a Deist of sorts, and that, unlike Washington, who leaned Stoic, he leaned Epicurean. (The latter, alas, not covered in the book.) I had not realized, though, how much he hated priests and preachers.

So far, halfway through the book, the biggest surprises concern John Adams, son of Calvinism, but a man who grew to repudiate most of its doctrines. His disgust with the religion of his time, and with the Second Great Awakening, I had no clue of. Perhaps I'd avoided Adams too much.

The book is easy to read, and quotes amply from original source material, such as letters and journal entries. As this book makes clear, there is no doubt that the myth of America's founding fathers as Christians was perpetrated by liars and believed by gullible fools.

Of course, this was aided, in part, by the care with which these men took not to upset the religious people of their time. Even Jefferson, the most obviously un-Christian of them all, didn't spout every one of his beliefs and reasons to the public. Still, the public knew what they were voting for when they voted for him. One of the main Federalist ploys in the Jefferson-Adams contest was to characterize Jefferson as an anti-Christ.

Adams blamed losing the election, though, to his making a national day of fasting, midway through his term, regarding the prospect of a war with France. This was seen by some as too religious, and Jefferson's support came from many religious people who could not trust mainline Christian denominations. Yes, the Methodists and the Baptists backed the atheist rather than Adams, who was perceived to be too doctrinaire, and thus not safe!

The basic lesson from our founders' religious and ethical beliefs is that ethics is not linked inextricably to any particular religion . . . or even to religion in general. It is possible to be good and do good without any god prompting by holy carrot or hellish stick.

In the last several years, I have found myself unable to read fiction with my old wide-ranging zeal. Science fiction, in particular, wears on me, and I stop after a few sentences.

Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, is an exception. This book grabbed me from the beginning, and, had I not lost track of it in the mess of my office, and then in the mess of my bedroom, I would have read it immediately upon purchase, in as close to one sitting as possible. As it is, it's taken me many months to read. (I've since cleaned up my bedroom, and I'm cleaning my office as I move to the room next door.)

It is a first-person narrative, but one of those with plenty of description and opinion, and one that builds up its story. In structure, it most resembles (or so I say in dim memory) Gore Vidal's Kalki. But this book is far superior to that.

And, though billed as literary fiction, and obviously written at a high level, this book cannot help but be called science fiction. It is more science fictional than most books so labelled, for here we are not only dealing with an imagined future, but a science is focused on as a living, breathing human enterprise, and the focus of that science provides the major plot points.

The science? Anthropology. The focus? The Clovis hunters, who (may have) eradicated the bulk of the large mammals of the North American continent. A Clovis discovery by the narrator's star pupil turns into something almost farcical, and then horrific. The general tone of the novel is satirical.

This is one of the better end-of-the-world stories I've read. It is one of the best novels I've read in some time.

The title is meant, I think, to be evocative, not literal. Towards the end there is something said about parasites:

The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion's share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled.

Interesting, but not glorious. One might say that's the author's view of humanity: interesting, but not glorious.

Radley Balko, on Reason's Hit and Run, rightly objects to this bit of hyperbolic nitwittery by someone who usually speaks less dishonestly . . . that is, by Barack Obama:

"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways," he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of "violence."

There's the "verbal violence" of Imus.

There's "the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country."

To extend the definition of violence to forms of speech that are not designed to start a fight, or to the withdrawing of a form of coöperation, is precisely the kind of thing we expect from demagogues. I don't remember hearing such dangerous nonsense from my favorite Democratic candidate for the presidency before. That we do now might be the result of the corrupting influence of Obama's goal: the most powerful position on the planet.

Conflating violence with other things we don't like is, of course, a good way to set up a violent opposition to those other things, such as Imus's silly racist remarks, or outsourcing. There is indeed a market for over-reaction. Obama seems to be pandering to that market, now.

I hope he doesn't continue. (The likelihood of him getting my vote just about disappeared; I had indeed contemplated voting for him before this.)

His full comments, of course, will strike some people as acceptable. To me, his whole speech sounded like bad pop humanism. He ascribes the prevalance of violence to "our incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other. To not understand that we are all connected, fundamentally as a people." Since much violence is within families, I suspect that this is not correct. The problem with violence is that some people cannot control their tempers, or have not engaged in habits of self-control, or not given others' their due as separate from themselves.

This separation of people is one of the keys to behaving well. Close connection with others can sometimes erode that separation, and allow a person to think and feel that others should cave in to his (or her) demands, to expect others to serve him (or her). When this does not happen, violence.

He also trotted out the classic line "I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper." And later extended the idea that my brother lives in Darfur. It's amazing how J's irony in the story of Cain and Abel has become a cliche amongst people who are trying to erode the standard of separateness that was assumed by Cain and his interlocutor, J's deity.

We are, he says, "trapped in this . . . belief that somehow we can impose our wills on each other, that we can differentiate ourselves and make ourselves feel better than one another because of the accidents of birth or race or gender."

Of course, politics is the mechanism by which we impose our wills on each other in the biggest way. As a Democrat, he feels it his most important mission to impose his will (and his fellow party-members' wills) on those who disagree, whether it be regarding seat belts or charity or how to run a transportation system. All must conform to the majority view, all must support the plans of the majority, and all must contribute to those plans' financial support.

The political idea is not that far from the criminal idea. They are not the same, but they are analogous.

And, of course, it doesn't matter what the origins of a trait are, their value holds because of their utility. We can and must differentiate ourselves from each other. We are separate persons. That separation allows for what dignity we have.

I bet Senator Obama knows this. But it's just not the kind of wisdom that a politician has any reason to trot out after a time of great slaughter.

Ethology came up as a subject today, next door to my office, as a few neighbors chatted about science and society. What monkeys do isn't always monkey-do. Monkeys can learn to swim, and live mostly aquatic lives; and monkeys can raid potato patches and roll the potatoes in the surf . . . for salt.

So behavior as a function of calculation and imagination and improvisation and mimesis is not limited to man. This is an important thing to remember, as human and wild populations increasingly intersect.

I came away from the conversation, though, with a very different thought regarding the categories of action.

Ethologists, for example, often talk of the standard behavior in cases of conflict: fight or flight. And that's often all us laymen remember from their studies. But the full spectrum of behavior, adaptive or otherwise, is not limited to flight and fight, is it?

fight - hegemonic coöperation - mutual coöperation - stand-off - flight

That is, in a situation of perceived conflict, the choice is not binary. There are many possibilities in between. One side in a potential conflict, even before a fight, can concede the dominance of the other and follow directions, coöperating. Or both sides can stand down, and work together in negotiation based on a constitutional rough parity. And then there is the stand-off, where the parties can agree to disagree, in close context but without coöperation.

That's a lot of options. And I think I can find examples of each of these in the natural world outside of humanity. They certainly abound in the study of humanity.

My trouble with so much theorizing about behavior is the prevalance of un-nuanced dualities. There are many different kinds of (and dimensions to) behavior, and they should be recognized in theory as well as in practice. (I've read many, many socialist theories that unduly dualize social life; and libertarian writers such as Murray Rothbard, in stressing force versus freedom set up another goofily dualistic terminology, without allowing for a wide spectrum of behavior in it. There are reasons I usually diminish Rothbard's status among recent libertarian theorists.)

One of my favorite sf stories, White Fang Goes Dingo, came out in a collection of same, years ago. I owned a copy. I no longer have it.

Which of my friends borrowed it and did not return it? Or did I actually give this book without expecting it back?

I've forgotten.

I miss the book, though.

Ludwig Feuerbach, at the start of his important treatise The Essence of Christianity, narrows down his subject matter:

Religion has as its basis in the essential difference between man the brute — the brutes have no religion.

But, you may object, do not our pets have a religion, us?

My cat is as loyal to me as any human acolyte was to Ashtaroth or Zeus. My dogs Chauncey and Rimsky died within three months of my leaving home, many, many years ago. Now that's loyalty.

Maybe.

The way to prove a religion among pets would be to remove the pets' owners from the home, and see whether the pets would maintain the old rituals, would pretend that the owners were, in some transcendental sense still there, or about to return.

No other animal than man has set up the worship of beings not himself, on no real prompting. Man is the religious animal, yes. Only man has made himself a pet to masters who do not exist.

My father turned 90 today. There was a party at his church, and many members of the community showed up. One old friend brought a dinner from the Community Hall Annual Chicken Feed for my father. Lots of people signed a large card, and even included money. One of the organizers of the event gave an amusingly apt gift: a pack of Cherry Cokes! My father has a passion for only one soft drink, really, and that's Cherry Coke. (Of course, he remembers the Fountain version of this drink, from days of yore. There are few fountain bars left.) I met some of my cousins, old and new, and talked with neighbors and relatives from the area.

Robert Michael Pyle stopped by, and gave my father a signed copy of his new book, Sky Time in Gray's River. He added a very nice inscription.

Bob spent a fair amount of time mingling with the nice crowd, and then left as the party started to wind down. But he had noticed me talking to my aunt, Alma, who is herself over 80. He walked back in the door and asked to be introduced. I introduced the two, and explained that my aunt is the mother (step-mother, really, but who's particular at such times?) of someone Bob knows: Bob Saari, local tree-climber extraordinaire.

What impressed me about this little chat is how socially adept author Bob Pyle was. He made time for an ancient woman whom he'd never met. He was polite, interested, complimentary.

Most people wouldn't try. I think that some of that interest in real people is detectable even in his book, which might remind people to be good neighbors, even in places where there's more anonymity than in Grays River Valley.

I missed most of the Don Imus Issue when it was big in the news and the pundit circuit. I saw moments of the Jackson/Sharpton sharp rebuke, and I saw the send-up of same on Saturday Night Live. I read a few paragraphs here and there about the event, from the commentators, pro and un-.

And, well, maybe it's just me, but when somebody says something as dumb as Imus did (not all that funny, not all the perspicacious, rather offensive), polite people should try to ignore the slight. Running somebody out of his job — a job with a fair amount of insult and comedy allegedly built into it, strikes me as going a bit overboard.

Of course, in less modish times, calling a group of women whores who were not, in fact, sex workers, would have been quite offensive. And even perhaps worth kicking someone out of his public job. But, as everyone seems to remind us, a whole community of men do call women and even girlfriends hos.

The great divide of our times, regarding language, appears to be racial, and black men have more freedom than white men.

We could call this divide the Tough Row to Ho, or simple the Ho Row.

Hi ho, hi ho.

The revival of naturalistic humanism under the term The Brights has sparked some interest far outside the usual core groups. The main idea is naturalism. Why, with perfectly good terms like biological naturalism and secular humanism another term was needed is not obvious to me. But, here we are, a movement of people calling themselves brights.

I immediately think of intelligence as processing power, speed and mental agility with which to think up solutions to complex problems. I was considered bright as a kid. And to now don the mantle of Bright? Odd.

You be a Bright; I'll be a Cobden.

Why this term, and not another? Well, I suppose it has something to do with the Enlightenment. I am a partisan of the Enlightenment, and am an unashamed one at that. I lean to the Scottish version, but still, Enlightenment all the same.

I've only skimmed the literature. I haven't read Dawkins on the movement yet. Daniel Dennett, in reply to a religious humanist preacher, has this to say about the new term:

I prefer bright to enlightened, which smacks of revelation, a phenomenon we brights are more than a little skeptical about. The opposite of gay isn’t glum; it's straight — a nice enough epithet, unlike, say, crooked. The opposite of bright isn't dull (or cloudy); it hasn't been coined yet, and could be, if you like, great or splendid. Let those who are not brights hijack the word of their choice and see if it will play.

Well, I'm strongly tempted to disagree with the last point. The opposite of a bright is quite obvious: the benighted.

Can we make a nicer term for them, something they can be proud of? That's up to them, of course, but may I suggest beknighted?

Think of Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith. Think of the religious person's sense of chivalry, of going about doing the duty and calling of his or her Master. They see themselves as knight errants. Like knights of yore, they speak very personally of their fealty to a Lord. So call them The Beknighted!

If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.

Thus spake Kurt Vonnegut, as of today, dead . . . this latter concept captured brilliantly by a Vonnegut drawing on today's front page of vonnegut.com:

Flown the cage, eh?

My drawing for my event would add a hand reaching into the cage and daintily pulling out, by one claw, an inverted bird.

It's not only my parents who probably are glad I didn't go into the visual arts.

But back to Vonnegut's advice. The greatest sorrow for parents, is when one of their children dies. The real sorrow, for the child, is when parents die.

Readers? Their sorrow at the passing of an author is not usually so great. Being at several removes of distance, we can take to heart the usual advice at death: As long as we remember him [or her], there's still life.

Still life.

Amazing, after all these years. Life still goes on, going it just so. That Vonnegut himself died of irreparable trauma to the head, that seems, oddly, fitting. He saw so much in civilization that he took at repeated blows to the head, to the sensibility of the humane man. Humans are such frail creatures. And yet, we endure. Vonnegut himself endured for quite a long time, no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, no matter how many pills he took. He even tried to kill himself once.

He found reason to laugh at in his survival. Even as we are saddened, can we find reason to laugh at his death? That, I bet, would be carrying laughter too far.

And yet we'll laugh again. Perhaps at a Vonnegut quip. His words will be remembered for a long time.

Vonnegut's novels, in my order of preference:

1. Mother Night




2. Slaughterhouse Five




3. Sirens of Titan




4. Bluebeard

The latter is, I believe, one of his books that most people never read. It is not sf. It is not considered major. But I'm very fond of it. It is Vonnegut's satire on modern art (abstract expressionism in particular) and on art-as-investment, and a whole lot more. And once again he brings up the matter of genocide.

Vonnegut was obviously obsessed with the subject. It was his touchstone concept. Man's inhumanity to man? Genocide is the ultimate form of this inhumanity.

The thing about Galapagos, the book of his that disappointed so many readers (including Jesse Walker), the chilling thing about it? In that book Vonnegut contemplates post-human evolution, and in a sense seems to be wishing for genocide. It has the same problem that Vidal's Kalki had: is this satire or is this wish fulfillment?

It's easy to be "against genocide." Vonnegut explored the idea, and tried to make some sense out of human senseless slaughter.

A human death, on the other hand, is just one natural death among so many . . . there's no use trying to make too much sense of that. Death is just the final burst of the glorious bubble of an individual life, and, though one hates to burst a bubble, every bubble will indeed burst. That Vonnegut's bubble lasted as long as it did is amazing in its way. And, iridescent as the bubble was, its longevity was something for which we could be grateful.

Joshua Bell — classical music's prettiest (er, handsomest?) male violinist — busks in Washington, D.C., and almost no one notices:

Bell earned $32 and change. The Post quotes him as saying, "That's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

Or, ahem, taxes.

The event was pitched to Bell as a test of whether, in an unlikely setting, "ordinary people would recognize genius." Whether or not she recognized his genius, at least Brazil native Edna Souza, who has been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, recognized something unusual. She dislikes buskers — she says they are make too much noise and prevent her from talking with her customers, which isn't good for business.

But asked about Joshua Bell, she says while he was also "too loud," "he was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

I haven't followed the cartoon strip B.C. in years. But I have many fond memories. Now, the author of those excellent three- and four-panel strips is dead:

Cartoonist Johnny Hart, who won awards and acclaim for creating the BC comic strip, has died at the age of 76.

I'm afraid my favorite Hart jokes were his epigrams, the poems attributed to Wiley, the peg-legged, misogynistic, aquaphobic curmudgeon. Here are two, from memory:

Feature the cone
And its function thereof.
It stands on its orifice
And points straight above.

Inverted and filled
It will tumble at once.
No wonder the cone
Symbolizes the dunce.

And this self-refential one:

Most of my poems
Are written in haste.
And therefore, resultingly,
Lacking in taste.

Yet people who read them
And think they are fine
Must surely have taste
Just as rotten as mine.

I have not read the bulk of his work in recent times, though I've seen a few of his controversial Christian cartoons. Much of the humor of the strip (which means, as my third grade teacher informed me, Before Christ) were all the anachronisms. There is nothing more anachronistic than a turtle and a bird and a clam in the age of dinosaurs and humans preaching about the separation of Church and State. Alas, most of these efforts seem more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha.

I rarely join organizations. I am rarely tempted. But I almost wish I worked in the lumber or forestry industry — or in some way with wood products — to enable me to join the Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo. Established in 1892 by five businessmen stranded in Gurdon, Arkansas, this fraternal organization was designed not merely to encourage the health, wealth, and longevity of its members, but also to allow a bit of harmless fun.

With a name like The Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo, it couldn't help but succeed.

Hoo-hoo, I learned recently, was a tuft of hair on the bald head of a friend of the founder of the order. Hoo-hoo, I had prevoiusly read, was the name members of the organziation used for all the silly medals that more enthusiastic members of such organizations wore to their meetings.

The Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo's symbol is an Egyptian black cat, tale curled to a stylized 9 . . . and because of this mascot, members often met on the ninth minute of the ninth hour of the ninth month of the year. They can probably hardly wait for the ninth year event, in September 2009.

Yes, the order still exists. It has a website. It appears to be a not-insignificant organization. One motto associated with the group remains of some significance: Health, Happiness, and Long Life. It is pleasant to see that the whimsical nomenclature remains, with the officers adorning names such as these:

• Snark of the Universe
• Supreme Nines
• Viceregent Snarks

Hmmm. The phrase dressed [up] to the nines is listed as obscure of origin in my references. I wonder if its origins lie here, in the nine-obsessions of the Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo.

George Meredith is undoubtedly the most unjustly under-appreciated 19th century British novelist. His repuation has fallen not for want of high praise, but for want of readers. He was and remains a highbrow author, a writer whose comedy was not too sophisticated for the average reader, but whose prose sometimes (too often?) was. Chaos and lightning! That's how Oscar Wilde characterized his work, and I agree.

I'm by no means an expert in his work, having only taken on a novel or two. But I aim to take on them all. For one thing, Meredith does one of the things I wish all novelists would do: contrive a brilliant opening. A great first sentence, or paragraph, or scene. I want to be drawn in from the first words. And Meredith usually does this. No boring opening lines for him.

Take The Amazing Marriage, one of his lesser works, by most critics' accounting. Take the first sentence:

Everybody has heard of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, who was one of the lights of this country at the time when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity's sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have of moping.

Yes, it's a longish sentence. True, it will vex the Hemingway slaves. And perhaps that clash of imagery, with crowned heads said to be running, will make some wince. But I suspect that was part of Meredith's aim. He aimed to amuse, and even the conflict of imagery amuses. The whole thing admirably starts the novel in question.

I want to read more, anyway.

I had never heard of the composer before hearing his work, a French Horn Concerto. It is magnificent! His basic approach strikes me as sound (ha!), and his stories of George Antheil might even interest those not interested in his music.

I had friends who were socialists when I was young. I didn't discriminate. At some point, though, I took up discrimination.

The turning point was probably my trip to the bookstore to pick up a book I'd ordered. I was in my early twenties, but reading economic theory voraciously, for pleasure, as part of my ongoing philosophical pursuits. And a friend of mine came along with me. He liked books, too.

But the book I retrieved gave him a mild shock: Perception, Opportunity, and Profit, a collection of essays by Israel Kirzner.

He giggled, as was his wont, and chided, Oooh, evil; profit!

At first I thought he was being ironic. He was pillorying the inanities of socialism.

Since he was not a dunce, I had assumed he understood profit as a return on a certain type of trade. All people expect positive benefits to their actions. Otherwise, they'd do something else. That this would be controversial struck me then as it does now as silly at best. Perverse at worst.

But later that day I realized that not only was my friend flirting with Hinduism (a lapse in spirituality that I tried, at the time, not to think about), but also with socialism. He was, by nature, a leftist. And his leftism was not merely of the save the wilderness, save the dying children sort; the kind I could admire, or at least share some goals. He actually did believe that profit was wrong.

And for the life of me, I couldn't see a reason to hang out with him any longer. If you believe that profit is evil, I don't really want to have much to do with you. You are either an idiot or a fool. I don't have friends who are idiots. And I'm trying to cut down on fools.

I love the land, am amused by its people; I distrust my government, and despise its politicians.

The love has no principle, just long habit.

The amusement can pall, but some principals of the people rise up to surpass the value of the land.

The government may (just may) be better than no government, but is certainly nowhere near the best it can be.

The politicians have no principles, but I do.

Peter T. Leeson gives what I am sure is very good advice to young Austrian school economists on a blog I'd never noticed before, titled (appropriately) The Austrian Economists. Here I'll take each point and replace his elaborative comment with my comment in response:

1. Stop block quoting Mises and Hayek.

Good idea. Too often such extended quotations strike non-Austrian economists (and even those sympathetic non-economists, like me) as appeals to authority. Like something Rand did with John Galt. Mises and Hayek actually existed, but they aren't the only economists to so exist. If you single these two for extended quotation, you sound like Johnny Two-Note. And for most of the Two Vons' notions there exist both earlier and later economists also worthy of citation. But mainly, keep your references to Mises and Hayek as citations, footnotes, not as huge chunks of reverently quoted material.

2. No more attempts at rewriting "capital theory."

This is sad news. I like capital theory. Standard capital discussion is often silly, useless, or at the very least misguided. But, that being said, this is probably good advice. Arguing about capital theory is like pushing a rock up a mountain in Hades: it's gonna come crashing down on you. I've talked with a number of economists over the years, and when I (a non-economist) mention capital theory, they usually just wave their hands and mention Irving Fisher. Ye gods, what a mess.

Work out your capital theory in fear and trembling. Then, in other work, if the occasion comes to bring it up, do it in the world's best constructed paragraph.

3. Work on topics other than history of thought.

Unless your contribution is going to be an economic alternative to evolutionary epistemology and the sociology of knowledge . . . and even then, do something new and exciting and bring this other in if you have to. Leeson's added advice is not only sound but funny: Set a limit for yourself--say, 1 history of thought paper for every 5 non-history of thought papers.

4. No more discussions about the calculation debate.

Great advice. I was tired of this by the early '90s. And then Don Lavoie's and David Ramsay Steele's books came out, and I thought, OK, stop talking about the calculation debate NOW.

5. Get over the "subjectivism stuff."

Leave it for those of us on the outside of the Academy, who bring it up in part to stick it to capital-O Objectivists.

6. Do not confuse "correctness" for "goodness" in economics and vice versa.

Hmmm. This is probably right. An economist is good who can expand knowledge; an economist who is correct may know nothing more than a few true basics. My interpretation of this rule? The hidden norm in academic life is progress. Nice to know.

7. You are not going to write a treatise that revolutionizes economics.

Well, this is an odd thing for an economist to write. It's not hedged. What he should have written is this: Given the odds, you are not likely to write that revolutionary treatise. So do something useful instead of try. The economists who do revolutionize will do so either (a) inadvertantly, in the course of other work, or (b) will not listen to good advice anyway. There are always exceptions in these things, and every good statistician knows this. (Of course, the correct statistician can make the statement and likely be right, depending on the size of his readership pool.)

8. Do not engage (i.e., make the focus of your research) work that is more than 25 years old.

The problem with this advice is that a few of the deep and abiding problems of Austrian economics are a century out of date! Take public goods. The Austrians got behind on this, and the work trying to catch up is still not there yet, from what I can tell. Give Austrians another five years. After they catch up to work done 90 years ago, then maybe we can nudge them to set their sites even nearer.

9. Don't tell us what Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, etc. "really meant."

This is another issue that reminds even non-economists too much of theology and literature and philosophy. Stick to economics. Leave hermeneutics to French Theorists and Continental theologians.

10. Stick a fork in the "philosophy talk."

This is something that Mises himself should have done more often, too. Though I was deeply impressed with his Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science when I read it at age 20 — and even though, in a pecular way it even changed my life! — I didn't buy his argument that he wasn't doing philosophy, and I didn't buy huge chunks of said philosophy. What he (almost inadvertantly) helped me to understood was the significance of subjective value. But that was almost an extraneous point. His main argument struck me at the time as dubious, and strikes me as more dubious now. Most of his subsequent defenders and friendly interpreters regarding method seem to demonstrate less than half the sophistication they pretend to possess. The whole Austrian school often comes out looking bad for this obsession.

And yes, I say these things even though I am sympathetic to most Austrian positions, even the ones I disagree with.

Of course, it's easy to dismiss me; I'm not, after all, an economist.

Final point: the reason young economists in the Austrian school should avoid these vices is that, in doing so, they will get ahead. They can leave these vices, listed above, to those of us outside the academic world and can't be harmed much by them. No one really cares what we do, or if we come off looking a bit nuts!

Bryan Caplan takes up a frequent Net debate tactic, the ad hominem argument:

The advocates of X are jerks; therefore, X is false is the classic ad hominem argument. But most of what we usually call ad hominem attacks simply argue that The advocates of X are jerks. Only the former is a logically fallacy, but high-quality thinkers usually avoid both.

Is there a droll element here? The factual statement about high-quality thinkers embeds a judgment about a person's character and links it to a kind of argument made. Which is why the whole issue is touchy anyway.

Now, my interest in the ad hominem is that we sometimes must attack individuals. To put it in Caplan's simple terminology, people are sometimes jerks, and it is important to call them on it.

To say that only arguments can be bad is to deny a central tenet of nearly every morality ever touted: that people are often quite bad.

In arguing with Hitler, do you merely dissect each and every one of his statements? Or do you dare to say: Sir, you have embraced totalitarianism and the very principles of injustice. You are becoming a moral monster.

The trouble with such an attack — and surely the reason why thinkers as opposed to politicians and citizens so rarely use it — is that once you have identified another person's moral fault, that person will see you as enemy, and will likely not be convinced.

But you have to write some people off. It doesn't take long in some debates to see that the person has committed himself or herself to a dangerous and vile course.

My usual example is Ayn Rand. She used a false dichotomy in defining egoism as rational self-interest and altruism, its opposite, as the obligation to sacrifice self for others. An honest dialectician would have defined the terms by the same standard.

Now, one could ascribe this to error, but in looking at The Virtue of Selfishness (or was it Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal?) one can see that she was aware of this disjunction. She swept it under the rug. She would not confront it honestly, philosophically. She always had high dudgeon up on the subject of sacrificing others to self (the common definition of selfishness, after all), and did not carefully explore the possibility of rational other-interest (despite, at times, arguing that a person's willing sacrifice of his own self for a loved other was not altruistic!).

I have argued that Rand did these things for a reason. She was trying to shore up an extremist macho flash, and get attention, without accepting the consequences of that stance.

But some things cannot be repressed forever. The very schema she set up, in effect, amounted to the very low selfish gambit she officially rejected, and it should be no surprise that the repressed definition of selfishness became the actual guiding light in her dealing with others. She became the ugly egoist of common parlance; that is, she became, in her life, an example of her opponents' (obviously justifiable) fears.

For making this argument I have been cited with making an ad hominem. I was certainly not guilty of logical fallacy. What I was saying is that bad arguments can have moral consequences, and that those consequences for Rand's character were dramatic, obvious, and helped make the very opposite point she was aiming to prove.

And I was doing nothing she herself had not done. She regularly showed how bad ideas lead to bad character. That was part of her schtick. So my analysis of her own arguments and character was a reciprocal volley in a very nasty and dangerous match. She deserved it.

I'm sure I haven't come up smelling like a rose. When you wrestle with pigs there are consequences.

But I have noticed that Objectivists don't like my doing this. They are deeply offended. They may practice this method all the time, but when that method is turned, successfully, upon their core ethical principle? Blankout.

So George Bernard Shaw was wrong. The pigs don't like it. Reciprocity in this game — the analysis of the close connection between bad ethical (and political) argument and vicious conduct — is not something they appreciate.

Is that the very reason to engage in it, though?

If those of selfish or particularist or even criminal mindset, hoping to put something over on us (and Rand, like many politicians, possessed precisely that instinct), are allowed to get away with it, allowed to mask their real agendas, what do we gain by foreswearing reciprocity?

On the phone, not long ago, I mentioned my love for Lucian. My friend on the other end heard Lacanian and gasped.

No, Lucian of Samosata, I said.

Very different. I prefer wriers who prick the balloons of pretension to those who fill up multiple ballons, ceaselessly.

But that doesn't mean I can't read writing that others find difficult, whether it comes from the allegedly long-winded Herbert Spencer or the obviously scholastic prose of C. S. Peirce.

Still, Lucian is a good palliative, if not cure, for excessive pomposity in speech and writing.

Why do I use OS X and not Linux? Very simple: OS X is very simple to use.

For example, I've used multiple monitors for years on my Macs, from OS 8.6 on. I use two extremely cheap 17" monitors now in Panther and Tiger. They are easy to set up, easy to configure.

Now, see how it's done under Linux:

First, as usual before any changes, you need backup current xorg.conf. Next open config in favourite editor, and add following lines under section Device:

Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP, CRT"
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "DFP, CRT"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "DFP LeftOf CRT"
Option "NoPowerConnectorCheck"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "1"
Option "Metamodes" "CRT-0: 1280x1024, DFP-0: 1680x1050"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31-82"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "56-76"

And that's just the beginning.

Linux is still for people who like to code. I reject it not because it is part of the white western male power structure, but because it still demands more attention than I'd like to details I've no interest in.

The Coen brothers are known for writing characters with the gift for gab. Some of these characters use big words in situations where big or strange words rarely get an outing.

This is funny. Hifalutin speech coming from low-status characters (recidivists, escaped convicts, Bible salesmen) helps make O, Brother, Where Art Thou and Raising Arizona such great movies.

When I was in high school, I too inculcated a gift for gab and a passion for twisty sentences and big words. After all, I was reading big words all the time. And the people around me regularly used low words, vulgar words, to put down others and raise themselves up. My strategy amounted to a sort of ironic counter-thrust. My deliberately out-of-place constructions formed a kind of self-defense. I was serious about my agenda, but engaged in the tropes and figures of speech, as well as the extended subordinate clauses, with a sense of humor, too. I realized (to some extent) its limitations as speech.

Real communication should not be so closely tied to establishing hierarchies, I came to realize. Real communication would be, in essence, post-conflict. (In high school, post-conflict meant one thing: after high school!)

In my own writing, big words still appear. And some of my sentences go on longer than Hemingway's. Or a newspaper reporter's. As a reader of James Branch Cabell, these constructions often conjure up a languorous irony that functions, by turns, as beautiful and witty.

But I don't write stuff like this (I hope):

Connectivity has been called the genius of feminism (by theorist Robin Morgan 53), and this genius is being realized in electronic spaces and texts in more totalizing ways than in any other medium to date. The multidimensional networks of the new media and the structural models of computing offer methods and approaches that I have freely adapted as a feminist pedagogy. Cyberfeminism is a process of dynamic interaction and fluid boundary-free practices that pose new strategies for navigating real and virtual worlds, and navigations in the cyberspaces of networked literature point to potentialities for how it might be possible to escape the white western male power structures that tend to rule technological discourse and our classroom work as well.

It, too, is funny, in a sort of Coenesque way. But it is, I think, unintentionally funny. The metaphor of fluidity is risible in and of itself. And the piling on of jargon is mind-numbing. That it comes from a philosopher's pedagogical manifesto strikes me as sad.

But, could I put myself in her shoes? What would I say if I believed and taught as she believes and teaches?

Here's a quick attempt at a revision:

Connectivity is the genius of the Internet. Everyone knows this. A new science now gestates: the science of networks. It used to be "who you knew" that was socially important. Then it became "what you know." Now, the connections themselves rise in importance, and both What and Who become subsumed by connectivity itself.

This may be new, but it is not unprecedented. Feminists have had an inkling of this, for as Robin Morgan (aged 53, or is that note 53?) has suggested, connectivity is the genius of feminism. The expanded dimensions of networks in new media, along with the structural models of computing, suggest methods and approaches that I freely adapt to teach and advance feminism.

We could call my method Cyberfeminism, I suppose. But let's smile as we say it, for as jargon goes, it conjures up a few unfortunate terms from science fiction: cyborg, for instance. We do not want cyborgs, or "the Borg," or any hive mind or mechanistic computation. Real human minds are more fluid, limber than A.I. constructs, -- at least so far. And with the dialectic now possible in the dynamic interaction of today's . . . .

But I can't conclude her passage, because she seems to believe that what characterizes science and computing theory is male. She speaks of white western male power structures that tend to rule technological discourse; is she suggesting, as so many feminist theorists have suggested, that rational thought, and the requirement to break things into pieces and then put them back together, are inherently male and thus inherently domineering?

Not human, but male. And sexist, to boot?

If yes, the proper response is dismissal, for such a gambit deprives women taking her courses (and those willing male victims, ready to be psychologically lobotomized by a figurative castration) from the tools that might allow them to think their way out of any sort of trap that social custom and political power has, in fact, set against them.

Rationality is not about sex. Or gender. It is the ability to distinguish one idea from another, and weigh them. Compare them. Privilege them, perhaps.

At a fairly early age I came to hate sexism, the very kind of thing the above-quoted philosopher hates. I saw it as both unnecessary and unjust.

And I quickly came to believe (based on observation, not ideology) that sexism arises naturally from childish attempts to sort out the world. It is a fairly obvious dogma that both men and women (or, perhaps more accurately, boys and girls) cook up almost spontaneously, probably out of fear and insecurity. They identify aspects of their own sex and then reinforce them in illegitimate ways.

I, as a youngster, noticed that my sisters were given piano lessons as a matter of course, but I was not. My interpretation was: boys don't play piano; that was unmanly.

This dogma, never once spelled out to me, was disastrous, for music later became for me an abiding and deep interest. But I had waited too late to master the musical instrument that fascinated me most, namely, the piano.

Should I blame my parents for not sending me to piano lessons at age seven, like my little sister did? Or the sports-obsessed society I grew up in, for its numerous clues about what it is to be a man?

Or myself, for too long accepting such notions?

Blame isn't the point. Harping on it isn't the point. A truly liberating education would simply assert a more humane and open course for each individual life. Idiotic limitations, like boys don't sing and girls don't play sports should be rejected simply as a matter of course.

I began to suspect, years ago, that feminism itself was too hung up on blaming people, too hung up on the past, and on human foibles, rather than offering up effective alternatives.

And this philosopher in question, with her ridiculous mélange of jargon and periphrasis, she, too, seems to think that everything is the result of male dominance. But I was prevented (to the extent I was prevented from anything) not by male dominance, but mostly by a limited view of sex roles that, as a boy, I took to with eager readiness. That I came to see it as childish, and other men and many women do not see such extra limitations as childish, is a problem. But it's not a question of men are wrong and feminists are right. It's a question of ethics and rationality and manners and norms and order and . . .

You get the idea. To call the remedy for foolish dogma on matters of sex feminism is itself foolish. An equal standard of conduct applied to individuals of both sexes should not be named after one of those sexes, and not the other. The very unequal (privileged!) naming leads its adherents, as if by an invisible hand, to espouse doctrines that are in fact sexist rather than equal.

The standard is not feminism or masculinism. The standard is individualism.

That may be a big word, but I'm not using it for comic effect.

The chasm between the inorganic and the organic is being filled up. —Herbert Spencer, Principles of Pscyhology

I just watched Jonathan Lethem and Judge Richard Posner on C-SPAN's BookTV talk about plagiarism. An interesting subject, but it chiefly brought up personal memories, for me.

During Liberty's early years, I wrote a short review, a Booknote, on a science fiction novel. Some months later I came across a state LP newsletter with a review of the same work. The odd thing was, over half the review was taken, quite obviously, from my review. The whole of my review was there, with a few editorial changes, and a few new paragraphs.

What astounded me was that the review was very personal, and talked about some of my own experiences. Those personal reflections were included, too, in the plagiarized review!

I couldn't help but laugh at the whole thing. I wrote a bemused letter to the editor of the newsletter. I didn't demand a thing. I simply requested that he instruct his writers not to be so blatant in future acts of plagiarism, should they feel compelled to steal so blatantly.

I seem to remember admitting to him the obvious fact (and one that Posner made in his remarks on BookTV) that the review, in its plagiarized form, was better than my shorter review.

At about the same time my employer, the editor of Liberty, wrote a very nasty letter to a major coin company. One of that company's writers had used one of my employer's graphs that he had published in his precious metals newsletter Analysis & Outlook (he had made his fortune in this field).

What struck me as so odd about this little event was not his truculence or his demands (though neither were to my taste), but the simple fact that he regularly stole the intellectual property of that company and all others in the industry. He regularly took their pictures of coins and put them into his own advertisements. How could he maintain such a self-righteous tone when he was, in effect, in no way righteous on the very matter involved?

The difference between my employer and myself can be seen in this one instance: I had a hard time getting worked up over one small plagiarism against me, whereas he angrily demanded recompense, even though he was more guilty than the offender against him.

My employer did not really believe in reciprocity. It was not only not second nature to him, it seemed no part of his nature.

Is it any wonder that we would some day part company?

Contemplating the Sony Reader, in the pages of The Weekly Standard, David Skinner writes:

[T]he virtues of portability are being exaggerated, but the Sony Reader has other selling points; above all, its potential to reduce the clutter of books. For me, the perfect advertisement for this device would be a picture of my bedstand without its ever-present leaning tower of literature. More reading, the tagline would say, fewer books.

No, no. This is wrong. At the risk of pedantry, I suggest that the line should read

More reading; fewer bookshelves.

Or maybe this:

More reading. Fewer ungainly towers of stacked books.

I have no trouble with the look and feel of a book. But the housing of such books, that can become a problem.

I've designed many a computer reader in my head. Just its functionality. Not its technical foundation, of course. And I think I'd be a great part of the Apple team. Sony? I haven't read a Reader for a test read, yet.

But I do know something: A computer-based, PDA-like e-book reader should cost no more than a bookshelf. So the Reader has a long way to go. Over $300 is way over its ideal price.

Still, my ideal portable digital device, mimicking as it does the handheld codex, the book, could, I suppose, be priced nearly as much as a computer, because it could indeed do many jobs, from providing a drawing sketch pad through browsing the Web to . . . letting you read a book.

The key? Two pages . . . two screens. Perhaps I thought of it because I use two monitors on my computer. Perhaps because a book presents two pages to the reader at once. But that's just the beginning of a truly useful portable device, a device that would make the PDAs of today look as limited as Post-It Notes.

(I think of my design as the iCodex, because it so well imitates the design of a book. The iBook name was already taken! Problem? It would almost certainly be shortened to iCod! Well, Apple could use as a logo a cod — yes, a fish in profile — and give it those three original Apple colors! Perhaps with a bite taken out on the right.)

From Skinner's review, it's obvious the Sony Reader was not designed by Apple:

[T]he Reader's shortcomings prove that whatever stage of development it represents, it is not to literature what the iPod is to music. Pages can be marked to help you find your way back to a passage, and the "continue reading" function returns you to the page reached before the device was last turned off. But pages cannot be marked with marginalia, a common enough practice with books that one hopes--or perhaps the verb "to dream" would be better here--that Sony is trying to figure how to make something like it possible with the Reader.

Also, maneuverability within books and within the Reader is limited. Text is not searchable. Flipping through several pages in a row is a small ordeal. A row of small buttons beneath the screen allows you to choose items from a central menu. Unfortunately, the buttons, like the Reader's small mouse-type pointer, are awkward and hard to use. The buttons can help you shift through a long text but do not correspond to obvious reference points like chapter openings, and the selection system is slow to respond.

But really, I'm more in the market for books and bookshelves than a replacement for them. Physical books, made of paper, seem like a very, very good idea to me. They've lasted because they are very good at what they do. They perform a function well.

I don't expect them to be replaced any time soon.

The newspaper, on the other hand . . . well, its days are numbered.

I just ordered this book:

The author, a sociologist I admire, seems to have moved into the Evolutionary Psychology Sweepstakes. That is, he's now doing what Ardrey re-started years ago: taking evolutionary conjectures and testing them against the (spotty?) evidence.

From the publisher's website:

Language and culture are often seen as unique characteristics of human beings. In this book the author argues that our ability to use a wide array of emotions evolved long before spoken language and, in fact, constituted a preadaptation for the speech and culture that developed among later hominids. Long before humans could speak with words, they communicated through body language their emotional dispositions; and it is the neurological wiring of the brain for these emotional languages that represented the key evolutionary breakthrough for our species.

How did natural selection work on the basic ape anatomy and neuroanatomy to create the hominid line? The author suggests that what distinguished our ancestors from other apes was the development of an increased capacity for sociality and organization, crucial for survival on the African savanna. All apes display a propensity for weak ties, individualism, mobility, and autonomy that was, and is today, useful in arboreal and woodland habitats but served them poorly when our ancestors began to move onto the African plain during the late Miocene.

The challenge for natural selection was to enhance traits in the species that would foster the social ties necessary for survival in the new environment. The author suggests that the result was a development of certain areas of the primate brain that encouraged strong emotional ties, allowing our ancestors to build higher levels of social solidarity. Our basic neurological wiring continues to reflect this adaptive development. From a sociological perspective that is informed by evolutionary biology, primatology, and neurology, the book examines the current neurological bases of our emotional repertoire and their implications for our social actions.

According to a review by Jack Barbalet, Turner takes some controversial positions . . .

Turner challenges many of sociology's cherished conventions: that language is key to social formation, that culture underpins social processes, and that biology is unnecessary in sociological consideration. Against these is the forcefully presented contention that "every facet of human endeavour is emotional" (p. 119) and that "all emotions ultimately have a biological basis because they are built from body systems activating one or more primary emotions" (p. 126).

. . . positions that I am familiar with largely because I've read Herbert Spencer.

This is not just one of my gratuitous Spencer references. Turner has written one of the best books about Spencer, and also edited an edition of Spencer's magesterial Principles of Sociology. He is attempting, in part, to carry on Spencer's approach in sociology, focusing his attention on at least two very Spencerian themes: evolutionary processes and biological foundations. These two programs were very suspect through the bulk of the 20th century, in the sociological profession anyway.

Just the other day I ruminated on the difference between tight and loose systems. Better terminology might have been centralized and decentralized organization.

Those are the terms Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom use in their new book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The two animals may look similar, but their systemic natures differ greatly. Cut up the legs of a starfish, and new starfish can grow from the severed portions. Cut off a leg of a spider, you have a crippled spider . . . and no leg regrowth. Cut off a spider's head, and the spider dies.

The authors extrapolate from there.

It looks like a fascinating book. I note that the topic is relevant to all sorts of things, as we'd expect from General Systems Theory. It's of special relevance to social theory and evolution, as was made fairly clear by an early proponent of such explanation, Herbert Spencer. Like Spencer, the authors draw a number of both broad and detailed conclusions from a basic distinction in systems theory.

How to fight Al-Qaida is one of those.

. . . I should write a book about a friend of mine. Title? Mr. Monteith: A Cautionary Tale. He left a message on my answering machine, which I just had the opportunity to listen to. He's helping his ex-wife move. Though he's in horrible health, and can't really do heavy work, she had hired no extra hands for the move. I couldn't help, because of a schedule conflict. And she, though technically able-bodied, did no prep work, packed nothing up, and is now lying, drunk and passed out, in his car.

Strict constructionism has evolved. A strict constructionist used to refer to one who upholds only those enumerated powers in the Constitution. Now it is one who upholds only those enumerated or specific rights in the Constitution, thus voiding the Ninth Amendment.

I support the first kind of strict constructionism. I abhor the second. The first is an individualist liberal, indeed, libertarian position. The second is a conservative position, one that doesn't allow recognition of rights retained by the people, and thus denies any furthering of the progress of liberty.

During the period in question, when strict constructionism evolved from a liberal to a conservative principle, there was a change in Christianity, too. Christians too often nowadays — both left and right — do not strictly construe their own religion. They invent new duties that were not present in their founding documents. There is, for instance, no command to get involved politically, or take a political position. There is no call for it in the New Testament. And yet many Christians nowadays pretend that, from their own religion, they can derive a politics.

I doubt if that's possible, considering the apolitical nature of the Christian revolution (AD 33–313*), to define a strictly Christian political philosophy. I've read numerous attempts, and all seem risible to me. A Christian's political philosophy has to be extra-Christian to be honest, and should be humbly recognized as such, not trumpted as The Word of God Absolute.

Jews and Muslims have it easier, of course. Both religions contain quite a lot of leal and political material — for the Jews, to much for their own contemporary use; for the Muslims, too much for the safety of non-Muslims! But Christianity was something else again, and its stance regarding law was Christian liberty, a very different critter. (And not a political critter, either.)

So my point is, Christians as Christians have no way to strictly make a political position. No strict construction of commands from the New Testament yield any inelectuable political truths. So it is amusing to see Christians on the right say they are for strict constructionism in the Constitution. This position cannot be a strictly constructed Christian position, despite their frequent pretenses. (One such being the pretense that America's status as a Christian nation has some bearing on developing its laws and polity; it does not.)

Leftist Christians are less hypocritical, more consistent. Those who oppose both conservative and libertarian versions of strict constructionism in politics mirror their lack of strict constructionism in their own religion. They pretend to find in the New Testament principles that would allow statism to flow directly from their religion. Since there are no such principles, they can be considered the opposite of strict constructionists in both religion and politics.

Of course, both left and right, there are many Christians with more humble approaches to politics. They may or may not support this or that form of strict constructionism in ideology. But, whatever they advocate, they realize that they do so largely as citizens and human beings, not in their special capacity as Christians. They do not receive special blessing from their scriptures, and they know it. They work out their political philosophy with fear and trembling. And, perhaps, even prayer.

Such Christians are a lot easier to take than those who pretend that they get each of their political positions as from the very Word of God.

...

*When Constantine legalized Christianity, and substantially supported the religion, the Christian consolidation began, which was very, very different than the revolution preceding.

There are tight system and loose systems. An organism, such as an individual Homo sapiens, is a fairly tight system; the super-organic structure of society is looser.

Tighter than man is a watch. Looser than society are the flight patterns of seven unrelated species of North American birds.

A Tight Systems Theorist is one who sees loose systems as tight. A Loose Systems Theorist is one who sees tight systems as loose.

Ayn Rand was a Tight Systems Theorist. She argued that falling in love had something to do with one's rational values.

Herbert Spencer seemed to understand that there were varying degrees of tightness and looseness to different types of systems. His Synthetic Philosophy has numerous examples of different levels of tightness. And looseness. He was, among other things, a spontaneous order theorist, and believed that social systems were somewhat loose. But still systemic.

C.S. Peirce argued that Spencer was too much a Tight System Theorist, however, and did not give enough scope to chance in his explanation of evolution. This appraisal is almost certainly correct. Peirce called his take on the role of chance Tychism.

We are still evolving, says a new study. Fascinating article, promising much, hinting at a lot, but it's not the actual study, so it's hard to judge. This perspective, though, is interesting . . .

In the June 2003 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Cur­rent An­thro­po­l­ogy, Hel­en Leach of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ota­go, New Zea­land wrote that skele­tons from some pop­u­la­tions in the hu­man line­age have un­der­gone a pro­gres­sive shrink­age and weak­en­ing, and re­duc­tion in tooth size, si­m­i­lar to changes seen in do­mes­ti­cat­ed an­i­mals. Hu­mans seem to have do­mes­ti­cat­ed them­selves, she ar­gued, caus­ing phys­i­cal as well as men­tal changes.

. . . but old hat.

Dick Armey, at a Cato event (you may be able to purchase a video of it here), admitted that his opposition to legalizing drugs comes from prejudice. He elaborated:

I think you are perfectly allowed to have prejudice if you are decent enough to admit it. . . . I got a real problem with Norwegian Lutherans, I got to tell you.

Otherwise, he came off pretty well for an alleged economist who sounds more like a drunked-up Rotarian. I'm at last becoming something of a fan.

And I'm saying this not because I share his prejudice about Norwegian Lutherans. Finnish Lutherans are much worse.

It appears that Microsoft is the computer company most guilty of planned obsolescence. Its Vista OS makes obsolete numerous other products you may own, including (get this) some of Microsoft's own most-used products!

Contrast this with Apple. I can shove Tiger on a Beige G3 if I want, and have few problems (the Molar, though, won't work well with anything past Jaguar, alas). My own Mac is over six years old, and runs Apple's latest OS without a hitch.

If you ask me, most people's addiction to Microsoft products is an example of sheer and utter folly.

I've been waiting for this, the Tunguska Theory:

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.

Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.

Wouldn't it be strange were this to turn out to be the real source of recent climate changes?

I doubt if I'm the only person to have waited for this theory. I mean, how many History Channel and Discover Channel documentaries about the Tunguska Event do you have to watch before you begin to ask the obvious question?

Still, waiting for the theory to be floated, and accepting it, are two entirely different things.

Am I just cynical, or is this the worst-written and most obviously moronic bit of global warming news to hit yet?

Here's the part I liked best, ending with a paroxysm of nincompoopery:

Species living in tropical areas may be less able to adapt, he said, adding that that is speculative and needs further study.

Areas like the Southeastern United States and the Arabian Peninsula may also be affected, the researchers said.

And they said mountain areas such as in Peruvian and Colombian Andes and regions such as Siberia and southern Australia face a risk of climates disappearing altogether.

That doesn't mean these regions would have no climate at all — rather their climate would change and the conditions currently in these areas would not occur elsewhere on Earth.

It's a pity that one has to go to science reporting for one's guffaws, but there you are.

While it's true that I don't follow the downward descent of every dollop of wisdom dripping from the drooling mouths of America's politicians, based on what I have heard, I'd never have guessed that Rudy Guiliani was anything like a libertarian. But he must be, because the Libertarian Republicans say so!

US Congressman Ed Royce hosted Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani over the weekend in Orange County, CA for a campaign event. Royce, formally endorsed Giuliani saying: Rudy Giuliani is the candidate who can keep us safe and lead us into a bright future.

I read this on Mainstream Libertarian, which oddly does not archive its articles. It doesn't provide much evidence for its contentions, either. Just repetitive assertion. Why should we care about who this Royce character endorses? Why, that's obvious!

Royce is a longtime Advisory Board member of the Republican Liberty Caucus. His Lifetime Liberty Index scores is one of the highest at 77.1% = Libertarian. His longtime Campaign Manager and fmr. Chief of Staff Jon Fleischman is a hardcore libertarian YAFer.

The breaking news descends into utter inanity in the final paragraph:

An attendee at the event, Dave Warrick, quoted in the Orange County Register, said the following: I agree with him that we need to stay on offense where national security is concerned, and the free market solutions to health care, Warrick, an investment manager, said after the speech, he's convinced that Giuliani is the Republican standard bearer for him.

The website, Mainstream Libertarian, repeatedly offers wisdom like this, from Neal Boortz:

Boortz said straight out, that he's a Pro-War Libertarian and that the war in Iraq is part of the collective right of self-defense. We, as the American people, all have the right of self-defense. Therefore we can grant that right to government to accomplish that goal for us. He continued, I believe it was essential to get Saddam Hussein out of power and to carry on an aggressive stance in the Middle East against Islamic terrorism.

The sheer, ignorant folly of this statement staggers the imagination. The idea that Bush's Wilsonian wars are making the world safer is just plain goofy. Boortz, and the man behind the site quoting him, apparently have only the shallowest understanding of how dangerous Islam is, and are dead set on using the least subtle, most Pyrrhic tactics upon our enemies. They have no conception of how imperialist actions breed more enemies. They think government should be minimal at home and maximal abroad. If these people had any influence (and they don't have much), within ten years they'd have authorized genocide or brought on the destruction of America . . . or both.

But it is fun to see juxtaposed on one page the phrase on offense and collective right of self-defense. These alleged libertarians don't really understand the difference between offense and defense. And that is their chief offense.

Conservative intellectuals sometimes pretend to be More Sophisticated Than Thou. But the right-leaning camp of the libertarian movement can usually be detected by a simplemindedness that borders — on the far side — sheer doltishness.

So, you read a column by Paul Jacob. It seems carefully worded, about global warming and possible consequences thereof, and even about the nature of prediction, the nature of pollution, the nature of government, the nature of science, of doubt . . . and . . .

then you read the commentary about it. The commentary of Townhall's readers. There's no subtlety in that camp!

The readers excoriate Mr. Jacob, for either not believing in Global Warming, or not denying it hard enough. They don't seem to see any value in the "ifs" and "maybes" that I noticed when reading. Mr. Jacob indicates that he's something of a skeptic on global warming. But his commentators want denials. Or recantations. They come off as religious whackos.

Well, the other day I wrote that Most libertarians are dogmatists. I immediately regretted writing that. The worst I can say is that most self-proclaimed libertarians are dogmatists . . . and even that is just a too-hasty judgment. I should have written too many instead of Most.

But it's easier and more responsible to make across-the-board judgments against the people who write comments on Townhall.com. (Of course, more are conservative than libertarian. Which probably explains the low intellectual level.)

Still, I'm even being hasty here. There were at least two good comments to the article.

Reading comments to articles online often makes me feel like Abraham negotiating with angels to save Gomorrah. If five comments can be found rational, may the site be saved?

When I was very young, I was fascinated by other peoples, such as Indians and Mongolians and the like, and read as much as I could about them. This led me into the strange problems associated with classification by race.

In a conversation with my uncle and cousins, one evening when I was about nine, I used the term "Mongoloid."

For my trouble I got a lecture from my uncle about tolerance. He thought I was talking about what nowadays we call people featuring Down Syndrome. I appreciated the lecture, though it also annoyed me to think that my uncle thought that I was a nasty name-caller. I was simply using the anthropological term (not in itself without problems or controversy) for the skeletal and facial features of many people who live in Asia.

I don't think my uncle understood that a 9-year-old could be interested in physical anthropology, and was actually fairly well read on the subject. He thought it more likely that I was speaking ill of disabled kids.

Funny thing was, it was he who demonstrated prejudice!

But no great matter. I never harbored ill will towards him, and was even rather happy that he felt compelled to lecture me on tolerance. Tolerance and good will seemed like a good idea to me even at nine.

I was beyond tolerance at that point, however: surrounded by white people, I found people of other color and other character fascinating. White people were, comparatively, boring.

My sister just saw Music and Lyrics (which I saw weeks and weeks ago), and mentioned how old Hugh Grant now looks. I find that the actor is less than a year younger than me. I also discover that his birth name was Hugh John Mungo Grant.

Mungo?

I see also that his favorite of his own films is About a Boy. That shows good taste on his part; it is undoubtedly his best film.

Too much negativity these past few days. I should name some things (not people; that would be too personal) that I am not negative about, things I find surprisingly good:

1. The minor-key symphonies of Luigi Boccherini. My love for Haydn's symphonies reaches back 30 years. But Boccherini? I've been listening to his work on my iPod recently. His minor-key symphonic works are nearly as fine as Haydn's.



2. The Ken Holt Mysteries. Of the hundreds and hundreds of genre fiction novels I read as a kid, at least one of those Grosset & Dunlap series would not embarrass me later in life, and that is the Ken Holt series. These are surprisingly well written, with expert sentences sometimes even adding imagery to the mix of astute description and the occasional complex clause. I've just started collecting and re-reading these, and so far I haven't been disappointed.



3. The Ciabatta sandwiches at Jack-in-the-Box. Some fast food doesn't suck. I had a steak-and-cheese ciabatta sandwich the other day. Not bad at all.



4. Steak. I actually ate a steak the other day. At a restaurant called Pig-n-Pancake, of all things. It was quite good. When I was a kid, my family ate steak quite often. We raised beef. There ain't a steer within a mile of the family home now, and, like increasing numbers of Americans, I don't eat steak nearly so often as I used to. I miss it.



5. As the song says, After you've been having steaks a long time, beans, beans taste fine. Yes, beans. I like beans. An amazingly cheap food that isn't bad for you. Buying them dry means actually having to prepare in advance, but you save a lot of money, and get extremely good product. Yesterday evening I prepared a dish of red and white beans together with a small amount of rice and a sizable portion of ground elk meat. I sprinkled cayenne pepper onto the meat as I browned it, and put in slices of several cloves of garlic, two cubes of beef bullion and water in the pan, and then dumped them with the beans. After cooking for over an hour, I added two bell peppers and one hot pepper. It was a nice spicy bean dish. I experiment with this kind of food several times per week. Not a bad bean dish yet.



6. Reason's Hit and Run. This is my favorite blog. I go to the site nearly every day.



7. The idea of honor, as sanitized by a universalistic ethic and divorced from the vile precapitalist social systems of the past. My first name, Timo, hails from the Greek, timé, which means honor. Someday I may even live up to my name. I've even done some things to help bring that along.



8. Apple's OS X operating system. It's amazingly stable, and it works on computers as old as a decade. Beautiful, easy to use, and sensibly conceived. And it doesn't get viruses or worms.



9. The Sonicare electric toothbrush. Amazingly efficient, and it prompts its user to stay long enough in the toothbrushing process.



10. Tom's of Maine Fennel toothpaste: fresh, licoricey. A great taste to end the day.



11. Bucket seats from automobiles. The ones in my possession, both in and outside of cars, are very comfortable; most are. I have one in my bedroom, and I'm sitting back in it now; its back is resting against the wall, allowing me to recline. It's a great chair to sit in for reading, or for working on my laptop computer.



12. Plastic. Amazing stuff. My bedroom has lots of wood and cork; elegant plank ceilings and a nice Craftsman-style book case. But the plastic containers I use for dresser drawers, and the plastic snap-together boxes that make for my paperback bookshelves, are not only very useful, they have a sleek elegance to them. Plastic is often used as a pejorative, almost a synonym for Mencken's favorite epithet, brummagem. But I will say nothing against the plastic in my room, here. It helps make my life better.



13. Used book stores. The independent seller of used books, and the independent new-and-used bookstore, has to be one of the most civilizing institutions in society. Owning books is almost as important as reading them. A book as personal property is one of the best signs of a civilized life. The ability to go to one's own bookshelf and pull out a book one has read, and thumb through the pages to find the passage one only half remembers . . . this is what a civilized person should be able to do. I, at any rate, do it often. Were it not for bookstores selling used books I would not be able to afford the bulk of the books I own. And, let it be admitted up front: publishers cannot keep in print every book ever written (or at least they couldn't until the recent birth of on-demand printing). So the existence of the used book store is a civilizing influence, it allows those who care to keep contact with the distant past, and to live and think outside the current crest of fashion.



14. Out-of-town library membership. Where I live, there is no good public library. This is not a horrible thing, for me, since I prefer to own books, and to seek out used book stores as my ritual immersion into high culture . . . and middle-brow culture, too. But to keep up with current fashion, and for my work as an editor, it is important to have access to some books (both new and old) that I have no intention of purchasing. So the public library is now of use to me. It wasn't always so. I've often avoided public libraries. I dislike aspects of librarian culture, the lingo and the buying and discard standards. And I see diminishing reasons for libraries to be public institutions. Taking a step back from my own addiction, I note that public libraries are the only institution in society aimed to provide addicts with free fixes. Should I feel guilty about using a public library? Well, that's one guilt I needn't worry over. Since my county doesn't provide a public library (the people have voted down funding for such many times over), I pay dues to a public library in a city 44 miles away. It is not an insignificant fee. Indeed, the fee is almost certainly far higher than the marginal cost of servicing my usage. So, I get the benefit of a library and I voluntarily contribute to it as if it were an unsubsidized institution.



15. The Kennerley Monotype font, designed by Goudy. I have only one book printed, in all my library, using this typeface. But it is quite elegant, and I hope some day to obtain the font for my computer usage and printing. Oh, the book? The Austrian Philosophy of Values, by Howard O. Eaton, a classic analysis of the evaluation theories of Ehrenfels and Meinong and the Austrian School of Economics. Fascinating study.



16. Birds. Where I live, these flighted animals are making a comeback. I have seen thrushes, starlings, jays, woodpeckers, corvids, vultures, eagles, hawks, cormorants, grouse, finches, pelicans, and many other varieties this last year, and now that spring is arriving (though at present with seemingly ceaseless rain), more birds arrive to my view every day. And their song! Between caws and fanfares and whistles and rasping bursts of pinkish tone, there's always something to hear in these parts. (Much better than the sound of traffic, which never seems to stop when one lives in the city.)



17. The concerti grossi of Locatelli. That's what's playing right now on the iPod I've conntected to my stereo. Aside from the great works of the Great Bach, it is Locatelli's concerti grossi that I love the most. What wondrous music!



18. The pianoforte. The musical keyboard is the great invention of musical instrument builders. (To say this I do not dispute the fine thinking that went behind the Jew's Harp.) It allows the player and the composer to see the vertical, harmonic relationships so clearly! It's so much more helpful to the mind, for the composing of music, than either fretted or fretless stinged instruments or to wind instruments. And the sound of the instrument can be itself quite powerful. Of course, pianos are no more equal than humans. The Bösendorfer grand is the greatest, most lovely of sound, to my ear. Steinways kick out a louder sound, I guess, but aren't as lovely of tone as is the Bösendorfer. A Yamaha may be factory-made and fungible one with another, and is quite fine, and a great low-priced instrument. But it's the Bösendorfer that qualifies as the pinnacle of the instrument-maker's craft. What the Strad is to the violin, the Bösendorfer is to the piano.



19. The books of my friends and neighbors. Two friends have had books published: Jesse Walker and Brian Doherty. And two neighbors have produced books of late: Bob Pyle and Krist Novoselic. Many books are bad, or least mediocre, but I'm happy to say that the books in question cannot be faulted. Krist's book on grunge and government is really quite well done, a real surprise . . . the juxtaposition of grunge rock and the mechanisms of democracy seem unlikely co-subjects, but Krist pulls it off well. Bob's book on the valley I live in is, as my sister described it, both poetic and wonderful. Brian's recent book is a hoot, and very thorough. As I wrote a few days ago, I greatly approve of its style, my favorite touch being his love of certain uncommon words; I share his appreciation for the rarities that can be found in the dictionary. Finally, Jesse's book on radio, already a bunch of years old, is still worth reading. I was greatly pleased with it, and laughed out loud in several places (his comment on Smooth Jazz may be worth the price of the book). And I was fascinated by his historical perspective, a history that I was (unlike Brian's book) not familiar with. (You can look up the books from my other site, wirkman.com.)



20. The alphabet. Ours may not be perfect, but it allows an amazingly efficent way of storing and communicating words and ideas and stories. I may have designed a better alphabet when I was a teenager, and in the process reinvented a branch of linguistics that I could have read about at the beginning of any good dictionary, but even unimproved, our alphabet enables the literate to think better and communicate over time and distance. This is no small thing. It's the foundation of a great many other good things. (Like used book stores!)



21. The number eleven, which in base eleven looks like this: 10. I like this prime number, and I like thinking in base eleven, too. It could be that our lives cycle in groups of eleven years, not in the decades we are led by base ten to think as most significant. So, celebrate your biggest birthdays at 10 (oops: 11), 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, and, if you are lucky, 99. By the way, in most instances one should spell out eleven as well as ten. And twelve, too. Why? Well, the style guides say stop the spelling out after ten, but they are base-ten-biased. Well, we have seemingly non-base-ten words for 11 and 12, don't we? We don't begin counting the 'teens until 13, so perhaps we should spell out all the numbers up until 13. Are you wondering, by the way, how to write ten and eleven in base twelve? The twelve, of course, is 10. But ten and eleven? Let's see; let's count from zero: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, ¥, 10. There you have it. (Yes, you could say I have a yen* for eleven!)

I could also wax eloquent on the value of rain, frog choruses, elk alive and elk-as-meat, indoor heating, paper towels, the brassiere, and many other features of nature and civilization. But I'll stop at 21. It's a nice prime number. And, in base eleven, could be written as 1X.

. . .

* I actually have no idea what numerals one should use for ten and eleven in base twelve. This is just a fancy. Surely the use of A and B as suggested on Wikipedia's entry is no more elegant than X and ¥, and present just as many problems.

Some wonder at my bitterness towards Ayn Rand. Part of it is simply fear of being found guilty by association. I find her arguments in ethics so appallingly ill-reasoned and substantively perverse that, since we share a general political outlook, I fear being tarred with her nasty brush.

There's a sadness in my revulsion, too. It saddens me to see her admirers frequently miss a great point made by, say, Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer, and miss it by a mile, largely and apparently out of undue interest in and reverence towards the formulations of Ayn Rand.

Take Tibor Machan. He was given the task of introducing a reprint of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics. And in that introduction, he writes this:

It is no secret that the bulk of ethical commentary, whether from the pulpit, editorials, the campaign trails, or the stages from which the oratory of commencement exercises rings forth, urges upon human beings acts of self-sacrifice. In this respect there is nothing revolutionary about Marxism, for example. Marx also places before us the ideals of selfsacrifice — his condemnation of the Lockean human-rights tradition consisted mainly of dismissing such rights as vehicles of selfishness. Spencer, however, advocated egoism. And his ethics could not be faulted for being of the hedonistic egoist variety. such as those of Jeremy Bentham and even John Stuart Mill. Instead, Spencer developed what he called a rational utilitarian moral theory. Omitting from consideration for now the difficulties of Spencer’s fusionist efforts, we cannot deny that the substance of Spencer’s ethical writings deserves extensive study We have here a brilliant theory in which the mutually compatible selfish goals of individuals are demonstrated to be the proper end of human conduct. The principles that would further this goal are the principles of rational utilitarianism, gleaned through a consideration of the self-consistently enhancing course of conduct possible for human beings to undertake.

The trouble with this is that Herbert Spencer did not advocate egoism.

Sure, Spencer wrote a fascinating chapter entitled Egoism vs. Altruism. He demonstrated the commonplace truth that self-directed behavior must take precedence over all else, and that, in fact, self-directed egoistic behavior is necessary for life.

But he followed it with another chapter entitled Altruism vs. Egoism, wherein he showed how life also depends on acts of voluntary self-sacrifice for the benefit of others (chiefly but not limited to offspring). He then spends two chapters dialectically resolving the apparent contradictions. In the end, he comes up with a synthesis which might well be called, as Spencer did put it, a rational utilitarianism, but which cannot in good conscience be called an egoism.

Now, Machan's own egoism isn't quite as outrageous as his beloved Ayn Rand's. But, apparently because of his obsession with egoism, Machan mistakes — nay; he completely ignores — Spencer's real contribution to the subject of agent-relative ethics.

Chris Sciabarra was quite right to identify* Herbert Spencer as the first dialectical libertarian. Spencer's contribution was that sophisticated. Much more sophisticated than most later libertarian philosophies, actually.

But Machan misses that. I believe because he is too enamored of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and especially with her chief obsession, egoism. I could be wrong. This could be misattribution. But I don't think so.

. . .

* Note: By the way, in that Sciabarra essay he argues against something I wrote. Here's what I wrote:

This method — I'm tempted to call it "dialectical," but Spencer's prose and position seem so far from Hegel's that the term is almost indecent — confuses many readers. But it is surely his strength.

Sciabarra counters:

It is unfortunate that Virkkala refuses to give into his temptation, because crucially significant aspects of Herbert Spencer's work are, indeed, dialectical.

I suspect Sciabarra actually did understand what I wrote. I was being ironic. I was calling Spencer's method dialectical in a back-handed way. I see no reason to make every statement in the standard, literalist manner. Even philosophy must have room for some nuance . . . without stooping to the folly of jargon or opacity. Or, ahem, dialectic. Call it rhetorical.

I just finished, last night, the sixth and seventh chapters of Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. I skimmed the remainder. I'll finish the book later. Right now I'm depressed.

What a bunch of nutcases so many libertarians are, or have been! Bob LeFevre, Andy Galambos, Tom Marshall . . . these people seem just strange to me. Even the Greats seem problematic. Doherty structures his story around five major figures:

• Ludwig von Mises
• F. A. Hayek
• Ayn Rand
• Murray N. Rothbard
• Milton Friedman

I must say, re-reading Rand's life, again, fills me with revulsion anew. Though I enjoyed reading her novel The Fountainhead, as a philosopher she was a great . . . crank. Something of a loon. And her private life was a torrid mess, a perfect mirror of her chief error: egoism.

Mises' writings were very important to me. Well, a few of them were. But I've long felt that he closed himself up far too much, and his rigidity on method has always struck me as bizarre. I could learn from him, but never follow.

Hayek's writings would have meant more to me had I never read Herbert Spencer. I find his evolution as an economist interesting and instructive. But in philosophy and his general approach, well, the best in Hayek was covered earlier in Spencer, and I didn't need Hayek as much as other readers did. (Similarly, I didn't need Rand like so many others did. As a teenager I was reading more adult books, and thinking for myself without her help.)

Rothbard was a strange case. I entered the libertarian movement about the time he was going apeshit over the Kochtopus, and though I understood where he was coming from, he came off looking like a resentful ass. Rothbard always believed he alone possessed the plumb line, and always knew the proper strategy to achieve a free society. But his plumb bob swung like a pendulum in an earthquake. As a prophet, he was no better than your standard religious whacko. He lacked clear vision; what he had was pride. And as for him being a thoughtful dialectician, that's utter absurdity. Rothbard was through-and-through a dualist, to use Chris Sciabarra's terminology.

Friedman I always admired. He was obviously a great teacher and a great gentleman. He did a lot of good. He wasn't a perfect libertarian, but then neither am I. Never have been, never will be, it looks like.

The basic idea of libertarianism is this: all of politics and law can be wrapped around the idea of liberty-as-noninterference.

The trouble with this notion, as I quickly realized, and was made even clearer by reading Spencer, is that children don't fit in this picture; their needs aren't for liberty, at first, but for sustenance and education.

And, frankly, the basic idea of private property is glossed over quickly in most libertarian thinking. The inability of most libertarian theorists to honestly approach the issue of acquiring and maintaining property, and do so with philosophical rigor, astounds me, now.

Much of the libertarian movement seems childish to me. Perhaps much of my own attitudes are, too. But I can only progress at my own pace. And will, obviously, change only when I get evidence and reasoning to help me along. I remain in the libertarian camp, uncomfortably inhabiting territory somewhere among past giants, like Spencer, Molinari, Donisthorpe, Herbert, and others. In economics, I'm an eclectic, as anyone must be whose favorite economists include Ludwig Lachmann, Sir John Hicks, F.W. Taussig, and the great Carl Menger. But I also think that sociology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and other social disciplines should be united in a general scientific/philosophic approach. Even Rothbard believed the same, but his narrowness in the theory department prevented him from actually learning much from others.

Many libertarian dogmas I hold provisionally, as worthy of being tested in actuality, not merely in imagination. And I suspect our imaginations are, at the present time, challenged by the gulf that separates us from the living practice of real liberty. I think people will be better able to judge many disputable areas in libertarian thought better the closer society approaches real, actual, practical liberty.

I remain an agnarchist. At heart.

But I also remain very committed to a less imperial state, with power devolved down closer to the people, with individuals allowed greater scope to make decisions free of interference. I loathe most aspects of the modern state. I find the finagling of politics to be deeply dishonest, and the dominant ideologies of liberalism and conservatism to be based on separate sets of lies, untruths, and preference falsifications, the kind that make libertarians shine in comparison.

This makes me a neoclassical liberal, I guess. I prefer terms such as individualist liberal. I try not to use terms like market or capitalism to define my ideas or my life, for there is more to a free society than truck and barter, and the exchange of money. Or: there should be.

Further, I don't see the existence of public property as a major problem. Doherty repeats a great old joke (which I transcribe from memory, since my copy of the book is at home):

The trouble with libertarians is that they'd allow fornication in public parks!

What do you mean public parks?

I rent my office from the county I live in. The property is a building made for a school, now decommissioned. Its origin? A local family gave 18 acres to the county for a public park, to be used as a school as long as the school district wanted it.

Now, forget the school aspect. It's a park, now. It was a gift from private owners to the public. I helped design a financial structure that would allow the county to run the site and the building without increasing taxes. The renting of rooms in the building covers the costs of the public uses.

I am afraid I just don't see how this is wrong. This is probably another issue that most libertarians and I part company on. I don't see how public property of this sort can be construed as wrong.

I have trouble with the bureaucracy involved in doing anything with the park, and this system has to be tweaked. But the basic idea is not evil, to say the least.

So, I have no problems with at least one form of public property. There are many more that I think are likely required by good principles.

But it's been my experience that libertarians don't even want to hear about this stuff. Most libertarians are dogmatists.

Sometimes a government bureaucracy is right and the people are wrong.

It's hard to think of examples, but there have to be some. Oh, here's one: the tit on the 1916 Liberty Quarter.

The coin's design went up for contest, as usual, and the best design for Liberty was chosen. It is, I think, the best design on any American coin ever, far surpassing the famous St. Gaudens $20 gold piece.

But Liberty's right breast was exposed.

It went through all the proper channels, but when it hit the public, there was an uproar. Indecency! Obsenity! Filth! Oh, the humanity!

There is nothing filthy about an exposed female breast. Some exposures aren't exactly high art (think SuperBowl), but to get upset about an occasional baring of a breast is the sign of a truly stunted moral development, a dirty mind, or . . . American Christendom, c. 1916.

I have no sympathy with those yokels. Or today's yokels who still worry about such small matters. (And a breast exposed on a quarter is a small matter.)

Now, I do think it good manners to go around clothed most of the time. I don't want to see most female breasts.

But, should one hang out here or there, I won't get into a tizzy. And artwork that exposes the naked male or female form doesn't bother me.

This episode in American history helps give me some sympathy, some sense of cameraderie, with the state functionary class. When so many citizens are so foolish and prudish and crazy, it's not easy to think highly of the people whom you serve.

And yes, my Liberty has her breast exposed. If your Liberty does not, then, well, your Liberty does not represent the right liberty.

Looking at the new dollar coin, I see that the word Liberty does not appear. The Statue of Liberty was deemed enough of Liberty.

I was told, once, that U.S. coinage was originally designed to have a representation of Liberty on one side. So we saw a lot of Indians (in a sort of American irony, I guess) and a lot of classical androgynous represenations on our coinage.

And then the presidents took over.

My thought was that a dead president wasn't that bad of a representation of liberty; live ones, though, wouldn't work at all.

But how much better would it be were it not a bust of a president presented, but a head of a president, bleeding on a pike?

(Perhaps I'm in such a bloody turn of mind because a friend of mine just noticed that we've been seeing a lot of Assassination Movies recently!)

I'm glad I'm not a judge. Or a politician. To have to pretend to be disturbed, as this judge claims to, would be too much work:

"The type of behavior is disturbing," Judge Michael Lucci said. "It's disturbing to the public. It's disturbing to the court."

What's so disturbing? A man apparently stole a car, killed a horse for necrophiliac activity, but was caught somehow engaged in sexual conduct with a deer.

It's not disturbing. It's risible. And pathetic. For theft and killing of animals that weren't his, throw the book at him. Treat him as a sexual offender? Oh, well. If you must. But frankly, we have enough to do without worrying about these whackjobs. Necrophiliac bestiality just seems like something we can all stand against without having to rattle the jailer's keys.

I suppose I understand some people's worries. Perhaps necrophiliac bestiality is a gateway crime. The next thing you know, he'll be fucking vegetables.

At midnight last night I made the mistake of starting Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, an excellent history of a political movement I know well. I got through the fourth chapter, and read many of the endnotes. I read nearly half the book last night. Way past the wee hours. I'm sleepy now.

Two things:

1. Doherty's clear prose receives added sparkle from some uncommon words. I like this. Where is writing without scabrous and limn?




2. I guess I would have preferred to leave the word capitalism alone. I'm not a capitalist. I don't have much money. I'm a tradesman. My support for the extended order of several property and free markets governed by a rule of law with limited purview is by no means confined to markets alone.

But I guess that's not all that important.

Of the great libertarians of the past, I tend to think it would have been Albert Jay Nock I'd most like to have met. So far.

I think we may have had more than a few ideas in common; I think his stance in the world was not far from mine.

Years ago, when I wore my hair long, a friend referred to the style as Thor Hair. He didn't say Jesus Hair, perhaps because of my Nordic look. But the subject does have something to do with the gods:

The Error of the Long-haired Jesus

One of the biggest errors Hollywood has made is in their depiction of Jesus while he was teaching here on earth. The error comes because the preachers, priests and theologians have themselves accepted a false type of Jesus that nowhere resembles the true Jesus who is described in the New Testament. The images of Jesus that Christians have in their churches, homes, Bibles, Sunday School or Sabbath School books are those which have the outward features of the chief pagan gods of the heathen world. If the apostles could come back to life and visit our churches, enter our homes, and see our movies about Jesus, they would be aghast at witnessing Jesus being portrayed like the chief gods of the heathen world.

Worth reading in toto, despite some obvious silliness.

So, conservatives back in the '60s, with their funniest and most outrageous line (Jesus, Get a Haircut!) were on to something.

Brian has a second book out, and yet he doesn't appear appropriately on Googlism! Neither current citation references the Brian Doherty I know:

brian doherty is a drummer best known for his work with bands like xtc
brian doherty is a performance engineer with the the java performance engineering group at sun microsystems

So, a few definitions for Googlism to pick up:

Brian Doherty is Senior Editor of Reason magazine.

Brian Doherty is a journalist who has published in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Spin, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The San Francisco Chronicle, Suck, and dozens of other publications.

Brian Doherty is a witty fellow.

Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man.

Brian Doherty is a true believer . . . in Burning Man, according to Booklist.

Brian Doherty is the author of Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, which was published in early 2007.

Brian Doherty was once my roommate. A long time ago. And for a very short time.

Brian Doherty is a record-label owner who had his hair cut onstage when his punk rock band changed its name from Turbo Satan to Turbo Jesus.

That should help him on Googlism. I hope.

Partial excuse for this entry? I just received Doherty's latest book in the mail today. I can hardly wait to start reading it.

Some time back Cato started a newsletter, or newspaper, or student magazine, or somesuch, called Liberty.

I think this happened in the latter days of my long stay at R. W. Bradford's Liberty. Or perhaps just after I left. I was surprised that Cato could think of nothing better to call it.

But then, Bill Bradford and Stephen Cox couldn't think of anything better to call Liberty than Liberty. There was already a Liberty, put out by Seventh-Day Adventists, and I felt queasy about the name. But none of my alternates prevailed. Still, I thought the name Taking Liberty would have been fun, and promotable. Or even the obscure-but-fun Locofoco.

When it came time to name a website for the magazine, I promoted Liberty Unbound, despite the fact that it played off The Atlantic Monthly's AOL site, Atlantic Unbound. My excuse for this bit of theft was simple: The word unbound was funny when united with Liberty, but not funny when united with Atlantic.

I prevailed on this one. See LibertyUnbound.com.

But then Cato put up Cato Unbound. What the heck?

And now Cato has Cato-at-Liberty. I'm afraid Cato needs a shot in the arm of creativity. It's muddying up the waters of trademark infringement too much. It seems hell-bent on taking from my old mag. A sort of elaborate pattern of dissing.

Perhaps the mag deserves it. But Cato looks bad because of it.

It's the spring equinox today, which I thought meant that the day and night were equal. But now I read Wikipedia's article on the subject and discover that this isn't quite so.

Everything in life is more complicated than pure theory suggests.

Even astronomy!

Still, the spring equinox means something, and it's something to makr on the calendar.

Actually, according to my preferred system, we would abolish months from the calendar, divide the year into quarters of 91 days each, and once at the end of the year celebrate an extra day, a day not part of any week (thus getting no designation such as Tuesday or Wednesday) and call it Year's Day. This kind of calendar would make oh so much more sense.

But that's another matter. Today's the spring equinox. The days begin their triumph over night, starting today.

In the early days of my using Macintosh computers, my boss at the time wanted me to get chummy in the local Mac Users Group. Why? Because he wanted me to borrow hardware, like an external floppy disk drive reader that read the new double-side/double-density disks.

I hated begging, especially since I knew that my boss was rich. I didn't like begging for myself, and rarely did. Begging for another, and, especially, a wealthy other, was especially loathesome. I only worked up my courage to ask one person that particular favor. I remember how he looked at me, in extreme puzzlement . . . bordering at once on both awe and revulsion at my effrontery. We barely knew each other. He did not let me borrow his drive.

I sympathized.

I have done many things that I'm ashamed of. That was something I was ashamed of at the time. But I was under orders.

One of the great things about self-employment is one feels under no compulsion to do whatever it is some boss or other says. You have no boss. You have clients.

This makes a lot of difference.

Most of my regrets in life are not for saying No but for saying Yes. My favorite idiomatic phrase is Nothing doing. In my mind it unites emphatic resistance with subtle wu wei.

Doing the right thing is often unlikely. So speculation about impeaching Bush and Cheney is very impractical. And necessary. It's nice to see Paul Craig Roberts give it a whirl, though.

And if Congressman Ron Paul were really serious about doing good and getting attention, he'd come out in support of impeachment.

The best video advertising of the new political season was not from a seasoned ad pro, but from somebody with a personal computer, cut and pasting video.

Plus to Obama, for getting the benefit of this bit of genius video editing.

Minus to Hillary, for being the target of it.

And double-minus to the Libertarian Party, supposedly filled with geeks, none of whom have figured out to use new media to elicit even the tiniest surgelet in their small, marginal returns at election time.

The value of a thing or person does not depend on its origin.

This is the great foolishness at the heart of so much vexation about value. And ethics. And even liberty.

Take a live topic today: To what extent was the United States of America founded upon Christian principles?

Some conservatives like to lay full credit to Christianity for America. Nonsense, of course; nonsense and poppycock.

But even were it so, it would be irrelevant. The origin of a person is in the union of sperm and egg within the womb of a woman, during or after coitus (or, these days, Petri dish manipulations). Years later, the person's value, morals, legal status . . . not one of these things is dependent upon his parents' continued intercourse. Just so with a human institution. Something may have been created for one purpose — say, crime — but the organization may have evolved far past its original intent, and may serve peaceful and just purposes. And, with a little reform, may put all its criminal nature behind it.

What conservatives in America try to do with the Christian nation rap is shore up both their politics and their religion. But these can be separated in fact and in theory, and over time have become so separated in actuality. What are the merits of some religious doctrine? Not its attachment to this or that institution.

Basically, constant yammering about origins usually is an attempt to avoid real and substantive argument. It is akin to the argument ad hominem.

It is one thing to try to make institutions conform to this or that notion; that's inevitable, and when the ideas are good, quite beneficial. But it is quite another to set the value of an idea, or an institution, as if either required a particular setting.

Liberty itself is like this. Some people pretend that the story of America is the story of liberty. Or that liberty requires America. And they get all weepy and patriotic.

Similarly with historians, who get amazingly weepy about ancient Greece. Democracy would never have taken hold had not those three hundred Spartans withstood the army of Xerxes. Well, no. Certain ideas are perennial. Liberty is one. Democracy, another.

If anything, the story of America is the story of the betrayal of this idea, liberty. But you won't hear patriotic people say this truth very often, as salient and easy to prove as it is. Why? Because they are tender-hearted souls with little oomph in the heads. They can't conceive of a liberty without a wave of the flag.

They are fools.

The idea of liberty is distinct from its value. Liberty's value is itself a complex thing, valued by some for itself, valued by those same and by others instrumentally, also. Both the direct value and the indirect value must be given their due.

And the history of liberty is distinct from the evaluations of any existing institution. This is, of course, in large part because liberty has less play in life than usually reckoned in the speeches of men seeking to whip up crowds of cannon fodder. Our institutions are as much instruments of hegemony and tyranny as of liberty. We are just used to them.

The man chained to the rock, who wastes away so that he can easily slip from the shackles, and then slip back in when the guard is looking, is not free. But he's freer than the man still always stuck to the wall.

The shackle is not an instrument of liberty. But because some take liberties with their shackles, they are in fact free enough by their lights. But to wax patriotic about the shackles is an afront to clear thinking.

Whether the shackle has a just origin or not, whether it is just now is what matters. And whether it can be made more just even yet.

We can define as a progressive those who see value as a subject for the present and the future, and who evaluate the past as a succession of past presents, with conjectured futures branching out, but collapsing into one trunk, as time passes. The past's value for us can be a source of learning. But the story of the past is not determinative of the future.

I think that makes me a progressive, no matter what idiocies the Left attaches to the term. And that distinguishes me from conservatism, which tends to make the same error over and over: that the origin of something determines its value.

Nonsense, I say; nonsense and poppycock.

But, you counter, doesn't the origin of something determine its nature, and thus value? No. The origins combined with its present context lead to separate evaluations, and help determine what we call its value. There is no one origin for anything. There are many causes. And, because of many contexts, many possibilities for changing values.

The desire to make the value of something one thing, and not many, and tie it to an origin, not its present context, is probably at the heart of the conservative error in philosophy.

Interestingly, Nietzsche also believed that value was determined by the evaluated thing's source. This is his great error, as far as I can see. He, too, fought the liberal philosophers of his day — the Mills, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, the economists — because they cast aspersions on the origins of things. Perhaps that's why conservatives so often bring up Nietzsche. They can pretend that he's the ultimate result of rejecting one or two of their favorite ideas. And yet this is a mere illusion, since he has not rejected the most disastrous of their ideas, the idea that value is tied to origins.

Apologies if this is, as I think it is, the least coherent rant I've posted in some time.

Economist Bryan Caplan conjectures on why monopoly governments have dominated the political landscape, considering that competing governments would be more economical. Economies of scale, he says, likely favored monopoly provision of justice services (government) in the early days, and lock-in set in, leaving us (by path dependence) stuck with monopoly government.

This is interesting, but seems too narrowly catallactic to me. Molinari's explanation (dimly remembered) strike me as better. But since my memory is so poor on Molinari's work, I'll just offer a few points that I'll ponder for a few weeks:

The origin of the state is not in goods offered on a market; pretending this is how states originate seems silly. States originate, usually, through conquest. Sometimes by the accession of several groups claiming hegemony over others. None of this looks like a market for services.

What it looks like is a demand for benefits gained from plunder and compulsion. So, a look at the demand for government services must also incorporate a demand for crime. Early governments take hold, sometimes, simply because everyone tries to get the upper hand. Justice as in protection and the like, is merely an excuse, at best a sometimes-produced by-product of government-as-it-usually -is, which is: Injustice.

The deep desire of people to hurt others, to not trust them with their lives, but to rule them, is one of the most dominant elements in the human psyche. Government grows from it. The idea of justice only evolves out of many conflicts, and then begins to constrain the acts of government.

There are many hierarchies of human talent. The ability to engage in combat, to kill, runs from the strongest man down to the weakest babe and oldest, frailest woman. The origin of government is in the natural ascendancy of the strong man. The cleverest strong man takes over, and rules generation after generation. Then it is the clever of mind who gains ascendancy over the strong of bone and muscle. And all this is done within a monopoly system, as it has been from time immemorial. It's not people contracting for services of these men. Or, not usually. Why? I think Molinari suggested that it was simply the natural dominance of the strong man. He was strongest, his friends were stronger, his enemies they left dead, and they greedily and naturally took as many spoils as possible.

This tradition of monopoly government was born of the greed of the early strong men, and kept in play by the greed of the clever.

Breaking that cycle will be difficult. If possible at all.

People are still creatures of hierarchy. And the greed and fear of large populations, each trying to gain some foothold in a world of conflict . . . none of this easily comports with the idea of explicit contracts made with government services like police and courts.

I'm not saying our ideas of politics shouldn't be rationalized by explicit contracts rather than ceaselessly futzed with (dishonestly) in the political arena. But I am saying that most people are much more primitive in their politics than what libertarian anarchism suggests. They want power, position, plunder. Libertarians do not offer them these things. So . . .

The world is much nastier than is painted by anarchocapitalists.

Isn't it?

Caplan might come up with an even more perceptive explanation for the dominance of monopoly governance were he to add the criminal dimension, and see the idea of justice and contract in an evolutionary context rather than game-theoretic and state-of-nature perspective.

There exists great music for concert band. And some of it doesn't even sound like band music!

It's the Sousa Sound that is what I think of as the classic sound of the band, and it is limiting. Oh, sure, Vaughan Williams and Holst wrote great music for it, such as their suites. But those suites still sound like band music, resembling nothing less than the close cousins to Sousa's marches.

And I'm not saying I don't like Sousa. But still, the Sousa Sound is not something I often seek when I seek good music.

Well, there are works for the ensemble that don't sound like what we've come to expect. Holst's Hammersmith, for example.

But I've just heard Vincent Persichetti's Masquerade. And what a great work it is. And how little like band music it sounds! I didn't even notice that it wasn't orchestral for the first few minutes of listening.

So, I add it to Hindemith's Symphony in B-Flat, Hovhaness's Symphony No. 4, and a handful of other works that stretch the medium, that don't echo everything else you've heard from the band.

I just listened to it on my favorite Live365 station, which is now playing (as I type) Poulence's great and glorious Gloria.

(You may notice I put in a lot of Amazon links. I do this in the course of spellchecking the works I cite; it comes second nature, now. I don't really do it for the money, which hasn't kept me overflowing in CDs or books. But hey: if you really want to throw a few pennies my way, just click to buy on Amazon. Or go to wirkman.com (the once and future home of my never-ending e-garage sale) and use the search button there.)

Pianos and organs without black keys, no matter how ancient, no matter how elegant the woodwork, no matter how dear or cheap, are of little use to a musician.

(Yes, I repeatedly dream of going into antique shops featuring multiple 19th century pianos and similar musical instruments . . . most of which lack, for some reason, black keys. These are very frustrating dreams.)

Clark Stooksbury did not err to compare the Al Gore brouhaha over his energy use to the Chickenhawk issue regarding war advocacy. And he realizes the limits of this sort of argumentum ad hominem:

Hypocrisy is the cheapest, and probably most common of political attacks. The fact is that a person's prior military service has no bearing on the quality of his or her arguments for war, although it makes a fun fact to know and tell. Likewise, Mr. Gore's personal virtue, or lack thereof, have no bearing on the seriousness of the global warming issue; even though his political enemies get great pleasure from pointing out his failings.

But the hypocrisy charge does carry some weight against Al Gore's contention that global warming is a moral issue. If it is, and he has failed, then it suggests that the precise complexion of the moral issue is symbolic, not practical. For if the leading advocate of global warming's danger cannot constrain his own profligate ways, what hope have the rest of us, with less attachment to the cause? Are we, then, doomed?

Truth is, of course, that the issue is moral in a sense not meant by Gore:

• It demands that we honestly research and discuss and debate the facts and the conjectures. That is, morality constrains the will to believe with a will to doubt.
• It demands that, if honestly done science leads us to conclude that the negative externalities of industrial civilization are causing dangerous climatic shifts, and that technological shifts can safely reduce the extent of that shift, then the issue becomes political, and honesty demands we address the issue as such, and not in a cultic moral fashion.
• It demands, then, that each person honestly announce direct complicity in the acts that, cumulatively, lead to problems.

This latter will be hardest for some. The second point, hardest for us all.

If, of course, the issue is indeed as vital as Gore proclaims. Considering the possibility that he is lying about his personal economies does suggest, however, that he cannot be trusted on matters of science, ideology, or (to state the painfully obvious) personal morality.

Driving a country highway at night is a grand experience — especially with a Boccherini symphony playing as the soundtrack. But it is not without dangers. I turned a corner tonight, and there, in the oncoming lane, majestically striding into view and towards harm's way was a magnificent elk. I slowed down, so, had I hit it, I might have lived. But the elk just stood there, waiting for me to pass. And I passed.

Perhaps you don't get to be a six-point buck elk without learning to avoid traffic.

Odd thing is, he stood alone. Perhaps others were following.

A joke, currently making the Beltway rounds, gets quoted in a BBC News article:

A lonesome Republican voter is accosted by a gunman in the dead of night. The gunman points his weapon at the hapless voter and asks: Who will you vote for? Romney? McCain? Or Giuliani?

The Republican thinks deeply, then shrugs and says: OK. Go ahead and shoot me!

Amusing speculation about what life would be like had the KT killer meteor not hit:

Adaptable dinosaurs had it all covered. Dinosaurs could have comfortably colonised many environments, from polar conditions to regions of rivers and forests, jungle and deserts.

Commentary on Reason's Hit and Run hit wild, of course. Jesse Walker's post was amusing, and there were many droll comments. I joined the fray. (My contribution there concludes this post, here.)

It's interesting how we all forget the Permian fauna. Most were wiped out by . . . well, we're not sure. Not as sure as we are about the dinosaurs. A recent book on the subject of the end Permian extinction (which killed off far more species than did the KT event) speculates that volcanic activity leading to global warming and then a series of methane burps did the deed, destroying as much as 96 percent of all species on the planet.

The record shows anoxia (lack of oxygen) gone mad at Permian/Triassic boundary. This was a horrendous event, worse than the KT event's killer meteor.

Why don't we think more about it? Why are we obsessed with dinosaurs, and not the Permian creatures?

My guess? Aesthetics. Dinosaurs are beautiful in their own way; well, at least sublime. Many are fearsome, but elegantly balanced. The Permian beasts, on the other hand, are ugly, lumpy, stubby, and just not pleasing to our tastes. The Permian beasts, removed one epoch more, seem much more alien.

Well then, what would have happened if the End Permian Extinction not happened?

Perhaps intelligent life would have evolved. But politics would have been much uglier. By definition.

Do not run over large grocery bags littered on the road: they might contain babies.

Open all mail. Sure, most is junk. Some is worse than junk. But you may have a benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous.

Nah. That latter is unlikely. In your dreams. Continue to throw out most mail, unread . . . especially those without return addresses.

I've just finished watching The Great Global Warming Swindle. A very slick and (as I noted earlier today) quickly cut documentary making something like a scientific case against CO₂ as a cause of warming. The link between carbon dioxide and global warming is, the documentary insists, put the wrong way 'round by anthropogenic global warming advocates. Yes, there is a link, as shown in ice core samples; but the carbon dioxide follows, rather than precedes, the warming!

But still no mention of my most persistent interest in the subject for the past few years: the Van Allen Belts and the magnetic pole inversion that a few scientists say is now beginning, and may last a hundred or even a thousand years to complete . . . all the while decreasing the potency of the shield protecting the planet from both cosmic radiation and the solar wind. When I first learned of the magnetic pole shift, and that this activity of our planet's molten core also weakened the planet's surface shield, I immediately wondered how this would affect climate.

I've yet to find one scientific study about this. You'd think that these Earth scientists would be leaping to get funding relating to global climate shift, since (as the documentary nicely demonstrates) this is one of the lead obsessions of our time and thus a great impetus to scientific funding.

Yet even this documentary doesn't even mention this smoking gun, so to speak. So I hesitate to take sides. If the most interesting aspect of the Radiation Theory of Global Warming is not addressed, how can I? (Besides, there's the distinct possibility of multiple causes, no?)

Still, the political nature of climate science is almost shocking. Al Gore mentions, in his rap (recorded as An Inconvenient Truth), that he'd witnessed scientists being mistreated and even fired for their global warming studies. This documentary actually documents this, and highlights unscientific suppression from the anthropogenic global warming crowd.

Now, I was thoroughly disgusted by the Bush Administration's editing of its scientists' reports on the subject. Here we learn that the anthropogenic global warming people do the same.

Professor Frederick Seitz wrote to the Wall Street Journal to charge that the IPCC report had suffered censorship:

This report is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists. . . . I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.

Dr Paul Reiter was so disgusted with the report that he quit the IPCC:

When I resigned from the IPCC, I thought that was the end of it. But when I saw the final draft, my name was still there. So I asked for it to be removed. Well, they told me that I had contributed, so it would remain there. So I said, "No, I haven't contributed, because they haven't listened to anything I've said." So in the end, it was quite a battle. Finally, I threatened legal action against them, and they removed my name. And I think this happens a great deal. Those people who are specialists but don't agree with the polemic, and resigned (and there have been a number that I know of), they are simply put on the author list and become part of this 2,500 of the world's top scientists.

There's fascinating science in the documentary. Yes, I'm annoyed that no one mentions pole shift. Still! But I'm much more annoyed to find out that the scientific community and media people and politicians seem as indecently dishonest about this subject as they have been on, say, economics. We can no more trust a reported scientist on this subject than we can on, say, boom and bust. Ideology runs everything. We, the non-scientist consumer of science news must adjudicate disputes! How nuts is that?

Policy drives too much. And core values drive too much policy . . . at least when it comes to reviewing basic facts. This should be a subject of open-ended exploration and debate and public testing.

Public testing does not mean how many leftists you can get to scream at a public rally.

You can always find leftists to scream at a public rally.

And you can always get rightists to squeeze their trigger fingers while watching the nightly news.

I'm very disappointed in a whole lot of people. On all sides. Too many people lie, and lie through their teeth. It helps, I'm sure, that they've convinced themselves first. That doesn't mean they are right, though.

I take back my previously expressed conjectures about anthropogenic causes of climate heating. Just last week I wrote this:

I remain skeptical of those who discount human activities such as our persistent and increasing use of fire and controlled burns (internal combustion engines, power plants, etc) as a source of some global warming. I just don't see how a person, looking at pollutants, or taking a whiff of a downtown street, can deny that humans can affect their environment.

It's easy to see what's wrong here. Parallax, perspective. Just because, up close, I see what pollutants like CO₁ and sulphur can do in a local skyscape does not mean that this is writ large. (Though we should wonder.) It doesn't mean that the CO₂ that cars and coal fires create is enough to do great damage to the atmosphere. We need to look at the actual evidence.

The perspective of the documentary in question is this: The sun is much bigger than we are, and it, and the clouds in the sky, have more to do with global temperatures than CO₂. Most importantly, it is the Earth's surface temperatures that have been rising, not high-in-the-atmosphere temperatures. (Or: so say the scientists in this documentary.) This, as one scientist puts it, is the evidence that falsifies the CO₂ greenhouse effect theory. The theory predicts that temperatures will rise higher in the atmosphere. This has not happened. Therefore, it is falsified.

Well, we'll see. But can we trust scientists whose budgets depend on the rising tide of global warming scare? It's amusing to listen to environmentalists rag on critics of global warming for their (often weak) connections to multinational corporations, and then watch them scream when the same charge comes back to them! All of this is ad hominem argumentation, but it is quite droll.

According to the documentary, it turns out we can lay some of the blame on all this to . . . Maggie Thatcher! Yes, the origin of this whole craze has a bipartisan political thrust. Watch the documentary to see what I mean. But, well, the whole anthropogenic global warming scare is beginning to look a lot like the folly in the Carter Administration's support for radical Islam.

Blowback's a bitch, and it doesn't respect ideological boundaries.

When injecting venomous snakes with HIV for medical research, take special care in handling the snakes.

Jonah Goldberg makes too much of the culture shift in libertarianism towards an alleged positive liberty. As usual, I find myself deeply unimpressed by Goldberg:

Libertarianism was once primarily concerned with negative liberty — i.e. delineating a zone free of government intrusion. Meyer's libertarianism was primarily concerned with the ability of the individual to find the virtuous path within "an objective moral order based on ontological foundations" best expressed in Western civilization. As such, fusionism was less a coalitional doctrine than a metaphysical imperative. But these days, phrases like "objective moral order" will get you knocked off Cato's Kwanzaa-card list. Liberty's virtue is no longer that it supports the virtuous. Rather, according to today's leading libertarians, economic freedom's virtue lies in its ability to provide everybody the custom-made lifestyle of his choice.

. . .This emphasis on the liberating power of technology and wealth — i.e., materialism and positive liberty — represents an enormous philosophical transformation within libertarianism that echoes, albeit faintly, elements of the economic liberalism of John Dewey and FDR. [emphases removed]

This is all so amazingly old hat that I can point out the worn felt and sweat rings.

What we are witnessing here is not a new commitment to positive liberty, but merely a tweak on the old Better Bathtub rhetoric of libertarian argument. With liberty you get better consumer goods, a better life, as paradigmatically represented by that Better Bathtub. The new versions of this argument, as provided by folks at Cato and Reason and elsewhere, are merely less crass than the old materialistic rap, now emphasizing the spiritual value of better things.

I've no problem with it.

Further, it doesn't explain the topic Jonah G. gleefully gee-whizzes about (to deflate) up front: the several attempts to reforge alliances with the left, or at least the Democratic Party. Indeed, the reason for that rapprochement is that, in the wake of the disastrous and deceitful reign of George Bush the Younger, aligning oneself with people who seem more than open to constitutional limits on Imperial Presidents and the tyrants thundering on the right could be a good way to . . . shore up negative liberty! Yes, it is for their favoring of personal liberties — good, old-fashioned negative freedom! — and opposition to imperialism that the left seems open to dialogue and influence. The right, as typified by GOP partisans like Jonah G., has been too open to the tyranny that the Bush administration has both boldly and timidly worked towards.

I have many friends and allies who admire Jonah Goldberg. I do not. To me he seems just another near-witless conservative pundit and GOP rah-rah shill. And that word, kerfuffle; I've tried it once or twice, I think. And found it ugly and stupid , too suggestive of a low IQ . . . or else low taste. Probably both. The conservative pundit and blogger class uses it over and over again. Do these folk think it makes them sound Menckenian? (Stick to brummagem, people!)

It makes them sound moronic. That is, more moronic than they are by argument alone.

As for Tyler Cowen's comment, quoted by Jonah G., it deserves better commentary than Jonah G. can provide:

Those developments have brought us much greater wealth and much greater liberty, at least in the positive sense of greater life opportunities. They’ve also brought much bigger government. The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats.

I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal.

I don't consider what I call the Luxury Theorem of Government Growth a paradox, for starters. Libertarianism provides a normative agenda, not a theory of social evolution. To note that government tends to grow in a democratic republic, in part because increased wealth brings a lower marginal utility to the wealth forgone by government extraction, is hardly earth-shaking. It is a very old notion. And it fits well with other notions, such as explored by Public Choice economists; you know: the problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.

It's just something those who argue for liberty have always had to deal with. That is, if they were smart.

Those who foolishly played the prediction game, resting their prophetic stance not on critique but on hope for revolution, had troubles. But I discount them. This is Rothbard's legacy at its worst. Smart libertarians reject such nonsense. Liberty's value does not increase because of a coming cultural evolution towards less government, or because of a government collapse as a result of liberty's spurning. Liberty remains the ideal, and retains salience even when the tide turns against it.

It's worth noting that savvy economists were discussing this a century ago and more. And most lost their bearings (though Molinari and Clark did not, it is worth remembering).

Also worth noting is this: The Luxury Theorem of Government Growth is closely related to the Laffer Curve (a very old principle, really). Governments can extract more at a lower rate, often. Similarly, the more the wealth in society the more that society can support higher rates as well as more extractions in total. It's part of the same principle set.

I don't see how this changes the case for establishing negative liberty.

I also disagree with Tyler Cowen regarding this: the older story of big government crushes liberty is being superseded by advances in liberty bring bigger government.

There is a dialectical, two-way relationship here that he's looking at in an alarmingly one-dimensional way. This astounds me, actually, since Tyler C. usually strikes me as one of the smartest cookies in the jar of contemporary libertarian economics.

Oh, well. No one is right all the time. Cowen himself may even express second thoughts, now that Jonah G. has trotted out his arguments to prove a remarkably silly point.

Yesterday was an Honegger day. I attended a performance of the oratorio King David at the Trinity Episcopal Church in northwest Portland. On the way home, listening to my iPod, I had my first chance to really give Honegger's Symphony No. 4a listen; I had purchased the work recorded on CD the previous month, but had not properly given it my full attention until the wet, dark drive home.

King David was magnificent. This is very good music, and the marches and choral sections, especially, were well done. The narrator in the performance was spectacular, and I was also greatly impressed with the musicians and singers, especially the choir, which performed flawlessly. And everybody in the audience enjoyed the over-the-top performance of the woman who played the Witch of Endor.

The oratorio may not get judged my favorite such work of the 20th century; it is, though, on par with Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, if not quite up there with Milhaud's Les Choéphores or Stravinsky's Persephone (the latter being, I believe, the most under-appreciated work by this great composer; the former being the greatest utterly serious effort by that prolific genius). Which is good company. (Note that most judges would place Stravinsky's Sophoclean drama on top. I do not, though I'm a big Stravinsky fan. I just don't agree with most critics, I guess. To me, Stravinsky's Persephone is his greatest work in the opera-oratorio tradition. Could it be that is because it is his most lyrical work, his most tuneful, his most sumptuous?)

The Honegger symphony is something else again. It is the most French of this Swiss-French composer's symphonies. Amusing, in that it is subtitled Deliciae Basilienses, or Delights of Basle, and thus constitutes one of the great symphonic-form tributes to a specific place. (My favorite being, I guess, Bohuslav Martinu's Sinfonietta La Jolla.)

I still think Arthur Honegger's greatest symphony is his second, the one for strings, with ad libitum trumpet at the end. His fifth, subtitled Di Tre Re, or on three D's, is generally considered his weakest, but is, I think, a grand example of absolutely flawless technique that is cerebral enough that most performances can't grab the attention of most listeners; I'm finding it I like it more and more each time heard, though. (Someday, it may become my favorite of Honegger's symphonies; only time and repeated listenings will tell.)

All in all, an Honegger Day is a good day!

There's a new book out by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, entitled Unstoppable Global Warming. The thesis, which advertisements proclaim is backed by a careful analysis of ice core samples and the like, is that the current streak of global warming is caused by a regular solar cycle and that cutting back on carbon emissions won't help alleviate an entirely natural and predictable process.

I'm curious about the book, but have yet to buy it, much less read it.

My first reaction, to the advertisements, is itself predictable. I think it quite likely that there are non-human causes for global warming as well as human ones. I link it to solar radiation and a weakening of the Van Allen Belt as a result magnetic pole shift, a periodic if not exactly regular event in the Earth's core.

Talk about core sample!

I have no sure knowledge of this, or anything else about global climate. But I remain skeptical of those who discount human activities such as our persistent and increasing use of fire and controlled burns (internal combusion engines, power plants, etc) as a source of some global warming. I just don't see how a person, looking at pollutants, or taking a whiff of a downtown street, can deny that humans can affect their environment.

I recently read When Life Nearly Died, a fascinating look at the End Permian Extinction that killed off species at a rate of ten to one. This decadal extinction was caused, the author figures, by two things:

1. A long period of volcanic eruptions in Siberia (the Siberian Traps) leading to a great increase in CO₂ and atmospheric temperatures;




2. A methane burp or series of same in the polar regions, which is a release of methane and other carbon-based gases trapped in water and ice, unleashed by global warming.

This latter is what was so deadly. Methane and CO₂ crowded out oxygen, killing most animals, and their rotting corpses unleashed even more system-killing gases into the atmosphere.

What author Michael Benton worries about, regarding humanity's current trajectory of killing off species after species of life, and of contributing to a startling rise in temperature, is that, at some point we hit the tipping point that will destabilize those trapped gases.

Flooding is the least of our worries. Runaway global warming stuck in a positive feedback loop could kill of most or even all life on the planet. It happened once before.

Well, another major extinction event was also likely caused by methane burp. But that's another story.

Our story is set in the unpredictable future. We don't know what will happen.

But this business about to what extent gases unleashed by human civilization are contributing to global warming is well worth investigating. Hopefully dismissing the issue seems an unpromising avenue for scientific advance.

But then, so does ascribing all causes of global warming to humanity. The real questions on the subject are

• to what extent is climate change going on?
• what are its causes?
• can human beings do anything about it?
• should we?

The unspoken premise to much talk on both sides is that the natural world is or must become a garden; that is, controlled by man. Fascinating supposition, eh?

Looking over my previous post, I realize that I have (at long last?) firmly graduated to the blogosphere's characteristic lowest level: mere specualation. I am writing, now, about things of which I have no expertise! None. Whatsoever.

Of course, I have written these posts in the form of questions. So perhaps I'll be forgiven for not having all the answers.

The subject of liability as to be considered worth thinking about, even by people who've not properly read up on the subject.

Apropos of yesteryday's post — Unlimited liability? The very idea! and my comment on Clark Stooksbury's blog — I should note that Clark responded to my query:

The point I'm making about [limited liability] and Libertarians is that it is an intervention in the marketplace that Libs never seem to criticize or even acknowledge as such.

Maybe. I've heard it talked about. But, granted, not much. My main question is: isn't unlimited liability, too, an intervention into the marketplace? That is, any theory of (and practice of assigning) liability is precontractual. It is not in itself a market activity. Unlimited liability strikes me as impractical. So why even bother with it.

I should note that what I am defining as unlimited liability is not the same thing as strict liability. Or, at least I don't think they are the same! Currently, one can hold people in a corporation for their acts under strict liability. But you cannot hold shareholders responsible to the degree that you can take all their wealth in a lawsuit, if, say, a corporate office or employee does something that might justify a tort, or an action against breach of contract. Or even a crime.

Strict liability, as I understand it, is a theory of legal responsibility that limits the idea of negligence.

Limited liability for corporations limits the extent of responsibility for investors in a business. It does not limit (as far as I know) the corporate liability itself — the corporations assets are always up for grabs in a lawsuit against it — or the employees. I could be wrong about the latter.

Hey: I could be wrong about all this. It has been nearly thirty years since I read Epstein's book on strict liability, and it was tough slogging at the time! And limited liability in a corporate context? I haven't even read the Wikipedia entry on it! (Hmmm. Maybe I should.)

Is a parent's liability for his or her child's actions a related issue? It strikes me that the older a child gets, limitations on the liability of a parent for an offspring's acts is utterly legitimate, considering that growing up is a process of gradual emancipation.

Investing in a company is an awful lot like investing in a child. You hope to get some returns, but the people who take the money become the ones most responsible for using those funds.

My former colleague Clark Stooksbury believes that the limiting of liability of corporations is somehow a major problem for the idea of liberty. In his latest blog entry, he says as much.

Please read it, and then click the comments, and read my comment. Am I wrong?

I thought limited liability was about limiting the liability of shareholders to the value of their stock. This doesn't seem so wrong to me, especially when you consider what would happen were the limitation removed: we'd be left with bankers, mainly, as the chief investors of accumulated capital.

But I could be wrong. I am awaiting to be enlightened.

(Note: you can communicate with me directly from my contact page.)

My best dream last night was a long involved dream going back to an old place of work. I've forgotten most of it, as is the way of dreams. But one moment stands out. I look down, and there, on a bench is an old, vintage Macintosh computer, pre-PPC.

Thing is, though, is that it was snow white, like a modern iBook. But its design was halfway between that of a Color Classic and an LC5x0 series all-in-one computer, but with far more curves than either. The screen was small, like the Color Classic's, but it had, paired with it, another, slightly larger color separate monitor, also snowy white in the chassis.

Macintosh never made anything like it, really. It was much more Art Deco than Mac items have been. It had more swoopy curves than an iMac or a Molar. If I had good drawing skills, I might draw it, but, my skills being what they are, in no way can I do my vision justice.

I woke up after seeing the thing. I knew, in the dream, that it was a dream, in part because the operating system's desktop image had a feature that I've long wanted: a hide feature, that would make the top white bar in all versions of the Mac OS disappear (mostly, except for the date and the far left Apple and name of program), only to reappear when the mouse aims for that vicinity.

To my knowledge Apple has never designed the desktop to look like that. I would like it to.

But, I wake up. Still hasn't happened.

I was never given a Birds and Bees talk, by my parents or anyone else. When I was about eight, our dog Tootsie had puppies, and, I'm told, I explained (to my mother and sisters) how it all had to have worked. My off-the-cuff lecture on sex was as explicit anything my parents could have provided, so they saw no need ever to have that talk.

The trouble was, I came up with such conjectures nearly every day. Who could keep track of them? And at eight years old, my interest in sex wasn't that high. I forgot my conjecture, and a few years later I had to learn about sex all over again, on the streets, like most kids, and in the pages of the dictionary and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

At age 15 I first learned of homosexuality and bisexuality. I was fascinated. I had heard the word faggot, of course, but had never bothered to look it up. I knew two meanings of the word, and though neither made much sense as epithet or oath, I never really thought my peers made much sense anyway, so it never bothered me.

Anyway, there I was, in high school, and I'd just learned about what was referred to as sexual inversion in one of my sources.

So I came up with a theory to explain it.

My theory was that sexual orientation was largely a function of repeated sexual arousal, and that one source for sexual arousal was visual stimulus. I thought of it in terms of beauty.

Now, I could see how pretty girls