Thoughts Aloud

Archive for January, 2009

Glenn Beck’s new TV show on Fox News is already the third most watched cable news program, even though it is not in prime time. Here is an example of why:

What would happen of all Americans saw this dramatic presentation and understood the implications? ◄Dave►

I have stumbled across a politics wiki called, “Open Politics” that looks interesting. I have not explored it in depth; but it has a “Political Personality Quiz” that is intriguing, because it sorts for different dynamics than most such devices. ◄Dave►

This is worthy of the IowaHawk; but then it would have immediately been recognized as satire. I stumbled onto it someplace and traced it back to what appears to be its source at the “Jumping in Pools” blog. I’ll admit that I about spewed my coffee on my keyboard when I started reading it; but it didn’t take long on Google to convince me that it was a spoof. Not all bloggers were as diligent, and it has created quite a stir out there.

It seems to be quoted in full in dozens of places, so I will too and save you the trip:

Conservative News and Reporting
“News for the Rest of Us”
Michele Chang

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is extremely frustrated with orders that the White House is contemplating. According to sources at the Pentagon, including all branches of the armed forces, the Obama Administration may break with a centuries-old tradition.

A spokesman for General James Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, states that the Obama Administration wants to have soldiers and officers pledge a loyalty oath directly to the office of the President, and no longer to the Constitution.

“The oath to the Constitution is as old as the document itself.” the spokesman said, “At no time in American history, not even in the Civil War, did the oath change or the subject of the oath differ. It has always been to the Constitution.”

The back-and-forth between the White House and the Defense Department was expected as President George W. Bush left office. President Obama has already signed orders to close Guantanamo and to pull combat troops from Iraq. But, this, say many at the Defense Department, goes too far.

“Technically, we can’t talk about it before it becomes official policy.” the spokesman continued. “However, the Defense Department, including the Secretary, will not take this laying down. Expect a fight from the bureaucracy and the brass.”

Sources at the White House had a different point of view. In a circular distributed by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, the rationale for the change was made more clear.

“The President feels that the military has been too indoctrinated by the old harbingers of hate: nationalism, racism, and classism. By removing an oath to the American society, the soldiers are less likely to commit atrocities like those at Abu Ghraib.”

“We expect a lot of flak over this,” the classified memo continues. “But those that would be most against it are those looking either for attention or control.”

The time frame for the changes are unknown. However, it is more likely that the changes will be made around the July 4th holiday, in order to dampen any potential backlash. The difference in the oath will actually only be slight. The main differences will be the new phrasing. It is expected that the oath to the Constitution will be entirely phased out within two years.

Good stuff.

Unfortunately, the reason it worked so well, is that it sounds so plausible for the Obamessiah. ◄Dave►

I tuned in to the Liberty Radio Network (FTL) I mentioned last night and caught an articulate young guy named Wes Bertrand doing an excellent interview discussing home schooling, mentioning Ayn Rand and Maria Montessori. He also mentioned a book he had written entitled, “The Psychology of Liberty,” and read a couple of passages out of it. One caught my attention, which was a quote by John Holt, the originator of the “unschooling” movement that is hot in the home schooling community:

Educator John Holt related some of his thoughts about students in universities and colleges and their extended transition process into the workforce:

Most of them were on campus to get a piece of paper that(they thought) would enable them to do whatever they were going to do next, when they got out of school. Most of them, if given the piece of paper, would leave immediately and do that next thing. Most of them, if they left right away with paper in hand to do that next thing, would do it about as well as they will do it after many more years on this or some other campus. Others of the students are here because they don’t know what to do next, or because they want to put off, for as long as they can, whatever they will do next.

Meanwhile, one might say that all those students are learning something. Perhaps they are. But they will not long remember more than a small part of it, or use or benefit from more than a small part of that. They are learning this stuff to pass exams. Most of them could not pass the same exam even a year later, to say nothing of ten years later. And, if some of what they learn should someday prove useful, they would probably have learned it ten times faster when they needed to use it and thus had a reason for learning
it.

I’d say he nailed it!

I listened to a 2 hour podcast of yesterday’s show, and he was taking calls, doing interviews, and pontificating just as well as the average talk radio host, only it seemed serious and not meant as entertainment like the big guys on AM. I enjoyed and would recommend it.

He has written two books, both are now available as free PDF downloads. I have read the education section of the above mentioned philosophy book, which is very well written; and have downloaded the other entitled, “Complete Liberty,” which is billed as more “plain talk” than the philosophy book, and can also be read on line. They are available on his two websites:
Complete Liberty and Logical Learning. ◄Dave►

Many of you probably already know about “The Liberty Radio Network.” It is new to me:

Introducing the Liberty Radio Network!
In its current form, the Liberty Radio Network (LRN) is streaming the best liberty-oriented content on the internet, 24/7. You will hear the latest episodes of the shows listed below, as well as live content originating from our studios in Keene, New Hampshire.

Live streaming and tons of podcasts by libertarian oriented hosts. If you are weary of the Left/Right oriented talk radio fare, there is probably something here for you, and it is all free without even so much as a sign-up required. Check it out. ◄Dave►

I have stumbled across an interesting source of financial charts. They have worked out a way to reconstruct M3, which the Fed quit reporting about the time they started inflating the money supply like crazy. It appears to be updated weekly. There are all manner of charts worth perusing there and many of them look like Al Gore’s hockey stick; but my favorite is:

It represents all the currency the FED has “printed” lately (although much of it is digital instead of paper). If one looks closely, there was about a trillion dollars in circulation in early 2008 and they doubled it by mid-summer. Then they had doubled it again in September and added another trillion by Christmas. So,there are nearly five times as many dollars in circulation today as there was a year ago. Our politicos are about to add another trillion in their stimulus package, and I fear no end is in sight. It is only a matter of time until all those dollars start looking for a shrinking supply of goods, and prices join the hockey stick trend. Gold is still cheap, folks. ◄Dave►

E-mail of the day:

According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem. A number of 12-14 year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom.

That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips on the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.

Every night the maintenance man would remove them, and the next day the girls would put them back. Finally the principal decided that something had to be done.

She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.

She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine all the yawns from the little princesses).

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required.

He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers …….. and then there are educators.

Sorry, I got a chuckle out of it, and needed a break from pondering the unraveling of our society. ◄Dave►

I encountered a really profound and thought provoking comment on the Secular Right blog today. In a thread entitled, “Obama’s Science,” Heather Mac Donald said:

Obama says he will “restore science to its rightful place.” All very nice and anti-oogedy-boogedy. I’ll believe Obama’s self-congratulatory rhetoric, however, when he stands up to the radical green lobby and considers the case for nuclear energy, a power source conspicuously absent from his inaugural list of PC alternative fuels.

On the oogedy-boogedy front, Texas is once again debating the teaching of evolution.

This drew a surprising number of comments, including debate over AGW, along with the predictable gnashing of teeth over the Darwin vs. Creation/ID school subjects. Then,  commenter Daniel Dare (from Europe, I think) made the following mind opener at comment #44:

I don’t think American people understand the problem.

Even now USA can’t educate all the scientists and engineers it needs. I get the impression that every second scientist is foreign-born. High-IQ Americans choose law, they choose business. Science has low-status in your country. You culture despises nerds. You revere singers and actors and sport’s stars, supermodels, business people. Above all, so many of your religious leaders bad-mouth science at every opportunity.

Confucianism/Taoism is different. The scholar is revered. They are the saints, the immortals, the Xiān (hsien). Marxism has added to this, not reduced it. A Marxist state is a technocracy. Engineers dominate the government. Not lawyers like America.

You only get away with this because of low taxes, which allows higher elite income, and the fact that you are still a leader in many fields. And because your main competitors are Westerners with similar values to you.

Wait till you are number two in everything. And your taxes rise to pay for trillion dollar deficits. After President Obama, you will have a welfare state like Europe. Maybe like Sweden LOL. After inflation hits in a year or two, everyone will be in higher tax-scales. You think you can double base-money and not get high inflation? President Obama and Speaker Pelosi will have no difficulty funding their schemes. High inflation and progressive income-tax will solve the problem.

A decade or two from now, people will go to Beijing. USA will be the ones with the brain-drain. Even the few scientists you manage to train will go to Beijing.

That’s what it’s like for developing countries now. All their elite dream of going to America.

Wow! How could one argue with his logic? To me, this is just one more (as if I needed another) reason to despair for the future of this once great country. It is like a perfect storm is lining up to flatten us very soon, and most will not see it coming. ◄Dave►

Troy has an interesting piece entitled, “I’m Sorry, So Sorry…,” in which he revisits the idea of breaking America into separate autonomous regions. Only, now he is suggesting it be done by consensus with those advocating different social systems free to choose to live where their preference prevails:

My solution? Let every group have what it wants by dividing the country into several autonomous regions, each free to choose the type of governmental/economic/social system it prefers. For sure, this would cause some dislocations since many would find themselves in a region that does not conform to their preferences. No problem. Leave them free to either:

• Willingly abide by the decisions of the majority in that region, or,
• Remove themselves to a different region, more suited to their tastes.

After all, we are a very mobile people.

Such freedom of choice and movement should remain open to any and all for a predetermined period after the division. However, after this period of choice has expired, each region should then be free to establish its own processes and rules for immigration. I suggest this last restriction in the absolute belief that those who choose poorly would soon want to flee to the protection of others who chose more wisely.

Sorry but when one chooses a system, one must choose ALL of that system. After all, would not any and every system be great if we could only choose its best attributes and be immune to its failings?

Is this not a form of the very thinking that has gotten the USA to the state of collapse?

This sounds great to me; but I see a few hidden flaws. Let’s say we break it into three pieces:

1. A socialist system, where the Politically Correct activists regulate moral behavior.
2. A corporatist system, where the Piously Correct activists regulate moral behavior.
3. A laissez faire capitalist system, where individual moral behavior is unregulated.

It would seem to me that few businesses that actually produced wealth would wish to stay in the socialist paradise (1), and would move to (3) where I would be. This would devastate the welfare state, for lack of a source of funds to redistribute to all the lazy whiners demanding their benefits. This might cause them to wish to invade (3) to re-enslave some producers.

Then, both (1) and (2) would require heavy enforcement mechanisms to force their citizens to “do the right thing.” This would drive all the dopers and criminals into (3) where they wouldn’t have enforcers breathing down their necks every moment of the day. This would force the cooperative citizens of (3) to hire more cops than they would otherwise need, and penal facilities that they probably had not planned for.

I am willing to kick the idea around; but it seems fraught with a lot of unintended consequences, and I suspect it would evolve into civil war eventually anyway. ◄Dave►

“Libertarian Papers: An Online Journal for Libertarian Scholarship” debuts today. It looks impressive:

A new libertarian journal—a new type of libertarian journal—is born today. Libertarian Papers is an exclusively online peer-reviewed journal. Its home is this elegant, fast, easy-to-use website. Please feel free to browse around.

Publishing online has allowed us to break free of many of the constraints faced by paper-based journals. Scholars working in the libertarian tradition will find dealing with us to be a refreshing change. For instance, we publish articles consecutively, online, as soon as they are peer-reviewed and a final copy is submitted. No waiting for the next issue or printing delays. We have also done away with arbitrary space limits. And we don’t care what citation style you use, as long as it is consistent, professional, and enables the reader to find the work referenced. Neither our time nor the author’s need be wasted converting from one citation style to another, or wondering whether “2nd. ed.” goes here or there, or whether it should be “2d. ed.” instead. In a digital age, old forms must give way to new forms.

And as our publications are online and open, you won’t find our authors furtively posting a scanned copy of their paper articles on their own sites, while their article is trapped in musty paper on a dark shelf—but if they want to, they are free to do so, since to the extent possible everything here is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Want to republish your piece in a book? No need to ask us for permission. We want to spread the ideas of liberty, not impose DRM on them.

I look forward to reading the three papers already there, and to future scholarly submissions.  I have already subscribed to their RSS & Twitter Feeds. ◄Dave►