Strange Bedfellows? Ralph Nader & Ron Paul Interviewed Together!

Obama equals Bush, two years later

See the picture? That is irony defined.
Reason TV demonstrates in the video below, that George Bush's war has become Barak Obama's war. No different, no hope, no change.
Where is the anti-war movement two years later? Has anything really changed?

The most distressing comment in the video is that the Republicans who started the wars, handed them to the Democrats, who will likely hand them back to the Republicans, possibly as soon as 2012.
Peace!

The "Declinism" of the Anglo-sphere

I'm reading a book right now, that points out how futile it is to make predictions about the future. If you liked Malcolm Gladwell's books (The Tipping Point etc.) you might like Future Babble - Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway  by Dan Gardner. Its easy to read, filled with interesting historical tidbits, and offers reams of examples where brilliant people made predictions that had no relation to what actually happened. Predicting the future is a mug's game, rarely will the experts be held to account - people forget.
So when I read Mark Steyn's Dependence Day, On the erosion of personal liberty, (thanks Jeffery), it did not take long to see that Mr. Steyn was predicting the demise of the Anglo-American classical liberal democracy that has dominated the world since the rise of the British Empire.
Mark Steyn's article is long, extremely well written and very distressing if he is indeed right. I'm leaning on Dan Gardner's view that Steyn's predictions will be wrong, no matter how well argued they are. Here's hoping!

Fromage from the cult of anti-humanism

Cheesy!

Do those make you feel hungry....for food? Me neither. Who knew that one of the hottest new trends involves making cheese out of breast milk, ugh. That's right, take a look here. I was totally out-to-lunch on this, so to speak.
The Post article proves that there is no accounting for taste, and superficially I don't see an issue here, until I read this part:
"....PETA, the animal rights organization, which wrote this after a Swiss restaurant added breast-milk to its menu two years ago: "PETA was inspired to ask ice cream giant Ben & Jerry's to switch from unhealthy bovine juice stolen from tormented calves (aka "cow milk") to healthier, humane human breast milk."
PETA thinks it's a good idea, of course they would. Now this may not be fair but I lump PETA in with the 'enviro-mental' movement. You know them, the people that the George Carlin video was satirizing late last week. They are the ones that seek to diminish human value and make us all feel guilty that we are somehow intruders on the Earth, disrupting the ecological-balance of Gaia. We use up resources, polluting as we do, disrupting and destroying habitats, and just plain making a nuisance out of ourselves. We are the parasites of the planet! We stomp around in our huge carbon-footprints, altering the climate, and endangering all other species. You sir or madame, are guilty by virtue of your birth, all 6 billion of us. This makes the Christian idea of original sin look unambitious.

Here is a short old clip from one of my favourite 'enviro-mentalists', who explains how you too may reach the exalted position of second-level maggot.

    

Joule Unlimited: A Potential Game Changer?

Artificial photosynthesis

That is what US Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry calls the technology being developed by Joule Unlimited Inc., a company in his home state of Massachusetts.
The company claims it has developed a method of producing large amounts of cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuel using a "proprietary organism" and freely available inputs like the evil carbon dioxide and water.
Neil Reynolds describes the company in a Globe and Mail column this week. Time magazine recently touted the company as one of its Top 20 Green Tech Ideas of 2010.
Joule Unlimited claims that it uses artificial photosynthesis that it can scale-up to produce large amounts of "fungible diesel fuel" for around $30US per barrel equivalent. Their technique does not use expensive biomass inputs to produce biofuels, such as is done with corn to make ethanol.
Joule Unlimited expects to begin commercial production in 2012. In the meantime I would put off purchasing that hybrid or electric car, the future is impossible to predict.  

Culturally Retarded

Haiti is on the westside of Island of Hispaniola

Is anyone surprised that one year after the earthquake little has happened in Haiti that indicates it is recovering?
What would a Haitian recovery look like anyway? It was a basket case (poorest in Western Hemisphere) before the earthquake, so would it recover to just being a basket case again?
The problems in Haiti exhaust the imagination, it is a situation where sending everyone away and starting over again seems almost sensible. Why is that? Why is it that a nation of 10 million has 10,000 NGO's present in country and it still doesn't help? There is no easy answer of course. There are economic problems that are directly related to property rights as noted in this column. There are political problems that go way back to corrupt leadership and government. But that I think is just part of the problem, the problem is deeper and more entrenched than mere economics. The problem I think is culture.
Over the past several days, even weeks around here, there has been a discussion about Asian students and lately Asian parenting. In November 2010 McLean's magazine published an article titled "Too Asian?", the title has since been retracted but the article remains and it implied that Asian students which represent a small portion of North American society nevertheless make up a large component of the university population because of their work ethic.
More recently an article by Amy Chua in the Wall Street Journal stated that Chinese mothers have superior parenting skills. Another article by Lawrence Solomon in the National Post takes issue with Amy Chua. Whatever the truth, I will testify (as a former teacher) that Chinese children, on the whole, make very good students indeed. Why is that? I think it is engrained in the culture. As Ms. Chua points out, if you expect more you just might get it, with patience and perseverance.
So what does that have to do with Haiti? I think a great deal. Much of the Haitian population is deeply religious (80% Roman Catholic, 16% Protestant) not that this precludes cultural success. Many populations are deeply religious. Haiti has the added burden that fully half the population practices or believes in Voodoo. How voodoo is reconciled with Catholicism or Protestantism is explained, sort of, in the Wikipedia article linked in the last sentence. 
In a column published this past week in the National Post, Dan Gardner takes I believe a courageous stand when he says: "...Haiti has been crippled, at least in part, by certain cultural values — such as the fatalism promoted by voodoo — that discourage initiative, rationality, trust, achievement, and education." Culture can foster greatness or the reverse.

Homeopathy is Bullsh*t

The People's TV Network (CBC-TV) up here in the Great White North, took a well deserved swipe at homeopathic "medicine" the other night on their program Marketplace. You can see the entire episode if you click on that link. If you harbour illusions about the efficacy of homeopathic medicine this program should dispel them.

The program shows how some of these "medicines" are manufactured by serial dilution (to the point of non-existence), and how they depend on water memory for their power. That power is, I believe, entirely due to the placebo effect. Not that there is anything wrong with the placebo effect, it sometimes works, and avoids expensive occasionally dangerous, treatments and drugs. Of course when real science is used to study the efficacy of any drug, the placebo effect must be ruled out or controlled, and that is reason for the gold-standard double-blind study. The homeopathic drugs mentioned in the program above would likely fail a double-blind study.

Of course Marketplace goes on to suggest that governments should take control of homeopathy. Across Canada government regulation of homeopathic medicine varies from province to province. Most of the regulation (coordinated by Health Canada) is designed to protect consumers from any harm due to the medicine. The CBC implies that this regulation somehow lends credence to the drug's efficacy, and the government should ban the medicines outright because they are ineffective. While understandable, prohibition never works and it will not in this case. People like to have control over their own medical care. That is an issue our governments and politicians will need realize soon enough as public funding of medical services explodes.     

Planetary Perspective

My generation was very fortunate to have George Carlin around to keep us laughing and to keep things in perspective. I'm not certain of Carlin's political views, but I know that there were many things that I could agree with and he certainly had a libertarian attitude. Carlin's views on religion are well known and when I was younger his views were a touchstone for mine before the days of the militant atheists.
Mostly he was important because his humour made us look at the world from his perspective.
People underestimate the power of humour and satire and their role in our society. Just look at how Jon Stewart has changed the way both young and old now view the NEWS.
So here, just for fun, is George Carlin's view on the Planet from almost twenty years ago: Warning: Carlin uses several of those seven words that can never be used on television. Enjoy :-)
 

Arizona revives gun debate. by Rod Rojas

The unfortunate, recent shooting in Arizona in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others were attacked has revived the debate regarding gun laws, especially because Arizona has relatively lax gun laws.

It is widely speculated on the media that Jared Loughner –the alleged gunman- may have some sort of mental imbalance, so there have been calls for further screening regulation to limit the ability of mental patients to purchase guns. It must be noted that mental illness only rarely translates into criminal violence.

One of the reasons why he is being deemed mentally unstable is because of his anti-government views, and his support for the gold standard. By this definition the entire libertarian community should be moved to a mental institution.

According to Rich Daly of Psychiatric News, the mentally ill only perpetrate between 3 and 5 percent of all gun related violence. It seems that a statistical link with the brand of shoes that the killer used might yield more conclusive results.

Mental health care is no different to any other sort of health care; it affects many people around us. Most of them lead relatively normal lives while coping with their imbalance in the same way that others cope with chronic fatigue or diabetes. Because of the huge stigma attached to mental illness, privacy is vital to the mental patient’s ability to function in society. The publication of mental records through a consolidated database to allow gun dealers to perform background checks would be a huge blow to this overwhelmingly peaceful -and sometimes fragile- segment of our population.

In Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) is already talking about a federal ban on high capacity magazines, like the one allegedly used by Loughner.

Considering the repeated and unmitigated failure of every single prohibitionist policy, why would anyone still advocate banning anything?

Banning a good or service only creates a black market for it. And along with the criminalization comes the violence related to the illegal trafficking. In other words, not only do the goods or services not leave the market, but we create new branches of crime, we incur huge costs in connection to the enforcement of the laws, and we see a rise in the price of the goods and services in question.

Sometimes a ban can even make the good more readily available than if it were legally obtainable. Take the case of illegal drugs for example. It is much easier for a teen to get hold of marijuana than beer.

Illegality also imparts the good or service with a certain appeal. The 1920’s prohibition of alcohol in the USA gave glamour to the underground bars. Likewise today, we see how drug dealing has been idealized in parts of the hip-hop culture.

We should also remember that producing, buying, selling or owning a weapon does not in any way harm anybody. The initiation of violence against others or their property is what needs to be punished, and this can be done with or without guns. Victimless, voluntary exchanges are not crimes.

I suppose Congresswoman McCarthy spends time in Washington DC, where some of the most draconian gun laws have been in effect since 1976. She should be familiar with the high crime rate and with the fact that violent criminals still carry guns in the District of Columbia. Restrictive gun laws disarm law abiding citizens, not criminals.

We may contrast the District of Columbia with Switzerland, which has one of the highest private gun ownership rates in the world, and where gun crime rates are statistically insignificant. That little country has no professional army, so Swiss males between the ages of 18 and 42 are required by law to keep a fully automatic assault rifle at home. While conscription should not be advocated, we should note that the Swiss don’t go around shooting each other, just like we don’t go around stabbing each other to death in spite of the fact that we all have big, sharp, lethal knives in our kitchens.

While we feel for the friends and families of the victims, and bans appear to be the right thing to do, we need to know that they do not produce the desired effects. There was once a world without guns and both cruelty and crime were definitely present.

Do not let politicians capitalize on your emotions. Oppose the passing of legislation that restricts your freedom, endangers your privacy and causes problems while solving none.

Rod Rojas is a holder of the Canadian Securities Course designation and performs as a financial adviser in personal, corporate, and public-policy matters. Read his articles at Mises.org.  Send him mail.

Antimatter from thunderstorms

This is very strange and out-of-this-world discovery! This posting from a NASA website claims that the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected evidence of antimatter particles inside thunderstorms.
The Fermi Telescope was designed to look out into the universe, but was able to detect terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.

BLAME

The recent shooting in Arizona has triggered the predictable blame game played out by the various and sundry media as well as bloggers. It's the guns, Arizona is too lax on guns, thats the cause. Or it's the acrimonious political atmosphere in the US, or its Sarah Palin's unfortunate poster with the sniperscope crosshairs on various congressional districts.
It is virtually impossible to comprehend that a 22-year-old man would pop-off six people in a parking lot as casually as you or I, tossing flat stones into a pond. But thats what happened. He planned it, he did it, and it might have been even worse.
People need reasons, people need to believe there is purpose to the world and the things that happen in it, so those in charge of the media offer up reasons. They march in the experts who have studied these situations (can you believe that!), and each expert gives a plausible cause for the incident because hindsight is 20/20, and it happened so it MUST have had a reason.
Sarah Palin like rifles, long guns with crosshairs, that poster is what I would expect, but it is not her fault.
When is the political atmosphere in America NOT acrimonious? That is not a cause.
Guns, well, thats like blaming the airliners for crashing into the Twin-Towers on 9/11, it's not guns that are at fault. It's the guy, the 22-year-old nut job and there is no reason in the world of sane people to explain it.
I'm already tired of hearing the parade of personalities invoking the deity and trying to give a reason for this story, a purpose for the six lives wasted, the twelve wounded, and for the suffering of the survivors. There is no deity, there is no purpose, and there is no getting over it if you were there.

If you think my commentary is bleak, have a look at this on the same topic.  

Rattling the cage of The Barefoot Bum 2

I was going to call this post Communist Bum, but I suspect the Barefoot Bum would have called that title "egregiously stupid," his favourite phrase when he references me, Libertarians, Randians (Objectivists), and anyone else who disagrees with him in general. I don't like calling anyone a communist (because in the USA that might get you shot), I prefer to use the word statist (but Statist Bum does not demonstrate the same level of contempt that I hold). Oh wait, Mr. Bum doesn't think the term 'statist' is "particularly well-defined." Let me help.
In my usage, statist comes from the word "statism" which means the theory or practice of concentrating economic and political power in the state, usually resulting in a weak position for the individual or community with respect to government. A statist is one who practices statism.  As far as I'm concerned there is very little difference in practice between communists, fascists, NAZI's, socialists (called New Democrats in Canada), Liberals (in Canada), Conservatives (everywhere), Democrats, Republicans, Greens and on and on. They are ALL statists according to that definition and my usage, and they differ only in degree of application. However, there is a very big difference between Libertarians and Conservatives/Republicans. Libertarians want limits on the size and scope of government, Conservatives/Republicans say that they do but in practice it never works out that way. In those so-called right-wing (Conservative/Republican) governments the state always accumulates more power, more control, and more funding at the expense of individuals and communities. That is what has happened in the US and Canada.

Mr. Bum has dissected my previous commentaries line-by-line and he did it again in a recent post after I responded to his initial attack. I don't read Mr. Bum's postings as a rule, it was only by accident that I found his attack on my posting. What I do know is is that Mr. Bum hates Libertarians. Strangely Mr. Bum has something in common with Ayn Rand, my supposed Prophet, she hated Libertarians too. Go figure.

I first read Rand's work as a boy in the late 1960's and early '70's and she obviously had a profound affect on me probably because my thinking at the time was similar to hers. Mr. Bum refers my "dreary Libertarian dogma" blaming Rand.  Of course his communist views are strictly his own, sprung from his fertile brow and certainly not dogmatic. I'm full of dogma and propaganda because I'm libertarian, he is just a communist, no dogma, no propaganda just lots of evidence and skepticism. Right Mr. Bum?

In his most recent dissection of my blog he avoids my comment "I too would be frustrated if my dream-Marxist world had collapsed to the point where just Cuba and North Korea are all that is left of the great revolution of the proletariat. The former communist world has taken on a decidedly capitalistic appearance, though it is still coercive by nature; they have moved closer to us in the West and unfortunately we have moved closer to them in many ways." He avoids it because its true, though he actually posts an apology for Communism before he dissects my blog. Nice touch. In it he says: "I self-identify as a communist. I could just as easily self-identify as a socialist. I chose "communist" for a couple of reasons. Both terms have some unfortunate connotations. Communism, of course, carries the baggage of the errors and excesses of the Soviet Union and China." So, Mr. Bum wants to distance himself from the "unfortunate connotations" of those places where communism began and had its greatest effect on humanity. He also feels free to distance himself from all the advocates of communism (Marx, Lenin, Mao etc.). Damn those unfortunate connotations! I guess he means the millions and millions murdered (possibly 110 million people!) by Stalin and Mao and others. Yes, that is unfortunate. But lets not dwell on reality. Mr. Bum shares with us his ethics: "My fundamental ethical philosophy is gob simple: I want as many people as possible to be as happy as possible, however each person construes "happiness"; I want as few people as possible to suffer as little as possible, however each person construes "suffering". I see the interesting part of politics and economics to be about how to bring about universal happiness. If I thought capitalism were the best way to bring about universal happiness, I would be a capitalist; I do not, therefore I searched for an alternative and settled — at least at present — on communism." Ugh, that sounds like the beauty contest contestant that wants "world peace," he just wants everyone to be happy, and not suffer, and that will happen in his communist lala land, but not like before, that was bad. Mr. Bum goes on to dismiss the communist (and also statist) idea of a planned economy as "unsound" and prefers "the social ownership of capital, the means of production," whatever the hell that means, I have no idea and I'm sure he could not explain it either.


I do agree with one thing that he says: "I consider economics and politics to be fundamentally scientific disciplines; I do not believe they areas merely of competing dogmas."  I agree, economics at least, is a science. Like any science, attempts should made to describe it with theories. Theories are formed by testing hypotheses, when a hypothesis corresponds with reality (i.e. is true) it is accepted. Hypotheses become theories when they describe reality and can be used to make predictions with outcomes that correspond to the real world if they work. If communist theory claims that the means of production should be owned by the proletariat for the good of everyone, fine, show me an example where this has worked or even partially worked now or in the past. Is it in Cuba, North Korea, the former Soviet Union, any of the Eastern Block satellites of the USSR, Red China, is it anywhere, anywhere but in the Communist Manifesto? Every time communism has been attempted anywhere it has led to "errors and excesses" and "unfortunate connotations" as Mr. Bum so blandly puts it. Every time! That is quite a record of rotten success, quite a record of UNhappiness, Mr. Bum!

So lets summarize, communism hasn't worked, doesn't work, and millions and millions have died, but Mr. Bum concludes: "so I'm a communist." Fine, be happy.

However, I'm a libertarian, I support freedom and I do not support coercion, and communism requires coercion and removes freedom, always. My choice of economics is the Austrian School or Theory. What is the Austrian Economics? Just click on that for a lengthy history and explanation. In essence it is a laissez-faire approach to economics. Where it has been tried, it has been wildly successful. Witness the United States, Canada or any country or territory that remotely resembles laissez-faire Austrian Economics. Again it is a matter of degree, but if you check out this interactive map of Economic Freedom and correlate it to the wealth, life expectancy, yes happiness, of individuals in those countries found in this document, then you might agree with me. If you live in Canada or the United States you are still free to choose. You are also free to agree with the Barefoot Bum and the dreck that he spews.      

The needs of the one vs. the needs of the many*

(Yup, I like Star Trek. *The Wrath of Khan was a great movie.)
In Judaism is there is a well known saying supposedly from the Talmud "To save one life is as if you saved the world." It is likely derived from the Talmudic principle that the preservation of human life overrides virtually any other religious consideration. I can't disagree with the principle, except that I would leave out the religious qualifier.
That saying came to mind when I read the story of the superhero vigilante in Lynwood Washington that patrols the night-time streets in costume like the kid in the movie Kick-Ass. I liked Kick-Ass the movie, so I love this story.
Phoenix Jones is his name and he has been doing this for 9 months so far, and as he says: "I symbolize that the average person doesn't have to walk around and see bad things and do nothing."  Jones saves lives and protects property; admirable, but dangerous.
Fortunately Mr. Jones has some military training and a team that assists him. I think this makes the local police look bad, remember in most towns the Police have the monopoly on protection, but they are generally not around to do it. I know, Police aren't omniscient or omnipotent, but I like the idea of competition in the protection racket, so I hope Mr. Jones and his team can turn this into something lucrative. Here is Mr. Jones on YouTube:


The reverse kind of story happened this week, a homeless man in Columbus Ohio with a radio voice was saved by many. Ted Williams who has a checkered past, was taken off the streets of Columbus and given another chance. There are a couple of reasons I think this story is important.
The most obvious reason is that this story shows the power of YouTube and the internet. The internet has become a tool of referendum. The "share-ing," the blogging," the "Like-ing," all of it from YouTube, to Facebook, to Google and beyond, adds up to a new and powerful force that can satisfy the needs of the many and in this case the one.
The Williams story also shows that people like to help people, one-to-one, it's a natural instinct. It does not require the coercive force of government along with the bureaucratic infrastructure that frequently gets in the way of help. Help can be given informally, without strings on a local scale.
Both stories are very local, tiny, but ultimately huge. I hope they end well.  

Bad Science

Finally the full story is out on the fraudulent link between MMR vaccine and autism. It seems to me that the purveyors of this fraud beginning with the original 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield including celebrities like Jenny McCarthy should be libel for something. That is not likely going to happen, but the good news about this story is that investigative journalism is still alive and effective. Brian Deer of The Sunday Times certainly deserves credit here. The other good news is that science still works. Despite all the chicanery, and all the media attention, politics, bullying, all of it, the truth comes out. Science is still self-correcting, even though it takes 12 years!
The bad news, I suspect that the link between vaccination and autism or anything else will remain in the public psyche, kept alive by charlatans and conspiracy theorists.

While I'm on the topic of bad science, here is a lie that has yet to be squelched: its man-made global-warming. Yes, Earth is warming, and as I've stated previous posts, it has been warming since the most recent ice-age 10 to 12,000 years ago. I'm more convinced than ever though that humans play only a tiny role in that warming.

A recent article in the National Post by Lawrence Solomon points to fudging some of the numbers, maybe not to the degree that Wakefield did in his vaccine scam. Solomon's article, 97% cooked stats talks about the so-called scientific consensus that purports that anthropogenic global warming is settled science. Its that apparent certainty, supported by an unquestioning media, that has led people and governments to act in nothing less than self-destructive ways.
One just needs to spend a few minutes reviewing the electrical generation policy in my home province of Ontario, to realize the harm that bad science can foist on an economy. Lawrence Solomon is also the executive director of Energy Probe and has written often criticizing Ontario's Liberal government.    

Atlas Shrugged Special: John Stossel FBN

This series of YouTube videos is one year old, but like Atlas Shrugged very relevant today. Enjoy.