Stimulus spending US style

Need a laugh? If you are an American this isn't really that funny - its just unbelievable. If you are Canadian you should not feel smug, it's not that much different here. This video link was brought to my attention by Cato-at-Liberty, enjoy:

Complexity, the State and You

It was totally by accident that I discovered Freedomain Radio some years ago while "surfing-the-net". This is a libertarian site, run by a true libertarian, but not in the political sense. Stefan Molyneux is a philosopher, or more correctly a libertarian philosopher (with a degree in philosophy), a sort of male Ayn Rand who uses modern tools to publish his message. He blogs, produces podcasts, he posts to YouTube and he writes books. He has some extraordinary insights that he shares with people through all these methods of publication. Need something to think about? Just spend a few minutes watching/listening/reading his always thought provoking material.
If you are in the Toronto area he will be attending one of our libertarian "pub-night" meetings in September. If you have Facebook - check this out, if not go to the Ontario Libertarian Party site and click on the pub-night prompt. Stefan is a local, from the Greater Toronto area and I think he is getting better and better at delivering his message. Here is one of his latest YouTube postings that gets to the core of libertarianism.
 

The best a government education system can provide

As a former public high school teacher I often feel pangs of guilt because I was part of a system in Ontario that did not have the best interests of its students as its ultimate purpose (although I did try to ignore the system). What was its ultimate purpose? Not an easy answer, but the system was primarily geared to other things like, staffing, timetabling, government "edu-babble" and maybe then to students. Of course this view was not shared by most teachers but I'm certain it was shared by many students.
Thanks to the wonders of social networking, email etc., I present to you a courageous valedictorian, Erica Goldson, of an American public high school who feels much the same as I do. If you want read along the full text of the speech is here. Erica is an anomaly, and her speech is obviously not typical but as you will hear, deeply felt.

A census I can support

That lovely photo (dragonfish) is just one of many taken over the last 10 years in a worldwide Census of Marine Life that will be formally presented in early October 2010.
This type of cataloguing and describing of species represents one of the lowest and oldest "levels" of scientific enterprise (although this study required the most up-to-date technology).  Cataloguing and describing species pre-dates the 18th Century's Carl Linnaeus (the father of Taxonomy) who invented the binomial naming system still in use today. It is worthwhile work and not surprisingly it reveals that there is an awful lot we have yet to discover about planet Earth.
The number of "new" creatures revealed in this study should be humbling to the scientists and for me indicates just how little is known about how things work on Earth.

The reason I bring this up aside from my love of science and nature, is the spin being applied to this story. Sure human actions are endangering ocean life, we are all aware of what "over-fishing" has done to the East Coast Canadian Maritime fisheries, but to me that is an issue of ownership. When no one owns an area, whether on the ocean or the land, when that area is designated as "public property" or "government-owned" who is responsible for the area? Of course the simple answer is that government bureaucracy "manages" the area. Well, in Canada the Department of Fisheries and Oceans "managed" the East Coast Cod Fishery, how did that work out? The Minerals Management Service in the USA was responsible for "regulating" safe oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, how did that work out? If these areas were privately owned, the owners would probably be more careful preserving them. I'll bet they would harvest whatever resource wealth was in their territory in as sustainable a fashion as possible to protect their own interests. Governments, bureaucrats, typically have other motives like pandering to special interest lobby groups for political favours.
The worst thing that could happen to some of these marvellously diverse and productive ecosystems discovered in the Census of Marine Life is that they are "managed" by various government agencies around the world.