Futility moment
I sent this letter to Senator Mel Martinez:

I have lately heard the unbelievable suggestion that illegal aliens - who lied and cheated to get into this country and continued to lie and cheat to work here - should be able to benefit from this deception by getting credit for their illegal work in the US Social Security system, even though the work was only possible because they used forged documentation! I certainly hope you don't agree with this appeasement of felonious conduct.
The rationale that has been given is that these workers paid into the system and should get the benefit of what they paid. Of course this is nonsense. Like all other workers, the system envisions giving them far more than what they or their employers paid. But it gets worse.
As I understand Social Security regulations, even if a worker doesn't make contributions to the Social Security system, or his employer doesn't, as long as the work he does SHOULD HAVE been covered by Social Security, he will get credit for the work. How long will it be until some liberal lawmaker gets the bright idea of imputing contributions from every illegal alien who asserts, however mendaciously, that he worked in this country? This is a real threat to the Social Security system and to honest, hard-working American workers. Illegal immigration and especially illegal employment must be stopped now.

I know. It's pointless. They'll do what they want and Mel Martinez in particular will never vote for justice and freedom. But I had to try. Do I feel especially strongly about all this because I'm within a decade of getting Social Security? Maybe. Or maybe the whole immigration thing is getting to me big time, even though I plan to spend my retirement as an immigrant - legal, let me hastily add - to some lucky country with a stimulating environment. It would be good, though, if there were an actual America to come back to now and then.

Insanely great

Michael Totten, (via Instapundit), has a mind-boggling post about tackling the leaders of the Palestinian insanity in their dens. What would you say to Saeb Erekat if you had the chance, even though you were surrounded by heavies with eyes like dead sharks'? This is what Totten said:

"Why did the intifada end?” I said. The question didn’t phase him like it did Abu Laila.

“I don’t know,” he said. “And I don’t care. I’m just glad it’s over. Hopefully it ended out of an understanding that it was bad. I condemned every single attack.”

“What do you think was the biggest Palestinian mistake since the Oslo peace process began?” I said.

“We were unsuccessful in terms of transparency and accountability,” he said. “We could have done it. But we failed. That’s why Hamas won. We should have been tough on people who abused their offices.”

“What was the biggest Israeli mistake since Oslo?” I said.

“The motto of No Sacred Dates,” he said. “Each time they had a date-based obligation, they didn’t do it. They kept building settlements.”

“Why is a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank such a big problem for Palestinians?” I said. “Would you rather the Israelis stay?”
"The problem with unilateralism is the outcome of it,” he said. “The Israelis will get everything they want without negotiation.”
***
“I am against suicide bombing morally, not politically,” he said.

“How many Palestinians agree with you about that?” I said.

“Few,” he said. “Very few.” He said this inside the Palestinian Legislative Council within earshot of his colleagues, many of whom speak English and could hear him perfectly well. “We have to keep working,” he said and gently put his hand on my shoulder. “It is difficult in this environment.”

Just amazing. Why has no other news outlet brought out the true attitude of Fatah toward Hamas, the "sickness unto death" of the Palestinian "leadership"? It would conflict with their agenda now, wouldn't it? Can you imagine the Guardian or the New York Times printing such an interview? Maybe today the blogosphere came of age.

Huh?

I hope no real geneticist notices my comment on this Gene Expression post.

I'm beginning to wonder whether failure to reproduce on the part of a specific organism with a particular genetic makeup really affects the survival of that behavioral complex at all, given the genetic complexity of behavioral syndromes and the multiple methods of producing the same phenotype using various combinations of genes. Homosexuality might be an example.

Oops. Looks like one did:

Stop wondering.
gcochran | Email | Homepage | 05.19.06 - 1:38 pm | #

Fallujah in Sao Paulo
Blair also links to an article about the violence in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I like the "activists concerned" tag. It's really the criminals who should be concerned. As a judge I used to appear in front of said to young thugs: "You think you've got a tough gang? I've got the biggest, toughest gang of all - the law. And you're about to learn how it feels to lose." The Brazilian police killed 115 people. I especially liked this bit:

Police did not identify any of those they killed, say where they were killed or in what circumstances, Sao Paulo's leading newspapers reported Wednesday.

Can you even imagine what would happen around here if even one gangster were killed under the same circumstances? Of course, I can't imagine what, for example, the Houston police would do if they had forty-one police killed by rampaging thugs. And I don't think I want to know.

Pub names

Tim Blair asks for weird pub names. My favorite: The Snark and Yeti. Or how about what I saw on the way in here, "I'm Feeling Lucky"?

Bigger, Better, Cheaper
Cheaper fares to Europe? I certainly hope so:

Singapore Airlines intends to configure its A380 interior to take around 500 passengers, although the plane - depending on airline requirements - can take up to 800 customers.

Also, fewer planes will be needed, which should make airports easier to get through, at least until traffic catches up. I'm going to enjoy the next few years.

Enrique Cuatro
Just finished reading a book about Henry 1V of Castile (1425-74). OK, I must admit when I took the book out of the Leon County Library I thought it was about Henry IV of Navarre, the Huguenot King of France who converted to Catholicism because "Paris is worth a mass". And I realized the danger of being confused with Henry IV of England, father of Prince Hal and all that. But that just goes to show you that when you least expect it, serendipity strikes. After all, if you expected it, it would hardly justify invoking the Princes of Serendip, would it? So anyway, I wound up with this Henry IV, also known as Enrique the Impotent. Yeek. But Townsend Miller's book is something of a tour de force. Enrique is in Miller's hands a most compelling if pathetic figure. And a major historical influence, right in there fighting in the conflicts between Castile and Aragon that led to the reign of Ferdinand (Fernando) and Isabella (Isabel). You remember them. The ones who gave a bit of money to equip three tiny ships that conquered the Western Ocean? And just in the same year conquered Granada, drove out the Muslims and, oh, yes, banished the Jews. Well, you gotta take the good with the bad. Under that Genoese guy, Cristobal Colon? Oh, sure we know him better as Christopher Columbus, the Western oppressive white male sexist pig. But to millions of Americanos he was the bringer of a few good things. Like the wheel. And alphabetic writing. And horses. And consciousness, if you believe Julian Jaynes. (And who doesn't, nowadays?) And civilization, unless you really think the Aztec way of life, featuring the ripping of hearts from tens of thousands of living sacrifices, was a GOOD THING??! And to top it all off, the descendants of Columbus's Spanish sponsors now get minority status in the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Talk about a winner!
Enrique tried his best, despite his obvious unfitness for kingliness and especially progenitizing. Here's a Miller sample:

For more than a tired and hapless man had died that winter night. Spain's Middle Ages themselves lay dead on those bare boards. An era, a world were over: the same chill dawn was coming in Segovia, and as young Isabel rose to greet it, as she drew her martened robe around her and leaned from her casement and watched the tall square towers grow gray, grow faintly pink, then as at last the sun burst forth above the snowy mountains and scattered gold and diamonds across the wakening city at her feet, a new day, too, was breaking for the kingdom, a day which was triumphantly to free it from the rue and fraction we have sought to chronicle and bring it on - healed, rectified and welded - to might, to majesty, to sway of half the globe, to unimaginable splendor.
But that is another story.

Oh good.

Diet hope - Food Yesterday, Food Tomorrow, Never Food Today?
I'm listening to the Glenn and Helen show about the Shangri-La Diet. It's pretty interesting. I had been looking for a copy of the book, almost bought it several times. But then I stumbled across this other, old, out-of-print book called The Eating Man's Diet, by Thomas Sharkey. Of course, being a man and having some experience with eating and hoping to continue eating for some time, I was fascinated. The idea is simple: eat every other day. Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, this is not a cruel delusion. You simply eat 900 calories or less one day, then the next day eat a "regular" set of meals, up to about 3000 calories. It's easy to follow. I'm in the tenth day now. Tomorrow morning I get to weigh myself. Woohoo! But I just love the "eating days". And I'm starting to get to the point where the "diet days" are not too bad. So we'll see. He says it takes about three weeks to become habituated to the schedule. He also has some interesting things to say about the psychology of dieting and how different breaking bad food habits is from stopping smoking or excessive drinking. I'm surprised he's never, as far as I can tell, written anything else.
The Sharkey book is from 1969. The most amazing thing is how little has changed. People were obsessed with dieting then, they have been for forty years and we're even fatter now, supposedly! Something's got to change. In the Seth Roberts podcast, he mentions that "ditto foods" or foods that taste exactly the same every time you eat them, are partly responsible for food cravings and "addictions". My only problem with his approach is that I don't want to drink a glass of sugar water and tablespoons of olive oil every day. I want a diet regime that allows me to eat whatever I want, but that changes the way I approach food so I don't want as much. That way, I can eat the best food and drink and enjoy myself, while not seeking absolution or nepenthe in massive amounts of calories.

Update: Lost three pounds in ten days! And that's with only five days of actual dieting. This could be good. Before too long I might even learn to cut back - just a little - on my calorie count on the eating days.

Puerto Rico - AGAIN??
Sometimes I wonder why I have to repeat things over and over before people finally admit how brilliant my thoughts are. Here on Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen puts out some less-than-brilliant (maybe lower-than-moronic would be more accurate) arguments on immigrants. I hate it when they don't differentiate between legal and illegal immigration in an argument about illegal immigration! And someone calls me a xenophobe. Hmmpf! (one of my favorite words). And some of my best friends are named Xeno. Luckily Steve Sailer and someone named Teller jump in with some of those embarrassing things called facts. They also must have the "how many times do I have to say this stuff?" feeling. I make a telling rejoinder:

Immigrants, and particularly illegal immigrants, which is what we're talking about, aren't "just people". They're a particular kind of people, with lower intelligence, less education, less comprehension of English and higher crime rates than the average American citizen. They also, by definition, have less respect for the American legal system. Besides, if they're such an asset, why doesn't Mexico do anything at all to get them to stay?

And I get this for my troubles:

Thank you for revealing yourself to be an ignorant xenophobe, thus saving the rest of us the bother of reading your nonsense.

So, scads and reams of unrebutted FACTS later, I haul out the heavy Puerto Rican artillery:

Puerto Rico offers a clear example of how "Latinos" fare in a US-style economic system. Over half the island is on USDA food stamps. They have not "assimilated". They are all US citizens, but have not accepted traditional American culture. Despite decades of tax breaks and huge taxpayer-funded assistance and massive money from tourism, they are in the same situation, relative to the mainland, that they have been in for years. Their per capita GDP is at about 35% of that on the mainland. Oh, and they have also had several opportunities to become independent and have rejected them all. Puerto Rico represents the future for any other parts of the US that become Hispanic-majority. Anyone who has eyes can see these facts. You have to be ignorant and viciously partisan to deny them.

I'm still waiting for someone to deny or rebut my contentions about Puerto Rico and cite some trenchant analysis or stunning countervailing data, thus destroying my analogy. I wonder why they haven't? You don't think maybe - Heavens! - I might actually be right??!

What I believe
This introduction to The Objective Standard summarizes it pretty well. And I acknowledge I have always had problems with the word "believe". Perhaps I should just say, this is what seems like common sense to me. A sample:

Altruism is not good for one’s life. If accepted and practiced consistently, it leads to death. This is what Jesus did. If accepted and practiced inconsistently, it retards one’s life and leads to guilt. This is what most altruists do. An altruist might not die from his morality—so long as he cheats on it—but nor will he live fully. Insofar as a person acts against the requirements of his life and happiness, he will not make the most of his life; he will not achieve the kind of happiness possible to Man.

He didn't!
Did David Cameron really say this:"We should be thinking not what is good for putting money in people's pockets but what is good for putting joy in people's hearts,"?

Yes, he did, in the Daily Telegraph. Here's more:

In the UK, the economist Richard Layard, New Labour's very own happiness guru, has succeeded in getting hard-nosed political operators to back his campaign. His recent call for the Government to train 10,000 more therapists to help us become happy, resonates with politicians who are desperately short of ideas. Back in the 1940s and '50s, the big idea was the Welfare State. Today it is the Happy State. Stalin, who called himself the "constructor of happiness" would approve.

Of course, in order to make everyone happy, the state has to have a definition of happiness that applies to everyone, in every circumstance. And therapists that can help everyone get to their own state-certified and guaranteed happiness level. And the Camerons and Blairs of the world will be writing that policy! Just think what a bang-up job Gore and Kerry and Ralph Nader could do with that kind of opportunity. Now if I were a Muslim, I'd only have to open the Koran and read the right parts to figure out what to do to achieve optimum bliss. Why can't they have some sort of guide like that for us poor atheists? Oh. That's what the government is going to do - provide an ideology that conduces to happiness, just like Buddhism makes Buddhists happy and Judaism makes Jews happy. The whole idea would be shocking if it weren't so stupid, naive and ahistorical. I, for one, feel quite competent to resist any attempt to make me happy for any considerable period of time that doesn't involve gin, red meat and chocolate.

Fan

My technical brilliance astounds even me:

In the latest technology air circulating devices, circa approximately 1923, the descriptive terms "oscillating" and "rotating" are not mutually exclusive. The rotating turbine oscillates - on another axis - to sweep an extensive volume of space.

Verity and EG, sitting in a tree ...

It's a bit odd, when you haven't a clue what either one looks like. But I had to put a comment in on a Samizdata post about comment control which brought up the question of the appropriateness of comments by the varied weirdos who show up there:

We invite comments but that does not mean we relinquish control over our property, just as when you invite people into your house, you do not relinquish the right to subsequently un-invite them if they act inappropriately or if you just want them out for whatever reason.

I have always relished the to-and-fro on Samizdata. The boundaries of comment style and substance fit my inclinations. I'm aware, though, that some Samizdata commenters might think I was over the edge and should be banned, just as I dislike some of them. But it's the house that makes the rules. So I thought I'd comment on the commenting of two of the edgiest commenters:

The great thing about the blogosphere in general is that every blog has a slightly different definition of who is a "racist" or an "Islamofascist" or just a "troll". So those who really want to profit from their blogiversations gravitate toward those sites with whose definitions they tend to agree. Kos's definition of a "right-winger" is about as far from Samizdata's as Protein Wisdom's definition of a "communist" is from that of the Idiotarian Rottweiler. And many Samizdatistas reject the whole right-left thing entirely. You guys do a good job of maintaining a balance while keeping an edge on the discussions. If Verity and EG can comment interestingly on the same post without dissolving into flames, anything is possible!

Note: Of course, that should be the "ANTI-Idiotarian Rottweiler"! My humblest apologies, Emperor Misha!

Marginal Revolution had an interesting post on the "forever stamp":

The forever stamp


The post office is planning a ''forever" stamp for letters, good no matter how many times postal rates increase. That means people could say goodbye to those annoying 2- or 3-cent stamps that have to be added to letters every time rates go up. The idea for the special stamps, which would be sold at the same price as other first-class stamps, was included in proposals announced yesterday that would also raise stamp prices 3 cents -- to 42 cents -- next year.

Here is the story. Yes this is a hedging device, but it also represents an attempt to peg a real rate of return.

So I had to extend the idea:

Maybe Wal-mart should guarantee people interest equal to gasoline price inflation (which is essentially what the Post Office is doing with stamps) when they put money on those cards that get you 3 cents a gallon off the gas price at their stations. So you would be guaranteed the same price for gas for as long as the money lasted. The problem there might be that the price of gas could (I wish!) come down. What if you put sixty dollars on the card and the price of gas was cut in half? Would you then only be able to buy thirty dollars worth of gas?
The viability of the scheme would appear to depend on the size of the float and the interest the seller could get on the float money.

Bookmeat?

Putting this comment in at Samizdata:

Some ideas just die of their own idiocy, like the "ozone hole", although that cost billions before it exposed itself as an illusion. "Acid rain" was another myth that was used until it no longer cut any ice. I don't think it will be too long before HIV=AIDS goes the same way. And "Oil comes from dinosaurs" is another. As is "Immigrants take jobs Americans won't do." It's often best to just let stupidity run its course. Attempts at debunking may actually stimulate opposition and lead to stubborn re-assertion of the received wisdom. If in fifty years it's no warmer than it is today, who will believe in global warming?

I found myself thinking, hey these would give me enough material for quite a lengthy treatise. Reminds me of a book I ran across long ago in the stacks at the University of New Hampshire Library, "The History of Human Stupidity". It was an enormous book.

Spengler and Lincoln

That iconoclast Spengler has posted some interesting speculation here and here about the causes of the US Civil War and the alternatives to war. This bit is especially intriguing:

Was it coincidence that France, England and Spain determined to invade Mexico after Benito Juarez suspended debt-service payment to Mexico's European creditors in 1861, just as the American Civil War began? French, English and Spanish forces landed in Mexico in December 1861, after the South's early victories in the Civil War convinced European governments that the slaveholders would prevail. By 1862, after Stonewall Jackson's success in the Shenandoah Valley, England came close to recognizing the Confederacy. In October of that year, William Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer, stated, "We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North." The Union half-victory at the Battle of Antietam in September came just in time to abort British recognition of the South.

Had the war broken out two years later, the European powers already would have been entrenched in Mexico, providing the South with a natural ally against the Lincoln government, and a base with which to expand the slave system southward. America would have split in two (at least), and the history of the world would have been radically different, and radically worse.

I'm skeptical if Lincoln really saw all this coming. But such speculation is truly stimulating. The Cinco de Mayo, representing the defeat of the French by the Mexican Army in 1864, may be more fateful and important than we've ever realized. The higher-level point about the timing of a war being even more important than the execution of the campaign also resonates. What if Bush 41 had gone on to Baghdad in '91? Would Iran now be threatening the peace of the world and the existence of Israel? As Spengler says elsewhere, the Chinese say it best: "Kill the chicken and let the monkey watch." And no, I don't really know what that means. But it sounds great.

As I was saying ...

Puerto Rico is the laboratory example of Hispanic culture in a modern North American democratic setting. The island has had numerous opportunities over the past fifty-plus years to become independent, to reclaim its territory from the oppressive Gringos. But they'd rather remain attached to the American taxpayer's nipple. And here's where they stand:

Many basic functions of Puerto Rico's government were unavailable Monday as the U.S. commonwealth ran out of money and imposed a partial public-sector shutdown _ putting nearly 100,000 people _ including 40,000 teachers _ out of work and granting an unscheduled holiday to 500,000 public school students.
*******
The government is Puerto Rico's largest employer, with some 200,000 workers. Salaries make up about 80 percent of the government's operational costs.

And as the article doesn't tell you, more than half the island is on USDA food stamps. The US taxpayer has ponied up for countless tax breaks to convince industry to locate there. Looks like most of those who do work, "work" for the government. Imagine. They might have to have a 5.9% sales tax! In Tallahassee it's 7.5%. This is the future for California, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, etc., if low-cognitive-skills, high-crime Hispanic and MesoAmerican immigration is allowed to continue unabated.

Back from Paris and blogging away

Finally got commenting to work on Captain's Quarters. An article on Zarqawi made me think about the fact that the war in Iraq is progressing quite differently from the way the Vietnam war did:

I have been thinking about all those Monday-morning quarterbacking retired generals and State Department pundits who say we should have used many more troops in Iraq. That's exactly what got LBJ into trouble in Vietnam. He kept increasing the numbers, up over 500,000 at one point, in a country smaller than Iraq. And that increased casualties to the point that the politics turned sour, even though LBJ was a Dem.
The anti-war front today wants Bush to escalate, because they can't think in any terms other than Vietnam, and they know significant escalation would doom the effort. They are traitors. Bush has done a great job by keeping troop levels down, using technology and training the Iraqi army. Zarqawi is in the situation of the Japanese after they started running out of kamikaze pilots and the American fleet was within range of the homeland. Main force efforts and occupying territory is suicide for Z. I believe Zarqawi will flee to Iran, if he's not there already, and start talking about how Iraq isn't really important, that Palestine is the critical front.

Last word on global warming

Comment on Econlog. Global warming theorists piffled:

The only "rejection of science" in the global warming debate is the refusal of the high priests of Gaia to answer the question "how do you know your computer models are correct?" The best available models cannot predict accurately three days in advance, in one small column of air, whether the temperature will rise three degrees or fall four, much less why. How is one supposed to accept that such models can predict accurately for the entire earth within ten degrees a century from now? Experience shows that historic temperatures have no relationship - none - to future temperatures. I'll go further. No one even knows what the "temperature of the earth" is or how one would go about measuring such a quantity. Piffle.

Shaken, but stirred

I was a bit shaken by this message from Dan Simmons laying out the future if more people don't realize that we have always been in a war for civilization. That war continues, not the "clash of civilizations" much talked-about these days but the defense of the only actual civilization against barbarism in the form of Islam, in the form of Catholicism, in the form of socialism. This is only a taste:

“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the Time Traveler. “Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”

Noodlefood comment:

This discussion has clarified in my mind the idea that libertarians - and Libertarians - really have no clear philosophy. "Tolerance" appears to be a synonym in their minds for "lack of thought" or simple fuzzy-mindedness. Sometimes in trying to explain to people what Objectivism is, I slip into the "It's like libertarianism, but..." mode, because I expect people will be more likely to have some idea of libertarianism than about Objectivism. That's a mistake and I'm glad to realize it. As to whether small "o" objectivism exists, certainly many people think it does. It does seem to be a contradiction in terms, however, since its difference with Objectivism appears to reside in its rejection of certain people's interpretations of the ideas of Ayn Rand. Ad hominem arguments can hardly form the basis of a coherent philosophy.

AIDS sense (finally)
I am boulversé by this Marginal Revolution post referring to a Washington Post article about the UN's blunders on estimating the extent of African AIDS. The Washington Post! After all these years, all the Duisburg suspicions and the Kary Mullis accusations appear to be vindicated. The article talks about how "independent researchers and U.N. officials"

raise questions about monitoring by the U.N. AIDS agency, which for years overestimated the extent of HIV/AIDS in East and West Africa and, by a smaller margin, in southern Africa

So I put in this comment:

Note that the article says nothing about the predicted massive declines in population that were supposed to be caused by AIDS in Africa, blamed on First World neglect. In fact, it mentions "burgeoning populations". Years ago many voices reported that most African "HIV cases" had never actually had a test, PCR or other, for HIV. Someone was sick, so they had AIDS. And, gee, what do you know, AIDS cases give you a stick to beat the West with and bring in more money for the kleptocrats. This article marks the beginning of the collapse of the entire AIDS conspiracy, responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands and the wasting of billions of dollars in scarce resources.

I'm convinced this is big. There was a big outcry about the article a few months ago in Harper's, I believe it was, casting doubt on the "HIV=AIDS" thesis. I wonder what will be said about this.

Update: Dean Esmay, as I expected, has picked up on this story. Nice analysis, saying what needed to be said, even though for years it was like talking into the wind:

To be sure, both of the above-linked stories take the view that HIV, and HIV alone, is the cause of AIDS. But, the establishment--by which I mean CDC, NIH, WHO, and the world's medical associations--now have to face up to at least two things:

1) We were greatly misled about the crisis in America and Europe.

And now,

2) We were greatly misled about the crisis in Africa.

Some of us have been saying for some time now that their numbers for Africa made no damned sense. If you looked too close at them, they always fell apart.

Is it or isn't it?

Geez, Financial Times will there be riots in April in Paris or not? That's all I want to know, so I know whether we should bring tear gas masks:

Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France’s ruling UMP party, on Monday grabbed centre stage in an attempt to find a compromise over the government’s controversial youth labour law as students and trades unions planned mass protests on Tuesday to demand its complete withdrawal.

If Sarkozy doesn't do something effective without caving in entirely to the leeches and goldbrickers, he's not going to get my vote in the next French presidential election.

Dealing with immigration

VDARE has been working hard dispelling immigration myths:

The fact of the matter is that most illegal aliens are law-breaking criminals already, and they’re also liars, cheaters, and thieves (i.e.—stealing a life in the U.S. that does not belong to them), just for good measure.

. And Juan Mann is quite right about the upshot:

But in my humble opinion, this "making it a crime" business is just one gigantic red herring for the reconquista crowd.

As long as the federal government is not particularly interested in enforcing immigration laws anymore, all of these legal distinctions don’t really hold my interest.

When you get right down to it, the immigration problems of the border areas of the US don't really hold my interest, either. I don't have any faith that Congress will do anything at all about illegal immigration except to exacerbate the problem. So I will assert my sovereign individuality by staying away from those areas of the country negatively affected by illegal immigration. And I will adjust my investment and political predictive strategies to reflect continuing and worsening effects on the US economy from what, practically speaking, is an open borders policy. Maybe I'll go live in, oh, just to take a random example, Mexico?!

I am curious, grumpy
I wish James Randi would return from the hospital. He's had some sort of heart problem. Despite his execrable politics, I always enjoy his debunkatory Commentary. He's got some associates doing it for now. They're OK, but sometimes the PC shows through, as in this from Hal Bidlack:

In my area, political science, all too often students are taught history as names and dates to be memorized. I think this is tragic. You can memorize that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066 and think yourself taught. But how much richer is your understanding of history to know that the Norman’s use of the simple stirrup, a cleverly twisted bit of metal allowing the rider to be more stable in the saddle, helped turn human history.

So I had to send him a letter:

For Hal Bidlack,

I must disagree with your downgrading of emphasis on dates in history. Far too little emphasis is placed on putting historical events in chronological context. I play a little game at the supermarket. When the cash register comes up with a recognizable number for the price of my order, say $17.76, I mention the connection to the cashier, who is often a student, "Hey, that's the year the Declaration of Independence was signed". When anything more obscure than 1776 comes up, I'm inevitably met by a blank stare or the question, "Oh, are you a history professor or something?" (I'm not). But how can a student accurately consider the little things like stirrups or Washington's temper when he can't place the Norman Conquest or Valley Forge in its proper century? History teachers these days seem to be afraid to require students to learn dates. They are the ABCs of history. I heard of one student who, when asked how Napoleon traveled to Moscow, asked, "Didn't they have cars back then?" Such are the dangers of not knowing your centuries. A far more pervasive emphasis on chronology would immeasurably enrich our students' ability to analyze history.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

This isn't just grumpiness. I'm perhaps a little obsessed with dates. But at least knowing "which came first" can be priceless. As when you start talking about Islamic influence in Persia and then you realize you're discussing events that happened before Muhammad was even born! Ooops. Then you mix up the Mongols and the Huns. Douple oops - by like seven hundred years. If you don't watch it you'll have Julian the Apostate running around with Alexander and Joan of Arc being burnt by the Crusaders. Time and space just aren't flexible enough. Darn Einstein!

Update: Response from Bidlack:

Mr. Speirs,

You raise a good point. I certainly did not mean to suggest that dates are
unimportant. Rather, I was trying to suggest that if *only* dates are taught,
history loses some of its magic. I certainly would never suggest that having no
knowledge of historical context is acceptable. Sorry if I appeared otherwise,
I'll seek to make that clear in a future column.

--
Hal Bidlack, Ph.D.
www.hamiltonlives.com

Good on yer, Bidlack. OK, maybe I will de-emphasize the "only Randi" meme.

Side point - is it legit to post someone's response to one's email without asking? Ah, blogo-ethics. What a puzzle palace!

More immigration babble

On Bloomberg, Kevin Hassett has a spectacularly wrong-headed article on immigration, including such stunners as this:

If we take the harsh approach, choosing a policy that admits almost nobody, we give up the large potential economic gains associated with diversity in the workforce.

So I sent him an email:

You say in your Bloomberg article:
Second, immigrants tend to have different skill sets, so they increase the beneficial diversity of the workforce, making firms that hire immigrants and the overall economy more productive.

New Orleans is an example that illustrates the latter. A friend recently returned and mentioned how quickly the city is snapping back to life. He saw construction under way throughout the city, performed by swarms of workers who appeared to be predominantly Spanish-speaking. Without those construction workers, restaurants, hotels and other businesses might still be closed.

Laboring on a construction site is a unique skill Americans don't possess?? Am I missing something? How many of the original inhabitants of New Orleans who left could NOT do the work of a laborer on a construction site? Of course, now they're all busy being brain surgeons and nuclear physicists. But. And why would construction sites full of legal immigrants - even, perish the thought, citizens! - not provide as much business for coffee shops as illegals who send most of their money back to Mexico? Hmm, you don't think there are so many illegal immigrants on N.O. construction sites because, being illegal, they're cheaper? And they can't complain about hours and accidents? Nah, couldn't be.

And:
the net effect is that society gains when people move to the U.S.
That very much depends on who those people are. If they have higher crime rates, lower rates of education, including lack of English language ability, and lower skills in general, it's not logical to say that the country would benefit, even compared to having no population growth at all. And it's definitely illogical to say that illegals are as valuable or productive as legal immigrants carefully selected for their skills and productivity would be. Australia and Canada, for instance, have been screening immigrants in this way for years. Our legal system tries, tremendously incompetently, to do the same thing. I still don't know what skills you're talking about that illegal immigrants possess, or why Hispanics, for instance, are so valuable because of their "diversity". Talk about assuming your conclusion! The mass of illegals has exactly the same set of skills as any other mass of uneducated, non-English-speaking peasants would have in America.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

Read the whole article, if you've got your Tums handy.

Last word on God
I seem to be clearing up a lot of old conundrums these days. I don't think anyone who talks about Heaven really knows what it would be like to go there, in the words (approximately) of the old song. I don't think the concept "God" and the concept "exist" should be mentioned in the same breath. So when Razib on Gene Expression came out with a post based on Justin Barrett's Book, "Why would Anyone Believe in God?", including ponderings such as this:

Lots of people say they don't believe in superhuman agency (including gods and ghosts) but will still modify their behaviors around cemeteries on spooky nights ("just in case"). I also run into plenty of people who say they don't believe in God but they really have chosen to act as if they don't believe in God because they are angry with God or don't like God. With these qualifications in place, certainly there are a number of factors that might predispose individuals to become atheists.(from Barrett)

I just had to add my two cents:

I haven't read the book, but isn't it true that the concept "belief" is as undefined and conveniently flexible as the concept "God"? Isn't it true that one cannot "disbelieve" any more than one can "believe" in some concept if that concept is irrational and self-contradictory? So there are not atheists and believers. There are merely wise men and fools.

Then I realized I didn't want to talk about things that don't make any sense. Well, that simplifies life. Although I still may have to think about exactly why people say they believe or disbelieve in God.

More on open borders
The Econlog fallacies are attracting some attention on Parapundit. They bring in the IQ analysis:

Think higher IQ people are better off in lower IQ countries? That's basically the argument that Jane Galt (Megan McArdle in real life) and Bryan Caplan would have you believe... Make sense? One problem: Show me a country with a low average IQ where 125 IQ computer programmers or electrical engineers make more money than they do in the United States or Japan or Germany. Anyone? Anyone? Show me the low IQ country where European and American corporations can't skim off the smart cream with first world job offers because the smart fraction is making so much money they do no want to leave.

And there's good stuff in the comments, too, such as this from John S. Bolton:

If comparative advantage were applicable as proposed, an even more effcient means of getting brains to match up with the largest possible number of brawns, as they called them; would be emigration of the brightest to places like Africa.

Read the whole thing and the whole comments.
Update: Just happened to think: That Bottom of the Pyramid book does seem to suggest that there's money to be made from the wretched - even the dumb - of the earth. But I think the thesis still holds. You can make a lot more money from rich, intelligent, productive people than you can from poor dumb ones. The difference of opinion seems to come in when some people insist, contrary to all experience, that dumb people can be turned into smart ones and will then go about getting productive and then rich.

Immigration questions
That darn Econlog is at it again:

The alternative ideology that I would propose might be called transnational libertarianism. The ideal libertarian world would have no economic borders. There would be no problem of illegal immigration, because all forms of immigration would be legal.

So I asked a few questions, which I have no answer to, but which need answering:

If immigration restrictions are wrong, why do almost all countries in the world have them? And if weak, unenforced US restrictions are bad, why aren't the immigration rules almost everywhere else worse? Why would countries, especially poor countries, harm their economies with strict immigration controls? Yet most do.
And is it entirely irrelevant that the crime rate among illegal immigrants is much higher than that among citizens? Do you favor admitting violent felons?

Immigration sense

Michael Blowhard was kind enough to note on this immigration post on 2Blowhards my comment on EconLog in response to Bryan Caplan's frankly silly post containing this language:

OK, suppose you could give American high school dropouts an 8% raise by deporting every man, woman, and child from Latin America back to their home countries. Would that be the right thing to do?

*******************

Call me a Non-Bleeding Heart Libertarian, but for once, the shoe doesn't fit. My heart does bleed for people born in poor countries who come here to better their condition with hard work. What about low-skilled Americans? They were born in the U.S. and speak fluent English. Let them count their blessings.

The arrogance and irrationality and pandering contained in that one short post sum up pretty well why the immigration situation is the way it is.

This is my take on it:

I'm glad someone realizes that if our government had enforced our laws over the last few decades the income of a segment of our country would be 8% higher than it is today. The question is how to keep America the most prosperous and freest country in the world for the average guy. The American legal system decided that the best way to do that was to impose certain conditions on immigrants. The wisdom of that course is proven by the economic problems, rise in crime, decrease in the educational level and increase in the threat of subversion and terrorism that a failure to enforce those laws has brought.
Posted March 29, 2006 02:00 PM

Thanks, Mr. M.B.!

Last word on voting

I think I've said enough about voting. I say the same thing over and over again, so I must have settled on a position. Jane Galt posted some thoughts on voting and economic rationality, such as this:

Obviously, people are getting some sort of utility out of voting that has nothing to do with casting the deciding vote. There are lots of theories about what this utility might be, but like theories about what makes men so defensively territorial about remote control devices, they tend to be speculative and heavily biased towards the theoreticians personal experiences.

I have no idea what she means about "remote control devices". Hogging the TV? How does that relate?

Somebody brought out the "well, what if everyone did(n't do) it" meme, so I struck back:

Just as one vote will not change an election, one person voting or not voting will not have any appreciable effect on whether "no one does it" or not. The individual's interest cannot be perfectly, or even approximately served, by a faction of millions. Some people influence others' votes more, so they have a greater obligation to vote. The reason for ethics is to be able to sleep at night, not to influence "everyone's" actions. The major effect that voting a particular way, or voting at all, can have on an individual is acceptance or rejection by his immediate peer group. That's reason enough for most people to vote, but it doesn't change the infinitesimal effect of the individual's vote by enough to matter.

I'm bored with people bringing up the same obviously faulty points again and again.

What if?

The pesky riots in France that threaten to interfere with my Paris trip set me to thinking. The protestors are objecting to a law that would make it possible for employers to fire employees under the age of 26 without jumping through nearly-impossible hoops. So what if the restrictions on employers that have for some time now been in effect in France had been in effect in the US? Ever been fired from a job? Laid off? Even left? Was it always the worst thing that could have happened?

What if you had not been fired or laid off from your first real job? What if you had hesitated to leave a job in order to go to, say, law school, because you knew once you left it might be impossible to find another one as good? Where would you be now? I've got a pretty good idea where I'd be. And it wouldn't be half as good as where I am now.

These restrictions aren't just on employers. They also restrict employees' freedom of action, their freedom to take moderate but intelligent risks to get ahead in life. Like most government measures, they do exactly the opposite of what they're promoted as doing. Instead of decreasing fear and uncertainty, they increase it. Instead of reassuring anyone that they can get ahead in a prospering economy, they make prosperity less sure. They destroy people's faith in themselves. As Janet Flannery said about Andre Gide when he came back from a tour of the Soviet Union in 1936: "He no longer believed. He now only hoped."

I scare myself
On a Samizdata post about national IDs, I came up with this idea:

Why not just combine the national ID with a credit card, so the government can regulate people's credit and can be made aware of any socially undesirable transactions? Then there would be the automatic mandatory deductions for the purchase of government securities. Don't want to give anyone ideas, but something tells me they're already thinking along this line.

It seems frighteningly possible. Fascism in the electronic age. When you already have money-laundering laws and mandatory income reporting, how far-fetched is a unitary Govcard?

Getting ready for Paris
Three weeks from tomorrow I am going to Paris for a week with my two older children. I've even found a hotel. There's just too much to do and only six full days to do it in, so I'm bound to come away a bit disappointed. But since we may run into strikes and riots I will just be satisfied to come back in one piece and a bit better informed about the possibilities of living overseas. Would I really like to be an honorary Frog? Is it better than being a Turk or a constant nomad? Some conundrum.

This seems to push my analysis one interesting bit further. Now I just wish I could remember where I put it:

Any Objectivist has to realize that the enemy is not just Al Qaeda, but the political system at home. To avoid being impeached and removed and leaving the destruction of the terrorists to the likes of Gore and Kerry, Bush has to moderate, unfortunately, the level of violence by US troops. This is as much a tactical consideration as what kind of weapons to use in the assault on Fallujah. He needs political support. He could have pushed harder in some places, at some times. And he could have downplayed the democracy angle. He could have shown more and clearer contempt for the obscenity that is Islam. But I don't think his decisions are driven by any motive other than the crushing of the enemies of the United States, the best hope for individual freedom and rationality in the world today. Overall, I'd give him a B-. Who else could do better?

Comment on Belmont Club:

If you want to use the mortality statistics for Americans to compute the effectiveness of the terrorists as soldiers, you have to look at combat deaths. These are quite a bit lower than overall deaths. And with their increasingly overwhelming dependence on IEDs and suicide bombs, which require little to no combat readiness, the picture is of abysmal effectiveness in force-to-force combat. In fact, it might be argued that the shift to bombings is a sign that the combat effectiveness of the average terrorist is approaching zero. This means that if civil war ever really does break out and terrorists try to control cities and launch actual combat operations, they will fail miserably.

Overlooked point

In Steve Sailer's famous "Baby Gap" article from 2004, I noticed this overlooked insight. I wonder why no one has picked up on this:

The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don’t care that white liberals’ kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.

I've known, or known of, several white liberals who have moved out to the country and have no problem at all with gun ownership. They would definitely vote for gun control in cities, but insist on their 2d amendment rights in the country. What's the difference? In the city, more dangerous people are around and you don't want them to have guns. And it's at least possible to fool yourself into thinking the cops will protect you, since you see them around all the time. And of course the racial angle makes it all explicable, even if only Sailer can point out the emperor's lack of garments. Bravo to him, despite his goofy attitude on the liberation of Iraq. There's another good point about school vouchers leading to competition for space in good public schools in the suburbs that I also missed when I read the article before. Read it all. Again.

I love the smell of Danish in the morning

I was delighted to run across this revealing article about the Danish reality-check(via Steve Sailer). It seems like someone is doing something about immigration:

The new government introduced legislation that made it harder for immigrants to enter Denmark and to acquire Danish nationality. Copenhagen began to repatriate illegal immigrants and encouraged rejected asylum seekers to leave. It implemented stricter rules to determine who should receive residence permits. It slashed social benefit payments to newcomers, allowing them only a box of bare necessities.

As a result, the number of asylum seekers in Denmark dropped from 12,100 in 2000 to 3,222 in 2004. The number of people recognized as refugees decreased from 5,159 in 2000 to 1,607 in 2004. Residence permits for family reunification dropped from 10,021 in 2000 to 4,791 in 2003. The number of people acquiring Danish nationality fell from 18,811 in 2000 to 6,583 in 2003, with Asians down from 7,844 to 1,436 and Africans from 2,371 to 312. People who wanted to become Danes had to pass a language, culture, and history test.

Can you imagine the furor if such commonsense measures were instituted in the US? Of course then the Muslim "street" would get mad at us. Can't have that.

The Browne/Bush package deal

Harry Browne has died. Some idiot on the von Mises blog gets this part of his legacy right:

As we look back on the history of the libertarian movement, and we think of those who have contributed mightily to making the idea of radical liberty more mainstream and popular, Harry Browne emerges as a giant. He was talented, dignified, sincere, and dedicated, and he showed genuine courage in the face of fantastic pressure to get him to cave in. All lovers of liberty should be grateful for him, his life, his writings, and his legacy.

But completely blows it here:

In the early 1980s, he went in the opposite direction, sympathizing far too much with the Republican agenda and even temporarily showing sympathies for Reaganite foreign policy. In this he foreshadowed the sad descent of many current-day libertarians into the miasma of DC policy wonkery and political gamesmanship.

I don't even know what that last sentence means. At least Browne never left you in doubt about his stance on an issue. So I had to drop a comment/hammer on the deluded libertarians:

Harry Browne was a great writer. His only flaw was his blind spot about the threats to individual freedom. His naive thinking about the Islamic menace would have abandoned fifty million people to Saddamism and the Taliban and put all our freedoms in mortal danger. Thank God we have George W. Bush. A combination of Bush for foreign policy and Browne for domestic policy would be perfect.

The other problem Browne had was that he just loved the spotlight. I remember in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World that he confessed that he wouldn't be able to enjoy some of the freedoms he urged on others because his outspokenness made him too easy a target. But I'm glad he did speak out.

Last time

OK, this is the last time I'm going to post a comment like this anywhere:

Perhaps the essential fact that makes some religions more dangerous than others is how much tolerance they have for amendment of their doctrines to accept new realities. Rodney Stark has convinced me that Europe developed only because Christianity allowed, even encouraged reasoned analysis of man's relationship to the world. Real practical science arose in "Medieval" Europe long before the Renaissance, before Aquinas even. Since Christianity was dominant then, it must get some of the credit. Comparing the state of cultures that have suffered under Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto to the progress in Europe under some forms of Christianity it's impossible not to see that Christianity is somehow more amenable to life and prosperity. It's not perfect. And certainly not every Christian country has developed. We have improved tremendously by putting some safeguards between the power of the Christian church and the culture of science and industry. But I can't get away from the necessity of crediting some characteristic of Christianity - I'm still unclear as to exactly what - for the freedoms and opportunities we enjoy today.

I feel like I've done it a hundred times. This one's on Noodlefood's post about the differential ferocity of various religions, so I thought it was appropriate. But that's it. I'd like to get some real fightback about it, but no one seems so inclined.

AIDS again

This comment

Speaking of AIDS, this month's Harper's, usually a stupid collectivist piece of nonsense, has a Celia Farber article shooting down the AIDS=HIV hypothesis. Mainstream ahead!

on an otherwise unremarkable post on Diana Hsieh's Noodlefood blog led to some questions about the HIV=AIDS hypothesis:

Tuesday, February 28, 2006 at 22:54:31 mst
Comment ID: #7 (link)
Name: Spoudaios
E-mail: spoudaios(at)spoudaios.com

How does the "HIV leads to AIDS hypothesis" result from collectivism?

So I sighed, thinking of the many comments Dean Esmay collected before I decided to abandon his blog (or did he ban me? I still don't know) but I replied thusly:

The collectivist link is in the way that big medicine, like big government, imposes its views on doctors, and possibly endangers patients by giving them highly toxic drugs. Duesberg and Nobel Prizewinner Kary Mullis have done a lot of work on this. The African AIDS "epidemic" is another factor. Many, if not most of the so-called AIDS cases in Africa never had a PCR test to detect HIV. It was just assumed because they were sick, they had AIDS. It was perhaps not a coincidence that billions of foreign aid dollars were available if the collectivists ranted long enough about the West's obligation to fight AIDS in Africa. The debate rages on, but I was surprised that Harper's, normally a liberal rag that attacks anything America does, printed some of the questions that continue to be raised. And I don't trust a word put out by the NIH. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong. But what if the skeptics are right? It's worth checking out. Dean Esmay's blog has much, much more:

I'm not sure whether Harper's realizes how many wacky right-wing (as they would say) objectivists and libertarians have profound skepticism about AIDS. But something tells me they're about to find out.

By George, I think they've done it

The Israelis have solved the key/lock problem:

The Israeli company E-lock has developed the first lock technology based on a Knock Code. This innovation is based on patented technology which uses a series of quick knocking sounds. The discrete mechanical knocks open the lock and are produced by a small device that can be carried by any authorized person.

They appear to have ruled out a number of possible evasive techniques. There's got to be a joke to go with this.
"Knock, knock, who's there?
Allah.
Allah who?
Allah blow myself up if you don't let me in."


A few of the KnocKey devices on the Israeli wall and Palestinian terrorism is a thing of the past.

Choice in schools is not absolute

A Pejman-post on Redstate explores aspects of the school voucher issue:

Arguing against school vouchers by claiming that they could be used to send children to schools run by jihadists and or white supremacists is a bit over the top. One should not, of course, be surprised--after all, the arguments against school vouchers are in such a parlous state that overreactions and rhetorical excesses such as the one linked to in this post become de rigeur for those desperate for something--anything--to stop school vouchers.

So I thought, why should schools be any different from anywhere else? Is this or is this not the land of the free? But that principle can be taken too far:

Is it not obvious that the constraints on freedom of speech in a school should not be any different than those anywhere else? It may be a good idea to have a discussion about what should be tolerated in public discourse. And about the apparently difficult-to-understand principle that toleration does not mean agreement. A KKK school has a constitutional right to preach idiotic racial hatred. It doesn't have a right to public funding, but that's another issue. To my mind no schools should be publicly funded. But isn't it clear to just about everyone that a school that teaches its students to blow themselves up in crowded shopping malls in order to get into Paradise has stepped over a line that no sane society can allow to be crossed?

How far is too far, short of actual incitement to murderous violence? That's up to the parents, who would think more carefully about the question if they were paying for the schooling.

Spengler in the Asia Times again. This time I really don't know what he's talking about:

In fact, the worst outcome from the vantage point of Washington's interest would be a stable constitutional government in Iraq.
***
Instability favors the side with the greatest strategic flexibility, and that is the United States. The Russian Federation, not an enemy but at least a competitor of the United States, wants to reduce US flexibility.
***

Now wait a minute, that's sounding a little better, a bit more like me a few years ago, when people were saying, "We can't invade Iraq! We'd destabilize the Middle East!" And I thought, but isn't that what we want? If the Middle East, the Arabs in particular and Islam in general is the enemy, is in fact responsible for 9/11 and threatens our civilization, what could be better than to have them fighting each other, inside and outside their borders? When was the Middle East most peaceful in recent decades? Right! During the Iran-Iraq war, when a million Muslims died with absolutely no effect on Western security. When the war ended, the mujihadeen were free to go throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. So that explains why:

One reads dire predictions everywhere that civil conflict in Iraq might lead to regional war. That is true, but no one fears this more than the government of Iran.
***
Iran's regime cannot be subverted, unless, of course, it becomes embroiled in a foreign military adventure in which President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's supporters come to dislike their role as cannon fodder.

Could the mullahs withstand another million-casualty war with the Sunni military, reconstituted this time with American weapons? One thinks not. Read the whole thing. You'll feel so much better!

Auto-da-feh?

The inimitable and always interesting Social Affairs Unit blog has a post about autodidacticism and its more famous participants:

Autodidactism also had its dark side, since an intellectual universe created from one's own variegated readings and preferred opinion often lacked a moral component, and often went with ethical solipsism. Two of the greatest autodidacts of this type were Hitler and Stalin.

The post didn't get into the effect of the Internet, so I thought I'd bring it up:

Sometimes I think that the effect of the Internet will be to make autodidacts the norm and that will be a good thing. It could go wrong, though, if easy access to all knowledge means that malevolent thinkers can easily find reinforcement for their evil thoughts and openminded rationalists are so overwhelmed with conflicting theses and opinions that they "lose all conviction".

I'm having a hard time getting my comment to register, but I'll link to the article anyway. Perhaps it's being moderated.

JJLuna's next book will, I have heard, deal with the great benefits of the school of hard knocks.

Rove-a-dope?

The Dubai port story (via Lucianne) appears about to blow up in W's face:

The administration's approval of the acquisition of London- based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. by a firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates has ignited a storm of protests from Democrats and Republicans in Congress and from governors of the states where the ports are located.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist joined Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York in calling on the administration to delay or block the $6.8 billion sale.

New York Governor George Pataki and Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, both Republicans, also have announced their opposition.

But wait a minute. Is the intent here to get Dems screaming about how awful Arabs are and what a threat the Islamic world is in the War on Terror? And isn't that just the opposite of what they were saying just a bit ago, that W was overhyping the threat because of Islamophobia? And won't that make them look a bit - oh - Islamophobic? And wouldn't W be putting a little hygienic distance between himself and the true Islamophobics on the fringe of his own party? Maybe I'm dreaming, but is that a smile I see on Karl Rove's face?

Are Smileys "haram"?

Found a blog called "Croziervision" with a post about freedom of speech:

How essential is freedom of speech?

Oh , it’s essential to me, of course, but then I am a libertarian. But what about Western civilisation in general? I ask because it occurs to me that freedom of speech has had a hard time of it over the years.

It got me thinking about when and how people get offended about things:

Perhaps it's the nature of offense that needs to be considered. Blasphemy, obscenity, profanity, have been considered bannable because they offend, they irritate. No one seriously contends that they cause physical harm. Any civil disorder that results is because of the irritation, the offense. They're not that different, then, from cigarette smoke, other recreational drugs, loud music, dirt (non-poisonous), neon signs and mismatched clothing.

The genius of Western society is that it has recognized that offense is not always to be taken seriously and catered to. Limits have been put on causes for complaint. Now the Muslims and the PC crowd have ganged up on freedom in the name of some absurd non-offensive utopia. I bet Mohammed never wore perfume. But he sure had a lot of offensive ideas. Oh and I forgot "Smileys". Boy do those things offend me! I bet they're haram!

Scots build Ferris Wheel for boats

Now that's not a sentence you'll see too often in the life of the universe. But it's true.

Praise the Lord. How many marvelous things there are in his creation.

Comment on Gene Expression:

So why not polygamy? The entire nation of Pakistan - heck, the entire Islamic world - can join one large civil partnership and move lock stock and barrel to Slough. Wait a minute, they already have!
Robert Speirs | Email | Homepage | 02.21.06 - 11:06 am | #

Weekly Standard profile of Nicholas Sarkozy

...the perfect holiday retreat...

Here's a good one:

Directions: 40 km from Ruse, 220 km from Varna
Area: 80 sq. meters
Land: 1700 sq. meters
Price: 5600 EUR or 3919 GBP or 7361 USD
Basic location: Near town. In mountain. In vacation place. Near highway. In fishing area. In hunting area. Near a golf course.

Only needs a little "cosmetical refreshment", but I can handle that for $7361.

Cartoon Pushback

Protein Wisdom has a comment relaying a statement by one of the famous cartoonists summarizing the evidence for the existence of the Moderate Muslim:

Muslim outrage huh. OK ... let’s do a little historical review.
Just some lowlights:
[1] Muslims fly commercial airliners into buildings in New York City. No Muslim outrage.

[2] Muslim officials block the exit where school girls are trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed. No Muslim outrage. *******************************************

[3] Muslims cut off the heads of three teenaged girls on their way to school in Indonesia. A Christian school. No Muslim outrage.

[4] Muslims murder teachers trying to teach Muslim children in Iraq. No Muslim outrage.

[5] Muslims murder over 80 tourists with car bombs outside cafes and hotels in Egypt. No Muslim outrage.

[6] A Muslim attacks a missionary children’s school in India. Kills six. No Muslim outrage.****************************************

[7] Muslims slaughter hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia. Muslims shoot children in the back. No Muslim outrage.
******************************************

[8] Let’s go way back. Muslims kidnap and kill athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. No Muslim outrage.

[9] Muslims fire rocket-propelled grenades into schools full of children in Israel. No Muslim outrage.


[10] Muslims murder more than 50 commuters in attacks on London subways and busses. Over 700 are injured. No Muslim outrage.

[11] Muslims massacre dozens of innocents at a Passover Seder. No Muslim outrage.

[12] Muslims murder innocent vacationers in Bali. No Muslim outrage.

[13] Muslim newspapers publish anti-Semitic cartoons. No Muslim outrage

[14] Muslims are involved, on one side or the other, in almost every one of the 125+ shooting wars around the world. No Muslim outrage.

[15] Muslims beat the charred bodies of Western civilians with their shoes, then hang them from a bridge. No Muslim outrage.

[16] Newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Muslims are outraged.

[17]
Dead children. Dead tourists. Dead teachers. Dead doctors and nurses. Death, destruction and mayhem around the world at the hands of Muslims .. no Muslim outrage ...

Is this really about cartoons?

The comment doesn't really fit with the post, which is about WMDs, but it sure comes on powerful and true.

Darn!

So does this:

TALLAHASSEE - It's happy hour in Florida's capital city, but you wouldn't know it. The outdoor bar near the Capitol that used to be crowded with lobbyists and legislators is virtually empty on a Tuesday evening.

"Boy, this crowd is awfully thin," says House Speaker Allan Bense, R-Panama City, walking past the watering hole known as Clyde's & Costello's. "Where is everybody?"

Those deserted tables are a consequence of a new state law that bans lobbyists from buying drinks, meals and gifts for legislators and staff members. Lawmakers passed the sweeping ban at the end of a four-day special session in December, in the wake of a controversial trip to Canada by four legislators at a gambling firm's expense and an unfolding lobbying scandal in Washington.

mean that I won't be able to walk past the Capitol at lunchtime and watch all the legislative staffers lining up for free meals at outdoor barbeque tents any time a county or association or other pressure group wants to get another piece of restrictive legislation passed? Guess so:

As chamber director, Gardiner helps organize the annual Lake County Days, promoting the area and highlighting its annual legislative agenda.

Because the sponsors of Lake County Days include Sprint, Progress Energy and others who employ lobbyists, lawmakers and legislative staffers cannot eat free.

Hey, wait a minute. Legislators have to pay for their own meals and fewer restrictions on individual freedom get passed. It's all good!

Original man

I had to reply to this post on Protein Wisdom about the constitutional prohibition against women Presidents:

According to a Baptist Minister, the U.S. Constitution prevents Hillary Rodham Clinton - or any woman - from serving as President. He says that contrary to what feminists think, the 19th Amendment did not de-gender the nation’s highest office. Article II, Section 1 declares 16 times the President will be a man.

That’s right, men only. Women need not apply.
***
But the gender exclusion argument seems to me a bit, well, dubious—even from a technical legal standpoint—particularly when the phrase “all men are created equal” has been taken by the court to mean all “persons,” a fact of precedence that would seem to take a bit of the starch out of the good Rev’s case.

I opined thusly:

Hey, if "man" means "male or female person" in the constitution, how come the language Nazis force us to say "chairperson" and "crewed space missions" instead of "chairman" and "manned missions"? Help, they're being illogical! They're undermining their insistence that the usage of "man" before the splendid liberation that occurred around 1970, when strong women finally came of age, women who, unlike their weak and stupid sisters of the past, could actually throw off the yoke of male oppression, was evidence of the historical oppression of women.
Clearly, all good feminists must insist that "man" in the Constitution means "male" and an amendment is necessary before Laura can take over from W.

"CAN'T TURN BACK A RIVER"

The press censorship situation in China may be more hopeful than some think:

"I can still spread news across the whole country in just 10 minutes, while the propaganda officials are still wondering what to do," he (Li Xinde) said with a chuckle.
***
"Our party always said revolution depended on the gun and the pen -- the military and propaganda," said Li, echoing a slogan of Mao's. "The gun is still firmly in the party's hands, but the pen has loosened."

All hail the power of blogs! The government would have to put half their budget into keeping control of the internet to stop all the heroes like Li. And that would take so much staff that some freethinkers would inevitably slip through. The dinosaurs will never stamp out all the little furry mammals. Sooner or later they'll give up trying. I am encouraged.

The non-Wisdom of (some) Crowds

Wretchard has a beautiful post called "The Wisdom of Crowds" on The Belmont Club:

The struggle against the unremitting stupidity of Political Correctness or the remorseless hatred of Osama Bin Laden are both at heart an effort to reclaim ordinary life -- with its laughter, pity and guiless admiration -- from the faded wraiths who envy our mortal humors.

In response to some comments, especially this one of Wretchard's:

mika.

I think the better comparison to Muslims is Germans, or if you prefer, Japanese. They'll always be that yet not always be your enemy. It would be fair to assert there is no such thing as an innocent in al-Qaeda. But as to Muslims in general there are thousands risking their lives in American service right now. You are born into Islam and can't help it; but you choose to be in al-Qaeda.

As a practical matter there are certain Muslims I know who I could trust implicitly. Why? Because I've trusted them with my life in situations where it would cost them nothing and gain them much to put me over the side. And there are certain Americans, some of the leftist persuasion, who I wouldn't trust at all.

Just my way of thinking, that's all.

I had to pontificate a bit:

Many of the "Muslims" in US service are actually Christian Arabs. One isn't automatically Muslim because one is Arab. And if it weren't for the absolute violent intolerance of apostasy in Islam, more Arabs would forsake Islam. Islam does not want agreement, it wants submission. When an individual submits to an intolerant, violent creed, he puts not just his soul but his life at risk from those of his creed's enemies who won't go quietly to the grave. The Islamic crowd is not wise at all, but ignorant and fearful.

Posts like Wretchard's, though, give one hope that the dialogue is turning in a direction that emphasizes imagination, clarity of thought and full appreciation of the dangers and opportunities this complex conflict with an outworn creed presents. Faster, please.

Workaround

I had a thought and just had to share it with Steve Sailer:

Mr. Sailer,

Call me crazy, but if race and IQ are really related, isn't hiring by race "inversely equivalent" to hiring by IQ? In other words, you could get the same results affirmative action supposedly gets - more (lower-IQ) minorities working - by giving all applicants a (suitably disguised) IQ test and hiring those with lower IQs in preference to those with higher IQs. You might want to give some thought to potential job performance on other measures (height? weight? strength?), until that's outlawed, too.

I suppose the only fly in the ointment might be that, if higher-IQ applicants got wind of the strategy, they might purposely score lower on the tests in order to get jobs. Ego being the force it is, though, I predict this would be rare. And you could mix it up. You could hire by low-IQ until you got enough identifiable minorities, then turn around and hire by ability to get the workers to actually do the jobs you need done.

A virtue of this tactic would be that you wouldn't even have to ask applicants to identify themselves by race. Perfect for the Internet. And you would avoid any accusations of quota-seeking. Also, you would know what you were getting and wouldn't have any false expectations. And liberals thought IQ was invariably racist!

I plan to put this email on my blog (http://conundrum.blogspot.com), but I won't post any response you may make unless you give me permission.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

Let them eat lies
Theodore Dalrymple's column in the Times on the accelerating drive toward total social control in Britain is disturbing:

Increasingly the citizen is asked to denounce his neighbour, for example if his neighbour is cheating social security. (Cheating it is the only rational response to so preposterous, impersonal and inhumane a system.) This official invitation to atomise society further by sowing mistrust among the population has not yet been entirely successful; but posters such as the one I saw last weekend in a bookshop — “Racism is a crime. Report it!” — engender a vague but nevertheless all-pervasive anxiety.
****
We also live in a propaganda state...One is reminded of the Stalinist images of flaxen-haired peasant maidens serving at banquet tables groaning with food of every description that were disseminated to the world in the midst of one of the most severe famines in history.

Let them eat lies!

Very disturbing. The double whammy of no freedom for the law-abiding and almost total incompetence in dealing with real, violent criminals is calculated to deter the most rabid Anglophile, a group in which I used to find myself, from even thinking of living in Britain. Now I even have serious qualms about visiting. This, too, shall pass, one hopes.

Lawrence O'Donnell is pathetic

I know, and water is wet. But Lawrence O'Donnell IS pathetic. Who knew that Bush Derangement Syndrome was indistinguishable from schizoid psychosis?:

HH: Well, you wrote it. I want to know about your...

LO: Let's assume that I talked to no one. Let's say that's a lie.

HH: Okay. So you did lie about this?

LO: Say it's a lie. I'm not saying...no.

HH: Did you make...

LO: No. You say it's a lie. Now let's proceed with the argument with that being a lie. So what?

HH: No, no. I'm just trying to get the facts, Lawrence. I would like to know...

LO: Yes, I talked to a bunch of lawyers.

What a sick, stupid bastard.

Hamas delenda est

I couldn't believe David Adesnik's stunning piece of dreck on Oxblog about Hamas winning the Palestinian elections:

What I want is a statement from the President himself that America punishes no one for the outcome of free and fair elections. And that such punishment would subvert the strategy of democracy promotion on which this administration's entire foreign policy rests.

It got me riled up:

So any democratically elected government, even one dedicated to the violent overthrow of a neighboring state, the mass killing of innocent civilians, the extermination of a people and the imposition of a tyrannical religious fundamentalism, should be perfectly OK with everyone and we should continue to shower them with billions of dollars? What nonsense. What evil.

I thought these Oxblog people were supposed to be smart? I thought I'd overreacted, or at least overreached, but the thread shows some positive support for my position. That's satisfactory, as Nero Wolfe would say.

Who says metaphor is dead?
Guy Herbert pontificates about world government on Samizdata:

With multiple governments, people have the possibility of moving to whatever nation suits them (with, admittedly, varying degrees of effort/risk).

With one government, if you object to how things are being run, your non-violent options are just about limited to "leave the planet entirely".

I'd add that with one world government your violent options are going to be be limited, too. Governmental violence will always be quantatively greater than any you can muster.

It struck me that the present world is pretty - uh - uniformly governed even without "one flag to cow them all":

You could say there already is one world government, as everywhere in the world is covered by some government or other and they all agree on 99% of the restrictions they impose on their subjects. Sure there are a few cracks in the authoritarian structure, but that would also be the case in a formally unitary world government. Individuals can only survive and live a reasonable life by being small furry mammals living in the cracks and keeping a sharp lookout lest the great clumsy dinosaurs step on us.

I also liked Richard Garner's comment:

Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language.

Read the whole thread, as they say. I would like to live in a house trailer, or perhaps just an RV, someday. I could have little shelters for it, with utility hookups, on little bits of land I would own, in various parts of the country, then just move house when I got bored. No worries about your house being vandalized when you're somewhere else.

Anti-smoking Nazis ride again

On Samizdata, this post's smoking comments included this piece of idiocy:

As I have said to anti-ban types many times, defend your 'right' to smoke in public all you like. Just don't object when I pour a bucket of water over your head to douse your noxious and annoying health risk (ESPECIALLY when I am eating). Does it need legislating ? In the wider sense, nothing should (imo there is nothing worse than the tyranny of the majority), however human nature being what it is some individuals will not respect my health and zone of personal comfort without either legislation or the afore-mentioned bucket of water.

Posted by Lusiphur at February 15, 2006 07:29 PM

So I had to take this PC collectivist brigand down a peg:

Lusiphur, would you really be so rude as to pour a bucket of water over someone's head without first asking him not to smoke? How about if someone was singing loudly or eating smelly cheese? Do you really have the right to dictate by violence how people should act, without any preliminaries? Civilized interaction requires a request for civil behavior before any drastic action. You are a barbarian. Why would you think anyone would approve of such an attack? And, by the way, no, you do not have the right to pour a bucket of water over someone's head because they are smoking. It's called battery. Deal with it. Act like an adult and a gentleman, if possible. And stop lying about the "health risk".

The "progressive" mindset continues to amaze. But not surprise.

Welfare eagle

In bald eagle news, the government is planning the future of the bald eagle:

Seven years after the government said the fierce raptor is no longer threatened with extinction, officials finally have a plan for removing it from the endangered species list.

Before too long they'll be harder to find than all those prosperous Americans the War on Poverty was supposed to produce from the poor of the pre-socialist era. Speirs' Law predicts that, when government says eagles are in fine shape, you might as well wave them bye-bye. There is another possibility. Maybe the whole "endangered" thing was just a lie all along, propounded to make jobs for bird-babysitters. Yah think?

Hall said at least 7,066 known nesting pairs now exist in the contiguous United States. The bald eagle's territory stretches over much of the North American continent. Tens of thousands more live in Alaska and Canada, where their existence never was imperiled.

If we'd just take down those ten-thousand feet high anti-eagle barriers that are preventing all the Canadian and Alaskan eagles from coming into the Lower 48, we might not have needed a government program. Ever think maybe the eagles just don't like it down here? Nah. The enviroweenies will whine unless there's one eagle for each acre everywhere. That's only natural, right?

The proof of the pudding

The news about this anti-HIV drug discovery will put the question to those who like myself are more than slightly skeptical about the whole AIDS business (see Dean Esmay's blog, to which I don't go any more). But what if this drug does kill all the HIV anyone can find and people are still dying in Africa, like they have been for, oh, the past 100,000 years or so? Will anyone say then that HIV was the cause of "AIDS"? What do you bet they come up with a new theory that requires, surprise, surprise, billions of dollars of research funding and foreign aid to kleptocracies?

Parallel Idiocy
My thoughts are coming together on this cartoonGate matter:

This controversy reminds me of a story about an English Communist who went to Moscow in the Soviet era. He was so excited to be out of what he considered the "tyranny" of England that he took out a picture of Queen Elizabeth and stomped on it and tore it. He expected the Soviets to be as gleeful as he. But they were outraged. They threw him in jail, then deported him. Their argument was almost as religious as the Islamists. Their religion was authority. They saw any rebellion against what had been constituted as authority as dangerous and unacceptable. One of the aspects of Western culture the Islamists hate is our tolerance of anti-religious feeling. They are almost as outraged at cartoons deriding Jesus as at those mocking Mohammed. They don't riot when those come out because they figure before long Islam will replace Christianity, since Christianity is obviously too weak to defend itself against blasphemers.
Make no mistake about it. Their enemy is not Christianity. It's toleration, individualism, reason, and sanity itself.

This was in response to a post on Belgravia Dispatch with thoughts like this which are, shall I say, blind and "not helpful":

And, truth be told, that's not a message that's particularly helpful to propagate at this juncture. I mean, why describe one of the three great monotheistic religions on the planet, one that over a billion individuals call their own, as a terrorist faith?

Uh, because it IS a terrorist faith??

And in the collegial world of the Senate ...
Senator McCain drops the hammer on a rookie:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere.

Seven years in a tiger cage can put an edge on a guy. Sure, he's off his meds, but that's pretty good snark. So good, in fact, that I have to quote more:

But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us.

Who's the Senator addressed, you may ask? To find out, read the whole thing. You won't regret it. Really. But he rhymes with Osama. (via Drudge)

Islam v. Christianity = Rand v. Branden?
In response to a Dane on Noodlefood:

"Denmark for the past 25 years has been one of the main contributors in the efforts of creating a sovereign state of Palestine. " Well, that'll teach you! I find it interesting that the Muslims find it completely incomprehensible that a man can defend someone else's right to say something that he disagrees with. Or, to put it a different way, that because a man tolerates a certain form of expression, that doesn't necessarily mean he agrees with the content of the expression. This applies double for governments. Separation of church and state is a foreign concept in the Islamic world, much less separation of the press and the state. Muslims assume that if something's printed in the New York Times, George W. Bush personally approved it. As we all know, that couldn't be farther from the truth! Perhaps one religious saying: "render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's and unto God that which is God's" has made a difference in the political consciousness of Christians, however much it has been ignored and belied in the last couple of thousand years.

I feel this comment summed up pretty neatly my ambivalence about Christianity and the state. Now Objectivists don't necessarily agree:

Just imagine how much would be lost if Europe slid into yet another Dark Ages, this time of Islam rather than Christianity. And if that happened, America would stand alone on the front lines of an ever-expanding cultural empire of Islam. Would we have the knowledge and determination to fight for the values of Western civilization? Or would we be overrun by our own Christian barbarians and embroiled in a religious war between two evils: Christianity and Islam?

Call me crazy, but I don't think our local "Christian barbarians" are anything like the threat represented by Hizbollah, Hamas, the Twelfth Imam moonbats and Bin Laden, especially when you throw nuclear weapons into the mix.

Trabzon in the news

But not for a good reason:

An Italian Catholic priest has been shot dead outside his church in north-east Turkey.

Police in the Black Sea port of Trabzon said they were searching for a teenage boy seen fleeing from the scene of the attack on Sunday.

So is Eastern Turkey significantly more moonbat-Moslem than the Aegean Coast and Istanbul? Duh. So I want to live there why again?

Holy Quartet
I've always wondered about this question:

Why not just declare Mohammed the Nephew of God and part of the Holy Quartet and have done with it? Making the Quran sacrosanct is in itself idolatrous. How can a man who received the Holy Word not be a god himself? To say he is a man is to admit that he and all his acts are capable of imperfection.

So I posted it to the comments section on this "paradox" post on Samizdata. This part of the post stimulated my thoughts:

So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistance that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God.

Does this have anything to do with the rejection of rationality? That's what brings that weird smile to the faces of the fanatics: the realization that what they're doing makes no sense at all but they can't help themselves. Of course that's what I feel when I have that fourth martini.