OT and loving it

Shopping carts, buggies, grocery carts, whatever you call them, they are a menace, as laid out in this Dailypundit post. But I desert the topic - kid's play-themed monstrosity carts - to beat up on lonely elderlies:

Ah, shopping carts. As aisles get wider, oldsters get better and better at placing their carts just kitty-cornered enough so no one can get by on either side while they debate with themselves which of seventy-six brands of denture adhesive will get them through the day. Of course, I sympathize with their pathetic need to have some sort of interaction with another human being, even if it's just to say, "Oh, sorry, am I in your way?" since their kids haven't called in six months, but really, JUST GET YOUR DAMNED BUGGY OUT OF MY WAY, YOU OLD FART! I need to get to the beer aisle NOW!

OT is my life.

Dean's World and me

Dean Esmay had a Beatles obsequy to which I had to comment and crush Paul (I refuse to call him "Sir Paul". Nonsense.):

Paul on his lonesome justified his critics. I mean, "Band on the Run"???!!! Could anything be more banal and formulaic and out-of-ideas? It's bleeding Hanna-Barbera. And "Hands across the water" ain't much better. We won't even mention "Standing Stone". The Beatles together were far more than four times as good as any one of them singly. But Paul was/is by far the worst as a solo act.

Another Esmay post, which reminded me of something Jane Galt would put up, stimulated this somewhat incoherent mini-rant:

The State gives corporate status. The State can take away corporate status. Blessed be the Name of the State.
Why should someone's liability be limited because he's taken advantage of the State's corporate status opportunity? Now if two people could agree that they would regard assets that they put into certain entities as immune from liability, vis a vis each other, perhaps the State could legitimately enforce that agreement. Call it an anti-corporation. But for the State to say to everyone, "look, you can't reach this fellow's personal assets, because he was acting as an agent of a corporation when he did that stupid thing", with no real consent involved, well, that's just nuts.

I've been trying to get people to listen to my hatred for the corporate concept for a long time. It reminds me of patents and copyrights: They sound like a good idea, but don't really work and just strengthen the power of the almighty State.

Next topic - evolution and cellular automata!

This is why I love blogs and the Internet in general. TallDave on Dean Esmay's blog put up this post about politics and fractals but I just had to bring in evolution:

Perhaps the response to those who say that random mutation cannot be powerful enough to explain evolution lies in the effect those mutations have on the progress of the cellular automata patterns so thoroughly described by Wolfram. A mutation in just one gene at just the right time could cause a major change in the phenotype. The unexplained "leaps" and "gaps" cited by anti-evolutionists - and Stephen Jay Gould! - may be part and parcel of this mechanism. The only kicker may be that the whole process is so difficult to understand and predict that we may be at the mercy of supercomputers more complex than human brains to get a handle on what's really going on.

I sent the following email to Richard Cohen of the Washington Post in comment on this post.

Dear Mr. Cohen,

I've always thought it would be instructive to ask a firmly pro-choice woman whether she would favor a woman's right to abortion if the baby in question was being carried by another woman. That is, if a surrogate mother had been implanted with another woman's fertilized egg, does the egg's owner still retain any rights to the disposition of the fetus? Or is it entirely up to the birth-mother? What if the two mothers disagreed? Whose opinion should govern? The question would be even more pointed if a completely in vitro birth were possible. This question is triggered by the observation that abortions are so often triggered not by health concerns or unwillingness to go through the process of giving birth, but by the inconvenience of having to bring a child up. I suspect that the cry of "A woman has the right to control her body" is just a smokescreen for that "right to convenience" that has doomed so many potential children.
As a professedly "pro-choice" man, would you be willing to say that the state could intervene, or that simple morality would dictate the necessity to keep a fetus on the road to life if the genetic mother's body were not at risk?

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

Followup to yesterday's "kabuki" comment to Jane Galt's post:

Voting is absurd. Let's just let everybody, including illegals and children and animals, vote as often as they want. Could we really wind up with a less reasonable system? The problem, though, is not that voting is absurd, but that voting determines far too much. A rational polity would restrict voting to the smallest sphere consistent with keeping people from rioting in the streets. All other issues would be decided by market forces.

I may have taken the agent provocateur theme a bit too far. Don't want to be banned. But really. I wish someone could explain to me exactly how voting makes any sense. It's a sacred mystery, I guess.

Riposte to further comments stemming from yesterday's Samizdata comment on this post:

Goodness. Maybe I was being sarcastic? But certainly I've heard that European birth rates are way down. Doesn't that apply to the UK as well? And also I realize the interdependency of economies. But ever since 1812 we've realized here in Jesusland the necessity for destroying the British economy in order to safeguard US prosperity from the ravages of the King's Navy. And you guys are doing the job for us!
Of course, if your birth rates are extremely low, the whole paternity leave issue is yet another pointless - and low-cost - exercise in saying the popular thing.

I seem to have run into some flak:

As an American worker, I hail the wisdom of the almighty British state. Anything that makes British industry less competitive can only help America's prosperity.

Robert I may not be an economist but even I realise that if we Englanders are worse off the whole world will end up being worse off, we can buy less of your goods.



Posted by steved at October 19, 2005 09:08 PM

I'm equally mystified as to why Robert Speirs thinks that "us folks" had given up on child rearing.

Could he explain?Posted by HJHJ at October 19, 2005 09:35 PM
Robert Speirs, your grasp of economics is rather tenuous as your remarks strongly suggest you have fallen prey to the notorious Fixed Quantity of Wealth fallacy.

Britain's economy being weaker does not therefore mean the US economy will become stronger and seeing as how Britain is one of the larger trading partners of the US, the opposite result is more likely: less British people buying things (an inevitable consequence of a weakening economy) means they buy less things from the USA and sell less to the USA of the things the UK previously had a comparative advantage in, increasing prices to US consumers.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at October 19, 2005 11:33 PM

From Samizdata, I found a dietblog called The Singleton Diet. So I had to put in my two cents about dieting:

Read this book: “Overcoming Overeating”. Diets don’t work. Exercise can be fatal. Graze, don’t eat meals. Throw away your scale and tape measure and get a full-length mirror. That’s just a start. You can be as thin as you want but if you still wish you were eating, it’s no good. Don’t ever let yourself get legitimately hungry. And this nonsense about “good food” and “junk” is delusion. Maybe the first step is to ask, “Why do I need to weigh less again?”

How's it going, you may ask. I don't know. I feel pretty good and am not worried about how much I eat, except for not letting myself get "stomach hungry". My clothes still fit and I can walk every day. And I love not having to think about dieting. For the last twenty years or more every day I have obsessed about whether I'm eating the right stuff and exercising enough. No more.

A Samizdata post on new UK government rules allowing men to take off three months for paternity leave - and get paid for it! - stimulated this response:

As an American worker, I hail the wisdom of the almighty British state. Anything that makes British industry less competitive can only help America's prosperity. On the other hand, scratch that. The British economy is so small a threat it really doesn't matter. And at least the pub owners will profit. Nobody really thinks the men are going to stay home with the crumb-crunchers, do they? By the way, I thought you folks had given up on child-rearing.

Jane Galt's ruminations on the voting ID controversy in Georgia give me the opportunity to pontificate on the electoral system:

I vote for kabuki. When you realize that illiterates and the profoundly ignorant are just as entitled to vote as people who actually know something about the political system, how can such a travesty be anything but a group hug? Sure the purpose of the system may be to elect someone, but it's how it's run that matters to whether the best candidate wins.

A sarcastic mini-rant emerges from my frustrated mind at the prospect of Megan McArdle losing focus on the war in Iraq:

Yes, of course, we should re-install Saddam as President and it would only be fair that we give him the names of any Iraqi who collaborated with us. That's the only way to save Iraq now that Bushitler has messed it up so badly. Unless someone has a better idea?

Just in case anyone took me seriously, I followed up with:

My point is: we can't go back. We must support the best civil polity we can come up with in Iraq. None of the critics seem to have a better way of doing that than what Bush is doing right now.

As to domestic spending, does anyone really think that a Democratic president with a Republican congress would spend LESS than a Republican president with the same congress? How could that happen? The Democrat would move heaven and earth to raise taxes. And wouldn't the election of a Democratic president be accompanied by the election of more Congressional Democrats anyway?

An Ann Althouse post about hurricanes and global warming elicited this thought, on record-citing behavior which I've noticed before:

Interesting. "Warmest September ever" er- since record keeping began. Doesn't that mean that August was NOT the warmest August ever? You can be sure that if August had been a record, that fact would have been mentioned: WARMEST AUGUST-SEPTEMBER EVER!!!!
In fact, doesn't that mean that August was below average? If it had been above average, the two-month period would probably have been a record, no? Funny I didn't see that reported anywhere.

Green's post on Vodkapundit about the Iraqi constitution and slavery stimulated me to comment on something I'd been thinking about a lot lately.

Maybe a little OT:
How many people realize that slavery in the US wasn't based on race? If this were so, there would not have been any free blacks before Emancipation. You'll not find any laws that state "Africans are slaves because of their race". Article 1 of the US Constitution does not mention race, only distinguishes between "free" persons, "those bound to service for a term of years" and "all other" persons. Even the "Indians not taxed" provision makes clear that Indians' status was not based on their race, but on their exemption from paying taxes. Slavery was based on property rights. Indentured slavery, which involved many whites, was based on contractual promise.

How many Americans believe that black people were enslaved because they were black? How many blacks? Of course, the reasons behind the (temporary) acceptance of slavery are complex. But it boils down to the fact that black Africans could not protect and provide for their own surplus population and Europeans took advantage of that fact. And the nature of the property system as it was accepted all over the world at the time made slavery acceptable to parts of the US population until 1865. Another point: would slavery have lasted as long as it did if the Constitution had refused to define men as property under any circumstances? Since importation of African slaves ended just about as the Constitution was being written, would it have made any difference?

Freedom from government jobs
Freedom and Whisky, one of my favorite blogs, had this post about the descent of Scotland into the abyss of socialism:

So while 39% of Lothian's current economic activity is in the state sector, only 38% of the jobs being advertised are not with the government. The percentage of advertised private vacancies is probably even less when we consider all those so-called charity jobs.

Apparently Margaret Thatcher wasn't able to hold off the forces of chaos forever. Well, we didn't really expect all that North Sea oil money to go to the benefit of those who put capital at risk to find and develop it, did we? I guess all the ambitious Scots got out. If Freedom and Whisky is any guide, though, some Scots still think the world is for winning, not whining. Ironically, my father came from Scotland in the Twenties and ended up working for the US government! But he was an officer in the Air Force, providing the one service that a state should arguably be engaged in.

I had to get in a crack about Reagan's Republican Senate majority on Captain's Quarters, in response to some of the commenters here:

Sure, Reagan had 53 or 54 Republican Senators for six of his eight years, although the House, which spends the money, was pretty heavily Democratic. That just shows how useless Republican Senators can be. A Republican President has to have at least 60 Senators on his side to compensate for the RINOs on spending issues. And that's pretty rare. In fact, it's never happened.

Hey, I even did some research! And one can quibble, in that the divisions between the parties were somewhat one-sided at times. But it's too difficult to figure out the percentages in every case when there were fewer than 100 senators, so I just let my comment stand. Interesting that some of the very earliest Senates had "Republicans" in them, but of course these weren't the same as the Party of Lincoln. Whigs and Free Soilers had much more interesting names!

Apropos of this post on Samizdata about identity theft, I opined:

Checking your credit card accounts on the internet should be reducing the scope and frequency of ID theft. I used to go over my account every thirty days, when the paper came. Nowadays I look at all my accounts at least every other day. If anything suspicious were to happen, I'd know it right away. And at least in the US maximum liability is really low if you catch problems right away. That has changed for the better. Debit cards are still a problem, though. And I do wish Wachovia would stop sending those credit card checks in the mail. Not that there's enough headroom in my cc accounts so I should worry much!

In response to this post on Dailypundit, I observed:

Uh oh. I'm agreeing with Quick and LT on this one. If they come for your cigarettes and you don't do anything it won't be long before they come for your guns. And then it's your butter. Now there's a slippery slope!
Odd, though. One reason some do-gooders don't want to push the $280 billion penalty is that they don't think it will be enough, that the smokers will just pay up. But then of course the govt. will come up with some other excuse to impose another, more drastic penalty. Why do we have that darn "no tobacco" clause in the Constitution, anyway? How did that get in there? And why didn't those evil tobacconists do something like put warning notices on every pack of cigarettes long ago?

I seem to be in a totally sarcastic mood today. Maybe because it was 52 degrees this morning, I saw my breath on my walk into work and I'm feeling great!

On Dailypundit, in response to a post about Bashir Assad possibly leaving power in Syria, in reference to the Interior Minister who was just found dead:

Russian missiles won't protect him from "committing suicide" with a gun equipped with a silencer.

and in response to Bill's comment defending the honor of Debkafile:

OTOH, "more reliable than the NYT" pretty much defines "damning with faint praise", non?

Then, in response to a statement about how Bush sycophants keep making excuses for him and that he really hasn't done anything effective against terror:

No, a major point of GWB's presidency is to protect America by defusing explosive totalitarianism, starting with the Taliban and Saddam and handling threats in descending order of seriousness. A caution. In 1973 it looked like Nixon would successfully get US forces out of Vietnam and establish links with China and pursue peace in the Middle East and combat inflation. Then, thanks to Congress and E. Howard Hunt's little group, it all fell apart. But until something like that happens to GWB, it would be difficult to call his presidency unsuccessful.

and

From the lack of effective attacks in the US in the last few years, one can deduce that the best way to protect oneself from terrorist attacks is to make sure such attacks have no good consequences for the terrorists. So far, Bush has done that. As to "moving the goalposts", I had no idea in 2000, when I did not vote, that I would vote for Bush in 2004 because I saw him as more able to deal with the problems than the Democrats. That was just barely enough to get me to vote in '04. I had no illusions. As of today, I expect much more from GWB than I did in 2000. So my goalposts are not closer but farther away. But, to beat the metaphor to death, I am also more confident than I was in 2004 that he will score enough points to prevail.

and moreover:

No, Bill, I don't think anyone can guarantee no attacks ever, never. What I worry about is that the terrorists aren't rational at all and that they don't care that all their butchery has gained them is the loss of two friendly regimes and disruption of their system. But then how do you explain the lack of attacks in the US? My best guess is that, wait for it, Bush scares them silly. Yep, they're afraid to attack us again lest we do something like nuking Mecca. So they attack Madrid and London and Istanbul and Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Bali and the Philippines. If that's true, Bush is indispensable in his present attitude. Ahh, that's good Koolaid!

Who knows where this argument ends?

I posted the following comment to this post on Bill Quick's Dailypundit blog:

Tell it to all the hard-working students who have been passed over in favor of lower-achieving affirmative-action "victims" and policemen and firemen who have to do their jobs and the jobs of the incompetent women "working" with them. This is not a new phenomenon with George W. Bush. The question is how does one best combat the new forms of racism, sexism and collectivism in general? Unfortunately the libertarian way does not work, gets no traction whatever. Neither does slamming Bush. So what other ideas WILL work, in the long run? Because that's what W has always been about, whether in the war on terror or in cutting budgets - the long run, when we're all dead but maybe, just maybe things will be better.

Because if libertarians have no idea how to achieve political goals, they might as well retreat into theorizing like me and the other objectivists, but they shouldn't criticize Bush for not being effective.

I posted the following comment at Dean Esmay's blog, in response to this post.

Hitchens reinforces the idea that AlQaeda isn't really interested in results, just in the struggle. What positive consequence resulted from 9/11 or 7/7 or any of the other examples for Wahhabism? Even the Madrid bombings can't be seen as having positive results if the point wasn't really Iraq but Andalusia. If anything, the War on Terror is reinvigorated every time a bomb goes off. So, as Hitchens says, the point for AlQaeda must not be to win in any conventional sense, but to continue until death the utterly futile struggle against rationality and the humane. Only by doing so will the likes of bin Laden and Zarqawi make themselves fit for paradise and enhance their reputation as holy warriors. Winning is for Turks, Mongols and Westerners. Losing gloriously is better in the long (very long!) run. Shades of Hitler in '45. No wonder they like Mein Kampf.

I posted this comment on this article on Angry in the Great White North:

"Maybe it's about time society stopped being colour-blind"?? The problem is that society isn't colour-blind and never has been. Black kids are allowed to get away with stuff that would never be tolerated from white kids. The justifications range from "well, they're oppressed, after all" to "What do you expect from THEM, anyway?" (that last one hardly ever stated outright, but always there as subtext.)

Maybe I am turning into Steve Sailer. This thought, though, is directly related to my year's experience as a detention counselor at a Florida juvenile detention center, featuring eighty to ninety percent black "kids" and my observations of the different expectations and standards applied to kids based on the color of their skins. Black kids routinely boasted of how many crimes they had got away with before getting busted. Cops routinely ignored most black crime. Let a white kid offend at all and he was in big trouble. One has to wonder at the cesspool of futile and stupid motives for such a policy, but one cannot doubt its reality.

The Bad news is that they're vicious buffoons. The good news is that they're buffoons.



The Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Roberts as reported by the AP expose the Democrats, especially Ted Kennedy, as clueless, incompetent and irresponsible beyond what even I realized. And that takes some doing, to make me even more aware of the true vacuousness of Kennedy, Biden, Schumer, Turban et al. Live and learn. This political system is dangerous. I'm beginning to think it's actively malignant, specifically with reference to me. Who, me, paranoid? But even if I'm not an intended target, I'm surely collateral damage.

Indictment

This photo in and of itself should be sufficient to indict the Mayor of New Orleans for malfeasance, corruption and incompetence. Yes, that idiot who tried to blame Bush like every other liberal, Did any students go to N.O. public schools on Monday? So, OK, Mr. Mayor - and School Superintendent and Police Chief - why weren't those buses used to get people out of New Orleans? Oh, I see, everybody was too busy looting, including the cops? Now I understand. And so should everyone else.

Rescued!

Fats Domino has apparently been rescued from the New Orleans disaster. OK, so now that's out of the way, how about getting everyone out and just nuking the place? The obvious parallel is Port Royal, the pirate city in Jamaica destroyed in 1692:

Once known as the 'Wickedest City on Earth,' Port Royal on the island of Jamaica was one of the largest towns in the English colonies during the late 17th century. It was a haven for privateers and pirates, such as the famed Sir Henry Morgan, due to its excellent geographic location in the middle of the Caribbean. From Port Royal, these buccaneers preyed upon and plundered the heavily laden treasure fleets departing from the Spanish Main.

Shortly before noon on 7 June 1692, 33 acres (66 percent) of the "storehouse and treasury of the West Indies" sank into Kingston Harbor in a disastrous earthquake. An estimated 2000 persons were killed in an instant. An additional 3000 citizens died of injuries and disease in the following days (Pawson and Buisseret 1975:121). Salvage and outright looting began almost immediately and continued off and on for years. A pocket watch, made ca. 1686 by Paul Blondel, a Frenchman living in the Netherlands, was recovered during Link's (1960:173) underwater excavations near Fort James. Its hands, frozen at 11:43 a.m., serve as an eerie reminder of the catastrophe.

Following the earthquake, Port Royal underwent a dramatic revival only to fall again when it was ravaged by fire in 1703. A total of 16 hurricanes between 1712 and 1951 have consistently smashed Jamaica, as have an additional six earthquakes between 1770 and 1956 (Cox 1984:Appendix B). Following a severe storm, a hurricane, and two earthquakes in 1722, Port Royal as it once was disappeared for the last time.

Maybe they could build a real sane city somewhere further inland.

Fats Domino is missing

The New Orleans songster, now 76 years old, has apparently gone missing. I wonder what happened to him. The last anyone saw of him he was at home in the Katrina-devastated section of the city. OK, I've got to say it, "Ain't that a shame?" I will keep track of any reports of his whereabouts. He could be a symbol of the revival of Sin City, that focus of evil of the Gulf Coast, or a sad token of its decline and disappearance. Sort of reminds one of Pompeii, gone never to return. How many cities have been alive, if corrupt and frustrating, one week and then gone forever the next? A thousand years from now will an archeologist digging through the ruins of what used to be New Orleans find a jolly skeleton in a porkpie hat surrounded by gold records?

Kassorla
I'm quite enthusiastic about the career and self-development advice contained in Irene Kassorla's book "Go For It". After all she's the "Shrink to the Stars" and that must be true because Merv Griffin said it. And my admiration is not diminished by the news that she gave psychological counseling to Monica Lewinsky after the traumatic events of the late 1990's. I note with approval that Monica never did run for office or protest against the liberation of Iraq. Which shows that someone put some sense into her. Overall, I'd have to say that Miss Lewinsky's effect was positive, at least as positive as Woodward and Bernstein's.

Boil, pot, boil!
CQ again has a daily step toward the truth in the Able-Danger-Gate story. Mary Jo White's participation is particularly interesting because she was appointed by the Clintons. But she apparently had an instinct for long-term self-preservation and for doing her job.

Does the system work?
Cap'n's Quarters, as usual, is one of the few out front on the Able Danger-gate story. Let's see if the new system (Blogs unearth a story, Fox brings it to the mass media, MSM derides and plays it down, blogs keep it alive, MSM finally caves) works to bring this story to everyone's attention and keep it going. It's only a hundred times bigger than the Joe Wilson moronism. The Sandy Burglar angle is only one of a hundred delicious penumbrae to AD-gate. Now if only Hillary could show up with some relevant printouts that had been "lost" for a few months. Wasn't Jamie Gorelick tight with Hill? Maybe that's just the way I want it to have been.

Ambassador Spyhusband is going to be speaking in Tallahassee sometime soon, BTW, but it will cost $25 to go and I am not going to contribute to further stoking of this non-story.

And didn't the NY Times try awfully hard to get out in front on this story? And where are they now? Something going on there. Maybe they just need a blog. Ahh. Fresh, spicy-smooth bloggy goodness.

So what?

I agree strongly with this column about steroid use in baseball. It pushes every libertarian button I've got:

The main argument against steroids and similar drugs is that they somehow screw with the "natural" abilities of players and disrupt the "level playing field." That is, they give "unfair" advantages to players willing to use them. That's why Commissioner Selig frets over the "integrity" of baseball. Steroids, goes this line of thought, turn an authentic competition into something less...real? But if any of that is true, why not ban, say, weight training or off-season workouts? Or special nutritional regimens that stop short of including certain banned supplements? What should be done about Lasik and other interventions that result in better than 20/20 vision? Or reconstructive surgeries that let pitchers throw faster than before undergoing the knife (just ask Chicago Cubs' hurler Kerry Wood)? All of these things muddy that wholly mythical level playing field.

Exactly. It's a sport, after all, not a religion. It's not like the z-car races, where they give each driver exactly the same car, tuned the same way and they have to use the same fuel. It's as though nature gave some drivers a two-cylinder Citroen and others a Ferrari. And that's ok. But if one of the Citroen drivers has an extra cup of coffee, oh, my! That's not "fair"! I hate that word.

HOW again?

Can someone tell me how taking tax money from taxpayers, filtering it through a federal bureaucracy with the expected deductions and giving it to construction companies, thereby making the money unavailable to the companies from which the taxes are taken, so they have fewer jobs to offer, and spending the money on construction jobs instead of the jobs the market would have dictated should be offered, how exactly does this procedure create jobs??

I found a forum for Ayn Rand fans here. It appears to be quite interesting. I left this comment, among others:

Rees-Mogg, in The Sovereign Individual, assumes that it is impossible to reform a large nation-state so that it protects individual liberties appropriately. He predicts that Internet technology will develop to the point that assets and privacy can be protected cheaply from anywhere in the world. He suggests that a number of mini-states will arise offering citizenship "packages" to wealthy or merely well-off sovereign individuals. He cites Hong Kong and Switzerland as examples of highly efficient, extremely prosperous regimes where an individual can now or soon will be able to purchase the protection he needs from the activities of the welfare/warfare nation-states that dominate the world.

I think he's right in that the project of coming up with a scheme to protect individual rights in a large democracy is a fool's quest. What's important is to develop a strategy to protect one's own interests, as one does not owe anything to others. If one could realize Galt's Gulch, why worry about the rest of the world reeling along on its merry destructive way?

Maybe I can construct my own mini-state somewhere near Trebizond/Trabzon.

Cloned appetizers

This article claims that Koreans are cloning dogs to be "companion animals"! Right. Companion to the kimchee and rice, I bet. I wonder if they've heard of "hush puppies"?

Tiny houses
I'm amazed at the variety of small affordable houses available, such as these. I love the pictures, but the words are all about "saving the planet" and "sustainability" and other stupid nonsense. Darn it, I want a cheap place to live that doesn't take a lot of cleaning and that is easy to heat and cool. Maybe when I get rich I'll add another, or maybe four of them around an atrium with a swimming pool. I am glad there are so many varieties. I also like the idea of trailering one of the itsy bitsies, although the peaked roofs on most of them would appear to make them dangerous to take on roads with overpasses. I wonder if my Peugeot 505 could drag one safely over the Rockies? Maybe one could come up with a peaked-roof tiny house with the loft attic arranged so that it could be folded down for traveling, like a tent trailer. I'm encouraged, anyway.

My latest obsession is with Trabzon, Turkey, where maybe someday I can buy a tiny house. Or maybe buy a boat and keep it in the harbor. Hmm, a houseboat. Now I'm thinking. Tiny house on the Black Sea, duplicating the Argo. Off to find the Golden Fleece and fight the Amazons. Metaphorically!

London duds

No, not the socialists. Futile bombings today in London had an odd aspect. All four attempts at bombings failed to go off properly. The detonators detonated but the explosives didn't catch. In all four. How likely is it that this was an accident? My theory is that the bombing group was infiltrated by agents who made sure the bombs weren't going to work properly. Then the bombs and with any luck the bombers could be captured and mucho intelligence gleaned. Sounds like the only reasonable thesis.

Islam and Communism

For seventy years the civilized world fought the adherents of a collectivist ideology who thought nothing of killing millions to enforce their dogma on the entire world. Then the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet empire broke up and Communism was discredited everywhere except in certain universities.

Now the civilized world faces a similar threat from Islam, a collective dogma of a different kind, but similar in that it advocates the use of limitless violence against those who refuse to accept its ideology and will not cease being violent until its advocates are entirely exterminated or its empire is broken as the Communist empire was. The good news is that Islam does not have military forces that begin to compare with the Soviets. The bad news is that it cannot be defeated by containment or military assault or even internal revolt against a particular regime. It needs to be faced on the battlefield of ideology. But that is an advantatge in some ways. I hope to address this topic further in coming days.

Right about 200 pounds now. Wondering if I can nail that level by the end of April and head lower before 5/17. Personal concerns outweigh political at this point. Is there any doubt about going to Istanbul this fall? How can I not?

Sovereign Individual
Just finished reading Davidson and Rees-Mogg's The Sovereign Individual. Every so often you read a book that changes your view of life. I now look at government power with a more jaundiced eye than ever before. And I wasn't exactly a collectivist in any case! I've been a confirmed objectivist (note the small "o") for some years.

It struck me that a lot of the crises cobbled up by environmentalists and health crusaders have a perhaps not unintended effect. Global warming, for instance, enforces the logic that only national or supernational (not "supranational" - the UN is just a bigger state, not a different kind of state) entities can solve the terrible problems caused by greedy stupid capitalist white men. The same rationale applies to acid rain, the ozone non-hole, AIDS, world hunger and every other putative problem of recent years. Without these problems, we wouldn't need anywhere near as much government power. The Sovereign Individual predicts the decline of the nation-state, as well as the frantic efforts of those who depend on and profit from the nation-state to retain and strengthen its power. It all makes sense now, how the media and the political system work together. Hey, paranoia is when you think you know what's going on, right?

Starving
Funny living in Tallahassee how sometimes national events jump up and grab you. I walk through the Capitol courtyard several noontimes a week, on my way to the library or a restaurant. Yesterday I headed over to the library and bought a book (I never borrow books from the library, but have found it a good source of bargain tomes) on dieting: Kurzweil's rant about low-fat living The 10% Solution. I've tried Atkins and not been able to stay on it, so thought I'd give the much-despised low-fat regimen a try. So I'm heading back to work through the Capitol plaza, thinking about how hungry I'm going to be for the next, oh, thirty years or so. Then I see a couple of "Don't let Terri Schiavo die!" protesters wandering around aimlessly looking for a TV camera or at least a couple of legislators. One of them was holding a sign reading: "Don't starve the living!" So I'm thinking, is this a message for me from the diet gods? But then I realized it was OK. If the low-fat fanaticism turns out to be as painful as all that, I'll never stick with it, anyway, and go back to high living - high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high anxiety and gout all day every day. Now Terri's husband has chosen the ultimate low-fat, low-calorie diet for her. I just wish I knew more about her mental state or lack thereof, so I could get all worked up over keeping her "alive" or letting her die, whichever is more appropriate. The case is an education in how people take sides without having full information. And in these days of blogging, more information than anyone could want is available somewhere. But deciding rationally spoils all the fun. Where are the MRI's, EEGs and all the other brain scans that might prove whether anything's going on in her brain? You would think the educated populace would be clamoring for them. But I guess they're more concerned with soundbites.

The Intellectual Terrorist

Nah little poufters*.
I have stumbled upon the basic misconception (!) that has led to this recent idea that men can or should, in some sense, "marry" men and women can or should "marry" women. This obviously monstrous absurdity can only have come about because some addle-pated "gays" (but I repeat myself) must not ever have been told the facts of life. They must be harboring the fond but biologically impossible hope that after they have whatever they consider an approximation of heterosexual sex, little poufters will suddenly, from some bodily orifice, emerge nine months or so later. Or maybe the new little addlepates will spring full-grown from their heads, like the gods and goddesses used to do. It reminds one of the pathos-soaked cargo cults of the Pacific Islanders, who after seeing US GIs call up on radios and have large airplanes full of trade goods descend, copied the GIs after they left, but with radios made of wood and vines for antennas. Needless to say, no C-47s full of Hershey bars and nylon stockings ever responded to these primitive entreaties.
The idea of marriage - and the fact I have to say this demonstrates the depths to which this discourse has descended - is to have children emerge that display a mixture of the characteristics of the husband and the wife. That is why a man looking for a wife carefully observes not only a woman's physical conformation but her intellectual shape and size as well. Does she have a good sense of humor? Ah, our child may share that. How jolly. Does she have flashing green eyes? Imagine a boy with my muscles and her eyes! He will be a great warrior and a triumphant conqueror of women! Is her mother a scold? Later, baby.
Perhaps it's understandable that those whose sexual "preferences" make it impossible for them to have a biological family would think that by standing up in front of a fake religious figure and going through a fake ceremony and having fake sex they can share some of the juju associated with the most basic relationship of the tribe of Man. But, as they say on MTV, get over it. Ain't gonna happen.
*reference is of course to the Constitution of Australia, which consists of two words: Nah poufters.

Pathetic old yawp
So Hunter Thompson is dead. You know you're dead when Tom Wolfe writes about you in the Wall Street Journal. Thompson of course was amusing, at least the first time you read one of his items. But they all sound the same after a while. Thompson was one of those pathetic ex-hippies who don't think life is worth living unless something weird is happening every second. Reminds me of an old man at a wedding trying to get attention by standing up every so often and shouting incoherently. Regular old boring everyday life isn't good enough for him. So he never had a chance to see deeper. The most ordinary, "conformist" waitress or bank clerk, who had to put up with Thompson's childish tantrums, knew more about real life than Thompson ever was going to find out if he lived another "gonzo" lifetime. Sad.

New word
New term for a comedian: chortlemonger

Lucky me
All this Social Security stuff has been making me think. I'm 56 years old. If Ray Kurzweil is right, there's a good chance that I'll be ready for Social Security right about the time when the scientists figure out how to make people live pretty much forever:

Many experts, including the authors, believe that within a decade we will be adding more than a year to human life expectancy every year. At that point, with each passing year, your remaining life expectancy will move further into the future.

As I understand the present proposals for Social Security, those who are now within ten years or so of retirement will be guaranteed full coverage for the rest of their lives. Now, following Kurzweil, that could be forever. Unfortunately, for younger people, no such guarantee is available, although I can well believe that the personal equity accounts that Bush is supporting will allow today's twenty-somethings to make a lot more money than I ever did on my admittedly spotty SS contributions. But the trade-off there will be no automatic guaranteed government income forever. I may be the last of the complete socialists, able to loaf indefinitely even when, because of medical advances, I could be working. Am I lucky or what?

Schema? Schemata?
I read somewhere on the Web about how a good army allocates its officers. Sorry I can't link to it, because I can't remember where. There are two continua, from Brilliant to Stupid and from Active to Lazy. So, the officers break down into four groups:
1. Stupid but Active
2. Lazy and Stupid
3. Brilliant and Active
4. Brilliant and Lazy
Group 1, Stupid but Active, are very dangerous. These men must be reassigned, transferred, cashiered, whatever. They will get many men killed in battle, or even in training, because they don't have a clue what they're doing and yet are always doing things.
Group 2, Stupid and Lazy, form the mass of the officer corps. They head almost all the field units. They're not dangerous, because, even though they don't know what to do, they do as little as possible. They're not very useful, however, because they can't figure out what to do. They do get along with the masses of soldiers, because they're very much like them.
Group 3, Brilliant and Active: These are the staff officers, who are always having bright ideas and doing things. They can't be successful field officers, because the men - and the Group 2 officers - hate them, because they're always pushing soldiers to do stuff. They're only useful at Headquarters and do most of the work there.
Group 4, Brilliant and Lazy, are the top commanders. These are the guys who can be relied on to come up with good ideas but to delegate the carrying out of those ideas to the Group 3s. Every few months they may make a tour of the front lines, but they're usually relaxing and drinking, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now or Nero Wolfe, who let Archie Goodwin do all the legwork.

My goal, of course, is to be recognized as a Group 4, even though I'm not in the army. Someone should write a management book using this schema (These schemata?) But I just got a new bottle of gin and it's been in the freezer long enough to be nice and cold....

Straightening out the tangle
I would be even more straightforward than Instapundit or the Goodridge case:

Yes, the creepiest line in the Goodridge case is the one about there being three parties to every marriage -- the couple being married, and the state.

Marriage is not a relationship between a man and a woman, it is a relationship between an individual and the state. Anyone who's ever been through a divorce, or even contemplated one, knows what I mean. The relationship between a man and a woman is called love. You do not - or should not - enter into marriage to get anything from your mate. The bonds of love are your only security with relation to the one you've married. Signing a marriage license application binds you to a certain standard of behavior set by the state, not by your mate. In return, the state guarantees certain financial benefits, including tax relief and inheritance rights. From the state's point of view, the beneficiaries of this relationship are the children of the marriage. The state has an obvious interest in keeping new taxpayers coming along, as without them it would fail.
It's hardly surprising that the expectations that many have of the marriage relationship are often disappointed. When love disappears, the bare framework of legal obligations is frequently insufficient to achieve the state's aims. Any woman who's tried to get the state to force an absent husband to pay child support, and any man who's tried to get a fair shake from the state in domestic litigation knows the incompetence and impenetrability of the state apparatus. These facts form just some of the background that make me shake my head in wonder at "gay" folk who actually expect state certification of their pretend "marriages" to do anything good for them or for the society as a whole.
Which forces an odd conclusion: Since successful results - well-reared children - from a marriage depend on love, and cannot be forced, and the state depends on successful marriages, the state itself depends on love. Who would have thought it?

Peru
OK, today is Peru Day. Here's a website already, now go away. I gotta go to bed.

Europe Day - Silesia
Ah, Silesia! I remember it well. In law school I competed in an international law moot court contest. The Franklin Pierce team's assignment was the International Claims Commission for Silesia after World War I. I only have a vague recollection of the issues - something about compensation for minerals mined while Silesia was under occupation. But I've had a soft spot for Silesia ever since. And in Karpacz there are strangely shaped rocks! Who could ask for more? But there is more - skiing! Look around the linked sites. You will be all prepared to have a lovely time in Silesia, summer or winter.

Rand centennial
Cathy Young celebrates 100 years of Ayn Rand with a critical but appreciative article in Reason magazine. (via Vodkapundit) Branden and Branden and Roark and D'Anconia and Dagny Taggart and Peter Keating and Hank Rearden and Wynand and Dominique and Sciabarra and even David Kelley. But no "Doctor Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's Intellectual Heir". Perfect. Perhaps at 200, in an Objectivist world, today will be looked back on as a dark age which our progeny marvel that we survived.
I am bothered by the constant confusion between Rand's ideas and her personal life. Granted that she herself thought her life should reflect her ideals, the fact that she wasn't epistemologically perfect shouldn't adversely reflect on her political thesis. Doesn't "ad hominem" still mean anything? The whole lesson of the Barbara Branden thing is that we can all fall prey to personal silliness, which makes solid, workable political ideas even more, not less important. The final test of Rand's ideas is not whether she lived up to them all the time, but whether, everything else being equal, they help create a freer and happier world when implemented. So far, they haven't failed that test.

Asia Day - Sri Lanka - Uva
Let's celebrate a province of an Asian country that sounds like a part of the human eye. Or is that "uvea"? Anyway, there's plenty to see in Uva with your uveas and your foveas. Especially check out the super-aboriginal-looking aborigines. And remember, they're "fast-dwindling". Looks to me like they've already done a major amount of dwindling. My old school's motto is "Finis ab origine pendet" which, I think, means "Finns hang aborigines" or some other such slander on the Suomi nation. The Uva natives' god is called Skanda, which appears to this social scientist to be proof positive of the visit of Finns (or other Skanda-navians, in their navies, no doubt) to the area at some remote period. And don't forget the "tea experience". If you know what I mean, nudge, nudge!
And, just in time, here's breakfast!

Africa Day - Madagascar
Even though a former French colony, Madagascar, to my mind, still qualifies as part of Africa. The website is an information-packed travelogue by a half-Malagasy, half-German guy who went back to explore his roots. In most of the countries I've investigated, the best websites are from travelers who cobbled together the information on their own, without any government help or reliance on "environmental" movements or "sustainable travel" ideocracies. The most striking fact about Madagascar I gather from Kuederle's site is how it seems well-favored by nature and not very much affected by the inherently evil activities of Man. If you believe the Lonely Planet people (what a self-hating pessimistically-named organization!) there will soon be nothing left. But then they say the "salvation" of the country may be "eco-tourism". Now why would tourists visit a country portrayed as a pile of dirt denuded of trees and animals by globalist corporate fascism? Well, I've long ago stopped trying to figure out the non-logic of the hysterical lying left. Read here about the abounding lemurs and "countless animals". Hmm. Doesn't sound like an environmental basket case to me. I like the journal entry where the guy says that in some end-of-the-earth disco, they consider Britney Spears music "world music"! Ha! And no vegetarians! Love those Malagasy.

Vast frozen wasteland day - Siberia
Yamal means "the end of the earth". Looking around the website at how far north and far east the Yamal Peninsula (Poluostrov) is, I won't quibble. Lakes and rivers abound, mostly frozen, I'm sure, most of the year and abounding in mosquitoes in the short summer. An icebreaker would be handy for getting around in winter and a hovercraft in summer.

Also, the Yamal holds what may be the greatest untapped natural gas reserves in the world. So we may be hearing more about this unheard of vast frozen wasteland. Oh, here are some Russian eskimo types (eskimoskis?), complete with reindeer. Nice dogs, too, if you like white shaggy ones. I don't like dogs. I tend to think of them as wolves who only put on collars and tags so they can sneak up on you and eat you.

Oceania Day of the Weekly World Tour - Nauru
World's smallest republic (hmm. Smaller than the Vatican? But, right, that's not a republic. It's a popeocracy or something like that.) Nauru is made up entirely of guano, which brought in much money. Squandered under UN supervision, depopulated by the Japanese, Nauru is a typical fiasco island, where politics reigns. Ah, "Bank owned by the government". There's your problem. And, of course, "threatened by the greenhouse effect." IF global warming raises water levels, Nauru goes under. A big "IF". You mean they don't really know and there's been no sign of it yet, even though SUV's have been around for twenty years? Hey, something smells here and it ain't just the guano.

South America Day - French Guiana
There's still a European colony in South America? Mais non, it's an overseas department of France. Not a colony at all. And it's different from a colony exactly how? Well, it's very much like France in one way:

French Guiana is expensive, with costs comparable to those in France; even diehard budget travelers will have a tough time getting by on less than US$45 per day. If restaurant meals and the occasional warm shower fit into your plan, count on spending close to US$100 per day. Transportation, especially to Guiana's interior, is very expensive.

Maybe they've even imported some snooty waiters. The European Space Agency site at Kourou looks like it's worth a visit and I hear Cayenne is hot!

Which reminds me. Two cannibals were eating a clown. One looks at the other and asks, "Does this taste funny to you?"

Chaos in thinking about Iraq
Since Sunday's election, I have noticed quite a few borderline antiwar types acting in a very strange manner, as though blinders have been lifted from their eyes. I must admit there were some honest antiwar types, not so blinded by emotion that they couldn't see when striking facts such as the joy and determination of the Iraqi people became obvious. I must admit I thought all of them were being blind on purpose. I'm glad to give up that misconception. The thoughtful types seem thrown into a maelstrom of indecision and wonder. Could it be true that all people do want freedom, that everyone will participate in their own liberation? Even those of us who have been hanging on by our fingertips through all the blood and horror of the last year and a half, half-doubting the wisdom of the boldest political step of the last half century, have to shake ourselves awake. More attacks will come, more brave American soldiers and defiant Iraqi soldiers and civilians will die, but the terrorists are done. They are history. As is George W. Bush.

Europe Day - Slovenia
What a beautiful country! Let me go over these pictures for a minute. Fjords, waterfalls, castles, lakes, quaint old buildings. Makes me want to relax just looking at the ambience. And right next to Venezia. Not that there isn't much to see in Tallahassee. But there isn't! It's amazing how small Slovenia's coastline is to have all those opportunities for seascapes. In that it resembles New Hampshire. Much, much more (in Slovenian) here.

Asia Day - what else could it be?
This looks like the framework for a representative government website in the most interesting country in Asia today. Interesting in that, in true democratic fashion, the future is quite unpredictable. The legions of news stories indicate that even Sunnis, in defiance of the terrorists' warnings, are participating in the elections. Who could have predicted any turnout at all in Fallujah a few months ago?! And John Kerry's on Meet the Press saying, "don't jump to conclusions!" Well, the average Iraqi isn't going to vote for freedom and then vote against it! The cat is out of the bag, the egg is broken, alea iacta est. The political alignment is entirely unclear, except that Arabs have shown that, given a chance, they will defy violence to make their own political decisions. I look forward to watching, over the next few months, a new polity emerge from chaos and nothing to allow Iraq to reach its full potential. Doomsayers compare Iraq to Lebanon in the late Seventies and Eighties. I don't see it. Lebanon had outside forces stoking the fires of internal chaos with no effective means of achieving order and stability. Thanks to George W. Bush and our brave soldiers, the Iraqis have a great chance to serve as a model not just for the Arab world but for all countries kept down by collectivism. Bravo!

A True Miracle!
I've often been critical of the "civic religion" of democracy and the dubious philosophical underpinnings of the voting process, but today's events prove the power of the democratic principle in people's hearts. And if voting is a religion, today is a miracle in Iraq.

Pearl of the Atlantic
Putting "RepublicofTogo" instead of just "Togo" into Google brings up a number of new sites, including one featuring a fetching French travel agent who really likes the place:

Where do many West Africans go for an extended holiday or weekend fun? Chances are better than average that Togo tops many of their agendas. While we were living in West Africa, my family and I will never forget the Togolese hospitality we enjoyed during our visits to that friendly country. Some say, should a popularity contest be held today, amongst all West African countries, Togo-"Pearl of West Africa" would come first. Lome, the capital city, with several five star hotels and acres of sandy, sun-drenched beaches, has become a highly popular vacation center for Europeans. For most Americans and Canadians, it's still a well kept secret. Visitors hardly need to leave their hotel area; the Atlantic ocean is one block from the heart of the city.

Unless Togo is markedly better off cognitively and financially than neighboring Ghana, though, with an IQ of 71 and GDP of $1,700, some skepticism about the abundance of Mercedes-Benzes that so impressed Miss Gaufrani is entirely appropriate. The CIA Factbook gives a per capita GDP figure of $1,500, so I guess the Togolese aren't even as well off as the Ghanaians.

Africa day - Togo (no, not "to go"!)
Assessing the state of web resources for a place like Togo, a sliver of a nation wedged in between Benin on the east and Ghana on the west in West Africa, is a bit tricky. A simple Google brings up a useful, info-packed page, although one gets the feeling the maintainers of the page have never been anywhere near Lome.

Deep Hot Biosphere - right out on the surface!
On the Saturnian moon Titan, hydrocarbons abound on the surface and, presumably, underground. Yet, wait a minute, how did they get there without dinosaurs to decompose and produce them? Isn't that how all our hydrocarbons here on Earth supposedly originated? And isn't that why the Greenie-Weenies insist that we'll run out of gasoline next week and so we'd all better start toughening up our feet so we can push our cars along like Fred Flintstone? As you may have guessed, I'm a Thomas Gold fan, only because his abiogenic theory makes so much sense. And, OK, because it would be so much fun to force the eco-freaks to admit that we actually have enough accessible hydrocarbons to last for a few thousand years, by which time enough people will have become thoroughly sick of ignorant, vicious opposition to a common-sensical nuclear power program, fission or fusion. As Gold says, "Similar hydrocarbons are widespread on many other planetary bodies". Do you think this evidence is going to be enough to make any of the doom-sayers shut their pieholes? Don't bet on it. The facts are simply amazing, though:

"What we've learned is that our speculation is really pretty good," Owen said. "The main difference, the main new thing that we have is that indeed, we can detect liquid methane on the surface. It's not seas of liquid ethane, it's really liquid methane, liquid natural gas."

Seas of gas, motorheads! Planets of petrol! Before you know it we'll be able to tell the (spit!) Saudis to put their gas back where they found it. We'll be bringing tankers in from Titan.

Vast frozen Adventureland
Having already blogged Svalbard, I figured Jan Mayen Land wouldn't be that different. But I found a great description of mountaineering on an isolated volcanic frozen island. Enthusiasm is a wonderful thing and the description is in English. "Climbing the world's northernmost volcano" is a goal anyone could empathize with. Great photos of - well, of vast frozen wasteland, which is what Friday is for! More info and pictures here.

Oceania Day - Palmyra Atoll
Or, "No-People Atoll"! Owned by the Nature Conservancy (whose mission is to apologize for and compensate the natural world for the presence of actual human beings on the planet), Palmyra Atoll is way out there in many ways. So donate to the Nature Conservancy, to help it attain its goal of making the whole world inaccessible to any of those nasty peoples! After all, without the NC, no seagulls or fish would ever inhabit the Pacific, which would be quickly turned into a gigantic parking lot for Las Vegas.
The real story of Palmyra is considerably different from the tropical-paradise-unspoiled-by-man that the treehugger collectivists would like you to believe. Pirate treasures and curses do go together, it seems:

"Palmyra is one of the last uninhabited islands in the Pacific. The island is a very threatening place. It is a hostile place. I wrote in my log: "Palmyra, a world removed from time, the place where even vinyl rots. I have never seen vinyl rot anywhere else." He also wrote that "Palmyra will always belong to itself, never to man. It is a very forbidding place."

North America Day
Including the Caribbean on Wednesday makes it possible to explore the web info available for a wide variety of countries with a wide variety of palm trees and tropical drinks. Having never been to the Caribbean, I can say it would be boring, just so many casinos and beaches and Spanish fortresses. But I don't really know. Statia, for instance, appears to have a lot of history and gourmandizing to offer. The Blue Bead, on Gallows Bay, sounds like it could keep me interested for the evening.

Burns Day
Tonight is the traditional night for the commemorative Burns Supper, wie haggis and a'(via Colby Cosh). I have always been ambivalent about Burns, who I've viewed as turning my hard-living, neurotic forebears into cartoonish Caledonian clownsters. "Oh, look at the man in the funny skirt! He's drunk! What quaint Scottish charm!". My father's family lived in Edinburgh until he was eight, and, the way I've always heard it, they were relieved as hell to make it to Boston, America, where you weren't going to starve or freeze without a fighting chance. For all those other Speirses who spent dreary lives eating fish and oatmeal on the Isle of Arran while Atlantic gales drenched the bare rocks, I intend to live as intensely pleasure-filled a life as I can prod my suspicious Scottish soul into.

South America Day - southern (very southern!) Chile
I've been worrying about running out of countries for the Weekly World Tour, but then it struck me - some of the countries are hundreds of times smaller than some of the others. So why not blog to the particular areas of countries that catch my eye, instead of assuming that one blogtrip to Santiago, for instance, disposes of the wonders of Chile? Very southern Chile is quite large, with thousands of islands, many towns and lakes. And there's plenty left for next week, next month, next year.

Close to bedtime
Past eleven-thirty now and all the Law and Order episodes are over and I'm watching this History Channel program about the handling of dead bodies over the centuries. Interesting, but somehow unsettling. Some day my body will be one of those. I don't have a great attachment to this particular bodily form. I could be a frog or horse or platypus and be just as mystical. Hey, if I were a platypus, I would just have to deal with eggs, not children!
Moving around without pain is a great pleasure. Reversion to "normality" deprives one of this pleasure, but is probably preferable to going through the pain in order to enjoy its absence when treatment becomes effective. Most of us waste so much of our lives anyway, that it almost seems to make sense to dedicate a portion of our lives to pain in order that another portion will be more enjoyable because of its freedom from that pain. OK, I may have to think about that a bit. But Balzac and Stendhal and even Voltaire would, I believe, understand.

More Gout-blogging
OK, so gout-blogging is for me, not any reader. But, then, I don't have many readers. So why not please myself? Nine-thirty now, and I'm wondering if the gout remission caused by the one capsule of indomethacin I took at five-thirty is going to last until midnight, when I take another so I can sleep without pain. It's a different world from the moaning agony of the weekend, though. And I've got four Law and Orders (Laws and Orders?) to watch this evening. My indignation at the liberal mindset exhibited in most of the cases is moderated by the fact that justice is sometimes done, or at least seen to be done.

More Gout-blogging
Eight-thirty and the whole world is a bit woozy. Thank God for Law and Order, the universe where I always feel at home, because I always know what to expect. It's getting well under seventy degrees inside here, which should trigger the heat fairly soon. Walking without pain is a wonderful experience. Thank you, Doctor Carter.

Gout-blogging
In what I think could be a big new fad, I'm going to use my blog as a daily diary of the progress of my gout treatment. My doctor today took some synovial fluid out of my knee joint today, for examination and diagnosis. He put me back on indomethacin, for the pain and stiffness, until we can figure out how to make the transition to a daily dose of a preventative gout drug. I think it's called Prebenasin or something like that. I had an excruciating weekend, trying to avoid taking any other drugs, since my previous supply of indomethacin ran out. On Monday I finally broke down and used some OTC naproxen sodium. At five-thirty I took the first indomethacin capsule. It's now six-thirty and I'm feeling a little better. Some of the stiffness and pain on movement is dissipating. Can't wait to have a pain-free sleep tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a better day, when I won't have to worry about my aches and pains, but can concentrate on dreaming of great accomplishments. I'll take another capsule at midnight or so, when I go to sleep.

Update
Seven=thirty now, two hours since I took the first indomethacin capsule. Getting extremely sleepy. Knee is freeing up and I can once again walk without limping too badly. Time for a martini, which may send me off to dreamland. Will take one more capsule before bedtime, so I can wake up pain-free. And no nagging pain all night, which drastically limited my sleep rations the last three nights. Progress.

Europe day - Moldova
Ah, beautiful Moldova! I remember well writing the condominium law for Moldova back in the Nineties. Or helping, anyway. And I didn't ask any awkward questions, like why Moldova needed a condo law. Here's Ungheni city's web page, in, notice, Romanian, the un-Cyrillic side of Moldova. Well, since Ungheni's right on the Romanian border, one can understand why they speak Romanian there. Unlike the silly trans-Dniester folks, some of whom insist on sticking to Russian. More info here. IQ number not available, but Romania's is 94.

Blogging Blog
Read Hugh Hewitt's Blog this week. I wonder how this book is going to look in ten years? HH does a good job of explaining why blogs are important and in documenting blogdom's coming of age in the 2004 elections. The book will certainly be a valuable historical resource. Maybe in 2014 its message that individuals can affect how whole cultures view political and social events will seem obvious. Strikes me, though, that the nature of blogging - idiosyncratic, iconoclastic and skeptical - fits far better with the self-reliance and rebelliousness that characterizes the libertarians and objectivists than it does with either wing of the mainstream political spectrum. If there's a story Hugh missed, perhaps that's it. Bloggers don't believe anything until it's been critically examined by thousands of knowledgeable observers with no ax to grind. In this way, blogdom at its best resembles the world of open source software versus the big MS/Apple combines, as laid out in Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The Cathedrals, of course, would be NBC, ABC, CBS and around the world the BBC and other governmental media tyrannies.
Blogdom's refusal to take any truth as proven separates bloggers from conventional religions as well as conventional political and cultural authorities. HH compares the rise of the blogs to Luther's confrontation with the Catholic hierarchy in the 1500s. It's well to remember, though, that the Protestant upwelling did not lead to a cohesive theology, but to innumerable schismatic sects. And Luther at the end of his life, like Marx, seemed to regret the chaos he had instigated. I just hope that HH and the religio-bloggers don't turn against free thought when they see their ideas losing out in the new ideological bazaar. Belief as an end in itself is entirely at odds with the freedom we now find within our grasp.

Asia Day - Macau
I've always loved colonialism. One of the best things about it is wondering how a little place like Portugal could hang onto a beautiful prosperous city halfway around the world in the days of sailing ships. Yet Macau was a focus of Portuguese trading efforts in Asia from before 1600 until 1999. You could argue it wasn't a real colony, because millions of Portuguese didn't ship out from Lisbon to take up residence there. Of course, China never needed more people! Macau was, like Hong Kong, its sister city just forty miles away, a port of entry into the China trade. From what I've been able to see on the web, though, the Portuguese presence in Macau is of much longer standing than the Brits' in HK. Oh, some may kvetch and call Macau "South China's Sin City" but such a moniker didn't hurt Las Vegas. I wonder if Macau is still a transition point where travelers from China can get a flight to Taiwan, which is impossible directly from China?
This cool slideshow made me feel like I was walking around the city. Bet it's hot and humid in the summer.

Ambivalent about snow
It's snowing in the Northeast and Midwest. I look out my Tallahassee trailer window and see only fog in the morning, clouds all day. Right now it's over seventy inside and the heat hasn't been on for several days. Oh, sure, it's supposed to go down to twenty degrees tomorrow night. But no snow. Every now and then I would like to walk out on crunchy crusty snow like up in Concord, New Hampshire. But then I think about scraping ice off windshields and ordering a new tank of heating oil every couple of weeks. That's when I realize I had a reason to move down here. My envy of snow is somewhat less powerful than my envy of warm weather was when I lived in New England. So I guess I've improved my status in life, my Happiness Quotient (HQ). The question is, in what direction do I move to make it even better?

Finished Pepys overview
Just finished reading Claire Tomalin's biography, The Unequalled Self of "old Pepys", as Samuel Johnson called him. Very well done, with a minimum of feminist finger-wagging. Tomalin does cluck about how Pepys hardly ever mentioned his women except to boast about his pleasures. But she doesn't let this obvious annoyance get in the way of a fully-realized portrait. I've been reading about Pepys for years, including all the Diaries, but I learned quite a few things. It's good to get a fuller idea of what really happened after SP stopped keeping the diary, in the exciting years leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. I know have a much better appreciation of SP's historical importance beyond that of a daily record-keeper. Some day I'll get around to reading John Evelyn's Diaries, too.

Weekly World Tour continues - Africa Day again - Malawi
Our survey of net resources for relatively obscure places focuses today on Malawi, the former Nyasaland, for all you philatelists out there. It's a reportedly beautiful country wrapped around Lake Nyasa between Mozambique and Zambia. I've heard it called the Switzerland of Africa. But, hey, why isn't Switzerland the Malawi of Europe? Stats and other info are available easily (thanks again, Myway.com!) IQ is not given, but Zambia's is 77 and Zimbabwe (a near neighbor) sits at 66. Tanzania, on the other side of the lake, comes in at 72. Mozambique's doesn't seem to be available, either. So have a guess. (All data from IQ and the Wealth of Nations, as always.) Here's a U of Texas map in .jpg format.
On our grand tour of the world, I would like to find at least one interesting fact or highlight one noteworthy feature of each of these countries, localities, islands or regions. For Malawi, I found a remarkably open-minded cartoon, Taxina, which the properly-trained academic could probably interpret so as to shed light on Asian/native cultural dynamics. As for me, I'll just enjoy.

Brave Old World?
Is it me, or does this New Yorker article (via Arts and Letters Daily)purposely ignore that great Aldous Huxley book, Brave New World? I can remember a time when the present back-and-forth about the heritability of intelligence would bring up Huxley's book immediately. It's still a presence in my mind. This trenchant passage in Jim Holt's appreciation of Francis Galton could have been right off the back cover of Brave New World:

It is the goal of the new eugenics that is morally cloudy. If its technologies are used to shape the genetic endowment of children according to the desires—and financial means—of their parents, the outcome could be a “GenRich” class of people who are smarter, healthier, and handsomer than the underclass of “Naturals.” The ideal of individual enhancement, rather than species uplift, is in stark contrast to the Galtonian vision.

I'm sure the Epsilon-minuses of the world would never mind, (they're too interested in "roof!") but all those on Alpha Island have the right to feel unjustly slighted.

Hayek, yes.

Vladimir Georgiyev, "Novaya Zemlya Is Ready for Detonations"
What, again?

Vast frozen beautiful wasteland.

Vast frozen wasteland day
So here we are at the end of our world tour standing in a vast frozen wasteland, today having been projected as Antarctica-day but craving diversity in iciness, one has liberated one's thoughts to subsume the essence of Antarctica and identify it anywhere it appears around the world. Or, even, if one expands one's horizons, on other worlds, like Titan or Neptune. Now the usual frozen wasteland entry should look like something like this:

Bouvetøya , 54°25'S : 3°22'E

Also known as Bouvet, this island is a single volcanic island with an offlier. The island covers 54 km² with its highest elevation being Mt. Olavtoppen at 780 m. It is 93% glacierized. Discovered by Jean Baptiste Charles de Lozier Bouvet on January 1, 1739, the first recorded landing was by sealers in 1822. The island is uninhabited with no wintering population, and is a dependency of Norway (claimed in 1927).

The important part of course is "93% glacierized". The fact of no habitation with no wintering population is also to be carefully noted. The Norwegians seem to specialize in this sort of place, looking desperately around the world, no doubt, for some environment that makes good old Trømso look habitable by contrast.

Elevation envy?
Peggy Noonan's cautious review of the President's Inaugural speech has to bring up the possibility that she really, really would have liked to have written the speech for W. I never thought of her as an old grump, but this:

This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

comes pretty close to grumpiness. Aren't inaugural speeches for visions of perfection? Remember, W is right up there battling with the Washingtons, Jeffersons and Lincolns of the earth, as well as the bin Ladens. I say go for it.

Lord Howe Island Day
Thursday was going to be Australia Day, but I realised there was only one government in the smallest continent, so I could only learn about its currency and culture once. That may be simple-minded, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to make Thursday "Australia, Oceania and other little interesting islands-day" And Friday, which was going to be Antarctica Day, could be Frozen Wasteland Day, since there's no government and precious little culture in Antarctica. But there are plenty of frozen wastelands out there.
Anyway, here's a link to info about Lord Howe Island, an isolated nature park about halfway between Australia and New Zealand in the sunny South Pacific. Politically, it's part of New South Wales, but it looks like it might be a cool place to spend a vacation week if you really really liked birds and plants.

North America Day Focus: St. Pierre et Miquelon
You would think it might be hard to find an obscure political entity in North America. The US, Canada, Mexico, that's about it? Not quite. A few historical remnants persist, like this shadow of the great-a-long-time-ago French Empire in North America. Not too hard to get too, either, with multiple ferries and airports. French electrical system, the Euro and no cybercafés, though. Yuck. Well, I guess one wouldn't go there to sit in front of a computer. OK, then, why would you go there? Give me a minute. To say you went there? To fish?

23 degrees in Florida
It's a bit chilly tonight, although not unprecedently so for Tallahassee. My poor Peugeot has to endure another cold night. I really need to get it going for good. Or at least for as long as a 1987 Frenchiemobile is supposed to last. It's a great car when it's running - smooth, powerful and luxurious. Perhaps someday I'll ship it over to the Massif Centrale. Or sell it to a Cairo (Egypt, not Georgia!) cabbie. They charge twice as much for a ride in a Peugeot. And they can probably find parts and mechanics who know something about Pugs. Unlike in chilly Tallahassee.

It's those darn dancing robots again!
First they take away my factory job, then they outperform me at math and chess, now they're dancing away with all the women! (via Slashdot) Somebody's got to do something about these robots. Give a fat old white guy a chance! There's no use applying for that job driving a backhoe. They've got that covered (scroll down). It wouldn't be so bad, but do they have to be better dressed and with flashier sunglasses, too!? And I bet they don't get gout.

South America Day. Focus: Paraguay.
The Weekly World Tour continues, with a look at the overlooked, such as this alluring and temperate refuge. (Rumor has it certain Teutonic refugees took advantage of its obscurity in, oh, just coincidentally, 1945 or thereabouts). The only problem with the web resources I'm finding is that a good number of them have an odd habit of being written in Spanish! Go figure! I mean, "Contactico Turistico"?! Why can't they just say "Tourist Contact" so people can understand them? Stubborn Spanish-type South Americans!
Finally! A page in a civilized language, via the Hotel Westfalenhaus (Westphalia? Hmm. What country is that in?) Hey, the calendar says only one day of the year is a "Day of Work"! My kind of country! (pais?)

Unfortunately, Paraguay isn't listed in this table, taken from Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations, so I can't tell you the national IQ. Perhaps you can make a guess from the recorded 96 IQs of Argentina and Uruguay, though, since they are somewhat similar, I believe, in ethnic composition and climate. The only divergence might be traceable to Paraguay's interior position, implying a larger Indian population. Peru, for instance, with a heavily Indian population, comes in at 90. Keep in mind that the Nazis may have actually increased the IQ, and the national susceptibility to martial music and mustached haranguers. It's always good to know the cognitive status of a country's people before you trust them with your money and time.

IQ - in a nutshell
You don't really have to read The Bell Curve to understand the state of thinking about intelligence, although I highly recommend the experience. This "public statement" makes most of the points Herrnstein and Murray make, in one page. I don't pretend that it answers all the questions, but it certainly presents them clearly and honestly, along with the contentions that have stirred up so much controversy in the last ten years. Now if you want something controversial, but still coherent and logical, try La Griffe du Lion. Don't worry, you can get past the Frenchiness.

Svalbard Day!
Who knew there was a Radisson in Svalbard! I didn't even know Svalbard and Jan Mayen were considered part of Europe (this being Europe Day) but they are owned by Norway. I guess there wouldn't be any other category to put them in, other than "Frozen Wastelands". If you like snowmobiles, polar bears and Northern Lights, this is your kind of place. Judging by the number of hotels and guest houses, a good number (and I use that word advisedly!) of Norwegians get up to this Ultima Thule every year.

Titan Day!
Some images (via Instapundit) of the surface of Titan from the European Space Agency have been manipulated by amateurs to produce interesting mosaics and panaromas. As the compiler says:

This work has been done by amateurs with no extensive scientific background, publishing the first images in under 8 hours. We'll have to wait for ESA/NASA to deliver us the correct images, so please, take the resulting images on this page with a grain of salt (that was a disclaimer). We have shown, however, to be able to bring composited images online earlier than ESA/NASA! It was an amazing night, these results have been gathered in about 8 hours time starting with the raw images and having no idea of what to expect, or what goals to reach.

The images that have been used are the same images that ESA/NASA is using, and we expect that the resulting images created by the professionals will be more extensive than those on this page, but they will be based on the same quality raw images as used in the pictures below, so do not expect higher resolutions from ESA or NASA.

Astonishing! They said the rivers were of liquid ethane, but just for a minute I thought they said "ethanol". The mountains were of some foamy stuff that might - just possibly! - be peppermint flavored. Rivers of whisky, seas of gin in the Big Rock Candy Mountains. When does the next probe leave?
Just think of the trouble that could have been avoided if Mary Mapes had taken the faxed documents she got from the Kinko's in Plano (or wherever it was), scanned them to a webpage, emailed the link around the blogosphere and said, in effect, "Hey, fellows, what do you think of this?" before she jumped to any conclusions! I'm sure amateurs would have taken that raw data and come to far more appropriate conclusions far sooner than CBS News did.

Kyrgyz-what?
Perhaps we should lower our sights a bit. At least we can get the name of the country right. But then why be so boring as to have just one name? The US is also USA, America, United States, Les Etats-Unis, Los Estados Unidos, The Land of the Big PX (only service brats would understand that!) ZI (Zone of the Interior) and others that can't be repeated, usually used by those losers being out-competed, out-invented, out-fought and out-hustled by the world's greatest yet most humble nation!
The y/i distinction changes the Kyrgyz Republic into the Kirgiz ethnic minority in China. Google's quite adamant about that. But why!? The Weekly World Tour, as usual, raises more questions than it answers.

Asia Day!
Focus: Kyrgyzstan. Problem: not too much is available in the way of local sites in Kyr-stan. I'm not really looking to link to USAID or other NGO-supported sites. The idea of this Weekly World Tour is to identify web resources cobbled up by local residents on their own initiative. That said, this Freenet site, though it appears to be a USAID project, looks to be a good intro to places where locals might contribute real stuff. The fact that the Kyr-stan freenet links to an article about Uzbekistan that originated in Moscow, from Nezavisimaya Gazeta, tells you how thin on the ground net resources are in Kyr-stan. I'll keep looking.

Update
Jackpot! I found a Kyr-stan site funded by George Soros, with a link to a cartoon by Ted Rall, who has "traveled extensively in Central Asia"! Of course, I'm not going to link to anything by either of these spawns of the devil. I just hope the two of them, traveling together, get caught up in a revolution in Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan and someone points out to the soldiers capturing them the cartoons Rall has drawn mocking the local governments. If I could only be there to see it, I would die happy!

Asia day a little early?
Maybe tomorrow should be Asia Day. This article showed up on Instapundit, dated tomorrow, about the Japanese preparing to defend their islands from the Chinese. Gee, wasn't there some kind of unpleasantness between the Japanese and Chinese in the Thirties and Forties? Wasn't that one of the times we had to save a disorderly chaotic regime from Fascism? Just like France? Didn't we lose a lot of men and have to resort to the atomic bomb? I just hope this time we don't have to save the Japanese from the Chinese.

Africa Day
I've decided to expand the reach of my blogging beyond Dean's World, Instapundit and The Corner. Each day of the week I plan to link to a blog or other site from some interesting but little-known part of the world. Saturday, for instance, could be Africa Day. And so, here's the Eritrean Ministry of Information webpage with some pictures of the capital, Asmara. I don't wish to be patronizing, but perhaps it would be a good idea to provide a bit of info on the places I link to. Eritrea, for instance, is a former Italian colony. It was part of Ethiopia for decades after WWII and just recently (1991) became independent, after a long and bloody war. This site has much more, clearly organized. Here's the national symbol.

Last word on the liberation of Iraq
As so often happens these days, Victor Davis Hanson has supplied the last word on the successful liberation of Iraq for which George W. Bush will go down in history as a political mastermind. Hanson invokes valuable historical context and stubbornly points out the reality that lies before everyone's noses but which none of the mainstream media is willing to acknowledge:

There are many constants in all this pessimistic confusion — beside the fact that we are becoming a near hysterical society. First, our miraculous efforts in toppling the Taliban and Saddam have apparently made us forget war is always a litany of mistakes. No conflict is conducted according to either antebellum planning or can proceed with the benefit of hindsight. Iraq was not Yemen or Qatar, but rather the most wicked regime in the world, in the heart of the Arab world, full of oil, terrorists, and mass graves. There were no helpful neighbors to keep a lid on their own infiltrating jihadists. Instead we had to go into the heart of the caliphate, take out a mass murderer, restore civil society after 30 years of brutality, and ward off Sunni and Baathist fomenters in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria — all the while keeping out Iranian-Shiite agents bent on stopping democracy. The wonder is not that there is violence and gloom in Iraq, but that less than two years after Saddam was removed, elections are still on track.

It needs to be pointed out every day, and remembered insistently, how the collectivist press utterly refused to lend moral support to the Afghan people when it became obvious that they would win their battle against medieval jihadism. It is greatly to the credit of this administration that they did not follow the media's lead, as Clinton or Gore or Kerry surely would have. And it must dismay the Zarqawis and bin Ladens of the world no end that Bush's steadfastness in Afghanistan is being followed up, for all its mistakes and delays, with equal determination in Iraq.

Drugged driving en françaisThe French have come up with a new way to intrude on people's liberties by having saliva tests for drivers, to make sure they're not driving under the influence of "stupéfiants". I'm glad the new test is so eagerly awaited by the forces of "order":

Le test salivaire, qui permet de se passer d'un médecin mais pas du contrôle sanguin postérieur au dépistage, était donc très attendu par les forces de l'ordre.

Of course, mes amis, we will continue to allow the Mussulmen to construct bombs by the sound of Koranic chants in their bidonvilles. But at least teenagers won't be driving while stoned. Sure is convenient not to have to worry about that pesky Fourth Amendment. Or any of the rest of the Constitution, for that matter.