1875

My grandfather, Arthur Colchester, was born in 1875. I remember as a child of 8 or so playing with him in our home in Florida, in about 1955. He must then have been 80. Just think what he lived through. In 1875, Ulysses S. Grant was president of the United States. The Civil War had only been over for a decade. Queen Victoria still had more than a quarter of a century to reign over the British Empire. The Declaration of Independence had been signed only 99 years before. The Constitution had been in effect for 86 years. The telephone would not be invented until the next year. Marconi was only a year old, although Tesla was already 19. Their dispute about who invented the radio would not be resolved for more than sixty years. General George Armstrong Custer still had a year to live, although the Indian Wars were in full spate. San Francisco was experiencing the first Tong War. The first Kentucky Derby ran in May. William Backhouse Astor, the richest man in the United States, died in 1875. He had been born in 1792. If my grandfather had, at the age of 8 in 1883, had a chat with his 83-year old grandfather, he would have been talking to a man born in the eighteenth century.

Practical automobiles were not to be invented for another ten years or so. Henry Ford was twelve years old. Neither of the Wright brothers was ten yet. Kitty Hawk lay 28 years in the future. Railroads had only been prevalent for thirty years. My grandfather, in his twenties, worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad as it was extended across Canada. His job was shooting mountain lions that threatened the railroad workers.

In 1875, Tchaikovsky was still working on Swan Lake. Bizet's Carmen was first performed. Gaslight was the new miracle technology. The transAtlantic telegraph cable had been operating for nine years, Most people got from place to place by foot, or horse if they were lucky. Only in the most heavily populated places were trolleys and horse-drawn busses available. Life was nasty, brutish and short to a degree that most of the people alive today, even in the poorest countries, could barely imagine. But in the most forward-thinking lands, it seemed like the best time ever. Because it was. Medicine, industry, transport, food production and research were entering an era of unbelievably rapid progress.

Full life

It struck me this morning: If I were to die now, at the age of 57, people would say, "He had children, a marriage, a career of sorts, some experiences, but still what a shame he had to die so young." But if I survive thirty more years and die at 87, they would say, "Well, he had a full life." The fulness of life lies ahead.

Cui bono?

A Samizdata quote from P.J. O'Rourke sends me drifting back in time to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I started my not-particularly-successful career in government jobbery:

Starting a job as a welfare "financial assistance social worker" decades ago in Massachusetts, I was challenged to consider "who was really on welfare?" the recipients or the workers? Certainly the workers got more benefits from the system. And the workers were overwhelmingly liberal college graduates. They did, of course, have to show up every day and at least pretend to work. All the recipients had to do was whine convincingly. No, wait a minute, that's right. The workers whined, too. And certainly the money spent on the system went mostly to administration, not to paying benefits. Years later a program was started to give recipients jobs handing out benefits. It was universally noted that the ex-recipients were much harder on new recipients than the college kids ever had been.

Osama bin Libby!

Lileks hits the bullseye again:

Letter-writer talking points: The above was a transparent attempt to shift attention away from Scooter. Because that's really the biggest problem the nation has faced in the last five years. Osama bin Libby.

Kaus gets curious

Mickey Kaus starts wondering about some of the same things that struck me yesterday:

Would Libby really have been dumb enough to contradict his own notes (which the prosecutor has had from the start) under oath?

He even has a link to info about the Marc Rich/Clinton/Libby connection. He hasn't stumbled on Sailer yet, though. Maybe in a couple of weeks everyone will be in the same ballpark with me, or I'll be exposed as just another blognut. More here. And a mention of Chandra Levy!? Could Vince Foster be tied in next?

Curiouser and curiouser

Who is "Scooter" Libby? And why does he still use a sixth-grade nickname at the age of 55? Anyway, after reading this more than troubling information from Steve Sailer, I am beginning to think that Mr. Libby's recent activities could use even more scrutiny than Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald gave them. Why did Dick Cheney hire Marc Rich's lawyer? Most of all, why did Scooter lie so unconvincingly and amateurishly to the investigators and the grand jury, if the indictment is true? Why in the world would a professional politician and high-stakes Washington lawyer do something like that? Why would Scooter get involved, even tangentially, with a reporter like Judith Miller? What kind of game is he playing? Maybe I'm nuts, but it sure looks like he's some sort of agent provocateur or mole. What did he mean in that silly (?) note to Judith Miller about "the aspens are all quaking together this time of year because they're all connected at the roots."? Was Scooter setting a petard in the office of the VP and was he hoist by it because Fitzgerald wouldn't go along with the game? If it starts coming out that Scooter and Joe Wilson were seen having mint tea together in Niger, I'm really going to start freaking!

Indictment Day

As Glenn Reynolds said, "The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse."

And in response to Bill Quick's indignation at the fact that the indictments don't even address the underlying crime, I became a tad indignant myself:

Have you read the indictment? Libby is essentially being indicted for making "false statements" to Tim Russert on Meet the Press!! It's like indicting George Stephanopolous for statements he made on TV after the Monica investigation started - or Rahm Emanuel or James Carville or Paul Begala. Heck, Ken Starr didn't even indict Klintoon himself, when he clearly made actual false statements to the grand jury itself. Sure, Libby should have been smarter. But this indictment, as Glenn Reynolds said, is "lame".

Update
Continuing on Dean Esmay:

Didn't Fitzgerald seem VERY nervous, voice shaking and all, in the press conference? He's an experienced prosecutor, it couldn't have just been public speaking that got to him. I think he knows he's got nothing and he's worried - even a little ashamed - about presenting such a ridiculous case to the Grand Jury. I also don't think he did a very good job presenting the indictment. He went on about how important it was to prevent leaks of CIA agent identities, but then not only didn't indict anyone for leaks, he didn't even say a prosecutable leak had occurred. Sounds like he's worried about justifying two years of work.

Teddy is right for once?
Not hardly. Peggy Noonan is getting down in the dumps. But she just should remember, anything Teddy Kennedy says:

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford's lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It's called "Symptoms of Withdrawal." At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford's mother's apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn't gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. "Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta." Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy "took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

is wrong.
I'm optimistic. I certainly don't think things are worse than they were in, say, 1970. Now there was a year to forget, when things were really and truly going downhill and stayed down there for a long time. At least we can't rationally expect to lose a war, lose control of gas prices, see inflation at all-time highs, watch with horror the rise of disco and suffer through four years of Jimmy Carter again within the next ten years. Via the Corner.

Self-consciousness

I'm getting in a lot of my favorite ideas these days. Dailypundit reported on a Reason article extolling the individual. So I had to wonder:

What happens when the very meaning of "individual" changes? The worldview of artificial but fully intelligent and conscious brains connected to multiple sensors of all different types has to be different from that of a man with two eyes and ears and a nose. We are so used to thinking of the individual as man-sized with a head-sized brain that I'm not sure it will be easy to adapt to an individual that can sense and think like a god. What will the appropriate "unit of consciousness" be?

Well, what do you know, my security code included "666"!(looks around nervously)

Grocery stores - again


Gene Expression linked to a story about remotely controlling people's behavior, so I had to feed my two main obsessions - beer and green beans - with this comment:

Maybe competing hackers could try to remotely control you when you step into a grocery store, one making you feel like it would be such a good idea to get some Budweiser, then another taking over and making you switch to Miller. Of course, that wouldn't really constitute much of a change in behavior outwardly ... I'm sure many people will be relieved at not having to make their own decisions any more. This reminds me of the sight of shoppers in front of the cans of green beans, with a cell phone stuck to their ears, calling someone to decide for them whether they want the french cut or straight beans.

I for one welcome our new hacker overlords.

Religion and science - again

Stephen Green links to an Ann Applebaum piece about the "bird flu" doom that awaits us all. Boy is she going to look silly in a couple of years. But I just had to comment on her gratuitous slap at all things religious:

The history of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution which brought so many good things to so many people is the story of religion and science finding a way to coexist, not the story of science condemning any and every religious idea out of hand. The last three hundred years in the West have demonstrated that scientific progress is possible when religion is not exterminated, as long as it does not dominate.

Sure, I'm an objectivist. And I see much evidence that anti-scientific thinking is a worse pandemic than the bird flu ever will be. But it's truly important that those who harbor religious feelings and yet understand and work with science every day - and that means most people - be tolerated while they are encouraged to drop those silly emotional sentiments. The genius of capitalism is that it finds a way to accommodate everyone, no matter how wrong they might be, as long as they don't get physically violent. And science and capitalism are two sides of the same coin, whose substance is, do I have to say it? Logic.

Nano! Nano!

Nano-science has apparently come up with a potential successor to the lightbulb. You know, those round glass things GE keeps making with shorter and shorter lives as electricity gets more and more expensive? Perhaps you've noticed leds in turn signals and traffic lights. Now, thanks to nano-wizardry every home could have not just one but billions:

Take an LED that produces intense, blue light. Coat it with a thin layer of special microscopic beads called quantum dots. And you have what could become the successor to the venerable light bulb.

The resulting hybrid LED gives off a warm white light with a slightly yellow cast, similar to that of the incandescent lamp.

Note in the whole article the interesting use of the word "magic". As in "any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic". Keep waving that magic wand, electrical engineers. Before too long our electric bills will be down to zero like our phone bills.

Bumper Sticker

What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it's all about?

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.