It's Time We Got Rid of All Those Burdensome Children!

On ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, Nancy Pelosi admitted a lot in the following exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

So, children are a burden to society, as far as Pelosi is concerned. Specifically, they are a burden to government, and Pelosi considers the government and the economy the same (how else does what she says make sense?). I guess if you want to help out the economy, you should do your civic duty and get an abortion. Have to get rid of all those burdens on society. This is typical Leftist thinking -- if you don't fit into the system, we have to get rid of you.

Of course, her plan won't do anything about the immediate economy. Further, eliminating parts of a system do not necessarily improve the system or make it grow. In fact, it is more likely to reduce the complexity of the overall system over time. Of course, by putting it in these terms, many on the Left would accuse me of dehumanization. But it is they who, in advocating the elimination of potential children, who are dehumanizing. Anti-life is anti-growth at any level.

The Real Shame

Kyle Queal should be ashamed for firing his girl's basketball coach for refusing to be ashamed of his team demonstrating their excellence on the court. I was considering enrolling my daughter in Covenant School when she was old enough to attend, but how can I justify that decision when it is clear that the headmaster of the school is intent on first apologizing for and then punishing excellence? Those who complain that "these are children after all" are masking a hatred of excellence behind such rhetoric. The Covenant School girls' basketball team did what they should have done in playing their very best; the opposing team showed their integrity in refusing to throw in the towel at halftime. It would have been disrespectful and condescending to the losing team for the winning one to "give them a chance." The adults involved should be ashamed that the children are the ones showing more honor, integrity, and backbone than the adults.

The Left's War on Choice

John Stossel on the Left's War on Choice. And he's right. The Left do not want us to be free to choose. They are convinced that we are too stupid or bad to make the right choices so they, in their infinitely greater wisdom and virtue, must make it for us. Never mind that so far there is little to no evidence that anyone who has ever entered government anyplace has ever shown greater wisdom or virtue than the vast majority of the human population. Typically, they have demonstrated that they have far, far less.

Congratulations Obama

David Horowiz has a marvelous article on the pride we should feel about Obama's Inauguration. And he is right, we should. There is a significant part of me that is very happy he is President precisely because of what it has done and will continue to do for us as a nation. He is my President. Being the person I am, though, that means that he will have to withstand my loyal opposition from my tiny little corner of cyberspace. I'm sure he can take it. I wish him nothing but true success (which means he will have to have many failures in order to succeed, as former President Clinton knows). I hope Obama has a wonderful Inauguration Day.

Hope and Obama's Presidency

Tomorrow we inaugurate Barack Hussein Obama our 44th President. And all I have right now is hope.

I hope Obama is not as economically radical as his associations suggest he is. Which is to say, I hope he only happened to associate with Marxists and that he is in fact not one.

I hope that Obama's presence in his church in Chicago was in fact nothing more than a cynical act of political expediency and in no way reflects either his religious beliefs or general ideology.

I hope that Obama has very, very wise advisors when it comes to international affairs.

I hope (and, yet, cannot hope) that nobody on the international scene decides to test Obama.

I hope that Obama's economic "recovery" bill won't put this economy into a depression. Unfortunately, economist John Lott isn't hopeful.

I hope that Obama's tax cuts pass -- any tax cuts are better than none.

I hope Obama supports Israel over Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran.

I hope Obama does in fact have a successful, uneventful Presidency. He will do so if he abandons his redistributionist ideology and embraced free market economics. Perhaps someone will be able to communicate to him that reality works, and replacing the spontaneous order economy with ideology has not, does not, and will not work.

And, if none of my hopes come true, I at least hope that the Emerson Institute will receive the funding it needs to fight for the free market by supporting the right artists and scholars.

Cultures of Vengeance and Abu Ghraib (Reprint)

This is an article that was published by TechCentralStaiton (now, TCSDaily.com). I am publishing it here because I can no longer find it in the archives at TCSDaily.

Cultures of Vengeance and Abu Ghraib

When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, many asked how it could have happened. The first assumption many jumped to was that the corruption must have come from the top – as though corruption were unusual, and could only be explained if one top person was corrupt. This is a safe assumption when dealing with dictators, as the majority of the corruption is indeed at the top. But, as the subsequent investigation showed, in a country where power is decentralized, corruption does not have to spring from the Presidency, or even the military leadership. Even the head of the prison was apparently unaware of what was going on under her watch. So we are still left with the mystery of the source of such corruption as would lead to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

My answer at first sounds like a cliche: it is institutional. When most people say this, they mean that the institution’s rules create corruption, and if we only had the right rules, we would eliminate corruption forever. What I mean to suggest, however, is that the very institution of the military – and of the police, for that matter – is corrupting, regardless of the rules. Now, before you get angry (or, if you are of an anarchist slant, jump for joy), let me explain.

The purpose of a military in a just society is to protect the country from invasion or otherwise being threatened. When an invasion or attack occurs, its purpose is to take vengeance on those who hurt or try to hurt us. In the same vein, the purpose of a police force in a just society is to protect the citizens from criminals. And when a crime is committed, its purpose is to take vengeance on those who committed the crime, by tracking them down and arresting them – though sometimes this vengeance is necessarily more direct. This is the very definition of what a military and a police force are supposed to do in a just society, to keep its people safe. When someone performs an injustice, it is their job to punish that person, or capture them so they may be punished. It is also the reason why these institutions are inherently corrupting.

What is Revenge?

Revenge is the punishing of an injustice already performed; it is defined as the returning of evil for evil. Killing a fellow human is evil – murder is prohibited in all cultures, even if the definition of murder sometimes varies – yet it is sometimes necessary in self-defense. But even if killing someone is justified, any time you kill someone, it corrupts you. This is why so many who have killed in self-defense feel guilty afterwards, even knowing if they had not done it, they or others would now be dead. This is why the military and police departments have psychiatrists. The doing of evil, even when necessary to prevent a greater evil, is corrupting. Since the military and the police are our institutions of revenge, they become cultures of revenge, and cultures of revenge are always corrupting.

The word “avenge” comes from the Latin a-, “to” and vindic_re, “punish,” which is derived from deik, which is also the root of the Greek word diké, which is typically translated as justice, but which carries with it the idea of balance. There is a sense of balance in doing evil for evil, but it is a balance that leads to escalation, making the world less just, not more. There is a balance in everyone being equally evil, but is this any sort of balance we really want?

In his Rhetoric, Aristotle points out that there is a kind of good that is good because it is better than another choice – but that this is the worst kind of good (the best kind of good is that which aims at the beautiful). Vengeance is this worst kind of good, when it is a good. If corruption cannot be eliminated in a culture of revenge, can one at least reduce the corruption? A bad kind of vengeance would be one where a greater evil is given for a lesser evil. A better kind of vengeance is then one where an equal evil is given for an evil. But I think we can agree that we do not want a police or military force with members as evil as those they are fighting. If we want better, less corrupt protectors, we need laws where, if revenge is needed, the revenge is a lesser evil than the one originally perpetuated. To do this, of course, would require the identification of “evil,” including levels of “evil,” so we do not make the mistake of using a greater evil against a lesser one. A historical example is prohibition in the early part of the 20th Century in the United States. Since alcohol was illegal, buying and selling it could get one put in prison. This was a greater evil (putting someone in prison) for a lesser evil (buying and selling alcohol), and most would now say it was using an evil against something that was and is at least morally neutral, since drunkenness and alcoholism are bad (these being actions), though the social benefits of drinking and the health benefits of at least red wine are good. During prohibition, we saw dramatic increases in all crimes, particularly murder, organized crime, and police corruption. When prohibition was repealed, the crime rates all dramatically decreased. This is why it is important to be able to identify what is good and what is bad, or even evil.

Forgiveness is the giving of good for evil. Forgiveness is not rewarding evil – rewarding evil would itself be evil – but rather a gift of love to those who do wrong. Nor is forgiveness the elimination of punishment for doing wrong. Forgiveness occurs both during and after punishment, after the person has been corrected. One has far less corruption in a culture of forgiveness, as no evil is returned for evil. Thus is evil lessened in the culture. As a gift freely given, forgiveness is good, and makes the culture in which it is practiced good. Forgiveness is, like kindness, a gift which makes the recipient better for having received it. To get forgiveness and kindness, we must first give it. If the world is not as forgiving and kind as you would like it to be, it is no one’s fault but your own. You can give forgiveness and kindness, but you cannot take it. You thus cannot make anyone forgiving or kind – you can only be forgiving or kind yourself.

It is impractical for a government to forgive even if it is best for its people to be forgiving. The purpose of a military and a police force is to practice vengeance for a society so the other members of that society do not have to do so – and are thus protected from its corrupting influence. The people who volunteer to serve the military or as a police officer are thus volunteering to put themselves in moral jeopardy so the rest of society can be good. Corruption occurs among those who do not have the moral fortitude to withstand the corrupting influence of vengeance. This is why the military and the police must always be policed, to weed out those most easily corrupted.

The Tragic Institutions

To have a free and ethical society, we must have a military and a police force. But these institutions, even when we reduce the corruption by making our vengeance less evil than the evils perpetuated, are still corrupting. We thus create a tragic situation: we must have corrupting institutions so that everyone else may live free of the corrupting influence of vengeance. As a society it is our duty to those who would put themselves in moral jeopardy to make sure we always have laws and engage in wars that give less evil punishments for the evils they are meant to fight, so these institutions will be less corrupting.

There are, of course, a few who will join the military or police because these institutions are corrupting. They look forward to abusing others, and expect they will not get caught. These must always be weeded out – before they join, when possible. But the vast majority of people who join the military and police join up to do good, to protect their fellow citizens. Among those are many who are morally good enough to withstand the corrupting influence inherent in these institutions. One could say that such people are, for all intents and purposes, heroically good. However, there are also those who join intending to be good, but who do not realize they are not good enough to withstand the corruption. When they succumb to the corruption, they become tragic heroes, in the tradition of Oedipus – who also fell because of his good intentions and because he had overextended himself. And, like Oedipus, such good people who have succumbed to corruption must be removed, for the good of society.

When we look at what happened at Abu Ghraib, we can see it is an institutional problem. We now know who among those who worked at Abu Ghraib, as well as their superiors are either most corrupt or most susceptible to corruption, meaning we can now remove them from the ranks. What should be most remarkable is how very little corruption Abu Ghraib actually represents. Considering how many armies through history made it a practice to murder, steal, rape, and torture, we should be proud of ourselves for having as little corruption as we do in the military – just as we should be proud of ourselves for being so outraged by it when it does occur. This suggests that our institutions of vengeance are working as they should.

Nationalizing the Banks

Well, it's almost official: we are nationalizing several banks. I expect the same kinds of efficiencies and profitability we see in all the other nationalized companies around the world. The federal government seems determined to turn this into a depression -- and a further excuse for more nationalizations. Hold it, wait, I think I just answered my own question on why they would do something that would cause a depression. Never mind.

Heinrich Heine on Nature and Poetry

"Like a good poet, nature does not like abrupt transitions. The clouds, as bizarre as they sometimes appeared to be shaped, have a white or at least a soft tint that corresponds harmoniously with the blue sky and the green earth, so that all the colors of a region melt into one another like gentle music, and every view of nature has the effect of quieting pain and calming the spirit. [...] Just like a great poet, nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the fewest means. It has only a sun, trees, flowers, water, and love. To be sure, if the last is lacking in the heart of the observer, the whole view will probably seem to be a poor one; the sun is then only so-and-so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for kindling, the flowers are classified by their stamens, and water is wet."

-- from The Hartz Journey, The German Library 32, pg. 125

The EPA's Plan to Make Global Warming Worse, Clear Cut Rain Forests, and Reduce Biodiversity

The EPA plans to tax ranchers for each cow they own to fight their contribution to global warming (from flatulence).

The EPA can, of course, only tax American ranchers.

The ranchers will pass on the price of the tax to the consumer in higher beef and milk prices.

This will increase the demand for foreign beef -- including beef from places like Brazil.

In places like Brazil, grazing land is created by clear cutting forests.

Trees absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

Thus, the EPA's tax will contribute to global warming, clear cutting of rain forests, and the reduction of biodiversity in other countries.

Great plan.

Idiots.

A Scholarly Life of Ironies

Oh well, it looks like I won't be teaching philosophy after all. It seems the dean for the college I was set to teach at didn't approve of my credentials. You see, you have to have 18 graduate hours of philosophy to teach philosophy at the community college level, and UTD, where I got my Ph.D. has a strange, interdisciplinary program where philosophy classes, per se, aren't offered. Thus, one has to argue for each and every class. I thought for certain I had it:

HUSL-6372 -- Existentialism (school of philosophy)
HUSL-6370 -- Foundationalism and Antifoundationalism (metaphysics)
HUSL-7333 -- Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (was also cross-listed as HUHI-7333)
HUSL-6370 -- Beauty (aesthetic philosophy)
HUHI-7379 -- Topics in Rec. Cont. Phil. -- Nietzsche
HUHI-7340 -- Germans and Greeks (history of philosophical thought)
HUSL-6355 -- Game Theory in the Humanities

I think the first 6 would be easiest to argue, though the last one is in essence informal logic and decision theory.

Now, here's the funny thing: this Fall my book, Diaphysics, a work of philosophy, will be published. So I can publish a book on philosophy, but I cannot teach philosophy. I also will have a paper published soon (after revisions are finished) on economics, though I also cannot teach economics. It seems I'm readily getting published in fields I'm not qualified to teach, but I'm not getting published in fields in which I am qualified to teach (creative writing, literary studies, humanities). Go figure.

Article on the Rejection of Beauty in Art

My brother would be outraged by the first (about) half of this article on modern art and the rejection of beauty, but it's worth getting to the end. He would also argue that he's not had this experience at his MFA program at UNT, but then UNT sounds like an exceptional program.

Analysts Suggest Horsey Set Buggy Whip Maker Can't Turn Around Company

Things were so bad last year that a single Toyota model, the Camry/Solara midsize car, outsold the entire production of buggy whips.

"Basically they're done," said Jebediah Mason, a transportation analyst with the consulting company Outter Insight in Williamsburg, VA. "There is no real possibility of turning this thing around as an industry in my opinion."

Buggy whip producers will not comment on speculation about its future, spokeswoman Jezebel Morgana said Wednesday.

"We are completely focused on our plans to ensure the future viability of our company," she said.

U.S. sales of buggy whips fell 30 percent last year, the worst decline of any major goods producer. Analysts say most buggy whips don't look, feel or drive horses as well as they used to.

The Horsey Set plans to introduce an electric buggy whip in 2010, but until then, there are few promising models to boost sales. Many analysts predict that by 2010, The Horsey Set will be acquired by another buggy whip maker or sold in pieces by its majority owner, New York private equity firm 19th Century Capital Management.

The Horsey Set's chief financial officer has said the company needs $7 billion every 45 days to pay parts suppliers, and analysts question whether the company's meager sales are generating enough cash to make those payments.

Analysts also say an acquisition by Ass Sets is still possible. The two companies discussed it late last year before Ass Sets backed away to focus on its own cash issues.

Friederick Hayek, a University of Chicago economics professor who has been critical of government subsidies and bailouts, said Horsey Set's sales numbers are "further evidence of an unviable entity."

When buggy whip makers went to Washington late last year, their aim was to get enough money to become viable again. They wound up with only enough help from the Bush administration to get them through March, when President-elect Barack Obama will be in office and might provide more aid.

Hayek said giving the carmakers any money is burning cash.

"I'm a big fan of not throwing good money after bad," he said. "The idea that you would enter into a financing relationship like this without any parameters is more evidence of the complete insanity of all this."

A Treasury Department spokeswoman noted that the agreement for the government's buggy whip maker's loans required that the administration designate someone to keep analyzing the companies' finances and viability.

Hayek said it's too late for Horsey Set and Ass Set to solve their problems, including high labor costs and union work rules that hinder competitiveness.

To get the loans, Ass Set and Horsey Set had to agree to negotiate concessions from creditors and the United Buggy Whip Makers union, but the specifics have yet to be worked out. The government can call in the loans March 31.

Horsey Set's Chief Executive Obediah Numbrain, in a presentation to the Senate Banking Committee last month, said the company could stay alive in the long term with reasonable concessions, a $7 billion bridge loan and $6 billion more out of the $25 billion Congress allocated to develop new wrist-efficient technology.

The Bush administration provided a $4 billion loan. Now, Horsey Set is counting on an additional $3 billion in aid for its financing arm, Horsey Set Financial.

Some lawmakers say buggy whip makers need time to wring out the concessions, and point out that the recession and nearly frozen credit markets are at least partly to blame for poor sales.

"You could make a buggy whip that could run on air or could fly and people wouldn't buy it," said Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. "I'm hoping that we may see some of that investor consumer confidence come back."

Horsey Set, based in Auburn Hills, Mich., and Mule Train Co., in nearby Dearborn, are also waiting on a decision from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on whether they can become industrial loan corporations. That would mean the government could guarantee their debt, making it more appealing to investors, whose cash Horsey Set could use to make more buggy whip loans at better terms.

Some lawmakers have noted that automakers, including Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. and Germany's BMW AG, have the industrial banks, placing the domestic auto industry at a disadvantage.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., whose state is home to Horsey Set, Ass Set and Mule Train, said much will depend on how the Obama administration executes the terms of the buggy whip bailout.

In his presentation to Congress, Numbrain used charts that showed Horsey Set could post an operating profit of $400 million this year if Americans buy about 11 million buggy whips overall. But in this economy, analysts predict the figure will come in smaller.

NUubrain said Horsey Set will improve whip economy on 19 models this year, about three-quarters of its product line. Besides the electric buggy whip, it also has a deal with Ass Set to produce a Horsey Set subcompact in 2010.

Last month, Horsey Set showed off prototypes of a new 300 Whipper, Thrasher performance whip and Cat-o-Nine Grand, as well as new, more luxurious handles under development for nearly all of its products.

The problem, says Numbrain, is that significant new products don't arrive for another year. And Horsey Set may not make it until then.

"The good stuff doesn't come in time," Numbrain said. "We don't have any help coming really for 2009."

Porn Bailout

Sometimes you have to really love Larry Flynt. He and the CEO of Girls Gone Wild are asking the federal government for a $5 billion bailout. Brilliant satire on their part. They are actually going to make the request, but neither one is so stupid as to believe they will actually get the money. Them making the request really drives the point home, though, doesn't it? The government is picking and choosing who is going to get the money, rewarding political friends and throwing political enemies to the dogs, supporting failed ideas and policies on the backs of the successful.

When (Former) Celebrities Are Bored . . .

I don't usually comment on pop culture happenings, but this is something that affects bloggers and blogging itself. I"m talking about the model Liskula Cohen's, to paraphrase Cohen herself, petty, stupid, pathetic attempt to sue Google over the comments made by some blogger. This sounds to me like nothing more than a pathetic attempt to get attention -- I certainly hadn't heard of her before this. It's sad, really. What won't people do for attention? If I were her, I'd be too embarrassed to even admit that I cared what some blogger said about me.

The War on the Economy . . . Er, Recession

Ph, goody. Joe Biden just declared that "We're at war" on the recession. I figure if the government's war on the recession is even half as effective as the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty, this recession should become about twice as bad as the Great Depression. Idiots.

The Origins of Homosexuality?

Here's a little something for some molecular biologist out there to look into:

I've read a few months ago that there seem s to be a connection between pheromone receptors and homosexuality. Specifically, gay men have male pheromone receptors, making them sensitive to male pheromones, and lesbians have female pheromone receptors, making them sensitive to female pheromones.

I have also read that male homosexuality seems to be linked genetically to their mothers.

Add these two together, and you get a connection between sexual orientation and the sex chromosomes themselves -- something we should perhaps not be all that surprised about.

My wife has a gay friend whose brother is also gay, who has a gay uncle on his mother's side, and many gay and lesbian cousins -- again, on his mother's side. This seems to argue in favor of the genetic linkage to the mother. This got me thinking about the possible genetics behind this.

It seems likely that male pheromone receptors are on the X chromosome, and female pheromone receptors are on the Y chromosome. I'm guessing that Y chromosome also has a way of blocking the production of male pheromone receptors. We can make sense of the cause of same-sex sexual orientation with a simple phenomenon: a chromosomal recombination that placed a female pheromone receptor on the X chromosome.

How does this make sense? Through the fact that sometimes, when you add another gene to a chromosome, instead of making more of the gene, it shuts the genes off. As a consequence, the presence of the female pheromone receptor on the X would turn off the gene on the Y, meaning only male pheromone receptors would be made. This would explain the sexual orientation of gay men. It would then suggest that having an X chromosomes having this gene would make a woman a lesbian, since one of the X chromosomes would be acting like a Y.

If true, this should be fairly easy to prove.

Relativism

A fun article on relativism at New Criterion. There's a continuation of the very misunderstanding of Nietzsche that lead to relativism, but it's otherwise a good article. It does support my belief that Rousseau is the root of all evil in the West, extending into contemporary times. I am almost of the opinion that Rousseau's works should be given the same fate he was happy the volumes of the Great Library met. If one can be sent to Hell for the outcomes of one's ideas -- and I think one can -- then Rousseau is in a lower rung of Hell than even Marx. Perhaps even below Satan himself -- I think Satan was better-intentioned than Rousseau was.

Predictions for 2009

Here's a few things I hope I'm wrong about but I expect to happen in 2009.

A major war in the Middle East, focused on Israel and Iran. The U.S. will, naturally, be caught in the middle of it, not just because we support Israel, but because of our presence literally in the middle of it, in Iraq.

A minimum of increased tensions with Russia, who just cut off natural gas to Ukraine -- and thus to the rest of Europe. They will also be supporting Iran with military aid.

India and Pakistan will go to war. If Obama has any sense at all, he will stay completely out of it. I also predict Obama doesn't have any sense at all.

Continued worldwide economic collapse, with the financial center of the world shifting to China.

An outbreak of madness in the U.S. as the U.S. switches from a 1st Tier to 2nd Tier society.

Well, the second half of the last one, I hope I'm not wrong about. We need the switch.

On the Free Exercise of Religious Beliefs

I can't say I'm not amused by the fact that Leftist atheists are now demanding that Obama remove all references to God and religion from his inauguration. I think it's apt, in fact, that the Democrats' supporters are now starting to demand that the Democrats support them. The atheists are, of course, misusing the establishment clause of the first amendment, which states that the federal government cannot make a law establishing a state religion -- they use it to mean that the government cannot even make mention of religion, and that religion must be purged entirely from government. They seem to conveniently forget what follows: "or prohibit the free exercise thereof." These atheists are attempting to prohibit the free exercise of religious beliefs by our elected officials. Thus, they are trying to get Obama to violate his own civil rights. You liberals are getting exactly what you deserve, since this is the sort of thing that you meant, even if you didn't know you meant it. Ideas have consequences.

Analytical Creativity

There have been a lot of articles talking about the late Harold Pinter's politics, resulting in one writer asking why it is that so many artists seem to have crazy politics. Marrin in fact goes a long way to explaining it in her observation that there seems to be a separation between the analytical and creative minds. What she doesn't ask is if this is a necessary condition, or only a recent phenomenon. I'm of the opinion that it's a recent phenomenon, born of the Modern Era, after the Renaissance. There are many who fused the two, such as Voltaire and Goethe, but certainly in the case of Goethe, it seemed to be a reaction to the separation of the two in so many other artists (such as the Romantics). But we only have to look to the Renaissance to see that being analtyical and being creative are not necessarily separate. Indeed, in her book Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, Sister Mirium Joseph makes the case that Shakespeare was deeply analytical, making use of logic throughout his works. Frederick Turner, another who fuses being analytical and creative, also makes the case in Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics that Shakespeare also had a very sensible understanding of economics -- certainly a far more sensible understanding than did such literary greats as Sartre, Steinbeck, or Shaw. But one of the aspects of modernism is specialization, and artists and analytical people separated themselves from each other.

Perhaps this is an indication that we need a new combination of analytics and creativity. Perhaps we could have a manifesto for "Analytical Creativity." Shouldn't our art be sensible? If, as Harold Bloom and Minette Marrin suggest, art is the source of wisdom, how can it be that the artists themselves are unwise and so full of nonsense? If that doesn't make any sense, it's because wise nonsense is itself nonsensical. If people wonder why it is we haven't had a Shakespeare since Shakespeare, it's precisely because artists after him abandoned half their minds. It's time we had artists who used their entire minds to create the most beautiful works of art.

Bank Exec Bonuses

I was one of those outraged at the bonuses, etc. given out by companies who received money from the "bailout." That is, I was until I learned that the federal government strong-armed 9 large banks who did not need or want the money, but were forced to take it to make it appear that it was not a stigma to take the money. If you did not need or want the money, and your executives were up for bonuses, then they should get the bonuses. Unfortunately, nobody's telling the public who the 9 banks were who the government forced to take the money. But there sure are members of Congress using this situation to make the banks who are giving out the bonuses and who probably didn't need the money look bad. Sounds almost like a set-up job. No, it IS a set-up job.

Mark Twain's Perpetual Wisdom

Two observations made by Mark Twain that are truer now than they were when he spoke them:

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”

“No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session.”

Music and Evolution

An interesting article on music and human evolution.

Social Security Is a Ponzi Scheme

Bernie Madoff will rightly go to prison for running a Ponzi scheme. So how does one explain why our elected government officials are still running free running a Ponzi scheme (aka, Social Security)?

Social Security has been a Ponzi scheme from the beginning. The money paid in went immediately to retirees. What little was in fact left over was invested in government bonds that paid a lower interest rate than the inflation rate (yes, the government lent itself the money at a low interest rate), meaning the money has been losing value in light of inflation. In the meantime, the money we pay in continues to go out to retirees, whose money was already spent on other retirees. This system works fine so long as there are more people working than retiring at a fairly high percentage. But as that percentage goes down, SS taxes will have to go up, or the system will collapse sooner rather than later. And it will collapse, as all Ponzi schemes do.

Yet another example of something the government does legally that is illegal for others. One could also include the protection racket (property taxes, where if you don't pay them, they take all your stuff away from you, and keep you paying under threat). Taxes are essentially tribute, after all. One could argue that we are in fact getting something for the money we pay, which is true -- but Kroger doesn't threaten to lock me in their storage room unless I buy groceries from them, even if I do need to eat.

Fed Promises Even Worse Policies For Economy

From The New York Times: "the Fed bluntly announced that it would print as much money as necessary to revive the frozen credit markets and fight what is shaping up as the nation’s worst economic downturn since World War II."

The Fed is going to print more money. We are on the verge of a depression, and the Fed is going to devalue the dollar and artificially drive up prices. Please, somebody go get all the Keynes books in D.C. and New York and burn them. Then fire anyone who has ever thought Keynes, who had everything backwards, ever had anything good to say. Artificial inflation, as opposed to real inflation (prices going up due to economic growth), is devastatingly bad for an economy, as we saw in the 1970's around the world. All it does is send false signals, resulting in high prices AND high unemployment. It's a double sucker-punch to the poor and middle class.

Our government's every action seems designed to drive this economy into 3rd world status. And we just elected people who promised to accelerate the process! Heaven help us. It's all that's left that can.

Shame

Dennis Prager on shame.

On the Naive View of Artistic Creation

In his response to Frederick Turner's Creating a Culture of Gift, Richard P. Gabriel chastises Turner using what I call the naive view of artistic creation -- a view which I believe to be a barrier to truly understanding art, artistic creation, and perhaps to the healthy creation of art at all.

In the naive view of artistic creation, a work of art comes spontaneously, miraculously, inexplicably -- a gift from the Muses. To propose a theme for art to investigate is heresy in such a view. A theme would provide fetters on art, and we all know art is unfettered. Such is the naive view of artistic creation, where style, not content, is what is relevant.

But style can be taught. I can teach someone to write in iambic pentameter, to rhyme, to develop a work so it has an introduction, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, to create a sonnet. Milan Kundera identifies the art of the novel as prose-poetry variations on a theme. For him, the theme(s) is/are selected beforehand, and the novel constructed with that idea/theme in mind. Style affects content -- but one must first have content. When I write a play, I have a plot first, then characters and setting, then I flesh it out with poetry. The idea for the work my come from something I hear in a church sermon (as happened this past Sunday) or on the news. I may have a theme I'm concerned with, or a human problem I want to work out. From whence does the art spring forth? In the initial idea? In the conscious planning? In the choice of style? In the word-explosion encased in the engine block of structure to create the work? And the Muse? Those who now invoke the Muses as a "mindless" source of art forget (or never knew) that the Muses' mother's Memory, their father's Zeus, god of wisdom and power. Memory means content -- to remember, there must be something to remember. We must have knowledge to be artists. We must, too, have wisdom, an understanding of the whole. Wisdom and knowledge, the system asa whole and the parts of the system, are the necessary elements of beauty.

The more we know -- the more we have in memory -- the more there is for our minds to work with, assimilate, make connections, re-member, see the system as a whole. Insight or inspiration, that sudden flash, is the coming-to-consciousness of our brain's work. If we give our brains good content, good themes, and good styles, we can then create good works of art. My poetic dreams come to life in iambic pentameter only after I learned how to write in it and internalized it to such a degree that it became a part of the artistic flash that comes to me. Externalities also inform my art. I see my 2-year-old daughter go up to a pansy and say, "Hi flower." and I delight, see what she's done, understand it in light of evolutionary and emergentist psychology, transforming it into iambic lines, and a poem is born. Wisdom in art -- there there is wisdom or else it's not art -- comes about from this kind of deep understanding.

Fetterless art? Art without rules? THere is no art without patterns. There are no patterns without rules. Fetterlessness is randomness, and randomness is patternless -- the opposite of art. No system is random or patternless. If a work of art to be a work of art is wise and born of knowledge, it is a true system, and thus a patterned work. Art, to be art, is complex, emergent, beautiful. If it is not, it is something else. Rhetoric, perhaps, but hardly art. And then, it's probably not even very persuasive rhetoric, either.

Sandy Keenan: A Tragedy

Here's a teaser from "Sandy Keenan: A Tragedy."

Sandy:

A senseless war has killed my son. A war
Of nothing but revenge – against a man
Who never did a thing to me and his
Poor helpless nation, made a victim of
This nation’s President. How many sons
Has President Oakshott sent to the grave
On either side of this damned war? The brave
Must die so cowards holding power look
Like men. No man would send an army out
To fight their battles for them. Caesar did
Not stay in Rome. Great Alexander and
His boyfriend both were on the battlefront.
And Richard was a Lionheart because
He went to fight, himself. How easy it
Is now to sit behind a desk and send
So many others out to die and you
Just have to think about the polls and how
To be more popular. You do not have
To be responsible. Who will hold you
To it? The virtuous must die so that
The President can give a speech about
The virtues of this stupid war. He’ll use
Each soldier’s death to go up in the polls.
Disgusting. My intestines roil at
The thought. My gas pains, heart pains – how the soul
Can make the body ache. The two are one.
My spirit weakens me. I must be strong.
My husband thinks I’m delicate. That’s why
He left me here. But all he did is let
Me burn inside until I bear the stripes
True to a mother’s pain. I will not gaze
Upon this country’s government with blind
And starry eyes. Oh, no. I see the truth.

Happy Birthday Melina!

Today is Melina's 2nd birthday!!! This is what she looked like exactly two years ago today.

In Defense of Teasing

Everyone should read this excellent article in defense of teasing. Bans on teasing and other forms of social communication are all part of -- and an enforcement of -- the post-existentialist, postmodernist world view that we are all socially isolated atoms. In the end, this is a dehumanizing ideology. Certainly it has brought us many good things, like attention to sexual harassment and bullying, which, as the author of the article points out, are not at all the same thing as teasing. It shows a suspension of judgment to insist that they are the same -- but then, postmodernism is all about suspending judgment as well. When postmodernism becomes politically correct bullying, as is the case with rules against teasing, laws against smoking in bars, etc., it poisons the well of humanity. If you want to believe that we are all socially alienated atoms amongst true communication with others is impossible, that's your business. But don't force it down the throat of all the rest of us who know better.

I"m increasingly convinced that one of the key features of postmodernism is its humorlessness. Even with people, like Kurt Vonnegut, who use humor in their work. Now there's a postmodern ironic stance for you: humorless humor. Yet how can you read someone like Vonnegut and not come away with that opinion of him? And while it seems that most postmodernists are on the Left, such as the ever-increasingly humorless Al Franken and Jeneane Garaffalo, the Right-leaning neocons aren't exactly the exemplars of humor (Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are decidedly not neocons, by the way). Teasing is a form of humor -- thus the postmodernist must ban it, since it is nothing like them, and nothing they seem to understand.

Even more importantly, the author suggests something very interesting: teasing and poetry both have the same origin, in ritual designed to stave off aggression. Ironically, then, the attempts to get rid of teasing to stave off violence are likely actually causing aggression to become violence.

My objections to postmodernism come from someone on the other side of it. I see postmodernism as a necessary stage to go through -- in this sense, postmodernism is much like the metaphor Nietzsche gave of virtue being a tree: the taller the tree, higher the limbs of virtue, the deeper the roots of evil. Postmodernism is a necessary evil to pass through to get to a better, more virtuous, more beautiful existence. One must descend lowest to ascend highest. Unfortunately, the postmodernists don't realize they are in Hell -- and worse, being in Hell, they are busy making life Hell for everyone else.

Teaser from "Vice: A Tragedy"

ACT I

Outside. We see the corners of two houses. There are bushes planted between them. Flowers also decorate the fronts of both houses.

Scene 1 – Enter Sam, Allie, Ben, and Randy. Allie is dressed in such a way as to indicate
she is a member of a very conservative religion. It should look fairly uncomfortable to wear. She will wear something familiar throughout. The men are dressed conservatively.

Sam:

The sign is down. I guess that someone bought
This place. What kind of neighbors will they be?
I hope they’re moral and do as they ought.
To know that we will have to wait and see.

Allie:

Don’t judge them, Sam, before you get to know
Them. We will see if each is a black crow
Or swan-white, full of grace and beautiful.

Sam:

If they all shine with grace or all are dull
From evil living, I will know for sure
When I meet them. I’ll know if they are pure.

Ben:

And if they’re not? What will we do with them
Beside us? It could be a real problem.

Randy:

Can virtue live this close to wicked vice?
I hope they’re good, else we will pay the price.

Allie:

I’m sure that they’ll be fine. They’re moving here,
So they must know that our community
Is very ethical. I doubt they’d leer
At us or try to foster enmity.

Sam:

I hope you’re right or, if you’re not, that they
Are open to conversion. That, I pray.

[Exit all.]

Teaser from K(no)w

Act I, Scene 1 of my new play K(no)w:

Scene 1 – Interior Catholic Church. Enter Father Fischer.

Fischer:

Oh Lord, I pray you give me wisdom, strength
To lead my congregation, show the length
To which we all must go to give up sin.
Submissive Christians, finding freedom in
Our faith, please help us learn benevolence
And mercy-tempered justice, teach us sense
And wisdom in our lives, and bring politeness
Into our lives, the basis of true rightness
Of living in society. And start
With me, dear Lord – I’ll drag the burden-cart
And show through life the way you want us all
To live. You gave us knowledge in the Fall,
The knowledge of what’s good and evil, made
Us truly human, gave us choice and laid
The ground for loving you and your forgiveness,
The gift that was and is your son, who’d live less
Than forty years on Earth and take the pain
Of all our sins on Him. On Him you’ve lain
Out the last sacrifice and all we must
Now do is just believe in you and trust
Your word, be comforted by You, Your Son,
The Holy Ghost, the sacred Three-in-One.
And when we do our lives will be transformed,
Our souls and actions, lives and thoughts reformed
By You, in You, through You, my Lord. I’ve been
A sinner. Forgive me, my Lord. Amen.

My Decision

One of the reasons I decided to start the Emerson Institute for Freedom and Culture was because of my passion for the arts and humanities (I do, after all, have a M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in the Humanities) and my belief that economics is a complex system emergent from human action, a naturally-occurring system that is dangerous to tinker with. Looking at the think tanks we now have, I saw they were mostly trying to influence politicians. But politicians are going to do wha t the voters want (more or less), meaning the problem is less with the politicians than with the voters. We live in a culture that is anti-market in its beliefs and overall mentality. That needs to change. How do we change that? We need to change the culture, meaning we need to change the messages put out by the arts and humanities. Those who are pro-market do not find a lot of support in the universities or elsewhere, so it seemed to me that we needed a new institution to support those kinds of artists and scholars, and to educate the populace as a whole. That is the goal of the Emerson Institute. One of the reasons for my passion for the arts and humanities is the fact that I am myself a poet, playwrights, short story writer, and scholar. I write because I must. This Fall I wrote three verse plays. Now, in reality, I could probably take on both full time jobs of running for office and of running the Emerson Institute. But when would that leave time for me to do my creative and scholarly writing? That is something I cannot imagine giving up. Thus, I'm afraid that my decision is that my time would be best spent on the Emerson Institute and on working on my own creative and scholarly works. Political office just isn't for me. At least, not that this time. I'd rather do something of longer-lasting importance than hold political office. I hope that those who were planning to support me in my run will instead support me in my endeavors with the Emerson Institute. My goal with is is nothing less than educating the populace about the very nature of freedom, its importance in our lives, and the place of free markets in it. If one cannot have a democratic republic without an educated populace, then my work will be just as important, if not more so, than if I had run for office and won.

Thoughts on Literature (Harold Bloom)

A few thoughts by Harold Bloom to contemplate:

"I accept only three criteria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom."

"Shakespeare may well stand here for the largest benign effect of the highest literature: properly appreciated, it can heal part of the violence that is built into every society whatsoever."

For John Milton's 400th Birthday

For the 400th Birthday of John Milton, Starbucks presents a reading of

John Milton’s

Paradise Lost

By Troy Camplin

On December 9, beginning at 9 a.m., at the Starbucks on Coit and Campbell. Also featuring a coffee and pastry tasting.

Troops

The anti-war crowd should be thoroughly horrified by Obama's national security picks.

In the meantime, Glenn Beck recently talked about the fact that 20,000 U.S. troops are getting ready to be deployed in the U.S. itself. Never mind that that is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Our government doesn't follow the Constitution, os why should it bother to follow the laws it passes?

Reader Advice Wanted

I thought I would seek some advice from my readers. Here is the situation:

I have been busy trying to set up the Emerson Institute for Freedom and Culture ( www.emersoninstitute.org ) this year, and I just received 501(c)(3) status, meaning we are now able to solicit funds and really get the EIFC started. The Emerson Institute is a free market think tank focused on supporting the arts and humanities. I see it as a privately-funded organization within the arts and humanities spontaneous order whose purpose is to support those artists who understand the world as a hierarchy of self-organizing systems, of which the free market economic system is a naturally-occurring member. We already have a journal (see website), whose website is going to get a renovation soon. To get this thing well-funded so we can get started transforming the culture in a positive manner, it will take up much of my time. This will essentially be a full-time job.

I live in the Texas 32nd Congressional district, and Pete Sessions (R) is our Congressman. I consider his vote against the bailout, then for it when some money came his political way, to be a prime example of the kind of corruption we desperately need to fight against. And it shows his incredible ignorance of economics. Now he is coming up with the lame excuse that he really didn't want to vote for it, but he had to. Nobody ever "has" to vote for something they are honestly against. These sorts of things show the kind of man -- and the ideology of the man -- Pete Sessions is. For these reasons, I have been considering running against Pete Sessions in the GOP primary. However, this too will be a full-time job. I want to be fair to my supporters.

And speaking of being fair to my supporters, if I should run -- I have also been applying for academic positions across the country. If I should get one of those jobs, I will have to move out of the district. Since we are talking about academic jobs, there's not a high probability of my getting hired, especially since I am applying for primarily English positions and my Ph.D. is in the humanities and my work deals with scientific approaches to understanding literature (when I'm not presenting conference papers on spontaneous orders, that is). Scientific approaches to understanding literature are not exactly popular (let alone my politics) in English departments. So there is a very high level of uncertainty.

So, it comes down to this: with the information provided, does it seem reasonable for me to run in the primary against Pete Sessions (please ignore any considerations of my ability to actually defeat Pete Sessions)? Any and all advice is welcome.

501(c)(3) Achieved!

Good news! The Emerson Institute is now a 501(c)(3). That's right, we're a nonprofit. That means we can now collect money and get to work on supporting pro-market artists and scholars!

Congress Violated the Constitution WIth Bailout

"the Constitution does not repose in the Congress the power to bail out individuals or private industry: Bailouts violate the Equal Protection doctrine because the Congress can’t fairly pick and choose who to bail out and who to let expire; they violate the General Welfare Clause because they benefit only a small group and not the general public; they violate the Due Process Clause because they interfere with contracts already entered into; and they turn the public treasury into a public trough. Worse still, Congress lacks the power to let someone else decide how to spend the peoples’ money."

Further: "the Congress delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury some of the power the Constitution has delegated to the Congress: The power to decide when, how, for whose benefit, and in what amounts taxpayer dollars should be spent.

This delegation of power to the secretary directly violates a basic principle of constitutional law: Delegated powers cannot be delegated away. The Constitution delegates to the Congress the power to write all federal laws specifically related to spending, to the president the power to enforce those laws (and he must spend as the Congress ordains), and to the courts the power to interpret the laws (and they usually stay away from issues of spending). The Congress can no more delegate to the secretary of the treasury the power to decide how to spend billions than the president could delegate to the Congress his power to appoint the secretary." -- Judge Andrew Napolitano

Read the whole thing. But since when did our government allow the Constitution to stand in the way of doing what it does? Other than the military and the post office, the Constitution actually doesn't allow our government to do much of anything. Everyone who voted for the bailout have thus violated their oaths and should be required to step down.

Liberace

Now, whoever put the piano in the woods for the police to find are brilliant artists -- whether they intended to be or not. Actually, what they did was turn a police photographer into an artist. I love that they even titled the piece. "Liberace"

On Pragmatism

I've given a little thought to the idea of pragmatism. If we say someone is "pragmatic," we mean that they support "what works." Well, one would hope that everyone is a pragmatist, then. But is that what a pragmatist really is? It seems to me that those we call pragmatists in politics are only interested in finding out "what works" to get them elected. Any politician who was actually interested in what works would be a supporter of the market system and would oppose almost all government involvement and interference in that system. I also doubt there would be much support for the current laws, the way we deal with criminals, regulations, prohibitions, social policies, the welfare state, etc. from a true pragmatist. A true pragmatist supports what works because a true pragmatist believes in reality. Political pragmatists are not true pragmatists, but are rather mere politicians, looking to find what works to get them elected and reelected.

Loose Lending Sinks Economies

Bank lending practices have returned to the more sensible way they were prior to Clinton's intervention. As a result, everyone is saying that credit has "frozen," making getting a loan "nearly impossible." Nonsense. More difficult, yes. But not impossible. More rationally available, yes. But hardly frozen. But because loans are nowhere near as easy to get as they were in the situation which caused this crisis, the Treasury Dept. has announced that they are moving to free up credit, to make it easier to get -- again. Loose credit is what put us in this situation. Doesn't that moron Paulson get that? Easily available credit is a political, not an economic, issue. that should tell you all you need to know about why Paulson is doing it, and what the consequences will be.

Wisdom and Literature

The arts have a future when you actually have a critic argue that the reason why we should study literature is because it is full of wisdom.

Some Things for the GOP to Consider

What is success and what is failure? We do not succeed when we win offices and keep them. We succeed when we can govern well, when government’s a gently guiding hand and not a foot that presses down on us, as government has certainly become, and threatens worse things still. Let’s put things in perspective. We say Franklin Roosevelt was a socialist when he presided over such a small and unobtrusive government which only made up six percent of GDP, and then we turn around, proclaim ourselves to be supporters of free markets with a government which uses forty percent of our GDP. A government Republicans presided over. Where’s the smaller government Republicans have promised us? Republicans took over Congress and the Presidency and turned into Democrats. The government was ours, and so we took the money and the power, never looking back. We won the Congress on the promises of Gingrich that we would shrink government, be different from the Democrats. We lost the Congress when, with Dennis Hastert, we became like Democrats, and spent like Democrats, and grew the government like Democrats. The public looked at us and looked at them, decided we were both the same, and went with them because at least they spoke the truth about the way they’d spend and grow the government. And then we chose a man to run for President whose ideology was that of what has failed us with both Bushes, Hastert, Dole, and Nixon. These are leaders who supported economic theories which have failed and failed again, especially the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. His theories gave us terrible economies, inflation, and high deficits – stagflation in the seventies we blamed on Carter, who deserved the blame for stupidly continuing with policies which failed with Ford and Nixon. Reagan, after all, first ran against Ford, then he ran against the failing policies of Carter. Reagan’s policies succeeded, so we then rewarded them by voting in a man who brought us back to Nixon’s policies. We made the right decision once again with Gingrich, but then blindly chose to grasp to power without understanding how we got it. Market policies are what have worked. Throw out your Keynes and read your Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Adam Smith. Believe in markets, not big businesses. Support a system that has proven every time to work, when tried. Reject ideas that failed us. Republicans must stand for more than merely cutting taxes. We must have a full, coherent message if we want to win. And more, we must believe the things we say, which means that we must do the things we say we’ll do. If we believe in smaller government, then we must cut the budget – not just cut the growth we’ve built into our budgets. Zero-baseline budgeting is but a start. We have to then begin to cut, beginning with the subsidies which only help our donors and those engaging in bad business practices. And speaking of supporting failing business practices, the ones who voted not to spend the seven hundred billion dollars on the bailout voted to support reality in economics. Let the failures fail so better people can move in. But those who voted first against it and then voted for it when some money came their way exposed themselves for what they are: corrupt. Such people have to go. But only if we want a vibrant party. Such a party stands on principle and for reality. We win when we don’t try to win by being pragmatists. We won whenever we have stood for principles, for what is right, for liberty. We’ll win again if we can offer more than tax cuts as a way to separate ourselves from Democrats. But in the meantime, government just builds and builds in size. We should support a sunset law for every law we pass – if any law’s worth having, it’s worth voting for again each decade. Thus we can get rid of laws that we no longer need. Now, John McCain was right to stand against the use of earmarks, but we must go further. If a bill’s work voting for, then it should stand alone. No packaging of bills – let each stand on its merit. These are real, effective ways to stop the growth of government. We need coherent economic, international, and social policies which both address the world in its complexity, but which are easy for the general public to then understand. If you cannot explain whatever laws you want to pass, then you don’t understand them, either, and you have no business passing them. And, finally, we have to ask ourselves just why we want to win. If it is just so we have power, then we don’t deserve it and won’t get it. If, however, we want power so we can bring liberty to individuals once again, if we want power so our markets can be free so average people have real opportunities to have success, if we want power so America is once again a beacon to the world of what is best and possible and true, then we will win and, more, we will deserve to win.

Troy Camplin for Congress

So, I am considering running against Pete Sessions here in the Texas 32nd District in the GOP primary. I figure it is the least he deserves for voting for the $700 billion bailout -- but only after a bit of money was thrown his way in the "bailout." Anyone who voted for it the first time was merely wrong and ignorant of economics. But those who voted against it the first time, then voted for it the second time once some money was thrown their way (or, more accurately, the district's way, so they could get reelected more easily, regardless of whether the bailout was a good idea or not) shows them to be basically corrupt. Aren't we tired of having politicians? Don't we deserve statesmen?

Person With All the Power Accuses Underling of Sexual Harassment

Now, I'm the first one to say that 13 year olds are little jerks -- I half-jokingly say they need to be locked up and beaten daily, in fact -- but when an adult woman who is a social worker and, thus, has authority and power over a 13 year old boy intends to bring "sexual harassment" charges against him because she felt he hugged her "inappropriately," then there is something seriously wrong. Here's how this should have been handled:

"Excuse me, but that hug wasn't appropriate."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, . . ." and then she should have told him.

Instead, the woman has set out to create a criminal record for this child.

Why? My guess is that, in this case, it's a clear abuse of power and authority. It does not help that morons like Nicole Littler from MOCSA, the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault , says of sexual harassment, "Hugging someone can be sexual harassment, but it also depends on who it is and how they feel about the situation."

In other words, if I offer to give someone a hug, and they accept, and afterwards they decide they didn't like the hug, I've committed sexual harassment?!? This is perversity. And it's a perversity designed to eliminate any and all social bonds, which are reinforced by touching. This sort of thing is less "sexual harassment" and more "how dare you be a social mammal!"

My God, orthodox, fundamentalist, fanatical religious groups are more tolerant of people touching each other than this.

SEC, Mark Cuban, and "Insider Trading"

The SEC going after Mark Cuban for insider trading is completely ridiculous. Insider trading laws were designed to prevent people within the company from screwing over the other investors. It's primary use, though, including this use of it, however, is a clear abuse of power. The SEC doesn't go after everybody, but just whoever they pick and choose. The law is such that if you hear anything from anybody who might know something, and you use that information to sell a stock, you are engaged in insider trading — so let’s be honest here, that this is designed so the federal government can go after whomever they want whenever they want. So you can’t use information to make a decision? This is a clear violation of the very basis of the market economy. I hope Cuban does have evidence that he didn’t even violate the unjust law they are trying to enforce. Good for him for standing up against these thugs who call themselves our federal government. David Henderson at EconLog discuss this issue at well, and go over a lot of the economics behind it (and why the law is a dumb one overall).

Walter Williams on the Evil That Is Wealth Redistribution

Walter WIlliams, as usual, has it exactly right regarding the evil that is wealth redistribution. He gives the marvelous example of an old woman who cannot mow her lawn or afford to have it mowed, so the government will either force someone to mow it for her, or to give her $40 to have it mowed. Everyone would identify the first one as slavery, but nobody seems to think the second one, even though the person had to work to make that $40, and now that work is forcibly given to another human being. And it is forcibly given. Try not to pay your taxes, and see what happens. For a government to be ethical, it must get money in ways other than through the use of force. If anybody has to go to jail over the government not getting their money, the way they are getting it is unethical, pure and simple. When non-government entities engage in these kinds of activities, we call them organized crime and engaging in protection rackets, etc. But just because the gang calls themselves your government, you think what they do is moral?

In the meantime, Jonah Goldberg points out that Obama's solution to an economic situation being made worse and worse by the uncertainty created by Paulson is . . . to create more uncertainty! He says he's going to engage in bold experimentation, which is a signal to the markets that "you never know just what I'll do!" It is an admission by Obama that he doesn't have a clue what he's doing, that he doesn't in fact understand the economy at all. Great. News we could have used a month ago.

John Stossel also points out that Paulson's every ignorant action weakens the economy. Seriously, if Paulson were a M.D., he would have been put in prison by now for negligence and malpractice. And Obama is now telling the hospital that just hired him that he's at least as incompetent as Paulson. Great.

In the end, for an economy to grow and be strong at all, it has to have steady, standard rules. It needs the stability of rule of law, knowing the rules won't be changed from day to day, week to week, or even month to month. What is happening and being promised is not rule of law, but rule of men, and the ever-shifting policies that comes with it. Rule by men rather than law was one of the very things our Founding Fathers fought Britain over. Why, then, are we allowing it to happen? And why did we vote back in a COngress that gave this kind of power to a single man?

Kleptocrats' Money Used For Art Instead

In a demonstration that they can do something good, the U.N Human Rights Council spend foreign aid money on a ceiling mural. I say it's good because the more money spent on foreign aid, the worse the situation of those who receive the help. "Colorful stalactites" as critics are calling them, are a far better use of the money than if they had used it to line the pockets of kleptocrats, which is what it would have otherwise been used for.

Ethics, Laws, Rules, and Being a Jerk

At the Spontaneous Orders conference I attended Nov. 1-4, Gus diZerega asked a question designed, it seems, to test one's (my, in this case) "libertarian purity": What is the difference between me shining a bright light onto my neighbor's property and painting naked people on my fence so the neighbor can see it? He proposed there was no difference, as light must cross property, regardless, and so tough luck for the neighbor, who must now live with an oppressive neighbor rather than an oppressive government. I propose, however, that there is a marked difference.

If we take the issue of the light itself, there is a difference between the purposeful directing of the light toward the neighbors and the incidental reflection of light from off of a painting. This is perhaps the weakest argument, but it does parallel the distinction Marc Hauser makes in "Moral Minds" regarding what people naturally find ethical or unethical. He observes that people find bad outcomes incidental to a decision to not be unethical, but do find bad outcomes built into the decision to be unethical. It seems a light I direct into the neighbor's yard to be of the latter kind, while a painting whose reflected light enters a property to be of the former kind.

But the issue with the painting is itself incidental to the light involved. True, we need light to see it at all, but the point is the images. The issue with the images involves the neighbors taking offense. But here we see that the person who painted the images is not responsible for the reactions of the neighbors. It is the neighbors who take offense, so they are the ones responsible for their own reactions. There is nothing inherently, objectively offensive about an image -- offense is always subjective. The directed light, however, can have an objective consequence in its disruption of circadian rhythms. The neighbors' plants can be negatively affected, let alone the neighbors themselves, whose sleep could be disrupted, whose eyes could be damaged by the intensity of the light, etc. The neighbor could, of course, take measures against the light, but such measures cost the neighbor. If I run into another car, I have to pay for repairs because the person now has to buy things they did not have to buy absent my actions. Again, the painting costs the neighbor nothing, as they can avoid looking at it by simply averting their eyes.

Both behaviors may make me a jerk -- meaning I am acting in an antisocial manner -- but the real issue here is which of these should require a law. For my money, laws should be involved only when some kind of objective harm is involved for the secondary party, and if the law can be applied equally for everybody. Disrupting one's circadian rhythms certainly qualifies for the first. Doing something at which someone may or may not take offense does not. The latter examples is purely subjective -- it is "harmful" because the secondary party chooses for it to be "harmful" to them. That is certainly not the fault of the primary party. However, if I want to be a member of a certain society, then I should try to abide by that society's rules. But law is one thing, rules are another -- and being a jerk shouldn't necessarily be illegal.

GM Board Supports Useless Management Team

Last week a General Motors spokesman said, "Nothing has changed relative to the GM board's support for the GM management team during this historically difficult economic period for the U.S. auto industry." Perhaps this is why they are a failed company with failed policies which needs to declare bankruptcy. If the board supports a management team that is going to run the company out of money in a few months so that it could not possibly continue to exist afterwards unless it receives $50 billion from the federal government, then the board needs to be fired too. GM is nothing but a failure upon a failure.

Still, I'll be very surprised if the federal government didn't bail them out. If we had the same kind of government in 1900 as we have now, Walmart would be selling buggy whips even now. Well, not selling them, but offering them for sale.

In the meantime, what will those wanting to buy an American-made car do? I don't know. Perhaps they could buy a Kia, made in Birmingham, Alabama. Or a Toyota, made in Kentucky, Indiana, or Texas. They probably even have more American-made parts in them than do GM, Chrysler, or FOrd products anyway. American-owned doesn't mean American-made, and Non-American owned doesn't mean it's not American-made. Welcome to the world economy. If GM fails, that just means a larger market share for companies like Kia and Toyota, who will then have to hire even more American workers to meet the new demand for their products.

Whatever It Takes? Doubtful.

President-elect Obama says he's going to do "whatever it takes" to get the economy moving. Fantastic! So he's going to cut taxes, push through a massive deregulation program, reverse the bailout he voted for . . . No, wait, he's going to do the complete opposite of all these. I wish he would do whatever it takes to fix the economy -- but he won't. What he will do is slow the economy even more and stretch out this recession unnecessarily.

U.S. Auto Makers Are Dinosaurs

I agree with Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama when he says the U.S. auto makers are dinosaurs and should face market realities. In fact, had the federal government said this to them decades ago, we would in fact have a health auto-making sector by now. Instead, we fed and fed and fed the dinosaur until it's legs buckled under its weight. But as in nature, sometimes a species has to die because it is no longer adapted to the environment, and keeping it around only prevents new species and evolutionary innovation from arising. Such is the case with the U.S. auto makers. They haven't had to deal with reality for a long, long time. If our government would stop creating mirages for them, they would have been able to survive. What has happened with the auto industry should be a warning against governments propping up poorly-run companies. We need to stop rewarding failure.

Oldest Temple Found

11,500 years old. That's the age of a temple found in Turkey. It predates domestication and agriculture. Thus, it was set up by tribalist people, hunter-gatherers. This is a group who moved from tribalist into egoist psychology and social structure, which then led to settlement behaviors. It's quite an insight into human psychological and social development and emergence that it is what seems to have led to settlements, and not the other way around. I personally am not surprised, as I have argued elsewhere that the social order emerges out of the psychological order, as the social order is a spontaneous order which develops out of the kinds of entities that make it up. You have to have a high enough percentage of a psychological level to get a new social level.

RNC Chair

If Gingrich is running for RNC chair, I'm for him. If not, I choose Michael Steele over Saul Anuzis, who called for banning Ron Paul from the debates. I'm against anyone who is in favor of excluding voices from the debates. Nor does it help that he singled out Ron Paul, whose ideas were by far the best ones among the GOP lineup. Paul's knowledge of economics is desperately needed in the GOP at large.

More Evidence for the Benefits of Music

A new study suggests that music makes children smarter, particularly in vocabulary. However, the authors claim that "Contrary to previous research, instrumental music training was not associated with heightened spatial skills, phonemic awareness, or mathematical abilities." This does not mean that there is no connection, as a great deal of other research has shown, only that they did not find it in this particular study. They did find a connection to improved verbal abilities, though. A general improvement in cognitive abilities makes a great deal of sense since development of the ability to play a musical instrument helps one understand the world better. "Music involves grasping patterns," and the world is deeply patterned. Further, music is structured much like grammar, and thus it makes sense that it helps with language and reasoning. In fact, "The young musicians' vocabulary scores were 15 percent higher, and non-verbal reasoning scores were 11 percent higher. The longer the child was musically trained, the higher the scores." This is a pretty significant improvement. Makes me glad I have my daughter, Melina, in a music class already. Besides, she loves it. She will definitely be learning how to play a musical instrument when she gets a bit older. In the meantime, I find it remarkable that music isn't a dominant part of all education in the U.S., starting in Kindergarten. If we really wanted students to learn more and become more intelligent, we would implement this kind of information.

Self-Esteem Movement Diagnosed as Unhealthy

Psychologists have finally come around to noting what I noticed for quite a while now: teens think too highly of themselves. I saw it especially in the college classes I taught. Just as bad as thinking too well of themselves, they cannot take criticism at all. And when they get to college, too many administrators and professors also let them slide by. I've been told that the rhetorical, grammatical, and literary expectations common in public elementary school children in the Renaissance is too much for college Freshmen, and is now only expected to be taught at the graduate level. Fortunately, there is a movement in certain religious schools to teach the Trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and logic) and the literary Canon that is very welcome. Unfortunately, they also typically combine it with a "literalist" Biblical science curriculum. Can't we please get some balance somewhere in this country?

Government Redistribution Does Not Make You Generous

In theists or atheists better people? In the U.S., studies have shown theists to be far more generous and happier people than atheists. However, in this review of Society Without God, the reviewer notes that the author says that Danes and Swedes are for the most part atheists, and that they are in fact very generous people. His evidence?

"They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do."

Well, if letting someone rob you without complaint so that they can give your money to others is generosity, then call me against generosity. An extensive welfare and socialized medicine are not indicators of generosity. They are indicators of a government run by people who are not personally generous, but want to force others to be. The net effect is a decrease in actual generosity. To put it another way: you are not morally culpable when you are forced to do something. Nor are you moral if you are forced to do good. Virtue is freely made. Thus, an expansive welfare and health care service is no indication of virtue at all. At best it is a relinquishing of virtue.

I have no idea what is meant here by "social equality," but if it means an egalitarian world view, then it is deeply unjust, as people are not in fact the same, and when we try to treat unequal things equally, we get injustice. "One law for the lion and the lamb is tyranny." _William Blake.

The only point he may have is the statement about murder and rape. However, we must not make the mistake of equating positive correlation with causation. There may be any number of causes of a higher rape and murder rate in the U.S. than in Denmark and Sweden that have nothing to do with religion -- or lack of religion -- per se. Of course, if most Swedes and Danes are at the Egalitarian level, that would also explain well the low levels of murder and rape, which are not commonly found among those with an Egalitarianist psychology in the U.S., either. The presence of a higher percentage of people in the U.S. with an Egoist psychology well into adulthood may go farther in explaining the higher levels of rape and murder, though. I suspect that Authoritative and Classical Liberal psychologies don't exactly rape and murder much, either (and when they do, it's because of a strong, negative Egoist psychology still at work in them), so the fact that pure Egalitarians are also atheists doesn't necessarily support the thesis entirely. There are atheists at all levels.

The rest of the review, though, it quite interesting and thought-provoking. His point about moral communities having a strong locally social component is dead-on, and the quote he gives from Robert Putnam that "voluntary association with other people is integral to a fulfilled and productive existence—it makes us "smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy"" is also an important point. Please note the term "voluntary." When government takes money and property from you through taxation and confiscation, there's nothing voluntary about it. Government thus prevents us from living "a fulfilled and productive existence" and prevents us from becoming "smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy". Government is preventing us from governing well? Yes. And when that happens, it's time for a real change. Governmen

Spontaneous Orders and Bailouts

The free market is a naturally-occurring spontaneous order, a self-organizing system that emerges out of the free exchange of the people in that economy. Outside interference in that system will always result in perverse incentives and unintended consequences. More, it results in a simplification of a complex system. And if you simplify a complex system, you get sickness and death -- consider what happens if you simplify a cell from a complex system to a simple pile of chemicals. More, when government interferes, it is typically trying to import something appropriate to that system into another system. It would be as though the economy were a rain forest and the government were the arctic, and the arctic government decided the rain forest economy needed polar bears. Neither the polar bears nor the rain forest would benefit. Or let's say that someone decided that what rain forests really needed was more cashew trees, so efforts were made to grow more cashews. naturally, that would push out other tree species, and reduce the biodiversity that makes the rain forest healthy. Environmentalists would object that we are trying to force a monoculture on the rain forest, which reduces biodiversity. Yet many of the same people (unfortunately) are more than willing to support policies that have the same effect in the economy. The phrase "too big to fail" is much like complaining that if we let a banana plantation revert back to the rain forest, we will harm the biodiversity of the rain forest itself. This is utter nonsense, which we can see in the ecological examples given, but which too many cannot seem to see with the economy. Perhaps this is because nobody understands that the economy too is a kind of ecosystem, or environment. Until we understand that, though, we will continue to make the mistake of thinking we can do better with our planning than the system itself can do naturally.

Evidence for Life as Self-ORganizing Systems

Exciting news out of Princeton: scientists there have discovered a protein that directs its own evolution using feedback, keeping the system stable. More evidence for biological systems as self-organizing systems.

Bailouts and Perverse Incentives

When we bail companies out, all we are doing is rewarding bad decisions. Why make good decisions? If you are big enough and make a bad enough decision, the government will give you money! And where do they get the money? From those responsible enough to have made a profit by making good decisions. So all a bailout is designed to do is punish good decisions and successful choices, while rewarding bad decisions and failures. Only a government could come up with a massive plan of perverse incentives and say it will help the economy. In both the short and the long term, it will do neither. If they wanted to throw money around, they should have let the companies in question all go under and gave each person $2500, so that a family of four would get $10,000. That's a couple mortgage payments right there. Or at least some high-priced items being bought that gets that money in circulation. And I say that with the opinion that that's not a good idea, either, as it results in the U.S. being in even more debt, which is really bad for us long-term. And you end up paying people not working, which acts as an incentive to continue not working.

Bailout for Starbucks

Starbucks announces its profits dropped 97%. This is clearly a world crisis! How will people get their caffeine?!? Starbucks is too big to fail! Bail them out! Quick! Before all coffee vanishes from the world with the terrible condition Starbucks is in! Someone call President Bush! Better, call Barack Obama! Only a great and powerful and all-wise and all-knowing world leader like the President of the United States can save us now!

The Right Side of History

Yesterday my brother pointed out something brilliant. He observed that the news media was engaging in a subtle bias by constantly referring to this past Presidential election as "historical." That is, it would be historical if we made the right decision and elected Obama. Only then would it be truly historical. And we all want to be on the right side of history. That, too, was always a Marxist argument: you want to be on the right side of History, don't you? Heaven help anyone who said they didn't.

New Poll

Take my newest poll, at the bottom of the page.

Break, Blow, Burn -- The Outtakes

Camille Paglia does a marvelous job of analyzing what is wrong with modern poetry when she explains why she left out certain poems from her best-selling work of close readings of poems Break, Blow, Burn. This is why I love Paglia. She is such a clear-headed thinker. I don't always agree with her, but I think it would be possible for us to disagree agreeably.

Trust, Economy, and the Arts

What do the arts have to say to us about the current financial crisis? Here are a few thoughts. Excepting the Marxists, who grossly misuse this fact for unethical ends, we often forget that economics is deeply tied to ethics -- the language of both tends to be the same. The author of the linked piece focuses on "trust," and it is "trust" that is indeed what is at stake here. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed because they proved untrustworthy. The solution? A government we trust even less nationalized them. How will this solve the problem of trust? It won't -- and hasn't. We do need a George Bailey. He understood what economic institutions are really about.

40 Acres

Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower

From The New York Times Online
November 5, 2008
________________________________
Not to be a wet blanket, but does anyone notice the irony in the fact that Obama is not a descendent of the people Walcott is talking about in this poem? Also, the poem itself seems a bit rushed. Not the best poem of Walcott's -- one would expect better from a Nobel Prize winner. There are some lovely ideas in the images, though. Too bad they're wasted on the son of a African chief whose family was wealthy enough to send their son to the U.S. t o study. The problem is that this is simply not the appropriate poem for Barack Obama. I'm no fan of his as a politician, but doesn't he deserve to have a poem that is actually about HIM?

A Prediction, Riffing on Biden

A prediction:

Biden is right that Obama will be tested internationally. Several times, I bet. At least once by someone he considers to be an ideological ally. When he goes up against this ideological ally, it will be the conservatives who support him.

Incidentally, Venezuela's Leftist President Hugo Chavez just nationalized their gold mines and turned production over to Russia. Russia has also been talking nuclear "power" with Chavez.

China Asks US to Support Free Markets?!?

The world has certainly been turned on its head when China is asking the President-elect of the U.S. to please respect the concept of free trade. The continued slide of the stock market post-election is not a good sign, either.

Stocks Plunge 5% Upon Obama Win

The stock market has given its verdict on the election: a 486 point (5.05%) drop. This is the worse drop since FDR was elected (4.51%). Worse, in fact, as we can see. This tells us that those who know the most about the economy have no confidence in Obama, just as the drop in 1932 said the same thing during the Great Depression. And rightly so, as it turned out, with FDR, whose policies extended the Great Depression, as his predecessor's had. It was in fact the implementation of increased governmental intervention in the economy which perpetuated the depression into the Great Depression, and those interventions were eerily similar to things Obama has promised to do. It is a myth that the free market caused the Great Depression, just as it is a myth that FDR did anything to end it -- WWII is what ended it. Equally, it is a myth that the free market had anything at all to do with the latest meltdown. This economy is facing a recession. If Obama can move quickly to get much of what he wants, he will put this weak economy into a depression. The last thing you want to do is take money out of an economy during an economic slowdown. That has a deflationary effect. Less money in an economy slows the economy down. If you take money out of a recessionary economy, you will cause that economy to enter into a depression. Obama has further talked about implementing trade barriers, which were another cause of the Great Depression -- and of our war with Japan. These are not good signs. I hope Obama isn't able to implement much until after the economy starts to get back on its feet. Unfortunately, Bush's last few months of trying to help the economy have made a rapid recovery unlikely. Remember, though, that Obama supported it, so what he's going to inherit is just as much the Obama economy as the Bush one.

My Election Results

If the election had been held on my blog, McCain would have won 30 (40%) votes to Obama's 27 (36%). The Libertarians would also now be a major party with their 13 votes (17%). Heck, even McKinney of the Green Party got 2 votes (3%), and Nader got 1 (1%). What this really shows is that I have a pretty nice mix of readers, about which I'm glad. Wouldn't it be nice if we had this kind of distribution in the real election? I mean, that parties other than the two-party-one-ideology monopoly we have had a real chance. Might even make the Republicans want to differentiate themselves from the Democrats.

Stop Moving Left You Stupid Republicans!

Obama certainly had coattails, but let me suggest another reason Republicans lost seats: if you're going to have someone in office acting like a Democrat, you might as well have a Democrat. The Republican Party needs to take THAT lesson away from this. Probably, instead, they will be convinced that they need to move even more to the left. The Republicans deserve to lose to the Democrats if they are going to act like the Democrats.

Spontaneous Order Conference

I am back from the spontaneous orders conference, and it was great. It was good to be able to talk to people who see the world in a similar fashion. There was the question if -- and feeling that -- what we were doing was the beginning of a paradigm shift. I hope so. If so, it has a long lead-in tail going back before WWII with Bertalanffy, Polanyi, Prigogine, and Hayek. Most at the conference came from a Hayekian tradition, but we had people like me influenced by people like Baertalanffy, Prigogine, Frederick TUrner, J. T. Fraser, Stuart Kauffman, and the chaos theorist, and even a person involved in systems robotics, taking the computer systems approach. Of the 19 people there, I think 4-5 knew Fred Turner personally. He's an underground influence that needs to be brought above ground. I'm going to be revising my paper and submitting it to the journal they are beginning. I will be making links to that journal as it comes up.

As I think through some of these ideas, I'll try to talk about those ideas here. Of course, I will always be talking through the subtle shifts in world view that occur whenever I learn something new.

The Government We Deserve

Apparently the people of John Murtha's district really are as backwards, ignorant and stupid as he repeatedly said they were. How else does one explain his re-election? And Alaska seems to be going to re-elect Ted Stevens Senator despite being convicted of corruption. I mean, my God, what do you have to do to lose re-election in this country? Put bribe money in a freezer and get caught? Hmm. Apparently not.

I still find it bizarre that a political party whose Congress has only 10% approval rating gained many new seats. Seriously, people -- you get the government you deserve in a democracy. I fear we may.

On Obama's Victory

One. It's sad that Obama's grandmother died before she could see her grandson elected President.

Two. This is a great moment in our history in that we have proven to ourselves that we are not a racist nation. In fact, I better not hear anyone ever say that again. It is a lie, and only racists believe it.

Three. Obama is promising to do everything that lead to the Great Depression at a time when the economy is in a very weak state. The Democratic majority in the Congress will more than happily do everything he wants. Redistribution of wealth destroys it, and he has promised to redistribute wealth. My opposition to Obama is and has always been based on his devastatingly wrong economic beliefs. His economics is like having a belief about the ecosystem that if you only bulldozed the forest, you could save it from deforestation.

Four. Obama has the most hubris of any Presidential candidate I have ever known of. Being hubristic, I doubt he will choose good advisors -- but we will see for sure. More important than the obvious Cabinet will be his real advisors he keeps close to him. Know who they are, and you will know what he's really going to do. The problem with a hubristic person is that eventually they find the true end of the rope. Everyone needs to go out and read all the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's tragedies. Now. You need to know what we're going to face with him as President.