"Moderate" Islam

"Moderate" Islam: I've never been a fan of the term "moderate" to describe religious adherents, I think it's much better to categorize them as consistent or inconsistent.  Currently, Islam is more of an existential threat to rational people because its practitioners are more consistent and take religion's importance more seriously than do Christians and others.  An article at PJM by  Andrew McCarthy does a good job of showing how ridiculous it is to give Islamists a pass for being moderates.

(a) Not all Islamic supremacists (or “Islamists”) are violent, but the goal of all Islamic supremacists is the same: to coerce the acceptance of sharia. The methods of pursuing that goal vary: sometimes terrorism is used, sometimes non-violent avenues are exploited — meaning, Islamic supremacists co-opt legal processes, the media, educational institutions, and/or government agencies. But regardless of what methods an Islamic supremacist uses, his goal never changes: He aims to implement sharia. In Islamic supremacist ideology, sharia is regarded as the mandatory, non-negotiable foundation that must be laid before a society can be Islamized. Sharia is not “moderate”; therefore, you are not a “moderate” if you want it, no matter what method you use to implement it. For example, if you are an Islamic supremacist and you want to repeal the First Amendment in order to prohibit speech that casts Islam in a negative light, you are not a “moderate” — even if you wouldn’t blow up buildings to press your point.

(b) Islamic supremacism is not a fringe interpretation of Islam. It is probably still the minority interpretation in North America. Nevertheless, it is the predominant interpretation of Islam in the Middle East. Poll after poll shows us that upwards of two-thirds of Muslims in countries like Egypt and Pakistan want their governments to adopt and strictly enforce sharia. This is why the Islamic supremacist parties in the “Arab Spring” countries are currently enjoying such success in elections

He then goes on to show how we whitewash the threat of Islam, even denying the common underlying motivation that these killers have:

The Obama administration and the Republican establishment would have us live a lie — a lie that endangers our liberties and our security. The lie is this: There is a difference between mainstream Islamic ideology and what they call “violent extremism.”

The vogue term “violent extremism” is chosen very deliberately. To be sure, we’ve always bent over backwards to be politically correct. Until Obama came to power, we used to use terms like “violent jihadism” or “Islamic extremism” in order to make sure everyone knew that we were not condemning all of Islam, that we were distinguishing Muslim terrorists from other Muslims. (In a more sensible time, we did not say “German Nazis” — we said “Germans” or “Nazis” and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.) But now, the Obama administration and the Republican establishment prefer to say “violent extremism” because this term has no hint of Islam.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Celebrate the Cinema

Celebrate the Cinema:
In light of depressed movie attendance due partly to the recent murders at an Aurora movie theater, we should remember the profound joy and inspiration good movies can offer.
TOS has reviewed a number of films: The Avengers, Act of Valor, The Help, Atlas Shrugged: Part I, and The King’s Speech.
The print journal has featured the articles, “Atlas Shrugged’s Long Journey to the Silver Screen” and “An Interview with Atlas Shrugged Movie Producer Harmon Kaslow.”
Finally, TOS blog has published posts about The Dark Knight Rises, Marry Poppins, Hugo, and The Grey.
Remember that movie theaters remain very safe places to experience meaningful art, see inspiring heroes, and celebrate our values.
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Image: iStockPhoto

Haste Makes Waste

Haste Makes Waste: Quick! Is procrastination a bad thing?

Maybe you should take some time before you answer that question, as Frank Partnoy, author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, argues in an interview with Smithsonian.com. Noting that the Greeks and Romans valued deliberation, Partnoy sees decision-making as a two-step process, which he illustrates with an amusing vignette from his childhood:

My mom would ask me to make my bed before going to school. I would say, no, because I didn't see the point of making my bed if I was just going to sleep in it again that night. She would say, well, we have guests coming over at 6 o'clock, and they might come upstairs and look at your room. I said, I would make my bed when we know they are here. I want to see a car in the driveway. I want to hear a knock on the door. I know it will take me about one minute to make my bed so at 5:59, if they are here, I will make my bed.

By waiting to make up his mind, he could use his time for more urgent things and, as he later confirmed from his experience and research, he could also make a better choice. He further illustrates the value of letting things simmer with both a negative example and several positive ones.

The executives [at Lehman Brothers] took this class [which, a la Malcolm Gladwell's Blink], extolled quick decisions] and then hurriedly marched back to their headquarters and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets. I wanted to explore what was wrong with that lesson and to create something that would be the course that Wall Street should have taken and hopefully will take.

Partnoy shifts from the market to the prowl to provide an example of a different tack:

The international dating service It's Just Lunch advocates that clients not look at photos, because photos lead to snap reactions that just take milliseconds. It asks that they consciously not make judgments about a person when they first meet them. Instead, they tell clients to go to lunch, wait until the last possible moment, and then at the end of lunch just answer one question: Would I like to go out on a second date with this person? In the same way it frees up time for a tennis player to wait a few extra milliseconds, someone on a date will make a better decision if they free up extra minutes to observe and process information. [bold added]

Partnoy presents us with the following rule of thumb as a means of improving descision-making: Determine now long one really has to make a decision, and use as much of that time as one can.

I don't think that one must always use all of that time, but Partnoy makes an worthwhile point about some kinds of procrastination actually being good,

-- CAV

9 Lessons Learned from Using Reddit

9 Lessons Learned from Using Reddit:

Jim Woods gave me the permission to use this referenced blog post (Nine Lessons Learned from Using Reddit) as a guest post for EGO on Blogspot.

Starting a new blog focused on politics, I decided to try reddit as a source to kickstart some traffic. As reddit referrals are now 50% of my traffic, I think that the experiment has had a successful start, so let me share some of my lessons learned.

1. Self-promoting blog content on reddit is easy and without significant friction.
2. The reddit post title attracts the interest as that is what the users primarily will see, so experiment and test.
3. Reddit’s system for voting and comments are used actively and provide insightful metrics when feedback is not being left on a new blog.
4. Older evergreen blog posts that are not attracting traffic can be resurrected with a reddit post.
5. Subreddits are great for doing segmentation testing as you can target specific communities and tailor titles to that community.
6. Posting the same post to different subreddits on different days can keep posts active overtime and allow for easy differentiation of traffic from different subreddits for results tracking.
7. Subreddits have their own personalities and can sometimes respond differently than their name would suggest.
8. Controversy resulting from matching a post with a subreddit can help traffic to your site even if it is not helping your link karma. Highly recommended.
9. Reddit offers a good opportunity to reach new potential readers from outside your usual circles of communication.

If you have not been using Reddit to promote your own blog content, using the above lessons learned, I have a suggestion for how to start with a test using the traffic stats already tracked for your blog.

1. Start by picking seven of your posts that you think deserve more eyes. In doing so, do not ignore older posts that still have timely information.
2. Brainstorm types of people that you think would be interested in each specific post.
3. Use the search feature on reddit to find subreddits that are a community for those types of people.
4. Throughout the week, submit links for your posts to various subreddits and track the results using your own blog’s traffic stats.
5. At the end of the week, review your own lessons learned and plan how you could use reddit to promote your blog content.

You can check out reddit’s FAQ for how-to details.

If you try this experiment, please share your own lessons learned.



Jim Woods blogs about politics at Selfish Citizenship (selfishcitizenship.wordpress.com).

Inspirational Philosophy

Inspirational Philosophy:

by Jason Stotts

I’ve long had a problem with atheists; or, at least with some atheists.  And the problem is not that they don’t believe in the irrationality that is religion, because I don’t believe in that nonsense either.  No, the problem is that so many atheists spend countless hours arguing against the irrationality of others in an attempt to get them to move beyond their irrational beliefs.  Why is that a problem?  Atheism isn’t a belief, it’s the lack of a belief.  People do no have a belief in atheism; rather, they lack a belief in a particular kind of nonsense.  But people cannot hold negatives as beliefs.  A lack of belief in something important creates a cognitive vacuum that will be filled (“Shattered Illusions”).  This is why some people go from religion, to atheism, and back.  They never answered the real question and that void had to be filled, so they filled it the only way they knew.

If you focus simply on destroying your opponent’s arguments, even if you win, then what?  You need to give people something positive to believe in.  A vacuum will be filled by something.

I have the same problem with how some people handle the “pro-choice, anti-choice” debate about abortion.  Some people focus only on the negatives of the debate: they deny the religious arguments (on which all arguments against abortion are based), they deny the government’s right to control our lives, they argue against a woman being forced to carry a child to term she has no desire to keep, etc.  But what they don’t do is frame the argument positively and talk about how abortion can be a real value in a woman’s life.  They don’t make the positive argument that a woman’s long-term happiness can sometimes be best served by having an abortion.  By framing the arguments completely in the negative, they give the moral high-ground to the religion and save for themselves only that it might be “practical.”  But by ceding the moral high-ground, they are doomed to ultimately lose the debate.

If we don’t take a positive tack, if we don’t take the moral high-ground and argue on moral terms, if we merely attack and never build, then we lose.  In order to win, to truly win, an argument or a culture, you must present positive reasons why your course of action is the better one, how it is the moral one, and give people something to believe in and to fight for.

In order to win the world, you must give people a morality worth living for: you must help them find meaning.

I’ve long held these thoughts and problems with the way people were arguing, but I had never connected the various issues on which we were forced to fight defensively (religion, abortion, oil, global warming, ad nauseum) as all suffering from the same problem: we couldn’t win until we reframed the arguments and stopped fighting to only tear down and never build up.

I preamble so much to set the stage for what I think is one of the best ideas that I’ve seen recently, Alex Epstein’s “The Power of Aspirational Activism,” which I’m going to quote selectively below.

The Power of Aspirational Advocacy
By Alex Epstein, Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress
I have been writing about environmental and industrial issues for over a decade now. For most of that decade, my approach was essentially to focus on what was wrong with the “green” movement. For example, I would make the point that “green energy” policies, by forcing Americans to use expensive, unreliable solar and wind power, would be economically devastating.
But even though this point was true, and even though I could argue it articulately, I noticed that I had very limited success in inspiring audiences to fight for better policies.[…]
And then I realized why: people only really care about energy policy, good or bad, to the extent they understand there’s a crucial, positive value at stake. […] Thus priority number one needs to be: present a compelling, positive vision of the right values and policies.
There is a lot to learn on this topic from the “green” movement, even though they advocate all the wrong policies. They are able to gain a huge amount of enthusiasm for “green” policies because they connect those policies to crucial values…and they are able to gain the moral high ground against industrial freedom by portraying it as the source of short- and long-term environmental destruction–that is, the destruction of crucial values.
There is no reason that advocates of industrial capitalism can’t do the same thing, but much better and much more honestly.
[…]
When we offer an ideal, we can set the terms of the debate.
[…]
By contrast, if we focus our efforts on arguing against environmentalism, without offering a clear, defined, illustrated, inspiring alternative, then our best-case scenario is to get from bad to zero–from embracing “green” policies to disagreeing with them. But we want to get them from bad to good–to embracing industrial progress and industrial freedom.
I call this approach Aspirational Advocacy, because it means connecting our political policies to our audience’s deepest values and aspirations. […]
[Find out more about Alex Epstein by visiting www.industrialprogress.net]

Alex does a great job of capturing the essence of the problem: “When we offer an ideal, we can set the terms of the debate.”  And when we don’t, we can’t and we are forced to fight on the ground our enemies have picked for us.

When we inspire our audience by showing them how to make their lives better, we give them a reason to act and knowledge of why they are acting.  This is important in any debate we might wish to win, in any arena in which real values are threatened by false values or where human life is being attacked for the sake of non-humans (whether mythical, imaginary, animal, whatever).  We can’t win by being on the defensive.  We can’t win by fighting a battle that was stacked against us at the beginning. We can’t win by merely destroying: we must create.  We must show the value of a life lived well and the value doing so.

If we want to win the world, then we have to inspire people to our moral ideal and show them why our way is the only way.

Seeing the Unseen

Seeing the Unseen:

The loss of production that results from the increased taxes associated with Obamacare will be very real but largely unseen.  Here's one story in which it's made explicit:

An Indiana-based medical equipment manufacturer says it's scrapping plans to open five new plants in the coming years because of a looming tax tied to President Obama's health care overhaul law.

Cook Medical claims the tax on medical devices, set to take effect next year, will cost the company roughly $20 million a year, cutting into money that would otherwise go toward expanding into new facilities over the next five years.

"This is the equivalent of about a plant a year that we're not going to be able to build," a company spokesman told FoxNews.com.

He said the original plan was to build factories in "hard-pressed" Midwestern communities, each employing up to 300 people. But those factories cost roughly the same amount as the projected cost of the new tax.

"In reality, we're not looking at the U.S. to build factories anymore as long as this tax is in place. We can't, to be competitive," he said.

Department of Justice Sputters on Censorship

Department of Justice Sputters on Censorship: I emailed this letter to Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, at the Department of Justice:

27 July 2012

Thomas Perez
Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division
Department of Justice
Washington, DC

Mr. Perez:

Your astoundingly evasive and nearly comical response to Representative Trent Franks's direct, simple question today, during a session of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, about whether or not the Justice Department would criminalize speech against any religion (Frank: “Will you tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?” and three other variations of the same question) tipped your hand and that of your boss, Attorney General Holder, that you and your cohorts would certainly "entertain or advance" the criminalization of any and all such speech, especially in regards to your friends, the Islamic supremacists and lobbyists who apparently hold more sway in Washington than do Americans who value their freedom of speech. I have watched the video of that exchange, as have countless other Americans, and like them wonder just what level of disgusting and craven dhimmitude you and your ilk have stooped to.

You kept begging for "context" but the context was a question that required a simple, honest, straightforward denial or affirmation. That you could not answer such a simple question without sounding like a malevolent Elmer Fudd and fidgeting like a criminal suspect being given the third degree, telegraphed your sleazy, weasel character and informed anyone with a modicum of character judgment that lying is an integral part of your makeup. No decent person could watch your behavior with feeling revulsion. It was with great satisfaction to me that Representative Franks would not let you scurry from your corner and allow you to change the subject.

Be forewarned: I write extensively on the perils of Islam and its barbaric and nihilist nature, and in particular about the brutality of Sharia law – which so many Islamic supremacists have boasted will replace our Constitution, the loudest having been the doyens of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic organizations in this country – if the Justice Department ever does issue such a totalitarian measure, I shall continue to write what I wish about Islam, which is simply a totalitarian ideology garbed in religious dogma. You are obviously, like your boss, and his boss, and all their advisors, of the Left, and there is an ideological symbiosis between the Left and Islam.

Oh, and I mustn't forget to mention Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her "close" advisor, Huma Abedin, and their efforts to silence criticism of Islam, most notably in partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to have speech critical of Islam treated as legally enforceable "hate speech," whatever its form or intent.

You are a coward, a traitor, and a discredit to your country. You are a perfect fit for this administration. In the context of the principles on which this country was founded, you and your cohorts are the "blasphemers."

The letter is self-explanatory and contains all the information one would need to grasp the context that Perez attempted to evade and switch.

I sent a copy of it to Representative Trent Franks, as well. There has been no response from Perez, and none is expected, although it is likely that my blog articles, here and elsewhere, will come under scrutiny. But I take that scrutiny for granted, because the federal government is already monitoring blog sites for "national security reasons."

The threat contained in Perez's waffling responses extends of course to any kind of speech, particularly speech the government deems "hate speech" or "seditious speech" or "revolutionary speech" directed against its growing powers to regulate, stifle, gag, and destroy. If the Department of Justice criminalizes speech "against religion" (specifically Islam) or imposes any kind of "anti-blasphemy" law, that in itself would be anti-Constitutional, but would, of course, open the door to prohibitions against any kind of speech deemed "dangerous" or "harmful" or "defamatory."

It is clear from the video that Perez did not care for Rep. Frank's context, and wished to switch the focus from an admission of totalitarian ambition to one that would rationalize totalitarianism.

Perez is one of those political creatures whose careers have been solely in government "service." It would not be fair to claim that he knows nothing about the First Amendment of the Constitution. Creatures like him always know what absolutes they are dodging. It was a "hard" question to answer, Franks allegedly "threatened" Perez, and Perez was obviously in need of rescue. Some member of the committee came to his rescue by interrupting Franks on some procedural matter. The video ends there, and we don’t know how the questioning ended.

Perez's nomination for the post of Assistant Attorney General was endorsed or recommended to the Senate Judiciary Committee by literal menagerie of collectivist groups and statist politicians. And there is this revealing "credit" in his "vitae": "He also served as Special Counsel to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, and was Senator Kennedy's principal adviser on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues." Kennedy also endorsed his nomination for the position. That speaks for itself, and is nearly as much an indictment of him as his wanting to leave the door open to censorship.

Instances of Perez's friendliness towards Islam and his willingness to criminalize any speech that smacks of "religious intolerance" (the term preferred by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Hillary Clinton) are numerous. In June of 2012, The New English Review, for example, offered these tidbits about Perez's inclinations:

On October 7, 2010, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Thomas E. Perez, paid a visit to the US Attorney Nashville office and met with local Muslim groups including members of the board of the ICM. Perez told the group that included the Imams the both the ICM and Nashville mosques [about the controversial Murfreesboro mega mosque} that “his office has their back if it turns out that opponents [of the mosque] aren't as interested in zoning esoteric as they are in sidelining the practice of Islam in Murfreesboro.”

And:

Later in December 2011, Secretary of State Clinton would convene an international plenary session with OIC members and other foreign representatives at the State Department. The so-called Istanbul Process conference was directed at developing best practices for combating religious intolerance, a code word for Shariah blasphemy codes adopted by the Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez of the USDOJ Civil Rights Division spoke about development of best practices to comply with the UN religious intolerance resolution.

Call the Assistant Attorney General an infidel "Activist for Allah."

Perez can pontificate on "human rights" with the best of them. In December 2011 he addressed Clinton's State Department on the importance of protecting "religious freedom," in conjunction with the OIC conference chaired by Hillary in Washington that month.

The United Nations Human Rights Council echoed the Universal Declaration in resolution 16/18, which is the basis for this conference. As important as it is to assert such principles, however, it is equally or even more important to ensure that such principles are put into practice.

What is Resolution 16/18? Forbes Magazine published a post-OIC conference article by Abigail R. Esman. She isn't quite sure that it's such a bad thing. However, she begins:

While you were out scavenging the Wal-Mart super sales or trying on trinkets at Tiffany and Cartier, your government has been quietly wrapping up a Christmas gift of its own: adoption of UN resolution 16/18. An initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (formerly Organization of Islamic Conferences), the confederacy of 56 Islamic states, Resolution 16/18 seeks to limit speech that is viewed as “discriminatory” or which involves the “defamation of religion” – specifically that which can be viewed as “incitement to imminent violence”….

….But this latest version, which includes the “incitement to imminent violence” phrase – that is, which criminalizes speech which incites violence against others on the basis of religion, race, or national origin – has succeeded in winning US approval –despite the fact that it (indirectly) places limitations as well on speech considered “blasphemous.”

Resolution 16/18 has undergone many revisions over the years in attempts to create ambiguous enough a language but still seem pseudo-specific enough to lock especially the United States into a commitment to "tweak" the First Amendment to suit Islamic notions of "blasphemy," "defamation," and "intolerance." This is in the notable tradition of Thomas Perez, to switch the context and establish the terms of "legal" censorship. Esman writes:

The background to all of this, unsurprisingly, is an effort on the part of Muslim countries to limit what they consider to be defamatory and blasphemous speech: criticism of Islam, say, or insulting the prophet Mohammed – which, as we’ve learned, can mean anything from drawing a cartoon or making a joke in a comedy sketch to burning a Koran. Such acts – according to some readings of the Koran and, indeed, according to law in some OIC countries – are punishable by death. Hence the riots that met the publication of the so-called “Danish cartoons,” the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and on and on.

Books, novels, cartoons, and literature of all kinds could all be charged with "incitement to imminent violence." Prove that they aren't inciting anything. For Islam and Muslims, there is always a handy mob of demonstrators on call ready to claim "offense" and "defamation" and to carry signs that read, "To Hell with Freedom of Speech." They'll always be hovering in the background, prepared to initiate violence just to back up or make credible some attorney's charge that the violence is "imminent." This fact has been demonstrated countless times over the last few decades.

Dhimmified politicians and public figures who endorse restrictions on speech against Islam out of fear of "inciting" such violence are merely cowards. Figures such as Perez do not fear such violence; to judge by Perez's career and the careers of his ilk in the DHS and FBI, they take pleasure in suppressing speech for the sake of suppressing it. That would go far in explaining Perez's behavior when he chose not to answer Representative Franks' s question. He wished to change the subject and present a rationalized, "legalized" option of "entertaining or advancing" censorship.

For the reader's edification, here is a partial list of the organizations that endorsed Perez's nomination:

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, ADA Watch, Alliance for Justice, American Association of University Women (AAUW), American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Americans for Democratic Action, Asian American Justice Center, Bazelon Center, Feminist Majority, Human Rights Campaign, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Abortion Federatino, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), National Association of Consumer Advocates, National Coalition for Disability Rights (NCDR), National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), National Education Association, National Fair Housing Alliance, National Health Law Program, National Partnership for Women & Families, National Women's Law Center, People for the American Way, The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law

As you can see, these are the organizations that are united in an alliance against the individual, against individual rights, and against reason, and all believe that the Constitution can be "tweaked" to sanction their collectivist "rights" and "entitlements." In Perez's view, individuals do not have "civil rights."

One would not otherwise waste time on detailing the career of a political wonk such as Perez, except that his contemptible but signature performance before the Subcommittee on the Constitution revealed the insouciant attitude the Department of Justice, under the aegis of a Marxist, Attorney General Eric Holder, has towards the Constitution and individual rights. In Perez's warped universe, there are only collectivized rights. Remember that he was nominated by President Obama. That also speaks for itself.

I encourage readers to send their own letters of protest to Thomas Perez (to AskDOJ@usdoj.gov – there is no direct email address for him), and a letter of support to Representative Trent Franks (at http://www.franks.house.gov/contacts/new – you will need to use his District's Arizona Zip code, 85308, for a letter to be accepted, but you can use your own address and contact information).

It is important that we let all wannabe totalitarians and career "humanitarians" such as Perez know that the American people are on to him and his "context" games. It is also important that we let Congressmen such as Trent Franks know that Americans are behind him.

It is crucial that we stand up for freedom of speech. Without that freedom, we cannot protect any of our other rights.

Ian Fleming’s Beautiful Plan to Defeat the Nazis

Ian Fleming’s Beautiful Plan to Defeat the Nazis:
Before writing a series of books on the exploits of British spy James Bond (aka 007), Ian Fleming served in Britain’s navy during World War II.
As part of his job as lieutenant-commander in naval Intelligence, Fleming developed various plans to foil the Nazis in their aspirations to take over and enslave Europe. Here we see early glimpses of Fleming’s novel mind at work.
Consider, for example, the following plan, known as “Operation Ruthless,” that Sinclair McKay recounts in a forthcoming book titled The Secret Lives of Codebreakers:

[This plan] involved the use of “an air-worthy German bomber” to be obtained from the Air Ministry—a “tough crew of five, including a pilot, WT operator, and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit.”

The plan was to “crash the plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service” and, justifying the operation name, “once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.”

What was so valuable about a rescue boat? The hope was that there would be an Enigma machine onboard, which the Nazis used for communication, and that with this in hand, some of Britain’s top minds could decipher the messages sent to and from German High Command.

Not only did Fleming come up with this idea; he also, remarkably, volunteered for the mission. Unfortunately, reports McKay, this plan was never put into practice, because weather conditions and other circumstances did not permit it.
(McKay tells us that, on hearing the plan would not be enacted, Alan Turing and Peter Twinn, who were working nonstop on breaking into Enigma via the creation of “bombe” machines that would lead to our modern computers, felt like “undertakers cheated of a nice corpse.”)
But Fleming developed many other plans, some as ingenious as this, and several were implemented toward the victory of Britain and the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany.
(For a recounting of some of Fleming’s other plans, see Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, which I reviewed in the Summer 2011 issue of TOS.)
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Image: Wikipedia.

Andy Kessler Takes on Job-Destroying Mandates

Andy Kessler Takes on Job-Destroying Mandates:
In my interview with Andy Kessler (TOS Summer 2011), Kessler said, “There is always room for new creators to make the world more productive. Don’t buy the argument that technology will lead to massive unemployment and an underclass; just the opposite happens every cycle.”
Recently, in The Wall Street Journal, Kessler elaborated on this point. He observed that in doing something in the marketplace better, more efficiently, or more productively, entrepreneurs may initially cause some people to be unemployed, but ultimately they create many more jobs or wealth than previously existed. Quoting from the article:

Since 1986, Staples has opened 2,000 stores, eliminating the jobs of distributors and brokers who charged nasty markups for paper and office supplies. But it enabled hundreds of thousands of small (and not so small) businesses to stock themselves cheaply and conveniently and expand their operations.
It’s the same story elsewhere. Apple employs just 47,000 people, and Google under 25,000. Like Staples, they have destroyed many old jobs, like making paper maps and pink “While You Were Out” notepads. But by lowering the cost of doing business they’ve enabled innumerable entrepreneurs to start new businesses and employ hundreds of thousands, even millions, of workers world-wide—all while capital gets redeployed more effectively.

Kessler is right that in paying attention to the seen layoffs, and ignoring the unseen increase in productivity or wealth, economically illiterate policymakers have punished innovators for innovating, encouraged businesses to produce things that consumers don’t want to buy, and (via a host of regulations) locked in the status quo.
Kessler is also right that the solution is for the government to, as he puts it, get out of the way.

Every government-mandated low-flow toilet, phosphorous-free dishwasher detergent, CFL light bulb, and carbon-emission regulation is another obstacle on the way to a productive, job-creating economy that produces things consumers really want.

It’s hard for people to argue with any of this; after all, if consumers did want something the government would not have to mandate it. But of course that won’t stop leftists (or unprincipled “rightists”) from arguing with it, and it won’t stop policy-makers from enacting ever more mandates in the future.
What will?
While educating people about economics may help, such madness will end only when Americans—and their elected officials—come to recognize each individual’s right to property and the pursuit of his own happiness as sacrosanct. The ultimate solution, then, is to educate Americans about the source and nature of rights.
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Related:

• Interview with Andy Kessler about the Virtue of Eating People
• Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society

Wên T'ien-hsiang, on Books

Wên T'ien-hsiang, on Books:

Of his time as a captive around the year 1280, Chinese scholar, Wên T'ien-hsiang, wrote about books:



"Alas! the fates were against me; I was without resource. 

Bound with fetters, hurried away toward the north,

death would have been sweet indeed;

but that boon was refused.



My dungeon is lighted by the will-o'-the-wisp alone:

no breath of spring cheers the murky solitude in which I dwell.

The ox and the barb herd together in one stall:

the rooster and the phoenix feed together from  one dish.



Exposed to mist and dew, I had many times thought to die;

and yet, through the seasons of two revolving years,

disease hovered around me in vain.

The dark, unhealthy soil to me became Paradise itself.



For there was that within me which misfortune could not steal away.

And so I remained firm, gazing at the white clouds floating over my head,

and bearing in my heart a sorrow boundless as the sky.



The sun of those dead heroes has long since set,

 but their record is before me still.

And, while the wind whistles under the eaves,

I open my books and read;

and lo! in their presence my heart glows with a borrowed fire."

Mayor of Boston Versus Individual Rights

Mayor of Boston Versus Individual Rights:
I support gay marriage wholeheartedly, and I’ve long been appalled by Chick-Fil-A’s support for theocracy. However, I’m just as appalled by the attempt by the Mayor of Boston to exclude Chick-Fil-A from Boston. It is a contemptible violation of rights — including of the proper separation of church and state.
The letter from the mayor reads:

To Mr. Cathy:
In recent days you said Chick fil-A opposes same-sex marriage and said the generation that supports it as an “arrogant attitude.”
Now — incredibly — your company says you are backing out of the same-sex marriage debate. I urge you to back out of your plans to locate in Boston.
You called supporters of gay marriage “prideful.” Here in Boston, to borrow your own words, we are “guilty as charged.” We are indeed full of pride for our support of same sex marriage and our work to expand freedom to all people. We are proud that our state and our city have led the way for the country on equal marriage rights.
I was angry to learn on the heels of your prejudiced statements about your search for a site to locate in Boston. There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it. When Massachusetts became the first state in the country to recognize equal marriage rights, I personally stood on City Hall Plaza to greet same sex couples here to be married. It would be an insult to them and to our city’s long history of expanding freedom to have a Chick fil-A across the street from that spot.
Sincerely,
Thomas M. Menino

Such would be a fabulous letter from a private person, speaking his own personal opinions. From the mayor, however, that letter implies a threat of force, namely that of excluding Chick-Fil-A from Boston. That’s terribly wrong.
At this point, I strongly recommend that people boycott Chick-Fil-A. I discussed that in the 12 February 2012 episode of Philosophy in Action Radio, in fact. Here’s my 15-minute answer to the question, “Should people boycott Chick-Fil-A for its hostility to gays?”

You can also download the MP3 Segment.
Oh, and see this post from Eugene Volokh: No Building Permits for Opponent of Same-Sex Marriage. As Eugene explains, it’s a First Amendment violation, plain and simple:

But denying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation. Even when it comes to government contracting — where the government is choosing how to spend government money — the government generally may not discriminate based on the contractor’s speech, see Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr (1996). It is even clearer that the government may not make decisions about how people will be allowed to use their own property based on the speaker’s past speech.
And this is so even if there is no statutory right to a particular kind of building permit (and I don’t know what the rule is under Illinois law). Even if the government may deny permits to people based on various reasons, it may not deny permits to people based on their exercise of his First Amendment rights. It doesn’t matter if the applicant expresses speech that doesn’t share the government officials’ values, or even the values of the majority of local citizens. It doesn’t matter if the applicant’s speech is seen as “disrespect[ful]” of certain groups. The First Amendment generally protects people’s rights to express such views without worrying that the government will deny them business permits as a result. That’s basic First Amendment law — but Alderman Moreno, Mayor Menino, and, apparently, Mayor Emanuel (if his statement is quoted in context), seem to either not know or not care about the law.

Go read the whole thing.

Civilian Responses to Active Attackers

Civilian Responses to Active Attackers:
If you ever find yourself in a mass-shooting incident, how can you safely respond?
Our friend Ari Armstrong discusses this with his father Linn Armstrong (a certified firearms instructor here in Colorado) on what unarmed — and armed — civilians can do. For instance, unarmed civilians could throw their movie theater drinks and any available objects en masse at a shooter, thus disorienting him.
Here’s the full blog post by Ari and the related video, “Civilian Responses to Active Attackers“:
FWIW, my group practices at two of the big trauma hospitals in Denver that received casualties from the Colorado shooting, The Medical Center of Aurora (TMCA) and Swedish Medical Center.
I was off-duty that night, but when I came in early that morning I talked to one of the ER doctors at TMCA who helped treated these patients.  He and his colleagues were worn out after a long and busy night, but they did a terrific job under enormous pressure.

Persuade Someone

Persuade Someone: Two blog posts have me thinking about the importance, in cultural activism, of reaching a wide audience.

The first post, by a technology blogger, makes a great point, although I don't care for his opening example. (Dictatorial rule systematically usurps the reason of those subjected to it, for starters.)

Nobody ever changed anything by remaining quiet, idly standing by, or remaining part of the faceless, voiceless masses. If you ever want to effect change, in your work, in your life, you must learn to persuade others. [bold in original]

These others are individuals, and change happens one mind at a time. But even the most persuasive people don't persuade everyone every time, no matter how right or just their cause. One reason for this is that some people simply are not bright enough or do not know enough to be reachable. Another is that some people are evasive (i.e., simply not open to reason).

I found an almost perfect example of evasion the other day, when reading a news story about the fallout from the Freeh Report. The Freeh Report had been commissioned by Penn State in order to determine how serial sexual predator Jerry Sandusky had been able to operate there for well over a decade after officials, including Coach Joe Paterno, had been made aware of his activities.

"I'll go to my grave believing he didn't do anything until someone shows me a video of him participating in whatever they're saying that he did," said [David] Sage, who later flashed his large ring with Paterno's name engraved on the side, the same ring he showed Joe's sons, Scott and Jay, at their father's on-campus memorial viewing in January. " . . . I think if you looked up the word integrity in the dictionary, you'd see his picture there."

He might as well have added that if someone ever showed him such a video, he'd "know" it was a fake. Assuming for the sake of argument that the above remains this man's position in a year -- unless some pretty good evidence against Paterno having a role in the cover-up somehow surfaces -- this is a nearly perfect example of evasion, a refusal to think. (There is the possibility that the man is in temporary denial, too shocked to believe the evidence yet.)

Most people have no trouble deciding whether to expend more effort or give up on persuading someone who is less intelligent or informed. However, some people (including myself at times in the past) don't make this call with as much ease when someone is evasive. That's a problem, because a cultural activist cannot waste his time -- or far worse, his energy -- by investing it in attempting to persuade someone who is evasive. Aside from comment threads here, I almost never participate in on-line discussions, but when I do look at them, I usually see someone who is obviously right about something allowing someone who is obviously wrong (and being evasive) to waste his time and energy by making a reply. One clue that the person in the right is wasting his time is that he is becoming angry out of frustration.

It is far better to look for help with one's persuasiveness from people one knows to be conscientious and helpful, and then to always work to reach a broader audience than any one individual. Even in an online discussion, there is a broader audience -- lurkers and passers-by -- who might be open to the points one wants to make. It is the broader audience, and the fact that there are likely to be receptive minds there that one must remember when promoting one's cause.

Strive to be persuasive, but don't beat yourself up if persuasion doesn't work on everyone.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo and corrected the wording in a sentence about the example of evasion.

Atheists Don't Need Nannies

Atheists Don't Need Nannies: In two news stories, we see self-proclaimed advocates of tolerance undercutting the causes they allegedly espouse -- and coming across as thin-skinned ninnies in the process -- by resorting to government-backed threats, rather than persuasion.

We'll look at the more obvious offense first, which Michelle Malkin writes about, in which the mayor of a major American city threatens to a restaurant chain with government discrimination because he disagrees with the views of its outspoken owners regarding such matters as gay marriage.

This week, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino declared, "Chick-fil-A doesn't belong in Boston." He recklessly slandered [sic] the company by accusing it of "discriminat(ing) against the population." And he warned ominously: "If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult -- unless they open up their policies."

Drawing on the city's history, he railed against the restaurant empire's plans to build a franchise near a famed path: "We're an open city. We're a city that's at the forefront of inclusion. That's the Freedom Trail. That's where it all started right here. And we're not going to have a company, Chick-fil-A or whatever the hell the name is, on our Freedom Trail." [bold added]

I can't help but offer free campaign advice for any future opponent of Thomas Menino in the form of a campaign slogan: "Don't let Thomas Menino close the Freedom Trail."

This atheist does not share Malkin's obvious sympathy with the religious views of the restaurant chain's owners. However, it isn't the business of the mayor to violate the property rights of the Cathy family simply because he disagrees with them and they choose to shape their chain's policies based on their views. (He compounds this offense with hypocrisy by condemning the owners for discrimination and tops that with sacrilege by invoking the Founding Fathers.) As for the proper way to protest the Cathys' arbitrary and anachronistic views, there are numerous ways that individual citizens can exercise their freedom of speech, perhaps by organizing a voluntary boycott. (Hell, the Cathys have already spotted them one day of the week by closing on Sundays.)

Another thin-skinned secularist who apparently has little confidence in the persuasive power of reason has also chosen to abuse improper government force:

[John] Wolff, a Lancaster resident who said he's never been to Prudhomme's, recently filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission claiming the 22-year-old restaurant should not give discounts based on religion. "I bear them no ill will," he said, "but they shouldn't be pushing religion."

The restaurant offers a ten percent discount to anyone wielding a (gasp!) church bulletin on Sunday. I don't care for this policy, either, but it's their restaurant, and they have the right (whether the government protects it or not) to charge whatever price to whomever they please.

There is no right to be free from other people acting according to their own judgement, unless they actually violate the rights of others by doing so. Not being able to enjoy a Chick-Fil-A sandwich provided by a company whose owners I agree with doesn't harm me. Neither does being  "annoyed" because a restaurant has people bring church bulletins in for discounts.

-- CAV

President "You Didn't Build That"

President "You Didn't Build That":

I agree with the WSJ 's conclusion that the president revealed the soul of his campaign message in his recent Roanoke speech.  It's perhaps one of the most flagrant attacks on justice -- on the very idea of earning one's way, of achieving and thus deserving one's values -- that we've ever seen in presidential politics. And as such, it might be a low-point in anti-Americanism.

The battlelines are thus clearer than usual, and it's important that this be brought to the forefront for the entire political season. 


To assist in this, I've collected some of the better commentaries and sites here:

- Perhaps my favorite column is by Rich Lowry, including this segment:

The Obama riff is a direct steal from Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts who sent liberal hearts aflutter by throwing the same wet towel on the notion of individual success a few months ago. The Obama/Warren view is a warrant for socialization of the proceeds of success. Behind its faux sophistication is a faculty-lounge disdain for business, and all those who make more than tenured professors by excelling at it. Behind its smiley we’re-all-in-it-together façade is a frank demand: You owe us.

 For that most American figure of the self-made man, exemplified most famously by Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, President Obama wants to substitute the figure of the guy who happened to get lucky while not paying his fair share in taxes. What a dreary and pinched view of human endeavor. What a telling insight into his animating philosophy. In his Virginia remarks, greeted with warm applause, Obama took down a notch anyone who has made it: “I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”

 True enough, and we should value the dignity of all work, no matter how humble. But the hallmark of the man of extraordinary accomplishment isn’t simply work. Some of us may work as hard as Steve Jobs. Few of us are as single-minded, risk-taking, shrewd, or visionary. Millions of us could work twelve-hour days for years yet never come up with the idea for the iPad, let alone successfully manufacture and market it.

 To redefine Steve Jobs as the product of the (necessary and unremarkable) infrastructure and government services around him is to devalue human creativity. The Obama formulation goes something like this: Steve Jobs couldn’t get to work every day without roads; he couldn’t drive safely on those roads without a well-regulated system of driver’s licenses; ergo, the San Jose, Calif., DMV practically built Apple.

 - Here's a site dedicated to various pictures of personal achievements which the president denies (from which I shared the two photos here).


- Alex Epstein weighs in here, including this paragraph:  

The fact that builders benefit from others in a free society does not mean that they should be forced to “give something back.” It means we should all treasure living in a free society, and fight to make it freer. But if we are going to talk about who owes whom the most gratitude, then we should recognize that the biggest builders are owed the most. They have not only financed the lion’s share of government, they have, more importantly, created the most enduring achievements. When I think of whom I owe gratitude to, it is individuals like Steve Jobs, not the millions of patrons of America’s welfare state.

- Another worthwhile editorial includes this insight:

Yet on another level, the president's little lesson is self-evidently absurd. Lots of people attend public schools and have teachers. Very few people become Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Everybody uses the roads and bridges the factory owner uses to bring his products to market. But not everyone builds a factory.

The tax dollars that paid for those roads, bridges, schools, and teachers didn't just come from "someone else" or the "rest of us." They came from the innovators, the factory owners, and the entrepreneurs too. In 2009, the top 400 taxpayers paid almost as much in federal income taxes as the entire bottom 50 percent combined.

- Even milquetoast Romney got roused up (including my favorite line: "President Obama attacks success, and therefore under president Obama we have less success."). (Of course his insistence on rights being god-given is very worrisome.)

- Burt Folsom reminds us that for the most part, not only does the Federal Government not help businesses, it often targets them, including by various subsidies to competitors.

I'll conclude the list with an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged that is also making the rounds:

“He didn't invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his? Why does he think it's his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn't anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

(Feel free to suggest other good links and commentary in the comment section.)

Objectivist Round Up: The Final Edition

Objectivist Round Up: The Final Edition: After *five years* of managing the Objectivist Round Up, Rational Jenn has decided to retire the Round Up. Many thanks to Jenn for all her work, and here's the link to the last edition.

“You Didn’t Build That”—Obama’s Ode to Envy

“You Didn’t Build That”—Obama’s Ode to Envy:
Barack Obama’s July 13 speech, in which he tells business owners, “you didn’t build that,” has rightly generated enormous criticism. But why did he say it? Before we turn to that question, let’s review exactly what Obama said:

[I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

This speech is remarkable only for its ludicrousness. (It is certainly not remarkable for its originality; as others have noted, Obama took a page out of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign book. Then again, Obama would say she didn’t write that.)
Obama wishes us to believe that the successful—whatever their field and scale of success—are wrong to attribute their success to applying their minds and working hard. Unfortunately for Obama, rational Americans know that his claim contradicts the facts surrounding the achievements of every productive industrialist, producer, and creator, who succeeds by thinking, planning, and working hard.
Examples range from from J. D. Rockefeller, who revolutionized the oil industry; to the Wright brothers, who pioneered heavier-than-air human flight; to Thomas Edison, who developed a usable electric light bulb (among other innovations); to Ayn Rand, who wrote great novels on the themes of independence, individual productiveness, and the role of reason in man’s life; to Steve Jobs, who revolutionized the computer, music, and film industries.
Subscribe to the

Journal for People of ReasonObama wishes us to believe that, because not every “smart,” hard-working person reaches the pinnacle of success, that somehow diminishes the achievements of those who do. True enough, some “smart” people misapply their intelligence, for instance, by becoming animal “rights” activists or Marxist community organizers. Others go into business without having the right business plan, the right motivation, the right leadership skills, or the right good or service for their intended market; indeed, only a third of businesses survive their first decade. Often entrepreneurs fail numerous times before developing a successful business. Rational Americans understand that, while not every smart, hard-working person builds a successful business, that does not alter the fact that those who do build successful businesses do so by thinking, planning, and working hard.
Obama also wishes us to believe that, because successful producers learned something from government teachers, used government roads and bridges, employed government research, and the like, this means they don’t really own their success or wealth. Rational Americans know full well that the government funds such things by forcibly confiscating the wealth of producers. Rational Americans also know that a bum is as free to use a government bridge as is a successful business owner, but the business owner chose to apply his intelligence and work hard to build something great.
Finally, to mask the inanity of what he just said, Obama mentions that “individual initiative” perhaps has something to do with a producer’s success. But, in addition to seeing through Obama’s flagrant contradictions, rational Americans see this subordination for exactly what it is: an attempt to insignificantly mitigate what he said before, while leaving what he said before as his main and emphatic message.
Of course, that Obama flouts logic and observable facts is obvious to anyone who spends even a few moments evaluating his claims. Why, then, does he spout such nonsense?
To understand the atmosphere in which Obama delivered his remarks, watch the video. When Obama tells business leaders, “You didn’t get there on your own,” some in the crowd chant, “That’s right!” When Obama ridicules business leaders for thinking they’re “just so smart,” many in the crowd meet his comments with jeering laughter.
The purpose of Obama’s speech was not to present serious arguments about the causes of success in business. His claims are ridiculous on their face. Obama’s purpose was to give envious Americans the pretext they need to openly loathe those who have been successful—and to vote accordingly.
If the successful didn’t really earn their success—and thus the wealth that comes with it—then there’s nothing wrong with “spreading their wealth around” to those who have not been so successful. If no one is responsible for his success, then no one has a right to the fruits of his success, and thus those who haven’t been successful have the same right to those fruits. And if the successful resist the “noble” effort to redistribute what is “really” the community’s wealth, then they are evil—or so Obama wishes us to believe.
In reality, anyone who develops a new technology, writes a great novel, brings an innovative new product to market, or in any other way earns success, thereby deserves the fruits of that success. Unfortunately for Obama, rational Americans know this, and rational Americans will win this debate.
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice
• Why Marxism? Evil Laid Bare

Creative Commons Image by Steve Jurvetson

On a Revisionist’s Proposal to Upend the Declaration of Independence

On a Revisionist’s Proposal to Upend the Declaration of Independence:
University of Virginia’s Center for Politics director Larry Sabato, citing the Founders’ approval of a Constitution open for revision, has proposed several revisions of his own.
One may argue over the merits of Sabato’s proposed revisions regarding war powers, Senate structure, elections, and Supreme Court terms. But no one can reasonably advocate his fifth proposal: a constitutional amendment to require every able-bodied American between the ages of 18 and 26 to “perform two years of national service, civilian or military.”
Not only would Universal National Service—which means involuntary servitude to the state—be in direct contravention to the Thirteenth Amendment; it would be nothing less than a repeal of the Declaration of Independence, the philosophical blueprint for the Constitution. The Founders could never have agreed or even conceived that the fundamental principles upon which this nation rests would ever be subject to repeal, in the name of “constructive change in a 21st-century world unimaginable to the Founders.”
A National Service Amendment would upend America’s very reason for being—that is, to protect the inalienable rights of the individual to pursue his own goals and happiness, by means of a government charged with the sole task of protecting those rights.
The signers of the Declaration pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in support of those ideals. It’s shocking that any American would so dishonor the ideals behind that pledge—and in the Founders’ names, no less.
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice
• The Creed of Sacrifice vs. The Land of Liberty

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Help Joshua Lipana Fight Cancer

Help Joshua Lipana Fight Cancer:
I posted last week to inform readers that Joshua Lipana has been diagnosed with cancer, and I mentioned that I’d soon organize a fundraiser to help him pay his bills (which now exceed $30,000). I’ve created a page at gofundme.com where you can contribute. If you’d like to help Joshua, please follow this link and make a donation.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Craig Biddle

Crowdfunding

...and the Home of the Slave.

...and the Home of the Slave.:
Americans Will Work More than 6 Months to Pay Cost of Government in 2012 - CNSNews.com Article
Just pretend the stolen time/property was never yours in the first place.  We hear tell that this helps some people cope.
Full Article Here

Debt Aggregation Follow-Up

Debt Aggregation Follow-Up:
My first “vectors” feature on debt aggregation featured the story of Spain’s debt aggregation landscape.  Today two stories have emerged to complement Spain’s debt aggregation narrative.
First, from Zero Hedge:
Valencia Announces SOS, Needs To Tap Government LIquidity Support Just Eurogroup Accepts Spanish Bailout Plan

Spain’s heavily indebted eastern region of Valencia said on Friday it would apply for help under the government’s 18 billion euro plan passed on Thursday aimed at helping regional finances.

This, just shortly on the heels of a Spanish bank rescue announcement, from Bloomberg:

Euro Finance Chiefs Give Final Approval to Spain Bank Rescue

Euro-area finance ministers gave final approval to as much as 100 billion euros ($122 billion) of bank aid for Spain, putting Greece back on the front line of the bloc’s crisis-fighting agenda.

Note that the “bank aid” is a loan, via the EFSF mechanism.  This is the essence of debt aggregation: with national “too big to fail” institutions given cheap money permitted by international collusion to keep them afloat.”
For the foreseeable future, Europe’s leaders will use debt aggregation to “kick the can down the road.”  It never ceases to amaze me that this works to assuage the financial markets, and how well it “works” to keep the economy going, but piling more debt onto already un-payable debt leads to only one place: default.    In a coming update, I’ll try to predict when that is going to happen, by dissecting Germany’s untenable position in the Eurozone from a historical perspective.

Great Minds? Maybe Not

Great Minds? Maybe Not:

Guess what, folks? It’s not small-minded, second-handed, or otherwise undesirable to be interested in people. People are amazing wellsprings of knowledge, innovation, and values. They’re complex, nuanced, and unique. People matter to our lives, hugely.
Unless you allow other people to trump facts, to be interested in people is not any kind of moral or intellectual taint. To condemn that is to claim moral superiority based on differences in personality and preference. That is a mistake — a huge mistake.
Yes, I’m aware the the poster probably means to condemn gossip, but not all gossip is malicious, destructive, or petty. Gossip can be a form of benevolent interest in other people in your community, as I discussed in this webcast.

The AEI's Lame Initiative

The AEI's Lame Initiative: The true color of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, has been revealed (via HBL), and that color is Al Gore green:

On Wednesday, the conservative American Enterprise Institute hosted a secret meeting with other Washington, D.C., think tank officials, including members from several prominent liberal ones, to discuss how to build political support for a carbon pollution tax.

The discussion even apparently raised the subject of trying to get the upcoming post-election "lame duck" Congress to address the issue. [link dropped]

Fortunately, Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, got wind of this foolishness and spread the word.

The Economic Policy Director of the AEI claimed that his outfit was merely hosting an "information sharing" event, to which the CEI's Marlo Lewis responds appropriately:

[L]et's assume he experienced it that way, but what about the 'progressives' who set the agenda? They must really be into sharing, because this was their fifth meeting. Whatever the AEI folks thought the event was about, the agenda clearly outlines a strategy meeting to develop the PR/legislative campaign to promote and enact carbon taxes. [bold added]

I am grateful to the CEI for its vigilance.

-- CAV

Nature vs. Altruism

Nature vs. Altruism: In a posting at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne discusses what it would take to disprove the theory of evolution. I found the following two points, taken together, interesting in light of a notion I have seen bandied about to the effect that altruism exists in nature or has somehow been selected for. (To be clear, each of these things are not what we actually see.)

• The observation that most adaptations of individuals are inimical for individuals or their genes but good for populations/species.  Such adaptations aren't expected to evolve often because they would require the inefficient process of group or species selection rather than genic, individual, or kin selection.  And indeed, we see very few features of organisms that seem inimical to organisms or their genes but useful for the population or species. One possible exception is sexual reproduction.

• Evolved "true" altruistic behavior among non-relatives in non-social animals. What I mean by "true" altruistic behavior is the observation of an individual sacrificing its reproductive output for the benefit of individuals to which it is either unrelated or from whom it does not expect to receive return benefits.  In this "true" altruism your genes give benefits to others and get nothing back, and this shouldn't evolve under natural selection. And, indeed, we don't see such altruism in nature. There are reports that vampire bats regurgitate blood to other individuals in the colony to whom they're unrelated, but those need confirmation, and there may also be reciprocal altruism, so that individuals regurgitate blood to those from whom, one day, they expect a return meal. Such cooperation can evolve by normal natural selection. [bold added]

I am not familiar enough with studies of "altruistic" behavior to know whether the term "altruism" in such contexts is normally used to mean something more like cooperation, but I have always disliked the term. I strongly suspect that most biologists, at least, don't mean some kind of non-cooperative phenomenon. Nevertheless, the use of the ethical term fosters misunderstanding of such work (not the least because of the actual meaning of altruism) among non-scientists in the general public. It also lends false credence to the misconception that the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution somehow also indicates that self-sacrifice is a "natural" way for man to live. If anything, the opposite is true.

-- CAV

Leave It Up

Leave It Up: Writing as a guest columnist for the New York Times, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues against removing the statue of Joe Paterno from the entrance to Beaver Stadium, where Penn State plays its home football games. For anyone who hasn't followed the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal, the calls for removal come after the findings from the school's internal investigation, headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh, noted Paterno's role in a cover-up.

While the desire to demolish a statue created to honor Paterno is understandable, Coates holds, removing the statue would actually be a mistake. Coates ends the piece as follows:

Arguing for the statue's removal, the legendary coach Bobby Bowden said he wouldn't want [Jerry] Sandusky's crimes "brought up every time I walked out on the field." That's the point. Sandusky's crimes should never be forgotten, nor should the crimes of the broader community. It is shameful to deify men who put nationalist ritual before children. But it is more shameful to pretend that this elevation was achieved by Joe Paterno's singular hand.

Removing the Paterno statue allows Happy Valley to forget its own compliance in a national crime, to expunge its own culpability in its ruthless pursuit of glory. The statue should remain, and beneath it there should be a full explanation of Sandusky's crimes, Paterno's role and some warning to all of us who would turn a pastime into a god and elect a mortal man as its avatar. [bold added]

I agree. Tearing down the statue will not magically change for the better the cultural problems that enabled this atrocity any more than looking the other way while mouthing pieties about character meant that Jerry Sandusky had never harmed anyone or would cease his predations. If leaving the statue in place pleases a few Paterno loyalists, so be it: The very fact that it might would be an integral part of the lesson.

-- CAV

Aporia: Sexual Orientation

Aporia: Sexual Orientation:

by Jason Stotts

Aporia (Ancient Greek: ἀπορɛία: impasse; lack of resources; puzzlement; doubt; confusion) In philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement;  In rhetoric, a rhetorically useful expression of doubt.

Sexual orientation is a confusing subject.  So confusing that some people have taken to the idea that your sexual orientation is whatever you want it to be, that whatever you self-identify as must be your actual sexual orientation.  But, I find that idea at least…problematic.  What about the issue of self-deception?  What about the issue of other-deception?  What about contexts in which it’s acceptable to be different and cultures where it isn’t?

If a person’s sexual orientation is simply what they self-identify as, then how do we treat a man who calls himself straight, but who only is aroused by men, who only has sex with men, and who has no desire to ever be in a relationship with a woman or have sex with one?  Certainly he’s at least self-deceptive, but isn’t he also wrong that he is straight?  If it’s true that this man does the opposite of what a straight man would do, then this man is not straight.

What about the man who calls himself straight, who is in a relationship with a woman with whom he regularly has sex, but who also feels a strong desire to have sex with men and does so on a regular basis.  He’s not self-deceptive because he knows his desires and acts on them.  He’s likely hiding his true orientation from others because of the stigma of being a male bisexual, but in so doing so he’s communicating something false about himself.  Should we simply consider him a liar?  A coward for not being true to himself?  He’s not wrong about his sexual orientation, since he actually does know what it is, but there is a problem here for other people who might want or need to know his sexual orientation (for example, the men with whom he has sex or his own partner).

So, no matter what sexual orientation is, it’s definitely not just whatever you might self-identify as.  Your sexual orientation is more than simply whatever you feel it is.

Part of the problem is that we have this polarized idea of sexuality: that everyone is either gay or straight and these are mutually exclusive categories.  But this is wrong and misses much of actual human sexuality.  Sexual orientation is not binary.  It is, at the very least, a continuum of sexual options.  I think this is best captured in the Kinsey Scale, which is 0-6, with 0 being a “perfect heterosexual” who only desires and has sex with those of the opposite sex and 6 is a “perfect homosexual” who only desires and has sex with those of the same sex.  Then there are, obviously, the vast majority of people who are somewhere in between.

One alternative scale involves ranking a person on two independent axes: androphilia and gynephilia, or desire for men and women (respectively).  So, a person could have 8/10 desire level for women and a 4/10 desire for men, making them a bisexual.  With this schema, the levels of arousal for men and women are independent and indicate desire for that sex.  Thus, one advantage of this system is that also measures level of overall desire for sexual activity as well as sexual desire for each sex.  I’m not sure which I think is better, but this system does capture more than the Kinsey system, which itself captures much more than the standard dichotomy of gay vs. straight.

Of course, there much these scales don’t capture, like propensity to form relationships versus simply having sex with a person, or a person’s overall level of sexual desire (perhaps their desire for men or women is only moderate, but they really enjoy masturbating), or the fact that a person’s sexual proclivities and orientation can change over time.  But, it does, at least, help move us in the right direction

Of course, one issue that we haven’t addressed head on is the issue of action versus desire.  Or, is being gay a matter of doing gay things or having gay desires or both.  I find this issue more confusing that some of the others.  For example, what should a man who considers himself a Kinsey 2 (bisexual – opposite sex leaning) because he has both desire for men and women, even though his desire for women is stronger, but who has never, due to lack of opportunity, had sex with a women and has only had sex with men?  He self-identifies as bisexual on the heterosexual side, but he’s never had sex with a woman.  On the other hand, it’s not because he doesn’t want to, but is merely frustrated by the situation.  This is further confounded by the fact that many men grow up in our culture with internalized homophobia and try to be bi as they come into their sexual maturity so they can maintain some semblance of being “normal,” when they really know their probably a K5 or K6.  But, leaving aside the issue of whether this particular man is being self-deceptive, what should he be considered?  I find it very strange to call him a K2 when he’s only had sex with men.  Perhaps sexual orientation is simply a matter of ideal situation and not of actual situation.  But that doesn’t seem right either.  I might wish I were a K6, but if I’ve only ever had sex with women, then that obviously seems wrong.  I don’t have an answer for the question of whether we should judge sexual orientation by action or desire, or perhaps both, but it’s an interesting topic that needs more investigating.

I wonder, though, what we should do about children, adolescents, and young adults.  Should we really consider a young person to be gay, bi, or straight when they have no actual sexual experience?  Is this not being at least somewhat…optimistic about their guessing powers?  Should we simply accept that this is what they think they would like to be or should be when they get older?  Should we consider their orientation an open question until they have some experience?  As unlikely as this last sounds, there would be some definite advantages to it: people wouldn’t try to force themselves to conform to their adolescent beliefs growing up and could approach the issue of orientation with an open mind.  Their sexuality could be treated as very tentative until they’re older, maybe even their mid-twenties.  Of course, perhaps it’d be better if we all held our sexuality less rigidly and treated it as at least something of an open question.

Ultimately, I still have more questions than answers on the question of sexual orientation, but I think the topic is a rich one and deserves more careful analysis that it usually gets.