Reality. Reason. Rights.

From John Cox:

For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.

This isn’t a great letter, but it’s a bit reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged when they try to force John Galt to be their economic dictator to solve the countries problems.

Now the suggestion: Draft Steve Jobs (his health willing) to run a combined GM and Chrysler. After all, who has done a better job developing and marketing products consumers want to buy? Who has been more successful keeping the US ahead of other nations in competitive, technology-based markets?…

As has been widely reported, Mr. Jobs has some health issues and it is possible that he may not be able to dedicate the time and effort required to put the US auto industry back on firm footing. Only Mr. Jobs knows if he is up to the task. If anyone can convince him to take this on, I suspect it’s you.

Mr. Jobs couldn’t save Detroit, but bankruptcy could.

San Francisco, CA – February 15, 2009 – Omni Consumer Products has announced a 4-year sponsorship deal with Vice President Joe Biden to endorse their product Sex Panther Cologne.

“Joe’s veneer of confidence is a perfect match for what we are trying to achieve,” noted Sex Panther spokesman Brian Fantana. “We’re 40% sure this is definitely the right decision. And it doesn’t hurt that he really knows how to connect with the ladies.”

Nervous and confident at the same time, Biden discussed the first TV spot shot on Wednesday saying, “I was absolutely certain there was a 30 percent chance I’d get the slogan wrong.” And he was right, delivering on 7 of 10 takes where he held the product and recited the tagline, Sex Panther. 60% of the time, it works every time.

Omni Consumer Products would like to note that this announcement was planned for yesterday to coincide with Valentine’s Day, but their ISP only guarantees 99% percent uptime.

Biden and Fantana at Sex Panther partnership announcement.

In a coincidence not quite as remarkable as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on the same day, the 50th anniversary of America’s Independence, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day 200 years ago.

Who was more influential and important to world history? Who would I rather have dinner with? These are tough questions that I will gladly ignore.

We can thank Lincoln for defending republican liberty:

Lincoln was clearly motivated by something other than the dictator’s desire for power. During the Civil War, he sought to save the Constitution and the Union, but only because they were the means of preserving that most precious of goods, republican liberty [ed- note that the most precious good isn't "democracy"]. It is with this end in mind, and with an understanding of the nature of prudence, that we can properly understand Lincoln’s actions as commander-in-chief.

Lincoln is probably more emotionally stirring for me. See if this part of his July 10, 1858 speech gives you any goose bumps.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty—or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,—with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,—we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these [Independence Day] meetings in better humor with ourselves—we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration [loud and long continued applause], and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

But I’m a sucker for any story that mentions an aspect of Evolution (which isn’t just a theory) that I haven’t heard of before. So Darwin wins the battle for intellectual stimulation.

Until recently, conventional wisdom held that human beings had mastered their environment so thoroughly that the imperative to evolve in many ways diminished about 10,000 years ago, when agriculture gave rise to more-stable societies.

“People thought that with technology and culture, there’d be no reason for physical things to make any difference,” said Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan. “If you can ride a horse, it doesn’t matter if you can run fast.”

That turned out to be wrong. As it happens, the pace of evolution has been speeding up — not slowing down — in the 40,000 years since our ancestors fanned out from Ethiopia to populate the globe.

And in the 5,000 to 10,000 years since agriculture triggered the growth of large societies, the pace has accelerated to 100 times historical levels.

“When there’s more people, there are more mutations,” Wolpoff said. “And when there are more mutations, there’s more selection.”

…

Diet is another big force behind recent human evolution. As humans made the transition from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, their bodies had to adapt to new kinds of foods.

The best-known example involves the gene that regulates a person’s ability to make an enzyme required to digest lactose, the sugar in milk. Historically, the LCT gene shut down in early childhood as babies were weaned off breast milk. But after cows, sheep and goats were domesticated, people with a mutation that allowed them to drink milk as adults had a nutritional advantage that made it easier for them to propagate their genes.

DNA analyses have shown that the mutation cropped up in Europe about 8,000 years ago, and quickly spread all the way to India. Today, it is carried by more than 95% of people of Northern European descent.

Good stuff. Happy Birthday Boys!

A little about the stimulus from the one-man Onion that is Iowahawk.

PALO ALTO, CA – An international mathematics research team announced today that they had discovered a new integer that surpasses any previously known value “by a totally mindblowning shitload.” Project director Yujin Xiao of Stanford University said the theoretical number, dubbed a “stimulus,” could lead to breakthroughs in fields as diverse as astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Chicago asphalt contracting.

“Unlike previous large numbers like the Googleplex or the Bazillionty, the Stimulus has no static numerical definition,” said Xiao. “It keeps growing and growing, compounding factorially, eating up all zeros in its path. It moves freely across Cartesian dimensions and has the power to make any other number irrational.”

Jean-Luc Brossard, a researcher with the European consortium CERN, said the number is so staggeringly large that it is difficult to for even mathematicians to grasp, let alone lay people.

“The number itself is incomprehensible by human minds, and can only be theoretically understood in a fractional parallel universe which we refer to as the DC dimension,” said Brossard. “The best way to understand a stimulus is to imagine a dollar sign followed by a packed string of hexidecimal nanodigits, wound into a triple helix, woven into a dodecahedron, and stacked on top of one another. Now imagine you were a black hole on the far edge of the universe, trying to escape the stimulus at 30 times the speed of light. The stimulus would still catch up to you and ram your black hole with such furious, repeated force that it would cause your entire reality itself to collapse.”

I spent the last week or so in Colorado with family and friends. Now that I’m back from CO and can breath a little easier, I’ll get back to posting.

Imperial Bowl at Breckenridge

While defending the current stimulus plan, Paul Krugman makes a ridiculous argument.

[W]rite off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

Claiming that government provides a level of consumer protection that wouldn’t be there in a free market is an argument as common as it is false. Here’s a newsflash for you; it’s in the best interest of an airline to not have midair collisions. Shocking I know.

Left to their own devices, airlines and airports would create their own system to track and manage air traffic. And I bet it would be more efficient and cheaper than the government model. Planes won’t start running into each other without the FAA, elevators won’t start plummeting to the basement without goverment inspectors, and canned goods won’t be full of E. coli without the FDA.

I trust the people who’s livelihood, and in fact lives, depend on the safe delivery of their products and services, not the government.

I must have been sick on “army crawl day” in grade school. When people tell you that both sides in the middle east conflict want peace, show them what Hamas is teaching their kids.

I was hoping that the post “Putting the ‘Next’ Into ‘Next Right’: Retooling vs. Restructuring” would offer a proper defense of capitalism. This is the issue that lost McCain the election and the Right needs to be “retooled” to understand and explain the moral right to free markets. Unfortunately, I found the same consequentialism that is the Right’s default defense for capitalism. Here’s their explanation of the first of the three pillars of conservatism.

Fiscal Conservatism

Philosophical basis: The marketplace is a more efficient allocator of resources than the government; hence when deciding how resources should be allocated, the bias should always be in favor of private-sector decision making. Free markets build wealth, create prosperity, and raises standards of living for all; hence markets should be kept as free as reasonably possible. Moreover capitalism and free markets do a great job at preserving individual liberty [moreover!], as those participating in the marketplace aren’t requied to obey the will of the majority (e.g. if 90% of the population prefers Pepsi but I prefer Coke, I can still buy Coke if I so desire); hence regulations that restrict choices in the marketplace should be kept to a minimum.

Moreover? When defending a free marketplace, individual liberty deserves and demands better than a passing “moreover.” The “philosophical basis” for fiscal conservatism is individual liberty. It’s not a happenstance side benefit. A moral right to the product of one’s labor is the basis for capitalism and fiscal conservatism. The above is a very weak “ends justifies the means” defense of capitalism; it works better for everyone, so it is the moral choice. Weak ideology like this will continue to lose elections and leave a vacuum to be filled by government which assumes the moral authority to fix break things.

And I take issue with this line discussing the second pillar, Social Conservatism.

[I]ndividual liberty is only beneficially meaningful when it is conjoined with a moral people.

Protecting individual liberty is what makes a people moral. The two can’t be conjoined because they can’t be separated in the first place. The first is what defines the second as such.

When the post gets to the third pillar of National Security, I want to agree that we should “[u]napologetically defend the ideals upon which this nation was founded,” but based on what we’ve gone over above, the writer doesn’t understand what the ideals this nation was founded on actually are.

The post finishes with some questions for the audience. The first question shouldn’t even have to be asked, ironically, because the answer is the same as the unknown ideals (that is, unknown in this post) which inspired our founding fathers to create this nation, and is what the “next” right still needs to be retooled to defend.

Q. What is the philosophical basis for the brand of conservatism that you wish to see adopted?

A. Reason and Individual Rights.

I don’t understand why these precious ideas need to be rediscovered and are so hard for some to defend, but that’s why I’m throwing my hat in the ring for the next election.

The internet has already overtaken newspapers and the protracted demise of the medium is given another nudge as internet giant Google ends its print ad program.

In the last few months, we’ve been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted. As a result, we will stop offering Print Ads on February 28. For advertisers who have campaigns already booked, we will place their ads through March 31.

With advertisers pulling out, newspapers are dropping like flies. A list of the dead or dying includes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, Tucson Citizen, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Daily News, and the New York Observer. Will cash infusions be enough to keep the New York Times going?