Lucky, just back from a little excursion.

- What's the matter, boss? You've been calling me rather frantically.

Well, this was the matter:

And a little farther on in the race (click on the images for enlarged versions):

And so I explained:

- I just got a heart attack, Lucky.

- What's a heart attack, boss?

Sigh.

- Let's talk about football, Lucky.

- Your silly Kaiserslautern football team is gonna get relegated, this year.

- Lucky!

Grrr.

More Lucky.

On Wednesday, Chuck Todd, NBC News’ political director and host of MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown,” rhetorically asked: “Just what has Romney promised Ron Paul.”

 

Nobody knows if some sort of bargain has been made, but it is interesting that Rep. Ron Paul has never really attacked Mitt Romney, yet he has frequently attacked more conservative candidates at just the moment they were beginning to pose a threat to Romney. (For example, consider his latest ad, attacking Rick Santorum.)

 

The timing has been noticeable.

 

Now, a Kentucky media outlet, WFPL News, might be offering us a clue:

 

    Kentucky’s junior senator says it would be an honor to be considered as a possible running mate for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

 

    … After a speech in Louisville today, [Sen. Rand] Paul held that door firmly open, saying he wants to be part of the national debate.

 

    … “I don’t know if I can answer that question, but I can say it would be an honor to be considered,” he said.

via nation.foxnews.com

Thoughts? Comments?

“From the day when the first members of council placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their unhappy work to the present day.” - Leo Tolstoy

…What happens, then? What makes persons in a mob behave as they do? What accounts for the distinction between these persons acting as responsible individuals and acting in association?

Perhaps it is this: These persons, when in mob association, and maybe at the instigation of a demented leader, remove the self-disciplines which guide them in individual action; thus the evil that is in each person is released, for there is some evil in all of us. In this situation, no one of the mobsters consciously assumes the personal guilt for what is thought to be a collective act but, instead, puts the onus of it on an abstraction which, without persons, is what the mob is.

There may be the appearance of unfairness in relating mob association to association in general. In all but one respect, yes. But in one respect there is a striking similarity.

Persons advocate proposals in association that they would in no circumstance practice in individual action. Honest men, by any of the common standards of honesty, will, in a board or a committee, sponsor, for instance, legal thievery that is, they will urge the use of the political means to exact the fruits of the labor of others for the purpose of benefiting themselves, their group, or their community.

These leaders, for they have been elected or appointed to a board or a committee, do not think of themselves as having sponsored legal thievery. They think of the board, the committee, the council or the association as having taken the action. The onus of the act, to their way of thinking, is put on an abstraction which is what a board or an association is without persons.

Full Text: On That Day Began Lies

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

Unfortunately, there are many preconceptions that tempt people to take a depreciatory view of theory.

Nothing alerts me more than a person taking pride in being "a practical man," thereby implying a corresponding disutility of theory.

We live in a civilisation that is abstract (i.e. ruled by evolved abstract principles) and cannot survive unless we are in a position to mentally (i.e. theoretically) reconstruct and act in accordance with the theoretical scaffolding of the human environment in its hitherto most advanced state.

Regrettably, the contemporary economist does not understand the rule of law, as being the precondition and originator of a free economy, while the contemporary lawyer does not understand that the rule of law of necessity and quite naturally produces a free economy, which, at the same time, instantiates the benign nature and superior civilizatory performance of a social order protected against arbitrariness.

Rather than appreciating this systematic nexus, economist and lawyer consider it their calling and duty to meddle with the social order on the basis of ad hoc intuitions largely separated from a sound theoretical framework, increasingly so when political correctness (i.e. compliancy with the powers du jour) promises far greater rewards (especially from a practical point of view) than intellectual honesty and thoroughness.

Today, we are in a mess because of a severe lack of good theory, which Don Boudreaux expresses in a statement that fully corresponds to my experience:

Quotation of the Day ...

… is from pages 4-5 of what is perhaps the single book that has had the greatest impact on my thinking, Hayek’s 1973 Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Rules and Order:

One of the main themes of this book will be that the rules of just conduct which the lawyer studies serve a kind of order of the character of which the lawyer is largely ignorant; and that this order is studied chiefly by the economist who in turn is similarly ignorant of the character of the rules of conduct on which the order that he studies rests.

The source.

We live in a free society with unprecedented access for everyone to information essential to the critical mind, and yet mass deception and consequential madness and hysteria are rampant - in fact, they define the profile of our political system.

It is the lack of interest to exercise their critical faculties that distinguish today's Mitläufer (literally: fellow-runner, i.e. the opportunistically compliant person) from the Mitläufer of the 1930s, the latter having been in an incomparably more disadvantaged position to probe the news and other forms of propaganda.

Even science has been captured by it to an extent that has turned it into a politically correct force ready to buttress any charlatanry.

One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere. [...]

Germans have paid about $130 billion for a climate-change policy that has no impact on global warming. They have subsidized Chinese jobs and other European countries’ reliance on dirty energy sources. And they have needlessly burdened their economy. As even many German officials would probably attest, governments elsewhere cannot afford to repeat the same mistake.

Read the entire piece.

See also my post The Sun Queen of Germany and The Epistemic Consequences of Totalitarian Democracy.

Writes Der Spiegel (The Mirror):

German carnival culminated on Rose Monday with huge parades in the cities of Cologne, Düsseldorf and Mainz. Hundreds of thousands lined the streets to catch sweets and watch the marching bands and satirical floats, one of which illustrated the close relationship between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.

German carnival started in earnest last Thursday, Old Wives' Day, when women went around storming town halls and committing symbolic mass castration by cutting off the ties of all the men they come across in their rampage.

The festival reached its height on Rose Monday with the big processions. But the partying will continue on Tuesday. Parades and fancy dress balls have been going on in scores of towns and villages across the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and south-west of the country, which have come to a virtual standstill for the best part of a week.

Sadly, it will all end on Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the Christian fasting season before Easter, when order and discipline will be restored on German streets for another year.

Read the entire report and enjoy the (22) images of the carnival parades.

The internet has done its part in fomenting the ideas of liberty and has brought with it the ability to network instantly. We are not alone and we're discovering that our political parties and leaders have been rather underhanded in what was thought to be a fair election/debate procedure. There can be no doubt that Ron Paul has been treated differently and that the monopolistic main stream media possesses far too much control over the process. Also, a very large academic support framework has appeared to help in riposting the to-be-expected onslaught of ad hominems, as well as non sequiturs so obtuse they’re undeserving of the descriptive nobility found in Latin terms.

Even so, the masses have been dialectically conditioned over many years to believe that the synthesis of Hegel's technique, useful in promoting socialist outcomes, is the best we can hope for in a Machiavellian world. This juxtaposed, two-party version of freedom - where blue people supposedly defend personal freedoms and red people guard economic freedoms - has led to government growing against both areas. Control still trumps repeal in the present political atmosphere.

This brings me to the political constituency. The crowds who vote for all of this status quo. …

{See the comments section for the rest.}

Many senior Republicans do not think Santorum, a social conservative caught up in the U.S. culture wars over issues like abortion and contraception, has a chance to beat Obama if he wins the party's presidential nomination.

When he ran for re-election as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania in 2006, Santorum lost by 18 percentage points. But, nevertheless, he is exposing Romney's weaknesses in Michigan, where Santorum leads polls ahead of the big Midwestern state's February 28 primary.

A Romney loss to Santorum in Michigan, the state where he was born and where his father was governor, would only intensify the talk about a weak Republican field and feed demands for someone else as the party's candidate to challenge Obama.

"It's hard for me to see how Romney rights the ship if he loses Michigan," said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. "There is no level of spin that can overcome that disaster."

Michigan will set the table for "Super Tuesday," the March 6 jackpot when 10 states hold Republican nominating contests. A loss for Romney in Michigan would raise serious doubts over whether he can rally enough support to have a big day on Super Tuesday and make a big move toward clinching the nomination.

The candidates are engaging in a state-by-state battle to become the Republican nominee. The party will officially pick a nominee at its August convention in Tampa, Florida.

Romney is the best financed and organized of the Republican candidates and long has been considered the likely nominee. But the former Massachusetts governor and private equity executive has failed so far to take control of the race.

Who would Republicans turn to if not Romney or Santorum? Think of two popular governors, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey, or former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, or even U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, author of a budget plan popular with Republicans.

via www.reuters.com

I'll admit, as a political scientist and political junkie, this talk of a brokered convention sort of gets my juices flowing. As a Republican, it's something that--if done right--bring good attention to the Party, and force the various factions to come together. Of course it could make matters worse...

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent." - Victor Hugo

The painting shows a canon in a room, the walls of which show various images: clouds, the torso of a woman, several planks, or a façade with windows. The title of this work by René Magritte was suggested by his friend Paul Nougé. The title is probably borrowed from a quotation from the book Prester John by John Buchnan: 'The clear air of dawn was like wine in my blood. I was not free, but I was on the threshold of freedom'. In fact, the painting is really a promise.

The source.

Georges Moustaki sings of his freedom. And how he lost it. See also Le Métèque.

Ma liberté                                          My Freedom

Ma liberté
Longtemps je t'ai gardée
Comme une perle rare
Ma liberté
C'est toi qui m'as aidé
A larguer les amarres
Pour aller n'importe où
Pour aller jusqu'au bout
Des chemins de fortune
Pour cueillir en rêvant
Une rose des vents
Sur un rayon de lune

Ma liberté
Devant tes volontés
Mon âme était soumise
Ma liberté
Je t'avais tout donné
Ma dernière chemise
Et combien j'ai souffert
Pour pouvoir satisfaire
Tes moindres exigences
J'ai changé de pays
J'ai perdu mes amis
Pour gagner ta confiance

Ma liberté
Tu as su désarmer
Toutes mes habitudes
Ma liberté
Toi qui m'as fait aimer
Même la solitude
Toi qui m'as fait sourire
Quand je voyais finir
Une belle aventure
Toi qui m'as protégé
Quand j'allais me cacher
Pour soigner mes blessures

Ma liberté
Pourtant je t'ai quittée
Une nuit de décembre
J'ai déserté
Les chemins écartés
Que nous suivions ensemble
Lorsque sans me méfier
Les pieds et poings liés
Je me suis laissé faire
Et je t'ai trahie pour
Une prison d'amour
Et sa belle geôlière

Et je t'ai trahie pour
Une prison d'amour
Et sa belle geôlière

Mark Spitznagel over at Project Syndicate explains to us the Randian world now thrust upon us:

Today, Rand’s fictional world has seemingly become a reality – endless bailouts and economic stimulus for the unproductive at the expense of the most productive, and calls for additional taxation on capital investment. The shrug of Rand’s heroic entrepreneurs is to be found today within the tangled ciphers of corporate and government balance sheets.

The US Federal Reserve has added more than $2 trillion to the base money supply since 2008 – an incredible and unprecedented number that is basically a gift to banks intended to cover their deep losses and spur lending and investment. Instead, as banks continue their enormous deleveraging, almost all of their new money remains at the Fed in the form of excess reserves.

Corporations, moreover, are holding the largest amounts of cash, relative to assets and net worth, ever recorded. And yet, despite what pundits claim about strong balance sheets, firms’ debt levels, relative to assets and net worth, also remain near record-high levels.

Hoarded cash is king. The velocity of money (the frequency at which money is spent, or GDP relative to base money) continues to plunge to historic lows. No wonder monetary policy has had so little impact. Capital, the engine of economic growth, sits idle – shrugging everywhere.

Rand, perhaps better than any economic observer, underscored the central role of incentives in driving entrepreneurial innovation and risk-taking. Whittle away at incentives – and at the market’s ability to communicate them through price signals – and you starve the growth engine of its fuel. Alas, central bankers, with their manipulation of interest rates and use of quantitative easing, patently neglect this fact.

Interest rates are more than a mere economic input that determines levels of saving and investment. Rather, as the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises emphasized, they are a reflection of people’s aggregate time preference – or desire for present versus future satisfaction – not a determinant of it.

…The Fed is purposefully and insidiously distorting the incentive system – specifically, signals provided by the price of money – resulting in mal-investment (and, when public debt is monetized, inflation). This can continue for a time, rewarding unproductive investments and aspiring oligarch-speculators who presume that the Fed has eliminated risk. But, as Rand reminds us, at some point the jig is up.

Full article: Capital Shrugged

Click here if you don't get it. 

Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination.

One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights.

Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prison sites are other places to which Washington brings human rights. Obama, who has the power to murder American citizens without due process of law, is too powerless to close Guantanamo Prison.

He is powerless to prevent himself from supplying Israel with weapons with which to murder Palestinians and Lebanese citizens to whom Obama brings human rights by vetoing every UN resolution passed against Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Instead of following Washington’s human rights lead, the evil Chinese invest in other countries, buy things from them, and sell them goods.

Has any foreign dignitary ever raised “a sensitive human rights issue” with Obama or his predecessor? How is the world so deranged that Washington can murder innocents for years on end and still profess to be the world’s defender of human rights?

Full Article.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but....did Ron Paul actually win Maine?  Sadly, I'm not quite sure if the video is actually embedding here, or it I'm seeing it from my cache , but in any event...the latest "Reality Report" from Ben Swann sure makes it seem possible. 

Click here to see it if you don't see it below....

Paul represents the re-emergence of a great American tradition.  That tradition reawakens in the person of Ron Paul, who has a fair claim to be our era’s Thomas Jefferson.  As Jefferson’s heir he commands deep respect if not always (as in the case of this Supply Side, Hamiltonian, writer) complete fealty.

… Jefferson was a courageous radical.   His anti-(federal)-government convictions often are indistinguishable from those of Dr. Paul.  Dr. Paul unabashedly went to bat for secession after Gov. Perry came under fire for rhetorically toying with that.  Jefferson’s anonymous co-authorship of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions is in many ways the charter text on the primacy of states rights.

Jefferson envisaged America becoming the world’s great “empire of liberty. ” On departing the presidency he wrote:

“ Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

…There are principled reasons to dispute with some of Dr. Paul’s positions. 

Full article.

It is always interesting when a comparison is made between two people and their circumstances – especially when the differences lead to disputes of principle. In the case of Jefferson, his unconstitutional moments as president do not lend themselves to principles as they do pragmatics. It is an error to believe that justification can be found for such acts other than a lack of patience, if not faith, in free systems.

Politicians endeavor to put out small fires for fear of conflagrations. The fear justifies immediate force. Because freedom requires considerations of agreement as opposed to force, it warrants understanding and sanctions patience toward anticipated remedies that only stalwarts of liberty are willing to believe will appear. Too often, the present emotional din reaches the extreme, as action is demanded and political plans are implemented, rectifying the latest problematic event or societal injustice.

Over time, we expect instant gratification from a government that grows itself in preparation for every contingency. It is in this fashion, as Edmund Burke foresaw, that “liberty is nibbled away, for expedients.” The only question remaining leaves us to wonder exactly how much is left to eat.