Uncle Sol's shared items in Google Reader

Don't Let Judges Tear Up Mortgage Contracts:

Randy Barnett — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:02:00 PST

Amidst the so-called "credit crisis," there is much talk about how libertarianism is dead, or at least how libertarian first principles are irrelevant. One appeal of libertarianism is that its basic...

The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America

(author unknown) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:14:00 PST

The Washington Post Magazine on Sunday ran a cover story about the violent drug raid on the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD. The Cato Institute has done significant research on no-knock raids and the militarization of police work in America, and last fall held a forum with Mayor Calvo.

Cato's Interactive Map of Botched Paramilitary Police Raids
Overkill, by Radley Balko
"Should No-Knock Police Raids be Rare-or Routine?," Cato Policy Forum with Mayor Calvo

Dealing with Drug Violence in Mexico

(author unknown) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:06:00 PST

While U.S. leaders have focused on actual or illusory security threats in distant regions, there is a troubling security problem brewing much closer to home. Violence in Mexico, mostly related to the trade in illegal drugs, has risen sharply in recent years and shows signs of becoming even worse. In a new study, Cato scholar Ted Galen Carpenter argues that abandoning the prohibitionist model of dealing with the drug problem is the only effective way to stem the violence in Mexico and its spillover into the United States.

"Troubled Neighbor: Mexico's Drug Violence Poses a Threat to the United States," by Ted Galen Carpenter
Carpenter's paper in Spanish

Economists across the Political Spectrum. Not.

David Boaz — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:49:52 PST

Robert Reich joins President Obama and Vice President Biden in claiming that “economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama’s plan.”

Now, President Obama and Vice President Biden probably aren’t reading whole newspapers these days, and like their predecessors they don’t talk much to people who don’t agree with them. So they may have genuinely believed that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on the need for a massive stimulus program.

But Reich doesn’t have that excuse. He’s a professor at Berkeley. He has full access to newspapers, email, the Internet, and the help of grad students — and so he cannot be unaware that lots of leading economists oppose the Obama plan and similar massive spending programs. But then, as I’ve noted before, he’s often been at wide variance with the facts. This time, knowing that his claim might be doubted, he cited the one conservative economist who has famously endorsed a large stimulus — Martin Feldstein of Harvard — but didn’t quite acknowledge that Feldstein has called Obama’s plan “An $800 Billion Mistake.”

How the New Deal Prolonged and Deepened the Great Depression:

Ilya Somin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:02:00 PST

Economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian have written an interesting Wall Street Journal op ed summarizing their important research showing that the New Deal prolonged and deepend the Great Depression...

Chopping down the Tree of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:30:00 PST

New Scientist declares that St. Darwin is more wrong... again:

For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. "For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life," says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. "We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.

So what happened? In a nutshell, DNA.

To me, the most interesting thing about this article isn't the fact that it declares evolutionary biologists have spent most of their efforts over the last 150 years on a futile endeavor. Nor is it the fact that as I have been predicting since I first started reading up on ND-TENS, it should be DNA evidence that is turning Darwin's theory on its ear again, as genetics is genuine science versus the sort of fill-in-the-blank series of tautological fairy tales that evolution increasingly appears to be.

No, what's interesting is the way that the Tree of Life-supporters are still fighting to preserve their increasingly outdated model, in precisely the way we are told scientists simply don't behave. The following passage explains why one is always advised to be skeptical of the theoretical model when persistent gaps remain:

By the mid-1980s there was great optimism that molecular techniques would finally reveal the universal tree of life in all its glory. Ironically, the opposite happened.

I expect a similarly ironic discovery to eventually blow apart the greater part of the oft-revised theory because although biologists don't like to admit it, every time a x-million year old "fossil" is discovered swimming or crawling around, it demonstrates how wildly inaccurate their theoretical model is. Daniel Dennett illogically tried to argue that we should trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results, but what he should have concluded if he had followed the logic properly is that if a division of doxastic labor is justified in the case of science because it gets amazingly accurate results, then evolutionary biology cannot be science. Popper need not even enter into the discussion as one can very reasonably ask: what are the amazingly accurate results predicted by evolutionary biologists that justify a doxastic division of labor here?

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job.

It is still far too soon to declare victory over the biology experts now, as they're clearly not ready to junk the entire theoretical model yet. Biologists are still in the "drawing deferents and epicycles" stage in attempting to revise TENS in order to fit the observations. What they fail to grasp is that the more complex their model has to be, the more likely it is that the entire foundation upon which it is based will turn out to be incorrect.

Posted by Vox Day.

Consequence, not cause

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:30:00 PST

Stanley Fish's explanation for the death of the academic intellectual life is interesting, but somehow manages to miss the significant point:

One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.

The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals.

Humanities professors like to think that this is a temporary imbalance and talk about ways of redressing it, but Donoghue insists that this development, planned by no one but now well under way, cannot be reversed. Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.”

What Fish fails to note is the effect of what Bloom described as "The Closing of the American Mind". The reason there is no place for the traditional liberal arts education is that there is nothing liberal, in the original sense of the term, about the liberal arts anymore. Having abandoned their original purpose of offering a broad-based education to students in favor of attempting to instill left-wing ideologies into them, the university system no longer provides anything of value to anyone except technical training.

It should come as no surprise, then, that since the demand for technical training has replaced the demand for the illiberal arts, the supply has readjusted itself in line with the requirements of the market.

Posted by Vox Day.

Bush’s Gift to Obama: A More Powerful State

David Boaz — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:44:45 PST

Friends of freedom, the Constitution, and limited government have plenty of reasons to deplore the past eight years. But in case you thought we might get some relief now, this Washington Post article from inauguration morning will change your mind. One of the points it makes — as some of us warned during the past few years — is that powers claimed by one president are left in the hands of the next, even though the first president’s supporters might have less confidence in his successor’s integrity and wisdom. So here’s the government that President Bush and the Republicans have turned over to President Obama and the Democrats:

Barack Obama takes office today with a realistic prospect of joining the ranks of history’s most powerful presidents….

Historians, recent White House officials and senior members of the incoming team expressed broad agreement that Obama begins his term in command of an office that is at or near its historic zenith….

The federal government itself is a far more potent instrument, in its breadth and depth of command over national life, than it has ever been before. Largely in response to the threat of terrorism, the Bush years and President Bill Clinton’s two terms saw “an incredible period of state-building that’s unrivaled in American history except by the creation of the national security state in the 1940s and ’50s,” said Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law at Yale whose blog, Balkinization, is often cited by members of the Obama team.

By necessity or design, and most often by passive acquiescence, Congress and the courts have let presidents do most of the steering of the new and expanded institutions that govern finance, commerce, communications, travel, energy production and especially intelligence gathering. When there were struggles for dominance among the three branches, most of them ended with lopsided victories for the executive.

The legislative power to declare war and ratify treaties, for example, has been deeply eroded by the practice of presidents to launch military operations on their own and to make major international commitments — such as December’s “status of forces” pact with Iraq — by “executive agreement” rather than by treaty requiring a two-thirds Senate vote. After lengthy controversy over warrantless domestic surveillance in the Bush administration, Congress authorized the program without obtaining any details about what, exactly, is collected and how it is used.

“Really, in the last 80 years we’ve seen a gradual, and at times not gradual, concentration of power in the executive office,” said William P. Marshall, who served as deputy White House counsel under Clinton….

Even in its first iteration, the government’s $700 billion expenditure to shore up U.S. financial systems will rival the roughly $1 trillion a year in “discretionary” federal spending — the portion of the budget, not including interest on loans and mandatory benefits such as Social Security, that is negotiated each year between the White House and Congress. Obama, who told The Post last week that he must “go big” in response to “the biggest emergency since World War II,” has spoken elliptically of the prospect that the cost could double.

Congress, the principal power of which is thought to be control of the national purse, has made little pretense of managing these vast expenditures. It will fall to Obama and his subordinates to decide winners and losers in the banking, financial services, automobile and other major industries, a span of control that dwarfs President Harry S. Truman’s attempt to seize control of steel production.

We don’t know yet whether President Obama will prove to be FDR or Jimmy Carter. But it’s clear that the freedom movement faces challenges that aren’t going away.

Enigma Desktop Ported to Linux [Featured Linux Download]

Adam Pash — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:00:00 PST

If you like the Windows-based Enigma Desktop Customization created by reader Kaelri but you're running Linux, we've got good news: Enigma has been ported to Linux.

This time the desktop customization comes from reader kremso, who—inspired by Kaelri's Enigma desktop—decided to port the design for the Linux crowd. The desktop includes:

Simple calendar — I even considered adding google calendar events using gcalcli, but the desktop was way too crowded

RSS news

Remember The Milk tasks

Weather Forecast

and system stats

Check out the post for a detailed setup guide. The ported Enigma doesn't currently support every feature available in Enigma, but it's a great start. The Enigma for Linux scripts and background files are a free download, Linux only. Nice work, kresmo!

Enigma ported to Linux [java.net.Blog]

The In-Progress Plot To Kill Google

timothy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:50:00 PST

twitter writes "Four years after Steve Ballmer vowed to kill Google, Wired details Microsoft's, AT&T's, and big publishers' ongoing slog. The story is filled with astroturfers, lobbyists and others spending millions to manufacture FUD about privacy and monopoly in order to protect the obsolete business models of their patrons, who are mostly known for progress-halting monopoly and invasion of privacy. Their greatest coup to date was preventing Google from rescuing Yahoo."

Bush is Indeed Like Herbert Hoover - But Not in the Way You Think:

Ilya Somin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:01:00 PST

In the course of a New Republic article analogizing George W. Bush to Herbert Hoover, historian Alan Brinkley perpetuates the long-discredited myth that Hoover failed to stop the Great Depression...

Why Congress Should Turn Federal Lands into Fiduciary Trusts

(author unknown) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:38:00 PST

The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service collectively manage well over a quarter of the land in the United States. Several Cato Institute studies have called for privatization of these public lands, but this idea is strongly resisted by environmentalists, recreationists, and others. A new paper from Cato scholar Randal O'Toole suggests an alternative policy: turn them into fiduciary trusts. Under this proposal, the U.S. would retain title to the lands, but the rules under which they would be governed would be very different.

"A Matter of Trust: Why Congress Should Turn Federal Lands into Fiduciary Trusts," by Randal O'Toole

Porqué Amo La Raza

Michael F. Cannon — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:08:21 PST

Several months ago, the National Council of La Raza convened a group of health care wonks to help that organization make up its mind about how Congress should reform the tax treatment of health care. The wonks included people from Harvard University, the Urban Institute, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Families USA, the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and elsewhere.

La Raza took the unusual step of inviting a libertarian (me) to be part of that discussion, despite our divergent views. Where La Raza wants to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, for example, I advocate repealing SCHIP. I’m glad they invited me; it was one of the most enjoyable policy discussions I’ve ever had.

La Raza took the further unusual step of publishing a transcript of that discussion. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a libertarian in the very un-libertarian world of health care policy — and you know you have — I recommend giving it a read. Oh, and you’ll also learn a lot about health policy from a lot of smart people.

Here is the final product of those deliberations, La Raza’s policy paper on health tax incentives, in which La Raza plugs (without endorsement) my proposal for large health savings accounts.

Obama Meets Calderón

Juan Carlos Hidalgo — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:08:54 PST

When president-elect Barack Obama meets Mexico’s Felipe Calderón today, he will be presented with a problem that went largely ignored during the last campaign season: the dramatic increase in drug violence in México. Last year, more than 6,000 people were murdered as a result of clashes between drug-trafficking gangs and the Mexican police and army. The violence is starting to spill across the border into the United States.

Instead of insisting on the prohibitionist strategy that Washington has pursued for decades in the region, President Obama should discuss with Calderón and other Latin American leaders alternatives that aim to reduce the pervasiveness of drug-related violence and corruption in drug production and drug transit countries. Only drug legalization will ultimately end the destabilizing effects of prohibition in this important U.S. neighbor.

Questions for Mrs. Clinton

Tim Lynch — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:17:48 PST

Hillary Clinton is expected to have a smooth confirmation hearing today. Bizarre. If we had more citizen-legislators instead of professional politicians, some of the following questions would be asked at today’s hearing:

Did you request, or see, any of the hundreds of FBI files that were improperly acquired by the Clinton White House? Who hired Craig Livingstone anyway?

Why did you fire Billy Dale?

What is your view of the war power? Can (Should) the President attack another country without a declaration of war from the Congress?

What is your view of the Tenth Amendment? Is there any subject beyond the purview of a federal law or spending program?

Exactly what did you and your Husband take from the White House when you left?

Did you or your husband make any arrangements to get money to Susan McDougal since Bill left the White House? Do you know why she was pardoned?

Do you plan to hire Sandy Berger?

To revisit Clintonian policies and practices, go here and here.

Pedophile or Post-human?

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:49:00 PST

If a fourteen year-old girl has sex, is she still human?

Darimont told LiveScience that while he considers the changes to be evolutionary, some biologists consider them phenotypic and, without evidence of genetic shifts, would not call them evolution... One specific example: the overfished Atlantic cod on the eastern coast of Canada. Less than two decades ago, they began mating at age 6. Now they start at age 5.

In support of this impressive science, I note the following report from the Observer: Britons are losing their virginity younger than in the past: for over-55s the average age was 19; within the 25-34 group it was 16; and among 16-24s, 15. That's a difference of THREE years in two decades; homo sapiens is evolving even faster than the Atlantic cod!

Clearly adults who are attracted to children under 15 should not be labeled pedophiles when they can be scientifically shown to be nothing more than evolutionary change-agents bringing about post-humanity. Based on the increasingly lunatic declarations of its advocates, I'm beginning to suspect we may see TENS collapse even sooner than I'd ever imagined. I still don't expect to see it happen in my lifetime, but I'm quite confident that it is probable, if not necessarily inevitable. Yet.

Evolution's defenders are in the position of a bridge builder watching his rickety old edifice sway and bend in the wind. "It hasn't fallen yet!" he shouts defiantly. But any less self-interested observer will readily notice that it's only a matter of time before the structure collapses completely. The linked article is evidence of bad science journalism, not bad science, but then, there's not much about evolution that can reasonably described as science by any non-tautological definition of the term.

Posted by Vox Day.

A laudable cause

noreply@blogger.com (Vox) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:52:00 PST

It's practically the definition of a win-win situation:

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free.

Anyone still wonder why I call them evolutionary dead-ends? Now, since they're quite determined to extinguish themselves, do you think they'd have any objection if we helped them move the process along a little more quickly?

I'm thinking radical lobotomies and Bene Tleilaxu tanks.

Posted by Vox Day.

Dogs and Demons

Tyler Cowen — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:13:00 PST

The subtitle is Tales from the Dark Side of Japan and the author is Alex Kerr. It is recommended reading for those who would have Obama expand his stimulus plan to include more construction. Here are some strung-together excerpts:

Few have questioned why Japan's supposed "cities of the future" are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason...or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles...

Led by bureaucrats on automatic pilot, the nation has carried certain policies -- namely construction -- to extremes that would be comical were they not also at times terrifying...

Dozens of government agencies owe their existence solely to thinking up new ways of sculpting the earth. Planned spending on public works for the decade 1995-2005 will come to an astronomical...$6.2 trillion, three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population, will spend on public construction in the same period.

...from an economic point of view the majority of the civil-engineering works do not address real needs. All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense.

...The construction industry here is so powerful that Japanese commentators often describe their country as doken kokka, a "construction state."...the millions of jobs supported by construction are not jobs created by real growth but "make work," paid for by government handouts. These are filled by people who could have been employed in services, software, and other advanced industries.

Kerr provides almost four hundred pages of documentation for these claims and more. In the meantime, I am pondering the question of whether government in the United States is of higher quality than government in Japan. I believe it can be argued either way.

Addendum: Here is my previous post on fiscal policy in Japan.

U.S. Government Default?

Greg Mankiw — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:38:24 PST

Greg Ip reports:

Thanks to the advent of credit derivatives -- financial contracts that allow investors to speculate on or protect against default -- we can now observe how likely global markets think it is that Uncle Sam will renege on America's mounting debts. Last week, markets pegged the probability of a U.S. default at 6 percent over the next 10 years, compared with just 1 percent a year ago.

Proposition 8 Donor Maps,

Eugene Volokh — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:01:00 PST

for San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Orange County, are now posted at EightMaps.com. Proposition 8, of course, was the proposition that amended the California Constitution to bar legal recognition of...