Thomas Jefferson is not my favorite among the founding fathers, but this 1785 letter to James Madison quoted by Daniel Kuehn is another good example of the non-libertarianism of classical liberalism:
Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.
As with John Locke you see this concern about concentrated appropriation of finite resources. In practical terms, Jefferson and other leaders of the early Republic were able to sidestep inequality within the white community by redistributing land from Native Americans to white people.
This post is a double delight. Not only does it punch libertarianism in the nose, it tweaks the tail of the "virtuous founding fathers" by pointing out that their ethics was more that of mountebanks than of saints.
(I watched ABC News' This Week and saw a segment where George Will presented the Tea Party hagiography that "the founders" carved in stone in the hallowed Constitutional documents Truth-with-a-capital-T and that for the millenia that come all that we can expect is to teach the young to mouth the words and worship at the feet of that document. I wanted to puke. Sure the US founders struck it rich and hit on a pretty good formula for building a society, but they got it wrong first time out the gate -- the Articles of Confederation -- and even in the the "sacred" Constitution they did despicable things like counting slave as both "property" but also have an electoral punch of 3/5 of a person that would be exercised by their "master", i.e. the worst kind of back room hack political deal you can imagine.)
I don't usually watch Fox "News". I treat it like a sexually transmitted disease and stay as far away as possible, but when they put on one of my favourite political comedians, I couldn't rush over fast enough to watch...
At 9:00 the real heart of this interview is presented. Chris Wallace thinks Jon Stewart yearns to be a political commentator. Jon Stewart tries to make Chris understand that he wants to be a comic who does political material and is willing to lampoon both left and right. But Chris Wallace is such an ideologue he only sees Jon as attacking the right. This is excellent. It shows how an ideologue filters reality and just can't see what is right in front of their nose. Their politics blinds them to reality. This is a perfect example!
I also love 18:30 where Stewart summarizes his most basic disagreement with the Obama administration: he put the same guys back in power who created the financial mess! That's right. That is exactly what is most infuriating about Obama. He may be sympathetic to "the little people" but his economic policy is 100% bought and paid for by Wall Street through their money under the table to him. Tragic.
I like the fact that Jon Stewart tries to remain genuine, open, and honest through the entire interview. Chris Wallace has an ideological axe to grind and doesn't really hear what Stewart is saying. But I also agree with Stewart the Chris Wallace was hired by Fox "News" to be "the adult in the room" compared to the other bozos that Fox "News" has an anchors and commentators.
Some people are so morally "sure" of themselves they are willing to "go public" with their idiocy.
Here's a story about a cradle-robbing 35 year old guy who got his just-turned 18 year old "girlfriend" pregnant. When she asked him to marry her, he said "no way!". Of course when the baby died, the guy went berserk and accused the 18 year of "killing" his baby! Right... "his" baby, the one he wouldn't marry the mother of. He was happy to impregnate, but not interested in any responsible fathering, but he sure wanted to make sure she bore "his" child and that she would put in the 20 years it would take to raise "his" child.
A "morally pure" man like this wants the whole world to know just how "godly" he is. He's put up billboards to accuse the 18 year old of "killing his child". Facts be damned. He will make sure she carries a scarlet letter for life.
A New Mexico man who said he was upset that his girlfriend had an abortion bought a highway billboard and accused her of killing their child.
...
Fultz's ex-girlfriend calls the billboard harassment and invasion of privacy, and has taken him to court under the New Mexico Family Violence Protection Act. But Fultz says he's exercising his First Amendment rights, said his attorney, Todd Holmes.
"Citizens have the right to express their speech through any media and he chose a billboard," Holmes told Reuters on Tuesday. "We feel a billboard fits within the First Amendment even if it's offensive to some."
A petition filed by Fultz' ex-girlfriend said that Fultz had a pattern of stalking and harassment, including posting "intimate cyber shots of me from one of our cyber dates," she wrote. The domestic abuse petition also requested that the billboard be removed and online harassment stopped.
...
In a hearing last week, a judge ordered the billboard to come down by mid-June. Holmes said he plans to file a motion to keep the billboard up, but he said his client is ready to face prison if necessary.
"That's how passionately he feels about protecting his free speech," Holmes said.
According to Holmes, when Fultz and his girlfriend, who was then 18, found out they were going to have a baby, she wanted to get married. Fultz refused, Holmes said, and during a church camping trip there was a "discussion about an ultimatum. Either you marry me or I'm not going to have this baby type of thing."
The girlfriend later flew to Wisconsin for work and when she returned she was no longer pregnant, Holmes said. She did not explain what happened, but Fultz suspected she had an abortion, Holmes said.
"I know it's her body," Holmes said. "But his statement is more along the lines of 'Hey, you know what? Dads have a decision in the process too."
New Mexico's Right to Life Committee initially endorsed the billboard, but has withdrawn its support because it received a number of emails from people who said Fultz' ex-girlfriend had a miscarriage, not an abortion, said executive director Dauneen Dolce.
Notice how the idiotic "right to life" people did a knee-jerk support of this moral-blight-of-a-guy until friends of the girl pointed out there was no abortion, it was a miscarriage.
They don't put your in the stocks and throw rotten vegetables at you like in the "good old days", but in the US they still have a strange idea of moral turpitude and they will punish you for crimes like "sitting in a park to eat a donut without an accompanying minor". Seriously.
The police may not be ticketing for smoking in the parks, but they are still ticketing parker visitors for crimes like...eating a doughnut in a playground. Yup, this weekend the police gave two young women in Bed-Stuy summonses for eating doughnuts in a playground while unaccompanied by a minor.
Tickets for being an adult in or around a playground have been popping up fairly frequently lately—see the Inwood chess players—but instead of giving the offending citizens a warning and urging them to leave, the NYPD's M.O. appears to be to hand out a ticket. Here's how our reader, an anthropology graduate student, describes her experience this weekend.
I'm waiting for the police to arrest you for have "unclean thoughts". And I'm trying to think up an appropriate punishment for such a deviant. Maybe incarcerate you like the Magdalene asylums in Ireland that imprisoned unwed mothers and abused girls forcing them into slave-like drudgery in their infamous "Magdalene launderies".
Everybody knows that clean and tidy parks are next to Godliness. And there is no better way to keep them clean and tidy than to ban people from the parks. Keep them pristine. Wall them off. Put up restrictions like "a person can only enter this park while carrying an infant in the left arm on a Tuesday while have 'pure thoughts' about God and his graciousness". That will keep the park clean and wholesome!
After a recession, the least rational rise (temporarily) to prominence. Ignore them.
If you are reading this, the previously scheduled end of the world did not occur. Perhaps the date was wrong — next Saturday night? 1994? October?
Despite millennia of Armageddon forecasts, betting on the end of the world has always been a money-losing wager. Given this oh-fer batting record of 0.000 percent, one wonders why people still regularly make this forecast. Wall Street fund strategists, religious zealots and economists seem strangely drawn to it. Never mind that if it were ever a winning trade, no one would be left for you to collect from. (That is called counterparty risk.)
You humans are a hardy breed. No matter how dire the circumstance, your species has managed to prosper.
You survived the Ice Age, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Age of Aquarius (as well as Disco and Polyester). Mother Nature has thrown floods, earthquakes, droughts, plagues, pandemics, tornadoes, asteroids, tsunamis, hurricanes, melting glaciers and global warming at you. Not to mention world wars and nuclear proliferation.
Economically, you’ve withstood the Panics of 1819, 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1896, 1907, 1929, 1933, 1938, 1973, 1987, 1998, 2000, and 2007-09 — and that is just over the past two centuries. You also saw through the Tulip Bubble, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression and the Great Recession, the Nifty-Fifty, the Asian Contagion, the Dot-com Bubble, the subprime fiasco and Bernie Madoff.
What is it going to take to kill this species off — or at least to bankrupt it?
Given this long and storied history of survival, why does anyone pay attention to the dang fools predicting the end of the world?
Go read the whole article because at this point he starts explaining why people are such suckers for doom & gloom. He provides a very long classification of the varieties of doomsters and poisonous prophets.
The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
Since the Chinese have hacked US government and military sights a large number of times over the last few year, I expect the nuclear missiles are now on their way to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc. Look out below!
Oh wait... the article goes on to say:
In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.
What?
Oh... I guess this is like the Democracies reponse to Hitler in the 1930s.
When Hitler seized the Ruhr, the western democracies warned him that was unacceptable behaviour.
When Hitler seized Austria in the Anschluss, the western democracies made it very clear that this was unacceptable behaviour by a modern state and could lead to war.
When Hitler threatened to take the Sudentanland, the western democracies said this was completely unacceptable militaristic behaviour, but you can have the Sudentenland because we are going to let you get away with this once, but that is all.
When Hitler seized the Dantzig corridor and invaded Poland, the western democracies said this was an "act of war" and put their militaries on "war footing" and them promptly sad and watched while Hitler and Stalin divided up Poland and decimated that country. This was the infamous "Sitzkrig" or "phoney war".
After reviewing a little history, I now have the proper "context" to understand this new US policy of computer sabotage being interpreted as "constituting an act of war". The US is following the policy prescriptions of the western democracies by making lots of threatening noises, but clearly intends to do nothing. This "act of war" nonsense is just throwing dust up. It makes the world more dangerous because it isn't clear what and when the US will react violently to an assault from outlaw nations like China. It makes us all more unsafe not safer.
My advice to the US: If you want to be taken seriously, then say what you mean and mean what you say. Don't go throwing around the words "constitute an act of war" unless you seriously mean it. Otherwise, when you want to warn a rogue nation like China that their actions "constitute an act of war", they won't believe you!
Oh... and if this is a new US policy, then publishing it as study paper within the Pentagon is not the way to put a nation like China on notice. If this is really going to be US policy, the US President needs to address Congress and ask for an endorsement through a vote for the policy that "a cyber attack constitutes an act of war upon the US and the US will unleash the full might of its military in response". That will get China's attention. Shuffling papers in the Pentagon will only get a chuckle out of the Chinese.
Oh... and yet another thought. If the US views cyber attacks this seriously, then it should immediately mandate a requirement to make the Internet more secure. It should enforce the requirement that all traffic be subject to protocols that make it simple and clear as to who sent what to whom when where and how over the Internet. Until that is done, the idea of "going to war" over a cyber attack makes no sense because it is just too hard to know who did what to whom on the current Internet infrastructure.
Before Ronald Reagan became governor of California, and then president of the United States, people wondered if an actor could become a good politician. It's no surprise that actors are excellent at campaigning and giving speeches. But lately I've noticed that acting is becoming the most important skill involved in policy too. Let's look at some examples.
1. The U.S. acts as though it doesn't have permission from Pakistan to attack Al Qaeda on Pakistani soil. The government of Pakistan has to publicly complain about it and threaten vague consequences to be seen as defending its sovereignty.
2. The U.S. has to act as though the Israelis and Palestinians can come up with a workable peace plan if they try hard enough.
3. Republican politicians that don't agree with the main party lines have to act as though they do or else face consequences.
4. Donald Trump acted as though he was seriously considering running for president. The media acted as though they believed him.
5. Democrat politicians have to act as though the rich are a bunch of immoral tax dodgers that are the main cause of the budget problem, as opposed to the main source of funding.
You can probably add to the list. But I think you see the point. During the Reagan era, I believe the acting was mostly limited to how one presented one's self to the public. Now the acting is integrated with most major policies. For example, it is generally understood that any politician who says he knows how to solve the budget problem is literally acting. In the past, that sort of claim might have been interpreted as lying. But a lie is something that the perpetrator expects the recipient to believe. We're way past that point. What we have now is pure theater. Our politicians aren't lying in the technical sense of the word because their fiction is as transparent as any movie or stage play. The audience is in on it.
I've seen some in the media claim that certain groups and politicians are not reality-based, as though some of their actions can be explained by collective delusions. I think that might be how things got started. The world became so complicated that no one could see obvious solutions for any of the bigger problems. That situation breeds hallucination. But I think we've moved beyond that point, at least partially. To me, it is starting to look more like a stage play where the audience expects fiction and the actors deliver.
That is a better insight into American politics than I read on most academic sites that claim to understand the "dynamics" of American politics. What puzzles me is: Why do Americans want to confuse entertainment with politics? They have a lot of serious problems that need to be solved, but they are busy undermining any such attempt because the politicians are deeply involved in false pretenses and misdirection as part of an elaborate "entertainment" which they feel they must provide to the electorate.
Harold Camping has just created his second great crime against humanity: his latest "end of days" prediction has proved to be nothing but his vanity about seeing "God's will" and using that to manipulate people around him.
He was a sullen and depressive, but volatile man who cast a long, dark shadow over the lives of his two daughters, never forgiving them for not being sons. He drove one into a lifetime of therapy and the other into a lifetime of denial.
And:
He was a lifelong teetotaler, but when these sudden moods struck him he became a sober version of a mawkish drunk, sobbing and proclaiming his deep love for strangers in the bar. The strangers in this case were his own daughters, grandchildren and family who would exchange nervous looks and do their best to comfort him as, one by one, we would each make and repeat the promise he would beg us to make him.
“Don’t worry,” we would say, “you won’t be cremated. I promise. No, no, it’s OK. We won’t let that happen to you.”
Why the fear of cremation? Because he thought you can't be resurrected if you are cremated.
He sounds like a thoroughly disagreeable, manipulative, domineering guy. It is tragic that people fall into his orbit and have their lives disrupted by this crazies theological fantasies.
It is tragic that each one of these manipulative SOBs, there has to be hundreds of decent, hard-working, sensible people putting in solid work every day to keep the glue of society together and the economy rolling. But these hard working salt-of-the-earth types get no fame or attention. They quietly do their thing while these blowhards and manipulators seize the public's imagination. Worse, guys like Camping convince people to quit their jobs, take out their life savings, and go on a "religious" binge of end-of-the-worldism that simply ends in grief and a wrecked life. Camping thinks nothing of the pain and suffering he has caused.
How can a book which was originally published in the early 1990s for a price of around $50 become listed by two reputable book vendors in 2011 for a price of over $20 million?
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
...
The price peaked on April 18th, but on April 19th profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23 * 1.27059 = $134.97. But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).
Having worked in the computer industry for 30 years, I for one will not be happy the day the computers take over. These machines are not like biological machines which have great redundancy and soft failure modes. Computers simply crash. And like the above case, they simply go nuts from time to time. Humans don't have the abililty to program a truly complex system that is meant to be autonomous. The idea that robots can "do their thing" is scary.
On the other hand, it is inevitable that the computers will take over. We are in a headlong rush of technological development and along the way we keep ceding more and more turf to them. The day will come when they are "in charge". Hopefully I won't live long enough to see that day. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. I'm fascinated by them. But I realize how the industry has grown too fast with too little regard for the robust safety needed for truly autonomous decision-making.
The future will be "interesting". That is both a curse and a promise.
How, then, do these single-celled intestinal denizens exert their influence on a complex multicellular organ such as the brain? Although the answer is unclear, there are several possibilities: the Vagus nerve, for example, connects the gut to the brain, and it’s known that infection with the Salmonella bacteria stimulates the expression of certain genes in the brain, which is blocked when the Vagus nerve is severed. This nerve may be stimulated as well by normal gut microbes, and serve as the link between them and the brain. Alternatively, those microbes may modulate the release of chemical signals by the gut into the bloodstream which ultimately reach the brain. These gut microbes, for example, are known to modulate stress hormones which may in turn influence the expression of genes in the brain.
Regardless of how these intestinal “guests” exert their influence, these studies suggest that brain-directed behaviors, which influence the manner in which animals interact with the external world, may be deeply influenced by that animal’s relationship with the microbial organisms living in its gut. And the discovery that gut bacteria exert their influence on the brain within a discrete developmental stage may have important implications for developmental brain disorders.
This reminds me of an ant whose mind is seized the parasite Dicrocoelium dendriticum and forced to go climb a grass stem and hang there waiting to be eaten by a grazing animal:
The second intermediate host, an ant (Formica fusca in the United States[5]), uses the trail of snail slime as a source of moisture. The ant then swallows a cyst loaded with hundreds of juvenile lancet flukes. The parasites enter the gut and then drift through its body. Most of the cercariae encyst in the haemocoel of the ant and mature into metacercariae, but one moves to the sub-esophageal ganglion (a cluster of nerve cells underneath the esophagus). There, the fluke takes control of the ant's actions by manipulating these nerves.[6] As evening approaches and the air cools, the infected ant is drawn away from other members of the colony and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Once there, it clamps its mandibles onto the top of the blade and stays there until dawn. Afterward, it goes back to its normal activity at the ant colony. If the host ant were to be subjected to the heat of the direct sun, it would die along with the parasite. Night after night, the ant goes back to the top of a blade of grass until a grazing animal comes along and eats the blade, ingesting the ant along with it, thus putting lancet flukes back inside their host. They live out their adult lives inside the animal, reproducing so that the cycle begins again.
To my mind, there is nothing quite as scary as being seized and turned into a helpless robot manipulated by alien life to satisfy its needs while you are trapped in your own body. It combines the horror of being paralyzed along with the horror of being used by another for their own benefit and at the expense of your own interests.
Here is a video of a fungus that seizes an ant and grows from its head. It gives me the shivers to watch:
You can read more about this brain-controlling, zombie ant making fungus here.
It's a jungle out there! Whoever can believe the soft soap story about gentle nature, of the lamb lying with the lion, about the noble primitive. No. The real world is fully of cruelly indifferent agents that sometimes cooperate but can also compete with or exploit their fellow creatures, cruelly exploit in the case of these parasites.
Thanks to hard working research scientists, we now have a solution for global warming. Luckily you and I will be able to have a front row seat in watching this "rectification project" undertaken around the world. I'm sure that it can all be pulled off in a few months. For details, read this National Geographic article Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years.
Reversing Global Warming?
The global cooling caused by these high carbon clouds wouldn't be as catastrophic as a superpower-versus-superpower nuclear winter, but "the effects would still be regarded as leading to unprecedented climate change," research physical scientist Luke Oman said during a press briefing Friday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
Now we can all relax. We can check "global warming" off our "to do" list! Thank goodness!
Wait... are you saying you aren't completely enthralled with the idea of unleashing a minor "global winter" around the world?
"Our results suggest that agriculture could be severely impacted, especially in areas that are susceptible to late-spring and early-fall frosts," said Oman, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
"Examples similar to the crop failures and famines experienced following the Mount Tambora eruption in 1815 could be widespread and last several years," he added. That Indonesian volcano ushered in "the year without summer," a time of famines and unrest. (See pictures of the Mount Tambora eruption.)
You say you worry about the side-effects of radiation poisoning? Oh... and you say you don't trust that the "experts" have foreseen all the "known unknowns" to use the Rumsfeldian neologism. Oh, and there are those nasty "unknown unknowns". We won't even mention those!
Why is National Geographic publishing this ridiculous "article"? Are they like William Randolf Hearst with his yellow press, i.e. drumming up "small regional nuclear wars" as a fix for global warming because it will sell more of their National Geographic magazines? What is the point of this article?
The nuclear winter scenario was milked for all it was worth back in the 1980s. Why is National Geographic reviving this "research" now? And why in the context of "fixing" global warming?
The Second Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Nuclear Weapons
The Second Amendment has nothing specifically to do with guns
The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right of every American citizen to own and operate their own nuclear weapons.
The Second Amendment in its entirety reads:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee individuals’ right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution, so that they can defend their states from the unlawful infringements of the Federal government. If the Federal government decides to invade and take over a state, its citizens should be able to defend themselves with their own weapons.
Notice that the Second Amendment does not specifically mention guns at all, only arms. It gave people the right to own guns, because that’s what the soldiers of the Federal government had. If the soldiers of the Federal government invade a state with their guns blazing, then the citizens of the state should be able to return fire with their own guns.
But that was a long time ago – 1791, to be exact – and the hardware of the soldiers of the US Armed Forces has considerably advanced since then. Now the US Armed Forces have bombs, supersonic fighter jets, tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines, laser-guided missiles, and, yes, nuclear bombs.
When Barack Obama decides to send his Socialist Muslim Army down south to invade South Carolina, how are the good people of South Carolina going to defend themselves with automatic pistols and high-power rifles? Obama has his finger on the button. He has access to a large nuclear arsenal as well as efficient means to deliver it. The Francis Marion of the 21st century will need much more than automatic pistols and high-power rifles, let alone muskets, in order to keep South Carolina a free state.
If the invading army has nuclear bombs, and the Stealth Bombers and nuclear submarines to deliver them, why shouldn’t the citizens of South Carolina (and every other state) have the right to own and deploy nuclear weapons to defend themselves and to keep their state free? (We’ll return later to the thorny problem of how the good people of Colorado can keep their submarines.) If the soldiers of the Federal Armed Forces have upgraded their hardware in the last 200 years, so must citizens of the United States, in order to fight them.
We the United States needed nuclear weapons because the Soviet Union had them, so that we could deter them and keep them from invading us. Now that the US Armed Forces have nuclear weapons, every citizen of the United States must have them as well to deter the Federal government from usurping our freedom and invading our states. It is essential “to the security of a free State.”
Thus, the logic of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States stipulates that the right of the people to keep and bear nuclear weapons, supersonic fighter jets, laser-guided missiles and nuclear submarines shall not be infringed.
Since I'm in Canada, I don't get to see what Seth Meyers said on SNL [something about the US's interest in keeping Canada the land of the pure and the innocent, unexposed to greedy commercial interests sited in the US, you know, "copyright"], but I'm sure Seth argued the right of Americans to own pulse cannons, Varon-T disruptors, Thalaron radiation, and Chroniton torpedoes (more details here). What self-respecting American would have an armamentarium with less than these cutting edge weapons?
I don't want to hear about school shootouts anymore. I want to hear how a kid brought a gravimetric torpedo to school and obliterated the school and all its occupants. Now that would be newsworthy! And that would show that Americans are serious about their right to bear arms!
The idea of a civil society is that you accept some give-and-take with your neighbors in order to achieve a larger society. But civil society is not that deep in the American identity. The New England colonies were founded by religious fanatics with an intolerance for differences over doctrine or morality. That trait still exists in the US. Here is a bit from an article in Mother Jones magazine:
South Dakota Moves To Legalize Killing Abortion Providers
A bill under consideration in the Mount Rushmore State would make preventing harm to a fetus a "justifiable homicide" in many cases.
By Kate Sheppard
A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.
...
"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers," says Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers. Since 1993, eight doctors have been assassinated at the hands of anti-abortion extremists, and another 17 have been the victims of murder attempts. Some of the perpetrators of those crimes have tried to use the justifiable homicide defense at their trials. "This is not an abstract bill," Saporta says. The measure could have major implications if a "misguided extremist invokes this 'self-defense' statute to justify the murder of a doctor, nurse or volunteer," the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families warned in a message to supporters last week.
Let's test the "morality" of this bill...
Suppose you felt that a nation calling on its youth to go to war to defend the country is morally wrong. Wrong because it results in the killing of these youth and you honour "life" above all else. Consequently you come up with a catchy slogan for your group like "Liberty and Life" and denigrate those who would marshal a military to defend the nation as "baby killers". With your group you call on like-minded "freedom lovers" to kill legislators in order to stop them from passing a military budget, a "death bill", and you call for the assassination of the President because he is "ordering innocent youth to their deaths". You are in moral anguish because literally hundreds of thousands, even millions, can die in a major war, so forcing youth to shoulder arms is homicide and genocide on a grand scale. In a fanatic's mind this justifies setting up "militias" and undertaking an extensive terrorist campaign to stop the the mobilization of a military. Our "Liberty and Life" group would kill political figures, assassinate leading military figures, murder military recruiters, etc. in the name of a "higher authority". They would claim this is justified because these "despicable" figures are sending innocent people to their death.
But most people would disagree with the above call to murder and mayhem. They accept that citizenship requires supporting a military to defend the country. But a commmitted minority, if they follow their own "moralaity" disagree, and not just with words. They are willing to harass, bomb, and kill to achieve their "moral" goal. That's the position of the anti-abortion, so-called "pro life" group that feels killing is just another way to express their profoundly moral "pro life" morality.
A people cannot have a "civil society" if minorities can declare war on other groups because of their "moral differences". Certainly minorities have the right to appeal to and argue for a change of the laws to accord with their moral vision. But to do what the "pro life" group is doing, i.e. legalize murder because you are against "murder", is absolutely nutty and undermines any attempt at a civil society. Compromise and reason are the social glue. Fanaticism and ultimatums are the sledge hammer that unglues a society.
I was teaching a high school social studies class in the mid-1970s and we had materials on the "oil crisis". Most of the material was gloomy and predicted that oil would soon run out and that it would be so expensive that the only choice was to cut down our expectations of the future. This was completely in tune with the Club of Rome which published an infamous book called The Limits to Growth. I passed on the sad news to the students because that was the teaching material I had. I hadn't yet realized that doomsters have always been around and they are constantly thinking up new worries that get lots of attention (and big bucks) for them.
The end of oil, the so-called Hubbert's peak oil theory, has been trotted out over the years to sell more gloom and doom. Only when my father pointed out to me that when in was in high school in the early 1930s he was being told that there was only 20 years of oil left did it ding on me... it will always be the case that we will soon run out of any given resource because governments don't go out and find resources, they rely on resource companies to tell them what kind of reserves they know about. And it doesn't pay a resource company to go and find resources that won't be used within a reasonable period of time. So there will always be a problem of "running out of resources in about 20 years".
I've grown much more cynical over time. And I've been convinced by the arguments of Julian Simon and his book The Ultimate Resource. Humanity has always been running out of resources, but we will always find ways around the problem. Sure if you multiplied the current population 5 fold we would be at each other's throats fighting over food. But the Zero Population Growth people who wanted forcible sterilzation and predicted tens of millions if not hundreds of millions would stave in the 1980s were proved wrong by the Green Revolution. Norman Borlaug has been the greatest humanitarian the world has ever seen. He didn't sell "limits to growth" or "population explosion" or "global warming". Nope. He rolled his sleeves up and did research to expand the food supply. Of course the doom & gloom crowd has labeled all this "frankenfood" and spend their effort trying to convince people to not eat the food!
The doom & gloom crowd never look for a silver lining in a cloud. They take a paradise an worry themselves silly trying to find flaws in it, turn up potentially, hypothetically possible future problems with paradise.
As for running out of oil. We haven't hit "peak oil" yet as it continues to be slid out into the indefinite future. I'm sure it will happen some day. But in the meantime, we have a sufeit of riches. Here's a news story about how recent technological advances mean we now have 250 years supply of natural gas!
Supplies of natural gas could last more than 250 years if Asian and European economies follow the U.S. unconventional reserves, the IEA said.
The abundance of shale gas and other forms of so-called unconventional gas discovered in the United States prompted a global rush to explore for the new resource.
The International Energy Agency said Australia is taking the lead in the push toward unconventional gas, though China, India and Indonesia are close behind. European companies are taking preliminary steps to unlock unconventional gas as are other regions.
"Production of 'unconventional' gas in the U.S. has rocketed in the past few years, going beyond even the most optimistic forecasts," said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a gas analyst at the IEA. "It is no wonder that its success has sparked such international interest."
Shale gas production in the United States is booming and the IEA estimates that unconventional gas makes up around 12 percent of the global supply.
Global supplies of natural gas could last for another 130 years at current consumption rates. That time frame could double with unconventional gas, the IEA said.
I guess the doom & gloom crowd can run around wailing and gnashing their teeth telling us that there is "only" 250 years supply so we need to cut back consumption now because it will all run out far too soon! They will find some way to use this to tell us we can't live a happy life. They will find a way to tell us that this means we have to abandon industrial society and go back to walking behind ox carts. They will only be happy when we get back to the "truly good old days" when 95% of th population was illiterate, most were starving, and pretty well everybody died in the early 40s. Yep... those "good old days"!
The reality is that technology changes the landscape under our feet. Here is a nice graph from a BP study "BP Energy Outlook 2030" that shows how various countries have shifted in the dependence on energy for GDP growth:
Click to Enlarge
And, as you can see, this report predicts that US dependence of imported oil & gas will fall:
Here is a new entry into "scared the pants off people" contest...
I reject the thesis of this video. These specialists shouldn't be scaring people about something that (a) only happens every 100 or 200 years and (b) is a problem on large scale at which an individual is helpless. This is the porn of doomsday nuts. If you want to "alert the public" to ARk STORM through scaring people with these scenarios is crazy. You might as well also scare them with:
Global nuclear war. This is still a real threat. So lets reinstate the "duck and cover" drills for schools. The weekly air raid sirens. Have constant "testing of the emergency broadcasting service". And send kiddies home with literature to convince their parents to go into a massive building program to put air raid shelters in every backyard.
Put out continual health system warnings about "the coming global plague". Epidemiologists assure us that it is inevitable that some new disease to which people have no natural resistance will jump the species barrier. It will be like the native Americans when small pox arrived. Death rates of 50% or 80% are very likely. Better be prepared for the complete breakdown of the infrastructure as bodies litter the street.
Have people prepare for an astroid impact. It will happen some day. It did 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. An asteroid will someday strike earth and destroy civilization as we know it.
And I could go on...
This is all nutty. There is no point of putting fear into people about extremely rare events for which there is nothing that an individual can do to "prepare" for it.
On the other hand, this is an excellent example of the purpose of government. A large government has the resources to hire brilliant minds to think about these threats, come up with scenarios to deal with them, and propose cost-effective techniques to lower the devastation that such freak events would cause.
But there is absolutely no point in scaring the public. The above video is pure "doomsday porn" put out by twisted minds that love to think about how millions might be killed. Real people, ordinary people, have more pressing concerns. They need to get on with the daily life.
Jon Stewart has used the curiously effective Glen Beck techniques to decode the secret message behind the message of Glen Beck... be afraid, be very afraid...
The title is just a play on the idiotic title of Douglas Rushkoff's latest book Program of Be Programmed. The logic is fear mongering. It is the equivalent of an automobile enthusiast in 1920 saying "Be your own mechanic or have your auto eat you alive with costs because of your ignorance". Or, the fear mongering of a merchant in ancient Rome announcing "Sell or be sold!". Nutty! Not everybody should be a salesman. Not everybody should learn the mysterious innards of a car. And similarly, not everyone should learn to program.
Back in 1980 I would have agreed with "Program or be programmed" because machines were simpler then and simple programming languages abounded and the technical slope to be climbed to do something interesting with a machine was not very steep. But today, machines are essentially closed boxes (manufacturers have no interest in selling you a machine along with the tools to "program it yourself"). The machines are much more complex and consequently the programming languages are an order, probably two orders of magnitude, more complex than those in 1980. So why would you break your bones trying to learn to program?
I understand that fear mongering sells books. I understand enthusiasts wanting to sign everybody up to "participate" in whatever activity excites them. But 99% of the people on earth today don't need to program. That is a specialist craft. And it has become "professionalized". The old do-it-yourself and hacker mentality of the 1960s through 1980s is long gone. Program if you want a career that pays relatively well. But you don't have to program to use your computer to surf the web, join in social networks, play games, or do your finances. Rushkoff is creating a bogeyman. (Note: if you get 5:00 minutes into this interview he backs off his extremist claim that "everybody must be a programmer" but he still makes claims that are nutty.)
Here is text I've transcribed from the video showing the idiocy of Rushkoff trying "sell" his fear of "Program or be programmed!":
Rushkoff: Now we get computers and we know how to use them but we don't really know how to program them. And that, as I see it, sets up a potentially dangerous difference between those who know how this technology works and those who really don't.
Metzger: Dangerous how?
Rushkoff: Dangerous in that, if you're incapable of distinguishing between that which is and that which has been made to be like this, then it is really difficult to, um, engage consciously with reality, it's difficult to have any autonomy, it's, it's, you know the thing that happened to a lot of us either when we took psyhodelics for the first time, or studied buddhism for the first time, or went on line for the first time, is that we had this realization that 'oh, a whole lot of what I've been taking for granted isn't just this way by nature, these are not pre-existing circumstances, the world was made like this by people. These are social constructions. These are programs. From money to democracy to the city to using cars, that so much of the world around us doesn't have to be this way, it is this way because of a series of choices. If we move into an increasingly programmed reality without understanding that it has been programmed, much less understanding how to program it ourselves, I feel we are going to become incapable of really distinguishing between the map and the territory.
What a pile of horse shit! He is saying you can't operate an automobile unless you are a mechanic because you wont be able to "really distinguish between the map and the territory" of automobiling. Nutty! I need a general understanding of how a car works, but I shouldn't need to be able to pop the hood and point to devices and explain in detail their operation. That's a specialist's task, a mechanics task!
You can tell his argument is weak because the above quote gets murky with metaphysics and mystical terms. There is no crisp logic and not clear "this because of that" to it. Just like we don't train every kid in school to be a mechanic. We don't need to train every kid to be a programmer. Sure kids need to know "how a car works" and a kid needs to know "what is a computer and how a program works" but at a high level of principles without the ugly details of actual hardware, actual operating system, all the gory details of a programming language, and the necessary accoutrements of a professional programmer with knowledge about development environments, testing techniques, documentation, etc. That's for the pros. The other 99% can get along well enough with generalities and conceptual sketches.
At 6:30 into this video he puts up another idiotic claim that the "golden era" of computers is now past. In those golden days we used bulletin boards and downloaded comments, thought about our replies, composed them, and uploaded them. But today so many social media applications are instant & now. He claims "We've turned the Net from an asynchronous medium to an always on medium." And he "blames" the market for "doing this" to us. Nutty. You can choose applications, like blogging, that are asynchronous, if you enjoy that style of interaction. Or you can chat if you want instant interaction. It is a choice. It isn't "dictated by the market". Nutty!
Rushkoff is an idiot and doing fearmongering to sell this book. He is distorting what is into a story that reflects his fears and his fancies. There is nothing wrong with alerting people to alternative interpretations, but when you, like Rushkoff, claim your "insights" are Truth and sell them using fear, you've gone too far.
I like other stuff he has written, but I won't be reading this book. I'm outraged that he is making such ludicrous claims and using such disreputable means to sell his book.
Update 2010oct08: Here is a video that distills Rushkoff's book into two minutes of video. I still don't buy the "message"...
The group 10:10 thinks this is a wonderful way to encourage people to be "civic minded" and encourage participation in a democracy...
Yeah... a democracy where the guys at the top scare you shitless if you don't "conform" to their idea of political correctness!
This group and the Earth First! group scare the pants off me. Their motto seems to be "my way or the highway!"
And this...
If you wonder what it would be like to "interview" the SS guards at a Nazi concentration camp as they finished off a big batch of the "final solution", it would probably have been with giggles like this:
The above gives you a feel for what it was like to be about the "true believers" in the late 1930s in Germany. Lots of enthusiasm and not a clue of how they, as lemmings, were going over a cliff to achieve the maniacal vision of some crazed fanatic, in this case a "global warming" fanatic.
The scientific consensus has convinced our world government - the officials of the United Nations - that one of the most urgent tasks for the humanity is to optimize our communication with the extraterrestrial aliens and the E.T. diplomacy.
Because their arrival is imminent, they may be confused whom they should call if they want to talk to the Earth's humans - much like the U.S. president is confused whom he should talk to if he wants to talk to Europe.
While the situation in Europe is remaining confusing and the holy mission of the "nice" people to create a unified dictatorship on the Old Continent hasn't yet succeeded, the United Nations have apparently made much more progress.
The woman who has already worked as the Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in Vienna - but this office wasn't yet "good enough" - is Ms Mazlan Othman, Malaysian girl who dreamed about becoming a physician. But after 100+ years of the existence of a school, she was given the first female physics PhD in Otago, whatever the place is, once the female reproductive organs became popular and worth rewarding over there. This achievement of hers, which unfortunately remained completely unmatched by her publication record, made her qualified to be employed in the modest job of the mankind's ambassador to the rest of the Universe; she will unfortunately not be sent to her new target country yet. ;-)
I'm afraid that those awaiting the "imminent" arrival of extraterrestrials will have a rather long wait... something between billions of years and never. I would guess that it is more likely that earth will be visited millions of years from now by long-forgotten descendants of today's Earth-originated robots than by any carbon-based extraterrestrial. Space is just too big for "casual visits". We are living in a vast and empty space. We aren't the centre of anything. But people keep thinking they are "important" and expect ambassadors of far flung alien empires to come courting. It ain't gonna happen!
Go read the full post by Luboš Motl to get his take on extraterrestrials. I understand Motl's frustration with the cost, the waste, and the ineffectualness of the UN. But I differ from Motl. He is a radical libertarian who hates government. I happen to believe that government is a tool -- an imperfect one -- that we wield to shape a civil society. If you think there is a purpose to having a local government, to having a state/regional government, and a national government, it should be a no-brainer to see a need for an international government. But Motl is hostile to the idea. I would say that he is irrationally hostile. He is a brilliant guy, but he has a severe case of ideology, the libertarian brand, that makes him hostile to social institutions. I'm willing to agree with his frustrations about inept government and overly-repressive governments, but you don't abandon a tool just because it fails you before you master it.
The following is the crudest, sleaziest example of hucksters "selling religion" to line their pockets.
The above makes obvious the old saying that "religion is the opium of the masses". The idea that "God" is just waiting to shower wealth on you is nutty. But people will end up shelling out money to religious quacks like Peter Popoff. From the guy who is telling you that God will shower you with money (from Wikipedia):
At Popoff's peak in 1987, according to his comptroller, he took in $4.3 million a month.[21] After his exposure on the Tonight show he declared bankruptcy in 1987.[7]
According to Charity Navigator, in FY2004, Peter Popoff received $548,167 as president of his organization and the Peter Popoff Ministries raised $16,220,066 in revenue in FYE 2004.[22] Then in FY2005, Popoff received $628,732, his wife Elizabeth received $203,029, his son received $182,166, and daughter received $176,290 with $23,556,469 in revenue.[22] These figures are from IRS documents, which "only outline the millions of dollars people give Popoff's organization in the US." [15]
When the guy telling you that his "miracle water" will allow God to shower you with wealth is himself declaring bankruptcy despite receiving tens of millions of dollars, you should be skeptical. But fools rush to embrace religion for the very fact that it rejects reason in favour of "faith". They have the audacity to claim that religion is all the more powerful because it requires a "leap of faith" and the more outrageous the gap between reason and the idiocy they sell, the more "powerful" the religious claim!
For me, the real icing on the cupcake is the Madison Avenue touch selling the miracle packet of spring water "now in a larger size"! Funny. If this packet truly provides a miracle. Why would you need a bigger packet? To get a bigger miracle? Since when are miracles sized by the "packets" the come inside of? Nutty!
