Personal Update: general

The week leading up to Christmas week was hectic and I found myself too tired and uninterested in any thing but a break. The last day of that week, Saturday, before Christmas week I had lighting check duty on the airfield and my tool-partner and I found ourselves shoveling snow off of the edge lights on the third runway because the knuckle draggers that run the snow plows left a three foot berm right on the edge light line. So, no rest for the wicked.

Christmas week I have been "off the air" because I wanted to goof off with my family. We also did some marathon movie watching in our cozy house with the snow piled up outside. I received the DVD sets of seasons 1, 2.0, 2.5, & Razor of Battlestar Galactica for a Christmas present so I have been wasting the final hours of my time off with some serious couch potato action. I haven't been as guilty for staring into the vacuous grimoire as much as I ordinarily would as I know that when work starts Monday night it will begin another long period of servitude to the Port (Port of Seattle). When I'm back to work, the only self improvement I tend to have time for is reading through some work of literature for our literary group, the occasional magazine article, and my BSF lessons. Well maybe I'll have a little internet surf time, and I'll try to post a few comments on the piece we are reading. And if the Lord wills, Janie and I may try to take a long weekend at the end of February to celebrate our anniversary (our 18th).

Happy new year!

Social Philosophy: Economics: something to think about

Krugman on FDR and the "Clean" New Deal
Posted by Bill Anderson at December 26, 2008 07:26 AM

It's Friday, and Paul Krugman does not disappoint. Today, we read that the New Deal of FDR not only helped revitalize the economy, but also was an exercise in "clean" government. Yes, you cannot make up this stuff:

F.D.R. managed to navigate these treacherous political waters safely, greatly improving government’s reputation even as he vastly expanded it. As a study recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research puts it, “Before 1932, the administration of public relief was widely regarded as politically corrupt,” and the New Deal’s huge relief programs “offered an opportunity for corruption unique in the nation’s history.” Yet “by 1940, charges of corruption and political manipulation had diminished considerably.”

How did F.D.R. manage to make big government so clean?

A large part of the answer is that oversight was built into New Deal programs from the beginning. The Works Progress Administration, in particular, had a powerful, independent “division of progress investigation” devoted to investigating complaints of fraud. This division was so diligent that in 1940, when a Congressional subcommittee investigated the W.P.A., it couldn’t find a single serious irregularity that the division had missed.

F.D.R. also made sure that Congress didn’t stuff stimulus legislation with pork: there were no earmarks in the legislation that provided funding for the W.P.A. and other emergency measures.

Last but not least, F.D.R. built an emotional bond with working Americans, which helped carry his administration through the inevitable setbacks and failures that beset its attempts to fix the economy.

Unfortunately for Krugman, there is the book by William Shughart and James Couch, The Political Economy of the New Deal. Their research demonstrates strongly that New Deal public works money went to those areas where votes were most needed, contra Krugman.

For example, the "neediest" region was the South (still recovering from Lincoln's war), but that also was known then as the "Solid South," with the Democratic Party being absolutely supreme. Since FDR did not need to bribe southerners to vote for him, the New Deal money went elsewhere.

I reviewed this book in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics several years ago, and found that this book, along with with a paper Bob Tollison and others had in the Journal of Political Economy a while back on the New Deal pretty much established that it was government as we always have known it. So, once again we have a Nobel Prize winning "economist" declaring something that absolutely is not true.

A constant theme of Krugman is that government can work wonders as long as those carrying out the program "believe in government." He has excoriated the Bushies for being ideological free marketeers, which means that even when they employ government programs, they are not run by True Believers, which makes their projects fail.

This is what one might call "Faith-Based Government," in which all it takes is belief. Yes, believe in government and all will be well. Only believe.

Boxing Day

Christmas Day

Although not nearly as cold as this picture, we did have a white Christmas this year.

Christmas Eve

Fourth Sunday in Advent

Third Sunday in Advent

Abraham Lincoln on Labor

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.

Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much higher consideration.

Working men are the basis of all governments, for the plain reason that they are more numerous.

To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as much as possible, is a worthy object of any good government.

Technos & Social Philosophy: Car 2.0

In the Tacoma News Tribune on December 11, 2008 appeared the following article:

The Car 2.0 Race is America's to Lose:
A business model for cars similar to buying minutes for a cell phone.

As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can't help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today's integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed, It's this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don't think it won't be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you'll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

Why do I bring this up? Because someone in the mobility business in Denmark and Tel Aviv is already developing a real world alternative to Detroit's business model. I don't know if this alternative to gasoline-powered cars will work, but I do know that it can be done - and Detroit isn't doing it. And therefore it will be done, and eventually, I bet, it will be done profitably.

And when it is, our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a bookstore chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet.

What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi's electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay Area and, yes, Denmark.

The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy - such as wind and solar - as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure. This consists of electricity charging spots with plug-in outlets - the first pilots were opened in Israel this week - plus battery exchange stations all over the respective country. The whole system is then coordinated by a service control center that integrates and does the billing.

Under the Better Place model, consumers can buy or lease an electric car from the French automaker Renault or Japanese companies like Nissan (General Motors snubbed Agassi) and then buy miles on their electric car batteries from Better Place the way you now buy an Apple cell phone and the minutes from AT&T. That way Better Place, or any car company that partners with it, benefits from each mile you drive. GM sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.

The first Renault and Nissan electric cars are scheduled to hit Denmark and Israel in 2011, when the whole system should be up and running. On Tuesday, Japan's Ministry of Environment invited Better Place to join the first government led electric car project along with Honda, Mitsubishi and Subaru. Better Place was the only foreign company invited to participate, working with Japan's leading auto companies, to build a battery swap station for electric cars in Yokohama, the Detroit of Japan.

What I find exciting about Better Place is that it's building a car company off the new industrial platform of the 21st century, not the one from the 20th - the exact same way that Steve Jobs did to overturn the music business.

What did Apple understand first? One, that today's technology platform would allow anyone with a computer to record music. Two, that the Internet and MP3 players would allow anyone to transfer music in digital form to anyone else. You wouldn't need CDs or record companies anymore. Apple simply took all those innovations and integrated them into a single music-generating, buying and listening system that completely disrupted the music business.

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery - the iPod in this story - and the right kind of national plug-in network - the iTunes store - to make the business model work for electric cars at 6 cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.

Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage - 25 miles per gallon - than many Ford, GM and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don't be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done. If we miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit's new shareholders: we the taxpayers.

{Thomas L. Friedman is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times.}

This article says some of the same things I’ve been saying, but this article also illustrates why newspapers are losing readers—Wired magazine had an article about Shai Agassi four months ago, and if a newspaper even reports the sort of news that is interesting to the mildly intelligent or better it is usually woefully out of date. Anyway the advent of Car 2.0 is reason enough to let the Big 2.5 US automakers go into bankruptcy. This would cause some disruption in the short term, but in the long term it would allow more innovation and growth.

Daguerreotype: Micro-warp drive test

Trinity College Library in Dublin Ireland

STIFTSBIBLIOTHEK ST. GALLEN

2008 Second Sunday in Advent

Also, don't forget, today is Pearl Harbor Day.

Social Philosophy: Civilization End Game Scenario

In the happy warrior column in National Review, Mark Steyn writes the following:


Quote:

Animal Magnetism

If September 11, 2001, was "the day everything changed," November 4, 2008, was the day everything changed back--at least as far as the rest of the world is concerned. The "global war on terror" was a Bush concept and will expire with his presidency, long past its sell-by date, as far as the "international community" is concerned: Weary Europeans find it unhelpful to the cause of mollifying their own restive Muslim populations, and wealthy Arabs want to get on with buying up the Western world's banks and soccer teams with a somewhat lighter level of scrutiny than they've been subject to these last seven years.

As for President Bush's own citizens, Code Orange is fine if it's just taking your shoes off at the airport, but as a 24/7 mindset it's kind of exhausting. So the United States elected a chief magistrate who talks about health care and job creation and hardly mentions terrorism, except for occasional effusions about invading Pakistan, which one assumes is one of those back-burner midway-through-the second-term things after he's lowered the oceans and healed the planet. Certainly, in the chancelleries of Europe they don't take it too seriously. The Bush fever is assumed to have passed.

Still, there remain a handful of us who think "the war" was not entirely a construct of Rove-Cheney's dark imagination, and valiantly tootle around town with our "FEAR, NOT HOPE" bumper stickers. Brian T. Kennedy of the Claremont Institute had a grim piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day positing an Iranian-directed freighter somewhere off America's shores capable of firing a nuclear-armed Shahab-3 missile that explodes in space over Chicago:

Gamma rays from the explosion, through the Compton Effect, generate three classes of disruptive electromagnetic pulses, which permanently destroy consumer electronics, the electronics in some automobiles and, most importantly, the hundreds of large transformers that distribute power throughout the U.S. All of our lights, refrigerators, water-pumping stations, TVs and radios stop running. We have no communication and no ability to provide food and water to 300 million Americans.

This is what is referred to as an EMP attack, and such an attack would effectively throw America back technologically into the early 19th century.

If Brian Kennedy were to switch it from an Iranian freighter to an Iranian freighter secretly controlled by a Halliburton subsidiary, he might have a scenario he could pitch to Paramount. But he's got a tougher job pitching it to America. This is the Katrina nation: Our inclination is to ignore the warnings, wait for it to happen, and then blame the government for not doing more. That last part will prove a little more difficult after an EMP attack. I doubt there'll be a blue-ribbon EMP Commission for Lee Hamilton to serve on, or much of a mass media for him to be interviewed by Larry King and Diane Sawyer on. "An EMP attack is not one from which America could recover as we did after Pearl Harbor," writes Mr. Kennedy. "Such an attack might mean the end of the United States and most likely the Free World."

Are there really people out there who want to do that? End the entire Free World? The very term sounds faintly cobwebbed. When nukes were confined to five reasonably sane great powers, the Left couldn't get enough of Armageddon: There were movies, novels, plays, even children's books about the day after, and the long nuclear winter. When it was crazies like Reagan and Thatcher with their fingers on the buttons, the liberal imagination feasted on imminent nuclear immolation. Now it's Ahmadinejad and Kim long II and who knows who else with their fingers on the buttons, and nobody cares: What's the big deal?

Well, the Iranians have held at least two tests in the Caspian Sea to launch missiles in the manner necessary to set off an EMP meltdown. And if you were, say, Vladimir Putin and obsessed with restoring Russia's superpower status, you might reasonably conclude that that might be well nigh impossible without diminishing the superpower status of the other fellow. And, while you wouldn't necessarily want your fingerprints on the operation, you wouldn't go to a lot of trouble to dissuade whichever excitable chaps were minded to have a go.

But beyond that is a broader question. In Afghanistan, the young men tying down First World armies have no coherent strategic goals, but they've figured out the Europeans' rules of engagement, and they know they can fire on NATO troops more or less with impunity. So why not do it? On the high seas off the Horn of Attica, the Somali pirates have a more rational motivation: They can extort millions of dollars in ransom by seizing oil tankers. But, as in the Hindu Kush, it's a low-risk occupation. They know that the Western navies that patrol the waters are no longer in the business of killing or even capturing pirates. The Royal Navy that once hanged pirates in the cause of advancing civilization and order is now advised not even to take them into custody lest they claim refugee status in the United Kingdom under its absurd Human Rights Act.

"Weakness is a provocation," Don Rumsfeld famously asserted many years ago. The new barbarians reprimitivizing various corners of the map are doing so because they understand the weakness of what Brian Kennedy quaintly calls "the Free World." One day the forces of old-school reprimitivization will meet up with state-of-the-art technology, and the barbarians will no longer be on the fringes of the map. If that gives you a headache, I'm sure President Obama will have a prescription-drug plan tailored just for you.

End of Quote


In the Nietzschean realpolitik of today's world there is no reason for "HOPE" in the normal course of things--unless it is the will of God to grant us mercy.

High Voltage Antivirus protection

Philosophy, General: Objectivism, part 2

I have been posting condensations of Objectivist thought by Glyn Hughes not in the order of that philosophy's development of it's ideas but in an order that struck me as provocative and important. As a disclaimer, I don't know if I agree 100% with the following article, but there are some things there worth discussing:

RACISM
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock farm version of collectivism.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes to "protect the family name", the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history - all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today's so-called "newly emerging nations."

The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, or a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievement. Even if it were proved - which it is not - that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes - or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms. To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them.

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. Racism was always strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany - and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth - and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Southern racists' claim of "states' rights" is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the "right" of some men to violate the rights of others. The "conservatives" who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism, do not seem to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. The "liberals" are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule - yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

This accumulation of contradictions has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges. For instance, since Negroes constitute 25 per cent of the population of New York City, they demand 25 per cent of the jobs.

That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes' fight. If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own. For instance, the demand for racial quotas in schools is pure racism. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments. If the individual has all the rights and privileges due him under the laws and the Constitution, we need not worry about groups and masses - those do not, in fact, exist, except as figures of speech.

Philosophy, General: Objectivism, part 1

Glyn Hughes has done an excellent job of condensing the various tenants of Objectivist thought (as first promulgated by Ayn Rand). Here is an excellent critique of socialism:

THE MONUMENT BUILDERS
What had once been an alleged ideal is now a ragged skeleton rattling like a scarecrow in the wind over the whole world, but men lack the courage to glance up and to discover the grinning skull under the bloody rags. That skeleton is socialism.

Fifty (seventy now) years ago, there might have been some excuse (though not justification) for the widespread belief that socialism is a political theory aimed at the achievement of men's well-being. Today, that belief can no longer be regarded as an innocent error. Socialism may be established by force, as in the USSR - or by vote, as in Nazi Germany. The socialization may be total, as in Russia - or partial, as in England. But the results have always been a terrifying failure - terrifying, that is, if one's motive is men's welfare.

England, once the freest and proudest nation of Europe, has been reduced to the status of a second-rate power and is perishing slowly from hemophilia, losing the best of her economic blood: the middle class and the professions. They are escaping from the reign of mediocrity, from the mawkish poorhouse where, having sold their rights in exchange for free dentures.

Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement led and controlled by the intellectuals, out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs. What is the motive of such intellectuals? Power-lust - as a manifestation of helplessness, of self-loathing and of the desire for the unearned. "The public interest," "service to the public" are the means. Since there is no such entity as "the public," since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of "the public interest" with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others.

Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man's mind in the pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals. But a delusion of grandeur can be served only by the switching, undefinable chimera of a public monument. America's greatness lies in the fact that her monuments are not public. The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers kept raising the people's standard of living- including the inhabitants of the slums, who lead a life of luxury compared to the life of an ancient Egyptian slave or of a modern Soviet Socialist worker.

When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed, not for "the good of mankind" nor for any "noble ideal," but for the festering vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned "greatness" - and that the monument to socialism is a pyramid of public factories, public theaters and public parks, erected on a foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for "prestige" to the starless void above him.

Social Philosophy: Obamanation: misc. 3

Another example of environmental hypocrisy: article

Madame Pelosi wasn't happy with the small private jet that comes with the Speaker's job, no, Madame Pelosi was aggravated that this little jet had to stop to refuel, so she ordered a Big Fat 200 seat jet that could get her back to California without stopping!

Many, many legislators walked by and grinned with glee as Joe informed everyone that's Nancy's Big Fat Jet costs us, the hard working American tax payers, thousands of gallons of fuel every week.

Since she only works 3 days a week, this gas guzzling jet gets fueled and she flies home to California, cost to the taxpayers of about $60,000, one way!

As Joe put it, 'Unfortunately we have to pay to bring her back on Monday night.' Cost to us another $60,000.

Folks, that is $480,000 per month and that is an annual cost to the taxpayers of $5,760,000. No wonder she complains about the cost of this war, it might cramp her style and she is styling, on my back and yours.

I think of the military families in this country doing without and this woman, who heads up the most do-nothing Congress in the history of this country, keeps fueling that jet while doing nothing. Madame Pelosi wants you and I to conserve our carbon footprint. She wants us to buy smaller cars and Obama wants us to get a bicycle pump and air up our tires.

Social Philosophy: Intellectuals and Economics

Robert Nozick writes in his essay:

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average.

Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism?

An attempt to answer this question and consider the ramifications of this factor in society is made in the above linked essay. I think the hypothesis is reasonable.

One possibility is the way that "wordsmith" intellectuals receive their education in the modern west, and that is through age-segregated schools where the ability to communicate via the written and spoken word is the most rewarded skill. As Robert Nozick writes:

Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

All the more reason to homeschool your children to keep them from falling to the temptation to believe in something that is not in their own best interests.

The essay is a bit more comprehensive than what I have represented here, so be sure to read it.