Author: Jacques Delacroix

Am I Smarter Than Everyone? Experts and Advocates (Revised)

Jacques Delacroix Religion , , , , ,

“Do you think you are smarter than everyone, Jacques?” asked the young intelligent liberal man with whom I have occasional conversations. He was referring to my deep skepticism regarding global warming, its consequences, its remedies, its very existence, when it comes down to it. He was also implicitly referring to an alleged “consensus” about global warming, of course.

Good question. Let me answer in two steps. First, I don’t think I am smarter than everyone and I don’t have to. Fortunately, the question does not arise. (See Part Two below.) Rather, I think I am smarter than most. It’s not much of a claim. It does not involves much conceit. “Most” means the same as “a majority.” That’s half, or 50%, plus one person. If you divided the human race in two equal halves based on intelligence, I think I would be standing somewhere to the right of the divide. So?

Part One

Here is my second answer to the question (That’s Part One – 2): I am much smarter than most in two important respects. I don’t have a religious fiber in my body and I don’t care if I belong to the club or not. In fact, I would rather not join. Many intelligent people, many much smarter than I, have a religious streak and they crave belonging. (The whole history of Communism in the West tells us that this is true.) Religiosity and wanting to belong have a great deal to do with belief in the global warming syndrome, I am sure.

The global warming syndrome is first and foremost a successful contemporary cult: It has its dogma (the world is ending because of our sins) and its priesthood (climate scientists with no scientific conscience, and other scientists who have no training regarding climate issues, a large majority of signatories of climate change manifestos, by the way.) It has its promised Armageddon, the Death of Life on Earth through global warming. But it’s a religion of redemption, like Christianity. We can still avoid the End, collectively, if we repent, give half of our money to the poor and accept future poverty for ourselves and for the poor themselves in the form of much diminished economic activity. The originality of this cult is that its Holy Places are nomadic. Its Rome used to be Kyoto, then it was Rio; today it’s Copenhagen. It will be somewhere else tomorrow (unless the End catches up with us first, of course. )

The cult also allows for individual salvation but only through rigorous methods: Sinners must reduce their individual carbon footprint, whatever it takes. As in some other religious groups, high-ranking members are exempted, however. The manager of the biggest limousine service in Copenhagen says she had to bring (gasoline and diesel) cars from Sweden and Germany because there aren’t enough in all of Denmark to satisfy the demand from delegates to the climate conference. It has now exceeded 1,200 vehicles of which five (5) are electric. (Confirmed by the Wall Street Journal on 12/14/09.)  I am not that smart actually so, I wonder why militant environmentalists seeking to reduce everyone’s carbon footprint can’t use the city’s vaunted public transportation.

Last but absolutely not least (see below), the global warming cult has its Grand Poopah. Like the Pope in Rome the Grand Poopah is infallible when speaking on matters of faith. No amount of evidence, and certainly, no misdeeds by his clergy, can persuade him to alter the intrinsically truthful dogma.

So, finally to answer the question: Yes, I think I am smarter than most because I am an atheist, Thanks God! None of the trappings of the global warming cult makes any impression on me. Zero! And, no, I have no desire to follow to the cult. As I have said, I have no wish to belong in general. In fact, I take a small and discreet but nevertheless real perverse pleasure in not going to church.

Part Two

The global warming cult uses the idea of science the way the Catholic Church used the arts, graphic, statuary and musical, for centuries, as an attractive wrapping for ideas that are basically unsound and unpalatable. The cult betrays itself when its spokesmen claim that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. There isn’t and if there were, it would not matter. The way a scientific theory comes to dominate any part of reality is through elimination of competing theories. That’s what happened with evolutionary theory for example. It was never “proven.” Rather other ways of explaining the same observations fell by the wayside and lost almost all their advocates. The global warming cult tries to pass for “scientific” precisely as it combats as forcefully as it can the consideration, and even the production, of competing explanations.

The public allows this to happen because of an excess of generosity, paradoxically. There is widespread confusion about what the holder of any intellectual position owes the public. The confusion is about the important distinction between “expert” and “advocate.” The American public generously allows the latter to operate with the rules intended for the former.

Experts are your doctor, your dentist, your car mechanic, your “chef de cuisine.” It’s generally accepted that experts’ performance should be assessed as a ratio of good decisions to bad decisions. People don’t withdraw their confidence from an expert because of the occasional misdiagnostic, because of a slip of the drill, or because of the rare extra nut on the car floor. It hurts me to say this but even a boring dish coming from a great chef allows him to remain a great chef. In this country, the courts even admit this kind of assessment. “Negligence” won’t get you much; it takes “gross negligence” to cash out.

An advocate is someone who is trying to make you change your ways and therefore, trying to make you change who you are. Because of the seriousness of their endeavor, and,often, its irreversibility, advocates must be held to a higher standard of truthfulness than are experts. Like this:

“If you don’t know what you are talking about, why should I change my life to make it conform to what you preach?”

And,

“If you have to lie for your cause, it’s a bad cause and I am not for it.”

The global warming cult had some of its clergymen in good standing caught telling untruths recently. The so-called “scientists” at the University of East Anglia both showed that they didn’t know what they were talking about and they lied. To make matters worse, the cult did not immediately spew them out but it tried to defend them and to minimize their crimes against truth. End of story. It’s absolutely fair and intellectually appropriate to stop believing any of the cult’s pronouncements.

And I haven’t even touched on he cult’s heartlessness. The best example is turning food crops into unnecessary and expensive fuel, which was sure to raise the price of food for the poorest of the poor in the world.

By the way, I could have saved you all this tedious reasoning. You just have to look at the cult’s Grand Poopah: Al Gore is an ignoramus who believes the inside of the earth is “millions of degrees” hot (I heard this with my own ears); he is a liar on multiple counts; he is a hypocrite who uses private jets and lives in a house 25 times larger than mine, with a corresponding carbon footprint. He is a moron who could not even carry his own state when he was running for President. That’s the same state of Tennessee where is daddy was a beloved Congressman for nearly thirty years. Of course, he, little Al, invented the Internet, but still!

Reminder: My fellow rationalists, there is not much reason to despair. Whatever, if anything, comes out of Copenhagen, will be an international agreement. Contrary to rumors in some right-wing circles, the President does not have the constitutional authority to enter into such agreements. They must be ratified by the Senate. And whatever has been ratified can be un-ratified after the next election.

Pot Shops and the Evils of Government

Jacques Delacroix Law, Liberty , , , , ,

It seems to me that few people dare entertain the thought that government is inherently bad, that it’s bad even when it’s honest and well-intentioned. That was pretty much what the founders of this republic thought but the idea is almost lost. Even when ordinary people think of bad, oppressive government, they usually have the distant federal government in mind. But it’s too far, precisely, too large, it has too many tentacles. Perhaps it’s easier to understand the moral issue if you consider something smaller and closer. The city of Santa Cruz in California (population about 50,000) just gave us a clear example of well-intentioned government action with predictably bad consequences. It’s small and it’s innocent. Repeat: innocent.

The city council just decreed that there could be only two medicinal marijuana shops in the city. Two consequences.

1 The council has created by decision a quasi-monopoly. Absent such restrictions, there might have been one hundred pot shops at first. After a short time, the number would have dwindled to a small number, possibly only two. But the winners would have been those offering the best combination of price and quality. The latter, understood widely to include possibly diversity of products and quality of service, an essential ingredient in serving presumably sick buyers.

Instead, we are going to end up with the first two applicants. That’s if the decision-making process is honest. Those two may be the worst possible or they may just be mediocre. The city’s decision is another factor, a small factor to be sure, of local high cost of living and a low level of satisfaction. Multiply this decision by 10 million and you have the Soviet Union’s economy. (Reminder: The Soviet Union did not just deny freedom, it denied a decent standard of living and the dignity that comes with not having to scramble for oranges.) Continue reading →

Global Warming: So?

Jacques Delacroix Religion ,

Le Figaro on-line is showing beautiful photographs of traditional Brittany houses with slate roofs covered with snow. (Le Figaro is one of the big French dailies. I read it every day.) The pictures are notable because Brittany is a peninsula with seas on three sides. There are even outdoors palm trees there. It’s almost never cold. Much of Europe and much of the US , including the Deep South, are experiencing one of the coldest winters on record.

I know this is meaningless with respect to the global warming hypothesis. A few data points don’t a long-term trend make, or unmake. I would refrain from mentioning this especially cold winter if climate-change cultists did no comment on the warm winter in California. It’s true that my rose bush is 25% abloom and that some of my tomatoes from last June are still more or less ripening. By the way, if that’s global warming, I am sorry it’s a religious hoax. I like it.

The global warming world view is wrong in its whole and in its parts as well. Let’s assume (“assume”) that every measurement of the alarmists and every numerical implication is correct. Then, what? It turns out we would still have much less than a global catastrophe on our hands. We would be facing a series of medium-sized problems all of which have solutions we could deal with.

For a sober article on the economic and social consequences of climate change if the cultists climate predictions were, in fact, correct, see “Socioeconomic Impacts of Global Warming are Systematically Overestimated.”

Cutting the Three Lifelines in Full Daylight; Boy Rape from Unexpected Quarters

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Liberty, Politics , , ,

I would never have thought that one can become bored with emergencies. It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet, here I am. I am bored with the procession of disasters that hit us every other day as a result of Obama administration actions or pronouncements. Also, I am not man enough to pay as much attention as I did a year ago. I have indignation fatigue. I should be energized by the thought of the unfairness of the crushing burden the Obama spending is placing on young people. I don’t feel it much because the young voted overwhelmingly from Obama and it seems they are the most obdurate about waking up from the dream. The ungenerous thought that they made their bed and they should lie in it dominates my reactions.

About indignation fatigue: The powers may have planned it that way. If a boxer gets punched fifty times in three minutes, he does not feel the pain as clearly as when the blows come every thirty seconds. Be it as it may, the new dispensation forces me to be more selective in what I expose myself to. Also, in what I write and what I talk about on the radio (“Facts Matter” KSCO radio Santa Cruz, Sundays 11am to 1pm, available on-line in real time.)

The recipes for sabotaging a modern, advanced capitalist economy such as this one are similar to the formulas to control it. I say, “such as this one” because I think that what I am saying below would apply equally to Germany, or to Japan, or to Finland. It would be the same play-book. This short essay is not about American exceptionalism, a political and a moral concept. It’s about the nuts and bolts of the only economic system that has brought prosperity to huge numbers, capitalism. Continue reading →

Aggressive Swimming Rabbits: Conservative Violence, Abortion

Jacques Delacroix History, Liberty, Politics ,

When he was President, Jimmy Carter reported that while he was hunting in some swamp, armed to the teeth of course, a rabbit had swam toward him and acted threateningly. (Would I make this up?) The current orchestrated media reports about violence and threats of all kinds against Democrats remind me of this glory moment in American liberal history.

Several black Representatives affirmed that they had be called “nigger” on Sunday. Today, as I write, almost four days later, I have been looking in vain for visual or audio evidence of this alleged episode. Let’s think things through: Tea Party activists are demonstrating outside Congress in their thousands against a bill that enrages much or most of the population. There is no hostile press, there are no mikes, there are no television cameras to record the historic event and the precious “n” moment? Among the thousands of counter-demonstrators, in the Congressmen’s entourage, there is no one with the presence of mind to whip out his cell-phone camera and recorder to catch the insults? What is this, 1958?

With each passing hour without evidence, I become more persuaded that the insults story was fabricated and disseminated by a supine and complicit media.

It’s like Pres. Carter’s rabbit story: It probably did not happen; if it did, it’s regrettable but insignificant. Somewhere between 50 and 70 million Americans are angry because of the contents of the law (those small parts of it they know), and even more angry because of the way it was passed. Under the circumstances, if only two, twenty, or two hundred of them allow themselves intemperate language, it’s a cause for celebrating our collective reasonableness. Continue reading →

Obama’s Haitian Policy

Jacques Delacroix History, Liberty, Religion , ,

A strange symmetry of irrationality and meanness in the news about Haiti: Pat Robertson declares that God is punishing the Haitians for their sins; two days latter, Denis Glover, the activist of all Leftist causes observes that the Haiti earthquake is somehow connected to the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen. It turns out that Gaia is just as mean as God the Father! Why bother to switch, I wonder. I have been telling you, friends, for a long time that climate warmism is a cult.

I have cool thoughts about the human catastrophe in Haiti, almost inhumane thoughts. I suspect the Haitians will end up coping better than many others would have under the same terrible circumstances. The population is so damned poor that it’s trained to do with little. I worry about water mostly because humans can’t make do without it but for a short time.

Parallel reasons lead me to predict that the 2010 earthquake will turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the survivors. Port-au-Prince and the rest of the country were so dismal that it would be impossible to restore them to their former awfulness if you tried. It’s difficult to rebuild massive quantities of housing without accompanying infrastructures, including roads, water pipes, and sewers (which are almost lacking today). I am betting, of course, that there is going to be a serious international effort to “rebuild.”

Another uncharitable thought: I will be curious to see how the population of Haiti stacks up, in energy and in entrepreneurship, with the population of New-Orleans post-Katrina. In case, you wonder, my money is on the Haitians. Continue reading →

Changement de marée?

Jacques Delacroix Politics

[Editor’s note: this essay first appeared on Dr. Delacroix’s blog, Facts Matter, on Nov 4 2009]

Il est arrivé quelque-chose d’important hier dans la politique américaine que les media francais n’auront peut-être pas estimé à sa juste valeur. Plusieurs elections partielles, hors-calendrier, ont pris place le 3 Novembre, dont trois que tous les observateurs jugeaient importantes. Dans l’election parlemantaire au nord de l’etat de New York, le candidat Democrate l’a emporté par 49/46. Sa victoire, pour être numériquement nette, n’en est pas pour autant impressionante car le jeu électoral avait été brouillé par la présence d’une troisième candidate. Celle-ci, nominalement Républicaine mais très proche des positions d’Obama, s’était retirée de la course deux jours avant l’élection, Son nom étant demeuré sur le bulletin de vote, elle a ramassé six pour cent des votes donc, assez potentiellement pour renverser les résultats de cette compétition.

La course pour le poste de gouverneur de l’état de Virginie s’est conclue par une dramatique défaite du candidat Démocrate. (Rappel: les gouverneurs d’ états sont élus independemment; ils ont leur propre budget sans aucune tutelle fédérale; les plus gros des affaire domestique est du ressort de l’état et non du gouvernement fédéral comme les media francais semblent le croire.) Dans une course avec deux candidats, le Démocrate a recueilli seulemnt 39% de votes contre 59% pour le gagnant Républicain. On ne voit que rarement une marge de ce gabarit dans les elections américaines. Obama avait conquis la Viriginie avec une marge de 6% l’année dernière. Ce dernier scrutin represente donc un recul de 26 points pour le parti Démocrate en un an de présidence Obama. Du jamais vu! Continue reading →

L’ Anarchisme et la recherche de la liberté: recommendations des Déserts du Nouveau Monde.

Jacques Delacroix Books, Current Events, Liberty ,

Je suis vieux mais j’ai quand même un copain lycéen à Paris. Je l’ai rencontré un Quatorze Juillet justement, en Californie où je vis depuis déjà longtemps. Ugo a quinze ou seize ans. Il me dit par courriel qu’il lit Bakounine et Kropotkine. Cela me fait plaisir à deux titres. D’abord, cela signifie qu’il a échappé à la malédiction du relent de totalitarisme collectiviste qui habite toujours de nombreux Français comme une croûte en Octobre colle encore aux lèvres des revenus de la colonie de vacances du mois d’Août.

La deuxième raison de ma réjouissance c’est que de telles lectures ne peuvent qu’allonger l’aune à laquelle Ugo mesurera la liberté. (J’allais dire la “liberté individuelle” mais, il n’y en a pas d’autre, c’est une mauvaise manie verbale.) Il me semble en effet que quand on vit dans le brouillard d’une societe étatique comme la France il doit être difficile seulement de reconnaitre le simple fait de liberté. Dans une telle société, on doit être menéinconsciemment à une mesure de la libertéétriquée pour la simple raison que les nombreux “droits” des autres ne peuvent que limiter naturellement, automatiquement les siens propres.

L’un de ces soi-disant droits est le droit de vivre correctement sans avoir jamais às’efforcer, c’est-à-dire aux crochets d’Ugo et d’autres qui ne rechignent pas à travailler ou àinventer. Continue reading →

Horse Meat and the European Union

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , ,

Big scandal in the European Union about horse meat masquerading as beef. Neither in Europe nor in this country do people really understand the story. Good thing I am here with my cross-cultural skills!

First things first and a confession: I ate much horse meat as a child, something like twice or three times a week. It was cheaper than beef. The horse butcher was half a block from the beef butcher. Horse meat was cheaper. My mother was concerned that her sons would not develop the right kind or quantity of hormones if they didn’t get red meat at every meal. Well, I don’t want to appear immodest or lacking in humility but it appears that my mother was right about the effect of horse meat on virility!

We ate ground horse meat barely singed. It tasted good, a lot like beef, in fact but also a little sweet. We did not feel sorry for the horses. There was a horsey set in France but it did not live in the government housing where I grew up. We did not know any of them although we read about some of them in the tabloids. Long story short: There is no particular health hazard associated with horse meat if it’s normally inspected. It’s probably less dangerous than say, chicken. Continue reading →

Possession Two (or too)

Jacques Delacroix Liberty

Part Two: No Place to Stay

Update: In a previous blog (“The A.A President,” posted 10/7/09 ), I argued that President Obama’s current string of failures was not surprising because he had never accomplished much of anything in his life under his own power. I mentioned that his passing the bar exam might prove me wrong. There is nothing on Wikipedia about his having passed the bar anywhere. There is nothing I could find on the Internet. Not trusting the thoroughness of my search, I went straight to the source. Nine days ago, I emailed the White House website asking when and where the President had passed the bar. No answer to-date.

In the first installment of this essay, I began to attempt to use a small-scale entity to explain the damage done by innocent government intervention. The small-scale entity is my town of Santa Cruz (population about 40,000). In Part One, I showed how the municipality’s practice of taking possession of buildings downtown to shelter social services impoverished the tax roll. There is worse.

Santa Cruz has two main parallel arteries. On one side of the river, lies Ocean Street, leading to the Boardwalk, a permanent carnival near the beach. Ocean avenue is appropriately lined with fast food joints and motels. It’s as devoid of interest as any similar commercial artery anywhere in the US.  Continue reading →

Possession

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

Part One: Drying up the tax fountain

I suspect many people have troubling getting a good grasp of the on-going conservative struggle to prevent large-scale takeover of the economy by the federal government. I think there are two main obstacles to their understanding.

First, the idea of the virtuousness of the market as a regulator and organizer of economic life is difficult to communicate. It’s an abstract idea and it does not correspond well to people’s own experience. In their personal life, people think that when good things happen it’s a because someone (some one) made good decisions. First, it’s Mom, and then, it’s the “leadership” of the many organizations within which they live, schools, churches and especially employing organizations. To an extent, the one is themselves.

In daily life, there are few occasions to reflect upon the fact that the myriad decisions made by anonymous decision-makers, including bad decisions, aggregate into good outcomes. The market processes involved are both too magical-seeming and too abstract.

At any rate, for some reason, schools and universities do a bad job of explaining these processes. Liberal Arts teachers don’t understand them themselves and they are hostile to them. Most of them are born socialists. If you eat the King’s bread long enough, you become a monarchist.  Continue reading →

Equal Pay for Equal Work: The New/Old Trojan Horse; Unfairness

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

I am a sore loser. Thoughts of re-emigration dance around in my head. However, I am too old. And the very mechanism that I fear is trapping this whole society has entrapped me: I am dependent on Medicare which is not transportable. I am a ward of the federal government which took loads of my money for forty years and turned it against me, like a two-bit dope-dealer. Like other conservatives I know, I am tempted by the option of personal, psychological secession from the new Obama Peronista United States. But, finally, there is nothing to do right now but to continue to sound a voice of reason and of conscience in the hope that it will reach some of the inner children Pres. Obama has been singing to.

(Personally, I make it a practice to take my inner-child out every so often and to beat his ass.)

President Obama won re-election handily not by winning arguments but by side-stepping deftly vital issues of the solvency of this society, present and future, and of the role of government in restricting our freedoms. (There was also quite a bit of slime he threw at hapless Romney but that was secondary in his victory, I think.) After his inauguration speech I wonder if he is going to succeed in side-stepping central matters again by raising silly issues such as that of homosexual marriage. (I don’t use the word “gay” because it carries a political agenda. I am not against homosexuals, however. I don’t even think they have a greater chance of burning in Hell than I do, for example.) Continue reading →

Telling the Truth and Tarentino, Liberals, the Secretary of State, and the President

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

I have a liberal friend with whom I have fairly frequent serious discussions. He thinks of himself as a moderate liberal, even a centrist because his owns guns and his guns are dear to him. Yet, he voted for Obama and he can give a spirited defense of every aspect of Obama’s policies and actions. That’s a test, in my book.

He told me once, but only once, that the administration’s program of at-a-distance- assassination-of-the-untried was not a problem for him. He dos not see how assassinating an American citizen, for example, on the presidential say-so, could be a problem, ethical or judicial. He does not discern a slippery slope. That too is a test.

He and I have had repeatedly two bases of disagreement. First, we have different values, of course. Thus, he insists that it’s fine for him to use the vote to take my money by force in order to give it to someone that he, my friend, thinks deserves it more than I do because he, the other guy, does not have health insurance.

I disagree.

Note that this is an actual example of a fundamental value difference because my liberal buddy does not have to go there to achieve the same results. He could try, for example, to convince me to give up some money on the basis of expediency: It’s unpleasant, even messy to have the uninsured dying on my front lawn for lack of medical care. (As they do all the time, of course.) Or, he could persuade me on fellow-human grounds. He does not feel like doing either because, I think, he has no moral qualm about taking my earnings by force for a cause he judges good. That’s a big difference between us. Continue reading →

Taking Guns by Executive Order

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , ,

I wrote recently about one of the American attitudes and set of beliefs about private ownership of firearms. (“Guns” ; “America and Firearms…“).

I need an addendum in view of current developments.

First, I want to confess that I wouldn’t be all that opposed to banning high-capacity magazine guns and rifles that can be turned into the currently illegal assault weapons, if I thought that would be the end of it. Nevertheless, I would never agree to such ban in the current cultural context. That’s because I think American gun-banning organizations are mostly in bad faith.

Let me put it in more clear words: I suspect they lie all the time. They are not merely after my so-called “assault weapon” (already illegal). If I let them have anything, I think, they will be after my duck shotgun next. Then, they will want the handgun that never leaves my house. Then, they will demand that I turn over the b.b. gun (very small-bore compressed-air rifle) that I use to sting marauding raccoons in the ass. (I do this because they insist in defecating en masse under my grape arbor, near where I sit outdoors in the summer. If they learned to shit on the neighbor’s lawn for example, I would let them be.)

To summarize: Gun control advocating organizations are liberals-led organizations. Not all liberals are liars but liberals leaders almost all are liars. That’s in addition to having no respect for the US Constitution. Continue reading →

Government Programs, Coffee and Bread

Jacques Delacroix Economics , ,

I have been vexed for years by a simple problem: How to explain to young people who were not taught anything of substance at school why free markets are desirable. You would expect this to not be much of a problem is this overall still capitalist country. When, I try, most of the time, I end up making their eyes glaze over although I am captivating speaker overflowing with charisma.

The difficulty is that the concept of market is counter-intuitive. In everybody’s personal experience, good things generally happen because someone makes them happen: Mom, Dad, the boss, God. The “invisible hand” of the free market is just that, invisible. To understand our economy takes an effort of imagination.

Lack of understanding of markets opens up people, especially young people, to the direct, unsophisticated emotional appeal of government intervention. In many minds again, especially in the young’s, government solves problems and when it does not, problems go unsolved. There is a good reason for this misapprehension of reality: The many good things that the market does, it does undramatically, almost imperceptibly. Its achievement tend to be taken for granted. By contrast, government interventions are nearly always thunderous, even and especially, if they turn out to be completely ineffective.

Below is a micro-essay question that illustrates this phenomenon. (No grade and no reward except the pleasure of discovery.) Continue reading →