Current Events

Kidnapped Girls: a Victory for Twitters and for Ms Obama!

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

The Twitters campaign and Mrs Michele Obama won a huge victory in the matter of the 300 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Islamist terrorists that the Obama administration does not want to call “Islamist” or “terrorists.”

No, none of the school girls has been returned to her family. In fact, it looks today like some or many of the girls will never be returned to their Kaffir (infidel) families because they have converted to Islam. There is an impious part of me that thinks that it would not take two weeks to convert me to anything if I had a gun pointed at my head. I would even convert to global warmism.

Some other girls, Christian girls, will be “married” by force to good Muslims. That’s rape, in my book. I keep asking Muslims and people who are better informed than I to contradict me and to affirm that the rape of non-Muslims girls is haram under Islam. Still waiting.

The Twitter campaign and the First Lady’s speech have succeeded in enlarging beyond their wildest dreams the reputation of the religious Nazis that is Boko Haram. Its leaders are now in a good position to negotiate anything they want with a Nigerian government softened by an indignant world public opinion. They will ask for the release of their fellow criminals and for money to buy even more and better weapons to kidnap even more school girls, to massacre even more civilians.

“We can’t be the policemen of the world” is a favorite of cliché today. I hear it from all sides. Nobody is stepping in to replace the US as sheriff yet. Perhaps Putin’s Russia or the People ‘s Republic of China will make a move soon. In the meantime, looking forward to that day, terrorism is spreading.

I keep wondering where are Reverend Jesse Jackson and President Carter, our normal hostage negotiators. Are they secretly afraid that Boko Haram would cut off their heads at the earliest opportunity if they meddled ? I wonder why.

Changing the subject, here is a quiz:

There is a largish country where more than thirty people are currently either on death row or serving a life sentence for blasphemy. The country is:

a Pakistan;

b Brazil;

c Russia;

d South Africa.

(The correct answer is in the Wall Street Journal 5/9/14 but don’t cheat.)

Radiations: Report is in!

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , ,

The report of a serious scientific study aimed at detecting radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident on the California coast is in. The study examined kelp (a kind of giant seaweed) because its tissues easily absorb and retain radiations.

The main finding is: _____________________________________

Energy Primer for Libertarians (or anyone else)

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty , , ,

One of these days Brandon’s going to kick me off this blog for posting notes that aren’t “on liberty.” But maybe he’s not looking. I’ll take a chance.

This piece is about energy and on second thought, it is relevant to libertarians. We need to know what we’re talking about when we enter into controversies on current topics like energy. Insights into how markets work are crucial, of course, but not sufficient. We should arm ourselves with a few facts and Lord knows, maybe even a little understanding of basic physics.

I base my remarks on an excellent chart produced by (gasp!) a government agency, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It appears here but if it’s illegible please find a better copy here.  Blame Brandon for squeezing our posts into a narrow column!Image

We see energy sources on the left. A couple of facts stand out. At the top, notice that solar and wind are negligible. The yellow line representing solar may be thinner than a single pixel on your monitor and therefore invisible. Geothermal is on the radar, but barely; same for biomass (wood chips, organic leftovers, corn used for ethanol instead of feeding people) that can either be burned or processed into methane or ethanol. Our three main sources are, and will be for the foreseeable future, petroleum, coal and natural gas.

At the top center we see electricity generation. We don’t consume electricity directly except maybe for executing criminals. We use it to power devices in the four broad categories shown on the right: residential, commercial, industrial, transportation.

Notice the fat grey line coming out of the electricity generation box called “rejected energy.” It tells us that about two thirds of the energy coming into power plants goes up in smoke or steam or other waste heat rather than electricity. That sounds like a terrible loss and indeed, there is always room for efficiency improvements at the margin. But, boys and girls, there’s something called the Second Law of Thermodynamics which puts an iron limit on how much energy in a particular situation is available to do useful work. In other words, a certain amount of the “waste” represented by that fat gray line is inevitable. It would be great if the good people at LLL could supply that calculation, but I suspect that reliable estimates of the necessary data would be difficult to come by.

Look at the residential box on the right. It only represents 11% of energy consumption meaning that relative to the big picture, home energy efficiency measures like insulation, solar panels, etc. can never do much for the big picture. I say this too keep things in perspective, not to deny the possibilities for cost-effective marginal improvements in many homes.

If your monitor resolution allows it, you’ll see a tiny orange line running from electricity generation to transportation. That means electric vehicles are, and for some time will be, utterly insignificant, though again, marginally beneficial in very special situations.

Another fat gray line comes out of transportation. When you burn gasoline, most of the energy goes out the tailpipe or the radiator; only a little ends up as kinetic energy and even that ends up as waste heat when you apply the brakes. (In the long run, it all ends up as waste heat. Look up “heat death” on Wikipedia.)

The overall message of this chart is: if we want to maintain anything like our present industrial civilization with its abundant heat/cooling, light, transportation, etc., we’d better keep the present main sources going – petroleum, coal, natural gas, nuclear because renewable energy sources are advancing only slowly and in many cases (wind and ethanol, especially), uneconomically. The stakes couldn’t be higher – significant losses of energy, more than anything short of nuclear war, will make life nastier, more brutish, and shorter.

How to decide which energy R&D projects deserve scarce resources? Solyndra, anyone? No, central planning of energy is just as much a disaster as any other form of central planning or maybe more so. Energy is a highly specialized field. A biomass expert, for example, may be ignorant of nuclear fusion. A transformer guy may know nothing of transmission line losses. I suspect there are dozens or hundreds of subspecialties within the biomass field. Knowledge, as Hayek taught us, is dispersed and often tacit. We need to let all these specialists use their particular knowledge and facilities to experiment around the edges, comparing present or expected future marginal costs and benefits. Other than an occasional nice chart like you see here, the Energy Department just gets in the way. (To see a boondoggle that dwarfs Solydra, google “national ignition facility.”)

Speaking of costs and benefits, one of these days I’ll comment on the strange notion that energy accounting – a perfectly legitimate engineering practice – should be used to judge the economic value of energy projects. Tallies of income/expenses and assets/liabilities, should, say proponents, be carried out not in dollars but in energy units (joules or BTUs.) Why is this wrong? Because the economic value of a joule depends on time and place and most critically, people’s ability to make good use of it. In fact, natural resources aren’t resources at all until and unless someone figures out how to make good use of them.  More generally, value never inheres in physical objects and materials but only in the minds of people who believe those objects and materials can help satisfy wants, theirs or others’.

Postscript: The oceans store unimaginable amounts of thermal energy. You can calculate this yourself: using your favorite system of units, just multiply the volume of water by its mass density by its specific heat at constant pressure. You’ll discover that if we were willing to lower the ocean temperature by a thousandth of a degree per year, we would have abundant energy from now till Kingdom Come. Try this idea on a “progressive” friend sometime, keeping the answer momentarily in your back pocket: the Second Law forbids it. Stated differently, even with perfect technology, you would have to put more energy into the conversion process than the usable energy end product.

Abstract Ideas Don’t Deserve Patents [NY Times]

Adam Magoon Current Events, Law, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

In preparation for something special that I will finally complete this week (Rothbard willing) lets talk about this editorial from the New York Times.

 

The article starts accurately enough explaining the US government’s monopoly power of ideas saying:

The Constitution gives Congress the power to grant inventors a temporary monopoly over their creations to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

 

I am actually shocked at the strong language used here, the four letter word “monopoly” is rarely used in reference to any government service.  At least in polite company.  I would also like to point out the subjective language quoted from the constitution.  “Useful arts”.  Useful to whom?  To the inventor?  To consumers?  To the government?  To humanity?  Like most state activities the ability to decide what is “useful” is left to bureaucrats in service to the government rather than in the free market where useful services will generate profits and those that generate disuse (or disutility) are met with losses.  Back to the article though:

“But in recent years, the government has too often given patent protection to inventions that do not represent real scientific advances.”

 

No argument there.  The “copyright troll” phenomenon is more than enough to make this libertarian squeamish.  Where is this editorial going I wonder?

  “The issue in this case, Alice Corporation Pty. v. CLS Bank International, is whether using a computer to implement a well-established economic concept can be patented. The court should rule that such ideas are not eligible for patent protection.

 

Alice Corporation obtained four American patents that cover a method of settling trades between investors in currency and other financial markets. The approach depends on a neutral middleman to make sure traders complete the transactions they have agreed to. The corporation, which is based in Australia, has accused CLS Bank, a London-based company that settles foreign exchange trades for investors around the world, of infringing its patents.”  

To make a long story short the US patent office granted the Alice Corporation a copyright on a form of interaction between a buyer, a middleman and a seller.  An absurd concept to be sure.  Now the question is what does the editorial suggest?

“The Supreme Court should make clear that nobody should be allowed to claim a monopoly over an abstract idea simply by tying it to a computer.”

I agree; but why stop there?  Why the artificial endpoint of “abstract ideas tied to a computer”?  If we shouldn’t allow patents on abstract ideas what would the author suggest if we proved that all ideas are necessarily abstract and therefore not able to be owned, sold, or monopolized?  Would he follow his logic to the conclusion that perhaps all patents are invalid?

Open Access Gary Becker papers, and a couple of thoughtful links on him

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker died Saturday. For those of you who don’t know about his work, go here. For the rest of you, economist Tyler Cowen has compiled a great list of articles by Becker that you can read:

    1. “Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory.”  Can the theorems of economics survive the assumption of irrational behavior? (hint: yes)
    2. “Altruism, Egoism, and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology.”  The title says it all, from 1976.
    3. “A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influence on Price.”  Why don’t successful restaurants just raise the prices for Saturday night seatings?
    4. “The Quantity and Quality of Life and the Evolution of World Inequality” (with Philipson and Soares).  The causes and importance of converging lifespans.
    5. “Competition and Democracy.“  From 1958, but most people still ignore this basic point about why government very often does not improve on market outcomes.
    6. “The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution.”  Auction off the right to enter this country.

Cowen also linked to sociologist Kieran Healy’s fascinating take on Michel Foucault’s thoughts about Gary Becker’s work over at Crooked Timber (and here is a pdf of Becker on Foucault on Becker).

And economist Mario Rizzo shares some short thoughts about Becker’s work in relation to the Austrian School of Economics (Becker is associated with the Chicago School of Economics). Rizzo’s account of the early 1960s debate on rationality between Becker and Kirzner is worth a look.

Update: Here is Gary Becker’s 1992 Nobel Prize lecture (pdf)

Eurocraine and Russocraine

Fred Foldvary Current Events , , , , , , ,

Elections are supposed to achieve social peace by providing a government that represents the people. But voting has not brought peace to Ukraine. Many people distrust the honesty of the elections, and many in Ukraine have disagreed with the policies of the government, both when policy favored association with Europe and when it favored association with Russia. The fact that many voters in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine favor union with Russia, or else independence, shows that many there do not feel well represented.

The election in Ukraine will not solve the governance problem, because it is just a continuation of the same system that some are rebelling against. Ukraine needs a new structure of government and democracy. The solution is to shift political power from the central government to the people as individuals. When a citizen of Ukraine holds power equal to that of all others, he will have nothing to rebel against.

Individual sovereignty can best be represented by a neighborhood council. The neighborhood should have a small population, such as a thousand residents. That is small enough for the people to personally know the candidates and for someone to be elected with little cost. The government of Ukraine can begin the decentralization by establishing neighborhood or village election districts. If the neighborhood population is a mixture of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, and the people wish to have a council that is aligned with one of these groups, or other interests, then the residents may regroup their districts and have councils that best represent their individual interests. This is the level-one level of governance.

In the Russian language, “Soviet” means “council”. The Soviet Union was supposed to be a union of elected councils, and there was indeed a structure of bottom-up multi-level soviets, but in practice, the Communist Party ruled top-down. Ukraine should resurrect the old Soviet system, which actually derives from the 19th-century anarchist concept of associations of voluntary communities. The Bolshevik slogan was, “All power to the soviets!”, but instead they perpetuated the dictatorship of the proletariat, usurped by the party oligarchs.

The power of the neighborhoods has to be constrained by a constitution that recognizes and enforces natural rights. In most countries, constitutions that proclaimed liberty have failed to be implemented, mainly because the structure of mass voting facilitates plutocracy, with policies that transfer wealth from workers to the moneyed and landed interests, resulting in poverty that gets remedied by trickle-down government welfare.

But with the bottom-up system of genuine soviets, the government would much better represent the people, and constitutional rights would be more strongly protected. As the level-one councils elect level-two regional councils, and these elect the supreme soviet or national parliament, the structure would prevent the usurpation of power from the top. The president would be elected by the parliament and easily dismissed if the people are dissatisfied. Any council member could be recalled by the council that elected him.

Decentralized government gets hampered by centralized tax collection, such as an income tax or value-added tax imposed from the central government. Decentralized governance is suitable to decentralized public finance, and the source of public revenue best suited to local power is the tapping of the area’s land rent or land value. Taxing wealth and investment invites capital to flee, hide, or else it shrinks from the burden. But land cannot hide, and it does not run away, nor does land shrink when taxed. Revenue from land-value taxation can be applied by the level-two councils, with revenues sent to both the level-one and level-three governments.

Ukraine needs two things: better governance and strong economic growth. The replacement of the current complex of market-hampering taxes by taxes on land value and pollution would give the economy such a comparative advantage that investment would pour in, wages would rise, the government would be able to pay off its debts, and the economic misery that fuels much of the unrest would be replaced by an economic joy that would eliminate the economic motivation to join Russia.

With small-group voting, the residents of eastern Ukraine would have their own local Russian-speaking councils, and probably ethnic Russian level-two councils representing some 25 thousand persons. The constitution of Ukraine should devolve most government services to the level-two councils, including local security, education, and public works. The ethnic Russians would no longer feel alienated from the government, and the government of Russia would find it difficult to control the local governments, because the council members would come from the people.

As to the situation of takeovers of government buildings in eastern Ukraine, the national government should surround them with walls of troops while establishing new centers of administration in other guarded buildings. But a lasting solution needs to replace the current government with councils that people feel represents them. The one good thing about the old Soviet Union, the bottom-up multi-level system of soviets, was the element that was most discarded without any debate. Ukraine: bring back the soviets, only this time, make it “all power to the people” as individuals and their chosen councils.

Irrationality, Self-indulgence, Childishness, Bizarre Beliefs, and Innovation: From the Belly of the Beast

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

I have lived for many years the People’s Socialist Green Republic of Santa Cruz in California, right in the Belly of the Beast. That’s not its real name actually, just the name it deserves. It’s a university town of about 50,000. A large campus of the University of California sits on the hills overlooking the town. The campus has several distinguished university departments, including Marine Biology and Astronomy. However, many more of it undergraduates believe in Astrology than know anything at all about Astronomy.

It’s a Bobo-land where LUGs prosper and the boys are quiet, timid, retiring, sweet, and too frightened to do the job that Mother Nature commanded for them. (LUG= Lesbian Until Graduation. I swear I have known several, young apparent lesbians who showed up a couple of years after school with a husband, a male husband, I mean. There is a logic to it: Lesbianism is the highest degree of feminism. It brings you a great deal of political prestige on campus. But then, soon, nature and convention re-assert themselves and everything returns pretty much to what the young woman’s parents always wished for, a dual income family, children, etc. Note that I have said nothing about or against lesbians by natural inclination.) The University of California at Santa Cruz has a healthy “Department of Feminist Studies,” not “Women’s Studies,” not “Feminine Studies, ” “Feminist,” with an “ist” indicating perhaps a certain lack of scholarly detachment!

Savvy faculty members of 70s vintage (like me) with more or less phony doctorates they invented have used this mass of ignorant, semi-literate, easily revolted, sometimes revolting, overwhelmingly middle-class young people to take over the running of the city. (Note for overseas readers: In California, you can pretty much register to vote anywhere where you have lived for I don’t know how long. I couldn’t even find it on the Internet. No identification is required or even permitted to actually vote. )

Picture it: a mass of voters who have no permanent stake in the city, whose parents in many cases pay their very indirect property taxes (via rent) determine who shall rule the city. When these voters graduate or go on Spring Break, permanent residents like me are left to live with their preferences. I hasten to say that their preferences are not always objectionable even when they are debatable. One example of the latter is covering the city hall parking lot with solar panels, an operation unlikely to be ever audited. I mean that I am not dead-set against such an experiment. I would just like to know how much it cost and how much power it actually produces. If it cost $500 per permanent resident of the city and it generates just enough power to light the city hall for three months, I am against it, dead-set against it. If it cost $50 per resident, anything goes, I think. Well, I will probably never know.

I will never really get old in Santa Cruz because I live here in a time warp. It’s still the sixties here and maybe the seventies. The radical professors go back to my time in graduate school. Some are young enough to have been “trained” by my graduate school colleagues when the latter became professors. They rule, often with the help of wealthy downtown businessmen who used to be hippies or Trostkysts, or both. The climate is a retro-mixture of the simplistic vulgar Marxism of those who have not read a single page of Marx, and of old New Age unexamined beliefs. There was a small demonstration downtown, just yesterday with signs reading: “Capitalism must die so we may live,” and also, “Four days work for five days pay.” (Why as many as four days, I wonder, why not three, or two?) What percentage of the young demonstrators could give definition of capitalism that’s not a mere slogan, I ask myself? (The answer is in Jacques Delacroix’s “Capitalism.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Blackwell Publishing. Vol. 2, Malden, Mass. 2006.) I would bet the answer is close to 0%, or even less!

In Santa Cruz, there is a brisk local trade in chunks of quartz, loved for their esoteric properties. Their properties are so esoteric, no one is able to explain to me what they are. Earth Day is celebrate here in a lively way. If anyone ventured to declare that one of the two original Earth Day founders, Ira Einhorn, beat his girlfriend to death and left her to dry in a trunk in a closet, he would be accused of slander so absurd as to prove madness, my madness. Incidentally, Einhorn, who had fled to France for fifteen-plus years, was defended to the end against extradition by the French Green Party. Does it show that greenies have a criminal bent? No, it indicates that they lack ordinary criticality. By the way, I knew the other founder, Dennis Hayes, when we were both undergraduates. I am sure he did not murder his girlfriend. That’s half of the founding team. We can’t all be perfect.

Here, in Santa Cruz, I am surrounded by irrationalisms of several categories. They range from otherwise dead varieties of communism, varieties dead everywhere else on earth, including North Korea, to environmentalist cults, through a large number of diet fads the least of which is veganism. Often, I think that my wife, my daughter, my toddler granddaughter, myself, and a handful of friends are the only rational and fact-bound people around.

Why do you live there, JD if you are so critical, if it’s so painful, they ask? Several answers. First, Santa Cruz maybe the only place on earth with beautiful, uncrowded beaches within a forty-five minute drive of Silicon Valley, a strong engine of economic development, of jobs, of technical innovation (perhaps, the strongest engine anywhere in the world). Second, it’s a very beautiful location (Big Sur is next door). Third, there are fish in the ocean only one mile from my house.

Fourth, the stranglehold of the university on the town is not all bad for me personally. It creates a kind of modern serfdom all to my advantage as a mature consumer. There is an inexhaustible local supply of young people who need a job but who are not about to go pick strawberries two miles away, as everyone knows. As a result, hardly anybody here earns more than ten dollars an hour. This basic economic fact makes for well-staffed bookstores, coffee shops, restaurants. Santa Cruz is better endowed with those attractions than any town of its size that would rely on seasonal tourism of non-elite variety. (My town’s main tourist attraction is the Boardwalk, a permanent carnival -a “Luna Park”- attracting blue-collar families and recent immigrants from poor countries who live in and near Silicon Valley.) There is presence of a permanent middle class of professors determined to live la vida loca even and especially if they are ardent Marxist. This fact helps  Santa Cruz  support restaurants that would probably not be found here without them. The movie theaters are better than average for the same reason. We actually also have three brick-and-mortar bookstores, one of which, Bookshop Santa Cruz, is downright lavish. I am often annoyed in this town; I am seldom in excruciating mental pain.

Fifth, with a median age that must hover next to 25 (I did not bother to check,) there is a fantastic music scene around me. I am of an age where I am wont to doddle to sleep in front of the TV fairly early but I like to know that there is good music to be had should it strike my fancy to remain awake. In fact, the rich night musical scene often bleeds into the day time, within my reach.

In general, if you have an open mind however, it’s not always easy to dismiss the other airheads, I find.

On the rare occasions when I go to one of the several “natural” stores in town, I wonder at the sight of paper-thin, shabbily dressed young women clutching three dollars to pay for what looks like an equal number of organic, sustainably and locally grown salad leaves. I snicker secretly of course. Yet, yet, there is good scientific evidence that rats fed a starvation diet live longer than their brethren fed a normal diet. The young women may just be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

It’s unavoidable that I have friends who partake more or less fully of the local culture, of course. For one thing, I spend time in coffee shops. They don’t have coffee shops for old conservative curmudgeons, it turns out. If there were, I would probably not patronize them. There is a difference between being one and liking others of the same kind. Besides, old men in public places often try shamelessly to recruit you into their mutual misery clubs: Let me tell you about my arthritis, I will listen about your shingles. Second, I am a writer of sorts. That fact entails a need for services not always provided by narrow rationalists like me. (By God, even my car mechanic is a spiritualist!) So, for example, the person who will adeptly lay out my stories for printing is a friend who will also try to persuade me of the merits of various herbal medicines. (I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography is live in the Kindle Store)

Leave me alone, I protest, I go by science alone. I don’t think I have any choice on this. It’s science or it’s superstition from the days when life expectancy was about fifty. Of course, tea made from a flower in Asia the name of which I cannot pronounce is “natural,” but so is cobra venom; why don’t you try an injection of it, I ask my friend venomously? It’s sovereign against almost all ills and pains.

And then, I read an article in a trusted newspaper (the Wall Street Journal 5/3/5/14). The author, Nina Teichloz, argues rather persuasively that the health-based rejection of animal fats, going back to the fifties, is founded on pseudo-science, on almost-science, on exaggerated amplification of sparse research result, and on monstrous career ambitions. It may well turn out that bacon fat is good for you, and canola oil bad, she argues. It’s turning out, as I speak, that foods that tend to replace the banned animal fats in enlightened Americans’ diets, all based on carbohydrates, have recognizable, well- demonstrated noxious effects on health.

Wait a minute, I think, I am one of those enlightened Americans though reared in France! All my adult life, I have been what doctors call a compliant patient. They don’t have to tell me the dos and don’ts twice. Also most of my adult life, I have deprived myself of pâté, rillettes, terrine of this and terrine of that, cheese, marbled steak, etc. For a long time, I was even on a fairly stern macrobiotic diet involving a great deal of grain, several kinds of grain, three times a day. I have Type II diabetes although I am only moderately overweight. My four unenlightened French siblings – who share 50% of my genes – have no trace of diabetes. One is enormous. All ate everything they wanted on the extravagantly fat French menu all their lives. (But three out of four don’t eat much at all.) Did I get severely punished for my well-informed science-based rationalism, I wonder? (But to be fair, I have to remember that beer too is rich in carbohydrates, not just whole bulgur wheat.)*

I had smelled a rat for a long time anyway because French men, who do all the wrong things but one, persisted in not dying.

Anger wells up in me when I see a young father bicycling blithely in traffic with a his toddler in handlebar seat as if the kid were a bumper against oncoming cars. He is obviously trying to save the planet from “climate change” (formerly “global warming”). Yet, the child will most likely survive. Seeing the world from Dad’ bike at an early age may cause him to become a natural cyclist when he grows up. This may be enough to compensate for his relentless, ceaseless small screen habits, for his sedentariness, health-wise and with respect to the development of his imagination.

In the end, it may well be that my annoying town is a boon to the wider society, in the manner of a natural laboratory. If it’ turns out, for example, that a diet based largely on raw carrots causes cancer, the local vegans will be the last ones to know. Yet, they will constitute a valuable sample on which to run a serious epidemiological study, a real one. If it’s a fact that ten joints of cannabis a day is an effective remedy against aging, there is an excellent chance the discovery will be made in Santa Cruz. Also, this town fairly drips with bad artists. Many are mere artistry pimps, living at public expense for little in return. Some try but don’t succeed. But art may be like the Olympics: You need a broad base of practitioners of varying merits for a chance of a handful of medals.

Silliness and sometimes downright madness may just be the price we pay for a reasonably inventive society. In the other society I know best, France, there is far less mediocrity on all kinds on display than I see in the US and in Santa Cruz. In France, in the past thirty years, there is also little new to hear or to see, I believe. The main recent French artistic achievement is an original and pleasant way to light up he Eiffel Tower. (I am not contemptuous, I like it.) The French industrial achievements likewise have been modest and largely the result of precise engineering rather than of innovation.

In America, they say, “Far out; by all means try it!” even if it has only one wing to one side, and a motor made of twisted rubber bands. Our nonjudgmentalism is often exasperating. In France, they will tell you, “It will never fly” even if the article in question is a complete WWII jet. Accordingly, the first men to fly in a controlled flight were Americans and former bicycles repairmen, failed businessmen, as well as high school dropouts. Unlikely it would have ever happened in France. There, the Wright brothers would have been admonished to stay in school until age 23 or 24, earn a couple of proper engineering degrees first and then, ridiculed until they returned to serious business of building bikes.

Every time I grate my teeth at the irrationality, the childishness, the self-indulgence around me in Santa Cruz, California, I make myself repeat the obvious to myself: America invented live radio broadcasting, the Internet, the Windsurfer, country music as well as jazz, and the giant double roll of toilet paper in public accommodations. Irritation is a small price to pay, perhaps.

Still rock-solid among my beliefs: 1 Children should be vaccinated; 2 Almost every service the government provides could be better supplied by the market, private contracts, and insurance schemes. (It’s “Almost” because I have not seen my way yet to defense being outsourced to mercenary outfits. Libertarians hardly ever discuss this central issue.)

* full disclosure: I have been on the Paleolithic Diet – with some systematic cheating – for over a year. My diabetes number have never been so good in fifteen years. My doctor is speechless because he does not want inadvertently to promote another diet fad. I am not making any other claim except that I am rarely hungry. The cheating is this: I drink coffee and wine or beer every day. None is really part of that diet. It’s just good for my soul.

In Utah

Brandon Christensen Current Events ,

Hello loyal readers. I’ve been in Utah for the last couple of weeks. It’s beautiful and cold here. I don’t know if I like the combination (reminds me of too many ex-girlfriends).

There is still snow on the mountain tops here. Weird. Beautiful but weird.

A Racist Old Man. So?

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

A rich old white man instructs one of his black employees in private not to be photographed with black men. The black men include other employees he pays millions of dollars for their skills. (I have no quarrel with this fact; if he didn’t, others would. There is a real market here.) The employee so instructed normally provides the old man with lots of face among other rich old geezers because she is beautiful. She contributes to his image, he thinks. She may also sell him some affection. The old guy is 80. Who would bet she provides much more than affection? Part of the deal is that he is allowed to refer to her as his “girlfriend.” Nobody is fooled, I would think.

For my overseas readers,: I refer to the owner of the Los Angles Clippers, an average basketball team that is part of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The old man’s name is “Sterling.” The NBA official who punishes him is named “Silver.” Makes it sound like a family quarrel. And it would be if the press were doing its job. See below.

The media explodes in outrages when those few words are leaked. The manufactured scandal occupies the best part of a day of news plus some. Some African-Americans are permanently in a rage anyway (for reasons I understand, I think.) Other African-Americans find it expedient, political to be also in rage whether they feel any rage or not. What are the white liberal media figures – public friends of racial minorities all – supposed to do? Does anyone think they might have stated, “No big deal, boring,” and gone back to covering real news?

I, for one, am not outraged. I am bored. Why should I care about what instructions an employer gives one his employees who participates in this shaky image building? Why should I care when his own black employees, more than 2/3 black themselves don’t say a thing about the alleged verbal atrocity?

If I did care, what right would I have to do or even say anything? If they are offended, the man’s highly coveted black players and their offended white teammates can walk away, go on strike. Offended players on other teams can refuse to play with the Clippers. The paying public can boycott the team all it wants if it’s scandalized.

Instead, the Grand Poopah of the National Basketball Association – to which the Clippers belong – forbids the old man from attending his own team games forever and fines him 2.5 million dollars. Poopah Silver’s entourage makes loud public statements about forcing him to sell his team.

What is the Poopah going to do if the old man stands his grounds about the fine and flips him one? Does he have a private geriatric jail into which to throw the old man? It all sounds to me like a private confiscation of private property and a gangsterish restraint of trade. That’s a mafia-like action.

I hope the old man fights back and sues. I hope I am on the jury.

Yes, fascism is in the air. But it does not come from a rich old guy with a mind floating in another era and associated prejudices. We learn the next day that US GPD growth for the first quarter of 2014 is 1/10 of 1 %. That’s a French level. President Obama’s policies are all failing, domestic and foreign. The Democratic Party if facing congressional elections in the fall. Many Democrats are running scared. The party needs to draw attention to something else, to anything at all. The mass media are obliging as usual. Panem et circenses and the panem is  stale.

New Book

Jacques Delacroix Books, Current Events , ,

The electronic version of my book is up on Amazon.com. (The print version will soon follow.)

I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography

is live in the Kindle Store at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JY0G3SA

Share it with your friends. Fling it at your enemies!

George Keenan’s racism *AND* affinity for the Democratic Party confuses Left-wing journalist

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , ,

From the New Republic‘s David Greenberg:

Normally a supporter of Democrats—in the diaries, he voices support for the presidential bids of Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Frank Church (“promptly regretted it deeply”), and Bill Clinton (“without enthusiasm”)—Kennan was nonetheless profoundly conservative in his worldview.

How on earth could a Democrat be a conservative? The logic of Progressives continues to astound me. Kennan, in addition to being an ardent supporter of Democratic Party candidates, also expresses adulation for ugly racist stuff like eugenics and even goes so far as to express sympathy for Apartheid in South Africa.

Libertarians and honest conservatives have long known about the intricate links between institutional and scientific racism and Left-wing political causes. The logical outgrowth of this subtle racism can be found in many of the Left’s pet political causes, such as Affirmative Action or government housing projects. These are inherently racist policies and if you read the justifications for such policies you can see why they are a natural  outgrowth of Progressivism.

The New Republic‘s David Greenberg is unable to put two and two together, however. To him, the fact that Kennan was a racist and an imperialist and a Democrat does nothing to show him why the Democratic Party is the party of reaction, of conservatism writ large in the United States.

By the way: Just because I think Affirmative Action and government housing projects are racist does not mean I do not support reparations for the US government’s theft of labor from slaves and theft of land from Native Americans. I just think there are better ways of atoning for our government’s sins than engaging in even more fruitless, racist policies.

Delacroix’s Autobiography is now out on Kindle

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events , , ,

After fat far too long, Dr Delacroix’s memoirs I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography are finally out. You can find it on amazon.com for $7. The print version should be available shortly.

You can find a short excerpt of his memoirs here.

Congrats Dr J!

PS: Dr J is turning 72 sometime this week. Be sure to wish the young man a happy birthday.

La France et Apple

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

Les réserves financières

de la France: 30 milliards de dollars
de la Russie: 400 milliards de dollars
d’Apple: 159 milliards de dollars.

J’ai enseigné pendant vingt-cinq ans au beau milieu de Silicon Valley. J’y ai gardé des copains, bien sur. De plus, j’habite à Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley-Plage pour ainsi dire.

Il y a de plus en plus de jeune Français bien diplômés à Silicon Valley. Je n’en n’ai pas fait le rescencement. J’en entend parler et je les reconcontre par hasard. Il me semble qu’
on pense beaucoup de bien d’eux ici, de leur niveau de compétence, de leurs habitudes de travail.

On est bien obligé de se demander pourquoi ils ne sont pas en France ou la charcuterie est très supérieure et les vacances beaucoup plus longues qu’aux Etats-Unis.

Vu d’ici, on dirait que c’est la débandade de la formidable et radieuse colonie de vacances que se sont octroée les Français vers 1970. Je suis ce que je peux depuis ici de l’actualité politique française. J’ai l’impression qu on n’aborde jamais le grand problème de fond: l’état nounou n’est pas viable. On ne discute que telle ou telle reformette, telle ou telle diminution des telle out telle prestation sociale.

Le président de la grande banque d’investissement Lazare frères présentait l’autre jour son livre sur les réformes à l’émission que j’estime assez, “On n’est pas couché.” Une de premières choses qu’il dit c’ est qu’il est  “de gauche”. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire?

On se croirait en 1946, comme si personne n’avait rien appris en soixante-huit ans. Misère!

Le capitalisme marche très bien quand on le laisse. C’est une vraie machine à fabriquer des emplois. Quand on l’empêche de faire son boulot, les gens fuient, à commencer par les meilleurs, comme on pourrait s’y attendre si on s’autorisait à y penser.

Fighting Obama!

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

We discovered something important a few days ago about the federal Bureau of Land Management. (Many Americans also discovered the existence of the Bureau of Land Management on the same occasion.) Anyway, the BLM, as it is fondly known in the American West, has snipers in its ranks. For some of our overseas friends: a sniper is a specially trained rifleman or woman with a super-powerful weapon who can kill someone at long distance, often with a single shot. The discovery took place on the occasion of a confrontation about a few hundred cattle between the BLM and the cattle’s owners.

That A.. H… Putin had better not try anything illegal or immoral to American cows. The dictator of Russia is now reconsidering his aggressiveness. The Obama administration wins another one!

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy

Rick Weber Current Events, Economics, Law, Liberty

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy

A new scientific study from Princeton researchers… found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.

“Princeton” concludes?! “A new scientific study…”?! This is some sloppy journalism that you should immediately ignore. But it gets worse…

“Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does,” Gilens and Page write. “Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.

“But we tend to doubt it.”

That’s the close of the article; these “scientists” are about as unsophisticated as the journalist reporting it. They repeat the same old adages about inequality that don’t really mean much: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting less richer, and (we wrongly assume) membership in these groups is stable over time. Their conclusion is basically “rich, powerful interests promote their own interests… if only the middle class was in charge to promote the public good instead of their own interests!”

And yet, I think there’s something worth reading here. I think the conclusion that the U.S. is an oligarchy is roughly correct. The importance of politically connected individuals and lobbying groups affects wealth creation and distribution. This is an example of where the Left and Right should agree with libertarians: centralization of political power is leading to wasteful rent seeking that weakens the economy (Right/libertarian) and the outcome is that politically powerful groups are given an unfair advantage (Left/libertarian).

We know that Democrats are libertarian on social issues (and this is one of them!) and Republicans are libertarian on economic issues (ditto), but we hit a snag. Each group tends to see the faults of the other party’s pet projects and miss the root causes. Republicans see Democrats centralizing power and weakening property rights and step in to save the victim: businesses. The result is pro-business policy recommendations that also centralize power. The Democrats see this and step in to save the victim: the little guy (poor people and consumers). The result is centralization of power that creates rent seeking opportunities for big business!