Riding Out

Time to go, again.


The Savannah River, below Lake Hartwell
I will be in the Wild for a few days. I'd like to take up Tex's post on Natural Law when I get back. In the meantime you are in the good hands of each other, companions of the Hall.

Stodgy progressives

A couple of old Coyote Blogs from the good old days before Hope and Change.  First, how progressives are conservative:

. . . I must say that on a number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social issues, I call progressives my allies.  On social issues, progressives, like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others. 

However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop trusting individual decision-making.  Progressives who support the right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use.  Progressives who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social Security funds.  And, Progressives who support the right of third worlders to strap on a backpack of TNT and explode themselves in the public market don't trust these same third worlders to make the right decision in choosing to work in the local Nike shoe plant. 

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism.   Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being "dynamic," the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms. Progressives want comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are.  They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Second, why the labor theory of value is lunacy.

People going "poof"

From House of Eratosthenes:

Liberalism is all about wishing things out to the cornfield. 

Which raises the question of:  What is the cornfield? This is the scary part: They don’t know.  They really don’t know.  Not even a little, tiny bit.  They are not like the semiconductor manufacturer working to make sure anything that might be a contaminant is kept outside of the million-dollar “clean room,” or the bartender telling the argumentative customers to “take it outside,” or the TSA checkpoint that keeps you from going into a secure area until you have been “cleared.”  Those agents possess a good, developed understanding of 1) criteria applied, and 2) where things should go when they fail to meet the criteria.  Liberals only understand the criteria.  It comes easily to them to say things like “There is no use discussing [blank] with someone like you, who can’t see [blank].”  You, then, are supposed to go away — but to where?  It’s completely obvious you aren’t supposed to take your money with you as you leave.  They’re building a society that “works for everyone” and you’re part of the “everyone,” at least when it comes time to pay taxes, regulatory fees and union dues.  How do you exclude the undesirables from an all-inclusive society that refuses to recognize undesirables?  This is the puzzle they’ve never managed to solve.

This rings true to me, but whenever the argument takes the form of "Liberals always. . .," I like to do the thought experiment of replacing "Liberals" with "Conservatives."  I suppose we all do our share of wishing people out to the cornfield.  On the other hand, I'm not sure conservatives expect liberals to leave their wallets behind when they go "poof."

Causation is hard

Fun with correlation-vs.-causation:  Why do climate activists hate longer lifespans?

H/t CoyoteBlog.

"Personnel and whatnot"

Screenshot of redacted EPA email produced in response to a FOIA request.  The message was sent under former Director Lisa Jackson's alternative identity "Richard Windsor," which she allegedly used to circumvent FOIA obligations.

H/t GlobalWarming.org

Related:  activists try to FOIA the FOIA process.

Fighting fire with fire

Combatting leukemia with disabled HIV.



H/t OpenMarket.org

Anti-mnemonics

“ROLLERBLADING MEN INVITED VITRIOL UNTIL X GAMES.”  That's how you can remember the waves on the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma), in case you ever need to.  But then you'll need a mnemonic for the not-so-memorable mnemonic.

Y'all come on down

One more reason to move to Texas:   The Sunset Commission, which has led to the abolition of 78 state agencies and saved nearly a billion dollars in the 29 years since it was established.

If we turn out to miss one that we abolished, it's only too easy to bring it back.

Thanks to Bookworm Room for this video:



Which elicited this comment on YouTube:  ✬ ;`*❊ *`;✬ Ⓢ Ⓤ Ⓟ Ⓔ Ⓡ ✬;`*❊*`; ✬

More from McSweeneys

We can say we love each other all we want, but I just can’t trust it without the data. See also "Hello, and welcome to the interactive call center for my girlfriend."

Russian Driving

You know, I've occasionally suspected that our brothers at BSBFBs might be cherry-picking their Russian driver videos.

Not so, it turns out!

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More here:
I apologize that the thought ever crossed my mind, gentlemen.

Magic scissors

A tangled web indeed.  First a CDC politico tries to explain why $30 million in sequester cuts to a vaccination program would have killed the children while the President's magic powers could cut $60 million from the same program without hurting anyone.  My favorite part is at the end, addressing the White House's new program to "re-calibrate" its sequester message in the wake of a pile of Pinocchios awarded by those conservative troglodytes at the Washington Post:  The White House plans to "de-emphasize the veracity of its previous statements."

Speaking of…Science

I was walking with my wife in this morning's frigid sucker hole in the weather when I flashed on a solution to both of our age's major questions: where are the other intelligent life forms, and where is the universe's missing mass?

The answer is breathtakingly simple, and it solves both mysteries. 

The missing intelligences have been present all along, and they're still here.  They've just placed themselves inside Dyson shells.  We can't detect the intelligences because of the lack of emissions, other than gravity, escaping the shells.

The gravity part is key to the other solution.  The so-called missing mass currently is considered to be composed of "dark matter" that doesn't interact with the composition of our universe, except…gravitationally.  How convenient a set of characteristics.

The missing mass, clearly, is ordinary matter; it's just contained within all of those Dyson shells.  After all, there are a double potful of LGMs and BEMs, and they've all built these spheres.

Why would a species do such a thing rather than getting out and about, or at least shouting out their existence to the universe around them?  Speculating on the motives of an alien mindset—that really would be magical thinking.

I’m ready for my NSF and NASA grants, which I promise only to use for good.

Eric Hines

Comet alert

We may get a glimpse of a comet just after sunset for the next few days.  Comet Pan-STARRS came within about 100 million miles of Earth a few days ago and now is going to come within about 45 million miles of the Sun.  That will make it bright, but unfortunately it also means we'll only get a glimpse right after sunset.  It's worth a try tonight, though viewing may be better for the next couple of days after.  We're nearly at dark of the moon; that will not only help with viewing but possibly give us a dramatic contrast in a couple of days, when the new crescent moon will be just above the horizon near the comet right after sunset.

I got a pretty good look at a comet -- was it Hale-Bopp? -- in the mid-90s from the window of a commercial airliner.

Mad Middle Earth

The way to a man's heart . . .

. . . Is through his coffee cup.  Well, not literally a man, but a flying insect vis-à-vis flowers trying to decide what kind of nectar will keep 'em coming back for more.  It seems that citrus nectar has a lot of caffeine in it.  In controlled experiments,"three times as many bees remembered the connection between odor and reward if the reward contained caffeine."

The article says that citrus leaves have toxic levels of caffeine, presumably to ward off insects.  I must say that it doesn't deter leaf-cutter ants.  They go straight for our citrus trees, preferring them over almost every other leaf, and can strip and kill a tree in days.  They've been particularly bad this year.

H/t Rocket Science.

No problem with the California budget

Guest blogger Gregg Stevens at CoyoteBlog reminds most of us why we're not trying to make a living in California, and why Douglas really needs to get working on that exit strategy.  The operator of a camping site near Eureka in extreme Northern California, Stevens found one day that a large fir tree had fallen over into the river, leaving a hole six feet deep and ten feet wide.  Thus began a strange and wonderful journey through familiar bureaucratic mazes he fondly imagined he already had mastered, in pursuit of permission to move the fallen tree (now "salmon habitat") and fill the hole.

It turned out that the tree issue was readily resolved, but the hole was a problem on a Kafkaesque scale.  Stevens sent off a $2,500 application fee and prepared the usual richly illustrated and annotated research paper examining the impact of filling the hole, then waited.  And waited.  In the meantime, he shoveled some of the displaced gravel over some exposed utility lines and put up a temporary fence to prevent campers from falling into the hole.

Then one winter day, more than a year after I had filed the application, I received a certified letter from the Coastal Commission.  They had been surreptitiously monitoring the work we had done, or not done, at the site.  And we were looking at a fine of $30,000 and up to $15,000 per day for doing the work.  Or not doing the work.  The letter was a bit vague on that part.  But one thing was clear.  Whatever it was we had or hadn’t done was wrong and thoroughly illegal.  And we were to be punished severely for it.

But all's well that ends well. No one was driven into bankruptcy this time, the salmon continue their happy lives uninterrupted, and all the wonders of modern technology were brought to bear on a cavity-mitigation project that's not quite visible from space.

The man who killed 40,000 elephants

He loved elephants, but he did it to save the land.  Then he found it made desertification worse instead of better, and devoted the rest of his life to figuring out why.  These are his conclusions and proposed solutions.  He and his team have restored desertified grazing land on several continents by increasing grazing herds instead of decreasing them, with careful rotation and movement.  It sounds a lot like what Joel Salatin does with his moveable fences and frequently moved cattle herds.  It's also a good deal like the restoration of cool oases from hot desert that is described in Gaia's Garden, a favorite permaculture resource in the Texan99 household.

The before-and-after shots are like something out of a dream of Paradise.  These are results he's achieving on poor lands with poor people.

H/t Watts Up with That, who's more excited about this than I've ever seen him.

Taxing today to pay for yesterday

The "Antiplanner" reacts poorly to a San Francisco councilman's proposal to tax email to help the U.S. Postal Service out with its operating deficit.

H/t a comment to an article linked by Rhymes with Cars and Girls, from Free Northerner, about Matthew Yglesias's inability to understand how we might structure a rail system that didn't rely on taxpayer subsidies: "What kind of system could possibly cause people to invest resources in providing valued services to others in an efficient manner solely so they can profit from operating surpluses?"

Hoaxes

I'm obsessed with hoaxes lately, and our ability to admit what we don't know.  This is a wonderful art quiz.  Can you tell the masterpiece from the hoax?  I scored a 67%.  This is a similar quiz.  Again I scored a 67%.

Visual arts not your thing?  Try this prose quiz, and distinguish snippets of Faulkner from a bad machine translation of German.  I was more disappointed this time, because I scored only a 75% score, and I thought I could do better than that with an author I like very much.