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It’s like a motorcycle, but without the pick-up or maneuverability. Or economy. Or range. Or sex-appeal. I want mine with the Vook option!

I’ve been thinking about the disgusting spectacle of millions of Americans presuming to have an opinion about whether or not some AIG employee deserves to be paid a bonus. This was once a country where the idea of minding one’s own business was virtually a sacrament. And then I can’t turn on the television without seeing some grandmother bragging that Medicare makes it possible for her to dine on her own grandchildren. And to top it all off, tonight I’ve been trading depressing emails with Joe Strummer about our progress down the Road to Serfdom.

I know people think they understand what I’m talking about, when I talk about political philosophy, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true. The simple truth is this: I am sovereign in my person — and so are you. I do not have the right or power or privilege or duty to push you around by force, and you do not have that right or power or privilege or duty with respect to me. That’s easy to understand when we’re only talking about we two: If I overstep the boundaries, you will surely help me find my way back to the righteous path. But there’s no difference (more…)

Victor Davis Hanson, a brilliant old Hellenist, here seeming more old than brilliant, wonders, “Who is John Galt?”

We sense we are trimmers and redistributors, and wouldn’t dare build a new dam a transcontinental railroad, a new 8-lane freeway.

Instead we would sue, file reports, argue, quit, delay—anything other than conceive a majestic idea and finish it, sighing, “It is not perfect, but damn good enough and will do.” Instead, here in California we are simply destroying agriculture by drying up its sources of water-giving life—a once brilliant farming that was the sum total of millions of brave lives from 1880 to 2000 who took a desert and fed the world.

Instead, ensconced in the Berkeley Hills or Woodside, our elites demand of better others to save for them not people, but a smelt, a minnow, or a newt-like creature that must have the entire Kings or San Joaquin River as it dumps its precious cargo out to sea.

So as scare snow melts, it goes out to the ocean, gratifying a lawyer or professor in Palo Alto that rivers flow as they did in the 19th-century, as millions of acres go fallow, hundreds of thousands lose jobs, and we feel so morally superior to (more…)

Is this the end of America? Canada’s Financial Post:

Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Probably not, if only because there are good reasons for optimism. The U.S. economy has pulled out of self-destructive political spirals in the past, spurred on by its business class and corporate leaders, the profit-making and market-creating people who rose above the political turmoil to once again lift the world out of financial crisis. It’s happened many times before, except for once, (more…)

One of the fun devices in Part III of Atlas Shrugged is something author Ayn Rand called “the policy of the microsecond.” Despite the high-flown philosophical claims of the looters, their actual motivation was never anything other than “the expediency of the moment” — one absurd rationalization after the next, justifying theft and visiting the consequences of that theft upon its victims.

Just about a month ago, as a comical palliative for the housing mess, I wrote this as a joke:

[I]t would make great sense to make immigration to America easier and faster. Imagine having neighbors who work hard, pay their bills on time and can spell correctly!

That’s the logic of the policy of the microsecond. We don’t want to stop stealing wealth from innocent people. We don’t want to amend our ways and do better going forward. We don’t want to undo the awful damage occasioned by centuries of accelerating criminal government. No. All we want to do is find a way to get through this crisis. We’ll worry about the crisis caused by this “solution” — the crisis of the microsecond after this one — later on.

So guess what happens? I might have been joking, but we live in a (more…)

They’d wake up and catch a clue, that’s what. From the Wall Street Journal:

It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama’s high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his administration. Indeed, a detailed look at recent survey data shows that the opposite is most likely true. The American people are coming to express increasingly significant doubts about his initiatives, and most likely support a different agenda and different policies from those that the Obama administration has advanced.

Polling data show that Mr. Obama’s approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001. Rasmussen Reports data shows that Mr. Obama’s net presidential approval rating — which is calculated by subtracting the number who strongly disapprove from the number who strongly approve — is just six, his lowest rating to date.

Overall, Rasmussen Reports shows a 56%-43% approval, with a third strongly disapproving of the president’s performance. This is a substantial degree of polarization so early in the administration. Mr. Obama has lost virtually all of his Republican support and a good part of his Independent (more…)

From TED Talks:

Very inspiring, yes? And think of all the emerging branches of science Professor Enriquez leaves out: Simulation, massive data sets, crowd-sourcing, nanotechnology, bio-computing, etc. It’s raining soup but we’re all so busy bawling that we’re starving that no one has time to eat…

We call it inauguration after the Romans, of course. Beginning at midnight on January 1st of each new year, the priests would take the augurs — the signs and portents — for the two new consuls, the duoviri who would govern the Republic for the next year. The ceremony would end with a long, slow march to the top of the Capitoline hill at dawn, at the end of which the senior consul for that year would sacrifice a bull. Only then would the new consuls and the senators convene in the Curia to take up the Republic’s business for the year.

And Janus, for whom January is named, is the god of doorways, presiding not just over beginnings but also endings. Today marks not just the beginning of Obama’s presidency, but also the end of the Bush era in Washington.

Both Bushes, pere and fils, seemed to me to be fundamentally decent people, quite unlike the man who served between them. But Bush the younger, by being so roundly reviled as president, has nowhere to go but up from here. Someday Americans will have the fortitude to thank this man for calling Islamofascism by its true name: Evil. In the mean time, (more…)

The Technium:

Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

Pascal kept a room full of “Rainmen” — idiot-savant math geeks — as human calculators. He could have done the problems he threw off to them himself, but they saved his time for the work they could not do.

While we will waste the web’s ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we’ll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of (more…)