Octopodial Chrome

Roger Clegg offers up an illuminating parable. It starts:

Suppose you are a lifeguard, and you are presented with studies showing that boys are more likely to drown than girls, probably because they engage in riskier behavior. Now, how does this affect the job you do as a lifeguard?

Well, I hope that one thing you do not do is shrug if you see a girl drowning. You also should not try to rescue boys who are not drowning.

In fact, if this datum doesn’t help you spot drowning people, and it probably doesn’t, then it won’t affect the way you do your job as lifeguard at all. You look for people flailing and screaming, and knowing that most of them will be boys is really irrelevant to you.

Would it prompt you to support “Safety First” swim programs for boys only? Well, so long as there is some percentage of girls who would benefit from such programs, it’s not clear why you would want to exclude girls from them. Maybe the “Safety First” videos you show in the programs would be more likely to depict boys doing typically boy-things, but that’s about it.

And, of course, if further studies showed that it’s not so much sex that matters, but some other factor, then you would care even less about gender, and would be even less supportive of a program for boys and boys alone. For example, if there were some way instead to target risk-seekers for the program—thereby excluding cautious boys (and girls), and including risk-seeking girls (and boys)—then you would be all for it.

Read the whole thing—it’s good.

Slowly but surely the forces of freedom are pushing back the liberty-hating brigades of anti-smoking fascists. This is a Good Thing, not because cigarettes are particularly pleasant (they’re not) or because Big Tobacco is particularly decent or honest (it’s not), but because it’s a fundamental principles of property rights that a property owner has the right to allow what he wants within extremely broad limits, and the public has the right not to attend if they don’t want to.

Sally Pipes makes some excellent points about health care. The most important one IMHO is that health care is a necessity but not a natural right. Here’s another good one: A little known fact is that of all of life’s necessities, save clothing, health care is by far the least costly. It’s not until Americans become senior citizens that the average household spends more out of pocket on heath care than entertainment and dining out. Yet we don’t decry the crisis in restaurant bills, football games, and rock concerts.

Oregon plans to raise the beer tax nineteen-fold, from $2.60 per barrel to $52.21. Crazy stuff.

Well, America has passed a milestone: we now have more people employed by the State than in manufacturing and construction. In other words, we have more leeches than producers.

I, of course, am one of those leeches, at least in part. In fact, looking at my family two of my brothers (as well as my sister-in-law) are paid by the State; my remaining brother lives off of scholarship money; and my parents both make their money off of the Church.

Once again the magnificent machinery of our republic has turned and we have a new president. It’s a remarkable thing for one man to cede power to another so easily, without violence or bloodshed–that’s terribly uncommon in an historical sense.

I’m sorry to see George Bush go. He did some things right and some wrong, but I think that history will agree that in the main he was a decent president and a fundamentally decent man. The Editors of National Review agree on that score; Peter Wehner has more to add and Victor Davis Hanson caps it off. Bush did his best to be bipartisan—his unprecedented renomination of Clinton appointees is just one instance—but the unfortunate circumstances of his initial election and a Left eager for vengeance for the Right’s Clinton Derangement Syndrome conspired to prevent that. I firmly believe that had he been a Democrat the media and the intelligentsia would have loved him to death and in eight years he’d be as popular as Bill Clinton is now. As it is, I imagine that we’ll have to wait a good 60–80 years for historians to honestly examine his record.

It’s pretty cool that we have a president perceived as black (really, he’s as white as he is black…). It’s a nice milestone in the road to racial equality. Now that we have a black president, can we get rid of racial discrimination finally?

Now this is just hilarious: a group of drug legalisation activists set up a honeypot for police: they rented a home and proceeded to grow two small Christmas trees inside it. There’s nothing illegal about that, and yet somehow the police managed to get a search warrant and raid the home. What the police didn’t know is that they were on tape…

Radley Balko has some analysis: basically, it’s likely that illegal (under an opinion written by Justice Scalia and joined by Justice Thomas) thermal imaging was used to detect the grow lights, and that the police then lied on an affidavit, alleging either that they smelled marijuana or that they had been tipped off (neither would have been possible since no marijuana was ever produced or sold at the house), got a warrant and raided.

In a police department which followed the law, they would not be using thermal imaging. If the department followed the law, they would not lie on an affidavit. In this case, it appears that a lot of care was taken to ensure that there was no legal probable cause to raid the house.

Within 60 days the police have to release the warrant and the affidavit and we’ll see for certain. The question is—if they indeed broke the law, will the offenders be punished? We are a nation of laws, and our public servants should be scrupulous about following those laws. When they are not, they should be held accountable.

This is actually orthogonal to the issue of drug legalisation: even if you support drug prohibition whole-heartedly, you should be concerned when police and prosecutors break the law.

Today is election day here in America. Unlike many others, I will not encourage you to just vote. You have that right, of course, but you also have the right to stand on a sidewalk claiming that Martians are running Major League Baseball. No, I’m going to encourage you to vote wisely. Vote for men and women who will faithfully discharge their duties under the constitutions of both the United States and your individual state. Vote for ballot issues which are consistent with those same constitutions. Vote wisely, having done your research. If you’ll vote foolishly, then please: don’t. Exercise your right not to vote. But if you will vote soberly and seriously, with an intelligent grasp of the issues at stake, then please: head down to your nearest polling station and vote.

As we all know, assimilation is key to successful immigration: foreigners immigrate, assimilate and their grandchildren are just as American as those whose forebears came over on Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. Unfortunately, immigrants from Mexico are not assimilating; in fact, assimilation is reverse in some cases. This is hardly healthy.

A disturbing statistic is that one in ten children born today has a mother born in Mexico; of those half never completed high school. This is not at all good for our republic: 10% (at least) of our citizens have roots in a culture which is not at all republican, and half of those come from uneducated families. The survival of our republic and our liberties relies upon an electorate which is cognisant of its history—what will happen when it feels more affinity for the failed policies of a failed state (Mexico is the very definition of a failed state: it has gotten so bad that it openly encourages the emigration of its citizens) than for those principals which made our union great?

Dr. Lawrence Huntoon has written a great article about health care costs. He says pretty much what I’ve been saying for years, so naturally I think him a genius. Medical insurance is no longer insurance at all, but rather inefficiently pre-paid medical care. Since it is generally obtained through an employer (due to tax laws dating back to the Second World War), it is more inefficient and harder to keep. The uninsured face a nasty tax liability ($19,000,000,000 per year). The way to fix rapidly-escalating health care costs is via a market mechanism using medical savings accounts.

Of course, this applies to just about everything. We’d all be better off if the money we’d spent on Social Security all these years were in a 401(k) or IRA or other investment vehicle.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a reasonably strict libertarian in both economic and social issues. I tend to think that the State has no business regulating private affairs, and my definition of private is fairly broad. I don’t believe, for example, that marriage should be an institution of the State (it is God’s creation, not man’s). This has led me to oppose the anti-polygamy laws not because I support polygamy (I oppose it) but because I don’t think that punishing polygamy is the proper business of the State any more than punishing the wearing of shorts by grown men (an offensive practise far more common) is the proper business of the State.

Rich Lowry has an article which gives me pause. He points out that polygamy as practised in Islamic and fundamentalist Mormon circles inevitably results in some pretty severe social effects. The most notable is that a few high-status men have many wive, leaving low-status men on the fringes of society, with little hope of marriage and children.

He’s right about the problem, although he doesn’t seem to realise that this is an effect of polygyny (multiple wives) rather than polygamy. A similar effect would probably be seen with polyandry (IIRC that was common in Tibet at one point, with brothers marrying a single wife).

The article provides a good reason for polygyny to be illegal: its negative effects spill over to the population as a whole. It may be that even a few polygynous marriages would be enough to have widespread negative effects.

I wonder though if those effects would hold in a generally polygamous society in which there were group marriages, polygynous marriages, polyandrous marriages and true marriages. And I wonder if polygamy would actually be all that common even were it legal. Certainly the majority of the churches would refuse to perform such marriages (though no doubt the Episcopalians would rush to be the first to allow them). Most women would object to a plural marriage as strenuously as they would to an affair. And I think most men really don’t want the extra bother.

Still, it does demonstrate that private choices can have public consequences.

The esteemed playwright David Mamet had discovered that he is no longer a brain-dead liberal. Apparently considered thought and careful reading revealed that his leftist tendencies were in part incorrect.

One hopes more leftists will have similar epiphanies.

Apparently homeschooling one’s children without a teaching certificate is illegal in California. Naturally, the teachers’ union is happy about this, as it helps cut down competition for their services. Interestingly enough, most of the great men of history were taught by teachers without credentials, and they turned out alright. Moreover, so far as I can see the education of teachers is sadly lacking in any sort of realistic philosophy of education, as can be seen in the end-product of both our public and private schools (and to be fair, many home schools as well).

What’s really sad is that we know how to teach; we just don’t want to teach. Rather, we want to be seen to have taught, which is something very much different.

Lisa Schiffren writes about polygyny in New York City. I’m of two minds about polygyny in particular and polygamy in general. On the one hand I don’t see that it’s any of the State’s business who sleeps with whom, or who lives with whom, or any of that. But on the other hand it’s clearly unacceptable for women to be brought over illegally and kept in subjugation to autocratic husbands; moreover given that the modern State in its limited wisdom sees fit to award funds to pretty much anyone, it’s inappropriate for the rest of us to have to pay for the kids produced thereby.

Jonah Goldberg demonstrates how progressivism and fascism were intertwined in the early twentieth century.

Here’s a truly disturbing picture: an Iraqi woman holding her slain six-year-old son in her arms. The family was headed home after enrolling the boy in school when terrorists fired on their car, killing one boy and wounding another. Different people have different reactions to it: some people want us to leave Iraq; others react with hatred towards Bush; but I have a different reaction entirely.

I believe this picture show why we must remain in Iraq. We’re there to prevent murders like this when we can and to punish them when we can’t. If we leave, we give men like those who slew this boy leave to do whatever they will to other sons and daughters.

Whether or not we should have invaded Iraq in the first place is immaterial now; whether our invasion caused more death and suffering than would otherwise be the case is also immaterial. We invaded; that’s a fact. Whatever death and suffering we have caused has already been caused. The question now is what the best course of action going forward is. If we stay, there will be some amount of death and suffering; if we leave, there will be some amount of death and suffering.

I hold that our staying is better than our leaving, that if we leave the misery will be greater than if we stay. We fight in order to hunt down and punish the men who killed this boy; we fight in order to stop men like them from killing others.

As a side-note, if your response to the photo is to want to leave Iraq, the you and people like you are part of why the boy was killed. One of the goals of his murderers is to drive us from Iraq; they believe they can do that by killing innocents.

Britain has a socialised health care system, one which works more-or-less. Its physicians are now asking to withhold treatment from smokers, drinkers, the obese and the elderly. This is the result of socialised medicine: those whom society deems unworthy are denied medical treatment.

The result of a private system, of course, is that those whose labour society does not appreciate and whom society is not charitable towards are denied medical treatment. I imagine that a private system treats more people.

Mencius Moldbug proposes a novel theory for the causes of anti-Americanism. A very interesting read. See also his iron polygon theory. He’s a smart guy and writes well. I don’t know if he’s right, but he is at the least provocative.

A fool of a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has led her students in a frivolous, self-important mock constitutional convention, complete which over-serious theatricality and rights which aren’t rights at all, e.g. a right to affordable housing, a right to sports and the other such addled products of juvenile minds and a yet more juvenile professor.

It’s truly pathetic what has become of our educational system. We no longer produce free citizens of a free republic; we now produce thugs who would gladly use the State to take from some and give to others, and expect to be thanked for their efforts.

Christopher Hitchens points out that Mitt Romney must talk about Mormonism and its influence upon him.

Ever wonder why Warren Buffet loves the estate tax? It turns out that he personally profits from the estate tax regime.

The science-fiction Jerry Pournelle (generally considered fairly right-wing) has an excellent article on drug laws and federalism.

Many cities and states unconstitutionally infringe upon their citizens’ right to carry and/or own knives and swords; Knife Rights is working to reverse these laws. They’re worthy of support.

David Harsanyi (the best man the Denver Post ever hired) writes on the return of Prohibition. From people getting arrested for a BAC of .03% (a single glass of wine, well below even the strictest legal limit), to revoking the license of a man who drinks heavily but never drives after drinking, to arresting bar patrons for drinking (without ever entering cars), states (egged on by MADD—whose own founder regrets the organisation’s neo-Prohibitionist slant) are outlawing alcohol in all but name. To quote a Virginia police chief, you can drink at home. Or at someone else’s home. And stay there until you’re not drunk.

Alcohol has certainly caused a lot of evil and suffering. It has also caused a lot of good. Banning its consumption is not the way forward.