Category: General

Ted Turner on terrorism: “There’s a lot of despair out there. Despair and poverty… these breed anger. And, I think, that’s one of the reasons terrorism exists. There’s so much frustration, anger, and despair..In the Arab view, America doesn’t do enough to help them and that’s why they’re so angry at it,” he said. The battle against terrorism is a battle against poverty and injustice. People are willing to die when they don’t have anything to live for.”

meanwhile, “poverty-stricken …. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday it would immediately end a freeze on its nuclear power plant in response to an allied decision to suspend oil aid to Pyongyang,.Under a 1994 pact, Pyongyang promised to scrap plans to develop nuclear weapons in return for light water nuclear reactors and fuel oil supplies.”

as, US forced seized then released an unmarked, North Korean freighter loaded with Scuds and chemicals:
“The real name of the North Korean ship had been painted over, so too had the registration number. The vessel was not flying a flag which Señor Trillo said meant the Spanish crew was within its legal rights to seize the vessel.At first the So San’s captain claimed she was a Cambodian vessel but on seeing marines clambering into launches and heading in his direction he asked if he could contact his masters in Pyongyang. “
“Señor Trillo listed the haul as 15 Scud missiles, 15 conventional warheads, 23 tanks of nitric acid rocket propellant and 85 drums of chemicals.”
The ship was allowed to go on with all it’s cargo after “The [Yemeni] Sanaa Government insisted the Scuds were for their own defence and were indignant at suggestions the missiles could fall into unscrupulous hands.”

Also, apparently Palestinian rule seems to have it’s flaws:
“Crime wave in West Bank as unpaid cops turn rogue…A network of gangs have appeared that extort from businessmen, steal property and other assets and work for those who want to eliminate their rivals. The sources said the gangs operate in the Jerusalem and Ramallah areas and face virtually no danger from being captured by either Israeli or Palestinian authorities.”

Gray Davis and the California democrats have done it again: California is on the edge of bankruptcy. Apparently all those “progressive” social programs couldn’t survive the recession.
Personally, I’m glad. Those stupid democrats have dug themselves into this hole, and I hope they feel the pain on the way out. After all, CA is unionized to hell, and they will have to convince all those teachers and state workers to take massive pay cuts /lay offs.
Either that, or raise taxes. But higher taxes will scare away even more business, digging them into an even bigger hole. Either way, California is screwed. Apparently, the highly progressive tax system in CA had a part to play:

“California prides itself on its progressive income tax, with people earning high incomes paying a huge share of state taxes. The top 10 percent of filers pay 75 percent of personal income taxes. But when their income drops, as it did when the technology boom went bust in early 2000, the state treasury crashes.”

It seems that you can’t milk the rich for all the’re worth after all. The Dems are still clueless though:

“Mr. Wesson, the Assembly speaker, said it was “mathematically impossible” to balance the state budget without raising taxes.
“The way you do it is to put absolutely everything on the table, every conceivable cut, every conceivable way to raise taxes,” he said. “Then you sort out what is the least painful and what is the most fair.”

The likely outcome, I think, is that taxes will go up, and many of California’s businesses will go away. NYC’s tax hike had (and will have) much the same effect. I’m hopeful that NYC and CA will learn a lesson from this, but somehow, I doubt it. Nevertheless, the lesson is not lost on all, as thisUSA Today story from a while back shows

See if you can spot the difference between two following photos from MSNBC: ….this and this

…I couldn’t.

(A bit of context: both groups were protesting the same topic.)

Interesting story at ArsTechnica:
As this article points out, many consumers are finding themselves presented with odd choices when they return to their favorite websites. Just today I searched on Amazon.com for “writers market”. Now, when I return to Amazon I’m presented with a list of recommendations, all of them books matching my earlier search criteria. This kind of techno-profiling, or as they would like you to believe, “feature”, is becoming quite common.

For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. [Jeff] Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com to show how it caters to his interests. The top
recommendation it gave him? The DVD for “Slave Girls From Beyond
Infinity.” That popped up because he had previously ordered “Barbarella,” starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.

But wait, there’s more. Not only has this trend become standard procedure at sites such as Amazon.com and NetFlix, even TiVo is in on the action.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described “straightest guy on earth,” he tried to tame TiVo’s gay fixation by recording war movies
and other “guy stuff.”

“The problem was, I overcompensated,” he says. “It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich.”

My own experience with Amazon is pretty good, with the expetion being the four post-modern books I ordered from Amazon for my english class. The books sucked, but the authors kept popping up on my recomendation lists until I finally rated all the books as “crap” (or whatever the amazon rating for that is) at which point Amazon resumed pushing Objectivist books at me due to my purchase of OPAR a few years ago.

In a pathetic attempt to find avoid having to work on all the papers I have due this week, I have checked my email, bugged all my friends online, done my laundry, cleaned the apartment, scrubbed the bathroom, and finally, in desperation, I even cleaned the toilet. All to no avail, as my paper still isn’t done. Oh, I also updated my website, so take a look around.

Reports BusinessWeek:
In April, 2002, hackers broke into the payroll database for the state of California. For more than a month, cybercriminals rooted around in the personal information of 265,000 Golden State employees, ranging from Governor Gray Davis to maintenance workers and clerks.

Worse, the California Controller’s Office, which ran the database, failed to notify state employees for more than two weeks after the breach was discovered. Although officials with the Controller’s office insisted the break-in probably hadn’t resulted in any significant harm, the incident enraged Golden State pols and employees, whose Social Security numbers, bank account information, and home addresses were fair game for the hackers.

This lapse sparked what may mark a dramatic shift in legal policy toward cybersecurity. Over strenuous objections from the business lobby, on Sept. 26 California enacted a sweeping measure that mandates public disclosure of computer-security breaches in which confidential information may have been compromised. The law covers not just state agencies but private enterprises doing business in California. Come July 1, 2003, those who fail to disclose that a breach has occurred could be liable for civil damages or face class actions.

Here is Slashdot’s very perceptive take on the new law:

” IMHO Big companies will have the resources to set up investigations even when they know it is unlikely to get anywhere, and business will go on as usual for them. Small businesses that don’t have the resources to maintain an investigation will have their reputations ruined. Also, the article doesn’t mention the contingency where a break-in occurs because of a software/hardware issue for which there is no released technical solution (i.e. anyone else who has software X would be susceptible to the same type of break-in). This is not good.”

Another Slashot comment on the story:
“Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) filed documents with the SEC today relating to a breach of network security.

According to the filings, at 5:23 AM last Tuesday, Microsoft’s network was “owned” by a hacker calling himself “Z3r0 kew10r”. While the hacker refered to himself as “1337” in his defacement of Microsoft’s webpage, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates indicated that the security breach was very minor.

In a press release accompanying the filing, Gates said: “t#1s punk th1nks h3’s 1337 but h3’s just a littl3 scr1p7 k1dd13 and i’m g0nna sh0w h1m what 1337 is when m3 and the M$ haxx0r cr3w crak his b0xx0r!” “

Ms. Lichter makes several good points in her nostalgic ode to Victorian morality as she shreds the “chaotic muddle” which goes for morality these days. However, before jumping on the “traditional family values” bandwagon, it is worthwhile to examine the particular differences between Victorian morality and what passes for morality today.

Victorian ideals stressed a rigid code of values that came from God himself. Being Good was the sole purpose of these values, regardless of whether they brought happiness and success or required the sacrifice of one’s dreams and desires to preserve an image of “true nobility and god deeds.”

Unfortunately, Queen Victoria’s morality died with her. Men who had been enjoying sex with whores suddenly felt free to enjoy sex with their own wives. They concluded that the Victorian morality was too “idealistic” and adopted a pragmatic approach to life. If morality is a set of rules to govern one’s actions, the first rule of today’s morality is that there are no rules!

For example, take sex. Where Victorian ethics preached sexual decency (no sex until marriage, and then only on the Sabbath.and don’t even think about enjoying it!) today’s moralists tell us to “Have sex whenever you want…with two or more people/sexes at a time.in public!” Consequences of actions are divorced from their causes: “If you get AIDS, take some protease inhibitors and lobby the government for more research to “solve the AIDS crisis.” If you find yourself unable to have meaningful relationships with the strangers you wake up next to, take Prozac!

Clearly, Victorian morality is just as “impractical” as today’s anti-morality — if living successful, happy lives is our goal. Victorian ethics divorce morals from their fundamental purpose (to serve as a guide for a happy and productive life) and today’s anti-morals divorce actions from their consequences by claiming that following whims and urges is sufficient guidance for achieving all of one’s goals without suffering the consequences of self-destructive and contradictory actions.

Ms. Lichter is correct in arguing that society has abandoned the very idea of morality as a principled guide to one’s actions. However, the foundation of morality is not to discard individual happiness and pursue self-sacrifice, but on the contrary, to seek individual happiness by means of a moral code. While the Victorian era’s morality may be an improvement over the modern-day wholesale rejection of morals, it lacks the logical foundation of morality, based not on an idealized concept of God, but on the idealized concept of principled man.

Today’s blog comes from my post on the ASC forum

Voting by definition is a process that involves forcing your will on others. Some actions of government (or its agents) are clearly coercive in that they limit your liberty directly, while others don’t involve initiating force, but rather define just what the initiation of force involves. Either way, voting is a process of forcefully restricting the actions of other people. If it weren’t forceful, they we could just ask, pay, or convince them to do whatever without going through the hassle of elections.

Statists think voting is a legitimate way to coerce anyone into doing anything, or in other words, that there is no higher, independent moral authority other than the “voice of the people.” Classical liberals (and their variants) on the other hand think that man has rights which are due to his nature as man (either because God said so, or that’s just how man is.)

Voting is not of course “the most important right” as some statists claim. Elections are only one of many safeguards used to protect the real rights, which are life, liberty, and property. Unfortunately, without constitutional safeguards on liberty, “voting” is just another word for “mob rule.” (Incidentally, so is anarcho-capitalism, where votes are replaced by ballots made of guns and money.) Now, many people who (correctly) think that the government of the US initiates force on a regular basis choose not to vote because they do not want to implicitly legitimize the system even when they vote for less force.

Such non-voters are mistaken. Whether you believe that voting is not a sufficient means of protecting liberty (as a classical liberal) or voting is a completely illegitimate means (as an anarcho-capitalist, for example) the fact remains that voting is the best means you have of changing the actions of government. It is also arguably the only nonviolent means you have of limiting the actions of government (at least until your private army is big enough so that the US military gives up without a fight.) Whether you like it or not, unless our whole society decides unanimously to change to another social order, voting will remain the most effective non-violent means to limit the growth of government.

This is not to say that the anti-statists of the world will be able to vote themselves into freedom, or even shrink the size and power of government – as a philosophical change in the public’s view of the role of the State is the best and only way to achieve liberty in the long run (which is why the LP will never succeed without adopting a philosophy of liberty.) In the short run however, the freedom lovers of the world must use every practical means to stop, or at least slow the growth of the leviathan state NOW, and short of non-violent protest in the form of tax evasion and such, voting remains our most effective way of doing so.

I came across this line in the Touchstone, Texas A&M’s local liberal loony paper:
“Greedy capitalists will not likely relinquish their firm grip on the currency. The future therefore looks bleak.”
I appreciate the compliment, but there is a small error in this logic: the government is actually in control of the currency, not “greedy capitalists.” The more general reply is that liberals have no idea what money actually is. Instead of writing a long rant on it, let me refer them to someone who wrote a much more graceful essay on it. To quote from it:

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

One more quote from the same piece: “The bottom line in commercial radio is the bottom line, and entertainment is merely a by-product, if there is any at all.”
Let me quote my friend Tim on this:

“No one will listen if they have no reason to (unless they are simply bored and like listening to ads, which some people do)
The one reason radio stations continually repeat ‘popular songs’ is to hook the commuter who only listens while driving (or working out) and wants to hear their favorite song.
So, just like any other company that truly has to work for their money (via advertisements, etc.) they must have something to sell. And the reproduction of entertainment certainly follows that line of reasoning.

Nevertheless, the Touchstone writers insist that socialism is not only inevitable, but desirable: “[According to] dialectical analysis…the only rational and humane conclusion is to do everything we can to bring about socialism.”

What can I say to that? According to Marxist theory, socialism may indeed be the inevitable conclusion, but if it’s really inevitable, there’s no point worrying about it, since we are merely products of our linguistic chains and “capitalism [cannot] go on destroying lives and the ecology indefinitely.”