Category: Uncategorized

After all, it’s just whacked-out polygamists who will have their children kidnapped by the government:

If you watch much television, you’ve probably heard of a product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade. And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television. The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

If spiked lemonade is considered child abuse already, how long will it be before taking a kid to Sunday School will be as well?

If scientists can’t figure out an ethical system from their rational materialism to limit their need to experiment, they can always wait for a sufficiently material argument to present itself.

A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of “humanzee,” created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting. In an interview with The Scotsman, Dr Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, warned the controversial draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill did not prevent human sperm being inseminated into animals. He said if a female chimpanzee was inseminated with human sperm the two species would be closely enough related that a hybrid could be born.

Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was “troublesome”, he could see no ethical objections to the creation of humanzees. “Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past,” he said. “If it turns out in the future there was fertilisation between a human animal and a non-human animal, it’s an idea that is troublesome, but in terms of what particular ethical principle is breached it’s not clear to me.”

There’s always “if you do that, then you will die and your life’s work will be destroyed.” I would think that would be a sufficiently materialist argument to convince even the most rational materialist. Of course, Professor McLachlan shouldn’t have any ethical problem with that minor rearrangement of atoms either.

In which we flirt with disaster:

There are a few different types of redesigns. First of all, there’s changing the look. In the simplest and best form, this is a very quick deal, especially if the site is properly architected for quick changes. It’s like taking your plain vanilla cellphone, buying a snazzy faceplate, one click – instant new hotness. I have nothing against this sort of redesigns.

The only thing you have to look out for here is what I call the “Felicity effect.” A television show Felicity had a famous redesign failure – the actress Keri Russell cut her trademark long hair. One might argue that she is hot no matter what, but the show suffered a huge drop in ratings. You have to keep in mind that a new look rarely attracts new customers, but often upsets the old ones.

Today we’re going to switch over to the new commenting system. This may work well. This may not work well. There’s really only one way to find out. Fortunately, we can make a number of modifications once it’s in place, but rest assured if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I won’t hesitate to rip them out and go back to Haloscan. This isn’t change for change’s sake; if it doesn’t improve the blog, I’m not going to subject everyone to it.

And good riddance to them:

Print circulation continues on its steep downward slide, the Audit Bureau of Circulations revealed this morning in releasing the latest numbers for some of the country’s largest dailies in the six-month period ending March 31, 2008. When a full analysis appears it is expected to find, according to sources, the biggest dip yet, about 3.5% daily and 4.5 for Sunday….

The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping 9.2% to 1,476,400. The paper’s daily circulation declined 3.8% to 1,077,256.

There are few things that please me more than watching television and newspaper audiences decline. It’s hard to decide which I despise more, television talking-heads or newspaper journalists, so it’s incredibly amusing to watch them act as if they are still not only relevant, but central to American daily life.

Over a movie he refuses to see:

A mature scientific theory is as much a glory of our civilization as is a cathedral or a university; and it is uniquely of ours. Other civilizations had temples, universities, systems of government, literature, philosophy; but only we of the West came up with scientific method, and the whole world owes the innumerable fruits of that method to us.

I am a huge fan of Western civilization. Thus, when people — well-educated people, who ought to set an example for the general — sneer at and spit on these majestic creations of the human intellect, I get mad. They are taking sides with barbarism. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Ben Stein ought to be ashamed of himself. And no, I won’t sit through his wretched movie.

I kind of like the idea of a scientific theory being viewed as a tribute to Western civilization. However, there’s one rather serious problem… it is becoming increasingly clear that Darwinism isn’t science according to any reasonable definition of the term, much less has it produced a mature scientific theory that produces any fruits of the sort that Derb rightly regards so highly. What are the fruits of Darwinian “science” that are not primarily derived from Mendelian genetics? Hey, we got a fly with a leg sticking out of its head! And a “striking prediction” that wouldn’t pass muster with the Catholic Church if it were claimed to be a miracle. What is it about atheism that seems to drive otherwise perfectly rational people over the edge?

As you know, I quite like Derb. He’s a smart and insightful guy and one of my favorite National Reviewers. But that uncharacteristic closing line is… well, let’s just say it teeters perilously close to being embarrassing.

If you can’t trust the Bluehelmets, who can you trust?

At UN headquarters there is both irritation and unease over the BBC story. Irritation because officials regard the allegations of gold smuggling in the Congo by Pakistani peacekeepers as rehashed. Unease because, as the head of UN peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, put it in a letter to the BBC: “Every incident of misconduct by the Blue Helmets diminishes public confidence in our work and weakens the institution of peacekeeping.”

Fortunately, the UN has investigated itself very thoroughly and is quite confident that its Pakistani peacekeepers have done no wrong. And by wrong, they mean torturing small children over open fires.

Comment was requested of Captain Hassan Ghorani of the Baloch regiment, but his words were largely unintelligible due to the new 24-karat grill he’d had installed on his teeth yesterday.

ANH throws what may be a curve ball into the ongoing Texas-FLDS debacle:

Outstanding article. But I will laugh my rump off when they start whipping out their New Hampshire marriage licenses…

457:4 Marriageable. – No male below the age of 14 years and no female below the age of 13 years shall be capable of contracting a valid marriage, and all marriages contracted by such persons shall be null and void.

Would explain all those FLDS Texas cars at the FLDS community in New Hampshire over the last several years.

How ironic would it be if it turned out that the Southern religious nutcases are taking advantage of godless Yankee laws to avoid any legal peril related to underage marriages?

Then it’s almost guaranteed that any action you devise to solve a problem will make it worse:

Many economists will tell you that the ideal intervention to help the poor is to simply give them money (a negative income tax) – that shores up their income – rather than directly controlling prices. In general, this is correct advice; but not in this case. Suppose we collect $1000 from the rich and hand this out to the poor. Since the rich spend a tiny fraction of their money on food and the poor a large fraction, this transfer will cause food prices to rise.

In general, this would not matter since the price was being driven up by the greater purchasing power of the poor. But in the present precarious situation, the risk is that if the negative income tax does not reach all the poor, then the ones who are left out will see their position deteriorating as prices rise further.

While the professor is correct in this particular instance, it’s worth noting that the only economists who think simply handing over money to the poor is an “ideal intervention” are the ridiculous neo-Keynesians who have landed the global economy in a serious quagmire with their incessant inflationary monetary and fiscal policies. This is no surprise, of course, considering that their philosophy is based on “in the long run we are all dead” thinking. So now the long run has arrived, Keynes is dead, and the inheritors of his economic policies are left to try to get out of the quicksand somehow.

Giving money for nothing, or even lending it for interest, leads to only one thing: price inflation. This is not hard to understand, for example, do college educations cost less now that they are heavily subsidized? The disastrous results of so many of these interventions is completely predictable, and yet most people continue to demand them because they simply can’t think past tomorrow. If you want to be wealthy, you must learn to think at least three years down the road.

Todd Zywicki does a nice job working out why two incomes mean less money than one income did 30 years ago:

Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi compare two middle-class families: an average family in the 1970s versus the 2000s (all dollar values are inflation-adjusted). The typical 1970s family is headed by a working father and a stay-at-home mother with two children. The father’s income is $38,700, out of which came $5,310 in mortgage payments, $5,140 a year on car expenses, $1,030 on health insurance, and income taxes “which claim 24% of [the father’s] income,” leaving $17,834, or about $1,500 per month in “discretionary income” for all other expenses, such as food, clothing, utilities and savings.

The typical 2000s family has two working parents and a higher income of $67,800, an increase of 75% over the 1970s family. But their expenses have also risen: The mortgage payment increases to $9,000, the additional car raises the family obligation to $8,000, and more expensive health insurance premiums cost $1,650. A new expense of full-time daycare so the mother can work is estimated at $9,670. Mother’s income bumps the family into a higher tax bracket, so that “the government takes 33% of the family’s money.” In the end, despite the dramatic increase in family income, the family is left with $17,045 in “discretionary income,” less than the earlier generation…. In fact, for the typical 1970s family, paying 24% of its income in taxes works out to be $9,288. And for the 2000s family, paying 33% of its income is $22,374.

Although income only rose 75%, and expenditures for the mortgage, car and health insurance rose by even less than that, the tax bill increased by $13,086 — a whopping 140% increase. The percentage of family income dedicated to health insurance, mortgage and automobiles actually declined between the two periods.

During this period, the figures used by Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi indicate that annual mortgage obligations increased by $3,690, automobile obligations by $2,860 and health insurance payments by $620 (a total increase of $7,170). Those increases are not trivial — but they are swamped by the increase in tax obligations. To put this in perspective, the increase in tax obligations is over three times as large as the increase in the mortgage payments and almost double the increase in the mortgage and automobile payments combined. Even the new expenditure on child care is about a quarter less than the increase in taxes.

I’m a bit skeptical of these computations, since at first glance this would seem to indicate that the wife’s car only cost sixty percent of the husband’s original car. Although, I suppose that the new leasing structures may account for that. One thing that is left out of Zywicki’s calculation, however, is the effect on the husband’s wage of all the other wives and single women who went to work in between 1970 and 2000; twice as many women work now as did in the 1950s. I don’t think it’s as important a factor as the taxes or even the second car, but it’s certainly played a major role in the decrease in average weekly wages since their 1973 peak.

Of course, it should surprise no one, least of all a libertarian with an econ degree, that the primary culprit is government and its overtaxation.

There’s a change coming in the next day or so that should please a few of you. The idea is to replace Haloscan with a sophisticated commenting system that will have a few features that I suggested. However, this may mean that your comments during the transition period will be lost, so try not to say anything too terribly profound. The previous 304,000 comments will be preserved; not only that, they’ll be searchable and trackable and all kinds of keen stuff. It should also facilitate the Thucydides discussions.

By the way, this was posted with Blogger’s new scheduled publishing feature, which Blogger has finally gotten around to adding. If you’re on Blogger, note that for the time being, you need to be logged in to draft.blogger.com to use it.