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George Rebane
• Artificial life created from scratch.
• Moving by thought – brain/machine interfaces.
• Hi-tech hiring, youth matters – ‘up or out’.
• Swarm computing – how do ants know what to do?
• ‘guaranteed’ gadget buyback service for frequent upgraders.
Posted at
in
George Rebane
I am a skeptic about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and all that is currently shoved under this all-encompassing umbrella. True believers or, more correctly, post-enquiry adherents (PEAs) of AGW do not recognize the nuanced category of skeptics and lump us all together under the label “Deniers” – it keeps things manageably simple for them. In one of the pieces that I posted on this issue, I expounded on the scientific notions of Occam’s razor and falsifiability. The latter being a requirement of any proposition accepted as science. If there is no way that what you propose can be shown to be false, then your proposition is not one of science but of faith/religion.
My friend James Currier, a smart and serious thinker, posted a comment to my piece in which he challenged me to defend my stance as a skeptic by presenting arguments in a manner that would allow my position to be falsified. If the arguments upon which a person bases his skepticism can be shown to be false, then his position as a skeptic would be unreasonable, and, presumably, such a person of good will would seek another more defendable position even, perhaps, becoming an AGW proponent. I have accepted my friend’s challenge and invite the reader to download the short paper ‘Climate Change – A Format for Reasoned Dialogue’.
In this paper I bend over backwards to not use equations or complex diagrams so as to make it accessible to the broadest audience of intelligent readers. Nevertheless, the issue of AGW is very complex and the paper will probably not be as broadly accessible as I had hoped. For that all I can do is apologize, and leave it as an admitted weakness that I was not able to overcome.
George Rebane
Ruminations joins a small group of local blogs that have launched the Bastiat Triangle Alliance. This is a declaration of the shared social and economic philosophies propounded by Frederic Bastiat, the 19th century French thinker and political philosopher. Bastiat is considered one of intellectual precursors of what came to be known as the Austrian School that was one of the first to counter the challenges of Marxian economics. This school gave rise to such 20th century economists and luminaries as Ludwig von Mises, Frederick von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The latter two Nobelists went on to become the pillars of our country’s Chicago School of economists promoting ideas of free markets and free peoples.
A basic tenet of the Alliance is that rapidly advancing technology, globalization, and the growing ‘dumbth’ of our American electorate has put in place an insidious environment of social values and thought which seeks ever greater government interventions, using other people’s money, to shelter us from our own risky behaviors and solve an increasing number of our everyday problems. We wish to call attention to the apparently invisible and incremental process by which this is happening and highlight its cost of abrogating what the Founders considered our “natural rights”.
The top right-hand link will download a more complete statement of purpose for the BTA.
George Rebane
This concludes the series on wildfires that started with Part I: Our House Burns and continued in Part II: Our House is Still There!.
During the hours we spent with the fire crews who were sheltered in our house, we learned a lot about the nature of wild fires and how they could and could not be successfully defended against. Jo Ann and I were the only civilians within a circle of ten or twelve firefighters gathered around the breakfast table and adjoining family room. There were no reporters, everyone could talk freely, political considerations were the furthest from everyone’s mind. Our main concerns at this point were 1) had we prepared properly, and 2) what else could we have done or now do to prepare for the future?
We were told straight out that the ‘future’ we were concerned about was about eight years away given how thoroughly the vegetation around our neighborhood and nearby mountains had burned. But there were some important insights which the fire fighters led by their captains laid down for us. These formed our lessons learned – some corroborated our thirty-plus years of experience watching and studying southern California wildfires; and some points made came as a complete surprise. I will list them with comments as appropriate.
George Rebane
• Linden Labs’ Second Life reigned in by feds.
• Contact Lens to give us Bionic Eyes
Second Life grabs attention of the Feds
Linden Labs is the developer and operator of today’s most popular online virtual world, Second Life, in which ‘residents’ can travel, shop, meet, and carry on many functions of the real world. Companies today hold meetings on (in?) Second Life and some people actually earn their living doing business in Second Life. It’s all made possible by Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life. But watch out, here come da judge!
George Rebane
“Saving Historic Homes – Grass Valley adds layer of protection to stave off the wrecking ball” This feel-good frontpage article in The Union today reports the latest affront to property rights in the name of the collective. What glides by without notice is that the “saving” is done for the sake of the collective – the people who don’t own the “historic home”. The legal and putative owner of that property gets screwed.
Putative? When we think, we realize that you own something only to the extent that you can dispose of it as you will. That is the operational definition of ownership, and the only one that really matters. When government restricts your rights of ownership, bit by piece it takes away your ownership. Of course, it doesn’t matter to you since that quaint looking house is not yours, and you kinda like the way it looks next to all the other such properties on the street. Besides, what’s another few thousand dollars of fees and another hoop to jump through if you want to do something else with the property. It’s for the common (collective) good, isn’t it?
Well if it is, then let’s have the collective buy it (without the market distorting restriction in place) with everyone’s tax dollars and do whatever they want with it. The “historic house” will then belong to those who value it in its present condition. Short of that, let the owner negotiate the price of a covenant put into the property’s CCRs that keeps it looking like that in perpetuity.
Instead of that, the nodding know-nothings encourage another step back from personal property ownership without a clue that this also erodes their personal security and social liberty. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment enshrined this principle and Frederic Bastiat (‘The Law’) explained it very clearly. And no one will notice.
George Rebane
• Idiocracy here and now
• Greenpeace sowing peace in the Antarctic
• The China Model may be our common future
• World Bank scandal and the role of government
The other night we had one of our movie nights with friends – cocktail hour then dinner then a movie in front of a warming fireplace. The movie was the dark comedy ‘Idiocracy’ (2005) and told the story of a future 500 years from now where the imbeciles had outbred people with three digit IQs and dominated society. As you can imagine, lots of TV was included in the daily fare of that future society. After the movie ended, we turned off the DVD player and on came a regular TV channel. From what was streaming out at us – especially the commercials – it was hard to tell that the movie had ended. Scary.
There is a little saga being played out in the Antarctic between the Greenpeace ship Esperanza and a small Japanese fleet claiming to start something called ‘scientific whaling’. The Esperanza launched motorized inflatables against the main Japanese ship. And as they came along side the crew of the small Greenpeace craft threw acid bottles at the Japanese crew. Then the same idiots pulled along side and two of them actually boarded the Japanese vessel. The Japanese, of course, took the enviro-hooligans into custody and will turn them over to authorities. Greenpeace is now claiming that the Japanese have taken hostage two of their crew members thereby yielding up another perfectly good English word to the politically correct word manglers. Go figger.
In their last 2007 issue The American has an extensive analysis of what may now be termed ‘The China Model’. The thesis is that China seems to heading toward a social model that mixes a heavy dose of capitalism and entrepreneurial freedoms with a continuing iron-fisted limitation of personal liberties. The news is that this may result in a new kind of equilibrium and demonstrate that capitalistic growth can co-exist with a repressive socialist regime with an entrenched and corrupt cadre of elites. This is an eye-opener to the world’s sleaze bags running countries ranging from banana republics to sub-Sahel African countries to mid-eastern secular dictatorships to our favorites Cuba and North Korea. These guys are saying to themselves that there may be a way to survive, maintain control, and still prosper if we follow the China Model. Vietnam is currently the poster-child of doing exactly this. Unfortunately our own US of A has also been headed for that destination as we slowly diminish our corporate freedoms and rapidly continue reducing our personal liberties.
Mike McDaniel, SESF Executive Director, looks at the recent $570,000,000 scandal at the World Bank (don’t look for it in your mainstream media) and posts the question ‘What is the role of government?’.
George Rebane
These posts highlight some current technological developments that confirm our increasing pace to the Singularity.
• Machine with a conscience
• Cars that drive themselves
• Robots to help the elderly
George Rebane
As the media bleats about $100/bbl oil, I wonder whether we’re supposed to forget that it’s really the dol
lar in our pockets that is under assault by the government. They want to take more money from us and find that raising taxes is too obvious because even the most backward of us then see that their take-home pay is smaller and may not agree that it’s all going for a good cause. A much better way to bilk us is to continue debasing the currency which allows the government’s fixed debts (e.g. national debt) to be paid off in cheaper dollars. The government figures correctly that the rubes among us will not notice. Those not convinced of the greenback’s fall in value should examine the nearby chart (from the 4jan08 WSJ) showing the price of oil in dollars, euros, and gold. There they will see that the price of crude in terms of real money (i.e. gold) has remained pretty much constant.
It was heartening last night in the New Hampshire debates to see all Republicans declare that the first part of any beneficial solution to the illegal alien problem is to secure our borders. This, of course, is anathema for our friends on the left whose solutions are akin to stopping the ship of state from sinking by ignoring the hole in the hull and just trying to bail more furiously. And then again, some of them don’t even want to bail all that much. I wonder what they’re up to.
Arguably taxes, trade, and the free market are the prime differentiators between the Republicans and Democrats. If the GOP loses its grip on making this clear during the coming year, it will become history sooner than later. (A canary in the mine will be Ron Paul becoming an independent or, better, a declared Libertarian candidate.) Some right-wing stalwarts are saying that abandoning such conservative distinctions will not necessarily spell the demise of the party. Maybe not, but it seems to me that it would be a prudent move to at least start measuring that sagging and staggering pachyderm for its pine box. The amount of lumber required will require placing a timely order.
Finally, those of us looking for an end to the state’s monopoly in education should add tax credits to vouchers as an alternative way for parents to direct the education of their children. Adam Schaeffer of the CATO Institute has completed a very readable policy paper (The Public Education Tax Credit) arguing the benefit of tax credits over vouchers in pushing through a success campaign for school choice. Personally, I was convinced and am now a proponent of the tax credit approach.
