CapitalistImperialistPig

Economics Nobelist Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom is one of the sacred texts of modern conservatism and libertarianism. If you are too cheap to buy the Amazon edition above, or check it out of the library there is a free Reader's Digest condensed version here or you can get a cartoon version from the freepers here. Hayek was annoyed with the totalitarian Communism of the Soviet Union, and concerned with the potential of wartime controls in Britain to morph into a Communist or Nazi style totalitarianism. He also feared that socialism or government planning would have the same effect. The sixty odd years since its publication revealed some ironies in his thesis, though. For one thing, neither the Soviet Union nor the Nazi regime arose through the kind of socialist transformation of a republic that he envisioned. Neither does his book concern itself with how actual medieval and modern serf based economies arose - essentially through debt peonage and the increasi...

Perhaps Americans are really awakening from their long opium stupor. The latest CBS poll has Bush at 34%. That's approaching Nixonville. Now if only the Democrats could come up with a good program (and people) to retake Congress. Karl Rove is probably wondering right now if he needs to gin up some kind of terrorist attack to firm up support.

My post on "Ecological Suicide" (soon to be a popular series) drew a comment from Alberich, who thought that everything would be dandy: If we can maintain our property rights or god-forbid make them more robust, we will be fine. I wasn't too impressed by his single factor analysis - after all, if the bluebird of happiness *does* fly up your nose, you *will be* ecstatic - but decided to deal with the question anyway - so Mr. A, if you have a case to make, here is your chance to be on topic. As it happens, Jared Diamond does mention the question of property rights in his discussion of Tokugawa Japan's successfull effort to deal with its own deforestation crisis. He argues that the isolation and political stability of Japan meant that Shogun, daimyo, and peasant could all expect not only to control their lands during their lifetimes, but pass it on to their children. This fact gave them an incentive to practice siliculture and other conservation measures that could onl...

Many a past and present society has imperiled itself through inadvertant destruction of its habitat. In the worst cases whole civilizations have collapsed, leaving behind decaying and abandoned monuments. Jared Diamond's Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed examines several examples. He uses Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous sonnet Ozymandias as an epigraph: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, Th...

Arun has a nice post on the varieties of dialog. It seems that Swami Dayananda Saraswati has classified the possibilities. The good: Vaada : ".... a discussion involving two or more people who are interested in finding out the facts about a certain subject matter. They are all exploring. In this type of discussion, there is no teacher-student relationship. Each person is equally placed, even though one person may [k]now a little more than the others about the subject matter. They are all interested in understanding. This kind of discussion among equals, any collective study among students, for example, is called " vaada " and is naturally healthy." The bad: One is the dialogue that takes place between two people who are already committed to different beliefs. Such a discussion, called " jalpa ", is governed purely by each person's wit. Any discussion between two fanatics falls into this category . . . Or any discussion on the Fox News Network. And ...

When I was about 12, my family took a roadtrip that took us through Eastern Canada. One town in Southern Ontario made a particular impression. In the midst of green and growing lands was a moonscape city of blasted land where no leaf of tree or blade of grass could grow. A few dead trunks of trees still stood, victims of some infernal process - my parents explained that it was the mining and refining of nickel, copper, arsenic and other materials that made these dead lands. I can't really be sure, but I think that city was Sudbury. Not completely coincidentally, one of those deep nickel mines was the site of quite likely the most important discovery in fundamental physics in the last quarter of a century. That was the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which in turn imply that neutrinos have mass. Neutrinos were formerly thought to be massless, and the discovery of their mass is the first real crack in the "Standard Model" which has ruled particle physics for decad...

James Traub has a nice article up on Slate about how Larry Summers came a cropper. Traub portrays Summers as a hard charging reformer. And at first, Summers looked like an inspired choice. Besides being brilliant even by the Harvard standard of brilliance, he was willing to make tough decisions, and he was fundamentally forward-looking. He pointed out, for example, that while it was socially unacceptable at a great university to admit that one hadn't read a play by Shakespeare, you could safely joke about not knowing the difference between a gene and a chromosome. Summers instigated a review of Harvard's "core curriculum" with a view to raising the status of science and of quantitative thinking generally, as well as to answer perennial complaints from freshmen that they had little or no contact with senior faculty. Even before Summers' departure, faculty opposition appears to have worn him down on the subject. On the other hand, Summers' decision to reshape...

My powers of concentration seem to be in decline like the rest of me. On my recent travels I took along some good books plus the first few chapter's of Mark Srednicki's new Quantum Field Theory , but much of the time was too distracted by the irrepressible and loud chatterboxes around me. One guy sitting behind me was so intent on telling a no doubt lavishly embroidered account of his life to his hapless female seat companion, at engine noise drowning volume, that I finally gave up and just listened. His story had some entertainment value. Any subject his fellow passenger mentioned, he was an expert and a pro. He was retired, self-employed, a nurse, a computer expert, a horse trainer, a cross country motorcyclist, a musician and conductor, a former pro footballer, a professor and master wildlife tracker. I was tempted to ask his opinions on string theory, but didn't feel like turning around and trying to interrupt. Those noise cancelling headphones are starting to look ...

I have spent an unreasonable amount of time lately being tortured in a fiendish contraption called a "Canadair Regional Jet." It's a lot like an airplane, only one designed to be comfortable only for a rare species of dwarf Frenchman that grows only above the Arctic Circle. Not fitting into the seats and not being able to stand up in the aisles are relatively minor torments. And I suppose it's partly my own fault that when I crawl out into the aisle I always crack my head on the opposite side luggage bins. The rest room offers a little comic relief, since using it requires positions I had only previously seen assumed by circus contortionists. What really annoys me though is that as I try to stumble out, bent so low that I can only see my feet, the pilot invariably distracts me with some fatuous comment, causing me to put yet another dent in my head by colliding with the sharp edge of the top of the door, which is mounted about 3.5 feet above the floor level.

So the totalitarian lynch mob got Summers after all. What a shame. And what an irony that Harvard should become such a symbol of anti-liberal thought.

I will be off the grid for a week or so. If anybody is interested, I should be back weekend after next.

The NYT today has an article suggesting that the information being released by the Texas hospital treating Harry Whittington continues to be more propaganda than truth. In particular, the suggested scenario of the the shot "moving" to his heart looks improbable. Dead-eye Dick seems to have shot him in the heart from the start. The account given yesterday by doctors caring for the Texas lawyer accidentally shot by Vice President Dick Cheney last weekend raises serious questions about how and when a pellet entered his heart and what tests were done to establish where the pellet was lodged, doctors not connected with his case said. Although the public was told for the first time yesterday that a shotgun pellet from a hunting accident had lodged in the lawyer's heart, one of his doctors said that "we knew that he had some birdshot very close to the heart from the get-go," but not its precise location. The local Texas sheriff is now suggesting that "if he die...

[By the way, forget the wild notions you've heard bandied about the Internet that Cheney might have been drinking heavily when he blasted his buddy. He talked to the Sheriff's Office just 18 hours after the shooting incident, and he would still have been measurably intoxicated at that point if he'd had, for example, 24 beers.] - Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post.

Gandalf: "They tried to pierce your heart with a Morghul-knife which remains in the wound. If they had succeeded, you would have become like they are, only weaker and under their command. You would have become a wraith under the Dark Lord..." JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings What Texas Republican could wish for more?

Brad Delong takes exception to Stanley Fish's NYT Op Ed on the Muslim cartoon controversy. Though Brad is the best of bloggers and most acute of critics, I think he overdoes it in his assault on Fish. So what has Brad in such a snit? (he actually nominated Fish for the Stupidiest Man Alive award, the award to which Don Luskin has a lifetime hall of fame claim.) Well Fish didn't think much of the rationale of the Danish paper that commissioned the blasphemous cartoons, and said this: This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality... different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil... the difference... is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.... Brad's rejoinder consists of some rather amusing cartoons, plus: Note that to Fish the problem with those he calls "liberals" is not that they are unwilling to die for their faith: it is that they are n...

The trouble with Amazon's recommended books is that they have no imagination or variety. I recently bought two or three books on geometry (algebraic and differential) and now they bombard me with nothing else. I could delete them, but maybe I might want some of those books in a few months. Can't they design an algorithm that would show me Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry a couple or three times and then shuffle it to the bottom of the list for a few weeks?

Joel Achenbach outdoes himself on this Achenbolg. As you know, quail hunting is what passes for military service in the upper ranks of the Bush Administration. Dick Cheney knows what it is like to fire a weapon in anger, particularly when the birds flush from the bracken unexpectedly. George W. Bush has flown airplanes, many of them folded from his personal stationery. Donald Rumsfeld has piloted boats and submarines through seemingly impenetrable mounds of suds. And so on. Now, as you have surely heard by now, the Vice President this weekend had a slight mishap while hunting, in that he committed the faux pas of pointing his shotgun in the direction of a friend of his. Also he pulled the trigger. Sort of, you know, shot the guy. In the face. "Peppered" him, in the quaint vernacular of the sport. The fellow is doing fine [maybe: CIP] at the hospital. But right here's what's wrong with the mainstream media: The stories don't tell us whether Cheney managed, ...

It sounds like the collateral damage from Cheney's bird hunting might be a bit more serious than the VP's office is letting on. The way Cheney's office is telling it, the shot barely broke the skin, so why is the guy still in ICU a day later? And where was Scalia when we really needed him?

The man who would be King was wroth. His good friends Vladamir and Abdullah, despite ruling piss-ant countries with little going for them but much of the World's supply of oil and gas, had too many powers that he lacked. He didn't envy Vlad's Villa's or Abdullah's thirty wives, he envied something important, their untrammelled power. It was humiliating, seeing Tim Russert put up tape showing that funny little look he still got on his face when he had to tell a lie about "every wiretap requiring a warrant." "Dog!" said the King (wb). "Yes Sir!", barked the hordes of GOP congressmen. "Dog," he said again, pointing this time to Pat Roberts, "Go on Tim Russert and tell him I can do any God Damned thing I want to if I want to!" "Yes Mr. President," woofed Roberts, "should I tell them the Constitution says you can do anything you like in defence of the country, even stuff the Constitution explicitly for...

I more or less accidentally let Yahoo install a toolbar on my web browser, and now my browser has developed a truly evil behavior - the top window won't get out of the way of other windows unless I force it to minimize itself. Anybody know a good simple way to fix this?

Wolfgang asks a question which really deserves an answer from James, William, or some other smart guy: The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has steadily increased during the last century. But the average surface temperature did not and shows three distinct phases. An (almost) linear increase in temperature from 1910 to 1940, a flat to slightly falling temperature from 1940 to 1980 and then again an (almost) linear increase until now. I found this page which argues: An argument against the idea that global warming is due to mankind's emissions of carbon dioxide goes as follows: the warming this century occurred mostly between 1910 and 1940, when the carbon dioxide concentration grew slowly from 293 to 300 ppm. On the other hand, the temperature remained steady between 1940-1980, while the carbon dioxide concentration increased from 300 to 335 ppm. The most likely answer to this inconsistency is atmospheric aerosol. Aerosols are emitted by industrial processes, transport, etc, a...

The guys over at real climate presumeably are experts, and know what they are doing, but I can tell you what they aren't doing: running a site that explains climate to the layman. Gavin has recently posted this article which is so arch that it looks like it is arguing that global warming is a myth: In another forum (on a planet far, far away), the following quote recently came up: ....the combined effect of these greenhouse gases is to warm Earth's atmosphere by about 33 ºC, from a chilly -18 ºC in their absence to a pleasant +15 ºC in their presence. 95% (31.35 ºC) of this warming is produced by water vapour, which is far and away the most important greenhouse gas. The other trace gases contribute 5% (1.65 ºC) of the greenhouse warming, amongst which carbon dioxide corresponds to 3.65% (1.19 ºC). The human-caused contribution corresponds to about 3% of the total carbon dioxide in the present atmosphere, the great majority of which is derived from natural sources. Therefore, ...

Arun has been dithering about renewing his study of Quantum Field Theory, after a dozen or so years on the sidelines. For me, it has been more like several decades, so not only have I forgotten a lot, but most of the new ideas hadn't even been developed back in those stone ages. Anyway, I've started furtively glancing into Peskin and Schroeder from time to time, and really think I ought to learn a little. Arun, however, is considering the online text Fields by W. Siegel. Has anybody else read/used it? Have an opinion?

Does it bother anyone else that the Google Earth icon appears to be a picture of Venus?

Brad Delong isn't happy with the Washington Post : People at the Washington Post periodically ask me why I don't presume that the employees of the Washington Post are people of good will, trying hard, who occasionally make mistakes. Here's one reason why: Robert Samuelson this morning regurgitates a piece of mendacious Republican spin that I'm tired of. I've finally had enough. He needs to be retired, and the sooner the better: I think he means fired. Brad supplies a detailed analysis of Samuelson's distortions and omissions, for which I refer you to the link. He concludes: Why? I don't know why he wants to misrepresent fiscal policy in the 1990s. I can't even call Robert Samuelson a right-wing hack. The real right-wingers I know openly and aggressively say that Clinton's fiscal policies were vastly, vastly preferable to Bush's. Republican hack? Establishment hack? Tell me what I should call Samuelson, and why he is doing what he is doing. I do ...

Bush is still trying to destroy Social Security. Allan Sloan of the Washington Post finds the details in Bush's budget. Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday. President Bush didn't mention a new proposal for privatizing Social Security in the State of the Union, but it's in his budget. (By Charles Dharapak -- Associated Press) His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years. If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You're not alone. Bush didn't pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message las...

Lumo was outraged recently when angry feminists torched the Czech Embassy.

Andrew Sullivan, conservative and former Bush worshipper, after prefacing his comments with I'm not a Democrat and don't think I ever could be, but here's what I'd say if I were in opposition right now. says: These guys are corrupt and incompetent. They have screwed up the Iraq war, turned FEMA into a joke and landed the next generation with a mountain of debt. We're for making the homeland safer, winning back our allies, and taking on the Iranian dictatorship. We're for energy independence, universal healthcare and balancing the budget again. I'd quibble a bit on the anti-Iranian posturing - the Iranian President was elected - but how much do you lose by just changing that to "preventing the spread of nuclear weapons."

Neutrino Physics by Kai Zuber boasts an intimidating price tag of $149.95, but at 1480 pages delivers a fair page value of about $0.10 per. Anybody know anything about this book? Is it any good? Is there really that much to say about neutrinos? UPDATE: What a ripoff! Independent evidence indicates that contrary to the info on Amazon and the publisher's web site, this book has a paltry 432 pages! Now that's ridiculous. Can I sue for false advertising if I didn't buy the book?

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post takes a look at reactions to the President's budget. The unsurprising concensus - it's not really a budget, just a bit of political theatre. Like everything else from Bush, it's just another lie. In the coverage of President Bush's proposed $2.77 trillion budget this morning, reporters are making no bones about the fact that it bears little relationship to reality. For one, the budget is based on absurd assumptions and intentional oversights. For another, few if any of its most controversial provisions have any realistic chance of survival. Naturally, it completely omits the cost of the war. Edmund L Andrews in the NYT says: "But in practice, the budget is much less realistic than it appears because it omits nearly a half-trillion dollars in costs that are likely to be incurred over the next five years. "The omissions include any costs for the war in Iraq after 2007, any additional reconstruction costs for New Orleans a...

The furious violence around the Islamic world is not an accident. I've already said that I thought the wide reprinting of the offensive cartoons was a mistake, but the real culprit are those who used this to whip up violence around the world. Unfortunately, the principal villains in this include not only our enemies and unfriendly rivals, but our supposed friends. Juan Cole has this long post based on the CIA's translation service accounts. After a certain amount of mainly local protest: The issue became quickly internationalized, with the embassies of Muslim countries demanding a retraction. by mid-October. PM Fogh-Rasmussen continues to refuse to entertain the complaints. Indeed, he went on the offensive, threatening Danish Muslims with heightened penalites for harassing persons who wrote on religion. A Turkish newspaper wrote a concerned editorial which was pretty moderate in tone. Then the Egyptian government got involved: Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit re...

Shankar Vedantam had this article in the WaPo about bias and our evaluation of information: Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed. When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior. Not too surprising to anyone, I guess, but I think it goes a long...

Lubos challenged us to prepare a better State of the Union speech than the Prez and his hacks. I'm working on it, but lacking the large WH staff, it's taking a while, so here is a preview: Fellow citizens, the state of our Union is strong but imperiled. The strength lies in the vitality of our democratic institutions, the vigor of our economy, and the unmatched power of our military. Unlike most nations of the world, we hold our destiny mainly in our own hands. We live in a world of peril, nonetheless. The peril comes not mainly from our enemies, dastardly though they be, because they are few and weak. I believe the main perils we face are the common perils of the world and the those mainly internal to our government. Those internal threats consist of corruption, incompetence, and, above all, the sorry state of our nation's finances. The United States is currently committed to pay not only very large debts, but very large sums in Social Security, military retirement,...

It is no secret that the lessons of tolerance have yet to be learned in most of the Muslim world. Nonetheless, the acts of the newspaper editors who published the cartoons that have enraged so much of the Muslim world were egregious in the extreme. These publications were particularly offensive because the editors chose to publish them in full knowledge that they were deeply insulting and offensive to a large segment of the world's population - a population already inflamed by war, sectarian strife and the inumerable assaults of the modern world. I believe strongly in free speech and freedom of the press, but yelling fire in a crowded theatre is justly punished as a crime. The fury, hatred, and violence aroused was a predictable consequence in the world we live in. So why did they do it? To defend freedom of the press? Hardly. It was a pure gesture of contempt from smug bigots in their comfortable democracies. That said, Islam had better face up to the fact that it is but on...

PZ Myers looks at political science in NASA : So, the Bush administration is going to try and be pro-science. Here we go. In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator." It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most." Deutsch is 24 years old, having just graduated...

So how likely is war with Iran? Despite the risks, the odds are looking a little shorter. Kevin Drum has up HOW LIKELY IS A MILITARY STRIKE AGAINST IRAN? An excerpt: I was up in Los Angeles today, and along with a dozen other bloggers I spent about an hour chatting with Wes Clark, who was in town for a political rally. Clark had some provocative things to say about Iran and its nuclear program, especially in light of today's news that the IAEA has reported Iran to the UN Security Council because of concerns that they're developing nuclear weapons. Here's what he said. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which suggests that Iran's research sites are too widespread to be destroyed via bombing, Clark believes that a military strike on Iran could wipe out its nuclear program very effectively indeed. He figures that a 14-day bombing campaign plus a few special-ops missions — which he described in some detail — would pretty much put them out of business. What's more, he ...

James Annan has another post on Bayesian inference, so, impressed by the underwhelming appreciation of my little joke, I will try a more explicit description of my current understanding of the issues. Here is James's example: I have a max-min thermometer in my garden, which I reset each day. It measures the max and min, and let's assume that I know that the error on each day's measurement is well-characterised as a standard gaussian deviate - ie a sample from N(0,1). This morning I went out and saw that the min from the last night was -5C. What is the probability that the actual minimum was below -5C? Most people will instinctively answer that the probability is 50%, reasoning that the error is just as likely to be positive as negative. Most people would be wrong. The probability depends on the prior distribution before you looked at the thermometer! This is an unavoidable consequence of how Bayes' Theorem works. The posterior is equal to the prior multiplied by the li...

James Annan has another probability post up in which he explains a bit about Bayesian probability and also claims that I make odd noises . This latter claim I can believe, since my wife says the same - but let me see if I understand the Bayesian bit with the following parable. So, this Bayesian and this frequentist go into a bar, where, naturally, they start arguing about probability. Their wives, who had accompanied them, quickly tire of this, and go home. After a couple of hours and a few beers, the debate degenerates into name calling and insults. The bartender calls the bouncer, and this big guy with enormous shoulders and two heads grabs each one under a thickly muscled arm, carts them out, and dumps them in the street. As they stare at the backs of his retreating heads, each pulls out a notebook and scribbles something down. They head home, still a bit dazed. The frequentist gets to his apartment, where his spouse asks him if anything interesting happened after she left. H...

William Saletan in Slate has this story : A Swedish study suggests taller boys get longer educations. Height was measured at age 18; additional years of education were measured afterward. Findings: 1) "The probability of achieving higher education in later life increases linearly with height." 2) "Men taller than 194 cm (6 ft 4 in) were two to three times more likely to obtain a higher education when compared with men shorter than 165 cm." The correlation persisted when IQ and social background were factored out. Researchers' speculation: We discriminate against short kids by expecting less of them. He links to this longer article at Yahoo. It seems to me there could be some alternate theories. Maybe tall boys got better nutrition, more sleep, and better parental care - or maybe their brains are taller too. I can't imagine it that it would work out quite the same in the US. Our most educated groups are Asians and Jews, both traditionally a bit shorter th...

I think maybe I'm beginning to understand the meaning of Lubos's phrase "politically immature."