Violent youth bulges

From this article in the Financial Times

when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Read the whole thing.

Restless Leg Syndrome

The Freakonomics guys have a post on Restless Leg Syndrome. Virginia Postrel comments

If something is a "disease," it is worth treating. If it isn't a "disease," you should just live with it. But why? Why not treat a biological condition you just don't like? (I'm assuming that you are directly or indirectly paying for the treatment.) We don't have to call Restless Leg Syndrome a disease to acknowledge that it disturbs some people's sleep and that those people would like relief. Contrary to what you may have heard, the only sort of character suffering builds is the ability to suffer--a useful ability in a world where suffering is the routine nature of life but not a virtue that makes the world a better place.

RLS is hardly the worst thing that one can have, but why not use all that modern society has to offer.

We're entering the age of the Loner!

I came across this article on diversity and society somewhere on the City Journal. To quote:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

It all makes sense, the more diverse, the less one has in common with one's neighbors. The less one has in common, the fewer common goals, the more group competition and the payoff for community action is less. Therefore, you get less of it.

This would explain why people tend to live near people a lot like them. It would be upsetting to people who think we should all live in neatly arranged boxes supporting the "community" goals instead of our own individual ones. I think there's lots of hugging in those boxes too.

Crazy vegans and social evolution

This horrifying article appeared in today's AJC

Vegan parents guilty in infant murder
6-week-old died of starvation after being fed diet of soy milk, apple juice
The parents of a baby that died of starvation after being fed a vegan diet have been found guilty of malice murder, felony murder and first degree cruelty to children.
...
Prosecutors said it was a chilling case of murder by starvation, a painful and prolonged death. Attorneys representing Sanders and Thomas told jurors the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to their vegan lifestyle. Vegans typically live free of animal products.

It's troubling in many ways; it raises the question of do we need an official (i.e. government) of raising children (no), and how could these two be so stupid as to not notice that their baby was shrinking?

The truly rare thing is how did these two avoid the self-appointed legions of women who see an infant as an invitation to ask the parents questions on every conceivable subject? It's not like you have to seek out child-rearing advice when it comes flying out of the woodwork in public places. I imagine it's decent advice too, just repetitive.

Perhaps it's an evolved behavior. Post-partum depression being common a society with an army of cooing watchdogs is the first line of defense against neglect or abuse.

A foppish post

From National Review's Mark Steyn. He makes the valid point that people in their 20s are not children, but the asinine part is

They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

It presumes that all of the victims were cowering in fear while they were shot. My initial thought is that since the fatality count is so high suggests that people were attempting to fight, and died trying. Furthermore, a gun-wielding attacker is qualitatively different from a knife-wielding attacker. If six men rush someone with a knife, it's reasonable to expect, say two, of the six to die, but their side would prevail. Against a gun, it's likely that all six would fall, and their side would lose (presuming a sufficient start distance). And suicidal attacks with no expectation of victory are a trademark of the Islamic extremists that Steyn usually rails against.

A curious ommission

From this article in the NYT on attitudes on the Iraq war by age group, specifically

Forty-eight percent of Americans 18 to 29 years old said the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 45 percent said the United States should have stayed out. That is in sharp contrast to the opinions of those 65 and older, who have lived through many other wars. Twenty eight percent of that age group said the United States did the right thing, while 67 percent said the United States should have stayed out.
...
"We've experienced more than the younger people. Older people are wiser. We've seen war and we know."

Anyway, it goes on like that. One thing that was not mentioned was the fact that the time horizons are quite different. Someone 65 is looking at an outer range of 30 years more of life, whereas someone age 25 is looking at 60 more years of life. It's quite plausible that younger people might be more favorable to risky experiments with possible longer term benefits, the same way they like investing in risky stocks and mutual funds - to wit, they have more time to play with, so they can take more risks.

I'm not saying this is the reason for the disparity, but it's odd it wasn't addressed.

The funniest thing I read today

From Time Magazine no less

Like all language or thought police, the nigger-nazis are humorless snobs who dream of a world without toilets.

Your tax dollars at work

In Lilburn in this case:

Shut up and drink, Lilburn bar patrons told
...
Earlier, the city outlawed pool — the game that spelled trouble in the musical "The Music Man" — in its watering holes. Now it's also barring karaoke and just about any other party game from places that serve alcohol.

America is getting ridiculous at an increasing rate. However, my zoning for no-children idea is gaining good feedback in my informal polls.

An interesting movie

I finally finished watching the documentary Bastards of the Party, an interesting history of gang activity in Los Angeles from the 40s to the present day. It's not a balanced take and doesn't pretend to be, which is quite refreshing.

One quibble - the historian explaining the rise of crack traced it back to Iran-Contra and the CIA-crack folklore. I've always found this ridiculous. It assumes that the government was that clever (doubtful) and also that no one else would have thought of taking a commodity that sells for five cents in South America and selling it for fifty dollars in the US.

Beyond that though, well worth watching.

Infuriating comments

From this CNN.com article

Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, for example, is a sponsor of a bill that would call for troops to come home in 180 days and allow for a minimum number of forces to be left behind to hunt down terrorists and train Iraqi security forces.

"Read the Constitution," Boxer told her colleagues last week. "The Congress has the power to declare war. And on multiple occasions, we used our power to end conflicts."

This idea is coming to her now? It's nauseating how we elect these people. There are countless acts of courage and kindness that happen when the cameras aren't running, but as soon as they start everyone puts their head down and genuflects to the conventional wisdom. Congress gives war making authority to the president, who of course was only enforcing UN resolutions. All to avoid criticism or losing a job, which very few of them need.

That's an odd thing about American; risk taking is private. That's good I suppose.

Another Bush comparison

As it seems to be the theme for the week, there are odd similarities between Bush and the Ipod. Both are predictable progressions over what came before, people get far too worked up about them, and people use them to talk about themselves.

Sunday quotes

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

and

"One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances."

Thomas Sowell

A rise in crime

Personally I think Katrina and meth have something to do with it but Tom Barnett might have it, specifically

the three-strikes and other harsh-penalty laws of the previous decade had surged the prison population, but soon the number of ex-cons being released (about 600k, if I remember) would surpass the number of new cons going in (about 500k). A simple prediction: urban crime was going to go up all across America.

Food for thought.

Monday round up

• GM has built a plug-in hybrid
• I like this guy

  Indian Hill lawyer and former congressional candidate Paul Hackett -- armed with a loaded assault rifle -- chased down three men in a car after it crashed into a fence at his home in the early morning hours of Nov. 19.

• I'm going to order this and this
• Tamara de Lempicka made some beautiful art deco paintings
  

MLK day thoughts

Since it's his birthday, I guess I'll post my impression of MLK. I find it surprising that everyone misses his most singular accomplishment, namely that he he was able to manage a coalition of highly and disparately motivated parties and have them all (more or less) follow a strategy of nonviolence, which is the only strategy that would have worked. As a management endeavor that is staggering.

For more on that, see The Gandhi Game, which explains it all in a game theory sort of way. Put simply, it allows the opposing party to do what you want them to do (usually defined as "doing the right thing", though it doesn't have to be that way) and not suffer any violent consequences. If the Palestinians did that, they would be in a much better position than they are now.

Another article that is well worth reading

From John Robb who predicts a coming privatization of security and the basic functions of the modern state

Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life.

Read the whole thing.

Semantics

I've always rejected the notion of Iraq being in a civil war due to the notion that a civil war requires two clearly defined sides and usually territories, be it Davis and Lincoln or Lenin and Kerensky.

While the two defining concepts in Iraq, Sunni and Shia, are clear, the fighting seems to be split up into 14-20 (from what I've read) different parties. Also, the fighting does not seem to be for control over the country, but rather ethnic cleansing of the classic variety, that is removing one group from a particular chunk of land.

What do you call that? It's not quite anarchy, malignant diversity? Failure of integration? What?

A good move from the FDA for once

They make the morning after pill available over the counter for consenting adults, but not for minors, which is exactly what I would have done. It's rare when the government and I agree on something. Presumably it will still be legal for not to stock it if they have moral objections.

Well put description of our times

From Josh Trevino

In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question.

On a more practical level these days we treat one's religion as their race (which is to say involuntary and not subject to questioning or criticism), and we're already far too touchy about race these days.

A fawning portrayal

I read this article about Fidel Castro in the Toronto Star. I honestly don't know how it could be more sycophantic.

He lives to learn and to put his knowledge in the service of the revolution. For Fidel, revolution is really a work of reason. In his view, revolution, when rigorously adopted, cannot fail to lead humanity towards ever greater justice, towards an ever more perfect social order.
...
His intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found. He is an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything.

Combined with a Herculean physique and extraordinary personal courage, this monumental intellect makes Fidel the giant that he is.

Those who bite the hand that feeds them will lick the boot that kicks them. 47 years of tyranny can be washed away instantly. HT: Tom Palmer.

Annoyances from the New York Times

This time it's about "Men who never marry". It was more patronizing than usual.

Choice Quotes

She speaks from experience. She married her high school boyfriend right after graduation, a 2-week-old baby in arms. But her husband, who never graduated, was unemployed for most of their marriage, and the couple broke up after six years.

Determined to find a man who had better prospects, Ms. Rudolph entered a relationship with a basketball player and had three children with him. It ended when she learned he was married to someone else, a revelation that left her badly shaken.
..
Joe Callender, 47, a retired New York City corrections officer and a father of four, has had long-term relationships with two women but has never married. One obstacle, he admits, has been his own infidelity.
...
Mr. Cunningham, 41, a sanitation worker, seems to defy any theory about why he is single. He has, he said, simply not met the right woman.
...
He is a tall, athletic man with cropped, George Clooney-style hair who projects a kind and upbeat persona; surely a catch to some women in Fort Collins.
...
When he walks in the front door after a weekend trip or a run or a bike ride, he often puts a commemorative baseball cap on his coat rack, and now, about three dozen hats cover the rack, with no apparent space for a purse or a diaper bag.

It's an interesting read. They start from the position that marriage is some inevitability that one must exert great effort to avoid (it's not). They also don't take into consideration the happy loner theory, nor active misanthropy. They all but call women genetically programmed golddiggers.

Web video is on it's way

In particular there is Video Egg. Very cool.

I stumbled across it via Pamela of Atlas Shrugs. I do have to say that pro-Bush apparachiks with strong New York accents give life a new horror. Hot Air does a better job with both the video and the vitriol.

Granted, I think partisan bickering is a sign of strength and self-esteem, but at some point it gets silly.

Best selling artists

I recently stumbled upon this list of top selling artists of all time. While it was pretty much what I expected there were some notable surprises, most notably, Leonard Cohen is in the top 20! He's ahead of Mettalica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.

I then go to the Leonard Cohen page on Wikipedia, and see this quote:

"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work. Just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."

which is as good a theory of working I've seen in quite some time.

Now readers, whose presence surprised you the most on the list of best selling artists? Comments are open.

Nighttime thinking

It's probably meaningful that I come across this article on Urban surveillance networks and this article on profiling on the same day. Both of them are worth reading.

Consider the following statement.

An overwhelming majority of Americans think that racial profiling is wrong. A lesser number think that racial profiling is not worth doing under ordinary circumstances, a smaller number think it's not worth doing under any circumstance.

The above is an accurate description of public sentiment when 100% of the factor is race. Gender and age are usually thrown in as well. The above still holds true.

But what happens when race is one factor of 50 and the profiling is being done by a computer? Assume a surveillance server can determine, height, weight, approximate age, race, gender, posture, gait, clothes, et al. Does it become acceptable at that point?

This line of thought reminds of the last Supreme Court affirmative action decision where it was said that it was wrong for people to discriminate, but fine for computers to do so.

Yet more London

I came across an interesting column in the Times of London, specifically The act of small-time losers by Anatole Kaletsky. Similar in some ways to my earlier thoughts on the matter, different in others. Specifically

In this sense, the most useful analogue for last week’s outrage in London may not be September 11 or even the bombing of Madrid last year, but the worst act of terrorism in postwar Western history before September 11: the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator, was, like the London bombers, a small-time loser who felt he was acting out of intense ideological and religious motives. He was a fervent white supremacist and belonged to an extensive network of neo-Nazi fanatics who are generally believed to number many thousands across the US. His commitment to an essentially religious doctrine — that a global Jewish conspiracy, using African-Americans as their subhuman foot-soldiers, was taking over the world and preparing to exterminate or enslave all white Christians — was every bit as sincere as the faith and “piety” of many jihadist terrorists.

...

It certainly did not occur to anyone after the Oklahoma bombing to apologise for the racial desegregation which had provoked the American neo-Nazis and their ideological antecedents, the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody suggested abolishing affirmative action or banning Jews from public office on the grounds that racial mixing and the prominence of Jews was angering white supremacists and acting as “a recruiting sergeant” for more neo-Nazi terrorists who might copy McVeigh.

Should the political sensitivities and religious aspirations of jihadist killers be treated with any greater respect? The answer is clearly, no.

and

Just as conservative America totally isolated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis after the bombings in Oklahoma, the rational Muslim community in Britain must be forced to reject completely the small minority of Wahhabi fanatics who boast that they “love death”. Only then can there be any hope of restoring respect for human life in the Islamic community and reducing the concept of martyrdom to what it really amounts to: a sad, lonely and utterly futile suicide.

While the entire column is well worth reading I do object to a few points. The final paragraph can easily be taken to mean that white supemacists and neo-Nazis were an integral part of conservatism in America, which hasn't been true in my lifetime (outside of Mississippi I suppose). The second point is that it ignores the proportions and locations.

The Wahhabi fanatics are part of the Muslim community in Britain, probably a very small percentage. For a round number, call it one percent. Compare that to the percentage of neo-nazis in the white community, where I would imagine it is less than one percent of one percent. Also, from what I've read British Muslims are concentrated in cities where the intimidation power of a commited minority is likely to be greater. The likely "conservative white" (to follow Kaletsky's logic) supporters were more suburban and rural where I would imagine the power of a commited minority is lessened by distance.

More Eric Hoffer

I don't remember the exact quotes but the both these are from The True Believer (I think)

• It is inherent in totalitarian societies to hide weakness and project strength, whereas free societies inherently project weakness and hide strength. ConvertToSteve(This will forever cause misjudgment and bizarre decisions to be made when one deals with the other.)
  
  
• American can never hate foreigners because they feel sorry for them.
  

Wednesday Rapid Fire

• Yahoo News with Yahoo Maps - I'll give Google 5 days to do this too. HT: Make
• Google Maps with Transparencies - HT: Make


• A glut of flat screen technology - which would be cool.


• Google Maps Walking Distance


• New MS Money


• Mencken
  

  "All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."



• Tom G Palmer has some nice words about Admiral Stockdale, clearly the classiest guy to run for national office in quite some time.


• Yet another review of Freakonomics, this time by James Q Wilson, the authors are on the Charlie Rose program tonight. Money quote
  

  "...quoting someone whose name I have forgotten: social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have trouble enough predicting the past."

Live 8

A very good post from the Agitator about this current foolishness

It's all the more perverse when you consider that corporate farms in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are a big reason why Africa remains so poor. In heavily subsidized crops like cotton and corn, farmers in these countries can sell their crop on the international market for less than what it costs them to grow it. There's simply no way poor farmers in emerging economies can compete with that. So lavish subsidies in rich countries keep poor countries from competing, which in turn keeps them poor. The rich countries feel guilty, so they sap taxpayers to come up with aid projects that don't work, and really only benefit the exact same industries that benefit from the subsidies. All the while, each time public aid does fail, it makes private donors think Africa's a lost cause, and therefore makes them less likely to give. Which is tragic, because private aid does seem to work. It's more likely to find its way around the corruption, and hit the people who need it.

Which brings us back to Live 8. The whole purpose of the event, Geldoff kept telling us, was not to raise private funds for Africa. Rather, it was to encourage the citizens of developed countries to lobby their governments for more public aid. Oh, and also to make spoiled rock stars feel better about their respective social consciences.

There is also this very good post from Josh Trevino who's reporting on the G-8 protesters

But the true believers exist, and they are capable of organizing themselves. A counterintuitive thing, one would think, but the anarchist/hard left capacity for assembling at set times and doing set things is a well-proven one. Just like libertarians availing themselves of public services, the contraindicating intersection of reality and ideology is often employed, but never acknowledged. As at Seattle, DC, and Genoa, so too Edinburgh: the city is overrun in a well-planned influx from across the developed, Western, wealthy world to protest developed, Western, wealthy things.

Live Aid / Live Eight

I came across a very interesting article in the Prospect (UK) about the original Live Aid funds. It touches on a corrolary to what I believe is Friedman's Law, to wit the government can't give anything away.

But did the mobilisation of public opinion through celebrity endorsement really play the positive role with which it is now credited? To ask this question is emphatically not to turn hagiography on its head and to demonise either Geldof or Live Aid. There is no smoking-gun evidence demonstrating that Live Aid achieved nothing, or only did harm. But there is ample reason to conclude that Live Aid did harm as well as good. It is also arguable that Live Aid may have done more harm than good.

and

With the exception of MSF, what neither the relief world in general, nor the UN, nor Geldof and his Live Aid team have ever come to terms with is that the Mengistu regime—finally ousted in 1991—also committed mass murder in the resettlement programme in which Live Aid monies were used and in which NGOs that benefited from Live Aid funding were active. The Dergue was in control, and it did with the UN and the NGOs what the Nazis did with the International Committee of the Red Cross: it made them unwilling collaborators.

A very interesting article. I had no ideas of the similarities to the Ukranine in the 30s. RTWT.

Links

Rounder, Sun Expose Archives Digitally

Add Google Maps’ Directions to Your Site

And this thought from Will Wilkinson

My hunch is that these folks aren't really utilitarians after all. They have a prior intuition about the injustice of inequality, and the justice of progressive redistribution. Then, they attempt to undermine resistance to higher tax rates on the wealthy by pointing to research that they interpret to say that this won't make the wealthy any less happy, and so, Why worry? The trouble is, it won't make the poor (in a country like the US where the poor are already rich) much happier either, and won't do anything to change relative position in the distribution. So what's the point? The point is more progressive redistribution, to which many folks are committed to prior to and independent of utilitarianism or their interest in happiness.

While I'm waiting for files

The Baby Name Generator - a very nice java app that shows where names show up throughout history

The NYT Alpharetta article

I probably won't have time to post on this tonight, but here it is
The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life

Continental Drift

While at last night's Boo Hoo Rambler's show, my friend Beth said something about "The country getting more conservative" which I wonder about. She was grouping the politics and the society but the general thought can be either true or false. More Republican certainly, but by what measure is the country getting more conservative? I thought I'd make a list:

Top moves to the left

1. Massive Federal Spending
   
2. Wars for Democracy (this has been adopted by the Republicans, but the idea has been on the left for quite some time)
   
3. Gay marriage on horizon
   
4. Government involvement all aspects of the medical system
   
5. Abortion available for minors without parental consent, paid for by the feds in some cases. This is something that has stayed the same, but it's a huge red flag for a lot of the right.
   
6. Central planning for education under the guise of No Child Left Behind.
   
7. The income tax actually becoming more progressive under Bush
8. Campaign Finance "Reform"
   

Top moves to the right

1. A push for Social Security privatization
   
2. A move to end the death tax
   
3. Assault Weapons ban NOT being renewed
   
4. Higher defense spending (Bush was proposing this before 9-11 so I'll include it here)
   
5. Over 55 speed limits remain in effect
   
6. 3 rounds of tax cuts
   

I'm sure I've missed a lot but that is something of a gist. Certainly the Republicans have been doing much of the above (on both sides) but where is the country actually drifting? IMHO the Democrats have not been following an Evolutionary Stable Strategy for quite a while which allows the Republicans play both sides of the street.

Affordable Family Formation

This article by Steve Sailor (via Mickey Kaus) is will worth reading. Put simply, it explains the current American Red State/Blue State gap largely in terms of self selection and children. It's much more expensive to have children in a blue (Democratic) state compared to a red (Republican) State. Throw in some freedom of movement and self selection and you've got a bifurcated America.

A few quibbles. He seems to throw in Atlanta as a "Red City" which is very much not the case. While metro Atlanta is a very red metro area, the city itself is quite blue. Also, the areas with the most recent and illegal immigrants (here in the Atlanta metro area anyway) seem to be the most Republican areas, which is seemingly at odds with his theory.

He also does not mention the Roe Effect, payroll taxes, the total tax burden, the actual cost of a mortgage (I got the full spiel from my mortgage broker when I refinanced, the cost of the mortgage itself can really vary quite a bit.)

On the whole, well worth reading though.

A good article from Landsburg

I stumbled across this on Cafe Hayek.

"Diversity" has always been my least favorite Shibboleth of the left. In fact, nothing else even comes close, although the right wing habit of appending "of faith" at the end of ever sentence is rapidly closing catching up.

That was why I liked this piece by Steven Landsburg. Initial Paragraph:

I was invited to speak about ``diversity'' to an audience of about 80 students, roughly half black and half white. Most of the blacks sat on the left side of the room and most of the whites sat on the right---as good an indication as any that nobody really cares very much about diversity.

How much of life is taken up with these self-conscious display of piety? If you removed all of the man-years that people have spent talking about "diversity", "sexuality", "culture of life","family values" I wonder what, if anything would be lost.

5-30-2005 Updated for Clarity (verb tense)

20 Predictions

Bearing in mind the Pundit's Fallacy, here they are:

1. Iran will work itself out fairly peacefully.
2. Executions will increase in the US as people realize that DNA testing and soon to be omnipresent surveillance makes it ever more likely to be executing the right person.
3. Surveillance cameras will proliferate, people will complain, but they will not alter their behavior at all.
4. Animal right and environmental groups will turn violent.
5. As the legacy of campaign finance reform grows ever uglier, term limits for politicians will make a comeback.
   
6. Social Security will not be altered in the next five years. It will transform into a general welfare programs for the elderly in 15 years
7. Marijuana will be legalized on the state or county level as a tax product when some interest group like education or seniors discovers a way to exclusively reap the tax receipts.
8. Jews will leave Europe for America and Israel.
9. Saudi Arabia will become increasingly isolated in the world.
10. China will buy or "assume responsibility" for part of Siberia.
11. Japan will change it's constitution to re-arm itself.
12. India will overtake China as the dominant Asian economy, though China will be a very significant player.
13. Chechnya and Russia resume their very ugly war.
    
14. Indian Medical Vacations kick off the start of a thriving global medical treatment market as people travel to lower cost medical treatment. Also a domestic medical black market will develop for surgery and treatment.
15. While their democracy holds the Palestinians don't accomplish much. On the other hand, the Lebanese will thrive.
16. The US government will forcibly medicate all of it's prisoners with mood altering and tranquilizing drugs.
17. The battle over abortion will be overtaken by legal fights over decisions made at the beginning and end of life.
    
    The beginning of life will start with prohibitions on smoking by pregnant women, unapproved prenatal care, etc and will end with genetic testing and an "approved" lifestyle for pregnant women.
    
    The end of life fight will begin when government picks up more than 80% of the cost of health care and someone discovers the disproportionate amount spent on health care for the last few months of life. The right to die question becomes the number one question at this point.
18. Many forms of congenital birth defects and diseases vanish from the population as genetic testing improves and people selectively abort non-optimum fetuses. This will have the unintended consequence of a vicious generational conflict down the road.
19. Higher energy prices prompt a move to nuclear power and the importance of Middle Eastern oil is diminished slightly.
20. The EU will be largely irrelevant, the UK and Eastern nations will eventually move away from binding commitments to the larger whole..
    

In place of a longer thought

Songs for John Doe was an anti-war record put out in the early 40's by dutiful Soviet apparachiks the Almanac Singers (Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie and the rest). For a brief period Stalin and Hitler were allies (and invaded Poland together, a little known fact). This record was their take on the matter, taking the position that America should not go to war for US Steel and JP Morgan, which was of course the only possible reason it would. They changed their tune the moment Operation Barbarossa began.

I have quite a few thoughts about this topic, but in general it would seem that the human condition is indeed timeless. I've got a quite a few thoughts on the matter that I'll get into words over the next week or so.

This should be our national motto

As I wait for the Outlook repair tool to truncate my email file, here's some stuff I've been meaning to get on the web. The below should be our national goal.

From Between the Devil and the Dragon by Eric Hoffer, the diary entry from February 11, 1959

I live in a society full of blemishes and deformities. But it is a society that gives every man elbow room to do the things near to his heart. In no other county is it so possible for a man of determination to go ahead, with whatever it is he sets his heart on, without compromising his integrity. Of course, those who set their heart on acclaim and fortune must cater to other people's demands. But for those who want to be left alone to realize their capacities and talents, this is an ideal county. It is incredible how easy it is in this county to cut oneself off from what one disapproves--from all vulgarity, mendacity, conformity, subservience, speciousness, and other corrupting influences and infections.

Perfectly put.