Positive Liberty

This is the most ridiculous Barack Obama rumor yet. I heard it today from the girl who cuts my hair, who heard it from her manager.

Barack Obama is going to be charged with treason, because on his recent trip to the Middle East and Europe he was trying to persuade soldiers to go AWOL and quit the army.

Really. The girl who cuts my hair is a student of mine, and an Obama supporter, but her manager actually believes it. Really.

And I suppose it’s just the mainstream media keeping the news from us.

Frankly, I’m tired of it. I wish I had a couple bucks for every person I’ve heard over the last few weeks say something like, “I’m a free-market guy, but we need the government to step up and do something.” I could buy some put options or more gold, and really profit from this un-principled wavering.

There are all kinds of variations of the phrase. One can substitute “conservative,” “small government,” “libertarian,” or “capitalist” for “free-market.” I’ve heard all of them. And the “government stepping up” part has taken a bunch of different forms, as panic induced philosophies tend to do. Nearly everyone has a brilliant scheme to defy gravity.

Often, a “but” in a sentence means you can disregard what came before it, and this is one of those instances. You’re not really a free-market conservative capitalist if you believe the government should bail-out businesses that failed. Call yourself what you want, but, at best, you’re a sunshine or fair weather free-marketer, and you resent how supply, demand, prices, and risk work. You think some person or committee should engineer a solution. There are words to describe that belief. They are Continue Reading »

In case you don’t know, he’s presently the announcer for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. But he used to hold a much less respectable position working on Howard Stern’s show. I love iconoclastic humor. Here are some notable clips of guilty laughs:

You’ve probably heard the story of the man whose girlfriend refused to leave the bathroom for two years and got physically stuck to the toilet… Now he’s won the lottery. Twice.

One time, at bandcamp… Wow, I guess that line had some truth it. And you thought fraternities had all the fun. (H/t)

Fake presidential candidate Paris Hilton continues to make more sense than the “real” candidates, at least the ones we see on TV, and I’m seriously thinking now about a write-in. Her Iraq policy seems exactly right to me. And her adviser Martin Sheen is a much-needed link to the go-go 90s: “People invested in a website that sold dog food because a puppet told them to do it.” Ah, the good old days.

I e-mailed that guy who was giving away two dozen tracheostomy kits because his “ideas for science fair projects never came about.” Alas (or perhaps thankfully) he wouldn’t tell me his plans.

I think mixed metaphors are the bee’s pajamas. Matt Taibbi amusingly crowned Thomas Friedman the leader of seriously mixed metaphors. If you enjoy this English language quirk, Friedman is your savant. He simply grabs metaphors by the horns, and runs with them.

I didn’t watch much of it, but I’m told that Barack Obama had his own rocket surgery moment last night. Obama said that John McCain thought that he (Obama) was, “green behind the ears.”

I love that! Does that mean he spends his time thinking about environmental issues, or that he’s good at gardening? You really have to dig in your feet to figure that one out.

But Obama is largely style, and mixed metaphor is a big part of his substance.

Obama: “This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it.” As David Frum points out, “When you try to use a well to support something, that thing tumbles 30 or 40 feet below ground and lands with a splash.”

Hardball delenda est.

From the March 10, 2007 issue of The Economist (p. 7):

Meanwhile Mr Bernanke continued the Fed’s campaign to rein in the mortgage portfolios held by two government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mr Bernanke suggested that the companies’ sizes and structures posed a risk to financial markets. He called for stronger regulation and supervision of the institutions.

I’m one of those libertarians skeptical of government bailouts of private enterprise. I wish more attention in these types of crises would be paid to innovative market oriented solutions. Here’s mine for the mortgage crisis. I don’t necessarily think this would solve the problem, but it could greatly help alleviate it: Automatic American citizenship for any person who buys a house, owned by a bank and previously foreclosed on, after a natural security check of said person. The national security check and payment in full to the bank for the real estate would be the only requirements for American citizenship.

Many anti-immigration folks argue against poor, uneducated immigrants coming to the nation looking for cheap work, that too much of it will turn America into a second or third world nation. And obviously those kinds of immigrants wouldn’t be buying houses. I don’t know how many potential immigrants there are in the first place who have that much $$ laying around. Certainly some relatively rich Europeans who wouldn’t mind retiring in an American suburb would qualify. However 1) the dollar is still relatively weak, comparatively, which makes the deal relatively attractive and more affordable. And 2) companies who want to hire educated immigrant workers would be permitted to buy houses (perhaps with tax incentives) for and on behalf of their workers and award them as compensation, holding the “mortgages” for so many periods until the immigrant workers’ full rights in the said real estate vest. And keep in mind, the world does have 6 billion people, with only 300 million in the United States. If this plan is open to the entire world, even a small fraction of the relatively world rich and upper middle class could make a difference.

This might be a pie in the sky plan. But, keep in mind, China and India alone each have over a billion people with sizable middle classes, many of them well educated. And there are other nations in similar positions.

American businesses and Universities, who would buy the houses and hold the mortgages on behalf of the immigrants, further, could help “drain the brains” from places like China and India whose rapid growth puts the fear of God into some experts that they soon one day will overtake America’s dominant economic might.

So what’s wrong with this idea?

This image is the thousand words that explain why I despise Sarah Palin. She seems to me to be a person who has always gotten by on her cuteness and charm. She may not be stupid, but I think we’ll never know because she’s never actually needed to use her mind.

And keep in mind that beautiful woman are less trustworthy than average looking women, according to research done by my mentor, John Orbell.

Once again I caught the last 20 minutes of the debate, this time in the car driving home from Disney on Ice at the Palace of Auburn Hills (the Auburn Hill, apparently, is the giant landfill looming over the arena). Here are some random thoughts, appropriate only to a casual Friday. Continue Reading »

I’ll be liveblogging the VP debate over at our good blogfriends The Crossed Pond. As usual, and maybe even more than usual, my comments there will not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

I think the folks at Nature just really, really understand how I feel about this election.

Reader Alan Scott asks a good question:

If this is a bill that must be passed to prevent worse tragedy later, then I’m a bit curious as to the libertarian take as to what the bill ought to look like.

I’m honestly not sure what the answer is. Obviously any bailout bill is anti-libertarian, so it’s a question of what type of bill is least offensive to the libertarian perspective. I’d like to hear what our readers and my co-bloggers think, because collectively we’re a lot smarter than I am by myself.

I’ll just start with this and hope it gets the ball rolling:

• Government should not have an ownership stake in the affected firms.

I actually think there’s a fairly good argument for such an ownership stake, but it seems to me to be the greatest possible level of government involvement in firms short of outright nationalization, so surely it ought to be off limits in the libertarian bailout bill.

Tomorrow is the big day for the Pulpit Initiative, promoted by Ralph Stanley the Alliance Defense Fund in which some evangelical pastors are going to endorse a political candidate from the pulpit to challenge the IRS’s rule that tax-exempt organizations must remain politically neutral. My brother (who writes the most eclectically interesting blog you’ve never yet read), explains their error succinctly.

Stanley seems to believe that the First Amendment mandates tax-exemption for churches. It does no such thing.* The IRS rules are entirely religion-neutral, because they cover any organization which has been granted tax-exemption for performing a public service. Any pastor is free to say anything he wants from the pulpit - he just has to choose between being neutral and having to pay taxes. Every other organization in America has to make exactly the same choice.

Not only are these particular pastors appallingly arrogant in assuming they have the spiritual authority to tell their congregation how to vote, they wholly ignore Jesus’ statement that his kingdom was not of this world. Their lust for temporal power reveals the shallowness of their spirituality.

I took a break from catching up on Battlestar Galactica (which I only recently found out is a great series) to watch the last 20 minutes of the presidential “debate,” feeling dirty as I did so. Fortunately this part was about foreign policy, a president’s real job, so it was almost worth watching. What I took away from it is the conviction that McCain is more of a dolt than I had thought. Continue Reading »

Television networks will all, of course, cover tonight’s presidential debate, due to begin in less than an hour. Programming gurus have long known, however, that what you air before or after a show can serious affect your ratings. With that in mind, here’s tonight’s pre-debate line-up:

PBS (at least here in Dallas) is airing CEO. Okay, that’s pretty obvious. What bigger CEO could there be than president?

ABC is running 20/20. Investigative reporting? Well, what passes for it on TV, anyway. (And actually I’m a fan of John Stossel’s work.)

CBS has The Mentalist (which, as far as I can tell, is just Psych warmed over). The Mental Case would be a better title for the debates, but I’ll let you decide who deserves that label.

Speaking of mentalism, it seems NBC put some thought behind its programming — it’s running America’s Toughest Jobs.. Pretty good hook, huh?

But the hands-down winner tonight is FOX, which is airing Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?