Growing up in the Cold War, I remember when I first grokked the irony of the communist party's propaganda rag being named "Truth." I wonder what old Trotsky would think if he were alive today to see the mouthpiece of the most murderous regime in human history turned into a sad imitation of the National Enquirer: UFOs, dragons, Noah's Ark, X-ray vision, and other apocryphal or mythical tales reported as fact.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

Check out the new Priceline commercials here.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 13 words, total size 1 kb.

I meant to link to this last week, when I first saw it on Geekpress.

Amazing. Kitschy. Fun. The QRIO.

Posted by: JohnL at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

Scott Burns, a financial affairs columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has an excellent piece today spelling out the true impact of the recent Medicare expansion. (Free registration required. Destined for the archives in the near future).

Scott is a member of the boomer generation, but his thinking on this issue is, refreshingly, fair and clear. He calculates the bill that our current elders are presenting to my children as $43.5 trillion. He essentially restates the libertarian nugget "TANSTAAFL." At some point benefits must be decreased or taxes increased (no!) to prevent a massive default under the system.

I hope in my lifetime to see some significant extension of the human lifespan. I expect it, actually. I am ready for the future of Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire,
even its dystopian aspects.

As a consequence, I think we need to be ready to rethink our "social obligation" to our elders. Medicare and Social Security, in my mind, are unconstitutional -- they are well beyond any reasonably necessary or proper enumerated power of the federal government. But are we ready as a society to take more personal responsibility for saving, for being ready to work in our retirements, to take care of our parents and grandparents? We need to be. Fortunately, if we do see some sort of "boosterspice" in our lifetimes, we will be young and healthy enough, even at the age of 65, 70, or even 90 to continue to be active and productive citizens and not wards of the state.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

Scott Burns, a financial affairs columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has an excellent piece today spelling out the true impact of the recent Medicare expansion. (Free registration required. Destined for the archives in the near future).

Scott is a member of the boomer generation, but his thinking on this issue is, refreshingly, fair and clear. He calculates the bill that our current elders are presenting to my children as $43.5 trillion. He essentially restates the libertarian nugget "TANSTAAFL." At some point benefits must be decreased or taxes increased (no!) to prevent a massive default under the system.

I hope in my lifetime to see some significant extension of the human lifespan. I expect it, actually. I am ready for the future of Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire,
even its dystopian aspects.

As a consequence, I think we need to be ready to rethink our "social obligation" to our elders. Medicare and Social Security, in my mind, are unconstitutional -- they are well beyond any reasonably necessary or proper enumerated power of the federal government. But are we ready as a society to take more personal responsibility for saving, for being ready to work in our retirements, to take care of our parents and grandparents? We need to be. Fortunately, if we do see some sort of "boosterspice" in our lifetimes, we will be young and healthy enough, even at the age of 65, 70, or even 90 to continue to be active and productive citizens and not wards of the state.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

The 1974 Nobel-prize winner in economics.

The author of The Road to Serfdom.

One of the great proto-libertarians of the twentieth century.

That's who.

But if you're reading this, you probably already knew that. Virginia Postrel has an excellent background on this champion of liberty here.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 56 words, total size 1 kb.

If you haven't read Atlas Shrugged, you may want to skip this post, as it contains a mild spoiler.

William H. Stoddard at New Troy has an interesting article about the ethics of Ayn Rand. As he explains, objectivist ethics rely upon the premise that it is only the concept of life that makes value possible. As value is something that one acts to gain or keep, all ethical actions should be directed to keeping oneself alive. Thus every function of a living organism is (or should be) directed toward a single goal: the organism's survival. But, as Mr. Stoddard illustrates, this isn't, in general, true. He uses the tale of the "Wet Nurse" (Tony) in Atlas Shrugged to illustrate that
merely preserving one's life is not always the ethical choice. Instead of a pure "survival" ethics, Mr. Stoddard posits a "legacy" ethics, the selfish desire to have something of value survive beyond one's own life.

I particularly like his discussion of the possible influence of Aristotle's metabiology on Rand's thinking here, when Darwinian biology would point more towards a legacy system of ethics. If you are into Rand, objectivism, darwinism, or any of the above, read the whole thing.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 204 words, total size 2 kb.

. . . . Or do they?

Robert Heinlein once stated:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and lastly die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

For my entire adult life, I have avoided specialization, maintaining a broad range of interests and pursuits (while semi-specializing in a couple -- at least enough to make a living!) And in fact the conventional wisdom holds that evolution favors generalist species over highly specialized ones. Carl Zimmer summarizes this wisdom and points to the early hominid Paranthropus as the classic example of an over-specialized evolutionary dead-end. But then he points to an abstract of an article "in press"(*) that challenges this conventional view of Paranthropus and concludes that Paranthropus was likely an ecological generalist like early Homo.

If true, then why did Paranthropus die out and Homo survive? Are we technologically-empowered super-generalists secure in our evolutionary niche? As Carl concludes: "Paranthropus looks on our happy beliefs from its oblivion and wonders."

(*)"In Press" here means the article has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, but not yet published.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 232 words, total size 2 kb.

Last weekend in his regular "Libertarian Bookwork" post, Tim Sandefur recommended Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand. In the process, he provided us with a very well-written overview of Ayn Rand's life and her work.

I would recommend this essay highly to anyone new to Rand's works, and even to those who have read her before.

Like Tim, The Fountainhead is my favorite of her fictional works, although I also love Anthem.

Posted by: JohnL at 09:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.