The Road to Serfdom

Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master.
—Sallust

Barry Ritholz has a rant. Barry Ritholz believes that oil is "a matter of National Security". Consequently, Barry Ritholz believes it is not only the prerogative, rather the very duty, of the Federal Government to crack down on oil usage in the United States. The government must pass laws—and quickly!—which mandate all of the following:

- Subsidies for Oil and Ethanol need to be replaced with subsidies for Solar;
- CAFE standards need to be raised;
- Expedited processing for Nuclear Power plant permits should be issued.

Barry's thinking seems to be that whenever there is an emergency, it is imperative for the Federal Government to solve it immediately, by draconian measures if necessary.

It occurs to me that there are two standard mechanisms by which our liberties are gradually removed, one for each party. Either they must be removed in the name of National Security or they must be removed in the name of Doing Good (aka Helping Poor People, Ending Poverty, Stopping Global Warming, Serving Gaia, etc.). It has famously been stated that "patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels", but I would submit that it is holier-than-thou do-gooderism which is the last refuge of mountebanks.

Reading further in Barry's rant, we discover that

I own a V8 (automatic), a straight 6 (6 speed), and a 4 cylinder (5 speed) -- so I am the last person to preach we all need to shift to Vespas and biofuels. But it's pretty apparent to even a gas hog like me that we need to do something other than send billions of dollars to terrorist nations each and every single month.

Why then, Barry, don't you do it? What, praytell, restrains you?

So, let us analyze this. In order to be spared the considerable pain of having to give up his V8 and replace it with a bicycle, or to sell off one or more of his cars, Barry demands that CAFE standards be raised abstractly, so that lots of other people are forced by the (evil) car companies into having more expensive cars with higher-mileage.

Is there not something utterly peculiar here? Is there not something rotten in the State of America? Is this the rational action of an adult free man, or the whine of a would-be child who wants to be taken care of by the nanny-state? I submit that this is not the American Way. I submit that our forefathers would have died of shame before demanding laws to protect themselves against their own actions from far-away Washington. A nation which consciously chooses sheepdom should scarcely be surprised to find that it is no longer free.

I call on you, Barry, to step up and be a free man after all. Sell your car. Do it for your country. Do it for Global Warming. We'll all be glad you did.

Science Media Studies

Britain continues it's decline into socialist stupidity, where slogans and propaganda replace thought and knowledge. The latest victim: physics.

The thing that attracts pupils to physics is its precision. Here, at last, is a discipline that gives real answers that apply to the physical world. But that precision is now gone. Calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE. Physics is a subject unpolluted by a torrent of malleable words, but now everything must be described in words.

In this course, pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power. Debate drives science, but pupils do not learn meaningful information about the topics they debate. Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins. But my pupils now discuss the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power plants, without any real understanding of how they work or what radiation is.

...

Pupils are taught to poke holes in scientific experiments, to constantly find what is wrong. However, never are the pupils given ways to determine when an experiment is reliable, to know when an experiment yields information about the world that we can trust. This encourages the belief that all quantitative data is unreliable and untrustworthy. Some of my pupils, after a year of the course, have gone from scientifically minded individuals to thinking, “It’s not possible to know anything, so why bother?” Combining distrust of scientific evidence with debates won on style and presentation alone is an unnerving trend that will lead society astray.

Note this bit, "Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins." That is precisely why I went into science and mathematics in high school, it was a concious decision because I was empowered, I could compete with the teachers. In the humanities it was always a matter of opinion, and teachers often have silly opinions. Now the humanities seem to have won in England. So the scribes will have their permanent positions while the peasants labor to support them in the manner to which they have become accustomed. It is progress that any of the pharaonic priesthoods would have appreciated.

Saturday Ant Facts

All of the following are taken from the Wikipedia article on ants. Things I never knew.

- There are more than 12,000 species of ants with more diversity of species in the tropics.
- Ants are not native to Hawaii.
- Ants evolved from waspoids about 150 million years ago.
- Ants lack lungs and a heart; their central nervous system is mostly a column of nerves, similar to the spinal column in humans.
- In addition to their compound eyes, they also have three small "oceli" on the top of their heads for detecting light and dark. They can aee polarized light and use it for geolocating themselves.
- It is estimated that, pound for pound, they constitute something between 15% and 25% of all terrestrial animal biomass.
- The genetic system in ants is "haplodiploidy" which means there are no sex chromosomes, and the sex is entirely determined by the number of chromosomes: males are haploid and females are diploid.
- Ants communicate through chemical signals sensed in the antennae, and unlike us they are able to smell in stereo and use that information spatially.
- Ant males have no fathers and no sons; their genetic material is entirely derived from their mothers.
- Most ants bite for defense but fire ants are unique in having a poison sac. Jack Jumper Ants found in - - - Australia have stings that cause several fatalities yearly.
- This one is a little scary: "ants may be the only group of animals besides primates and some other mammals in which interactive teaching behavior has been observed".
- Ant societies exhibit a wide variety of diversity. Some, like Protestants, are practically solitary; others are well-known for their aggressive warlike ways. War seems to be perfectly natural and endemic among some ant species and sugar ants are famous for their aggressive sidewalk battles which may leave thousands of ants dead. Some enslave others; very similarly to the Ottoman Emperors, Amazon ants are incapable of feeding themselves and must rely on captured slaves from other species to survive.
- Some ants farm fungus and some farm aphids.
- Many species of birds exhibit a peculiar behavior called "anting", in which they pick up and drop ants on their wings, which is not fully understood.
- Siafu ants function as natural insecticides: they will completely clear a field of insect pests and then move on.

Eugenics in Sweden

Facts I bet you didn't know.

Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for "crimes" such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children's homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their "low intelligence", being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.

Hmmm, I knew Swedish socialism had fascist roots, but I didn't know about the eugenics. Of course, eugenics was progressive science back in the early 20'th century. I believe that Margaret Sanger spoke twice to the KKK about eugenics in the 1920's. I have also read that the text at issue in the Scopes trial promoted the practice. But I didn't know Sweden had been so deeply involved, apparently they sterilized more people per capita than any other country besides Germany.

More here.