...I want to think about the implications of the worsening financial earthquake. Partisans of presidential elections will point to Dubya's record and say, Blame the GOP .... Libertarians will point to the existence of the Federal Reserve and fiat money, and say Blame the State .... People with retirement accounts will look at the huge bonuses of the executives who appear to have run the great banking conglomerates off the cliff, and say, Blame the corporate CEOs .... People who didn't go out and leverage their mortgages will look at all the people who signed up for ARMs and other fancy financial packages they couldn't afford, and say, Blame the people who got greedy for more than they could afford .... And on all these counts there is both merit and enough blame to go around for the firestorm I think we're about to live through. It will be as potentially life-changing and paradigm-shifting for this generation as 1929 was for the men and women who eventually emerged as ...

As the wheels of evolution are never predictable and cannot be engineered or domesticated and operate in a manner that is fundamentally different from even way the way Charles Darwin would have imagined, British researchers recently discovered the hexapus : yes you heard it right, a six legged octopus. His main missions: resources, food and sex. Sound like familiar themes? http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080303/sc_afp/sciencebritainanimalhexapusoffbeat In another story, it was recently announced that the Sexypus will be buying a Mercedes Benz or Volvo to do his part in destroying the American Automakers Union and the US Economy. When asked how he felt about this, he responded "blurb, blurb, blurb" and proceeded to copulate with the hull of a research vessel. I rarely post stories from the AP or Yahoo, but this was simply too good to pass. All of the credits for this go to the AP and Yahoo under the fair use regulations for using intellectual property for scientific and educati...

Biofuels are a hot topic. It seems everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to weigh in on it, from Bill Gates to Fidel Castro. So I want to send out a special thanks to Jesus' General for posting on what happens when biofuels go bad: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2008/03/food-or-fuel.html The case can be made that Brazil already produces enough sugar cane ethanol to fuel the entire continent of South America; and that we could use the same technology without creating food shortages or following some of the more radical soylent green biofuel dystopias floating around in the policy-o-sphere like using thermal depolymerization on people....if you do not know about thermal depolymerization , please read about turning turkey guts into diesel and the same could be done to people; scary huh? I think so: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1125_031125_turkeyoil.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization Now Libertarian phobic fantasies have been around fore...

Truism: Generals always prepare for the last war. This can't always be true, or World War One would have repeated itself over and over again. Instead, the French built the Maginot Line and the Germans built tanks. But there is a large kernel of truth here. The 1991 Gulf War essentially employed NATO's AirLand Battle doctrine from the Cold War, augmented by cruise missiles, very few of which were actually true precision-guided munitions. (We showed great pictures, but we significantly over-emphasized our capabilities as military disinformation; fuel-air explosives had more to do with burying the Iraqi Army in Kuwait than cruise missiles.) The 2003 invasion of Iraq--which followed the much-heralded Revolution in Military Affairs--actually delivered more of what people thought they'd been getting in 1991. The "Shock and Awe" aerial campaign eclipsed anything from the First Gulf War in explosive intensity (compared on similar time-scales) and allowed the famous ...

I actually saw this first about a year ago, was impressed, and then lost the file. Serendipity is a wonderful thing. While I was looking for an Indian Libertarian, I stumbled across it again. In this incarnation it's called Glimpse of the Future . The post itself does not have a unique URL, so you will have to scroll pretty far down the page to find it. The intro says, "The following is a text excerpt from an educational slide show, which—due to its fascinating content—meanwhile has gone viral on the Internet." That would make it, at least from some perspectives, a virus of the mind . [Richard Dawkins, noted evolutionary biologist, notorious atheist, and purveyor of the (I sincerely believe) soon-to-be-discredited serious theory of memes, once wrote an article in an anthology praising Dennis Dennett, where he likened religion to a virus of the mind . The article was not worth reading, and barely worth stealing from.] But this is good stuff: Did you know? Sometimes size...

You're used to the fact that about two years after you close on your house, the bank sends you a note telling you that your mortgage has been sold. But what about your FaceBook or MySpace accounts? The Electrionic Frontier Foundation's Deeplinks blog reports on the sale of LiveJourna l to SUP, a Moscow-based company without notice to its patrons (nor will a quick view of the site reveal that fact today): Despite strong protections in the Constitution and the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, United States law is by no means a perfect guarantor of privacy. It surprises many people to learn that U.S. courts have in the past decided that the simple act of handing data over to a company removes many of your constitutional protections over that data (though statutory protections remain).And, despite the United State's long tradition of being a free speech-friendly country, Six Apart, in an apparent attempt to fend off external domestic pressure, has removed content and can...

I'll give you the URLs for these articles from New Scientist , but you'll either have to buy the paper copy (like I do), subscribe, or have to wait a week for them to go into the archive to read more than the teaser paragraphs. Sorry; can't control that. But here it is : In an omnibus funding bill passed in late December, Congress added $70 billion in extra money for the [Iraq] war. To pare down the rest by $22 billion, requested increases for three major physical science agencies--the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology--were taken away.. With this proposed level of funding, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has reported that federal investment in basic and applied research will grow by just 1 per cent in the 2008 financial year, far less than inflation, making it the fourth year in a row in which federal research investment has declined in real terms....

The best science weekly (both online and in print) in the world is Great Britain's New Scientist , which--given that the Brits also produce the best news weekly in the world in The Economist , hardly seems fair. Trust New Scientist to have researched the details on India's new ultra-cheap car that's causing all the fuss amongst environmentalists, the Tata Nano. The Tata Nano will meet European emissions standards on exhaust. If you want to see details, check out the Euro IV line in this table. Bear in mind that exhaust emissions standards regulate the particles that make up smog, not emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (which the EU does not currently regulate, although it's trying). The numbers come out in favour of the Tata Nano. Euro IV standards are more stringent than those in place for the motorcycles and scooters, which make up a big chunk of India's motorised traffic. For instance, according to the Indian Federation of Automobile Dealers Associa...

This will date you: the Marvel No-Prize (and did you advance to the rank of Keeper of the Flame?). I actually got one of the treasured empty envelopes for having a letter published in Fantastic Four #90. If I'd had the foresight to hang onto it, who knows what it would be worth today? OK, for no-prize-at-all-except-bragging-rights, here's a question: What percentage of all the modern humans who have ever lived is believed to be alive today?

In a comment regarding my Just for Hube: Star Trek vs Battlestar Galactica post, Tom writes, "I would be interested to see a thorough social/political/economic analysis to Star Trek from a libertarian perspective." I was thinking about writing one, when I recalled my grandmother's constant admonition, "Try not to spend too much time doing what's already been done." (The other admonition that still sticks in my mind, the one about what would make me go blind if I didn't stop doing it, is the one I'm going to try to purge from the family line this generation.) So I went out and collected a few interesting links, only to discover that everybody pretty much mined that vein already. Still, it's worth gathering the references to a number of the better ones. In September 2007, National Review Online actually did a Star Trek Weekend , of which George Mason law professor Ilya Somin's Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Federation Tax Collect...

I offer this not as a polished statement, but the first word about how a Libertarian foreign policy might evolve, and what it might look like. I'm more comfortable, actually, with the format than I am with my policy formulations. See what you think, and feel free to ripe me a new onder, Both Brian Shields and Duffy anticipated my move forward into the aims of American foreign policy in their responses to the first post. Brian : "The first thing we need, even before the actual policy, is the philosophy of a Libertarian foreign policy, right? A philosophy of freedom, human rights, minimal government interference, organized humanitarianism, and respect for the rest of the world. We have to make sure our philosophy for the rest of the world does not make us hypocrites at home." Duffy : "Our foreign policy should be: Safeguard free trade between nations (i.e. fight piracy), force open closed markets for reciprocal trade, enforce contracts, protect our national interes...

Once (no shit) I wrote a footnote that turned into a book . This could happen again, although I hope not. Among the other ten thousand projects I'd like to accomplish with this blog is the development of a rational Libertarian foreign policy proposal for the United States. That hasn't existed up to now. Ron Paul's foreign policy is a non-interventionist strategy based on the near-immediate return of our troops and our navy to the direct physical defense of our borders: Today, we have troops in 130 countries. We are spread so thin that we have too few troops defending America. He's right about the bases, and I applaud in many ways the sentiment that we should shun military interventionism in favor of economic and diplomatic action, but his lack of apparent understanding of modern warfare is not re-assuring in a man who would be president. Other prominent Libertarians are worse. Former LP Presidential candidate Harry Browne (now a self-proclaimed Populist) has a four-poin...

During late May 1940, as the German Army was overrunning France and the British Expeditionary Force fled home from Dunkirk in an improvised fleet of fishing boats, it looked like Adolph Hitler had successfully redrawn the map of Europe for generations to come. The Third Reich had become the sole superpower of Europe: Italy was a satellite, France defeated, the Soviet Union cowed into a non-aggression pact, and Great Britain's forces expelled from the continent. In the grand, patriotic master narrative of history, the story usually concentrates on the gritty Winston Churchill assuming the reins of power, scowling defiantly across the English Channel (looking over his shoulder for FDR and the USA, to be sure), and proclaiming, "This was our finest hour!" as Great Britain carried on the war, virtually alone. In the Mediterranean Theater, General (soon to be Field Marshal) Archibald Wavell sat down and reviewed the prospects of his command, which stretched from Gibraltar t...

OK, I have formally identified myself as a pragmatic libertarian, and I have stated here and elsewhere that my difference with the scientific consensus on global warming is that I think there is adequate evidence to suggest that we are past the "tipping point," and need to become more concerned with adaptations than prevention. I also pointed out in a comment response elsewhere that "the market" in the larger sense was already moving on to the adaptation phase faster than the government. This was misinterpreted by some as me stating that the market was moving to fix the problem and that we didn't need any governmental or international polcies, interventions, etc. So let's clear up a few things. First, Nicholas Stern, in The Economics of Climate Change, The Stern Review makes it quite clear why "the market" has not done anything to halt or slow down global warming: In common with many other environmental problems, human-induced climate change is ...

One of the great problems of Demopublican machine politics like we have in Delaware (aside from those minor issues like corruption, contempt for the public, nepotism, etc. etc.) is the inability of the machine to look into the future. Here's a great example: Delaware and global warming. Let's make one assumption here for the sake of argument: global warming is real and has at least as a partial cause human, carbon-related activity. You can be agnostic or even hostile to that premise, but just bear with me for the moment. I've just been reading the report of the Delaware Climate Change Consortium , and I couldn't help but notice a key point: the whole "Climate Change Action Plan" is all about preventing Global Warming. It shows in great detail how Delaware can reduce its carbon emissions over the next few years, and I don't question the science behind the various graphs and stats at all. I just question the relevance. Here's assumption number two: ...