The Debbie has arrived!

The Debbie has arrived!  That is all...

You wanted the truth. You'll take abashed silence...

You wanted the truth.  You'd take abashed silence...  Ace, at his best, on the latest Benghazi wrinkles...

Good advice...

Good advice...  Things to do before publishing something on the web.  I try to do these things before posting on my blog here, though I don't always succeed...

The absurdity of LinkedIn...

The absurdity of LinkedIn...  That site is really starting to tick me off with their aggressive marketing of their premium services.  Several times now, after being bombarded with stupid efforts like this one, I've been tempted to simply delete my profile there...

Geek: useful lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions...

Geek: useful lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions...  Sobering table for secure systems implementers...

Nazi Germany's Type XXI submarines...

Nazi Germany's Type XXI submarines ... advanced, but too late to have any effect on the war's outcome...

Peaks made of ice...

Peaks made of ice ... in the rings of Saturn.  Captured by the magnificent robotic explorer Cassini.  Click to embiggen.  Awesome!

Estimating the value of π...

Estimating the value of π ... with 200 shots from a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun!

Many moons ago, when I was much younger and even more inclined to waste my time on something fun, I ran a slightly different Monte Carlo estimate of π.  That version used a box of 500 straight pins and a grid of lines drawn on paper.  As I recall, the estimate I calculated was less than 1% off the actual value of π...

Actual ObamaCare enrollment data...

Actual ObamaCare enrollment data...  And it's not good, just as many of us suspected.  Key points:

• 33% of people who signed up have not paid, and therefore aren't actually enrolled.  That 8 million you heard about?  Not so much...
• 31% of the people who actually enrolled (and paid) are under 35 years old.  The target was 50%.  This is precisely what the insurance companies were afraid would happen, and it means that the largest goal of ObamaCare – getting young people enrolled – has failed.  Why?  Because 34% of people under 35 were already insured before ObamaCare.  The slight difference is actually a decrease from pre-ObamaCare figures.  Epic fail.

“I miss having freedom of speech.”

“I miss having freedom of speech.”  That's Scott Adams, who is censoring his own blog posts from fear of online reprisals from (generally left-leaning) web sites.  He's vulnerable to this because he's a celebrity; he has good reason to fear economic damage from them (by, for example, managing to get his cartoons dropped from newspapers).  He doesn't propose any particular solution, but rather is simply telling his readers what he's doing, while bemoaning the fact that he feels compelled to do it.

It's a classic free speech issue: our Constitution allows us to speak freely, but there is no guarantee that we can do so without negative consequences.  I'm glad to see that Scott didn't propose curtailing the free speech of others to allow his own free speech to be free of consequences – that's the traditional stance of the left, with their attraction toward laws preventing offensive speech.  Scott implies (though he doesn't directly say it) that he'd like to have a way to sue the trolls who actually lie about him (libel).  That's an especially challenging thing in the anonymous world of the Internet, where it may not be possible to know who is saying something – though this sort of thing isn't actually new to the Internet; newspapers have published anonymous letters to the editor for centuries.

I've never heard a good solution for this problem.  Every solution I've ever heard proposed is fraught with either free speech issues or legal morass issues...

So a progressive starts a business...

So a progressive starts a business ...  and promptly discovers the profit motive.  Political transformation ensues...

One of the best of our Founding Father's many ideas was the notion of a government comprised of ordinary citizens.  Now that didn't last long, unfortunately (and this is something the Founding Fathers also foresaw).  But while it did, we had a government full of people who actually understood how the real world operated – and what a tremendous boon that was to the country.

I look at the quality of some of the bozos we have in government today, and I want to cry...

I support the legalization of drugs...

I support the legalization of drugs.  That's not because I use illegal drugs myself; I do not (I stick strictly to the legal drugs: alcohol and caffeine).  Here are some of the reasons why I support legalization.

Have you no decency, sir?

Have you no decency, sir?  That's the title of a recent post by Eric S. Raymond, and I find nothing in it to disagree with.  The post is about an example that shows clearly the difference between the political response from both the left and the right to a challenging human problem – and how both responses are deeply problematic.  The comments (as usual for one of his posts) are just as fascinating as the post itself...

One thing Eric says particularly resonates with me: I don't want anybody to associate me with either of the major parties.  Both of them are instruments of power hungry, corrupt big government folks.  There are individuals in both parties who are exceptions to this, but unfortunately they are just that: exceptions...

Baby goat and mirror...

Baby goat and mirror ... what could possibly go wrong?

Not so very long ago, we were all poor...

Not so very long ago, we were all poor...  Deidre McCloskey gives a short and interesting lecture on the rapid increase of human wealth in the last two centuries. 

She starts with a statement of fact that is obvious and completely uncontroversial to anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of human history – that is, perhaps 5% of the American citizenry.  That fact?  That there has been a constant and spectacularly rapid rise in the wealth of the human race since about 1800, no matter how you measure it.  It's very sad to me that this fact is not common knowledge...

She goes on to attribute this growth primarily to the advent of respect for traders, which I think is just a bit silly.  It seems pretty clear from my own reading of history that the rise of human wealth can be attributed primarily to the conjunction of these things:

• The advance of organized science, which leads directly to technological innovations.  This advance continues at an ever-increasing pace; the process is regenerative and there's no end in sight.
• The rise of capitalism, perhaps especially with the advent of stock corporations which allow vast pools of capital to be raised focused on a single business opportunity. 
• The rule of law, applied equally to everyone.  This is still far from perfect anywhere on the planet, but nevertheless there's a direct correlation between the rule of law (and the correlated rise of personal honesty) with the wealth of nations.  Corruption and thugocracy are major reasons why countries like North Korea, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. are generally much poorer than countries like England, Finland, America, etc.

I'm sure this list could be extended, but I think those three are the chief causes.

In conversations with my fellow Americans over the years, I've often been struck by their ignorance of both the temporal and geographical history of wealth.  Many Americans have not traveled extensively outside of the United States, and many more have never really paid any attention to history.  This leads to a set of assumptions – most likely completely unconscious – about the wealth of people in other places and times.  Generally that assumption is that they are (or were) much like the United States today – and of course that's very far from the truth.

I've been fortunate to have traveled to many parts of the world, some of them actually quite obscure :)  This travel has been almost entirely because of my military service and on business trips – the only exception is a single (wonderful) trip that Debbie and I once made to Costa Rica.

In those travels I have seen firsthand just how poor certain parts of the world are.  The Philippines in the '70s (under the corrupt thug Marcos) was one such place.  There I spent some time with people who lived in homes on stilts over their rice paddies, who tilled the earth with wooden plows pulled by water oxen, who defecated through a hole in their floor into the rice paddy below, who owned almost nothing made of metal, and who carried potable water by hand from a spring several miles from their home.  Today these same people have tractors and cars, live in decent homes, and have running water.  What changed?  Their government now embraces capitalism and they have the rule of law.

Even outside my own travels there are some spectacular before-and-after examples.  China is the most obvious one.  Millions of Chinese died of starvation within my own lifetime.  Today they are the fastest growing economy on the planet, home to thousands of millionaires, and soon will be the biggest economy on Earth.  What happened?  Mainly capitalism and a smattering of the rule of law.

Then there's our own history.  It's easy for me to remember that when I was a child, people were not generally as wealthy as they are today.  It always amazes me how easily people forget this, and especially how easily they conflate the rising prices (due to inflation) with their own decreasing wealth.  It's a good mental exercise to think hard about the state of the world in your childhood, and ask if you really think you're not wealthier today.  If you're more than 40 years old or so, it should be easy for you to realize how much better off you are today then when you were a child – unless you grew up in a wealthy family and have today become impoverished.

Consider this now-famous quote:

“I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat.” 

That's Dinesh D'Souza, quoting an Indian friend.  Two things strike me about that quote.  The first is the obvious one: that even the poor people in America today are much better off than many people around the world.  The second, though, is one that many Americans don't know (or have forgotten): that poor people in America weren't always fat.  In fact, less than 100 years ago – in the Great Depression – we had a great many of our citizens hungry to the point of malnutrition.  The adults who grew up in that time, including my own parents, were significantly shorter on average than the generation after them (height is the classic gross measure of nutrition).

Now here's my punchline: I strongly suspect that if most Americans understood just two things: the fact that our average wealth has been rapidly increasing, and why – that progressives would be squashed out of existence.
  Further, I think the progressives understand this – and that's why they resist educating people about it.  What provoked this thought was listening to Harry Reid (something that should only be done with the assistance of alcohol or psychiatric intervention, or both) blather on about income inequality.  He said a great many things that I simply cannot accept he actually believes – for Harry is himself a wealthy man, and hobnobs regularly with capitalist titans.  If he doesn't believe it, then why is he babbling about it?  That's easy: it provides political advantage (i.e., votes).  He doesn't want his constituents to understand that capitalism works, and that even with great inequality in income everyone can be better off.  That won't get him votes.  Stoking class envy, on the other hand, that's a proven success for progressives all the way back to Karl Marx.

How do we educate people about this?  I'm afraid I don't have any good ideas on that count.  The progressives have established pretty solid control of the educational system, most especially in our universities – where the students are of an age they're likely first interested in political matters.  Every time I think about this, the doom comes upon me...

The Democrats don't like being criticized...

The Democrats don't like being criticized ... and they want to amend the Constitution to allow the banning of political criticism.  Really.

I don't believe this attempt has any chance at all of succeeding.  As Ed Morrissey points out in the linked post, it probably won't even succeed amongst the Democratic caucus.  Personally, I think every supporter of this amendment ought to be removed from office by the voters – though most likely there aren't enough of them paying attention to make that happen.

Just for the record, let me point out that Hugo Chavez actually got an amendment like this passed in Venezuela – and that passage serves as a marker, as good as any other I can think of, of start of that country's disastrous fall into the thugocratic mess they're in today...

Today is a big day in Paradise...

Today is a big day in Paradise...  That's Paradise, Utah, where our new home is located.  I've been “camping” in our new home (with a bed, a table, and a chair) while getting some remodeling done, and my lovely bride Debbie has been holding down the fort in our Jamul, California home.  Today she's winging up to visit with me for a week.  She'll see first-hand what it's like to camp in the plaster dust :)  She can only do this because of the wonderful Dionecia, a local (to Jamul) lady who takes care of our house and animals when we go on vacation.  She was available this week, and Debbie jumped on it.  In a couple of hours, I'll be driving down to the Salt Lake City airport (the closest major airport to our new home) to pick her up.  Woo hoo!