Why Not Regulate Guns Like Cars?

Why Not Regulate Guns Like Cars?

via GUN WATCH by Dean Weingarten on 12/14/12

I was just on a HuffPost Live panel with, among others, Elie Mystal (Above The Law), and he suggested — as a gun control proposal — that guns should be regulated like cars. This prompts me to repost an item I posted several years ago:
Cars are basically regulated as follows (I rely below on California law, but to my knowledge the rules are similar throughout the country):
(1) No federal licensing or registration of car owners.
(2) Any person may use a car on his own private property without any license or registration. See, e.g., California Vehicle Code §§ 360, 12500 (driver's license required for driving on "highways," defined as places that are "publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel"); California Vehicle Code § 4000 (same as to registration).
(3) Any adult — and in most states, 16- and 17-year-olds as well — may get a license to use a car in public places by passing a fairly simple test that virtually everyone can pass.
This is pretty much how many gun rights advocates would like to see guns regulated, and is in fact pretty close to the dominant model in the over 35 states that now allow pretty much any law-abiding adult to get a license to carry a concealed weapon: No need to register or get a license to have a gun at home, and a simple, routine test through which any law-abiding citizen can get a state license to carry a gun in public.
Now I suspect that many gun control advocates would in reality prefer a much more onerous system of regulations for guns than for cars (though Mystal seemed to say that he was indeed suggesting a very similar regime for guns and for cars). Of course, one can certainly argue that guns should be regulated more heavily than cars; thoughtful gun control advocates do indeed do this. But then one should candidly admit that one is demanding specially burdensome regulation for guns — and not claim to be "merely asking that guns be regulated like cars."
Incidentally, I don't claim any great originality on these points: Others have made them before me, see, e.g., David Kopel's Taking It to the Streets, Reason, Nov. 1999. But some things are worth repeating.
UPDATE: I originally omitted the "of gun owners" in item (1); I included it in response to a comment pointing out that manufacturers must generally place VINs on cars, much as federal law already generally requires serial numbers for guns.

MercatorNet: What Is Marriage?

Link: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/what_is_marriage (via shareaholic.com)

One reason why supporters of traditional marriage are losing elections is that they are losing the war for intellectual credibility. They are too often mired in facile arguments about “tradition”, Bible passages, and bleeding heart litanies about children. Supporters of gay marriage have succeeded in ridiculing these fumbling attempts at a rationale as ignorant and homophobic.

Indeed. You can't win by making the case against redefining marriage until you make a case for the current definition of marriage. Here is one attempt to address that.

In 2010 [Sherif Girgis is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Princeton and a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School and Ryan T. Anderson, William E. Simon Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and editor of the Witherspoon Institute's journal Public Discourse, is a Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a Ph.D. candidate in political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame] published a controversial article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, putting forward a philosophical defence for the conjugal view of marriage. It gained many responses from all sides of the debate and has proved so successful that they have expanded it into a book to further flesh out their claims and answer their opponents.
...
The authors start by contrasting, with precision, the “conjugal” and the “revisionist” views of marriage. The conjugal view presupposes an exclusive union between a man and a woman that is bodily and mental and distinguishes itself by its comprehensiveness, while, revisionists claim that marriage is just two (no more, for the moment) people committing to romantically love and care for each other for as long as they see fit.
...
Marriage, as it has been understood for centuries, is a unique and comprehensive institution that joins mothers and fathers to their children and to each other. The authors show that it is a rationally defensible cornerstone of Western civilisation and a bedrock of societal stability. In confronting the challenge currently facing marriage in parliaments, courtrooms and schools around the world Girgis, Anderson and George put forth a clear and formidable case for one of our most sacred traditions.

Auditing Shooting Rampage Statistics - Daily Anarchist

Link: http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/07/31/auditing-shooting-rampage-statistics/ (via shareaholic.com)

Last week I posted a graphic on Facebook claiming the average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 18.25, and the average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by civilians is 2.2. I based it on 10 shootings I found listed on some timeline somewhere. I honestly don't even remember where. I presented the case studies in a blog post on the Silver Circle blog and I did the math myself.

The graphic was met with great enthusiasm and much skepticism. Leave it to Facebook users to demand an audit on a meme. So, I started over, only much more meticulous this time. I compiled and analyzed 93 shootings, noting my methodology, and I am now prepared to present my findings, complete with links to the data. But here's a spoiler… It's not that different.

The average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 14.3

The average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by a civilian is 2.3.

The Volokh Conspiracy -- How Private Property Rights Saved the Pilgrims

Link: http://www.volokh.com/2012/11/22/how-private-property-rights-saved-the-pilgrims-2/ (via shareaholic.com)

Today is Thanksgiving, and there is much to be thankful for. Not least on the list is the institution of private property, without which the Pilgrims might not have survived, and we would not have this holiday. Economist Benjamin Powell recounts the story here
Tom Bethell gave a more detailed account in this 1999 article.
In my 2010 Thanksgiving post on this subject, I noted that Thanksgiving is also a good time to disabuse ourselves of the longstanding myth that Native Americans had no private property rights and opposed the concept when it was supposedly first introduced by whites. In that post, I also explained why the lessons of the Pilgrims' experience with private and communal property are in no way negated by the fact that the Plymouth Plantation was a corporation.

http://www.volokh.com/2010/11/25/how-private-property-rights-saved-the-pilgrims/

UPDATE #2: For the benefit of various commenters, it's worth nothing that, contrary to popular mythology, Native Americans made extensive use of property rights too. Other commenters try to defeat my point by noting that Plymouth Plantation was a corporation. However, corporations had a very different status in 17th century England than today. They were not purely private organizations, but individually chartered by the government to carry out purposes specifically mandated by the state. Until the establishment of general incorporation laws in the 19th century, it was not possible for any private party to form a corporation at will for the purpose of pursuing its own goals. More to the point, this corporation, like some others at the time, was specifically created to carry out governmental functions: it was given a monopoly of force, control of the justice system, and every other power typically wielded by the state. Local governments in England were legally referred to as "corporations" and regulated by such laws as the Corporation Act of 1661. The fact that a government is called a "corporation" for legal purposes does not change its nature. If the United States government changed its name to "USA, Inc." tomorrow, it would not thereby cease to be a government.

http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_15-2009_03_21.shtml#1237224869

Like many property teachers, I sometimes encounter the persistent myth that Native Americans don't believe in private property, had no concept of property rights before Europeans arrived, and so on. But, as Anderson explained in this 1997 article, many Indian tribes used property rights for a wide range of purposes long before whites arrived. Ironically, the myth of Native American hostility to property rights was first developed by 18th and 19th century whites as a justification for dispossessing Indians of their land on the grounds that they didn't really own it. In the 20th century, the myth was taken up by some left-wing environmentalists and others in order to show that Native Americans had a supposedly superior collectivist ethic that whites should emulate.

http://perc.org/articles/american-indian-collectivism

In the past, most if not all North American indigenous peoples had a strong belief in individual property rights and ownership. Frederick Hodge (1910) noted that individual private ownership was "the norm" for North American tribes.
Likewise, Julian Steward (1938, 253) asserted that among Native Americans communal property was limited, and Frances Densmore (1939) concluded that the Makah tribe in the Pacifi�c Northwest had property rights similar to Europeans.' These early twentieth-century historians and anthropologists had the advantage of actually interviewing tribal members who had lived in pre-reservation Indian society.
By the late 1940s, however, these original and fi�rsthand sources of information had died, and false myths and historical distortions began to take dominant shape. By the mid–1960s, the tone in many college history books, history-inspired fi�lms and novels, and even speeches had completely changed (Mika 1995). A typical historical distortion, for example, is found in Baldwin and Kelley's best-selling 1965 college textbook, The Stream of American History, where they write, "Indians had little comprehension of the value of money, the ownership of land . . . and so land sharks and grog sellers found it easy to mulct them of their property"(208).

Terry Anderson (1995) attributes the beginning of the myth to settlers seeking farm land in the Great Plains, who interacted only with nomadic tribes that did not view land as an important asset. These settlers mistakenly generalized the lack of interest in land to infer a lack of property rights among all tribes. We argue that this fi�ction was further propagated in the nineteenth century by a virtual army of East Coast newspaper journalists, dime novelists, and Washington politicians who, in spite of writing about Native Americans, often had little contact with tribal groups. Reported, retold, and unchallenged, these incorrect perceptions ended up as the basis for later laws and institutional codifi�cation.

Comparative anatomy and extrapolation in palaeontology

Comparative anatomy and extrapolation in palaeontology

Dr Dave Hone: The incredible consistency of the anatomy of some groups of organisms means some strong inferences can be made from the smallest details
Some friends of mine have a new book out on art in palaeontology and what kinds of 'odd' behaviours and features may have been more common than are often illustrated. This has attracted some nice attention and I hope to cover this myself shortly. I've been keeping up with the coverage however, and spotted this comment under one piece (well I've extracted it from a slightly longer one).
"It seems that paleontologists tend to make tremendous extrapolations from minimal information. They will find a single knuckle bone and tell us the animals size, diet and how big a herd they ran in."
The commenter self identifies as a Dr of some description and one would hope he might have better respect for the work and ideas of other academic colleagues rather than apparently assuming we don't know what we're doing or just speculating wildly. I'm sure I could say some crude exaggerations about particle physics or geochemistry based on ignorance of the depth and detail in the subject. As with many of these types of comment on many aspects of science, what he has actually done is demonstrated how little he knows. So I'll use this very example to point out just how much can be reasonably determined from very little material.
First off, there aren't knuckle bones – the knuckles are the joins between bones, not bones themselves. The bones that produce the knuckles are the phalanges, the finger bones, though one might also want to include the metacarpals (that make up the palm of the hand) and the unguals (that support the claws, or in us, fingernails). So, let's say you do have just a single phalanx, could you really work out how big it was, what it ate and how large the heard was? Actually, yes.
It does of course depend on the animal in question, but conceptually it's perfectly plausible. Plenty of vertebrate species or entire groups have uniquely shaped phalanges and a good anatomist should be able to work out what they belong to. The phalanges of the birds are easy to spot given how they fuse together, whales and dolphins, the seals, the various member of the antelope / sheep / deer etc. group have odd phalanges and so too do various dinosaur groups for example. They look unlike those of any other vertebrate and simply cannot easily be mistaken. Naturally there would be a good few where you might not be able to say much more than 'bird' or 'bat', but it's far from tricky to get something as specific as 'mole' or 'gibbon' or even a single species like the aye-aye.
This works because an awful lot of bony anatomical shapes and structures are pretty conservative within these groups. All gibbon phalanges look alike, and while similar to other primates, they can be told apart. They have evolved to be well adapted for a given suite of behaviours and functions and the anatomy reflects both this and their ancestry.
Of course once you have established what group the phalanx belongs to, there's potentially quite a lot more information there. Some bones change in shape and proportion as animals grow, and a bone from a juvenile can be told from one that came from an adult. If it is indeed from an adult, one can work out how large it was. Some phalanges are obviously more consistent with the size of the animal than others, and it may not be possible to determine exactly which phalanx in the hand one has, so it might have been a big one from a smaller animal, or a smaller one from a bigger animal. Still, one could come up with a range of likely sizes, and of course in the case of something like a gibbon, most of them (and fossil forms) are of similar sizes, so it wouldn't be too unreasonable to take a guess at the size without any measurements at all.
Diet is pretty easy. Few clades vary that much in diet, and while there are oddities like pandas, if you know you have a phalanx from an elephant or antelope say, then you can bet on it eating plants, a seal and it'll be on the seafood diet, and a cat would be a carnivore. Thanks the third point ticked off rather nicely, so onto herding.
Some groups of animals naturally have a great range of behaviours and degrees of sociality. It would be hard to say anything meaningful about the behaviour of a fossil cat from a phalanx alone – they could have been social like lions or solitary like leopards. But of course others are much more conservative – almost all primates live in groups, and so too do the living elephants, and the seals and walruses congregate to breed etc., while others are almost always solitary like rhinos and bears. Of course when it comes to the fossil record we may be able to add more data like evidence of groups forming from tracks, mass nesting sites or where herds have died together and so on, but it's far from implausible that we could take a good stab at the likely herding behaviour, and even group size, of at least some vertebrates.
So while of course there are plenty of cases where a solitary phalanx would get us nowhere, the idea that discussing size, diet, and even social behaviour based on 'knuckle bones' is in fact entirely reasonable. It is deliciously ironic that was likely supposed to be a deliberately extreme example to be used as a withering putdown actually represents a great model of how we can potentially build up a reasonable picture of the biology of an animal from very little remains.
Perhaps unsurprisingly I'd also contend that the idea that palaeontologists do this kind of thing all the time is also a nonsense. It is, at best, a poor caricature and bears no resemblance to what I see in the scientific literature or what I get from my colleagues. We don't do that kind of thing because we recognise the inherent uncertainties of working out exactly what group this was and exactly how big it might have been and exactly what it might have done. Even if these kinds of things are hinted at, it's generally in the broadest of terms ('in the range of 50-250 kg') or suffused with caveats ('if the diagnosis is correct, and if it follows the pattern seen in living members of this group, then it's likely it spent at least some of its time in social groups'). What the accusation does resemble is the endless succession of often cheap and nasty "Yet another dinosaur book for kids"-type which do indeed regularly extrapolate wildly and get things badly wrong on a regular basis or do exaggerate because they take out all of the caveats and present them as certainties.
Comparative anatomy is an incredibly powerful tool and it's a shame that it's not appreciated as much as it should be and that too few universities seem to teach it now as part of biology or zoology degrees. It does allow palaeontologist to make great inferences about limited material and while we have to be careful, it does mean we can potentially draw a great deal of information from what might seem, to inexperienced eyes, very little.

The most violent country in Europe: Britain is also worse than South Africa and U.S. | Mail Online

Link: The most violent country in Europe: Britain is also worse than South Africa

Britain's violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.
Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa - widely considered one of the world's most dangerous countries.
....
The figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:

The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.
It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.
It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.
But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.
In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.

Also:  UK is violent crime capital of Europe

Analysis of figures from the European Commission showed a 77 per cent increase in murders, robberies, assaults and sexual offences in the UK since Labour came to power.
The total number of violent offences recorded compared to population is higher than any other country in Europe, as well as America, Canada, Australia and South Africa.
Opposition leaders said the disclosures were a "damning indictment" of the Government's failure to tackle deep-rooted social problems.
The figures combined crime statistics for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The UK had a greater number of murders in 2007 than any other EU country – 927 – and at a relative rate higher than most western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

How I learned a language in 22 hours | Education | The Guardian

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months (via shareaholic.com)

Ed had moved on to other things and co-founded an online learning company called Memrise with a Princeton University neuroscience PhD named Greg Detre. Their goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything – from the names of obscure cheeses, to the members of the British cabinet, to the vocabulary of an African language – as efficiently and effectively as possible. Since launching, the site has achieved a cult following among language enthusiasts and picked up more than a quarter of a million users.

Blindingly Obvious Revelations

Blindingly Obvious Revelations

Yesterday, I had a sudden inspiration into the modi operandi of Left and Right, and why it's so difficult to bridge that rhetorical gap:

• Conservatives and other anti-liberals tend to use, as our model for conflict resolution, trade negotiation, as if bargaining over the price of a used car: offer followed by counteroffer, give and take, introducing sweeteners, with agreed-upon penalties for intransigence. In the end, the issue is settled, and both parties move on to other issues, other negotiations, other agreements.
• Progressivists and other liberals use a very different strategic/tactical model to resolve disputes: the general strike, or nationwide protest. That is, those on the Left present demands and threaten disruption; the longer the strike goes on without "management" caving, the more strident and ridiculous the demands become. Eventually, one side or the other must surrender. But any such resolution is only temporary, for nothing is truely settled "for all time." Rather, every dispute ends in a cease-fire, which lasts just long enough to lick wounds and reload for the next strike.

That's why it's so difficult for conservatives to resolve disputes with liberals, and vice versa: We offer compromises, while they respond with threats to sever all relations and go to the mattresses. They make non-negotiable demands, which we counter with split-the-difference counteroffers. Neither side can make heads nor teakettles out of the other's response.
The core communications breakdown is that A does not use the same conflict-resolution model as B: A musters evidence, precedent, and offers extra inducements to B to come to an agreement; while B recruits allies, forms coalitions, and offers extra inducements to government or corresponding authority (judge, teacher, Mom) to wade in on B's side.
A might offer a lower price, thinking that will increase B's interest; while B tries to grab a seat on the BoD, so he can fire A and impose his will by executive fiat. It's as if A is bargaining in Latin while B is sloganeering and demonstrating in Chinese!
Yes, I realize I'm privileging my own model in dicta; nevertheness, I believe I have identified the two underlying models: striking a deal versus going on strike. In the end, since A and B cannot communicate even long enough to craft a cease-fire, both ultimately leap to the conclusion that the only solution is to utterly crush the opposition.
The Left has followed this model all the way back the French Revolution; that's because "destroying the opposition" is a normal part of the Left's operating model. By contrast, the Right is still stuck in the paradigm that if we demonstrate that we're making a good-faith offer that would leave both sides substantially improved, that will be enough. We don't yet understand that many on the left would rather pull the whole world down upon our ears (and their own!) than give up even the least and most preposterous of their demands.
Now we know. For future elections, we have only two options:

1. Use the destructive tactics of the Left -- but in service to the constructive principles of the Right. If you've seen the movie Lincoln, that is the modus I mean: Abraham Lincoln used the same corrupt tactics (buying votes) as the barbaric, slavery-supporting Democrats, but in service to the Godly goal of abolishing slavery.
2. Or else we must lose every election from now until the day after forever.

In terms supplied by radical Islamists (who share the dispute-resolution model used by lefties), we first must establish ourselves as the "strong horse" and threaten a Left-Right war that will destroy everyone. Only when the Left faces annihilation will enough of its adherents abandon the tactics of the "general strike" and finally begin bargaining.
The key is to chop their man down, early and often, as Barack Obama's minions chopped down Mitt Romney. We must demonstrate that we can play just as rough and dirty as they; we threaten the war of all again all, in which everybody loses. Out of sheer desperation, Progressivists will be driven to the unnatural course of actually negotiating a real contract.
But remember, such agreements are only fleeting cease-fires; we must be prepared to refight the same battles over and over again. We're now "on notice," so never again should we be taken by surprise.

Have you taken the Israel test yet? - ICJS Research

Link: http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?article=4312 (via shareaholic.com)

The double standard inherent in this shrill, ahistorical response to Israeli militarism is clear if one contrasts it with the response to something like the Obama administration's bombings in Pakistan. In many ways, Obama has already done to rural parts of Pakistan what Israel is currently doing to Gaza – that is, he has launched bombing raids against militants which have inevitably killed or injured large numbers of innocents, too. Where Israel has said to have killed 130 in Gaza over the past week – some of them Hamas militants but many of them not – Obama's drone attacks in Pakistan in recent years have killed many more: an estimated 2,600, in fact, only around 13 per cent of whom were militants. This means that around 2,200 ordinary Pakistanis have been killed in bomb attacks okayed by Obama. Yet far from Obama's drone attacks generating public protests, or being described as 'murderous' and 'Nazi-esque' by respectable, caring newspapers, Obama remains a hero of the very same set that sees red whenever Israel fires a missile or a gun.

Sultan Knish: War is the Answer

Link: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/11/war-is-answer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews %28from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News%29 (via shareaholic.com)

Hamas is not interested in being engaged. Its goal is the destruction of Israel. This isn't posturing, it's not sullen resentment over being blockaded by Israel or outrage over the latest round of fighting. This is the essential ideology of Hamas, derived from the core Islamic principles over the proper role of non-Muslims in the Muslim world. It is not interested in a two-state solution, job creation programs or any of the meaningless shiny toys that diplomats wave when they arrive in the region. Its goal is to make Islam supreme over all other systems by destroying a non-Muslim state in what it considers to be Muslim territory.

Carbon Taxes | The Beacon

Link: http://blog.independent.org/2012/11/27/carbon-taxes/ (via shareaholic.com)

As good as it sounds, I'm skeptical of the merits of carbon taxes, even if our CO2 emissions cause global warming. Fossil fuels have been the energy source behind the remarkable economic progress we have had since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Taxing that energy source will lower economic growth. Reducing income taxes should increase economic growth, but the issue is more complex than just which tax would, in theory, be the least detrimental to growth. Here are six reasons for my skepticism on carbon taxes.
1. Fossil fuels have powered the Industrial Revolution. Let's say that the Earth is 2-3 degrees warmer today than it would have been had the Industrial Revolution never occurred. Is that amount of warming worth it? Would you rather live in today's world, or have the standard of living of people in 1750 and an Earth 2-3 degrees cooler? If that is the cost of the remarkable economic progress that has resulted from the Industrial Revolution, most people would gladly accept the warming.
2. Carbon taxes would slow economic growth not only because they would make the power that fuels it more costly, but also because carbon taxes are unlikely to be revenue-neutral, even when their advocates propose it. Look at the VAT in the EU, which was proposed as a revenue-neutral tax reform, and sparked a substantial growth of government across the EU countries. Look at the federal income tax, which started as a progressive tax with a top marginal tax rate of 7%. A carbon tax would not be implemented by an omniscient benevolent government that would produce the "optimal" policy, but by a democratic process that is laced with special interest politics and cronyism. A new revenue source, even if intended by its architects to be revenue-neutral, ultimately would lead to bigger government, placing even more of a burden on the productive capacity of the economy.
3. If we are concerned about our children and grandchildren, then combining the first two points, would we make future generations better off by leaving them a world that is slightly cooler, but also poorer?
4. We should weigh the benefits as well as the costs of global warming. What if the people arguing that human use of fossil fuels is warming the planet are right? CO2, which is often viewed as a pollutant, is necessary for plant growth, and a higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will mean healthier plants. A warmer climate will mean a longer growing season, so we can better feed our population. It would open up land to crops that currently is too far north. People in some places would surely be made worse off from a warmer planet, but people in other places — Siberia, Canada — would be better off. People are mobile, and populations would shift as climate change made some places more desirable relative to others. Global warming would bring with it benefits as well as costs.
5. There are benefits to waiting to deal with global warming, if it is a problem. One is that technology will develop so that it will become cheaper to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future. For example Air Fuel Synthesis is a company that takes CO2 from the air and hydrogen from water to make oil. I don't know whether this is the winning technology, but over time more technological advances like this will occur, making it more cost-effective to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. Also over time, people get wealthier (if we don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs), and are willing to pay for "green" energy. People in wealthier countries are choosing to spend their own money to buy solar panels to generate electricity, and to engage in other "green" activity without any government mandates telling them they have to. If it is desirable to do something to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, there are some benefits to doing something later rather than now.
6. Carbon taxes could increase the emissions of greenhouse gasses. If the US implemented carbon taxes unilaterally, that would raise the cost of manufacturing in the US, which would push manufacturing to other countries (like China) where manufacturing produces higher emissions than in the relatively clean US. The shift in manufacturing from low emissions countries to high emissions countries would result in more greenhouse gas emissions.

The Weekend Interview with Harvey Mansfield: The Crisis of American Self-Government - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html?mod=djemITP_h (via shareaholic.com)

By SOHRAB AHMARI

Cambridge, Mass.
'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."

Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words.
Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the university. It isn't easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century. "I live in a one-party state and very much more so a one-party university," says the 80-year-old professor with a sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks the fact that I'm here means the things I say about Harvard can't be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter."

Partly his isolation on campus has to do with the nature of Mr. Mansfield's scholarship. At a time when his colleagues are obsessed with trendy quantitative methods and even trendier "identity studies," Mr. Mansfield holds steadfast to an older tradition that looks to the Western canon as the best guide to human affairs. For him, Greek philosophy and the works of thinkers such as Machiavelli and Tocqueville aren't historical curiosities; Mr. Mansfield sees writers grappling heroically with political and moral problems that are timeless and universally relevant.
"All modern social science deals with perceptions," he says, "but that is a misnomer because it neglects to distinguish between perceptions and misperceptions."

Consider voting. "You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."

By that measure, the electorate that granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved "a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on your side' to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what comes next, this silence about the future is ominous."

At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement "depends on the idea that things will get better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality." It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were "confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the party of free condoms. That's typical for them."
But Democrats' refusal to address the future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create "an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and renders them above politics." The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional tradition in favor of "a practical constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the Constitution."
It is a project begun at the turn of the previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."

The Obama campaign's dissection of the public into subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in point. "Victims come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so they're treated differently. You push different buttons to get them to react."

The threat to self-government is clear. "The American founders wanted people to live under the Constitution," Mr. Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people."

Harvey Mansfield Jr. was born in 1932 in New Haven, Conn. His parents were staunch New Dealers, and while an undergraduate at Harvard Mr. Mansfield counted himself a liberal Democrat.

Next came a Fulbright year in London and a two-year stint in the Army. "I was never in combat," he says. "In fact I ended up in France for a year, pulling what in the Army they call 'good duty' at Orléans, which is in easy reach of Paris. So even though I was an enlisted man I lived the life of Riley."

A return to the academy and a Harvard doctorate were perhaps inevitable but Mr. Mansfield also underwent a decisive political transformation. "I broke with the liberals over the communist issue," he says. "My initiating forces were anticommunism and my perception that Democrats were soft on communism, to use a rather unpleasant phrase from the time—unpleasant but true." He also began to question the progressive project at home: "I saw the frailties of big government exposed, one after another. Everything they tried didn't work and in fact made us worse off by making us dependent on an engine that was getting weaker and weaker."
His first teaching post came in 1960 at the University of California, Berkeley. In California, he came to know the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, who at the time was working at Stanford University. "Strauss was a factor in my becoming conservative," he says. "That was a whole change of outlook rather than a mere question of party allegiance."

Strauss had studied ancient Greek texts, which emphasized among other things that "within democracy there is good and bad, free and slave," and that "democracy can produce a slavish mind and a slavish country." The political task before every generation, Mr. Mansfield understood, is to "defend the good kind of democracy. And to do that you have to be aware of human differences and inequalities, especially intellectual inequalities."
American elites today prefer to dismiss the "unchangeable, undemocratic facts" about human inequality, he says. Progressives go further: "They think that the main use of liberty is to create more equality. They don't see that there is such a thing as too much equality. They don't see limits to democratic equalizing"—how, say, wealth redistribution can not only bankrupt the public fisc but corrupt the national soul.
"Americans take inequality for granted," Mr. Mansfield says. The American people frequently "protect inequalities by voting not to destroy or deprive the rich of their riches. They don't vote for all measures of equalization, for which they get condemned as suffering from false consciousness. But that's true consciousness because the American people want to make democracy work, and so do conservatives. Liberals on the other hand just want to make democracy more democratic."
Equality untempered by liberty invites disaster, he says. "There is a difference between making a form of government more like itself," Mr. Mansfield says, "and making it viable." Pushed to its extremes, democracy can lead to "mass rule by an ignorant, or uncaring, government."

Consider the entitlements crisis. "Entitlements are an attack on the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "Entitlements say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the country is when I get it.' So it's like a bond or an annuity. What the entitlement does is give the government version of a private security, which is better because the government provides a better guarantee than a private company can."
That is, until the government goes broke, as has occurred across Europe.

"The Republicans should want to recover the notion of the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "One way to do that is to show that we can't afford the entitlements as they are—that we've always underestimated the cost. 'Cost' is just an economic word for the common good. And if Republicans can get entitlements to be understood no longer as irrevocable but as open to negotiation and to political dispute and to reform, then I think they can accomplish something."

The welfare state's size isn't what makes it so stifling, Mr. Mansfield says. "What makes government dangerous to the common good is guaranteed entitlements, so that you can never question what expenses have been or will be incurred." Less important at this moment are spending and tax rates. "I don't think you can detect the presence or absence of good government," he says, "simply by looking at the percentage of GDP that government uses up. That's not an irrelevant figure but it's not decisive. The decisive thing is whether it's possible to reform, whether reform is a political possibility."

Then there is the matter of conservative political practice. "Conservatives should be the party of judgment, not just of principles," he says. "Of course there are conservative principles—free markets, family values, a strong national defense—but those principles must be defended with the use of good judgment. Conservatives need to be intelligent, and they shouldn't use their principles as substitutes for intelligence. Principles need to be there so judgment can be distinguished from opportunism. But just because you give ground on principle doesn't mean you're an opportunist."

Nor should flexibility mean abandoning major components of the conservative agenda—including cultural values—in response to a momentary electoral defeat. "Democrats have their cultural argument, which is the attack on the rich and the uncaring," Mr. Mansfield says. "So Republicans need their cultural arguments to oppose the Democrats', to say that goodness or justice in our country is not merely the transfer of resources to the poor and vulnerable. We have to take measures to teach the poor and vulnerable to become a little more independent and to prize independence, and not just live for a government check. That means self-government within each self, and where are you going to get that except with morality, responsibility and religion?"
So is it still possible to pull back from the brink of America's Europeanization? Mr. Mansfield is optimistic. "The material for recovery is there," he says. "Ambition, for one thing. I teach at a university where all the students are ambitious. They all want to do something with their lives." That is in contrast to students he has met in Europe, where "it was depressing to see young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent people so stunted." He adds with a smile: "Our other main resource is the Constitution."

Marriage in the Netherlands, a Decade After SSM

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/267478/marriage-netherlands-decade-after-ssm-william-c-duncan (via shareaholic.com)

The brief concludes: "At a minimum the data from the Netherlands does suggest that the hopes of those making a conservative case for gay marriage — that it will strengthen marriage generally and dramatically increase the stability and fidelity among same-sex couples — are likely to be disappointed."

Friends of Science | The Myths and Facts of Global Warming

Link: http://friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=3 (via shareaholic.com)

 MYTH 10:  The earth's poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.
FACT:  The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica. 
Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise. 

The Totalitarian Impulse Rears Its Head

The Totalitarian Impulse Rears Its Head

via Power Line by John on 9/8/10

John
Gateway Pundit, via Glenn Reynolds, presents another story of suppression of free speech by liberals:

School officials at Palm Beach State College kicked members of the Young America's Foundation off campus after they saw anti-Obama literature at their table.

There is much more to the story, as reported by the Orlando Political Press:

On Tuesday September 7, 2010 at around 11:00am one Palm Beach State College (PBSC) student and two Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) members, state chairman Daniel P. Diaz and state vice chairman Eddie Shaffer, were shut down and had campus police called on them after tabling and recruiting during club rush at the College. The PBSC student, Christina Beattie, had received prior permission from college administrator Olivia Ford-Morris to promote her organization on campus via telephone and email communication.
On the day of club rush, officials approached the group and after seeing information about the organization and its ideals criticizing Barack Obama's economic policy. Ms. Ford-Morris was visibly disturbed by the material presented, published by the Heritage Foundation, criticizing President Obama's administration. College officials then called the campus police to assure the group left campus. Ms. Ford-Morris denied having ever talked to Ms. Beattie about giving permission to the organization to be a part of PBSC club rush.

This reminds me of an episode years ago, when Scott and I were just becoming politically active. There was a freshman orientation at the University of Minnesota, and campus organizations were invited to set up booths and pass out literature to solicit incoming freshmen to join. The Young Republicans had a booth and passed out anti-Clinton literature--it seems like only yesterday! Students who were running the event disapproved of the presence of conservatives, ordered the Republicans out and confiscated their literature. Their obviously illegal action was backed up by the then-Dean of Students, who wrote a rather astonishing letter to the effect that because the University of Minnesota is devoted to diversity, there is no room there for Republicans. Seriously. (BTW, it is a reasonable guess that most of the tax money that supports the University of Minnesota is paid by Republicans.)
Our friend Peter Swanson, at that time the President of the Republican group at the U of M, came to Scott and me, and we represented the college Republicans in pursuing claims arising out of the obvious infringement of their First Amendment rights. We won hands down, and one of the remedies we negotiated was that the head of the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota was required to attend First Amendment sensitivity training at the hands of a law school professor.
We have fond memories of that occasion, but the underlying reality is chilling. I really don't think most liberals have any respect for free speech as such, and if they had the opportunity, they would shut us all up or throw us in jail.

Lomborg Denies Global Warming Conversion - I Told You So

Lomborg Denies Global Warming Conversion - I Told You So

via Hit & Run by Ronald Bailey on 9/16/10

Remember the silly Guardian story from a couple of weeks back that breathlessly revealed that Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg had made "an apparent U-turn" on man-made global warming that "will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby." In an op/ed in The Wall Street Journal, Lomborg explains that The Guardian made it all up. (OK, maybe the British near-tabloid just exaggerated and very selectively quoted him.) In any case, Lomborg notes that a panel of eminent economists one of his Copenhagen Consensus Conferences in 2008 basically rejected the carbon rationing scheme that is embodied in the Kyoto Protocol as too costly and ineffective.

Last year, Lomborg convened another group of economists to rank proposed policies to address future warming. The panel found that geoengineering and R&D on low carbon energy technologies would be worth pursuing, but they still rejected carbon rationing. As Lomborg explains in his op/ed:

Our experts (including three Nobel laureates) identified a number of other approaches to the problem that were economically feasible and likely to have a quicker and more powerful impact.
The most promising involved massive increases in R&D funding for green energy technologies and geo-engineering. I spent a good part of last year and most of this year advocating for this sensible approach to solving global warming, which is "one of the chief concerns facing the world today," as I said in an Aug. 31 interview with the Guardian, the British newspaper.
What happened next was startling. The Guardian reported my commonplace observation as evidence of "an apparent U-turn" by "the world's most high-profile climate change skeptic." This set off a media stampede; news organizations around the world scrambled to report my so-called change of heart.
I tried to explain that I had always considered climate change to be a problem. The only thing that had changed was that we finally had some good solutions to consider. Some people took the point, but just as many didn't. As far as the latter group was concerned, I had finally seen the light, and that was that.
I suppose I should take some comfort in the fact that I've been accused of being both a denier and a warmist. But the polarized nature of the global warming debate is no laughing matter. Limiting the debate to only two valid positions—for or against—makes a constructive discussion impossible. If we truly want to make progress on climate change, we must acknowledge a middle way—one that recognizes that while we do need to deal with the reality of global warming, solutions based on worst-case scenarios will actually do more harm than good.
The smart middle path means making green energy so cheap everyone wants it. There's nothing confusing about it.

So no conversion to carbon rationing. I told you so.
By the way, Lomborg's plan to greatly expand government R&D on low carbon energy technologies is very similar to the plan being pushed by techno-optimistic environmentalists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger at the Breakthrough Institute. Both plans suffer from the same defects.
Government may simply be an inadequate (perhaps even counterproductive) technology for solving the problems posed by man-made global warming.

Sweet Liberty

Sweet Liberty

Let's suppose you were born with an inheritance, something that accrues to you by virtue of being born and being human.
It's something you can spend, but not directly, like a lot of cash.  But you can trade for it.  Let's say it is a beautiful, rare, exquisitely cut diamond.  You can wear it, but it's not quite suited for display.  It's just something you've always had, more precious than anything else you have except life.  And if you keep it, lifelong, your kids will be given equal ones when they're born, and then your grandkids too.
How would you go about safeguarding such a jewel?
Would you keep it always under your control, where you are the only one who has a say on whether it's kept or taken away?  Or would you trust politicians – politicians who btw are telling you they can keep your jewel for you by taking other people's jewel away and trading it to keep yours safe – to safeguard that jewel by putting yourself, your life and everything you own in their power?
I'm very afraid for a number of people the answer is the second.  And that the answer is the second for even one person scares me beyond reason.
I was watching Bill Whittles's excellent video Cannibals, which details our fiscal and cultural troubles.  I wanted to leave a comment (ended up not doing it because youtube drives me nuts on registering to do so) so I looked at the comments.
Comment after comment, with names like "proudfree American" said things like "I voted for Obama because I don't want to have to bear a rapist's child.  My body is mine and no one else can make decisions about it."
(A friend pointed out these are pathetic comments both in search of approval of like minded people, and sticking one in the eye of what they imagine to be the opposition. Let that stand for a moment.  I'll come back to it in the end.)
Abortion is, of course, one of those complex things.  It is not a natural right.  It can't be a natural right because a human woman in a state of nature who tries to abort will more often than not end up offing herself along with the child.  You could say infanticide is a natural right, as it has been practiced by most civilizations throughout the ages, less so in Judeo Christian lands, but impossible to stamp out just like murder is impossible to stamp out.  Of course it violates another person's natural right to life, but in the case of infants that is always iffy as "natural" as they require someone else to defend them.  So, it is a very complex thing, not from a moral but from a NATURAL point of view.
Let's leave aside for a moment that no one in this election – not even Todd Akin – ever said a woman BY LAW should bear a rapist's child.  What Akin (who is an idiot for the way he expressed himself and for walking into the matter at all) and the other guy said was based on their own moral judgment, involving "if it happened to someone I love."  Let's leave aside, also, that my answer would be rather similar to theirs, and it's more germane, since I CAN get pregnant.  (In theory.  Well, it happened once naturally.)  "If I got pregnant by rape, it's impossible to know what I would do, but it would be hard to get over the fact that the child DIDN'T commit the rape, and that what causes a man to become a rapist is not necessarily genetic otherwise every man and woman born would be a rapist, because we're all descended from rapists several times over.  Though I can't say for sure what my state of mind would be, there's a good chance I'd decide the moral thing is to keep the child.  Because I like children, because it would still be mine, and because it's not the child's fault."
That is not important.  It's also not important that while Mitt Romney made noises about abortion, the MOST he could do – and he wouldn't, any more than he would abolish the department of education.  That's not how DC works – is sent the matter back to the states.  And he NEVER said anything about outlawing abortion in cases of rape or incest.
Let's instead assume that it is right and just, always, for a woman to abort a rapist's child.  This right to "not carry a rapist's child in MY body" is not only NOT a natural right – it is one that depends on an advanced enough technology, a functioning economy, and no one being able to regulate what kind of medicine is practiced upon you.
There is an English proverb "He who pays the piper calls the tune."  Same thing.  Updated "you buy your CDs, you buy whatever music you want."  However, if the government is giving you free music, then you will listen to whatever they want you to listen to.  And it can change.
So, let's suppose that for these young women the most important thing in the world, truly is that if they should get pregnant  from rape – unless you extend rape to "changed my mind afterwards" a small enough chance – they should be allowed to abort the child.
Very well.
To secure this non-natural (because it requires functioning high tech) right they voted for the man who promised them this AND contraceptives for free.  I.e. they voted for someone who said they'd pay for what these women consider a need, so that the women can "control their own bodies."  Further, to secure this, this man – this party – is trying to make people against whose conscience it is to pay for such things… pay for them.  That is, they are willfully violating what is a natural right of other people: the right to not pay/endorse things that violates their conscience.
And these women think giving these group of people the right to pay for/decide what is done to them gives the women control of their own bodies.
It never occurs to them apparently that those who give them contraceptives/free abortions today can also deny them tomorrow.  Or that the fiscal mess Bill Whittle is talking about in the video means a diminishing level of wealth and therefore of tech.
What I mean is even if the government isn't lying to you – and frankly, after Benghazi how can ANYONE believe these people won't lie to you and with a straight face – their policies are almost guaranteed to make doctors flee the country in droves, or go into retirement.  They are also guaranteed to add a layer of bureaucracy that will delay everything.
The end result might be that you did in fact get raped – I understand in countries where law breaks completely down this is a risk women run from eight to eighty – and you got pregnant.  (Or you had a night of sex with your boyfriend and didn't take precautions, so you're being "punished with a baby.") You have a right to your free abortion.  Great.
Only the nearest hospital is chock a block with more urgent cases and the nurse practitioner who could have done it is full up for six months.  In six months it will be a high-risk abortion, and gee, we just don't have the equipment.  Maybe if you go to Mexico?  I hear they can do these same day, for ten thousand dollars.
Think this is unlikely?  This is almost guaranteed.
Other nightmare scenarios include the government running out of contraceptives.  (No?  When something is free, people get it.  And when it's free there's no incentive for companies to research better stuff OR to make it cheaper or more abundant.)  I once heard an – hilarious, because it wasn't me, and because these people had escaped – interesting story by a group of Russians, at the end of the USSR, discussing how this group of ten men shared a condom which they washed after sex and which, btw, the one of them who worked in a rubber plant patched more than once.  If you think that can't happen here, you have missed the fiscal mess we're in to which we're adding an unimaginable amount of debt for an "entitlement" that can't be secured without enslaving doctors and other health professionals to serve at the pleasure of the government.
So, suppose you run out of contraceptives and your ONLY contraception is abortion.  But the birth rate is going through the floor and our lords and masters become aware they won't have enough of a next generation to bear the massive burden of debt.  Think they won't forbid abortion?  Or they decide you're from a non-favored group and they don't want you reproducing at all, so they mandate that you be sterilized and your existing children killed.  Think it won't happen?  It's happening in China.  Google "dying rooms" China and children, and I hope you have a strong stomach.
You think it won't happen here?
Why do you think that?  Show your work.  Is your body any more sacred than other people's convictions?  Why?  Why should a government that has the power of life and death over you, a government that can literally decide that you're too expensive to keep alive and send you home with palliative care (no?  It happens practically everywhere the state runs medicine.  Maybe everywhere.  Reporting on these things is iffy) NOT make you bear a child because it suits the state's needs?
You were born with this special, priceless jewel: Liberty.
You can keep it – that includes covering the costs of it, both monetary and in informed citizenry – and get to decide what to do with it, and in which circumstances to apply it.  OR you can entrust it to people who lie and whose very nature is predicated on having power over you.
Whether the liberty is freedom of religion, of assembly, the right to bear arms – no matter what those rights are, entrusting them to the government is a bad idea.  All the more so when those "rights" require a complex, functioning civilization to be effective.  (For instance, I would not vote for a government that promised me free weapons, because I know how bureaucracies work and in the end I'd have the right to a chipped bit of flint.)
No, you do not have a right to your own body.  No one does.  You can't say "I won't bear this child" any more than you can say "I won't die from this cancer."  Both of them involve a complex civilization and other people's skill and knowledge to avoid.  And neither can be granted to you by a tyrannical government who HAS to control other people's work, intelligence and freedom of thought to grant you this.
You do have a right to your own mind, and that so many people have chosen to give up their natural right to inform themselves and make informed decisions makes me seethe.
My friend was right, on the people who commented on that video being special snow flakes in search of social approval.  Of course why they think that idiotic statement makes them sound "correct" is why we must speak out.  For too long we've let the idiots own the air and the soundbites, because we didn't want to rock the boat.  And what we've created is sort of a state religion, in which young people repeat platitudes that don't make sense, in the sure certainty of social approval.
It's time to start taking back their minds.  And then maybe they'll understand how to keep control of their bodies.  And maybe they'll understand the meaning of liberty.

You can't enslave a free man.
Only person can do that to a man is himself.
No, sir—you can't enslave a free man.
The most you can do is kill him.  Free Men by Robert A. Heinlein

I, Pencil -- the movie

The Limited Government Case Against Gay Marriage

The Limited Government Case Against Gay Marriage

Same-sex marriage advocates frequently appeal to our countrys limited government tradition to urge redefining the age-old, cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of husband and wife into a union where a husband or a wife is unnecessary. Government shouldnt tell people who to marry," they say.

Notwithstanding this arguments misleading claim (no one is telling" you to marry anyone-though a society with gay marriage will have the force of law to tell some opponents to participate), its premise is still troubling. Expanding legal marriage to include same-sex unions, far from being a victory for limited government, is inconsistent with it.

A limited government can remain limited only when citizens take responsibility for the consequences of their choices. The less people take responsibility, Benjamin Franklin observed, the more they need government. The same is true with marriage. Marriage as traditionally understood ensures that a man and a woman channel their attraction for one another into a stable, committed relationship that gives any children they have the best developmental benefit: a mom and a dad.

In the absence of an independent institution that holds men and women accountable for their relationships public effect-the having and raising of children-government must make greater expenditures to fight crime, improve the education system, enforce child support requirements, aid abandoned single mothers, and provide general social services.

To be sure, the increasing severance of marriage from procreation-not same-sex marriage-caused these problems. Same-sex marriage, however, represents a further break. Marriages purpose as the only institution that unites children with their mother and father disappears if a union for which that purpose is inherently irrelevant is also considered a marriage. The marital union is distinct in this regard.

Even infertile couples have the potential to conceive a child, and even those who use birth control can potentially conceive. A male-female couple fully open to conception wont conceive every time they mate, but same-sex partners never present this concern. Marriage as a legal institution would have to be geared toward something else to remain distinct if a husband or wife is no longer needed.

The new basis of marriage, same-sex marriage advocates tell us, is not procreation or sexual difference, but love. For them, the personal promises husbands and wives make to each other is the governments only reason to license (or not license) a marital relationship.

But if that were true, any relationship that has love and makes promises could also be regulated and licensed by government-including dating relationships and cohabitation-while also giving the government a rationale to criminalize adultery. Whats more, if the institution of marriage only exists to license love, then how can we justly discriminate between relationships characterized by love but that lack sexual relations-like two brothers who love and support each other, or two best friends who live together after their spouses died and raise a child? For same-sex marriage advocates, these relationships arent marital precisely because they are not sexual.

Many gay marriage advocates claim that part of the point of legalizing gay marriage is to get the government out of our relationships, yet in reality, it would expand government so as to discriminate in favor of relationships with sex partners versus relationships without sex partners. How is that not an intrusion? Traditional marriage is concerned only with public effects-so while other relationships may be fulfilling and loving, they arent marital because they do not advance societys interest in responsible procreation and child-rearing.

Perhaps more worrying, a likely result of redefining marriage is that it will ultimately mean nothing at all. If friendships, dating relationships, or any relationship that has love with a remote possibility of sex is all it takes for the government to choose (or not choose) to license its existence, nearly all relationships will constitute a marriage; and thusno relationship will constitute a marriage.

A society where marriage is divorced from its procreative purpose within a stable union is a society that neuters its ability to prevent predatory men from impregnating women and abandoning them and to ensure that men take responsibility for their offspring. And it denies the child an incontrovertible social benefit: a present mother and father.

In such an alternative society-where marriage is divorced from procreation-the government steps in to look after children and relationships. And why not? If same-sex advocates view government validation of relationships as the means to achieve their social legitimacy, why not also look to government to solve the social failings of relationships?

Ultimately, the argument for same-sex marriage attempts to appeal to the personal promises we husbands and wives make to each other. But it only uses this course of reasoning because it cannot appeal to societys reasons for establishing marriage laws in the first place. Yet when debating whether or not to license something, we cannot let our emotions determine the extent of government power. Government power that lacks a logical limiting principle-as the argument for same-sex marriage does-is inconsistent with limited government. To support limited government is to support traditional marriage.

William J. Haun is a lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Saving Savita from Gravely Misleading Abortion Politics - By Kathryn Jean Lopez - The Corner - National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/333543/saving-savita-gravely-misleading-abortion-politics-kathryn-jean-lopez (via shareaholic.com)

"The lack of precise medical details included in media coverage of the Savita Halappanavar case does indeed make it difficult to offer a cogent moral analysis of what transpired," Reverend Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center cautions. "If it were the case, for example, that she suffered from a serious placental infection unable to be controlled by other remedies, it would have been allowable to induce labor under a proper application of the principle of double effect. Such an action would not constitute a direct abortion, but maternally directed therapy to remedy the infection, with the secondary, unintended effect that the life of the child would be lost."
As is so often the case in tragic situations, one family's tragedy has become a cultural one too, leading to misrepresentations and pouring salt in painful wounds. In being a leading defender of the lives of the most vulnerable, the Catholic Church does not insist on the forgoing of medical treatment to suffering women. We do no one any good by adding a myth-based debate over the Catholic Church to an already awful situation.

Savita’s tragic death could have been avoided – UPDATED

Link: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2012/11/15/savitas-tragic-death-could-have-been-avoided/ (via shareaholic.com)

Was it because an abortion was refused?  Maybe not.

Eff you, it's my blog: Time to realize what you voted for. Update: Instalanche!

Link: http://effyouitsmyblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/time-to-realize-what-you-voted-for.html

Philosophy aside, it is important to realize that elections have consequences. One of the consequences of this election is that Obamacare is here to stay, at least for a while. It is too inherently unworkable to stay for long, but it isn't going away in the next few years. Live with it.
Liberal contract attorneys might want to consider what "live with it" means. Under Obamacare, companies with 50 or more full-time employees either have to provide them with government-approved health insurance policies, or pay a per-employee fine. Further, the fine kicks in at the 31st employee, not the 51st, and it starts at $2,000 per year per employee. It goes up later. Companies, therefore, are discouraged from having full-time employees, or at least 50 or more of them. Hello, part-time employment. Think I'm fucking with you? Think again.
While you're thinking again, start thinking about the industry in which you work. Obamacare, unlike other government regulations, defines a full-time employee as one working 30 hours a week. Every temp agency in town worth a shit has 50 people working "full-time" in any given year under that definition. If you think that temp agencies will give you employer-funded health insurance that meets Obamacare standards (hint: lots of mandates make insurance less affordable), you are delusional. They already didn't offer comprehensive insurance, which was cheaper before Obamacare started affecting rates, so they won't start now. ....Temporary employment as we know it is unlikely to survive Obamacare, at least as it is currently structured. That's not my opinion, that's what temp agency heads said to Congress. I suggest you read the entire transcript. These guys have a pretty good idea of how Obamacare will fuck their industry and, by extension, you.
But don't worry about them. Maybe they're full of shit. Maybe you'll be fine. Or maybe you're fucked. but hey, that's what you voted for.

Edward Niedermeyer: Romney's Plan Would Also Have 'Saved' Detroit - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578090461206142072.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

When the president forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy court, the White House's auto task force used the process to execute a prearranged reorganization it had masterminded with political allies. By contrast, Mr. Romney called for a true bankruptcy, in which creditors and stakeholders negotiate reorganization together, with the government merely providing the minimum support needed to prevent disorderly liquidation. In retrospect, Mr. Romney's approach not only would have produced outcomes superior to the president's, it was actually the braver course of action.

To understand why, it is necessary to examine GM and Chrysler's behavior in the weeks and months that preceded their bailouts. Thanks to inept management and a rapacious union, GM and Chrysler had been shedding market share and jobs for decades before the credit crunch of 2008 brought the global economy to its knees. Despite rocky shores and rough waters, the managements of GM and Chrysler and their United Auto Workers partners never imagined they would have to pay the true cost of their failure to compete.

In fact, when Mr. Romney's op-ed was published in November 2008, the leaders of both GM and Chrysler were insisting that "bankruptcy is not an option," because they were sure nobody would buy a car from a bankrupted company, despite both having already repeatedly begged Congress for a government bailout. Industry watchers later discovered that, despite an emergency transfusion from the Bush administration, the auto makers never prepared contingency plans before President Obama decided to initiate a bailout and reorganization.

This failure to prepare bankruptcy plans was more than inexcusable mismanagement, it was akin to blackmail. Without responsible preparations in place for a worst-case scenario, GM and Chrysler could argue that unless the government intervened they wouldn't be able to secure financing for a bankruptcy in the necessary time frame. They would have to liquidate their holdings and assets, which would jeopardize if not crush America's entire auto-manufacturing supply chain.

....

The White House auto task force pushed a dealership cull on the auto makers that eliminated over 2,000 GM and Chrysler dealerships, forcing tens of thousands of Americans onto unemployment rolls, all with no appreciable benefit to either company.

Making matters worse, the Treasury Department issued notices which let "New GM" acquire $45 billion in tax write-offs from its defunct predecessor, a blatant violation of basic bankruptcy law. This not only deprived the government of billions in tax revenue, it hid the true cost of the bailout while disproportionally benefiting the UAW, an unsecured creditor.

By giving the UAW's unsecured claims against GM and Chrysler a higher priority than those of secured creditors, the government's reorganization further damaged bankruptcy precedent. The net result was a $26 billion transfer to a key Democratic ally and political donor, according to analysis by scholars from the Heritage Foundation and George Mason University.

GM and Chrysler could have averted tens of thousands of lost jobs, and the government could have preserved billions of dollars in tax revenue, by undergoing a true bankruptcy reorganization, even if the government had provided full debtor-in-possession financing.

In a true bankruptcy guided by the law rather than by a sympathetic, rule-bending political task force, GM and Chrysler would have more fully faced their competitive challenges, enjoyed more leverage to secure union concessions, and had the chance to divest money-losing operations like GM's moribund Opel unit. True bankruptcy would have lessened the chance that GM and Chrysler will stumble again, a very real possibility in the brutally competitive auto industry.

Michael Tanner: In Disaster Relief, Bigger Government Isn't Always Better - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204846304578090873245350506.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h (via shareaholic.com)

The wind and rain from Hurricane Sandy hadn't even stopped before some people argued that the storm made the case against reducing the size of the federal government or giving states more say in their affairs. The federal response to a crisis became the proxy for big government in all its bureaucratic glory. Cutting government, we were meant to understand, means letting Sandy's victims fend for themselves.

This is the classic straw-man gambit. To argue in favor of smaller or less costly government is not to demand no government at all. Opposition to, say, the federal government granting $505,000 to a thriving company that makes pet toothpaste and shampoo doesn't lead inexorably to opposing disaster relief. Calls for reforming a Medicare program that is at least $38 trillion in debt aren't tantamount to saying that the storm-stricken people of New York and New Jersey should be on their own.
An old trick of governments at all levels is to respond to the prospect of spending cuts by announcing that they will lay off teachers and firefighters first. By targeting the most essential services, they try to assure that public outcry will keep the tax dollars flowing. Equating disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with big government and big spending in general represents the same old scam.

The federal government spent $10 billion on disaster relief last year. That amounts to roughly 0.002% of federal spending. It also suggests that an awful lot of federal spending could be cut before we put FEMA under the knife. One might even argue that a smaller, leaner and more efficient government could better offer services such as disaster relief. A government that tries to do everything is liable to do nothing particularly well.

....

Mitt Romney is being attacked in some quarters because he suggested in a 2011 debate that some federal disaster-relief functions might be shifted to the states. Critics claim that this means he simply doesn't care about people affected by disaster—that he is putting dollars and ideology before people's lives. But might not a more locally focused disaster-relief program make sense?

After all, much of the federal government's relief efforts simply amount to shifting funds from one part of the country to another and back again. Yesterday New York paid for assistance to Louisiana; today Louisiana pays for assistance to New York. Is that necessarily the most efficient way to accomplish our goals?

FEMA essentially represents a centralized "command and control" approach to disaster relief. It presumes that only the experts in Washington—not state and local officials, and certainly not private charities—know best how to respond to local needs and conditions.

In the wake of Katrina and other disasters, there have been numerous stories of federal officials rejecting offers of assistance—from Coca-Cola KO -1.48% offering to send water, for example, or private organizations trying to deliver hospital supplies—because those offers didn't fit neatly into the bureaucratic script. Initial indications do suggest that with Hurricane Sandy, federal, state and local coordination has been better. But that doesn't argue against giving more authority, and more responsibility, to those actually in the affected areas.

The bottom line: Big government is seldom the same as effective government. That applies as much to disaster relief as to anything else.

How to Crack a Wi-Fi Password

How to Crack a Wi-Fi Password

via Lifehacker on 10/19/12

Cracking Wi-Fi passwords isn't a trivial process, but it isn't difficult. Learn how it works so you can learn how to protect yourself. More »

10 Questions a Pro-Choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media – Trevin Wax

Link: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2012/10/24/10-questions-a-pro-choice-candidate-is-never-asked-by-the-media/ (via shareaholic.com)

These really deserve some thought, and where the question admits to a yes/no answer, justify the answer.

1. You say you support a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices in regards to abortion and contraception. Are there any restrictions you would approve of?
2. In 2010, The Economist featured a cover story on "the war on girls" and the growth of "gendercide" in the world – abortion based solely on the sex of the baby. Does this phenomenon pose a problem for you or do you believe in the absolute right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy because the unborn fetus is female?
3. In many states, a teenager can have an abortion without her parents' consent or knowledge but cannot get an aspirin from the school nurse without parental authorization. Do you support any restrictions or parental notification regarding abortion access for minors?
4. If you do not believe that human life begins at conception, when do you believe it begins? At what stage of development should an unborn child have human rights?
5. Currently, when genetic testing reveals an unborn child has Down Syndrome, most women choose to abort. How do you answer the charge that this phenomenon resembles the "eugenics" movement a century ago – the slow, but deliberate "weeding out" of those our society would deem "unfit" to live?
6. Do you believe an employer should be forced to violate his or her religious conscience by providing access to abortifacient drugs and contraception to employees?
7. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. has said that "abortion is the white supremacist's best friend," pointing to the fact that Black and Latinos represent 25% of our population but account for 59% of all abortions. How do you respond to the charge that the majority of abortion clinics are found in inner-city areas with large numbers of minorities?
8. You describe abortion as a "tragic choice." If abortion is not morally objectionable, then why is it tragic? Does this mean there is something about abortion that is different than other standard surgical procedures?
9. Do you believe abortion should be legal once the unborn fetus is viable – able to survive outside the womb?
10. If a pregnant woman and her unborn child are murdered, do you believe the criminal should face two counts of murder and serve a harsher sentence?