Captain’s Log, Stardate 188220.7194.
Our advance team has returned from surveying the damage on the planet Susanoo, in the Izanagi system. Hotaru, a massive, long-dormant volcano, has erupted, destroying six cities in the Miyazaki prefecture and taking the lives of 50 million Susanoons. The air quality of approximately one third of the planet is degraded, and carbon capture devices have been deployed to clean the air worldwide.

The population of Susanoo has mobilized, sending food, medical staff, and military personnel to the affected islands to quell riots, search for survivors, beam them to safety if stable enough, and use shuttles to transport those who are critically injured. Additional aid is arriving from Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, the other Class M planets in the Kamiyonanayo galaxy. Americans are sending a fleet of starships to rebuild the destroyed cities and to protect Susanoo from Saracen pirates, who have arrived en masse and are conducting raids of the Hotaru ruins.

Fear is widespread on Susanoo. The eruption of Hotaru appears to have destabilized the thorium reactor near the planet’s core. Along with the other reactors in its chain, it provides approximately 50% of the power for the planet. While thorium is not as dangerous as other radioactive materials, there is concern that waste containment vessels could crack, leaking waste into magma and putting millions at risk of radiation poisoning. Scientists and military personnel in HAZMAT-theta suits are beaming into a containment facility near the planet’s core to attempt repairs to the reactor.

Read More →

Your Vote Does Not Count
Your vote does not count. You are one of hundreds of millions of people in the United States, and there is no way that your single vote actually makes a difference. Don’t vote. It’s a waste of time. There’s not that much difference between the two anyway.

A few months ago, as my libertarian leanings sputtered to a halt and I found myself comfortable in the more concrete world of mainstream conservatism, I read an article in The Freeman that really got on my nerves, because it advanced the idea above, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it, but I knew intuitively that it wasn’t quite right.

Think of voting as sort of like the lottery, except that the ticket price is your time spent, and if your ticket is the winner (i.e. your vote is a tiebreaker), your grand prize isn’t a brand new car or a bazillion dollars. (By entering this contest, each entrant releases and discharges the State and any other party associated with the development or administration of this contest from any and all liability whatsoever in connection with said election lottery, including without limitation legal claims, costs, injuries, losses or damages, demands or actions of any kind. Prize to be rewarded in monthly installments of increasingly lower value, unless and until State declares bankruptcy or decides to change the rules. By accepting this prize, the winner grants to State the right to use the winners name, address and/or likeness for advertising and trade purposes without further compensation to or permission from the winner.)

No. Instead you get a lousy politician who is (if you’re lucky) marginally less bad than the alternative. Congratulations. Break out the bubbly, hire a stripper, and pretend that what happens in Vegas won’t follow you home like a cheap vodka hangover, a bad tattoo, and a raging case of the clap (actually, I don’t think that a metaphor is necessarily necessary here, so take that as literally as you like).

Read More →

Confirmation Bias and You

“It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.” -Francis Bacon

You and I share something with one another, with President Obama, with Rush Limbaugh, with the Dalai Lama, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Sarah Palin, with Angela Merkel, and with every musician, movie star, plumber, prostitute, stamp collector, sergeant-at-arms, and unemployed underwater basket weaver in the world.

We all able to ascertain patterns, draw conclusions, and make predictions.

This pattern-finding ability is one of the distinguishing marks of humanity. Homo sapiens is man the thinker; perhaps we are, more accurately, Homo exemplum cupitor, man the pattern-seeker. (I am assuming that my decades-unused high school Latin skills are at least slightly accurate. If not, corrections are welcome.)

Pattern-seeking is one of the behaviors that makes humans, as a species, so successful, and it leads to the victories and the quirks that we, as individuals, manifest. It leads to the soaring success of some cultures and the unfortunate decline of others.

In this piece, I will be examining something called confirmation bias, which has given us protection from predators (and the corollary ability to be good ones), virgin sacrifices, psychics and spiritualists, conspiracy theories, and much more.

Read More →

”[When] men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them…there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

For years, I identified myself as a libertarian. I was even a Libertarian for a while. That is to say, I was a registered member of the Libertarian Party for about six months (Here is their platform). I’m not a Libertarian anymore, though, and I’m not really a libertarian either.

In the past, I’ve said that government should function, essentially, as a shell for society, arguing that things from medical research to local parks are a misuse of taxpayer money. I still advocate for limited, constitutional government, but there is a difference between the limits placed on the federal government by the Constitution and the limits placed on government at every level by libertarian ideology. Government, especially at a federal level, has the capacity to be destructive, but I think that there are many things that the government can provide better than anyone else and, for the sake of the civil society and healthy communities, should do so. (Parks, again, are the obvious example.)

At this point, there is a distinct possibility that you are groaning internally, because this may seem like a self-indulgent piece of philosophico-political puffery. For one thing, it is about libertarianism, a notoriously self-indulgent subject. For another, its author used a capital letter to distinguish between libertarianism and Libertarianism–in the first paragraph.

I hope that you’ll read on, however, if you’re interested in why I no longer buy into libertarianism or its ill-conceived, majuscular manifestations.

Libertarianism is an idiosyncratic and relatively new movement (between 40 and 60 years old, depending on where you start). It is based on the ideas of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman (a hero of mine), F.A. Hayek (whom I admire), Leonard Read (author of the brilliant essay “I, Pencil”), Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and possibly the author of the Little House books), and a few others. Most of the thinkers whose ideas form the backbone of libertarianism were radicals of one stripe of another, and this may explain why it is likely to remain a fringe movement, except when its palatable, realistic ideas can be integrated into the Republican Party platform.

Read More →

From the diaries…

Last week, the House Committee On Financial Services announced that Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Ron Paul (R-Crazytown, TX) would hold a hearing “to examine the impact of Federal Reserve policies on job creation and the unemployment rate”. The hearing is scheduled for tomorrow, February 9, and in their press release, the committee says that witnesses “will be announced at a later date”.

Well, the witnesses have been announced. Here is the agenda, and it is clear, for anyone who had doubts, that Ron Paul is going to use his subcommittee for the sort of political theater that makes the GOP look bad and reinforces stereotypes about conservatives being extremists. Dr. Paul, we want those committee assignments back.

Read More →

Midmorning on January 8, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona, Jared Lee Loughner, an unemployed 22-year-old, opened fire on a crowd in a Safeway parking lot, murdering six individuals and injuring over a dozen others.

In what appears to have been an assassination attempt, Loughner shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head, point blank. As of this writing, Congresswoman Giffords has survived the attack, thanks to the expertise of her doctors and the extraordinary, manmade miracles that we regularly receive as a consequence of advances in medicine. Imagine if this had happened a century ago. Giffords, it is almost certain, would have died en route to a dirty hospital or very soon after her arrival. After all, penicillin, something so basic that we take it for granted, was discovered and made available during World War II, and it is hard for us today to understand just how far medicine has come since then.

Many people have asked why Loughner targeted Giffords and murdered six others. Clarence Dupnik, sheriff of Tucson’s Pima County, attributed it to intolerance and the tone on talk radio, asserting that, “[T]he vitriol that comes out of certain mouths, about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.” Loughner, according to this line of thinking, was an unbalanced person reacting to inflaming rhetoric. We’ll call this the media hypothesis.

Some members of the media immediately blamed the shooting on Sarah Palin and various tea party groups. According to this narrative, political conservatives, Governor Palin in particular, were responsible for the murders. Interestingly, Congresswoman Giffords was, herself, quite conservative by many standards (a “Blue Dog Democrat), and the pogressive website Daily Kos included her on a list of “targets” for political primaries). Let’s lump these together and call them the political hypothesis.

Loughner’s friends, however, have said that he wasn’t particularly political. He wasn’t an avid watcher of news programs and didn’t listen to talk radio, and they don’t believe that he was influenced by Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. In fact, his favorite books (according to his YouTube account) were Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Some have said that Loughner used to be a pretty normal kid, but that his personality changed abruptly after a breakup with a high school girlfriend. Let’s call this the heartbreak hypothesis.

I’d like to offer an alternate hypothesis, one that it pretty obvious but unpopular with pundits and politicians, because it doesn’t have a solution and doesn’t offer the opportunity for a program that they can push: Jared Loughner is insane.

Read More →

Hi all, I’m relatively new to RS and may be speaking out of turn, but the last week has been a bit disheartening after the major gains that we made on November 2. In particular, the sniping between libertarians and social conservatives has become heated, and I don’t think that this will do much to advance the goals that everyone on Red State shares (trolls excluded).

We run the risk, I think, of being like T.S. Eliot’s hollow men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

In the past week, as Red Staters have been debating whether libertarians or SoCons are bigger stupid-heads and whether, “I know you are, but what am I?” is a solid argument, news junkies have followed the following stories:

• TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine
• Cancer surviving flight attendant forced to remove prosthetic breast during pat-down
• California Bond Woe Bodes Ill For States
• $11,000 fine, arrest possible for some who refuse airport scans and pat downs
• The U.S. Police State Outrages Continue: Why is the TSA strip searching little boys
• Voting Irregularities in Alaska?
• North Koreans Unveil Vast New Plant for Nuclear Use
• Critics Slam Obama Administration for ‘Hiding’ Massive Saudi Arms Deal: Largest Arms Deal In U.S. History Pushed While Congress In Recess
• Japan to send non-combat troops to west island in response to China navy maneuvers in East China Sea – Nikkei

As of Friday, according to National Debt Tweets, the National Debt stands at $13,788,455,142,118.05. That is approximately $39K for every individual in the United States and does not include the $107,000,000,000,000 ($107 Trillion) in unfunded liabilities that the United States had on the books before the passage of ObamaCare.

In Charlotte, NC, where I live, the local schools are going through the pain of cutting ~10% ($100mm) from their budget. This has led to the closure of a number of failed schools, the consolidation of others, and the relocation of successful programs into better facilities (My children’s school was involved in one of these disputes, which is why I didn’t make the time to write or comment on RS for a short period.) Because the student body at the failing schools is predominantly minority, racial tension has increased unpleasantly. This is likely to happen in other cities as well, since cuts in education spending will become the norm in coming years, according to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a recent event hosted by AEI.

The President of the United States is, in all likelihood, a closet socialist. I used to think that this assertion was hyperbolic, but between his political choices and his biography, I don’t think so anymore. I’m about halfway through Stanley Kurtz’s shocking new book Radical-In-Chief, and it has convinced me that we are dealing with someone much more hard left than most people realize. (Victor Davis Hanson shares this assessment.)

All of this points to the fact that the republic is in trouble. This is nothing new, and it has been the case since FDR and, arguably, Wilson. But we are at a greater risk than ever that America might not be America for much longer.

The Republican Party is the only thing standing between the United States and the tyranny that would ensue should our system of government fail.

Europe is barely democratic anymore, and our grandchildren are likely to see it become Eurabia, as Muslims become a majority and remake the culture in their image. Japan is likely to shrink into relative obscurity, and China, one of the least democratic countries in the world, is on the rise. To survive, Russia will probably have to become more totalitarian, and South America has never been a bastion of liberty.

Now more than ever, we are the last, best hope for man on earth.

In order to protect our way of life, Republicans must win a significant governing majority in both chambers of Congress and the White House, and then we must hold our representatives’ feet to the fire on those issues that pose an existential threat to the United States: the size and power of the Federal government, Federal spending, free markets (that are appropriately regulated), the mutability of the Constitution, and the stability of entitlement programs (Fully funding Social Security and Medicare would require an immediate 81% tax increase on all Americans).

Only once we have secured two of the branches of government for a significant period of time will we be able to impact the judiciary enough that they practice something akin to federalism and judicial restraint.

Debates about fiscal and social issues are important, and if we don’t have them, we won’t be able to build a cohesive, strong platform. If, however, we engage in ad hominem attacks, then we will not hold together long enough to develop strong candidates, win the victories that are necessary, and govern as we must if we are to prevent America from becoming a failed state.

It’s that serious.

The Republican Party is a coalition of Fiscal Conservatives, Libertarians, Moderates, NeoCons, PaleoCons, RINOs, Rockefeller Republicans, and Social Conservatives (arranged alphabetically, not in order of importance). Clearly, there are certain groups that most Republicans would prefer not to see elected (and I’m thinking here of RINOs and Rockefellers), but the money, activism, and votes of individuals from all of these groups is essential to our success.

In order to win, we must get out the entire Republican vote and convince enough independents to push us over the top, one election at a time, one state at a time, one district at a time, one precinct at a time (Read Cold Warrior’s excellent posts for information about how important precincts are). I don’t think that we need to dilute our substance to win and win big, but we have to be presentable.

We need to be seen as the people who the overwhelming majority of us are: Just regular, tax-paying, patriotic, freedom-loving, kind, giving, charitable, decent individuals– soldiers and firefighters and police officers and social workers; doctors and bankers and lawyers and small business owners; construction workers and plumbers and roofers and union members who have been disenfranchised by their leaders. We are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and non-believers.

We are America, and the more we treat one another with respect and amity, the more we will win. We more we treat one another with disrespect, the more we will lose, and as we go, so goes America.

No group or individual should shout down another. Let’s leave that to the other side.

At no point should we speak toxically. Let’s leave that to the other side.

We should not call one another names or be disrespectful. Let’s leave that to the other side.

They’re better at these things than we are.

By now, we’ve all heard about the TSA debacle of forced nude photography and the overt, unapologetic molestation of airline passengers (To read what most observers consider the definitive account, click here or here).

The people in charge of this country, we can say with a high degree of confidence, are crazed, craven, or both. How can anyone think that invading the privacy of millions of decent Americans is a good idea?

I don’t understand how any individual–conservative, progressive, libertarian, centrist, liberal, apathetic, whatever–can think that our policy is a good one. Even if it weren’t a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment (and it is), it’s just icky, to put it mildly.

This morning, I saw a horrible story that occurred here in Charlotte. A flight attendant who was a cancer survivor was searched, groped, and ultimately required to remove her prosthetic breast in order to placate the TSA stooge who had been assigned to her, just so she could go to work. The full story is here.

I no longer want to fly, at least not until airports go back to being places where a man has to go into a bathroom stall and start tapping his toes to begin a dangerous liaison.

Flying isn’t something that I do a whole lot anyway, but when I do, it’s great–the crowd in the airport, everyone a bit alert as they move between where they are and where they want to be; that feeling in my stomach when the wheels leave the ground; the pleasure of looking down from hundreds of feet in the air, knowing that for millennia, men could not do this. It helps me to remember how lucky I am to be alive today, instead of living before the mid-twentieth century.

I have, consequently, re-ranked the best forms of travel to see what I would choose before getting on an airplane. If I have left anything out, please point out my omission in the comments.

Forms of travel that are better than flying, thanks to the TSA
1. Dirigible
2. Pick-up truck (I drive)
3. Car (I drive)
4. Ride shotgun (Driver must be sober for me to consider this option)
5. Train
6. Hovercraft
7. Bus
8. Horse-drawn carriage
9. Rickshaw (similar to horse-drawn carriage, but would seem weirder)
10. Horseback (may cause almost as much bruising as an enhanced pat down)
11. Walk
12. Dogsled
13. Wheelchair/Bicycle
14. Tied to flock of migrating birds, preferably songbirds (messy)
15. Carried aloft by army of zombies (dangerous, especially if current skirmishes become full-fledged zombie war)

(Cross-posted at The Joy of Reason.)

Earmarks
Yesterday, U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced his support for a two-year moratorium on earmarks, a form of appropriating money that is deeply unpopular with the Republican base, particularly those who associate themselves with the Tea Party movement.

The amount of money that goes to earmarks is large, as far as my family’s budget is concerned (about 15 or 16 billion dollars), but as a percentage of the federal budget, it’s quite small. It’s around 0.4% of the total budget and 1% or so of the discretionary budget(1).

In many ways, banning earmarks is a symbol, and if Congress can figure out how to use different tricks during the appropriations process, tracking this money could theoretically be more difficult under a no-earmarks rule than the current system, which is why I applaud the move, but with realistic expectations and a hefty dose of skepticism.

If you’re a no-earmarks person and this is your big issue, go ahead and break out the party hats, hang some streamers, and maybe have a few slices of layer cake. But don’t swallow too much champagne, and for the love of God, keep away from the mixed drinks at the bar (It may look like an open bar, but you’ll get the bill later). Considering the history that we (and by “we”, I mean the human race) have with politicians, we’ll need to stay sober and clear-headed to deal with whatever accounting/appropriations tricks they may invent the days ahead.

Codpieces
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Transportation Security Administration(TSA), if you’ve ever wanted to be on a reality show, all you have to do is travel, and you can be the star of Who Wants To Be the Next Unpaid Nude Model?!

Read More →

Yesterday was the beginning of a sea change in American politics. One of this morning’s headlines should be: “REDISTRICTING IS COMING”.

Before 11/2/10, a majority of state legislatures were controlled by the Democrats: D – 27, R – 14, shared power – 9.

After 11/2 (as of 1pm on 11/3/10), a plurality are controlled by Republicans: D – 16, R – 25, shared – 6, undecided – 3.

Both legislative houses flipped in AL, ME, MN, NC, NH, and WI. Republicans are in control of North Carolina for the first time since 1870, Alabama for the first time since 1876.

They have a two-house supermajority (>60%) in 15 states: AZ, FL, GA, ID, IN, KS, MO, ND, NH, OK, SD, TN, TX, UT, WY.

Of the 25 states that Republicans now control, 18 use the state legislature to redraw congressional districts every ten years: AL, FL, GA, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, WI.

Maine uses a non-partisan program to come up with redistricting recommendations, and the legislature ultimately approves it.

In 10 of these redistricting states, Republicans now have a dual-house supermajority: FL, GA, IN, KS, MO, NH, OK, TN, TX, UT.

Here are the tables, updated with the freshest data available. Source here.

I’m something of an HTML novice and couldn’t make the state-level tables work very well on here. If you’d care to see more legible versions, please view the version cross-posted at my website, The Joy of Reason.

Read More →