My Favorite Teacher's Failure as Object Lesson on the Importance of Learning History Properly

I can distinctly remember the sense of doom I felt when I drew the topic for my research paper/presentation out of the hat. It was my senior year in high school in my favorite class with my favorite teacher, and what could have been a fun and fascinating project quickly turned into a deepening sense of dread for the hours and hours to come, slogging through a topic I had no interest in.

Mr. O’Brien was my favorite teacher. He taught my 10th grade English class, and he was funny, smart, motivated, and one of the few bright spots in my otherwise wasted three years at the central Minnesota school. I had the benefit, or perhaps misfortune, of having lived in Colorado until then and had a taste of a truly excellent high school, so I knew just how terrible things were. Mr. O’Brien’s class was one of the few things I didn’t hate about Minnesota.

In senior year, he taught Humanities, which was a full year survey of the sum total of human history through art, music, and philosophy. It was thrilling. I can still remember learning about Platonic Forms for the first time, and thinking how odd the entire concept was.

Sometime after winter break, it was time to start work on our big research papers, from which we were also to craft a presentation for the class. The trouble was we couldn’t pick our own topics. Mr. O’Brien put numbers in a hat which was passed around the class. As someone picked a number, they shouted it out and Mr. O’Brien read off the corresponding topic as he wrote it on the blackboard. It was a crazy amalgam of topics from “The Hohenzollerns” to “The Great Wall of China” to “The Battle of Marathon,” none of which we had covered during the year. I sat in suspense and apprehension as the hat was passed to me. I don’t remember what my number was, but I certainly remember the topic: Mary, Queen of Scots.

This was perhaps the first time I had ever heard the name. I didn’t know what to think, but I was a bit worried. Other students were similarly perplexed and concerned. “But what do you want me to write about the Great Wall of China?” someone asked. “Whatever you want,” Mr. O’Brien replied. “What is a Hohenzollern?” a kid named Randy asked. “Go look it up,” was the reply.

I checked out some books and started reading, and it was an incomprehensible mess. All I could find was what seemed to be soap operatic accounts of he said/she said, he betrayed/she betrayed. I didn’t have an iota of context for what was happening or why. So I put it together the best I could, got my ‘A’, and that was that. I walked away knowing just as little as I did before.

What was Mr. O’Brien thinking? It wasn’t until recently that I thought of this episode again, and came upon a theory. I think he was attempting to rectify the terrible lack of classical education we all had. I never took history, even in Colorado; it was all Social Studies, and therefore, basically worthless. It was an endless stream of disconnected facts, rote memorization, and a healthy spattering of multiculturalism. Mr. O’Brien’s Humanities class was designed to give us a taste of what we had been missing all along, and the research papers were just a part of that. But in lobbing contextless topic grenades at us in the hopes of getting us to dig deeper into history, he failed miserably. His assignment violated the hierarchy of knowledge, leaving us flailing away in a pool of sinking concretes (a mess of facts that, rather than helping to form a concept, piles up and sinks out of sight, out of mind.)

I had thought then that the presentation portion was training to help our public speaking skills, and it likely was to some extent. But I suspect that as each topic was designed to get us to dig deeply in one area, the presentations were meant to teach the other students about the topics they didn’t research themselves. Then after the whole exercise was completed, we would theoretically all be richer for it. This also failed miserably.

A few students got juicy topics that were easy to grasp, or to which they already had some context. “The Battle of Verdun,” in comparison, would have been a cakewalk to anyone who had seen an old war movie. The majority of topics were as disconnected from our context of knowledge as was mine, and the other students got as little out of the exercise as I did. As a result, their presentations were as superficial as mine was, and thus no one got anything out of anything.

The tragedy of all of this is that these topics are fascinating, if you have the right contextual knowledge. I applaud and respect Mr. O’Brien for what he did for me in that Humanities class--and even for what he was attempting with the research papers--but in trying to rectify over a decade of mis-education in history by forcing random topics on us with little guidance and almost no historical context, he was hanging us out to dry.

What a shame it was that I had no idea who Mary, Queen of Scots was, or why she was even worthy of study. If I had only known about the English Reformation and Henry VIII, and about his establishment of Anglicanism and the later reign of Bloody Mary who set about trying to reclaim England for the Pope, I would have understood Mary, Queen of Scots and her conflict with Elizabeth. The intrigues with Spain and the other powers in Europe would have made sense, and in the wider context of the Reformation on the Continent, the struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism would have made the story that much richer.

Instead, I spent weeks of work in a haze, reading, writing, practicing my presentation, all the while having no idea why anything I was doing had any value at all. I felt somewhat betrayed by Mr. O’Brien back then, since such an arbitrary exercise didn’t fit in with the otherwise logically constructed course. Looking back on it now, I understand what he was trying to accomplish, and why he failed.

The "Public Option" and Education (Live Oaks)

Check out The "Public Option" and Education at Live Oaks. Brian Phillips offers a great analysis of the proposed health care "reform" by drawing parallels to government schools, while stressing the importance of thinking in principles.

Australia Defeats Cap-and-Trade

Robert Tracinski reports that "In a potential preview for America, the Australian Senate has just defeated that country's version of cap-and-trade by a vote of 42-30." Tracinski notes that while most media coverage predictably ignores the real reasons behind the defeat, concentrating on the mining lobby and other causes, he says:

In fact, the bill was defeated because there is now serious disagreement in Australia on the very existence of human-caused global warming. That's the backbone behind the collapse of what was supposed to be bipartisan agreement. As Senator Nick Minchin put it in a blistering speech opposing the bill, "this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming… The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century."

I hope Tracinski is right that this could be a preview for America. But as I discussed this previously,

our own Congress and press would do well to follow in Australia's footsteps. Nancy Pelosi is set to try and ram the Waxman-Markey bill through the House today, and she'll probably succeed. Hopefully enough Senators will show the same intellectual curiosity that Australia's [Senators] did, and defeat their version of the bill. Doubtful, I know.

Happer Testimony on Climate Change

William Happer, distinguished Princeton physics professor and former director of energy research at D.O.E. (apparently fired by Gore for not going along with politicized science), testified before a Senate committee chaired by Barbara Boxer on February 25, 2009. [HT: Doug Reich]

I was very impressed by the quality of his ideas and presentation, debunking the climate science that is being taken as gospel by the administration, and the resulting need to "do something!" to fix it. His arguments are carefully structured, accessible to the scientific layman, and he weaves in historically analogous situations to support his points. I can't recommend it highly enough (though I wish he would have stopped before writing the last two paragraphs.) As an anecdote unequivocally proving the potency of the speech--you only need one data point for proof, right?--I sent it to a friend, who sent it to his girlfriend, who sent it to her father, a retired oceanographer, and he is now afire with new ideas questioning all sorts of old notions.

Here are a few choice quotes, but they don't do the speech justice. I recommend downloading the PDF from this site and printing it out. You'll want a pen handy to underline key points. It's that good.

On Gore and causality:

Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises, the temperature also rises. Doesn’t this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2? Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up.

There is a delay between a temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years. This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because of the fundamental concept of causality. A cause must precede its effect. For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o’clock, and by about 7 o’clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o’clock because the house got warm at 7 o’clock.

On the corruption of language, and thus of concepts:

I keep hearing about the “pollutant CO2,” or about “poisoning the atmosphere” with CO2, or about minimizing our “carbon footprint.” This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving “pollutant” and “poison” of their original meaning.

On the folly of trying to claim there is some "ideal" concentration of CO2 that we must go back to:

I remember being forced to read Voltaire’s novel, Candide, when I was young. You recall that Dr. Pangloss repeatedly assured young Candide that he was living in “the best of all possible worlds,” presumably also with the best of all CO2 concentrations. That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2 concentrations seems to be a tacit assumption of the IPCC executive summaries for policy makers.

But one of my favorite parts comes early in the speech where he talks of the futility of past efforts to to change the climate by wishing.

The climate has changed many times in the past with no help by mankind. Recall that the Romans grew grapes in Britain around the year 100, and Viking settlers prospered on small farms in Greenland for several centuries during the Medieval Climate Optimum around 1100. People have had an urge to control the climate throughout history so I suppose it is no surprise that we are at it again today. For example, in June of 1644, the Bishop of Geneva led a flock of believers to the face of a glacier that was advancing “by over a musket shot” every day. The glacier would soon destroy a village. The Bishop and his flock prayed over the glacier, and it is said to have stopped. The poor Vikings had long since abandoned Greenland where the advancing glaciers and cooling climate proved much less susceptible to prayer. Sometimes the obsession for control of the climate got a bit out of hand, as in the Aztec state, where the local scientific/religious establishment of the year 1500 had long since announced that the debate was over and that at least 20,000 human sacrifices a year were needed to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, and to stop climate change. [bold added]

Although the Bishop of Geneva's praying obviously worked -- wait... what was that about causality? -- the thought of someone praying in front of a glacier to make it stop made me chuckle. Then today, a friend sent me a link to some National Geographic photos of Indonesian cultures living near volcanoes. He was fascinated by the first photo, which is truly breathtaking. But I was amazed at seeing these human beings, living on earth, today, praying to volcano gods. The last photo was perhaps the most striking, taken along with its caption:
This man is praying to stop mud, just like the Bishop prayed to stop the glacier, and the Aztecs sacrificed thousands to their gods. Now the environmentalists and their friends in power are looking to march the economy, and therefore all of us, up to the top of the temple to sacrifice us to their climate god via Cap and Trade. Rather than appealing directly to faith, these last claim to fly the flag of science, all the while persecuting those who disagree with their hysterical claims as if this were an auto da fe.

If you're at all interested in this issue and would like some good points to bring up when you hear the typical "Denier!" assertions, or if you know someone on the fence who might be just active minded enough to listen to reason, you'll want to read this testimony and pass it on.

Tax Withholding is the Threat Here?

In the WSJ today, Charles Murray comes out strongly, forcefully, against taxes. Wait, I mean against tax withholding. But first, he sets the stage, listing the dire threat he sees:

America is supposed to be a democracy in which we're all in it together. Part of that ethos, which has been so essential to the country in times of crisis, is a common understanding that we all pay a share of the costs. Taxes are an essential ingredient in the civic glue that binds us together.

Our democracy is corrupted when some voters think that they won't have to pay for the benefits their representatives offer them. It is corrupted when some voters see themselves as victims of exploitation by their fellow citizens.

By both standards, American democracy is in trouble. [all emphasis mine]

OK, Charles, I got it. We're all in this together, bound by the happy glue of taxes, but we're in danger if some people feel one way about them and another group feels another way. And the key source of the conflict is not how much we're all paying, why we're forced to pay it, or whether the government has a right to take our money at all, but that payroll taxes and withholding hides from us the true weight of our dutiful burden. Observe:

For once, we face a problem with a solution that costs nothing. Most families who pay little or no personal income taxes are paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. All we need to do is make an accounting change, no longer pretending that payroll taxes are sequestered in trust funds.

Fold payroll taxes into the personal tax code, adjusting the rules so that everyone still pays the same total, but the tax bill shows up on the 1040. Doing so will tell everyone the truth: Their payroll taxes are being used to pay whatever bills the federal government brings upon itself, among which are the costs of Social Security and Medicare.

The finishing touch is to make sure that people understand how much they are paying, which is presently obscured by withholding at the workplace. End withholding, and require everybody to do what millions of Americans already do: write checks for estimated taxes four times a year. ...

End the payroll tax, end withholding, and these corrosive misapprehensions go away. We will once again be a democracy in which we're all in it together, we all know that we're all paying a share, and we are all aware how much that share is. [bold added]

I have to hand it to him. He's taken up a whole column in a very good newspaper writing urgently about a non-problem, proposing a non-solution. What's he really getting at with all of this? He mentioned "corrosive misapprehensions" and the poor feeling like the rich aren't paying their share while the rich feel like victims... all of these feelings are threatening our democracy!

While it's clear that his typical view of democracy is bad in itself--he seems to say that anything the government does is OK as long as a majority votes for it, and the only concern is that the voting is "honest" and runs smoothly--and that he pays no heed to individual rights or the fact that our country is a republic, the subtext of his whole piece is more instructive. The key to understanding this is to see that his essential worry is group polarization. I've had occassion to refer to the following quote from Ayn Rand a lot lately. People like Murray and Cass Sunstein keep returning to this idea, raising it as a vague threat to civil society, and holding Ayn Rand's points in mind is essential to being able to detect what they're really trying to do:

An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate . . . .

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? . . .

It is doubtful—even in the midst of today’s intellectual decadence—that one could get away with declaring explicitly: “Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares; “Don’t let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight’s object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of “polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts. [Ayn Rand Letter, italics in original]

Go back and read Murray's piece with this in mind, and his evasiveness will jump out at you. There is no there there. As I said earlier, it's a non-solution proposed for a non-problem, with some "we're all in this together" collectivism thrown in for good measure.

I wonder, and perhaps commenters could weigh in: What is the point of his piece? Is he trying to distract people from real issues? Is the root of his non-argument "Why can't we all get along?" Or is he really so deluded as to think that he's promoting actual ideas?


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Update: Thanks for the link, Billy.

Objectivist Roundup #109

Welcome to the August 13, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Roundup, your weekly dose of intellectual fuel and ammunition.

This roundup features posts by blog authors who are students and advocates of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. She called it a "philosophy for living on earth" and further described it:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

Considering the events of the day, as socialized medicine is in danger of being pushed through, you may notice that most of the posts below deal with politics. But note that they all share a common philosophical grounding in Objectivism, and consistently promote individual rights and the socio-economic system of laissez-faire capitalism to protect those rights. Such is the value of this roundup--weekly commentary on crucial issues from a rational, individual rights perspective. Oh, and don't miss the hidden gems on induction, art, and parenting.

And with that, I am pleased to present Objectivist Roundup #109!

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1. Kevin W. presents On "Destructive Efforts" posted at Wisecracks and Wisdom, saying, "A breif examination of the language and false premises of the universal health care debate."


2. Noah Stahl presents Help Wanted: "Difference" a plus posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Corporate America was once criticized for its alleged culture of conformity and tacit support of "glass ceilings" preventing minority advancement. Now, a day hardly goes by in any corporate setting without mention of the importance of "diversity." Nearly all major companies name diversity as among the central values of their corporate philosophies – PepsiCo strives to "Win with diversity and inclusion," while American Express declares that "Diversity is our business formula for success.""


3. Miranda Barzey presents Protest Letter to the White House posted at Ramen & Rand, saying, "I couldn't resist the chance to turn myself into the government for opposing Obama's healthcare plan openly."


4. Roderick Fitts presents The Importance of Concepts for Bacon posted at Inductive Quest, saying, "A technical summary of Bacon's approach to concept-formation and induction, with some interesting conclusions about logic to conclude."


5. Diana Hsieh presents Reporting Myself posted at NoodleFood, saying, "I report my "fishy" opinions on health care reform to the Obama Administration's Minister of Propaganda."


6. Stella presents So what can't wait, exactly? posted at ReasonPharm, saying, "The Democrats' urgency is not to change health care now, but to get Americans to agree to the change they want before they've had a chance to figure out what a disaster that would be. This is how con artists operate!"


7. Ari Armstrong presents Meet the 'Mob:' Longmont Protests Obamacare posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "Watch these videos from the "Hands Off My Health Care" rally in Longmont, CO, including "Longmont CO Health Ralliers Reply to Democratic 'Mob' Charge.""


8. Edward Cline presents Obama’s DNC Mouthpiece posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "On August 8, I sent this letter to the Democratic National Committee. The letter from Jen O’Malley Dillon -- obviously a form letter prepared for emailing to countless Citizens X for or against ObamaCare -- is reprinted in italics in its entirety following my response to it. Dillon’s letter is as impersonally comforting and assuring as a spam notice that you have a fantastic amount of money sitting in an account with the Bank of Lagos, ready to be wire-transferred to your stateside checking account, if only you would send the undersigned your private banking details. My response does not attempt to counter or refute every assertion, charge, and lie in Dillon’s letter, just the more egregiously offensive statements."


9. Sarah presents The Sculpture of Michael Wilkinson posted at Art, Love, & Philosophy.


10. Paul Hsieh presents Health Rationing in Oregon posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "Will this be the future for the rest of the US?"


11. Rational Jenn presents Encouragement vs Praise Update posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "This is a follow up to my post of last week, on the use of encouragement instead of praise with children. There's great discussion in the comments, too."


12. Trey Givens presents Fun Tweets About Obama's Health Care Plan posted at Trey Givens, saying, "Barack Obama and his minions have launched websites and Twitter themes around their health care "reality checks" in which they continue to spin fictions around their government-funded health insurance pyramid scheme. In response, I sent some reality checks their way in 140 characters or less."


13. Sylvia Bokor presents Capitalism vs the Welfare State: The Next Vote posted at Sylvia Bokor Comments.


14. Jared Rhoads presents Letters to Congress posted at The Lucidicus Project, saying, "If you write to Congress, remember to tell them what you are for, not just what you are against."


15. Bill Brown presents Review of Meltdown posted at The New Clarion, saying, "Review of "Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse" by Thomas Woods, Jr."


16. Doug Reich presents Simplistic vs. Complexistic posted at The Rational Capitalist, saying, "A recent scientific revolt against climate alarmism and a psychological study of climate "deniers" provides an excellent example of the stark contrast between those who employ the scientific method and those who do not."


17. Mike Zemack presents Potter's Revenge posted at Principled Perspectives, saying, ""It's a Wonderful Life"...or is it?"


18. Doug Reich presents Obama's Scare Tactics through a Jaundiced Eye posted at The Rational Capitalist, saying, "The Left has been smearing opponents of the health care bill as an uninformed, irrational mob, while posing as rational expositors of Truth. In reality, it is precisely the opposite. There is a deeper philosophical explanation to this recurring use of the argument from intimidation."


19. Gus Van Horn presents Switch and Pitch posted at Gus Van Horn, saying, "President Obama's idea of allaying our fears over medical insurance 'reform' is to liken it to the Post Office!"



20. Michael Labeit presents On the Mathematical Inadequacy and Parasitism of Socialism posted at Coroner's Bureau, saying, "Why socialism is an affront to logical/mathematical demonstration that depends, ironically, upon capitalism to survive."
    


21. Although it wasn't submitted, I'm including a post from John Lewis titled The Health Care Bill: What HR 3200, "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009," Says posted at Principles in Practice. Lewis says in the post, "What does the bill, HR 3200, short-titled 'America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,' actually say about major health care issues? I here pose a few questions in no particular order, citing relevant passages and offering a brief evaluation after each set of passages."

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That concludes Objectivist Roundup #109. Next week's host is The Rule of Reason. Submit your blog article to the Objectivist Roundup using our carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: Objectivist Roundup, blog carnival.

Papal Reign, Papal Reign

While listening again to the recorded lectures from Scott Powell's European history course on the way into work this morning, I heard something that made me burst into song and then into laughter.

In 1294, during a period of crisis in the papacy, Pope Boniface VIII came to power after the abdication of Celestine V. He later had Celestine imprisoned, and began clashing with the very powerful king of France, Phillip IV.

So where is the funny in all of this? Scott said, as he was describing this,

His actions cast a cloud over his papal reign.

Of course, at this, I started singing

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted to one time see you laughing
I only wanted to see you laughing in the papal reign

Papal reign papal reign
Papal reign papal reign
Papal reign papal reign

Talk of popes always puts me on the edge of laughter anyway because it is such an absurd institution. And for those playing at home, Phillip IV eventually had Boniface kidnapped, then installed his own pope who up and moved the papal seat to Avignon in France. (Châteauneuf-du-Pape, anyone? It's delicious.) And later there were antipopes and anti-antipopes. Hilarious. Do you think if you got the pope and antipope together in the same room, the universe would collapse in on itself?


Update:
Well in advance of Christmas, a special collector's edition of the movie is being made available. Here is the promo of the DVD cover:

Boaz: Calling for Limited Government is Not Racist

I read this execrable NYT op-ed by Paul Krugman today and just didn't have the stamina to tackle it; sometimes it's just too much, ya know? Luckily, David Boaz at CATO did. He starts off nailing the fundamental issue:

Some people on the left can’t see any excuse for opposition to collectivism except racism. (Which is, of course, as Ayn Rand said, “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”) [link in original]

Then he quotes someone who calls the Obama/Joker poster racist because it uses the "urban" makeup from the Heath Ledger version instead of the "urbane" makeup of Jack Nicholson's version, saying it plays on racial fears. WHAT?! "Urban" Joker makeup? Boaz appropriately says such a view is "ridiculous."

He uses as an example some criticism of a 1999 book by Cass Sunstein called The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, making the parenthetical aside, "(and you wonder why Obama chose him?)." The quoted author, Tom Palmer, portrays Sunstein's style of argument perfectly:

[I]mmediately after gallantly conceding that ‘‘Many critics of the regulatory-welfare state are in perfectly good faith’’ they turn around to tar all critics of the welfare state with the charge of racism: "...There are many possible answers, but inherited biases — including racial prejudice, conscious and unconscious — probably play a role. Indeed, the claim that the only real liberties are the rights of property and contract can sometimes verge on a form of white separatism."

And in the closing paragraphs Boaz states the case clearly:

The classical liberal ideas of individualism, individual rights, property rights, “negative liberties,” and limited government date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. They find their roots in the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the higher law, the Scholastic thinkers, the Levellers’ ideas of self-ownership and natural rights, the political theory of John Locke, the economic analysis of Adam Smith, and the political institutions of the American Founding. To suggest that the case for freedom and limited government — or the application of that theory to contemporary proposals for the expansion of government — must be attributable to racism is uncharitable, ahistorical, thoughtless, and indeed contemptible.

It cannot be the case that every parody of a president who happens to be black is racist. [bold added, links dropped]

And finally, he notes some significant cracks in the dike:

The good news for advocates of limited government is that our opponents are displaying a striking lack of confidence in the actual arguments for their proposals. If they thought they could win a debate on nationalizing health care, or running trillion-dollar deficits, they wouldn’t need to reach for such smears. [bold added]

Definitely read his whole article, The Boys Who Cried “Racist”.

A Spark in Dry Tinder

Last night I had a 20 minute conversation with my 5 1/2 yr old daughter as I was tucking her in. We heard a firecracker go off somewhere in the valley and she asked what it was. "Some fireworks," I said.

"Dad," she asked in that tone of voice where I knew I was in for it, "why can't we light fireworks?"

From there proceeded a discussion that spanned everything from voting, to laws including ones we may not agree with, to taking risks in violating silly laws and the potential for "getting in trouble" by doing so, to petitioning and grassroots organizing, and most fundamentally, individual rights. Actually, the last in that list was the first thing mentioned.

"What does 'illegal' mean?" she asked, when I told her that fireworks were banned in Massachusetts. I told her that the government said that we couldn't light them because some people thought they were dangerous, and so they made a law that said no one could light them.

A. responded, "but if we want to, and we don't hurt anyone and we're careful, why can't we do it at our own house?" After I shed a tear or two of pride, I said that I agreed that we should be able to. A. said, "As long as we're not nasty we should be able to light off fireworks if we want to and decide that it's OK." That's my girl! A 5yr old's definition of individual rights... I guess we must be doing something right!

"Why could that person light fireworks if they're illegal?" she asked.

"They made the decision to try it in the hopes that a policeman wouldn't drive by," I replied. "They took a risk, figuring they wouldn't get caught. But if someone called the police, they could get in trouble."

...more wheels spinning... "Dad, why could they have the fireworks after the 4th of July parade if it's illegal?" Man, she doesn't miss a thing. I tried to explain that they had to ask permission and fill in forms and the like, but that was a bit much. She switched tracks and tried to plan for how we could let everyone light fireworks.

She talked about how we should simply find enough people to vote for her ideas and then we'd be able to light fireworks at our house. She said "the next time I set up my lemonade stand, we should have people vote about this." No, kiddo, that's not how voting works.

"OK, we'll cut out circles of paper with lines for their names," she said, as she always reduces problems to art projects, "and they can put their first name on one line and their last name on another line, and their address, and then we can put it together and get them all to agree to vote for fireworks." So she has deciphered how grassroots organizing is done and wants to take up petitioning. We talked about about the scale of the prospect, how many people would need to be convinced, but "thousands or millions of people" is a floating abstraction to one so young. Thus the lemonade stand idea. Hey, all politics are local, right?

Then she came up with the Chicago strategy, and said, "We can get people who want fireworks to vote 5 times every time someone else votes against it."

"Well," I replied, "what if the people who didn't like fireworks then said that they should vote 8 times for every 5 we voted?"

I could tell she was sorting that out, and I added "We need to vote once for every person, it's like being fair." It can be quite difficult to translate abstract principles into kidspeak, but she seemed to get it.

We talked about the idea that people have inalienable rights (thank you School House Rock for introducing that concept... though this is a big topic that will come up again) and that even if people voted for something that doesn't mean it's right; that if we have a right to light fireworks at our house as long as we're not "nasty," then laws can keep us from doing it but those laws are wrong.

After 20 minutes of this, I must admit that I was exhausted. The sound of distant fireworks had sparked a raging fire in her active mind, and I was barely able to keep up. She went from an implicit understanding of individual rights to the workings of a representative government and the conflicts that can arise, to grassroots organization, and all I did was try to keep up and help guide this train of thought.

I made sure to tell her mom all about it after I went downstairs, because this conversation will likely spawn millions of questions, numerous works of art, and some highly complex (and oddly convoluted but well planned) crafts over the coming days. I knew she'd want to be prepared.

She observed, when I told her how proud I was of A. for immediately stating a principle of individual rights without my prompting, "Isn't that how kids should see the world when raised in a rational, normal household? Isn't the other view a result of having their independence and reason beaten out of kids as they grow up?" Yes, that sense of life should be the normal one. Thinking about this again today, I'm reminded of what Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, a sentence that is one of the most optimistic, benevolent, positive statements I've ever heard.

“To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started.”

It has always made me think of the end goal and the process of getting there, but now I can look at the beginning of it and the brilliance of such a vision in my children.

Hiroshima as Rorschach Test

Required reading in high school twenty years ago was the book Hiroshima by John Hersey. I remember being appalled at the graphic scenes of death and destruction. And because I also grew up in the era where actual teaching of history was replaced by social studies, I had very little context for evaluating whether dropping the atomic bombs was justified or not. I had seen enough old movies to know we had fought the bad guys for the right reasons, and I even knew that the assertion was that Truman dropped the bombs to prevent more American deaths from an invasion of Japan, but Hiroshima was very compelling--not enough so to convince me to condemn the bombing as immoral, but most of my classmates did. It wasn't until years later that I went back to the topic and sorted it all out.

Warren Kozak writes in today's Wall St. Journal that on this, the 64th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the historical event "has become a Rorschach test for Americans. We see the same pictures and we hear the same facts. But based on how we view our country, our government, and the world, we interpret these facts in very different ways."

While attempting to present a balanced argument, contrasting both sides of the debate, he clearly thinks that the risks of an invasion to American lives and the calculation that dropping the bomb would force a surrender were more than sufficient justification for the action. It's worth reading his whole argument.

But if the topic interests you and you're curious about the details of the war with Japan, how America's actions were rationally self-interested and thus some of the most moral in the history of war, and how Japan came to be one of the freest, richest countries on Earth mere decades after near total devastation, run, don't walk, to The Objective Standard and buy the article "Gifts from Heaven": The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945, by John Lewis. From the free bit you can see on the web:

The victory over Japan remains America’s greatest foreign policy success. Today, we take for granted a peaceful, productive, mutually beneficial relationship with the Japanese people. But this friendship was earned with blood, struggle, and an unrepentant drive to victory. The beneficent occupation of Japan—during which not one American was killed in hostile military action—and the corresponding billions in American aid were entirely post-surrender phenomena. Prior to their surrender, the Japanese could expect nothing but death from the Americans.

If there is one historical event that every American should study, beyond the American Revolution and the Civil War, it is America’s victory over Japan in World War II. Even more than the victory in Europe in the same war—in which we divided Germany with the Soviets—the victory over Japan remains the cardinal example of a complete, unambiguous, and fundamentally unshared American military victory.

Recruiting Government Informants

It seems that the White House is now looking for Soviet-style informants to report on their neighbors if they hear anything negative about government plans for health care. Here is a blog post from whitehouse.gov:

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM
Facts Are Stubborn Things
Posted by Macon Phillips

Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things."

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to "eliminate" private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

For the record, the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them. He has even proposed eight consumer protections relating specifically to the health insurance industry.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. [underlining in original, bold added]

I hear that people are sending protest emails to this address, so my guess is that it will be shut down soon.

As crazy as this all seems, this fear of rumors is exactly the kind of thing that Obama and Cass Sunstein hold as a basic guiding premise. Sunstein has been fighting "extremism" and rumor for well over a decade by making vague statements or even writing entire books insinuating that such things are a dire threat to "deliberative democracy."

In Sunstein's book, Why Groups Go To Extremes, he presents the following non-arguments and insinuations about the Internet and extremism, a line of pseudo-reasoning that applies just as well to his fear of rumors (p. 15-16):

Many people have expressed concern about processes of social influence on the mass media and the Internet. ...

If certain people are deliberating with many like-minded others, views will not be reinforced but instead shifted to more extreme points. This cannot be said to be bad by itself—perhaps the increased extremism is good—but it is certainly troublesome if diverse social groups are led, through predictable mechanisms, toward increasingly opposing and ever more extreme views. [emphasis added]

When is "increased extremism" good, in his view? He cites the abolitionist movement as a prime example. When is it... troublesome? Perhaps when people criticize the government's attempt to nationalize the health care market?

I shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes out of the Obama administration, but I honestly didn't expect that they would ask citizens to rat each other out to the secret police. As Myrhaf has said,

Once again, Obama’s radical ideology puts him at odds with reality. It’s uncanny how he gets everything exactly wrong. Barack Obama is Bizarro #1 from the Silver Age Superman comics. Bizarros live on Htrae instead of Earth and get everything backward. They do the opposite of what rational humans would do. [bold added]

It's hard to do, but if you'd like to predict the next absurd move the administration will make, try to think of what should be done, then flip it upside down in the most irrational way you possibly can, and then assume that whatever you come up with will still pale in comparison to what actually happens. Just don't write down or speak any of your predictions, because nosy neighbors good citizens might be listening.

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Update:

Gus Van Horn has a good commentary on this issue, and also addresses Obama's fascination with rumor, but from a more fundamental angle. He quotes Ayn Rand on the nature of second-handers and ties that back to Obama's views and goals:

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: "Is this true?" They ask: "Is this what others think is true?" Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull.

Does that last paragraph not sound familiar? And does it not almost perfectly characterize the form which Obama hopes political "debate" will take? Obama does not really have a self, and he hates those of us who do. [emphasis in original, links dropped]

The concern with rumors, "extreme" views, and the anti-concept of polarization can be understood through the lens of second-handedness. "Is this what others think is true?" is the only question worth asking to them.

By the way, it is fascinating to read Ayn Rand's characterization of "polarization" from the early 1970's because it perfectly describes nearly everything that Cass Sunstein has written in the past 10 years.

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what?

An Environmentalist's Hero

The Sunday Denver Post tells of a 41-year old man who hiked into the Rocky Mountains to starve because he "hated the materialism and greed that, in his view, prevented people from connecting with nature. And he was frustrated that he could not change that." [HT: Ari]

So, in a story that has dark parallels to the book and film "Into the Wild," this philosophical former Denver disc jockey and Silverton coffee-shop owner, went into the wilderness of western Colorado last summer to think through this quandary — or to die.

"He couldn't figure out how to make people change so they were not so caught up in money and cars and big houses and all that," said his sister, Jovanka Mersman, of Colorado Springs. "He ultimately ended up checking out."

What a brave environmental hero, right? Our evil natures are killing the planet, so unless he could come up with a solution, the only alternative was a slow, painful suicide. It is truly tragic that he didn't live long enough to read Doug Reich's "Corpses for Change" proposal. That would have been right up his alley.

He kept a "meticulously updated" journal, but sadly, it appears that we will never learn about his innermost hallucinations thoughts. It "was soaked by the 20 feet or so of snow that had entombed his body through the winter. The few decipherable words gave no clue to his thoughts."

One can only imagine what insane ramblings this journal contained. Surely, however, it would have been reprinted millions of times and been on Oprah's bestseller list.

What this guy did to himself reminds me of that terrible film, The Happening, except that instead of some mysterious substance that causes people to commit suicide for the sake of the planet, it was the toxic, literally death worshiping, ideas of environmentalism itself that drove this guy crazy.

20 More Words Against Socialized Medicine

Paul Hsieh quotes Amy Ridenour's nicely compact argument against "universal" health care, saying, "The point bears repeating: Coverage does not equal care."

Ridenour's formulation, which I would call "pretty good," follows:

To meet budget targets, governments reduce payments to providers and to buy equipment. This reduces the supply of people willing to provide health care services (doctors, nurses, medical staff and support) and the supply of equipment (hospital beds, diagnostic tools, etc.). Shortages develop, and those who are sick or injured, suffer.

They find themselves with health care coverage, but without health care.

The great thing about this is how short it is, and that, as far as it goes, it accurately represents one side of the economic question of government controls. For me, however, I'd like to see it expanded to briefly touch on the other side of this type of government intervention.

Ridenour correctly stresses how restrictions imposed by budget cutting in a government-controlled market will disincentivize producers (from docs to devices to drugs) from entering the non-market. This is one part of the way central planners cause shortages. But equally important is how artificially low prices--the price control scheme of "free" "universal" coverage--dramatically increase demand. Both of these market distortions contribute in a predictably destructive feedback loop to cause severe shortages. ¹

My expansion of Ridenour's argument, in only 82 words, is:

To meet budget targets, governments reduce payments to providers and to buy equipment. This reduces the supply of people willing to provide health care services (doctors, nurses, medical staff and support) and the supply of equipment (hospital beds, diagnostic tools, etc.). Meanwhile, the idea of "free" care leads to artificially high demand as people flock to the now understaffed, underequipped clinics. Shortages develop, and those who are sick or injured, suffer.

They find themselves with health care coverage, but without health care.

Government promises don't equal bread on your table or clothes on your back. Government health coverage doesn't equal health care. In fact, government's destruction of the free market in health care will inexorably lead to less care for everyone.


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1. See "The Flawed Economics of Socialized Medicine" for a detailed look at this phenomenon.