Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of ...

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

At Least Its Not Europe

As much as I complain about politics and policy in the US I have to occasionally acknowledge that the EU is far worse.

THE Government is seeking to prevent an EU directive that could extend broadcasting regulations to the internet, hitting popular video-sharing websites such as YouTube.

The European Commission proposal would require websites and mobile phone services that feature video images to conform to standards laid down in Brussels.

Ministers fear that the directive would hit not only successful sites such as YouTube but also amateur “video bloggers” who post material on their own sites. Personal websites would have to be licensed as a “television-like service”.
God forbid that someone would get the opinions of an unvetted amatuer with a camcorder.

The EU's obsession with controlling every aspect of everything has got to backfire sometime.

Doesn't it?

How Has Blogging Changed You

However, I really do think that daily blogging has made me think more about a panoply of issues, insofar as I have had to deeply examine why I think what I think if I am going to be making arguments in public. Further, reading a great deal of rabidly partisan blogging (from both sides of the aisle) has enhanced my distaste for such approaches to politics. That distaste has extended to other media. For the longest time I was quite the consumer of political talk radio, but for almost two years I have found my interest in such to have radically waned. I mostly listen to sportstalk now.

Much of this seems to apply to me as well. I can't even stand to listen to NPR anymore; the half-truths and barely hidden spin simply drive me bug-nutty. The deeply partisan blogs, from Daily Kos to RedState, are an instant turn off.

I'm not sure if it is the state of partisanship these days or the fact that I have taken some serious time evaluating my own viewpoint that shallow analysis just turns my stomach.

For those of you that write or discuss politics on a regular basis do you see any similar effects on yourself?

HatTip: ProfessorBainbridge

Happy Anniversary to Me

One year ago today I posted my first blog entry to this site.

Since that time I have posted 452 entries and had 8000 visitors from six continents. That is certainly not a lot by most standards but I'm quite proud that my odd little hobby has generated so much interest.

The last month, especially, has been quite good. KipEsquire added me to his Elite Eleven. Tons of attention to my fisking of Kos's Libertarian Democrat crap has elevated me to Crunchy Crustacean in the TTLB ecosystem and I've hit the top 100,000 at Technorati.

You know you have made it when you've been linked as an example of an extreme libertarian!

Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting and thanks for making this fun enough to do for a whole 365 days!

TSA Has Head Up Ass

Recently an airport security guy confiscated my 4 ounce shampoo container because he said the maximum allowed is 3 ounces. I pointed to the airport’s own sign that says 4 ounces is allowed, but that didn’t seem like a good argument to him. It was too late to check my bags, so he confiscated my mostly empty 4 ounce container.

But here’s the interesting part. The container is semi-transparent, and contained obviously less than 1 ounce of liquid. Apparently the empty portion of the container posed a threat. Or to put it another way, as we humorists like to do, the airport confiscated my 3 ounces of nothing so that I couldn’t use that nothing to blow up the plane.When

When are passengers going to get so fed up with the lawlessness of the TSA and revolt? When security guards can't even take their own instructions about the non-threat of shampoo seriously, its time for a change. Revoke the TSA mandate to screen passengers and let airlines do their own thing.

The airlines have far greater insentive to make sure their airplanes don't blow up than the TSA does and it is long past time that we let them do it.

Science LOL

When you actually read the concerns about using clones for food you really have little choice but to roll your eyes.

The available science shows that cloning presents serious food safety risks, animal welfare concerns and unresolved ethical issues that require strict oversight,

Um - science doesn't raise any ethical issues and government certainly doesn't have any place legislating ethical issues - next!

I had also thought that science was supposed to rely on empirical evidence. What evidence shows that clones provide a 'serious food safety risk?'

Industry scientists derided the petition's safety concerns, built largely on a theoretical possibility that subtle genetic changes seen in some clones may alter the nutritional nature of meat.

I guess the group that is presenting this concern doesn't believe in evolution then does it? After all, the theory of evolution is based on the 'theoretical possibility that subtle genetic changes seen in some clones may alter' a species - up to and including the change in the nutritional nature of meat.

Cloning Burgers

How can you read this news and see anything but positive?

The FDA is currently set to allow beef and milk from cloned animals onto the market. Further, the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals.

Wow! Eliminating genetic diseases and increasing the yield and quality of product is going to be a huge boon, lowering cost for food yet again.

Yet somehow, there are those that don't like the fact that they might be eating a cloned cow, which I just don't understand. A cloned cow is, by definition, exactly like an uncloned cow!

What point does labeling have? You might as well force farmers to label whether or not they harvested the corn on a Saturday or a Sunday since it has exactly the same impact as cloning does.

When a policy does nothing more than allow people to act on their hatred of technology then its certainly a bad policy.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Privacy, Schmivacy

Polls show that Americans think they are losing their privacy, but most don't seem to care.

When pollsters ask Americans about privacy, most say they are concerned about losing it. An MSNBC.com survey, which will be covered in detail on Tuesday, found an overwhelming pessimism about privacy, with 60 percent of respondents saying they feel their privacy is “slipping away, and that bothers me.”
...
Only a tiny fraction of Americans – 7 percent, according to a recent survey by The Ponemon Institute – change any behaviors in an effort to preserve their privacy. Few people turn down a discount at toll booths to avoid using the EZ-Pass system that can track automobile movements.
And few turn down supermarket loyalty cards. Carnegie Mellon privacy economist Alessandro Acquisti has run a series of tests that reveal people will surrender personal information like Social Security numbers just to get their hands on a measly 50-cents-off coupon.

This doesn't suprise me at all. The media and politicians keep repeating that Americans are losing their privacy, but the average American doesn't know what the hell they are talking about.

If they rephrased the poll questions to ask "Do you care if Madison Avenue knows what you bought for lunch last week?" the answer is going to be a resounding 'meh.'

Most of the data that corporations have about us is really inconsequential. And if it means that you get to buy your Cherios for a couple cents less that's a price that most American's are willing to pay.

Taxing an Illusion

You know that bureacrats have become overly self-important when they seriously consider taxing virtual transactions.

Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of real-world authorities.

Seriously? From a purely intellectual point of view it would be interesting to see consumption dry up after taxing was imposed. It would be a real life illustration on the damaging effects of government policy.

Who knows, such a move could spawn an entire generation of libertarians and other small government types.

More likely, though, is that the US is going to chase out any semblence of internet presence out of the country. Between the anti-gambling legislation, this and any other nonsense that the Fed thinks up, the US is going to appear very hostile to internet companies.

HatTip: Greg Mankiw

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Fun Facts For Nutjobs

Plane crashes into building on 10/11/6 - turn it upside down and you get -

Government Conspiracy!!!!

Climate Hate Crimes?

Some are proposing that skepticism about the effects of global warming and climate change should be illegal.

Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry.”

Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

When proponents of "environmentalism" want to limit debate and punish those that disagree with them how can you call it anything but religion?

All scientists should be skeptics, that's the only way that science moves forward.

Update: Just to be clear - this guy is not a climate change scientist. In fact he isn't really a scientist at all, which should be clear given that he doesn't understand that all scientists should be skeptics. Unfortunately, scientists aren't running the policy debate on climate, nutballs like the one above are, and they view the environment as something to be worshiped as opposed to a resource that we should all value, but consume as a resource.