There’s a new book
Category Archives: Philosophy
James Lovelock
We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.
What he doesn’t (or at least didn’t) understand is that they want civilization, and humanity itself, to fail.
The Grounding Of The Dreamliner
…is a sign of a threat to innovation:
The Dreamliner’s troubles reflect a wider trend. Innovation in mature economies such as America’s seems stuck in a perpetual holding pattern.
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has warned about this slowdown for years.
“There is so much incrementalism now,” Thiel said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “Even back in the ’90s there were companies like Amazon that were willing to do big things. That has gone out of fashion now.”
Thiel points to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and the electric car company Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), both run by Elon Musk, as the rare examples of recent attempts to leap forward boldly. Yet Musk often gets portrayed as a quixotic dreamer.
“I think this reflects the insanity of our country, that anything non-incremental is seen as insane,” Thiel says.
Who’s responsible for this perceived downturn in innovation? One obvious target is overweening government. Some Boeing defenders have charged that the FAA wildly overreacted by grounding the Dreamliner.
“They are trying to make us too risk-averse,” says Gordon Bethune, a retired airline executive who worked for Boeing and later ran Continental Airlines. “The FAA is teaching Boeing something. Are we sending the right signals to our innovators in automobiles, airplanes, appliances, that the heavy hand of God is going to come down on you if you have so much as one question wrong in a hundred-question exam?”
Yet an even more important factor than excessive regulation is that the public markets simply don’t reward big risks. While going public theoretically should give companies more access to capital to finance research and development, it turns out that an initial public offering actually tends to discourage bold bets.
More than 20 years of patent citations show that on average in the five years after a company stages an IPO there’s a 40 percent drop in the quality of innovation, says Shai Bernstein, an assistant finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who has studied the trend.
I think this is why Elon has backed off on what were originally rumored to be his plans for an IPO this year.
Gee, someone should write a book about the consequences of extreme risk aversion for human spaceflight.
The Intrinsically Marxist Nature Of Gun Control
I was going to write a piece on this theme, but (recovering Leftist) David Mamet does it much better than I could hope to:
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot.
Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
But President Obama, it seems, does.
He has just passed a bill that extends to him and his family protection, around the clock and for life, by the Secret Service. He, evidently, feels that he is best qualified to determine his needs, and, of course, he is. As I am best qualified to determine mine.
For it is, again, only the Marxists who assert that the government, which is to say the busy, corrupted, and hypocritical fools most elected officials are (have you ever had lunch with one?) should regulate gun ownership based on its assessment of needs.
…The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
Yes.
The Natural Right To Self Defense
…and the Christian case against gun control.
Free Will
Do we really have it? Do we need it?
Obama’s Un-American Beliefs
The NRA has higher approval than him because his (and the “progressives”‘) views are out of the mainstream.
[Update a few minutes later]
The bigotry behind the push for gun control:
We notice two things these three men have in common. First, there is no indication any of them have ever misused a gun, either accidentally or deliberately–in contrast to Marshall’s correspondent, who nonetheless evinces a smug sense of his own superiority over them.
Second, they all have eccentric political views, which Marshall’s correspondent seems to think is an argument for taking away their guns. Never mind the Second Amendment, do these guys even respect the First?
Not really. They just pay lip service.
A Bill Of Federalism
An interesting idea from Randy Barnett. It’s a radical solution, at least in the context of today’s political environment, but it’s certainly constitutional, and we need to do something to at least slow down, if not pare back Leviathan.
Being “Socially Liberal”
…is not being libertarian. And as he points out, no one who supports Barack Obama and the Democrats in the budget fight can credibly claim to be a “fiscally conservative.”
It’s Not About Hunting
…explains Andrew Klavan:
As with the death penalty, the argument of the progressives is that times and people have changed. Our democratic institutions and traditions are now engraved upon our hearts, they say, and no longer require the elaborate constitutional safeguards the founders provided for us. Civilized by the years, our leaders no longer pose the threat of tyranny, and guns only serve to give the anarchic power of death to individual lunatics and rednecks when it should be reserved to the state.
The conservative argument is, to put it succinctly: “Not so much.” Once again, we aggravating creatures of the right can’t help pointing out that human nature has changed neither a jot nor a tittle since we hightailed it out of Eden. Those who in ancient days sought to rule us in the name of our own good are still among us, and the only thing that keeps them on their side of the Rubicon is, in the words of that great patriot Neo from The Matrix: “Guns. Lots of guns.”
We have to keep hammering this point home, particularly to the morons like Piers Morgan.