Perhaps I’m willfully naive - and it has been argued by lecturers in the past that I am - but I like to think that most political decisions are driven by some innate sense of right. Based on this, in most cases I like to give political actors the benefit of the doubt. They may be wrong, they may be ignorant, but hopefully they think that it is to the greater good of the country (or the ‘general will‘) that they act in some manner.

Which is why it is nice to read articles like this, explaining the reasons behind seemingly partisan or inequitable political actions. “Keeping Great Crowds Off Central Park’s Great Lawn” (NYTimes, so it is probably reg. required - go to BugMeNot)

Limiting the use of the park to 50,000 people means that an anti-war crowd can’t have their projected 250,000 rally. Says the

“You have two choices,” [park commissioner Adrian Benepe] said. “You can have unlimited, large-scale events, or you can have nice grass, but you can’t have both.

“It was unlimited use that destroyed the park in the old days, so if you want the city’s backyard to be in good shape, you have got to put limitations on its use,” the commissioner said.

As Jane Galt says:

They complain that there are few wide open spaces in New York City in which to protest, which is true, but that doesn’t make it some sort of civil right to tear up the grass; you have a right to peacably assemble, not a right to hold your demonstrations in scenic & enjoyable locations.

I really couldn’t beat that quote, so it will have to suffice as the conclusion.

As you look at this you should be thinking two things:

1) Yes, Chris has given up trying to make the sources of his images obscure. And

2) Is it weird that he has fallen in love with a picture he drew himself?

As I’m sure I’ve said before, my Arts degree didn’t prove to be enormously informative about classical liberal theory. I had never heard of Hayek until my honours year, and even then it was because I had to search him out independently.

This website is stunning. Institute of Humane Studies - Independent Study Guides. Designed as an alternative to the standard university course, it will present guides to political science, Philosophy, History, Law, Sociology, Literature and Science. At the moment only Economics is available.

Perhaps the lack of classical liberal theory in universities contributes to the intellectual condescension toward conservatives or libertarians. If some fully university educated people are not even aware that there is an intellectual history of the right, then how can they respect their opponents views?

Like everyone else in the world it seems, I have just done the upgrade to Wordpress 1.5.

Thus follows a handy hint - when you upload the files to your server, remember that even though you didn’t delete the wp-content folder (because that’s where your images tend to be), there are still things in there that need to be copied across. If you get a blank index.php file, thats because you haven’t uploaded any themes, not even the default one.

A lesson well learnt.

Anyway, now to get to building my own theme.

UPDATE: As you can see, i’ve fiddled for a bit. I’ll probably leave it there for now - but it is certainly to be considered a work in progress.

I went up to Sydney a week or two ago for a short conference. As I travel nowhere without my iPod, it dutifully came along with me (as well as the charger, of course. It’s 18mths old.) I get in the plane, and turn off my cellphone - I’m good like that.

But now we are explicitly instructed to turn off our walkmans, discmans and MP3 players until 20 minutes after takeoff. Roughly 15-20 minutes before landing, we are told the same thing. No music until you are well inside the terminal. On an approximately 50 minute flight (I live in sunny Melbourne), that is a mere 10-15 minutes of music appreciation.

Hopefully this introduction gives you a good idea of my personal investment in the issue of aircraft interference.

Bryan Caplan has linked to the transcript of a (US) House of Reps aviation subcommittee hearing on just this.

In 69,000 anonymously reported flight problems, only 52 (or 0.08%) have been attributed - by the pilots or crew, not by technicians - to electronic devices. These effects have never been duplicated in lab conditions.

Boeing has attempted to duplicate instances of [personal electronic device] interference, reportedly even going so far as to purchase a passenger’s laptop that had allegedly caused interference on a London to Paris flight. The pilot on that flight claimed that turning the laptop on and off triggered autopilot error. Boeing flew the same laptop on the same route in the same seat but was unable to duplicate the interference.

As a sort of endnote comment - one of the things that strikes me whenever I travel in the US is the manner in which they use their mobile phones around airplanes. In Australia, you never see a phone from the moment you walk down the passage to the aircraft till you have entered the terminal at your destination. In the US, phones are used until the moment plane starts to move, and used again the moment the plane stops taxi-ing.(? strange word.)

As far as I can tell from the testimony of Robert H. Frenzel, this pattern of usage is not permitted unless there is an ‘extended delay’, and such use is at the discretion of the pilot.

I haven’t had a chance to post these yet. My living situation could be best described as ‘fluid’, so at the moment I don’t have internet at home, unfortunately. But here are my latest (digital) pictures.

UPDATE: Moved all of them to the jump because they were offensively large. Read the rest of this entry »

Tacked on the end of this article about iTunes libraries and personality is Michael Moore’s playlist.

“With God on Our Side”, “Masters of War”, “Fortunate Son”, “The Revolution Starts” and more. Doesn’t he seem to be trying a little too hard?

Fantastic primer on Chinese telecommunications issues that doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on the Great Firewall of China: “Chinese Telecommunications Policy Examined: The Case for Reform” (PDF), from the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

Via presurfer, a gallery of acoustic locators and sound mirrors:

Acoustic location was used from mid-WW1 to the early years of WW2 for the passive detection of aircraft by picking up the noise of the engines. It was rendered obsolete before and during WW2 by the introduction of radar, which was far more effective.

This is an enormous Japanese one, and one which I am very familiar with. Why? Tintin, that’s why.

I’m pretty confident that I really learnt to read by reading Tintin books, and the Calculus Affair was one of my favorites. (They got in a tank, and that was very cool.) The Calculus Affair features this very same image, as a Japanese offensive weapon, you see.

(I have this cover, in French, as a poster up on my wall at home. I got it at a Tintin themed store in Paris.)

I also have to recommend this documentary - Tintin et moi - an amazing insight into the political background of the Tintin series, and the astounding detail that went into the construction of each book. I’m also delighted to discover this site: Tintinologist, which will definitely use up more of my time than I can spare.

Tintin has enormous sentimental value for me, so you’ll just have to put up with this rather pointless ramble.

Cross-post from A Matter of Opinion

This post from Cafe Hayek got me thinking: Living in Harmony with Nature (and a follow up here)

The “Noble Savage” isn’t exactly a new concept. While the phrase can be tracked back only to 1672, the concept began with the Roman historian Tacitus and his book Germania. In it he portrays a brutal, but pure Germany in contrast with the sinful and decadent Rome of his time. And fair enough too - Germans drank alcohol made of grain, and Romans drank grapes.

But the most commonly acknowledged author of the noble savage myth was Rousseau, who linked this old noble savage tradition with the state of nature of John Locke. The ‘noble savage’ became such a fad that in the early 19th century, western nations would ship in these ‘barbarians’ and try to train them in western culture - put an African in a tuxedo, and take him to dinner parties.

Why do I bring this up? So much environmental debate is centered around this ancient and misguided notion of the ‘noble savage’. If only we could live in harmony with nature like the American Indians, or the Indigenous Australians, or the Pre-Columbian Indians, our environmental and social problems would be solved. If only we could leave the forests in the state in which they were, 400, 1000, 10,000 years ago. Somehow, scientific, social, political and technological progress has unwittingly destroyed civilisation - just as Tacitus admired the barbarians, so our environmental groups admire nonwestern societies.

But as the post at Cafe Hayek points out - this is all crap.

It’s an utter myth – we might say an urban myth – that primitive peoples lived with nature harmoniously. Nature devastated them. Nature battered them into early graves. Their ignorance of nature prevented them from achieving much material wealth. To dance to imaginary rain gods or to chant and pray for a child dying of bacterial infection is not to live harmoniously with nature; it is to live most inharmoniously. Nature is doing its thing – failing to water the crops, growing bacteria within a child’s lungs – while human beings who are as ignorant of nature as nature is of human beings, moan, chant, pray, dance, build totems, burn leaves and twigs, all in fruitless, inharmonious efforts to solve the problems.

Marx speaks of the ‘primitive communism’ that existed before class developed. Christianity speaks of the garden of eden. Green and left-leaning groups long for the utopian existence of the primitive societies. But the reality is that there was no such time. There was no utopia in the past - if there was, then we wouldn’t have tried so desperately to progress to where we are today.