Blogs

My favorite author on another site is Fred Reed. If I see his name on its daily menu of new articles, I click on it first. He is highly articulate, irreverent, accurate and funny. More than once, I've used his email link to tell him, Thanks.
 
But once in a while, he blows it; and he never blew it worse than this week, here.
 
He's written against evolution before, but this attempt is long, ridiculous and ill-reasoned. The very first sentence is grammatically suspect, and it goes down hill from there; since when was “ardent” a noun? Presumably, he was trying to say – incorrectly – that “the intent of this essay is not to debate with those ardent for evolutionism...” He then proceeds for over five thousand words to try to do precisely that, and fails.
 
Darwin is my favorite scientist, in large part because of his honesty in following the rational, scientific method even as it was leading him away from his pre-formed world-view. He was a theist, yet his findings told him that the natural world probably had no creator, or that if it does, that creator is cruel. His theory, abundantly confirmed since, is that species mutate and that mutants survive and reproduce if suited to their environment as well as or better than their progenitors, or die off if not – usually from starvation.
 
Now here cometh Reed, and sayeth that he can better believe in a self-assembling A-380 than in a self-assembling baby, and his mastery of prose is matched only by his ignorance of DNA “instructions.” His resounding conclusion is that “There is Something Else involved. I do not know what.” Well, whoopy-do. Bottom line (literally): he knows of no alternative. His is the Unknown God. Irrational, to the power of N.
 
Just prior to the essay's long-needed end, Reed offers this swipe: “Suppose a Darwinist found out that my hobby was using a blow torch to torture to death children with severe congenital retardation—vegetables, in the unkind vernacular. He would be horrified. 'Why?' I would ask.”
 
Very clever. Evolution is cruel – true, and sad. So he tries to smear, as also cruel, those who recognize that  the evolutionary theory is one of the best-supported in all science. What he misses is the really wonderful fact that an inherently cruel process has produced one species (at least) with moral sense far superior to that of the designer of the process if there was one – Reed's Unknown God.
 
So the answer to his nasty question “Why?” is that humans have developed rational ethics. Morality “needs” a supernatural morality teacher no more than the development of life needs a supernatural life-inventor.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yes we do; at least those of us who are anarcholibertarians.

It appears that someone has finally gone ahead and put this 1990s idea into motion, most likely assessing that the technology is now equal to the task.  We shall see.  And it's been covered by Forbes magazine, no less (as an aside, they have been publishing many anarchy-curious and even anarchy-friendly pieces in recent months):
 
 
Read the article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/
 
 
 

Economist Robert Murphy previews his upcoming Mises Academy short course on healthcare in this video.

Wonderful thing, the Internet! Surfing happened to lead me to the story of Robert Kahre. He's in prison now,  where he may stay until 2023, having committed the grave error of trusting what the government said.
 
He was a Vegas businessman, but paid his employees a pittance. He was never charged with violating minimum wage laws, for none of them complained; but typically he was paying only about $1.25 an hour. Very surprising that anyone would work for him.
 
But they did, because he paid them with government money in the form of one-ounce gold coins clearly embossed with "50 dollars", about once a month. Such a low wage didn't trigger any "reporting requirements", and that was what got up the government's snout.
 
Read details at http://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2012/03/26/use-real-money-go-to...

One down, many thousands to go: an innocent man has been prised loose from the government's prison system. Ryan Ferguson was sprung this week, after nearly ten years in a cage for a murder he didn't commit.
 
He was convicted on the basis of two witnesses. One was mentally unstable, the other admitted later to having said what the prosecutor wanted him to say. There was zero forensic evidence.
 
He commented that getting into prison is easy, getting out very hard. Ryan had the advantages of a determined father, a competent lawyer working pro bono publico, a campaign on change.org that swelled to over 260,000 petition signers, and several appearances on Dateline NBC. Even then, after an appeals court had castigated his prosecutors for poor work and overturned his conviction, he had to wait while the AG decided whether or not to re-try the case.
 
If he had lacked one of those advantages, he'd still be imprisoned on a 40-year sentence - and lucky, at that, not to have been executed. This is government "justice."

The market is responding to the obscenity of wall-to-wall NSA spying. http://www.darkmail.info/ shows what's in the works.

Opposition to the excessive use of prescription medicines, especially for children, is the theme of this carlos morales video. 

In this misesmedia video, Mark Thornon explicates the difference between data and knowledge.

Governments love to have a war or two simmering; it helps solidify popular support for their continued existence. Were peace and prosperity to prevail, too many people would ask that fatal question, "Government - who needs it?"
 
So Kerrybama are having a bad year. They're out of Iraq, nearly out of Afghanistan, and Peacemaker Putin pulled the rug from under their plans to battle Syria. Now, even the Iranians are saying "yes" instead of "no" and the prospects for some kind of war there are pouring down the toilet. A Man from Moscow has headed for Geneva to ensure nobody wriggles out.
 
What do they have left? - the "War on Terror"? That one is losing credibility by the month. Shrub invented the phrase and it's had an amazing life, given that nobody can actually wage war on an emotion, but its day is nearly done - like the War on Poverty that's been running for half a century but has produced nothing but more poverty.
 
So with any luck, the future might actually be bright.