…is a myth. Eric Raymond on the history of open source, and the ahistorical knowledge of young programmers.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Climate Activists Behaving Badly
Roger Pielke on the warm-mongers Internet antics. I look forward to his book.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: The president’s (anti)Science Advisor.
The Holdren appointment was just one among an appalling many.
The New Climate Agenda
…is apparently personal score settling. Holman Jenkins discusses the Mann suit, and the “exonerations.”
Also, Jim Lindgren weighs in on them.
Hindsight, Twenty Twenty
I ran across this old piece I wrote a few months after the loss of Columbia. It has some of the underlying themes of what later became the book, and holds up pretty well, I think.
Partitioning California
It’s not as crazy as The Economist thinks:
No doubt water, pension liabilities and Democrats (who would let this happen over their dead bodies) pose seemingly insurmountable obstacles to partition. But this is a reform movement we hope gains steam over time. The competing interests and priorities of California’s unmanageable, schismatic population are bad for democracy and bad for Californians.
It’s a mess.
“Rights Talk”
Yes, that is the way we talk in America, you stupid fascists:
Bittman likes Freudenberg’s debunking of notions of “rights and choice,” because he agrees that “we need… more than a few policies nudging people toward better health.” As Freudenberg told Bittman: “What we need… is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to profit at the expense of public health.” Oh! Did you see that? Freudenberg said “right.” He said “right” in the context of government, and he spoke of returning this “right” — a right to control people — to government. He’s saying “right” where the legal term is actually “power.” He wants government power at the expense of rights. And the fact that he speaks of the “return” of power to the government is either deceptive or unAmerican. We are free and have a right to do what we want until we give power to government. If the laws that restrict us are repealed, it makes sense to speak of returning rights to the people, but it’s wrong and really offensive to characterize new restrictions in terms of returning a right to the government.
I know it sounds like crazy talk to you, but we really do have rights to do things of which you disapprove.
People like this should be “nudged” out of town on a rail, bedecked with petroleum bi-products and bird coverings.
As a side note, I’d bet this guy would also tell me I don’t have a right to risk my life in a spaceship.
TSA Follies Update
In which a (probably serial) rapist sues Amy Alkon for being called a rapist. I’m pretty sure that shoving your hand into a unwilling woman’s vajajay is rape by almost anyone’s definition.
The Real War On Women
“Democrats should be embarrassed to appear with Bill Clinton.”
I think they proved pretty conclusively fifteen years ago that they’re shameless.
The Fossil Record
…doesn’t have a daily box score.
This is something that creationists don’t understand.
American Spring
It’s time for a little revolution here:
We need some government, obviously, but at this point in American history, in order to save our nation, we need to get the state as much as possible out of our lives, to cut its functions with a meat cleaver to release our better impulses, to have the renewal of Spring. Deep down even some modern liberals realize this. (Bill Clinton famously said the era of big government is over before running the other way as if in fear of his own honesty.)
In this coming crucial year, those of us who feel the overweening state is the problem must reach out our hands to our fellow citizens as never before. My sense is that many of them are ready to hear our message. (The fiasco of Obamacare has been a gift in that regard.) And if we don’t reach out our hands, there will be no American Spring. Things will only get worse. (The horrific attempt of the FCC to monitor newsrooms is a harbinger of totalitarian things to come.)
I am one of those eternal optimists who think we are on the brink of this American Spring. Another, whether he knows it or not, is ironically Joe Trippi, once the campaign manager for Howard Dean, a statist of the first order. (See Trippi’s interview with Reason magazine in which he foresees a libertarian-oriented president in the near future.) Possible allies can be found in more quarters than we know.
As Glenn Reynolds notes, it may already be starting to happen:
This is more “Irish Democracy,” passive resistance to government overreach. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant is demanding that the state use background-check records to prosecute those who haven’t registered, but the state doesn’t have the resources and it’s doubtful juries would convict ordinary, law-abiding people for failure to file some paperwork.
We need a lot more civil disobedience.