Category Archives: Commentary

Primarily links to other sites but with a bit of commentary on my part.

Republicans and Net Neutrality

Net neutrality violates the property rights of the ISPs.

Image from www.wired.com

According to the Wall Street Journal, Congressional Republicans have drafted a bill that “is designed to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally—without applying the part of telecommunications law that regulates common carriers.”

It is Sad That People Think This Way

IUnlike Monopoly, life is not a zero sum game. was taking a bit of a break from writing today and came across this image in my Facebook timeline. My first reaction was to post angrily about the rather ignorant view of economics. To equate real life economics to those of Monopoly implies that the original poster was just completely clueless about economics or, and this is more likely, was deliberately ignoring those differences in order to elicit the sorts of emotional, anti-capitalism comments the post received.

Real world economics, read more

[Video] Free Speech and the Danish Cartoons

danish cartoonA panel discussion by Dr. Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute and Dr. Daniel Pipes, Director of Middle East Forum, on free speech from 2006, about a year after cartoons critical of Islam were published in Denmark and riots protesting them broke out across the Muslim world.

Dr. Pipes makes the point that this was not really about the cartoons, but the more fundamental question of whether the West will accept some form or aspect of Sharia law. The cartoons were just the read more

Je Suis Charlie

While I have not written, yet, about this particular topic, the slaying of 12 people by Islamic jihadists in the Paris office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo today for expressing their ideas is something that needs responses, no matter how small the voice is. I am not a cartoonist able to respond to this attack as other have here, read more

A Look Back and a Look Ahead

Now that 2014 is in the books, I thought I would take a look back at the past year of the blog. I think I have learned a few things over the last year which I hope will be helpful in the years ahead.

Before I get into the numbers and some of the lessons learned, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has stopped by and read the blog. I really appreciate it when people take the time to read something that I wrote, and even more when they leave a comment.

  • Probably the biggest, and likely most obvious, thing I learned this year is that blogging is pretty much like any other task you can think of. The more you do it, the more you are able to do it and the easier it is. I liken it to exercising or eating a healthy diet. It can take a tremendous amount of effort to begin to do these things but once you get going and have established the routine of it, the amount of effort to maintain it drops considerably. If circumstances prevent you from doing these things for a period of time, you are right back where you started, more or less, and will need to spend the same amount of energy to get going again. I knew this was the case for exercise and diet but found this year it is the same for blogging. In July, August and September, the time I had devoted to blogging was given to my wife instead while she was here from Venezuela and it took me several months to get back on track.
  • Right around the time I found I had less time to write, I was also running into an issue that I think is related to the simple fact that I was learning more, especially about philosophy, and rather than making it easier to write, it was actually making it harder. One of the keys in writing is that you must delimit your topic. You simply cannot write a blog post, or anything short of an encyclopedia, about EVERYTHING. I found that as I learned more, it became more and more difficult to delimit my topics. When I started out, it was fairly easy to keep things contained but as time went on I started seeing more and more connections, not all of which were completely clear in my thinking, and I would get lost in those connections and be unable to write at all coherently. I am starting to get a handle on this now and I hope it won’t be as much of a hinderance this year.
  • A little technical issue I found about WordPress’ “publicize” feature in Jetpack. This feature allows you to auto-post to social media whenever you publish a new post to your blog. It is extra nice because you can customize which platforms your post to and modify the text of what gets posted. The problem came with the link that gets sent with it. It appears that the link goes just to the blog itself, not to the specific post. While in some ways this is not a problem, the people do get to the post, it does have a couple of problems. If you use custom headers, and I sometimes do, you don’t get them when you just link to the blog’s homepage. You see the default one instead. Also, it records the view as one of the home page rather than the specific post. I believe this is why my most viewed post in 2014 was my homepage, even though I don’t intentionally link to it. This makes it impossible to know which posts are actually the most viewed on the blog.

Some numbers

In 2014 I published 80 posts, though read more

Protests, Public Interest and Police Discretion

Police discretion in the public interest.

Image found at http://searchpp.com/police-discretion/

Reason.com ran a piece recently about protests that took place in Nashville, TN and the response of some to the course of action that the police took towards them. In brief, a group of people protesting the grand jury results in Ferguson, MO closed down several highways, including Interstate 24, as well as staging a “die-in” at a local mall. Rather than dispersing the protesters, read more

[Video] Creationism in Camouflage: The Intelligent Design Deception

Keith Lockitch presents a discussion of how the idea of intelligent design is simply a dressed up version of creationism. Even though intelligent design is often expressed in more formal, scientific sounding, language, it is not different in its essentials from the version of creationism based on a biblical version of geology, i.e., the world is only about 6000 years old and was created by some supernatural being. Dr. Lockitch says during the lecture:

The argument from design is not a valid argument read more

Money in Politics? Guess Who Gets More of it.

Big MoneyI have written a lot of posts in the past  on the topic of money in politics and why it is not, absent its use as outright bribes, a problem. (Check the list below for some of my posts on this topic.) In short, there is no evidence that the amount of money spent actually changes the outcome of an election and any attempts to limit spending in an election is a restriction on the freedom of speech. Such restrictions also serve to protect incumbents which is undoubtedly why so many politicians read more

Morality of War by Yaron Brook

[Video] Morality of War

Yaron Brook gives a passionate talk on applying the morality of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism to the concept of war and how war should be fought. While no philosophy can properly specify tactics, the specific means and methods used in fighting a way, it can provide the basis for deciding from what pool of possibilities these tactics can be drawn from.

In the early part of the talk Yaron discusses “just war theory,” the theory that in part says a country should not go to read more

Solar Panel “Affection” – Humbug!

Solar Panel HumbugSmaller Power Projects Up 58 Percent

This was the headline for the second item that caught my eye in the December 17, 2014 edition of the Caledonian Record. (The other I commented on here.) According to the article, the majority of these new small power projects, defined as those being able to generate up to 150 kilowatts, have come from solar installations where individuals “take advantage of federal tax credits and the state’s growing affection for cleaner read more