More positive reviews for Ron Paul

I have to admit that this article was custom-tailored to get my attention. Not only is it a positive article on Ron Paul, but it opens with an ultra-libertarian quote from P.J. O'Rourke:

"Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class."

— P.J. O’Rourke

As evidenced by the wild success of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, Americans have become Libertarians, even though they don’t seem to know it yet. Hardened views on the left and the right dominate the political scene in Washington D. C., with efficient and competent management of government the casualty of an ideological war between the two dominant parties. We have become a red state/blue state country, with elections angrily won 51 percent to 49 percent.

Little noticed in the increasingly shrill red versus blue sniping, however, is the emergence of a purplish centrism. The purple centrists who will shape future elections are we Libertarians, who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate. We believe in personal responsibility and minimal government. We do not meddle when the issues — be they Iraq, your bedroom or your religious beliefs — are not our business. In short, we say: Smoke all the crack you want, or go motorcycling without a helmet; just don’t expect me to pay for your rehab.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a thoughtful attempt to claim the broad center in the middle of the red/blue political bickering that passes for political discourse today. And if there has been a real surprise in the GOP race, it has been the strength of the independent-thinking OB/GYN doctor from Texas. His Web site gets many visits, and not because men think they might see naked women on it.

Celebrating the very worst in bad writing, 2007 edition

At least bad writing can have a purpose: the very "best" of it gets rewarded in the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

Miss Cardinal mused over the singularly decadent manner in which Master Hammond consumed the steak and kidney pie and was reminded of the practices of certain cannibalistic tribes with whom she had lived during her travels in Borneo, not New Guinea, although New Guinea is certainly nice this time of year, despite the fact steak and kidney pie is rarely served there, at least not the kind made from sheep or cows.
Brad R. Frazer
Boise, ID

Agent 53986262.9 was strapped precariously to a giant Chinese firework, the fuse slowly shortening like a noodle getting slurped into someone's pursed lips, and although he knew he was running out of time and still had no plan for escape, all he could think of was the song about the Muffin Man and how the word "polyurethane" made it sound like the material was made out of multiple urethras.
Allison Kelly
Great Falls, VA

Much, much more brain-curdling "goodness" at the link.

Extra-geeky gifts

PC World offers some suggestions for the mega-geeks in your life, including this (kinda cool) wearable:

4. Wi-Fi on the Fly
Wi-Fi Detector T-shirt
Wonder which of your neighbors has Wi-Fi? Forget wardriving. Put on Think Geek's stylish black Wi-Fi Detector T-shirt ($30), and you can warwalk. Electric blue bars on the front light up when you encounter a wireless network; the more bars that light, the stronger the signal. (But it won't tell you whether the network is secure--sorry.) When it's laundry time, you can remove the detector, which draws power from three AAA batteries housed in a compartment that slips into an interior pocket. Wow your friends, impress your neighbors, and convince your spouse that marrying you really was a terrible mistake.

Still no improvement at the main blog

All the MovableType interface can tell me is that [This post no longer exists] for each and every post I've ever made there. This is not a hopeful sign that things can be easily rectified.

Er, ooops?

While trying to post something earlier this evening, over on the main blog, I hit a snag: it looks like the ID numbers contain at least one duplicate, which means I can't post anything until we can resolve the issue.

I hope to be back online at the main site soon, but I may have lost a lot of recent posts (currently, the Movable Type interface says I've never posted anything on the blog . . . which doesn't augur well).

Template issues on main blog

Yes, I know . . . you can't read the main blog when you try to view it in IE or Opera (and possibly other browsers). I don't know what happened: I made a change to one of the archive templates, but it should not have had any influence on the main page of the blog. I don't know how to fix it yet, because I don't know why it broke in the first place.

The politics of data manipulation

Ken Holder points us to this little gem of a discovery:

Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record

An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action [. . .] this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. [. . .] While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

Links in the original article. Emphasis mine.

QotD: Operation Keelhaul

I remember [when I lost faith in government] quite clearly. It was the summer of 1972 (I could probably find the month and day if I did some shovelling). I had already been a libertarian for ten years, but still thought minimal government was the only choice. Then I attended a seminar in Wichita, conducted by Robert LeFevre and underwritten by the Love Box Company and the local Seven-Up bottlers every year.

Bob maintained that "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure", and as evidence, he presented, among other things, Operation Keelhaul. (Warning: the Wikipedia entry on this travesty is woefully inadequate.) Bob said that a drunken FDR and his equally drunken buddy Winston Churchill—deliberately kept that way by Stalin—had agreed at the Yalta conference to use their troops to round up everybody in western Europe who'd found the war a handy way to refugee the hell out of Russia.

The story is also told in George N. Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia.

Also rounded up were Russian expatriates who had left before, during, and after World War I, and others, their children, maybe, who had never even seen Russia. The Wiki piece emphasizes Austria as the place this was done. Bob talked about France and I have since met the son of a US Army officer who helped carry the program out there. He died feeling ashamed of having obeyed those orders.

They were all put in the same kind of cattle cars that had taken Jews to the concentration camps, shipped back to the Motherland (couple of syllables missing in that term, I think), and shot to death within hours. Estimates of their number vary. The governments involved will admit to a couple hundred thousand. A couple hundred thousand! Bob, who was in Europe at the time, said it was more like two million.

That was it for me and government. Any government, all government. And it's why I don't give a rusty fuck, to quote Rod Steiger, what we replace it with. Especially given the events of the past six years, what could be worse?

L. Neil Smith, "Letter from L. Neil Smith", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-12

Main site offline again

I don't know what's going on, but the main site is currently showing a blank page. I'll try to get in touch with my virtual landlord and see if it's fixable. Stay tuned.

Static web site down

Clive just informed me that the server hosting my static web site is down, and will probably be down for a couple of days. I'll let you know when it'll be back in service (once Clive lets me know, of course).

(Cross-posted to the main blog)