…if I told anyone here or not, but we’s having another baby. Sometime in August methinks.

I’m most likely moving to Kansas City in August, perhaps June.

I’ve started classes in my MA for Library Sciences. Hopefully PhD but who knows.

I’ve read John Paul II’s  Theology of the Body and I think I might be a Catholic sort, after all.

Still writing for film   .   com. I like it a lot and they send me loads of Criterion dvds.

No, Really.

Click here to read it.

“I must confess up front that I am not smart enough to reach any informed conclusion about the subject; the scientific debates exceed my poor knowledge by several orders of magnitude. But I would be very much surprised to learn that you could dump unnatural chemicals into the environment, or natural chemicals in unnatural amounts, and not have any effect. To expect nature to handle a chemical it has never seen, or to rebalance chemicals it has already balanced, is to expect too much of the natural order. Of this I am sure: The burden of proof must rest on the polluters. Those who wish to use the air, the rivers, the ocean, and the land as public dumps should be forced to demonstrate, on sound evidence, that it will do no harm. Those who would limit such dumping do not have to prove a thing, other than that such dumping is not natural; it is up to the dumpers to prove that nature can take it. ” – John Médaille

http://distributism.blogspot.com/2009/12/distributism-and-global-warming.html

Interesting post on Health Care Reform…

Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time – by Kevin Carson

“The point…is not that a socialized system is better than a private system. The point is that their honestly socialized system is better than our socialized corporate system masquerading as a “private” one.”

“Consider this [the public option] in light of the principles of dialectical libertarianism. A particular government measure is not to be evaluated on an atomistic basis, but in light of its contribution to the level of statism in the system of the whole. As Brad Spangler pointed out, when you’re held up at gunpoint the bagman who collects your money is just as much a robber as the guy holding your gun. The corporate bagmen who lobby for government intervention and profit from it are, therefore, part of the government. And when government intervenes to grant special privileges for nominally “private” actors, that is a net increase in statism. On the other hand, when a second government intervention qualifies or limits the exercise of this grant of privilege for the sake of ameliorating the worst effects of privilege, it is a net decrease in statism.”

Now has its own thread.

My premise for supporting a monarchy over a republic is as follows:

1) The Church has held, by (arguably non-binding) tradition that Monarchy is the best form of government. Monarchs are used as symbols in the bible. God instituted the ancient line of Hebrew kings, and Jesus was born, quite significantly, of the house of David. Christ is the King of kings, not of presidents and prime ministers.
2) modern liberal democratic republics justify themselves by claiming that the power to rule is derived from a mandate of the masses. We know, as Christians, that this is not so. Power comes from God, and God alone. To reject this is offensive.
3) A proper Catholic monarchy is held in check by the church. For instance, the election of the Holy Roman Emperor can be vetoed by the pope. In many kingdoms, the monarch would be deposed if apostatized or excommunicated, thereby giving the bishops authority to keep the monarch in check.
4) Monarchies tended to be smaller governments that taxed it citizens less than republics. Even if the monarch and his family were greedy, it doesn’t take nearly as much theft from the populous to satisfy his ambitions, compared to the ambitions of the president, his cabinet, 104 Senators, 500+ congresscritters, their staff, lobbiests, etc., etc., etc.
5) Monarchies tend to have very little control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens. Society was very tiered; a monarch didn’t directly tax his citizens, but instead demanded tribute from his dukes, who demand it from the tier under them. Life from one community to another could be vastly different; if one marquis was charging too much in taxes, they could move over to the next town.
6) In hereditary monarchy, the most important unit of government is family. This communicates to society, by example, the importance of the nuclear and extended families, from the top down.
7) The fact that rule monarchy is de jure exclusive, rather than de facto in a republic, it quells political ambitions of men. Peasants know that they can never be king, and thus will not try. This quells the problem of an ever-growing leech-like political class we see in modern republics.
8] Hereditary monarchs are typically on the throne for life, and thus can make real, meaningful changes to the long-term benefit of his people. He has a strong vested interest in leaving the nation in a better state than he received it, because his family’s name is synonymous with the nation.
9) Most monarchs actually have less real power than modern bureaucrats, even though they had real authority. To get anything big done, like a war, they would have to convince the nobles under them, who in turn would convince the peasants to follow them. Thus, the monarch needed a fair degree of consent to get anything really big done.

There’s many more points that favor monarchy, but that’s on the top of my head.

Bravo to Elinor Ostrom, the first women to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Paul Romer offers these thoughts on her ideas – ideas that are very fitting to our discussions here.

Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior. [...]

Not only has it been a surprise to have such an extended lull on this blog, but it is even more surprising that no one here has brought up the most debated and controversial subject being addressed in the media today: health care.

Well, I’d like to play some catch up today. I’ve been dialoging/debating on a mass email with my wife’s family on this issue for the last month or so. The topic of health care reform has proven rich in bringing up all kinds of underlying presuppositions that I am ashamed we haven’t yet hashed out here.

The issue as I see it is that a type of reform is needed (few seem to argue that point), some are concerned that having a national option would increase the government’s role in our lives, and some think the current administration isn’t going far enough and should develop a single-payer plan.

So what say you?

Guys, since we talk about environmental issues sometimes, you might be interested in this.

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

…

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist … politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust.

Aaaaand it goes downhill from there.

This man wrote classical music that moves me. I have always found classical music to be, well, old and not relevant to anything I cared much about. Either it smacks me as being overtly “pretty”, like a pottery barn catalog or a chick flick movie, or simply dated, like last year’s bestseller. Albeit, I’ve not listened to a lot of classical music. I’ve mostly just listened to “the classics”.

But this is different. Give him a try, if you’ve got the time.

Dear George

On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy’s gross domestic product.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don’t usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so — around 1950 — it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.

Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us — and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement — are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in “progress”, as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace “sustainable development” rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet.

I think this is simply denial. The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism and a deeply embedded cultural attitude to “nature”; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source that is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have used it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return.

What do you get? We are starting to find out.

We need to get real. Climate change is teetering on the point of no return while our leaders bang the drum for more growth. The economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth to function. And who wants it tamed anyway? Most people in the rich world won’t be giving up their cars or holidays without a fight.

Some people — perhaps you — believe that these things should not be said, even if true, because saying them will deprive people of “hope”, and without hope there will be no chance of “saving the planet”. But false hope is worse than no hope at all. As for saving the planet — what we are really trying to save, as we scrabble around planting turbines on mountains and shouting at [cabinet] ministers, is not the planet but our attachment to the western material culture, which we cannot imagine living without.

The challenge is not how to shore up a crumbling empire with wave machines and global summits, but to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse.

All the best, Paul
—– [...]

If you haven’t discovered TED, you’re missing out. In this lecture Paul Romer discusses his idea for Charter Cities, a modernized construction of Garden Cities, in which land somewhere is separated out from the mother country and given an independent government structure known to work (think Hong Kong) via a charter with the mother country. The beauty of it is that the success of the city will bring reform to the mother country and it forces no changes on anyone. People from the mother country are not forced to move to the new city, they go on their own free choice.

As it turns out, many willing government leaders can’t bring the liberating reform needed to their country due to the power of interest groups seeking to keep the present system in tact – a system which benefits them in particular (the opposite is true as well). But if a leader creates a Hong Kong, there is a possibility of reabsorbing the city at a later time, reaping the economic benefits that entails and providing a model for reform in other cities. It also provides competition as non-reforming cities will lose population to reforming cities. Thus reform can be self propagating. Charter cities creates a rule for changing rules.

Paul Romer also mentions the possibility of self-financed city services, such as police, healthcare, infustructure, by capturing increasing land values – again, like Hong Kong. Such common sense reforms are nearly impossible in existing cities due to special interests but could be extremely beneficial to all if set up correctly from the beginning.