perfidy

In old cartoons, you'd often see a character beset by a moral dilemma have a little angel and demon appear, one over each shoulder to argue the merits of the case. For me, thinking about politics, I have three.

I have a little Aretae, a little Foseti, and a little Bruce Charlton.  To me, at least, these three each represent an aspect of truth - the sort of truth that is not to be found in the mainstream.  But they don't exactly agree with each other.

• I agree with Aretae almost entirely, with the simple but large caveat that I don't think his thinking applies as well to people who are not very bright libertarians.  I would like to live in a society composed of people like me, Foseti, Bruce and Aretae.  We could have a minarchist system with free trade and cookies and skittles.  But, sadly, the world is inhabited by people with different levels of abilities, and different time horizons, and different propensities for violence.
• I agree with Foseti almost entirely as well.  The reactionary model of politics we both got from Moldbug is powerful.  It explains much.  But as we've seen with Moldbug's attempts, it is not exactly prescriptive.  Coming up with a new model reactionary system would either fail immediately, or soon fall prey to the same flaws that are dooming our current system.  I mean really, a new reactionary system?  How can that really work?
• I agree with Bruce slightly less, but the fault is mine and not his.  He is a convert to Orthodoxy, as am I, but I feel pretty sure that his conversion was rather more thorough than mine.  But the questions he asks are important ones, and ones for which the perspectives represented by Little Aretae and Little Foseti on my shoulders have no answer - if they even consider them at all.  Faith, tradition - you could call it culture, but that's not what it really is - it's what is missing.

I keep thinking that there's some synthesis of all this.  But maybe it's nothing more complicated than economics should approach as much as possible what Aretae recommends, politics aim more toward Foseti, and that in the end it won't really work unless the people believe in something, together.

Today is short post title day here at Perfidy, apparently.  The M stands for Motorcycle Endorsement, the which I have added to my Driver's License.  I sold my motorcycle back in '98, and hadn't ridden since - but increasing gas prices, and the increasing size of my vehicles, has led me to the point where I can justify returning to the world of motorcycles on a purely economic basis.  I work from home most days, but on the days that I do head in to the office, my commute is murderous - 70 miles each way, and half of that through some of the worst traffic our nation has to offer.  It now costs over $120 to fill up the Suburban, and $70 for the X-Terra.  Filling up the tank on a bike will cost less than $20. Right now, it costs me about $200 in gas to get to work in a month.  Switching to a bike will reduce that to about $30.  That's a not-insignificant savings. And if gas prices continue to rise, the savings will only get better!  And, as an added bonus, I'll be able to use the communist HOV lanes, and cut my commute time by about an hour. So, that's how I sold it to the wife. I'm looking at getting something along this line:

But I wouldn't be unhappy if Santa gave me one of these:

Or these:

Yesterday was a happy day, for I am finally south of 230 pounds for the first time in well over a decade.  That 230 had seemed for some little while now to be like the speed of light - something that can be approached but not exceeded.  I've been as close as 230.5 a few times in the last couple months, but just couldn't get any further.

I have blamed the stagnation on my wife, circumstances, children, cosmic rays, the Jews and always the never to be sufficiently damned herring eating Norwegians.  But the was just one simple cause, really - lack of focus and consistency.  So it was my fault, I guess.  The last couple weeks I have been much more strict in my paleo diet, and I've started lifting again.

I have to say that even just a little into the new exercise regime, I am very pleased with it and the the results.  I've combined the super-slow methodology that I was introduced to by Aretae with a collection of body-weight exercises, and it pretty much kicks my ass.  Which is what you want in an exercise program.

The first day's program was arms and shoulders.  I was surprised at how much more difficult push-ups are done super-slow style can be.  My arms are strongish, thanks to the six months of weight-lifting on machines I did last fall and winter.  The push-ups gave me a nice burn there, but the next day I could feel everything around the big muscles hurting, and even more, I could feel the pain in my abs.  I think this new program will be a lot more effective.  The best thing about the You Are Your Own Gym book is that he gives you lots of ways to adjust the difficulty of the exercises, which makes it easy to adjust each exercise to hit the 90-second-to-exhaustion target for super slow.

For the next few months, I'm going to be doing about seven minutes of lifting a day, four times a week.  I think this, along with a strict paleo diet, will get me down to an optimal body weight sometime in the Fall.  I'm not sure exactly what that will be, exactly, because I'm not sure how much more muscle I'll get; but I definitely want my body fat percentage down to at least 10.

For those who thought there was no way that bagpipes could possibly be more irritating: you are wrong.  For those who think the opposite, you also are wrong:

Make sure you watch to the end for the big finish.

Interesting interview with sf author and singularitarian Vernor Vinge here.

Vernor Vinge: I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity:

1. Artificial Intelligence: We create superhuman artificial intelligence in computers.
2. Digital Gaia: The worldwide network of embedded microprocessors, sensors, effectors, and localizers becomes a superhumanly intelligent entity.
3. Internet Scenario: Humanity with its networks, computers, and databases becomes a superhuman being. (Bruce’s story “Maneki Neko” is a beautiful and subtle illustration of this possibility.)
4. Intelligence Amplification: We enhance individual human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces.
5. Biomedical: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological function of our brains. (I regard this last item to be the weakest of the possibilities.)

AR is central to progress with possibilities (3) and (4).

If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.

Cool stuff, as you'd expect.  But the most exciting thing for me is the news that there will be a new Vinge book out this year, a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep called The Children of the Sky.  Sweet.

The Instapundit has been thrashing the higher education bubble meme for this little while, most recently lining to a longish piece in New York Magazine, The University Has No Clothes.  As you, Dear Reader, will be aware if you've been paying attention the Buckethead clan is homeschooling its youngins.  So the idea of college and education and assorted issues is important to us.  I have mixed feelings about college education.  It is in theory capable of providing the sort of knowledge that simply cannot be gotten any other way.  And we all like to think of it that way.  But the reality is something more akin to a four to seven year long, savagely, offensively expensive binger with a light frosting of vocational training and (for the lucky or skilled) a creamy filling of consequence- and moral-free sex.  At the end, you are tossed into the world with a credential of dubious and rapidly diminishing value and a mortgage for an expensive house you can't live in or sell.

Now, I would be the last person on Earth to undervalue spending the better part of a decade drunk, high and nailing anything with a heart beat.  But I managed accomplish exactly that with a bare minimum of debt by the simple expedient of not actually attending college.  And of all the people I met in college, a fair number of them did graduate with debt ranging from inconvenient to crushing.  And only one is actually doing anything remotely related to his degree, and of the rest very few are doing work that actually requires a college degree in even the most tenuous way.  Did they get their, or their parent's, worth of the money spent or borrowed?  I have no sheepskin, but I am doing better financially than a large number of graduates from the small Ohio liberal arts school I attended.  And I arguably had a lot more fun.  Because when I was doing my real drinking, I never had to worry about midterms.

If I'm willing to keep my kids out of public schools to give them a better education, college is certainly up for discussion.  Do I want to drop $200k (or more, hyperinflation depending) to allow my son, and equivalent or greater sums for three daughters to go on a four year bender in a world completely divorced from reality and end up unemployable?

I think I can think of better ways to spend the best part of a million dollars.

We've just recently hit a lot of fifty year milestones in space history. I've been somewhat surprised that a fairly wide spectrum of the public commentary has been negative on the long term effects of Apollo. I've personally felt for a long time that NASA's entire existence from the late fifties until this very moment has been a hindrance to real progress in space exploration. And not merely despite its successes, but really largely because of them. While I haven't been the only one saying this, it is gratifying to see that others are coming around. Rand Sindberg is the best example. (Oh, and not to suggest that this is a recent conversion for him - he's thought this way for a long, long time. But he puts it well. Related, and also interesting is this piece from James Bennett.)

I was born a month before we first walked on the moon. When I was a boy my son's age, we had a space station and the shuttle was on the horizon promising cheap access to space. Things seemed pretty cool, space-wise. Then we let the first US space station burn up, the shuttle turned into a hideously expensive, designed-by committee explodey thing, and the dream of space resolved into just that, a dream with no reality to it whatsoever.

So here I am, in my early forties. My son is eight, and we are again, maybe, seeing a rebirth of the dream of space. SpaceX has successfully flown the Falcon 9 and Dragon - which is, barring only some life support equipment, a vehicle capable of putting men in orbit for an less than a tenth the price of the shuttle. And they've announced that next year, they'll be test flying the Falcon Heavy - which will put 50 tons into orbit at a price of $100 million. Two launches to get the throw weight of an Apollo-era Saturn V, at less than a $1000 a pound. This is big news. At those sorts of prices, much that wasn't feasible becomes, well, feasible.

And better yet, there are others in the game. If SpaceX falls down, Rutan, Bezos, or someone else will likely be there to take up the slack. And everyone can fly to Bigelow's space hotels.

I've been reading a lot of economic doom and gloom (thanks, Zero Hedge!) lately, and the prognosis is, so far as I can see, pretty solidly doomy and gloomy. It feels like we've moved away from everything that once made us kick ass, and embraced everything lame. The list is long...

But, even though we've lost huge chunks of the manufacturing sector, and most of our exports are raw materials, and we can't even deliver pizza in under a half hour any more - the one bright spot in the last few decades has been the computer industry. And what makes me happy right now is that the people who did the best at that, and made the biggest piles of money, are using that money to reinvent the space program on their own terms.

Maybe we'll have an Indian Summer before it all falls apart.

I have a stupid reason for why I don't post more often. I hope you are now asking yourself, "How stupid?" and not muttering, "And this is surprising how?" And that reason is this: I do not have the luxury of pursuing lengthy trains of thought. While individually, my wife, son, three daughters, dog, cat, work, natural catastrophes, neighbor kids and Global Warming may only interrupt me only occasionally; collectively they are derailing my lengthy trains o' thought on average about every three milliseconds.

So the Grand Thoughts that I wish to think remain unthunk. Which pisses me off a little.

Because I feel that a lot of the stuff I think about is just this close to congealing into something more than a pile of unordered ramblings. I sense the outlines of order and coherence, but can't get it down on paper, or pixels.

So, I am making a conscious decision to: a) stop leaving things in my feed reader in the now obviously futile hope that I will get back to them and write something about them; b) prune the feed reader so that I have less to obsessively read; c) read more books; and finally, d) post smaller bits as they occur to me.

In aid of d), there's this: Aretae talks about immigration. Some of this has now been addressed in his comments, and he's updated his post a little from when I read it this morning.

To lay it out Aretae-style, my thoughts went roughly like this:

• Anti-Immigration summary: fair.  If something is hurting us, well, maybe stopping is a good idea.
• That's a good argument for letting that one Haitian dude in.  When you're confronted with one guy, you could even say, hey, I'll personally take a haircut of $2 a day (a substantive, if not crushing loss of almost $500 a year) to help Jean-Paul or whoever get a real life in the home of the free and the land of the brave.  That's charity.
• Wait a minute, where's Hati, where these Hatians are coming from?
• But, in the world of freely-entered contracts and libertarian (left- or otherwise-) why does Jean Paul get to come here and unilaterally cut my income and take $500 out of the mouths of my Children?  Do I get a say in this?
• Put another way, am I really morally obligated to give up my income and so reduce the prosperity of my family to help others?  More to the point, if I decide that I don't want to, is it right for others, like Jean-Paul, to force me to lose that income?
• Stalin said that quantity has a quality of its own, or something like that.  One Jean Paul - hard working, thrifty and pious - he's okay.  But what about five million of his less upright, smelly compatriots who have made a wonderland of their homeland in the 200 years of their independence?  Does their collective presence in this country make it less likely that immigrant n will get the same benefit from moving here?  Does it make it more likely that subsequent income loss to American workers will be more than $2/day?
• Aretae talks monkeybrains™ about everything except left-libertarian issues.  There is no tribe of all humanity.  As commenter Lurking Apple put it, "You seem to be assuming a spherical immigrant on a frictionless border..."  People are different.  Different tribes have different abilities, beliefs, and attitudes.  If we allow too many in, we cease to be what we were.  That may be good, but most mutations are not beneficial.  What we are - or at the very least, were - was very good at creating staggering amounts of prosperity from the nothing but hard work, ingenuity and the occasional tariff.  Add tens of millions of (to pick just two) notably prospering Mexicans, notably peaceful Muslims  - we might just end up with a shit sandwich on rye.
• It seems to me that while we should assiduously and strenuously hope that other places - backward, poor, disease infested, Global Warming-afflicted, trounced by Colonialism and the Man (you know where they are) - might adopt our miraculously effective package of property rights, innovation, and win! to rework their lives in a way that seems best to them, but in any event a richer version than what they have now.  We might even offer classes or something.  But it is probably not our job, as a nation or a people, to provide that life for them there, and it certainly isn't our job to provide that life for them here.

Anywho, that's my small thought for today.

[wik] And here is this amusing, if harsh, take on Libertarianism.

Here's some stuff I've managed to read whilst being distracted by, among other things, being swamped at work, dealing with multiple family medical crises, a new(-ish) baby, and ennui.

• Four Words That Make Me Suspicious of Myself When I Say Them I would add "Clearly" because that almost invariably indicates that I haven't really thought something through.  Clearly is academic code for "you're an idiot for thinking the opposite of what I'm about to say."
• "Amish" and "Contraband" aren't two words that normally go together.  But hey, why not.  When the Amish Mafia gets going, "Get Milk" will have an entirely new and sinister meaning.  I posted on the War on Milk™ previously, here.
• The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence - h/t to my pal Christian, who found this one.  The Russian domesticated foxes I first heard about when I watched a documentary on dogs - fascinating stuff, and Isegoria recently linked to another bit on the topic.
• Deflation or Hyperinflation? This piece goes into detail on an argument that's been bouncing around a lot on Zero Hedge, my new favorite source of economic news.  At this point, I don't think we can dodge econopocalypse.  The exact method of our demise is perhaps up in the air, but that seems to be about all that is in real doubt.
• Devin, Aretae, Foseti, and AnomalyUK have had some fascinating debates on matters Formalist.  I hope someday to have five minutes of uninterrupted time to string together a few thoughts on the matter.  Moldbug also posts on economics - something I've been surprised he hadn't hit sooner, given all the financial shenanigans that have been going on around here lately.
• Annoyed by partial RSS feeds?  I am, or rather, was.  This link provides several solutions.
• Ken, who was once the Oldsmoblogger, has a neato post centered on a quote from Wedgwood's The Thirty Years' War.  Another book I need to read.  And speaking of reading, reading is really hard.  It just isn't worth the effort to try and read anything more involved than a comic book when you can only devote five minutes at a time to reading it.

Evangel Cathedral.