There is some controversy regarding the memorial for MKL on the national mall. Not sure why because it looks awesome.

It’s worth noting that a statue of MLK has caused bureaucratic gridlock. Remember this the next time someone argues in favor of universal healthcare.

David over at The Volokh Conspiracy pulls some choice text from a liberal:

Nor do I believe that conservatives should never receive honorary degrees. There are conservative scholars who do work that is respected within academia—many economists, for example—and they would not be inappropriate candidates for such an honor. Nor would I have a problem with conservative pundits, so long as they’re sane and genuinely distinguished (which these days admittedly narrows the field to practically zero), such as the late William F. Buckley. I’ll even grudgingly accept the reality that conservative Republican elder statesmen are regularly awarded these things. Though even here there are limits—while personally I wouldn’t protest the awarding of a degree to George H.W. Bush, even though I find him pretty hateful, far-right lunatics like Cheney, Dubya, and Jesse Helms should be entirely out of bounds…. as much as conservatives may whine and scream to the contrary, liberalism and conservatism are not moral equivalents. Because, on the one side you have the thinkers and activists who have advanced freedom, social justice, and human rights, and on the other, you have those who have attempted to thwart all those things.

And one wonders how liberal became a dirty little world.

I imagine not a single one of my readers would agree with this. Refrain from posting the painfully obvious comment that there are conservative who speak like this as well. To that I would say, well no shit Sherlock.

Intelligence is often marred by hubris. Bureaucrats often believe that any solution can be obtained with the judicious application of the state in conjunction with ‘experts’. Much of Obama’s rhetoric has this flavor. This intensity of this attitude follows a definite gradation. Communists most intensely believe that with some state coercion coupled with development of planning by intelligent experts a country will be tremendously improved upon. Socialist belief is more moderate in intensity but nevertheless have what I would consider an unhealthy trust in the state. Liberal democrats of this US political landscape also believe this quite a bit, but not nearly as intensely as communist or socialist.

But their really is ridiculous amount of hubris in thinking that the state is the solution to the problem. I’m reminded of this every time I consider just how difficult it is to produce something other people want. Which brings me to the point of this post. I came across an essay explaining how a pencil is manufactured. The process makes obvious how no man, not matter how intelligent, would of been able to draw up plans for for manufacturing pencils.

This really gets at one of my core beliefs. Prediction that is not based in cold hard experience is not useful. Intelligent bureaucrats planning the economy must make many prediction disconnected from experience. Eventually this system falls apart. The problem is that the more intelligent you become the more likely you are to ignore the importance of experience in determining prediction. The most obvious example these days would be global warming. Nobody has any sense of what a slight increase in temperature will do to climate and yet many intelligent experts happily associate themselves with doomsday predictions if state planning is not implemented.

As if state planning will make things better. When has that ever been the case?

While I vehemently oppose such silly laws I wonder where the rest of you land. It seems to me silly to punish people for having ‘hateful’ thoughts. Whatever the hell that means. I’m sure the extant legal implementation such laws finds very little support amongst most of you but in principle would you support such laws?

I ask because some Canadian Muslims are throwing a tantrum because a pundit wrote several opinion pieces in a conservative magazine that hurt their feelings. As a result they used the Canadian Human Rights commission to force this magazine to publish their counter arguments. The human rights commission determined it could not do so because it’s not in its jurisdiction. Effectively these Muslims were trying to use the state to force a private company to do what they wanted, in this case publish their own counter editorials. Only because of jurisdiction did the state aperture fail in taking away a private company’s right to publish what it sees fit and force one set of beliefs over another set of beliefs.

No doubt the human rights commission was brought into existence to ‘protect’ minorities from hateful speech. But in my mind, such efforts are blatant attempts at censorship. One should be able to express hate towards any person or group of people. Such speech is obviously vile and unappealing but I accept that necessary noise for a free and functioning democracy. Some on the left have forgotten this basic law and as consequent attempt to criminalize some kinds of thoughts and ideas. Which oddly, is something up to just the last twenty or so years was the work of conservatives.

Marc Ambinder argues had McCain made the mistake Obama made, that the press coverage would of been much more extensive.

What do you think. I tend to agree.

An excellent opinion piece examines the hypocrisy of the religious views of some liberals.

Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.

Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.

He goes on to make this observation:

The double standard some liberals have employed in response to Wright makes one seriously consider their oft-stated preference for rationality, reason and secularism over superstition and prejudice.

This reminds me of a thought I keep having. Many pundits will assume any argument to support their party regardless of the overall consistency of the rhetoric. Thus we have conservatives who staunchly support the idea of staying out of international affairs, until a conservative president goes to war with Iraq. Or we have liberals who staunchly support constitutional rights except for the second one. Its rather alarming when you consider how much of either political party consist of people who seem mostly uninterested in rhetorical continuity.

It leaves one with the cynical, and paradoxical, view that a parties principles are determined solely by the other party’s views. This most obviously is the case when a political position in which the prevailing party lacks public support for a position. In those cases, no matter what underlying principle must be sacrificed the minority party will develop a rhetorical position to tap into that potential majority of voters.

Instapundit directs me to this report advising which patients should be given care in the event of a massive pandemic where medical resources must be conserved. I want you to think about this for a second because this is the same kind of reasoning we see in global warming.

A groups of experts, who have no actual experience working in a massive pandemic flu, have posited a set of outcomes, developed a set of guidelines for operation in those hypothetical outcomes, and then argue these guidelines should be applied to all hospitals that serve the 300 million or so people of this country. Can you imagine the kind of pride it takes to earnestly make these suggestions.

First, these so-called experts have no actual experience with a national or global pandemic. It’s simply assumed they do because their ‘expertise’ in some field appears to have some vague association with determining hospital policy during a catastrophe. However, given the fact that not a single one of them have ever actually been in a national or global pandemic, its hard to really see how their current expertise, whatever that may be, is more useful in foreseeing the events of such a pandemic, or that they would have more insight in setting policy then just a typical mix of people forced into that situation.

Its bad that these experts are riding on the coat tails of an association between their expertise and a perception that they are qualified prognostications, but then they suggest guidelines in which the entire medical system should be behave in this situation. Instead of taking a position that each facility should set it’s own policy so as to adapt to the conditions it finds itself in, these ‘experts’ wish to apply a set of rubrics that all facilities across the whole country, if not the world should follow. Its in this suggestion that their hubris becomes manifest. It’s one thing to shoot the shit with your colleagues about how the medical system will behave in a pandemic, but an entirely different thing when you actually argue for setting policy based on your prognostications. These experts think their conjecture is so likely to be true, that it’s best to advise how thousands upon thousand of medical facilities should respond to some future catastrophe.

It’s even worse than that. These same experts believe that the application of their rubrics will result in a better outcome than the collective action of all the medical professionals in the actual pandemic adapting their decisions to match the context of the local community. These experts are suggesting a command economy approach to managing a pandemic will be superior to a free market approach. History has really shown that to be true.

These experts know what no one can possibly know and believe their rubrics will be superior to managing the pandemic then medical professionals that develop an intimate understanding of of the catastrophe and adapt as context demands. Such belief is the very definition of hubris.

When composing letters to their loved ones.

Such letters, remembered Leonid Sitko, were written on tiny pieces of paper, with tiny letters. Everyone signed them with false names: his was “Hamlet,” his girlfriend’s was “Marsianka.” They had been “introduced” through other women, who had told him she was extremely depressed, having had her small baby taken away from her after her arrest. He began to write to her, and they even managed to meet once, inside an abandoned mine.