The Space Transportation System (STS) is officially over. The last one did not blow up so the program did go out not with a bang, but a whimper, and for everyone on board that was a good thing. Prior to the STS Americans had never died in space, but the shuttle remedied that statistic.

NASA is now dreaming/scheming/fantasizing about the next generation rocket, the so-called Space Launch System (SLS). The crew compartment is no longer the size of a Kharman-Ghia it has been made large enough for 4 so it is a Taurus station wagon. The end result is the same a financial rape of the taxpayer, a ride in a very uncomfortable space u2018taxi' for the politically connected, and the never ending hype of national pride.

This vehicle (SLS) will never go to Mars and back it is a cynical hype for more money so NASA can continue playing in space. I remember sitting in my taxpayer financed NASA cubicle 21 years ago and thinking we cannot possibly build the space station. Assembly of the space station would have taken an estimated 19,000 hours of space walking which was adventurous to say the least considering that at that time the US (1990) the US space program had accumulated less 200 hours. Mercifully someone(s) came to their senses and everything space station related was either never funded or under-funded and the whole thing withered.

Some quick observations on the SLS:

1. It is just another version of an old design Von Braun's Saturn I-V
2. It will be a kerosene-liquid oxygen hydrocarbon burning rocket because the expense of the higher energy density hydrogen-oxygen (space shuttle) is not worth the cost
3. Since these things explode occasionally the old escape tower is back aptly title u2018launch abort system'
4. It will be liquid fueled which is what the u2018developable' engine architecture is all about
5. Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) will help get this massive fuel tanker off the pad initially and then separate and fall back into the ocean, hopefully not on someone's private sector yacht
6. Nothing is new about this other than the fact that there has been no new space technology since 1960
7. New lies will be spun to make this appear to be a cost effective good idea

The Russian were smart enough to put their space shuttle u2018Buran' exactly where it belonged in the city dump! When they did it they did not call a press conference.

• More on the SLS
• My critique of the whole NASA/Rockets/Space Travel debacle is as true now as it was then

George Giles [send him mail] is an independent writer in Nashville TN. He studied atmospheric physics under the Alabama State Climatologist.

The Best of George Giles

Tornadoes swept through the south this past week killing more than 340 people. This toll may continue to rise as the devastated landscape is searched by rescue squads. As of May 2 some 458 people are still unaccounted for, let us pray that they are all students that have gone home without notifying anyone. Some of the these Tornadoes (atmospheric vortices) will be rated at F4, one in particular, the one that went through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham Alabama, may ultimately be rated at the level of F5 on the Fujita scale, a real life monster.

Tornadoes are unique features of the North American continent, they rarely form elsewhere. Tornadoes form when the cold air mass out of Canada meets with the warm most air from the Gulf of Mexico. u2018Tornado Alley' as it is called runs along a diagonal line between central Texas and the Great Lakes. The tornado season happens in the spring and fall as seasons change and hot moist air from the south collides with the cold dry air sweeping down from Canada. The sun heats the water of the gulf warming it up and raising the humidity level which then flows northward into the southern states. This provides half of the necessary features that create the 'supercell' thunderstorms which are the forebears and incubators of tornado production. Cold northern air dives down from Canada across the Great Plains and rushes above the warmer air from the gulf. Hot air rises and cold air sinks as these great masses of thermal energy collide. It is the rising of the warm air into the colder air above that generates the wind vortices that make up tornadoes.

In recent years thanks to the private sector miracle of Doppler radar these weather systems can now be understood in significant detail. Giant cumulonimbus clouds form along the interface or front between these colliding air masses which are at different pressures and temperatures. These clouds can produce a wall cloud which is the tornado nursery. The collision produces massive air vortices that are horizontal to the ground and invisible to the naked eye, but not to the penetration of the Doppler radar. Inside the cloud updrafts occur which brings moist air into contact with colder dryer air and hailstones form nucleating around dust particles that are suspended in the atmosphere. These begin to fall under the influence of gravity. This creates a downdraft alongside the updraft. This mass then rotates downward towards the ground and the vortex becomes vertical and can be seen descending from the wall cloud; the tornado forms and its short malevolent life begins. The most visible tornadoes are the large ones that accumulate dust and debris from the ground. Occasionally the horizontal vortex becoming vertical can be seen during this transition. The monster that formed near Tuscaloosa Alabama was videotaped making this transition thanks to some brave, daring and close videographers.

Most tornadoes only live a few minutes because they are unstable and rapidly dissipate. However, sometimes the conditions are so ripe for formation that as the squall line, along which the super-cells are formed, move these monstrous storms can then sweep across long distances and even strengthen. These are relatively rare events, a thousand or more tornadoes form every year, yet only a few are long-lived, but this is exactly what happened on Wednesday in southern Mississippi and Alabama. Only a couple of F4's form in a year and F5 often go years without formation. The figure below shows the percentage of tornado type by the Fujita scale for the period between 1950 and 1994:

The percentage of fatalities by the Fujita class of tornado can be seen below for the period between 1950-1994:

The data shown above shows that most deaths occur in the relatively rare F4 and F5 vortices. Another benefit of the agrarian nature of the Great Plains and the Midwest is that most tornadoes do not hit large cities at all, but wreak their havoc in fields with few human occupants!

As devastating as this week's storms were the casualties could have been much worse. The National Weather Service (NWS) began deploying NEXRAD radar stations around the country in the early 1990's. These radar systems use the Doppler effect to determine relative velocity with respect to the radar antenna. This correlates very closely with rotation of the air mass. These radar systems overlap in scans thus providing complete coverage of the continental United States. Each circle continues beyond the circular boundary but sensitivity and accuracy decrease with distance which account for the small pockets of white that do not show overlap.

NEXRAD Doppler radar station locations can be seen in the image below:

Your narrator was born in Wisconsin and lived most of his life in Michigan which seldom sees violent thunderstorms and tornadoes. I moved to south to Huntsville Alabama in January 1989. The beauty of the south is that even in winter it is a rare week that does not have a few warm days. In November of 1989 a warm front pushed up out of the Gulf of Mexico and collided with cold Canadian air above Mississippi and Alabama. The storm warnings went off at work so I left about 3 PM to go pick up my children at pre-school and bring them home. We had a nice small porch facing north on our home and we sat blissfully unaware watching the rain and enjoying an after-school snack. After dinner we started getting phone calls from concerned relatives, were OK, how did we survive the storm? "What storm we asked?" "The one that killed all of those people in Huntsville", came the answer. We turned on the TV to find that a monster F4 storm had gone just south of our house by a mile or so, and had run for more than 100 miles before dissipating. Twenty people were killed when it went through one of the busiest intersections in Huntsville at rush hour.

A couple of years later a local TV weatherman named Bob Barron put together a computer graphics system using Geographical Information System (GIS) data and real-time Doppler radar imagery provided by the National Weather Service. Using this u2018storm tracker' it was possible to identify the signature of a wind vortex from the Doppler radar. One side of the vortex is moving towards the radar and the other side is moving away. This is the signature of tornadic conditions beginning and/or a tornado in progress. Over time weather forecasters realized that something called a bow or hook echo in a squall line is also characteristic of the tornadic conditions of an actual tornado. The F5 monster below is a classic hook echo, it occurred in 1999 in Oklahoma and resulted in many fatalities.

During the last decade of the millennium Huntsville Alabama was the largest city in the country with the dubious distinction of having the most tornadoes within 25 miles. One of Huntsville's TV stations went so far as to purchase their own weather Doppler radar so that they would not be dependent upon external data feeds in times of dire need. A classic market solution if ever there was one!

Virtually every television station in the south now has a storm tracking system of some kind available to their weather man and thus their viewing audience. Many stations provide continuous coverage of the weather using storm tracking when the National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning. A tornado watch is when conditions are favorable to the formation of super-cell thunderstorms. A tornado warning is issued when Doppler radar shows that wind vortices and or hook echoes are forming. A tornado does not have to be seen in order for warnings to be posted. The NWS only need observe the proper conditions.

This past week's death toll from the super-cells tornadoes is testimony as to how serious this issue is in some parts of the country. When conditions are right diligent attention needs to be paid to the weather as many lives, including one's own depend upon it. The Weather Channel provides spectacular coverage of these and other crucial weather events with experts continuously monitoring the conditions in order to provide this essential information to their viewers. The Weather Channel goes so far as to send meteorologists into harm's way when forecasts predict that these tornadic atmospheric conditions are expected. Southerner's, like myself, knew that Wednesday was going to be a really bad weather day; the warm moist air had been rushing northward from the gulf for several days before the well-defined cold front began approaching from the plains.

The Weather Channel's Jeff Morrow was live on the scene in Birmingham to cover Wednesday's events. Forecasters knew Birmingham was going to be in the middle of these super-cell storm conditions far enough in advance to send him and his television crew there from Atlanta. Large tornadoes often throw debris in advance of the onrushing funnel cloud. In this case the debris was being thrown 10 miles or more, a grim indication of a massive tornado event. Morrow set up on a tall ridge south of Birmingham looking north when the F4 monster appeared on the left side of the screen. You can watch this incredible video on YouTube.

After the Weather Channel was displaying the information live the government issued a "Tornado Emergency" meaning a trained a spotter had seen the funnel cloud and that people must take cover immediately.

These wondrous technologies saved thousands of lives on Wednesday. While it was a terrible tragedy that so many lost their lives, the death toll could have been very much higher. The combination of Geographical Information Systems and NEXRAD weather data provided the viewing audience with warnings sufficient to take cover.

Bob Barron's storm tracker uses wind velocity and trained meteorologists to produce warning down to the street level on a minute by minute basis. While science cannot predict exactly when and where tornadoes will form these empirical systems in the hands of trained operators can always give a few minutes warning before one arrives. So here in the 21st century it is possible to never be surprised by the appearance of a killer tornado. These systems are so accurate that a tornado will only sneak up on the unwary. TV stations all over the south were telling viewers that Wednesday would be bad.

I have lived in Nashville since 1999 and our local weather forecasters were saying on Monday that bad storm conditions were setting in for Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Weather radios that sound a shrill alarm that can be configured county by county and state by state which will awaken the sleeping who can then tune in the cable TV and find out what should be done.

In a scene of no small irony the Emergency Broadcast System took over the Weather Channel cable TV feed for a few minutes on Wednesday around 5 PM. It is a plain grey background with white letters saying a Tornado warning exists, and then it lists the counties covered. Keep in mind this provides small to zero localized information. Some counties in this country are 300 miles long so knowing which county the storm is in or approaching from is not nearly accurate enough in comparison. The cable TV channels are required by law to let this occur! The irony is that the storm tracking systems which are giving minute by minute predictions on a town by town, street by street basis have to surrender to a system that is 1950's era relic of black and white television that provides little to no useful information. Just what one comes to expect from our sclerotic, bureaucratic, and centralized Federal leviathan having no accountability. This idiocy preempts and interrupts the system that is actively and actually saving lives. Classic governmental legerdemain if ever there was one! All of these technologies GIS, NEXRAD, Doppler, cable TV, and weather radios are the product of the free market economy, and as seen in Huntsville local television stations will purchase these expensive radar systems and operate them uninterrupted by commercials during storm conditions. They do this so they do not have to rely on the government and be at the mercy of unaccountable bureaucrats.

In closing let us all say a prayer for the departed, the victims of Wednesday's tragedy that lost everything to a malevolent wind. Let us loudly praise the men and women working in the free market developed the technology that saved thousands of lives on Wednesday, and will continue to save lives into the future by using all the tools conjured up by the minds of free men now available to predict and monitor these horrific events. In my 21 years in the south I have had 4 different tornadoes within a mile of my home, so needless to say I stay tuned in!

P.S. Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. Rand Paul please introduce a bill into Congress so we can get laws changed so that the useless Emergency Warning System can stop interfering with a warning system that has been proven to work time and time again over the last two decades, and never so vividly and wonderful as it did this past Wednesday.

George Giles is an independent writer in Nashville TN. He studied atmospheric physics under the Alabama State Climatologist.

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

Stockholders of Enron were chagrined to find that when one firm is performing voodoo accounting, lying or cooking the books. The mendacity eventually comes to light when other firms are accounting for their business activity truthfully. It is impossible to lie over the long run in a free market. Remember that the government had nothing to do with the ending the Enron scandal; they did not discover, report or stop it. Market analysts cratered the Enron balloon via accounting diligence; monitoring the lifeblood of an economy, the flow of "money."

All economies are based upon energy flow, even if it is the energy of metabolic expenditure in a subsistence economy. Advanced economies use more energy per producer and consumer. The upward advance of mankind is based upon harnessing more and more energy for human usage. This is the driver of the industrial revolution. Energy and accounting are governed by rigorous mathematical relationships. Thermodynamics is relentless in accounting for energy flow, unflinching, the purest of truths.

I quote from Wikipedia:

"In physics, thermodynamics (from the Greek θερμη, therme, meaning “heat” and δυναμις, dynamis, meaning “power”) is the study of the transformation of energy into different forms and its relation to macroscopic variables such as temperature, pressure, and volume. Its underpinnings, based upon statistical predictions of the collective motion of particles from their microscopic behavior, is the field of statistical thermodynamics, a branch of statistical mechanics. Roughly, heat means “energy in transit” and dynamics relates to “movement”; thus, in essence thermodynamics studies the movement of energy and how energy instills movement. Historically, thermodynamics developed out of need to increase the efficiency of early steam engines."

The starting point for most thermodynamic considerations are the laws of thermodynamics, which postulate that energy can be exchanged between physical systems as heat or work. They also postulate the existence of a quantity called entropy, which can be measured for any system. In thermodynamics, interactions between large ensembles (groups) of objects are studied and categorized. Central to this are the concepts of the system and surroundings. A system is composed of particles, whose average motions define its properties, which in turn are related to one another through equations of state. Properties can be combined to express internal energy and thermodynamic potentials, which are useful for determining conditions for equilibrium and spontaneous processes.

A law of physics is a thing of beauty. It exists for all people, all cultures, all colors, and all creeds. It is the most undiscriminating thing possible. It is the same for all people, over all time and space. It has no bias, no hidden agenda, and has no need for spin doctors. It is not a child of government, it needs no approval. Unlike mathematics which has the concept of proof, a law of physics is only postulated to be true. It is accepted as true if it has been verified by sufficient experimentation. As long as it has never been shown to not be true, that is to be false, it will be accepted as a "law."

The Creator in his infinite wisdom put physical law into the Universe so that order would exist and that chaos (not the dynamical system kind) would not rule. The Creator loves beauty, loves symmetry. Just as all men are equal before the Creator on judgment day, they are equal today with respect to physical law. The Creator’s bond with mankind and all living things is physical law. The Creator’s gift for peace between men has been faith. Much of mankind has failed in being faithful.

Primitive man tried a variety of tricks to get around the binding of the Creator’s will which made real physical law. Magic was postulated. Magic was simply physical law subject to change based on some social rule that was subordinated to the will of man. Magic would give us magicians, sorcerer’s, demon’s et al. That would be abhorrence to the Creator, and thus is not allowed.

The brilliant movie Dragonslayer (1981) has a wonderful scene where the King and his Sorcerer are trying to get a magic amulet to turn lead into gold by applying some ego-based hocus-pocus: "Now lead be ye gold" they fecklessly incant. Had this experiment worked and if lead had been transmuted into gold the King would have been disappointed in the outcome; as another law would have taken over: economics. This fictional King, just like the actual King of Spain found: that when the gold supply goes up in the absence of more productive economic activity, then the price of gold just goes down. This would be the exact opposite of what the King had intended. Actually a very typical government program: the squandering of resources under political control achieving the exact opposite result. Economics under the dominion of man is just as inexorable as physics is under the dominion of the Creator, much to chagrin of legions of politicians over the centuries.

Back to the physics: thermodynamics was one the first scientific products of the industrial age. When steam power was created observations of steam engines led designers to seek a method of accounting for their behavior. It needed quantification to be useful. Observation led to the postulating of the three laws of thermodynamics by Sadi Carnot:

One popularization of these three laws is as follows:

1. You can never win, you can only break even
2. You can only break even at absolute zero
3. You can never reach absolute zero

The inexorable nature of this energy accounting system or balance sheet is that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. They are equivalent thanks to Einstein famous formula. The first law is what Milton Friedman canonized with his famous "there is no free lunch" statement. All production requires energy input. The second says that there is no perpetual motion, friction and other dissipative processes consume energy that is not available for work. Over the long run disorder (entropy) always increases. The garbage man is guaranteed his job security thanks to the second law, as waste products are always produced. The third law gives us time, it is an arrow pointing from the present into the future. Lots of socialists, crank economists, and lunatics have postulated perpetual motion, that is, free lunches; they do not occur in this Universe.

The quadrennial farce of the American Presidential Election is a monument to the denial of the first law: free lunches for everyone, the closer you are to the winner of this charade the more sumptuous the banquet. Still the banquet is not free and the wealth of the taxpayer is driven closer to zero in the attempt (law #2). The fact that this goes on as long as there is government is canonized in #3.

Physics is the same everywhere, Mars, Andromeda, Iran and North Korea. It does not respect ideology. This puts constraints on the state. Austrian economics is where these constraints are applied. Like Thermodynamics, Austrian Economics is a qualitative theory, that is, it is expressed in inequalities, not exactitudes. It bounds behavior but does not proscribe details, it provides limits.

The Federal Reserve is the great gas station/energy source in the sky, where the pumps are always open. The Federal Reserve acts as gold would have in Dragonslayer. The Fed’s transmutation of political promises into currency for "all debts public and private" acts to drive, inexorably, the value of the currency down.

Driving the value of currency down has a name: Austrians call it inflation. It is the economic equivalent of thermodynamics third law of entropy increasing. Just like the King’s program of lead into gold for wealth creation in the Kingdom, the Federal Reserve always has the opposite result: the business cycle, mal-investment and unemployment. Inflation is entropy degrading the value of economic productivity. It is an unlegislated tax on all current holders of the currency being inflated (as they all sadly are).

The Federal Reserve has only one tool: currency creation. When they perform this magic act at the behest of the political elite it is called a stimulus. When you and I do this it is called a crime: counterfeiting.

Economic down-regulation occurs from currency creation. Larger and larger doses of the drug, currency creation and devaluation, provide less and less result, liquidity, until finally with an infinite dose, the result goes to zero, no stimulus at all.

Let us try an Einsteinian gedanken, a thought experiment. In this model a currency is only the medium of exchange, and has nothing to do with the economic activity transacted. The currency does not perform useful work, produces no economic activity intrinsically. You could print a trillion pink coupons, and I could print a gazillion orange coupons and we could trade them ferociously (the cuckoo stock exchange), but there would be no economic activity at all from this exercise, except that you and I might run out of breath from the ferocity of the exchange. Since we would burn caloric fuel during this effort and generate heat (warm skin and breath) the entropy of our Universe would increase and the third law would be validated once again. I would have turned my breakfast into entropy by not performing useful work thus exchange has no affect on the end result, hence the futility of the task.

There is no instantaneous action at a distance, that is real things like information, propagate at a finite speed. That is what the Federal Reserve is all about. The politically favored get to belly up, like hogs at a trough, to the "Discount Window" where the currency creation is doled out. It propagates into the economy at a finite speed so the first in line gets the most efficacies since the devaluation does not occur until after the money is spent. This is where the inequality comes into play. The elites get money at near full value, it always finds its way into the pockets of the benighted masses (salary, compensation, wages, etc.) and when it comes out of our pockets it has lost purchasing power. You and I find, over time that our currency aliquots procure less and less desired result: goods and services because shortage exists, and/or prices have risen.

Thermodynamics bounds the work done by physical processes. Austrian Economics bounds the work done by economic processes. Life exists on Earth because the Sun continually pumps energy into the physical world we live in. This provides the thermodynamic input to all the biological systems that transform the energy into physical work, chemical work (metabolism and excretion) all running downhill and increasing entropy. The continuous input from the Sun more than compensates for the entropic loss which is why biological systems persist over long periods of time.

The Federal Reserve has no analogy to the Sun. It injects pure entropy by differentially degrading the units of accounting. The thermodynamic equivalent for your car would be gasoline at a fixed price but the refinery is allowed to deliver less hydrocarbon fuel at the same unit volume over time. You as the consumer see that you get fewer and fewer miles per gallon in your car. You are being cheated out of the energy content you paid for. The obverse of this is that purchasing power has decreased; entropy has crept in to the system.

The net result of a Central Bank, fractional reserve banking, and a fiat currency is an entropic-based reordering of the system in favor of the elite and against the masses. They get more useful work and we get more entropy. This is socialism pure and simple. Socialist societies fail and spread misery and death along the way.

Capitalism, the laissez-faire kind, not the crippled-market/fascist/socialist hybrid that masquerades as capitalism, does have a tool, and this is the tool that allows the planet to support more than 6 billion souls. The economy of utility from the division of labor leads to productivity increases. Thus man’s knowledge increases over time and can be used to drive productivity up and prices down. This and only this provides the abundance of the modern world.

Let’s be clear: the free market and socialism are mortal enemies, one prospers at the expense of the other, and one provides life while the other is out to destroy it. Socialist societies are hallmarked by the economy of shortage, and the distribution of goods politically absent markets. Let’s call the fiat currency what it really is: rationing coupons.

Socialist societies continually misallocate resources by the use of rationing coupons instead of money. Rational calculation cannot occur since there is no meaningful pricing mechanism. Entropy increases until eventually no work is done at all. Entropy and disorder are maximized at this point and life is no longer possible absent continual work input which the Central Bank cannot provide.

This is where the battle between capitalism and etatism (socialism) is fought. The distribution of energy governed by thermodynamics is analogous to the distribution of goods by the market process. Just as the Sun counteracts the dissipative tendency of entropy for the benefit of life on Earth, so can social organization via the capitalist model counteract the shortage of prosperity by using the division of labor to increase supply of desired goods? This is where the market provides the cornucopia of goods and services available in a market economy.

Governments, all governments, dissipate, consume and destroy; they have no creative power in and of themselves, and they are agents only for the transference of wealth from one party to another. As we have seen in thermodynamics every transfer dissipates. They are social embodiment of entropy. As it consumes more and more of the economy less and less useful work is done.

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

The conventional wisdom is that the burning of fossil fuels is leading to a global catastrophe that must be averted. At the same time we are running out of oil so quickly, the story goes, that oil production will plummet any day now sending the American lifestyle and economy into a tail spin from which it will never recover. This phenomenon called Peak Oil means that oil production has peaked and that existing fields are near depletion with no new significant oil fields being found.

I have beaten Al Gore like a government mule on multiple occasions in these hallowed pages. Al Gore is the Teflon ecologist as none of his lies, misrepresentations, and twisting of facts stick to him. Even for a politician he sets records for mendacity; Al lies like a rug. No longer in office this crank ecologist managed to get a Nobel Prize for not actually knowing anything about climate science. Al’s mantra must be that he never lets the truth interfere with a good story. This man is unbounded; there is literally nothing that he will not take the credit for (creating the Internet, saving the whole planet, blah blah blah …) with no more credentials than being a rich man’s son and dropping out of graduate school. Not exactly the credentials most Nobel laureate’s possess.

I have written about peak oil before in LRC. The most recent piece can be found here. The basic thesis is quite simple: we are not running out of oil. Hubbert is as wrong as wrong can be. The facts backing up this assertion are simple: every year in the past 60 years has had more petroleum reserves at the end of the year than at the beginning. This is certainly an odd phenomenon to be sure for something that is dooming the entire planet. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what Hubbert forecasted. Let’s get some reification: in December of 2009 world petroleum reserves were estimated to be 1.31 trillion barrels aka 131,000,000,000 of them. A barrel as a concept is only useful to a petroleum engineer. A barrel is 42 gallons. So a trillion barrels is 5,502,000,000,000 gallons, aka 5.5 quadrillion gallons, which is actually a whole lot. Experts will say that reserve estimates are crude (no pun intended) at best, and that variance can be as large of 10% or more. Ecologists always round these numbers down presaging disaster, and marketing people will round them up. Nevertheless entrepreneurs continue to explore; which is a powerful statement that the free market makes about the future profit potential. Petroleum exploration is very expensive using techniques that are right on the forefront of science and engineering.

Even if skeptics will quibble about the number I have chosen the point is still obvious: how can we be running out of something we always seem to have more of, even including the 100 million barrels or so that we consume each and every day. The balance of justice will tip in my favor, Hubbert is wrong and I am right at least in the short run. Clearly there is not an infinite reserve of petroleum because everything is finite in the very long run.

The gas giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are largely composed of hydrogen and methane which indicates that crude petroleum feedstock is abundant in our solar system. Thus there is some reason to think that some of this lies in the interior of our planet which slowly but surely percolates through the rock to the upper layers of the crust. Along the way methane gets oxidized into longer chain molecule as byproducts of methanogen metabolism. Man sees rocks as solid, but scientists know that they are porous at the molecular level; a large sponge, retarding, and filtering, but not stopping migrations thanks to Archimedes’ Principal, aka buoyancy. Oil exploration does not look for oil directly. They look for the rock formations that trap oil migration through the crust. This is the abiotic theory of petroleum creation. Thomas Gold raised 25 million dollars (USD) and sunk a well 6 miles into the Swedish bedrock. Sweden is a country without any known petroleum reserves. Gold found methane; methanogen’s and longer chain organic molecules. His excellent book The Deep Hot Biosphere should be on everyone’s reading list, except apparently Al Gore’s.

The earth’s oxygen is not a product of planet formation but has been and continues to be a product of primitive organism metabolism. Plants and other organism’s convert carbon dioxide into the oxygen we breathe. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a food to this ecosystem. In some ecological sense the burning of petroleum is a symbiotic relationship between man (no other animal consumes the petroleum found in the crust) and the plant world. Mankind produces CO2 as a byproduct of petroleum consumption and the plants respond by producing oxygen.

Global warming is the catastrophe which has been hyped by the media and has thus been transmogrified into a cultural bogeyman targeting humanity. Global warming is the direct result of increased atmospheric CO2 which is produced by mankind in their insidious combustion of petroleum. Global warming will cause the north and south poles to melt which will destroy all waterfront property around the world; it will cause new biological threats to develop. New strains of influenza and other viral and bacterial threats will see the additional few parts per million of CO2 as the go signal to run wild. This is of course a pile of crap, but indicative of the shallow reasoning environmentalists use. Most of us learned this as a fable in grade school: "Chicken Little". Smokin’ Hot Al Gore runs around the world like a power-drunk Chicken Little searching for ignorant rubes that he can save. Runs is not accurate: Al flies around the world on private jets like a power-drunk Chicken Little. There are no TSA cavity searches for this vanguard of mankind. Still Al’s fable always ends the same way he is anointed king and the environmental ninnies open up concentration, I mean, reeducation camps. Al was so close to the levers of power that he cannot get it out of his mind. His fever dreams are replete with scenarios where he would act Presidential and force people to do the right thing. To date the American people and the Constitution have kept him at bay. He is not deterred; he spews his eco-madness non-stop as an attention-getting tool lest the public forget who their savior is.

Unfortunately the climate science to support these assertions is actually very thin even if present in copious amounts. It consists mainly of computer simulations of questionable predictive value. These models must be carefully tuned in order to converge at all. This same tuning can show many results like a perpetual ice ball planet or a raging inferno similar to Venus. A reputable climate scientist will admit this in professional publications but these facts always seems to get dropped from discussion in propaganda venues like Time, Newsweek, Financial Times, or the Economist. These models can generate many forms of disastrous outcome in glossy four-color graphics. What they can’t do is accurately predict the climate future. No amount of spending on supercomputers (always taxpayer funded) will change this fact. It is an initial condition boundary value problem for a system of coupled non-linear partial differential equations that can never be compensated for. If you read the hyperlinked data the problem is in the smoothness (the weather can never be smoothed out).

Temperature data over the last 150 is a worthless statistic when you consider that this planet has been around for 4.5 billion years, and that life emerged only in the last 600 million years. For millions of years the Earth was covered by a massive ice sheet that prevented sunlight from striking the ground. In the last hundred thousand years there have been multiple ice ages and warm periods, yet life prevails.

The mendacity of this "science" threatens all of humanity. The third world struggles to get into the first world. They do this by increasing their energy consumption in their daily lives by working in some form of hampered market economy. This increase in energy consumption allows them to produce goods like running shoes, trendy fleece jackets, and iPods. If either global-warming or peak petroleum cranks have their way energy consumption across the planet will decrease. New laws will only serve to strangle the economy of utility to be found from the division of labor. This strangulation will be most severe in the developing world; it literally threatens billions.

Socialism kills millions when confined to a single country (China, Russia, and Cambodia). If adopted on the world scale it threatens billions. Democracy is the god that the west is trying to get the whole world to implement. Ecologists and Socialists have failed miserably as the body politic knows to reject their eco-prophets at the polling place. Al Gore, John Kerry, current communist bozos and Ralph Nader have all been rejected in their manifold attempts to have their hands on the most powerful levers in the world: the American Imperial Presidency.

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It is the developing world that will be punished the most. It should seem odd that a celebrity like Al Gore can have a mansion that consumes twenty times the monthly average utilities in the town where he lives, Nashville. He can also fly around the world in private jets to spew his provocative mendacity. His eco-devotee worshippers never question big Al’s carbon footprint either personal (currently) or the 8 years of president on-deck imperialist to Clinton. Big Al will tell us with a straight face that global cooling is really global warming that has gone into a stealth mode, just to fool us. Bill Clinton is now a fulltime buffoon and acts like one; he knows where he belongs. Gore takes himself serious and is very dangerous to mankind thanks to his Nobel status.

The Intra-Government Panel on Climate Change spews questionable science at the entire world through mass media replication of the mendacious façade of impending doom. Taxpayers around the world get bilked for this science. Their tentacles reach into all other domains via regulation. If the triple threat of climate change, petroleum production, and intra-governmental socialism are successful then billions will suffer and millions will certainly perish.

These clowns who cannot predict the weather next week want to predict it forever. Unlike TV weathermen political predictions turn into laws thanks to prevaricating politicians like Al Gore. These laws are directly targeted at capitalism to destroy it. Politicians know that capitalism via Human Action is their mortal enemy as it strips them of all their power. Politicians are just ordinary citizens that have power over others. It is this power that they crave to yield. Capitalism and Political "Science" are in a death match to the end because one cannot exist without destroying the other.

Socialism is the stealth political platform that peak oil and climate doomsayers promulgate. It is a thinly veiled menace to the body politic of the first, second and third worlds. Socialism via ecological regulation will punish the taxpayers and workers of the entire planet. The first world can adapt to some extent as they have shown through all the market crashes, recessions, regulations wars and market hampering of the twentieth century. It is the developing world that will be damaged the most, and these are the planet’s most endangered ecosystems. Energy and market transactions are the only way out of the cruel misery of poverty and ignorance. They do not love their children or their cultures any less than the developed world and should be accorded the same chance to prosper.

Let’s make the next decade one in which reason takes the field of the political debate and rolls back the twin threats of "Peak Oil" and Climate Change socialism. Ignore the Hubbert’s and Gore’s of the world. Let us welcome the developing nations like China, India and others into the fraternity of peace and prosperity through capitalism.

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

I am a baby boomer, born right smack in the middle of the peak of the age distribution (1954). I am as average as anyone can be. Boomers are both the largest and best-educated demographic slice of the American population. Like many of my generation I went to college correlating education with a white-collar job and a higher income/tax bracket. My undergraduate degree was in Chemistry (ACS 99th percentile) and mathematics. Through a quirk of fate I wound up professionally as a computer scientist and systems architect specializing in artificial intelligence, dynamics and kinematics. My graduate work was in mathematical physics. Like many scientists of my generation atheism seemed to be the rational philosophical belief.

My/our arrogance in the success of science in describing the physical world mathematically seemed to rule out the possibility of a Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu or Buddhist divine being aka God. This for many led to secularism and the ascendancy of a scientific state being the faith of the modern world. This faith was been proven to be a disaster for over a hundred million human beings in the 20th century.

Communism expressed this faith explicitly becoming the first official atheistic modern state; China soon followed. This soon led to its adoption in much of the developing world of the twentieth century. As the Obama Administration seeks to implement socialism by bureaucratic fiat this faith is worth exploring in some detail because socialism explicitly seeks to manage the state by scientific principles denying both human nature and economic reality. The history of the twentieth century demonstrates in China, Russia, East Germany, North Korea, Cambodia and Cuba that Communism is the most despotic form of government. In a very short period of time this led to mass murder on scales never seen before. As Jolting’ Joe Stalin (Iossif Dhugashvilli) is supposed to have said: "A single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths that’s just a statistic." Chairman Mao took this as a prime directive and bolted into the lead with this pack of mass murderers. This revolting behavior has now been codified into a field of study: democide; when the state preys upon its own citizens. Sadly the following is the cruel reality:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
~ Lord Acton

Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely.
~ Dr. R. J. Rummel

Is it possible that democide could come to be practiced in the United States? Impossible? I believe that this possibility gets closer with each passing day. As Will Rogers said "The American people are in danger every day that Congress is in session."

Democide has always been the product of a strong centralized and authoritarian government. This is a necessary, but not sufficient criteria; that final shift comes from a crisis, perceived, manufactured or real. The language of political discourse in the United States generally since 1860, and since 2001 specifically has been directed toward just such a crisis. The Global War on Terror is an open-ended, ill-defined, and illegal police action from the perspective of International Law. As we have seen it has been prosecuted by successive administrations and is now longer running than both World War I and II together. Each day brings America closer to fiscal insolvency thanks to the Federal Reserve that has been printing money or liquidity injection that is in reality theft from future generations; an unlegislated tax. Such a bankruptcy has resulted in chaos and civil unrest in other countries much smaller than the United States and whose economies have much less of an impact on other nations. A US bankruptcy might have catastrophic repercussions for other nations.

The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been much ballyhooed in the press of western society of late, yet few Americans know that taxpayer funds and a U.S. "ally" Israel is in the process of building such a wall complete with guard towers, machine gun nests, and inevitably the murders that always follow such an edifice. Soldiers commit murder even if they are only following orders. The killing of one human by another is murder regardless of circumstance. Construction of this wall is in direct violation of International Law, making Israel culpable as a criminal state.

This "defense" wall is now large enough to be seen from space like the Great Wall of China; another monstrosity built by an authoritarian state on the corpses of tens of thousands of serfs that were buried in unmarked graves for their reward.

The United States gives each and every year about 10% of the Israeli Gross Domestic Product, so by that logic we have paid or ultimately will pay for some 43.6 miles of this 436-mile-long abomination.

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in history, was a devout monotheist. Sir Isaac wrote 1 million words on math and physics, with another 2 million words on issues of Faith. Never at Rest written by Dr. Richard Westfall is regarded as the definitive biography of Newton. In it he reveals that Newton did not believe in the Holy Trinity of the Roman Catholic faith; Newton believed that it was a product of secretive monks in the middle ages. What Newton did believe was that God was the supreme geometer. That the cosmos could be understood by man by the diligent application of Natural Philosophy; what science was called in the 17th century.

I have found that Sir Isaac was almost always right in his observations and conclusions. His birth marks the entry of mankind into the Age of Reason and the exit of western civilization from the Age of Faith as described by Will and Ariel Durant in their magnificent life work: History of Western Civilization. Mathematics begot physics which begot engineering which when coupled with Austrian Economics and the market economy begot the prosperity and social structure that provides sustenance and meaning for more than 6 billion souls that reside on our little blue jewel of a planet. Most of the people that have ever existed are alive now, due in no small part to these geniuses. Never have so many owed so much to so few!

My education in mathematical physics was quite by accident. I was hired for my artificial intelligence expertise in 1989 by a NASA prime contractor. I was quickly assigned to work on the commercialization of space technology in the wake of the Challenger disaster. I had some expertise in this area but not enough to lead a multi-million dollar development effort.

Emulating Sir Isaac I immediately enrolled in graduate school and trudged off to the Redstone Arsenal library, got a few books, turned to page 1 and got busy. Many courses later and thousands of hours of labor and I had absorbed a massive amount of differential geometry, built the product and delivered it to several customers.

Differential geometry is the mathematical tableau upon which all of the great theories of 20th century physics are built upon. Quantum field theory, general relativity, string theory, and loop quantum gravity are built upon this foundation. I was able to read and understand the canonical works by many experts in these fields. What this gradual enlightenment of your humble narrator over more than 2 decades produced was a renewed interest and understanding of Newton’s Supreme Geometer.

Being raised in the Missouri Synod branch of the Lutheran Church in America I was "forced" to memorize Luther’s small catechism in just 3 short weeks; I found this completely repellent, largely unintelligible and a wonderful way to extinguish any desire for "faith" in a young man. More than 30 years later mathematical physics reawakened me to these possibilities. I will make my mathematical discussion as brief as possible, and will go into much greater detail in another forum. I ask users to take it on faith pending their own independent investigation and verification.

The book of Genesis of the Old Testament talks about how God brought order into the chaos of the void. In Quantum Field Theory this is expressed as the chaotic nonlinear dynamics of the vacuum energy. The Casimir effect has been measured to demonstrate that this is in fact to be the case. The principle of general covariance is how order is brought into the physical space in which we reside. All modern accepted theories as validated by experiment have shown these principles to be inviolable, just as would be expected from a Supreme Geometer.

My conclusion is that mathematics tells us what is true. Physics tells us which truths are implemented as reality in the particular differentiable manifold we inhibit, AKA Universe. An infinite number of universes is possible, the vast majority of which would be uninhabitable for life as we currently understand it. These multiverses allow for an infinite possibility for reality. The one we inhabit seems to be uniquely tuned for life. This is called the Cosmological Anthropomorphic Principle, an excellent book on this that requires no more mathematics than beyond the 8th grade is The Cosmic Anthropic Principle from Oxford Press.

Modern physics has given ancient faith a basis for rational possibility. Physics provides frameworks for answering well-posed questions, but not all questions. Quantum Mechanics tells us about how the microscopic world of particles, fields and matter interact. It tells us nothing about larger aggregations of these building blocks like frogs, primates, and the dynamic living social creatures from ant colonies to nations. Relativity and Field theory do give us a moment of creation, a beginning as posited in many books of faith. Relativity tells us that we cannot understand what happened before and what is happening outside of our manifold (Universe). Yet mathematics indicates that these exotic objects could exist beyond our understanding and this is one of the basic tenets of a monotheistic supreme being; a Supreme Geometer that could inhabit and control these realms which lie beyond human understanding.

A particle physicist, Dr. Stephen Barrow, has written an excellent treatise that I recommend to every inquiring mind on the nature of faith and science in his monograph Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. It is an excellent read. I found it hard to put down.

As the United States seems to drift into a cult of Obama personality and worship of the state above man and God these issues are worth pondering. History has shown that rational societies can devolve into democide that can slaughter millions and alter history and human life in ways that seem incomprehensible. The strong authoritarian state is a necessary precondition and this is all that the Federal Government seems to do. Concerned citizens need to take notice and act to stem this monstrous tide before it is too late.

Ludwig von Mises demonstrated that death is the logical product of Socialism in 1922; just five short years after the October Revolution loosed the modern state, modern industrial production and authoritarian rule upon the millions that ultimately perished at the hands of this abomination.

From my perspective, physics is the bond between man and God; it is the same for all persons, all faiths, all societies, and all political desires. The Holy Bible and the Holy Quran are tenets which guide the majority of living beings are God’s word to forge a bond between human beings that is just and equitable. A society based upon the Ten Commandments has no need for Defense Departments, Homeland Security, FBI/CIA/NSA, Mossad, MI7, KGB, GRU or the NKVD.

Austrian Economics is the philosophical realization of this order. The message is simple yet pristine; something that all know in their hearts is true even if their minds and selfish desires convince them to act otherwise in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement. Only twelve simple words convey the message: power of love, forgiveness of sin, peace on earth, goodwill toward men; express a society based upon the Ten Commandments. We need to restructure government that acts contrary to those dictates.

The founding fathers wanted America to be the realization of this dream divorced from the old world and its classes, aristocracies, grudges and hatred. It is not too late for America and other nations to return to this state of grace, mercy and prosperity based upon private property, the free market and the economy of utility from the division of labor. The trend of the last 200 years can be reversed, but the hour is getting late and the forces of darkness seem to be gaining strength in Washington just as they did in Beijing, Tokyo, Berlin, London and elsewhere in the past.

My opinion is that "living again is no more of a miracle than having lived once; yet here we are alive in a gentle corner of a universe constructed as it would seem just for us." We need to honor what has been provided by living as we are meant to, in peace and prosperity.

It is in plumbing the depths of Natural Philosophy that I found faith, not in religious dogma or repetitive ritual. Many religious scholars, libertarian scholars and authors have recognized that individual liberty, private property, and the Free Market are completely consistent with the teachings of the great monotheist faiths. The Prophet Mohammed said and I paraphrase: "We live by trade, not by usury," Christ threw the moneychangers from the temple, not the merchants!

It takes the monster of the centralized authoritarian state ascendant over the last century to do the devils work, creating desktop murderers as Judge Robert Jackson called Hitler’s Third Reich. Air Force commercials showing handsome young soldiers using high-tech video games to rain death down on strangers seems to me to be eerily reminiscent of this injunction.

It is against this and other behaviors that concerned citizens and the devout must regain control by democratic plebiscite and rein the beast back in as the Founding Fathers intended with representative democracy in a democratic republic.

The greatest mathematician in history, Carl Friedrich Gauss, when interviewed near the end of his life said, and I paraphrase, "that life had no meaning without an afterlife." He was a genius of such immense magnitude that he was almost never wrong.

Quantum Mechanics says that if you wait long enough almost anything improbable could happen and eternity is a long long time.

"An educated man knows how little he knows."
~ Marquis Pierre Simone de Laplace

Res Ipsa Loquitur

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

I have been a critic of this effort for almost 20 years. Global Warming is a massive threat to humanity, so the story goes, such that only massive and dramatic government intervention can save us from its "effects." This intervention would come as socialist policies designed to cripple the economies of capitalist countries whose carbon dioxide emissions (it is alleged) are turning the planet in a pressure cooker.

My criticism takes two fronts of argument: firstly what mankind can do with all our technological wizardry is next to nothing compared to the immense forces of the natural world and secondly because I actually have some expertise in these types of mathematical models. I was critical of Al Gore’s award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth before it was even released. I have offered a criticism that is both elementary to understand, and very simple that easily shows basic flaws in the data.

Ironically the world’s foremost expert on Atmospheric Physics, MIT Professor Dr. Richard Lindzen has not participated in this charade (IPCC). He is a vigorous and vocal critic of this IPCC hype. Many others have realized that this farce was nothing more than a crude attempt to implement socialism and control of the economy via environmental regulation based on mendacious, uncritical, and fundamentally wrong interpretations of this "science."

I eschewed these models based upon years spent performing mathematical modeling on a variety of topics, one of them being, atmospheric physics. Lots of people are now recognizing that Global Warming does not exist. The temperature peaked in 1998 and things have been getting colder in the intervening years.

A bold theory has emerged from Dr. Henrik Svensmark that is actually experimentally verifiable. Dr. Svensmark’s thesis is that cloud formation is a much more important climate driver for temperature change than carbon dioxide—type "greenhouse gases" whose concentrations change in the parts per million. It is bold because it is simple and easily verified.

Almost every human being has experience with temperature changes on a cloudy day. Cloudy days are inevitably cooler than sunny days. The answer is obvious: less of the sun’s heat radiation gets to the surface. Clouds also serve to reflect significant amounts of the sun’s radiation back into space.

What controls cloud formation? Global-warming advocates will say it is evaporation from the surface and the oceans. Any school boy can demonstrate the flaw in this argument. Pour water on your skin on a warm day and the evaporation cools the skin as it removes the heat of vaporization from the surface of the body. Humans depend on this (sweating) heat removal mechanism to survive. Thus warm temperatures will serve as a buffer for average temperature change if evaporation is considered as a forcing function.

Dr. Svensmark’s excellent book The Chilling Stars exposits that ionized and high-energy particle absorption in the atmosphere is the pre-dominant mechanism for cloud formation. He has an impressive amount of detailed scientific evidence to prove this fact. It is based on literally hundreds, if not thousands, of independent experiments.

If you only buy one book on the global-warming/climate-change debate this is the one to procure. The science he lays out is compelling and is valid over time frames of hundreds of millions of years. Most of the global-warming debate centers on ice core experiments that look back in time for only a few hundred thousand years. This model has many flaws because the results are very sensitive to the mechanism of specimen collection and the particular gas analysis tools chosen.

High-Energy Physics is one of the most accurate scientific theories to date. A primary tool in this endeavor is the cloud chamber. The cloud chamber is a controlled volume of water vapor such that high-energy particles enter the chamber and leave trails characteristic of the type of particle and the energy of the particle. Cloud chambers have been used for more than a century and their physics is long-established and well-understood. Most detectors in high-energy physics derive much of their design from cloud change—type measurements. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator have detectors based upon these types of scattering principles.

The trail of high-energy particles in the cloud chamber show, unequivocally that high-energy particles streaming (what physicist’s call flux) into the atmosphere form clouds in greater and lesser amounts corresponding to hotter and colder epochs of the planet’s history.

What is the source of this particle flux? Threefold mainly, some stream from the sun (spaceweather.com), some from inside our galaxy the Milky Way, and the rest come from outside of the Milky Way from the myriad and incredibly violent events like black hole formation, accretion disk acceleration, magnetic flux tube formation and destruction, magnetar and quasar jets, etc. We live in a very docile and calm neighborhood in an immense volume of conditions very hostile to life as we understand it.

There is nothing that can be done about any of these three sources (except perhaps to call out the Oh-Oh-Squad); they stream down from all directions around the earth as they will. Most of these were created billions of years ago and are just now reaching the Earth. The conclusion then is that if Dr. Svensmark’s theory is correct than global-warming/cooling is just another of Nature’s characteristics that man can do little to control, so a debate and policy changes based upon this are feckless. The most rational thing we can do about climate change is to stop wasting taxpayer’s money on dubious scientific programs that produce questionable data that lead to a foregone conclusion: socialism.

In closing let’s review some unpleasant, but accepted historical facts. Some 600 million years ago the Earth was completely covered in ice that was a mile thick on average, No life existed here. The sun then, was about 10% younger than it is now so it was still on the same stellar evolutionary rung as currently. Only 100 million years later the snowball planet melted and life became abundant. This tells us that the planet can freeze, and the freeze can kill everything. Just 50 years ago the scientific consensus was that global cooling was the expected trend for the future not warming. An ice age on the scale of the one just 20,000 years ago caused glaciers to form as far south as Tennessee. Canada was completely smothered as were much of Russia and the northern half of Europe.

This most recent ice age would have dramatic effects on the human population; billions would die as food production plummeted. The planet can support less than 10% of the current population with subsistence farming as the technology of the day. Not to mention the fact that the most productive farmland on the planet would now be glaciated exacerbating this trend.

On the other hand what does a slight amount of global warming portend? The North Pole might completely melt. A significant part of the Antarctic ice shelf might also melt. This would raise average sea levels slightly. Oceans cover 2/3 of the planet’s surface; the average depth of the ocean is about a mile. A rise in sea level of say 10 feet (much larger than expected) would change the shoreline for a lot of real estate that was put too close to the water anyway. It would not make much difference to mankind’s ability to survive. Cropland would not be massively destroyed. Florida real estate would take a beating, but then it was never a good idea to overpopulate what is essentially a large sand bar.

If you go to a farm that is more than 100 years old you will almost never find that the farmhouse is in the valley or on the shoreline. Farmers were much too smart to make that mistake. They built on hilltops! Why? They learned the hard way about shifting shorelines, water and what it can do to your life and livelihood.

In closing let’s just stop wasting breath on global warming, the science is of such poor a quality that it should be ignored. It is at its heart a mendacious attempt designed to strip prosperity from millions that have it and billions more that want it.

"Global-warming Political Science" is the product of an affluent society that allows a spoiled rich brat like Al Gore to get a Nobel Prize for telling un-truths. The American people fired him! He is currently unemployed and for a good reason; he has no job skills of any value, as would many of the "scientists" prosecuting the global-warming crusade if the market were free to choose.

We cannot predict weather accurately for more than a week, why should we allow the same predictions to be accepted for all of the future? The answer is we should not.

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

On closer inspection Eddie realizes that the great tree has been hollowed out. Its strength has become an illusion; it still stands only because the vicissitudes of life have not seen fit to blow it over. So it is with America, the beacon of liberty, and the unlimited potential of Human Action to create wealth to satisfy the world’s wants and needs, has become a hollow oak, a fragile shell of what it once was. The only power the tree has is one last destructive blow as it falls crushing whatever happens to be underneath.

America was created from a vision of the possibility of what man could become in a free society, divorced from the strife, grudges and sclerotic misery of the common man in the old world.

The Founding Fathers imagined a continent and a system of government where the common man would rise ascendant, free to enjoy the fruits of his labor, secure in life limb and property, the state a mere vestige of its monstrous, murderous self.

In 1776 when liberty was declared, and the chains of the old world were thrown off, Thomas Paine imbued the wisdom of Founding Father’s genius into the vernacular of the common man. At that time he was the widest-read author on the continent. Something like 1 in 4 Americans owned one of his publications, the equivalent today would be more than 80 million copies sold.

Sadly the dream did not last. No sooner than the British capitulation, the tendrils of the state took root in fertile ground, rich with possibility. In only 75 years the dream was crushed as Abe (cannot tell the truth) Lincoln shattered a generation of the best and the brightest, so his cynical masters could enjoy the fruits of taxation without the pain of labor.

New England bankers would go on to spend the taxes paid by southern planters, and the War of Northern Aggression was off and running. It was never to end slavery, but to keep union, specifically the revenue generating part.

The genocide of Native Americans quickly followed so the robber barons could loot the public fisc via low-grade bonds, thanks to a complicit Congress, and a desire for expansion on rails that were falling apart as soon as they were built.

Ongoing operational costs and maintenance were to be picked up with the public purse. Abraham Lincoln was a railroad bond lawyer long before he was a politician and he never failed to repay his masters.

In no time at all America was defeated by Spain taking on the mantle of Empire in the swamps of the Philippines. Anglophile devotees of the state soon got America into the Great War.

The Federal Reserve and an Income tax were necessary prerequisites to give the statist monster the sustenance required. The Great War, parts I and II saw America partner with the Socialist Brits and the Communist Soviets. This unholy trinity caused the unnecessary death of more than 50 million people.

The Germanic people’s only crime was to become a more productive society than the other European powers. The Anglophile Morgan Bank was not about to allow the Chase/Rockefeller investments in Germany to bear fruit at their expense. Woodrow Wilson admitted to this very fact after his Presidency was over. It is not an accident that German GDP passed British GDP in 1913. Germans are the largest ethnic group that migrated to America, America is more German than British! The solution to this u2018problem’ killed millions, wasted billions and led to the Rise of a German Corporal Adolph Hitler to power in less than 2 decades. All so the Morgan Anglophiles could have private profits and socialized losses. At the end of the bailout what do we have the Morgan Bank, and Goldman Sachs back in power at the expense of the average American. Undeterred they have already announced record profits and huge bonuses for their staff. Still we cannot blame these bankers; they are just playing by the rules. The problem lies with the rule makers, our leaders, the Congress. We would all do well to harken back to the advice of Tennessee Hero Andrew Jackson:

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."

In spite of all these catastrophes America remained a relatively free, diverse, and vibrant nation. Still the war machine did not stand down; it occupied Europe and Japan and cast their envious eyes on other conquests.

The Korean and Vietnam War’s were sideshows designed to send messages from one set of corrupt leaders to another set using body language; dead bodies that is. The Korean War provided several new territories to occupy, Vietnam saw us secede control over a nation most Americans new nothing of.

By 1990 America was consuming a quarter of the world’s oil by 5% of the population. The oil was bought and paid for under market conditions, and was a voluntary transaction. Oil producing countries had little use of it themselves and were glad to sell for hard currency. Still our “leaders” began to worry about being cut off from what they viewed as an essential resource.

Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait with provocation. The Kuwaiti’s were drilling sideways into Iraq. A much more legitimate reason than the Bush-Cheney junta used to occupy and systematically devastate an ancient and secular society in the Middle East. Iraq, a former ally, was the only secular state in the region.

The horror on Wall Street, in London, Moscow, Tokyo, and Hong Kong shows no end in sight as the re-valuations push stockholders equity into the ground and mortgage borrowers find themselves prisoners of their McMansions servicing loans significantly above "market value."

Thanks to the intervention of our political leaders and a complicit Federal Reserve System, all these bastions of economic strength became hollow, just like the oak tree in the opening scene of Atlas Shrugged.

Unlike Eddie Willers we do not need to wonder how the hollowing happened, it was just as Ludwig Von Mises predicted in 1922 with his epic tome Socialism. In a socialist society it is impossible to properly set prices.

Please re-read that again, America is becoming a socialist society and with government bailing out and taking over more and more this façade becomes thinner and thinner. A free society has no need for the Patriot Act, only a prison society based upon Socialism does (America has more prisoners than any other country in the world). The government cost to American society is closing in on 50% of the gross domestic product, and that sounds a lot like socialism to this American Patriot.

Socialism has always been the product of a privileged elite fostered on the gullible proletariat because they are too busy getting on with their lives to pay attention to what is going on at their expense. The poor are lured into the trap with promises of free goods and little work.

A new domino theory has emerged this week. The excess credit binge that Austrian Economist’s have been decrying for decades has finally come to pass. Bear Stearns fell, followed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lehman Brothers followed over the weekend when no one would throw good money after bad by purchasing the debt soaked monster. Merrill Lynch was put on life support being purchased by Bank of America (known as the Bank of Italy for those with long memories). AIG tottered and fell on the taxpayer.

These debt-soaked and poorly managed enterprises are starting to fall like dominoes and like earlier domino theories this one is spreading around the world. This process threatens to make America, with the largest GNP on the planet, a fragile colossus, like Spain was in 1896.

Valuation and worth are always subjective. They depend upon the desire of the consumer’s valuation, and as such, are not amenable to any analytic measure. They also change with time and circumstance. This was beautifully illustrated by the collapse of Merrill Lynch’s stock price since 2007, it has fallen by 2/3 thirds. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill-Lynch have all seen their value asymptotically approach zero.

The bloodletting will not stop because the debt mountain of the last century still exists, and will not be paid off, so massive devaluations will continue.

The Federal Reserve Bank is the culprit here. The credit orgy of the last century is their only product. It is what it does, even if they try to justify their existence with a cadre of paid shills, I mean, research economists. They do not even bother to print money anymore (no wasting valuable commodities like paper and ink); it is just 1′s and 0′s on a secret government hard drive.

Every time the system burps out more "liquidity" (I use this money term loosely), it passes first to the hands of the favored: big banks and finance companies for free. When these boys have money, cash on hand, it is a liability, and only becomes an asset when it is loaned out. One of the biggest recipients of this seepage has been the mortgage industry. They were quick to loan anything that could sign the documents, and cash the check for the fees.

Americans went of a drunken credit binge like never before: housing mortgages, home equity loans, and a plethora of other clever financial instruments hit the streets as equity instruments that were quickly tranched into Mortgage Backed Securities and spread around the globe. SUV’s and plasma TV’s in every room of your 4000 square foot monument to you. The only spender to rival consumers has been the Department of Defense.

Several trillion dollars later and America is up to its eyeballs in debt. Inflation since 1913 has devastated American’s ability to save for their future, to provide capital for growth. Growth now largely comes from debt laying off large chunks of America’s future to whoever will buy it.

The leadership does not care, for the same reason that the burglar does not care. There is no return on assets for a thief, since everything is pure profit from the sale of stolen goods!

Since confiscatory malinvestment is driven by the Federal Reserve, those first in the queue of freshly printed money get it at its maximum value, those who follow later get a smaller and smaller share. As the value of our currency is driven asymptotically to zero, the common man gets less and less for his labors.

Inflation is a deliberate impoverishment of the benighted masses, by the political elites. It is an unlegislated tax, confiscation of capital. The Fed would have us believe inflation is like cosmic rays or a hurricane something out of their control, but that would be mendacity, i.e. a lie. It is a deliberate policy and always has been it is an unlegislated tax, nothing more.

The result of this process is twofold: more and more employers depend upon printed money for growth and this makes them supplicants of the great Federal cash teat. The housing industry: the building trades, building products suppliers and legions of mortgage brokers, title companies, insurance companies, and escrow lawyers come to mind here.

Malinvestment occurs as capital moves to market areas where it would not otherwise go. Defense contractors largely have no market for their products absent a Federal Reserve and a warfare state, and thus depend as well.

Austrians have been decrying the Federal Reserve for almost a century. They are ignored and marginalized because they send one message and one message only: government is a destroyer, and in a free society there is NO place for it and its toadies in all forms.

America has a billion weapons, and trillions of rounds of ammunition in private hands, it will never be invaded by foreigners. We have no need of a War Department (DOD, HSA, TSA or DEA). They only serve as occupiers, and occupying us they are. At what cost?

The fragility of America comes to be as malinvestment pushes capital and essential skills elsewhere. Malinvestment causes the financial service industry to seek high returns in speculative and risky ventures. Because the “bankers” are a federally sponsored entity, they can largely do as they please with funds given to them. Taxpayers desperate to keep a portion of their earnings flock to tax shelters, providing a steady stream of funds to “the smart guys of finance," who then invest it recklessly. Another click on Leviathan’s ratchet occurs.

The War Department bloats consuming manpower and capital, building monstrosities that are an abomination to both God and man. Giving them a dollar has the effect of removing a dollar of capital from circulation and possibly taking a productive life(s) and wrecking many dollars of someone else’s capital. The leverage of destruction occurs as one dollar can wreck many more: a terrible waste of a dollar.

Austrian Economics tells us what will happen, not how or when. The financial unwinding underway is both inevitable and tragic. Gresham’s Law will always be observed: bad money drives out good. The bad money is a tsunami sloshing over the entire world and the Federal Reserve is the culprit. The solution is to print more of it.

The American economy reels from these effects. The great unwinding of the Federal Reserve Gordian knot of finance is stealing the productive efforts of millions of people. Stocks, bonds, housing prices, and savings are being decimated. All the Fed offers in return is a stern promise to debase the currency more.

There is another name for this, it is an extortion scheme. High Level Government bullies and their supplicant are cowards; bullies that break your leg metaphorically and demand you be grateful for the crutches they provide, and be quick hobble back to work so you can make the minimum payment due. More than 70% of America was against the bailouts of 2008 yet they went ahead anyways. The insane logic of working men and women bailout the rich and the super rich did not wash in Middle America. This should have been prosecuted as high crime and treason. When we weaken America we strengthen our overseas enemies. We borrow around the world and hobble ourselves in the process; this is madness.

This is the fragility that is the theme of this monologue: more and more domains of society become political. Politics is all about lying and deception, fleecing the unwitting and the powerless. The poor management techniques of government intertwine with more and more of the world’s commerce for less and less efficient usage of scarce resources.

Only government pays a high price for low value, which is the opposite of what an acting man does. The malinvestment stratifies and ossifies the body politic. Jobs and capital are lost. The inevitable shocks of life: natural disasters, crime, normal variations in supply and demand, plus foreign intrigue push at the hollow tree of America.

Our leadership response to the problems of their own creation is the bizarre application of more of the techniques of destruction and the inexorable Hobbesian death spiral as they try more and more of what has hollowed us out.

Sooner or later the final impact comes and the great tree falls over and becomes a rotten log.

As William Graham Sumner so beautifully pointed out late in the 19th century that Spain has conquered the United States, not with a military battle but with a mountain of red ink as the taxpayer is forced to grossly overvalue things so the favored can skim off their vigorish.

In the meantime our military has been stretched to the breaking point “winning” a war that makes absolutely no sense by any strategic model. We have replaced someone else’s goons with our goons, but goons they are. Sadly we have paid a mountain of treasure plus 4 thousand precious American lives and untold others and still we keep counting.

The Bush/Cheney junta has wasted the equivalent of 200 Bill Gates and 50 John D. Rockefeller fortunes in order to test the nation-building theory of a bunch of cowards and draft dodgers. America has a deficit of these creative geniuses and surfeit of political hacks like Obama et al. We have tripled the national debt in just 9 short years, and in the process weakening the fabric of this Great nation.

“And when they ask how much should you give? The only answer is more, more, more.”

~ John Fogerty Fortunate Son

"Libertas in praesenti, libertas in infinitum”

Res Ipsa Loquitur

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

At approximately $100/ticket this is $500,000 per month or $6,000,000 per year. They already have plans to double the number of surveillance systems in place. Every other city in America will be envious and make this inevitable move. The cost/benefit ratio is compelling. As a Libertarian and proponent of Human Action I think this is a good idea. Driving is a privilege, not a right. Privileges must be earned and can be taken away.

Running red lights leads to a large number of fatalities per year. The driving privilege is a skill to be certified. I have 5 cars and 3 male drivers under the age of 25 on my insurance plan. I have to re-certify their college GPA’s once per year to keep the $150/month discount it provides. This is most definitely a form of free market driving certification. Most people that speed do it because of bad planning and then doing things like racing to appointments, work etc, and putting other drivers at risk.

It would also be a good idea to put up a system of monitors to catch and punish tailgaters which is one of the most dangerous of all driving behaviors and the least enforced. After this is put in place speed limits can eventually be raised for drivers that want to go faster, but cannot because of tailgaters and drivers that stay in the passing lane, another dangerous behavior.

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The expressway system can easily handle speeds of 80 to 90 mph if tailgating and exiting the passing lane after passing is enforced. This would give better throughput and lower insurance rates because of the drop in fatalities. Drivers will have to be certified for higher speeds as will their vehicles; just as pilots must be rated for flying conditions and type of aircraft. Naval all-weather nighttime carrier-qualified pilots are as different from single engine VFR pilots as riding a bicycle is from driving in the Daytona 500.

Eventually patterns will emerge and unsafe drivers will be identifiable by their behaviors and removed from the system until re-certification occurs. This will probably also take away the licenses of most drivers over the age of 70.

Law enforcement is a good idea for properly constructed laws. Cops should be punished if they are only writing speeding tickets, and not getting dangerous drivers from tailgating, and improper lane changes, that is a pattern that is tracked as well, but is difficult to enforce unless an incentive, both positive and negative is put into the enforcement system.

As fuel prices rise and smaller vehicles again become a popular market trend, regardless of the reason, the number of fatalities will inexorably rise as it did in the 80′s.

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The Federal Aviation Administration does not regulate speed, it regulates movement through altitude/direction regulations and separation of vehicles. All planes are tracked all the time by the FAA. The interstate system should be similarly configured, and almost certainly will be someday. The technology exists to drop the fatality rates. The number of fatalities per decade is still high enough to kill everyone in the state of North Dakota. More Americans were killed in traffic crashes in the 20th century than perished in combat by a factor of about 4. Astonishing! Yet this is a solvable problem. Do not call these accidents, because they are not. Accidental implies a random error, but these have been shown not to be random. Someone is always at fault. One third of these are alcohol-related, another easily solved problem.

I have been a safe driver for almost 40 years. I have driven about 500,000 miles. I have only been involved in three fender-benders accidents, all of which were due to failure to maintain safe distance. Two of the 3 were my fault. One was in the snow and the other in the rain and speed at impact was less than 20 miles per hour. I have not had a speeding ticket in more than 30 years because I do not speed. Speeding actually gets you to your destination slower if you are in or near a major city. Driving slightly under the speed limit is actually better. I have driven the exact same 20 mile stretch of interstate for so long that I recognize drivers, their cars and behaviors. I know every pothole and bump in the road. It can be shown using the method of characteristics and conservation of cars using first order partial differential equations that this is true. I empirically determined that if I dropped my speed from 70 to 65 that I made the distance in the same time, but dropped my fuel consumption by 10%. Drivers that raced by me at mile 65 were caught before my exit at mile 80. In college I drove the big rigs. It also served as an excellent pattern to observe driver behavior which empirically verified these assertions. Thirty years later I drove the big rig on weekends for the local high school band and found that these tailgating patterns still are highly visible.

I served as the foreman of the Grand Jury in Madison County in the Great State of Alabama in 1998. I saw first-hand the astonishing number of drunken-driving cases presented, probably 10% of the caseload. In the roughly 1000 cases we reviewed for prosecution there were multiple offenders with more than a dozen driving-under-the-influence (DUI) convictions. The "winner" with the most had 16 and was presented for number 17. Alabama at the time had no open container law preventing drinking and driving legally. They had passed a 4-strikes-you-are-out law meaning the fourth DUI got you a year in the Big House possibly working on the Athens Alabama Chain gang. To be consistent with Constitutional Law all previous offenses did not count in the tally.

How many billion dollars of lost productivity does this represent? How many skilled workers, loved ones, doctors, engineers, and artisans have we lost fecklessly? Human Action and the free market can easily knock these staggering statistics down by an order of magnitude in less than 25 years. An airline system that produced 25,000 fatalities a year would never be tolerated. This cruelty must come to an end. The revenue portion of this business proposition will be to compelling for every system of perpetually thirsty taxation machinery. It is up to those who understand freedom, property rights and defend liberty that this system, which will inevitably be put into place, be configured properly. It can be a cost-effective and self-financing technology that can save lives. It must be configured as a benefit for safe drivers and not just another etatist intrusion that degrades life in a myriad of ways.

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

The Best of George Giles

The economic bubble popping around the world in the last 24 months can also be taken as a literal truth. Central Banks everywhere are printing, injecting, liquefying, cajoling and seizing assets in the fiscal conflagration of their creation. The logic here being that if you are an alcoholic, have a drinking problem, and your life is suffering from it one must just double down and drink with both hands or maybe a funnel until you drink your way thru your drinking problem! Perhaps a new form of liquidity injection has been created. Still this is essential to the title here: "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" but this time we mean the bankers.

A new Battle of Britain is upon us, and metaphorically, upon the whole industrialized world as well. Independent specialists have published forecasts showing that an extra 50,000 public officials will have been recruited in the six months to the end of the year. The Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) forecast that over that same period some 300,000 private sector workers will have lost their jobs. Nothing was lost. They were fired and they will not find their jobs again. Statistics show that government borrowing (printing actually) is still on the rise. Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, expected to announce that it could reach 68billion this year. The Treasury had to borrow money in October, usually a strong month for collecting taxes, for the first time since 1994. Doug McWilliams CEBR chief executive, said: “There is an issue of how the pain should be shared out. What is clear is that the public sector is insulated from the pain and is getting special privileges." Brilliant Doug, are you always this quick? England is one tenth the size of the United States so multiple all these numbers by ten and you will have a fair approximation of component of this mess. Central bankers and their closely allied friends are busy capitalizing toxic assets by printing money. This magnum opus of fiscal legerdemain be nothing more than a massive wealth transfer from the private sector to the ultra-private sector: the 300 bankers that benefit from it all. It’s an elite club, no new members allowed. This gives new meaning to the many, to the few and who owes whom.

Billions of human beings have lived and died, still most of the human beings that ever existed in history are alive now as I type this. They owe dearly to the few because without modern capitalism and the benefits it produces like the capability to feed, clothe, and house 6 billion simultaneous breathing, eating and excreting human beings safely life would be very different on this blue jewel orbiting an ordinary star, in an ordinary solar system in a ordinary galaxy in an ordinary galactic cluster. Modern capitalism, bloodied as it is, is a direct product of the Age of Reason. The Age of Reason is a product of science and engineering descended directly to us courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton and his friends. Mathematics births physics which gives rise to engineering. Engineers dissatisfied with the state of mental tension created from dissatisfaction use capital, Human Action, and the market to give reification to their desire. From whom we all benefit. The root of this tree is the actual 300.

The preface to The Encyclopedia of the Natural and Mathematical Sciences by Professor Ari Ben-Menahem:

"Many books are published every year on the history of science, but I know of no comprehensive treatise that blends the essential historical data (chronology, biographies, major background political and economical events, etc.) together with science proper (principles, laws, experiments, observations, theories, equations, etc.). The present encyclopedic treatise does just that; it tells the reader not only who did it and when it was done but also precisely what was done.

"The saga of this history of ideas, discovery and invention in the natural and mathematical sciences — spanning about 100 generations of great thinkers from Thales to Feynman unfolds in all its grandeur before the eyes and mind of the reader. Whether to professional scientists, students, or unassuming curious laymen, the doors of this shrine are open, inviting them to browse, linger and study whatever suits them. I believe that every intelligent person can understand the development of science when properly presented from its beginnings. The historical method is the best for introducing scientific facts and ideas to unprepared minds in a thoroughly understandable manner.

The history of science is more than the arithmetical sum of the histories of all sciences, for it also explains the interrelations of them all. Indeed, our division of science into many branches is largely artificial. Like the branches of a living tree which have no separate existence, but grow together — the progress of each science is dependent upon the progress of all the others. The main postulate of science is the unity of nature: nature is one; and therefore, science is one. Finally, the fact that simultaneous discoveries have been made by different groups of workers, in different settings, organizations and nations, demonstrate that mankind is one: one mankind through one science is unfolding the mysteries of one nature. It follows that the only rational way to subdivide this history is not according to the sciences or countries involved, but only according to time; for each period of time we have to consider at once the whole of science’s historical and intellectual development. This calls for the marshaling of all scientific facts, activities and ideas in a definite order; which means that we must try to assign to each of them a date as precise as possible — not just the date of their birth or their publication, but also that of their actual incorporation into our knowledge — often a very diffcult thing to do, as the reader will not fail to appreciate. Such work of erudition is the bedrock upon which this history is built."

This is a heavy book; it contains more than 6000 pages. This is the true saga of the Human Action of the real 300 plus or minus a few, that keep us out of the stone age. It is a little pricey, but if you shop around the Internet you may find a deal on it. If you get started on it know you may be able to get it finished by the time that the global economy returns to economic growth. Based on the amount of government interference worldwide distorting markets thru malinvestment and the Central Bank you may have plenty of time.

George Giles [send him mail] is dissatisfied in Nashville, TN.

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History has shown that dogma is most strident as it is on the verge of overthrow. The history of science is a prime example of this assertion. Near the end of the 19th century many physicists lamented the end of physics. A generation later Relativity and Quantum Theory rewrote all the dogma. By the end of the 20th century dark matter, and the accelerating expansion of the universe are doing it again.

Math tells us what could be true, but physics tells us which of these possibilities are actually true. A good physicist knows when it is time to put the math down. Math and Physics have been the dogma from which the modern world was engineered from the medieval fabric that it inherited.

Ever since Isaac Newton published his Principia modern science has taken the river of time as an axiom. Space-time is the Cartesian product of the river of time and the three dimensional world that we live in, observe and measure. Albert Einstein used the Lorentz Transformation from Special Relativity to create a General Relativity in which space and time merge into a curved space-time.

What if this were wrong? What if time is a creation of man to put order into sensory data so that the mind can comprehend the environment? It is not is not a river at all. It does not exist; animal senses have fooled us into creating something from nothing. Could time’s role be that of a parameter, not as a basis coordinate degree of freedom in the physical world? Could there be no space-time only timeless space?

This may not be as bizarre as it sounds. There are no physical measurements of time (of which the author is aware) that are not actually measures of distance. Thus there are no experiments that measure time directly, as it may not be possible. Quantum Theory has shown the impossibility of stopping motion, even at absolute zero.

We mislabel time when we convert a large distance into a small number by inversion. Einstein used the speed of light as the conversion constant. The constant is the speed of light which if measured in angstroms of light is a very large number. Instead we invert that number and call it a second and then fool ourselves into thinking it is real by watching clocks and say the river of time is flowing by when it is just the hands making circles, i.e. motion.

Isaac Newton invented the Calculus in order to understand gravitation. His equations became the basis of Potential Theory from which much of mathematical physics is derived. Schrödinger’s Equation, one of the basis of modern Quantum Mechanics is just a perturbation of the heat equation derived from a potential. Still this is not the place to go into many of the myriad ways popular theories fail us like string theory, QCD with the ultraviolet cut-off, dark matter, and the acceleration of the Hubble constant, etc.

Physical theory is now measured at the edges of knowledge, at the extremes where understanding through mathematics breaks down: just after the Big Bang, near the singularity of a black hole, between entangled qubits. Here the answers from the equations go astray as the mathematics fails. The physics does not fail, because we had a Big Bang, Black Holes with singularities exist, and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox of entangled information is measurable.

Perhaps time itself is the problem. Using time as a metric perturbs our equation in to error. If time does not exist then what does the differential ‘dt’ become? That’s easy, it is zero. No point in trying to integrate that. The problem occurs with all the many differential equations with time as an independent variable. They need to be restructured to reflect time’s new role as a parameter and not as a basis.

Julian Barbour is a theoretical physicist trained at the University of Cologne. Unlike the majority of his peers he has been self-employed since graduation. This means he does not have to write peer reviewed papers as a condition of employment. He enjoys the luxury of real academic freedom. It also means that he does not have to adhere to dogma of his peers when publishing. He can write without fear or suppression or repercussion. He is independent of establishment dogma with regard to physical theory. In this respect he is unique.

Dr. Barbour is an expert in translating Russian technical material into English thanks to his fluency in the Russian language. This provides two benefits, the first being that absorption of knowledge during translation from a different cultural and technical organizational background (the old Soviet Empire), the other being academic freedom; both of which may essential to his work.

The first thing that I thought about when I read Barbour’s book The End of Time was not physics but economics. If there is no time then there are no differentials with respect to time. This causes problems for a lot of mathematical econometrics.

I have been very critical of the results of econometric modeling by the central bank here and elsewhere. It has been my opinion for a long time that econometrics is voodoo, a phony act, a sideshow perpetrated by the central bank and their paid shills to make economics have the appearance of an exact science, which it is not! This sideshow masquerades the underlying reality where the body politic and the public fisc suffer from it egregiously.

If econometrics worked then we would never have a recession, depressions would thus be impossible, houses would always rise in value, retirement funds would allow the masses to retire early. Gold as a quaint acronym would have zero value and would be free; we might pave roads with it or build dogs houses out of it. Roast ducks would fly into the mouths of the proletariat who would just have to open their mouths from the comfort of the recliner in front of the big screen flat panel HD television braying Fox News Fair and Balanced.

Wait a minute have I lost my mind? Based on the past few months econometrics clearly does not work. State central planning fails everywhere it is tried. The Soviet Union certainly failed as a model of social organization. The central bank and the fiat currency cause every country that adopt it into a race to bankruptcy. The Soviet Union showed how a very sophisticated technological warfare/welfare state can have a first world military machine and a third world social structure.

This lesson should be attended to by all policy planners. The United States is nearly bankrupt, the stock market has tanked, and multiple major banks have failed and in the process have become explicit vassals of the state.

Clearly by any responsible metric of predictive power econometrics as a science fails miserably. There is no factor in the stochastic equation for something like the Madoff fraud, our current liquidity trap, housing bubble or the outright failure of major industrial concerns. These are human nature injections into the system that mathematics will never be able to describe. Beyond all the stupidity, the criminal, the liars, scams and cheats are misbehaviors of governmental administration. Who would have imagined in the campaign of 2000 that a “conservative administration” with a Republican Congress would go on the largest and most irresponsible spending spree in all of the world’s history?You might guess at it and get lucky, but you cannot model it from principles a priori. Beyond that who would imagine all of the privileged and wealthy aristocrats falling for one of the oldest financial scams around, the Ponzi scheme. These are “stochastic” reasons for the failure of econometrics, beyond Barbour’s timeless space.

Banks, Finance Companies, Mortgage Lenders and Insurance companies have not been the only victims here. Malinvestment the major product of the central bank distorts the economy in many additional ways. General Motors, Chrysler and Ford are on life support with their life blood, and cash pouring out. Maybe the econometrics of building more SUV plant’s was not a good idea, nor was agreeing to pay unskilled labor $73/hour? Call it mal-investment a folly driven by econometrics.

Much of the problems distorting the business climate are from central bank induced shenanigans that perturb the normal economic activity. Housing prices have evaporated along with their equity and the 401K’s that many of us (mistakenly) thought made us rich. You may also have to forget about retirement. Don’t forget to thank your bi-partisan elected officials for that.

Econometrics and the monotonic increase in money supply (liquidity injection) created the illusion was that much of the aforementioned was ever real. The stock market has not lost value; the illusion was that the value was actually there to begin with. The trillions of dollars of wealth lost never existed to begin with because it was an inflationary chimera courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank.

What we have now is the normal market reaction to malinvestment: liquidation and retrenchment. This is market working, correcting the inflationary orgy courtesy of Alan Greenspan, Congress, the central bank, the loyal vassals and sycophants. The fiat currency has done what the Austrian Economists always said it would, asymptotically approach zero.

To me it appears that all the econometrics were not worth the paper they were printed on (no pun intended). Economics had gotten silly when it started using Riemannian manifolds and such. The proponents of this technology are blindly applying it to real problems and hoping an answer would pop out. Based on the results I would have to say it is not looking very good. Why is this? For starters there is no continuity in economic theory! All economic transactions are discrete; there are no fractional transactions, no time coordinate to integrate differential equations along

I can imagine a world with 1 spatial direction and 3 time directions, I just cannot live there, as a model it would only be good for mathematical analysis, it is not physical in the way our world is physical. The math is good but the physics is not!

Econometrics as practiced by the Central Bank has been a disastrous failure. The current chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke has written volumes on this crap. So far during his tenure we (US) have raced passed a socialist, negative population growth, decaying Europe in the race to decimating our economy and evaporating all equity. The dollar seems to reach a new all time low against the Euro.

Sure you can take a whole bunch of discrete data points and fit a curve to it and fool undergrads in macroeconomics, but what has that got to do with the economy? It has no value as predictive science.

The economic Humpty Dumpty, fractional reserve banking, central planning, and fiat currency, has fallen off the wall (shoved actually by Greenspan et al). We should not waste any time putting it back together as some kind of Frankenstein patchwork of Federal Programs, public-private ventures, and liquidity injection so that it can stumble around creating more carnage.

Ludwig Von Mises the Dean of the Austrian School of Economics had no use for mathematics in economic theory. He knew it was specious, a facade, not real. Mises knew that economics is a qualitative theory that tells us what will happen, not when. He also knew that social engineers (politicians, judges, bureaucrats) also strive to solve problems by codifying their models into public policy and law. Resources are finite; policy makers desire a maximum return to benefit the citizenry, with a minimum of input (taxation). These variation problems as they are called are alluring models for economists to transpose into their domain. It works for the physicists, why not the economists as well? Thus attempts to rigorize economics via mathematics has been a popular approach for well over a century.

Mathematical models are built to represent the problems and variational approaches are crafted to find the solutions. The calculus of variations has been used and abused by economists over the years trying to find extremal solutions in econometrics. Carl Menger along with many others have gone down this road unsuccessfully.

Ludwig Von Mises set the gold standard for rigorous deductive logic in the field of economic thought. He recognized the problem of mathematical modeling in economics when he wrote about math in the Epistemological Problems of Economics:

“Mathematics has significance in the natural sciences altogether different from what it has in sociology and economics. This is because physics is able to discover empirically constant relationships, which it describes in its equations. The scientific technology based on physics is thereby rendered capable of solving given problems with quantitative definiteness. The engineer is able to calculate how a bridge must be constructed in order to bear a given load. These constant relationships cannot be demonstrated in economics. The quantity theory of money, for example, shows that, ceteris paribus, an increase in the quantity of money leads to a decrease in the purchasing power of the monetary unit, but the doubling of the quantity of money does not bring about a fifty percent decline in its purchasing power. The relationship between the quantity of money and its purchasing power is not constant. It is a mistake to think that, from statistical investigations concerning the relationship of the supply of and the demand for definite commodities, quantitative conclusions can be drawn that would be applicable to the future configuration of this relationship.”

He also said:

“As soon as we introduce a concrete datum in our deliberation on human action, such as the price of a commodity expressed in terms of money, we leave the field of economics and enter that of economic history, even if it be the history of this very last moment.”

Many techniques are available for discrete problems. Economic transactions can be modeled as a network using graph theory. A graph consists of nodes and vertices. The vertices link nodes in a temporal fashion, it orders the past (as long as we use directed graphs). There are no present and future economic transactions since there are no nodes for them. Any economic transaction will always be in the past. Negotiations for a transaction, the pricing relationship, the terms and conditions may occur in the present. When completed the transaction itself is always in the past, even if delivery and payment are in the future. One can plan for the future, and execute that plan when the time comes, but the transaction itself is always history. Time is no longer a basis, it becomes an ordered graph using lattice theory.

Every society that has tried to put mathematical economic theory into practice with the Central Bank, fractional reserve banking and the fiat currency has wound up in the same boat as us: broke, deeply in debt, with a parasitic central state sucking the life out of the body politic, along with staggering deficits. We are all together in this ongoing failed experiment in econometric management of the discrete economy of uncounted billions of discrete transaction.

There is a way out. Listen to Von Mises! Embrace the free market, abolish central banks everywhere and the fiat currency. Privatize everything and gradually lay most federal government workers off and as the economy expands their precious labor will be in short supply, high demand, and thus high wage. They can get jobs like the former auto workers all eventually will. Call all the troops back from overseas and let peace and freedom ring! Things will change for the better and soon. The current disaster can soon be just a bad memory, a hangover of a youthful cultural indulgence in financial promiscuity, and wanton profligacy in silliness.

We are out of time, and that is a good thing, as we wash all econometrics, central planning, social engineering, and federated government away.

Individuals can and will plan for the future. Business will sprout up to employ everybody once the parasite of the federated state is laid to rest, R.I.P.! Let’s vote it out, shut it down and adhere to the Constitution (no differentials with respect to time there).

I have known many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. I have worked in multiple startup companies and I have never heard anyone say that if we integrate this or take a derivative of that using econometrics as a basis for a business plan. Of course not, because it would be meaningless and would lose money, which is death to the entrepreneur. They cannot afford to dally with frivolity when time is short, and profits are to be made, this is the manna of Human Action and the indication that correct decisions are being made.

Profits are the information theory of Human Action. Yet losses are important as well, they tell you something almost as valuable; that what you are doing is wrong and to stop it before you go broke: a lesson that Federated Governments never learn.

I believe any form of knowledge tools should be available to the private sector. Differential and Stochastic Equations, risk management, field theories, divining entrails and Magic 8 Balls are all tools that have validity in some domains, privately.

Time Series econometrics in the public sector has proven its worthlessness so let us discard it as a paradigm. What humans call time is like a metronome it; keeps the pace of the activity, but like the metronome it is not intrinsic to that activity. I prefer Beethoven when the metronome is not clicking away, it is the motion of the instruments that makes the music, and the metronome is superfluous. So it may be with public sector econometrics.

What I am proposing here is bold. Modern econometrics does not work, the proof is in failed policies of all central banks, Unless we consider bankruptcy as strategy worth emulating.

Time will be gone as a degree of freedom in the economic world to be replaced by graph theory, functional equations and integration, delta functions, lattice theory and path integration. These things work, and do not require time, but that is a story for another day.

In closing let’s remember what George Washington said in 1796 in his farewell address for he is admonishing the future and we are in that future, one and all.

"As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit."

Do not destroy the public credit as the trillions of fresh debt are in the process of doing.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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Flash Gordon was one of my favorite shows as a child (showing my age here). Watching the rocket ships flying through space trailing smoke and pretending not to see the puppeteer’s wires as Flash roamed around outer space saving people, doing good things, being an American dammit.

Star Trek was no better — bigger ships, more enemies, but still saving people doing the right thing, having the right stuff. American ingenuity would inevitably have all this technological stuff just around the corner. Democracy would get crammed down the throats of everybody and the galaxy and they would like it!

Eventually I grew up and gave up on the dreams of being a fighter pilot or an astronaut, went to college and got a real job. Not everybody did. Plenty went to graduate school (based on the number of PhD’s per year, way too many for way too long) determined to put childhood dreams into practice, but at a price, yours and mine.

NASA is a wonderful government agency (think about that), an agency that actually has some positive results. Robotic spacecraft and satellites work and they can actually be a business (Google maps). Unmanned space flight has real results, is a real business, and they get less than half the budget.

The other half goes to the “manned spaceflight program." The Space Shuttle (Space Transportation System or STS) is a Rube Goldberg device if there ever was one, a classic government make work program. As Doug Bandow once said “You would be hard pressed to find a more expensive way to put payload into orbit.”

I am old enough to remember when they STS was proposed in the 70′s it would be a freighter into orbit where cost per pound would be “too cheap to measure." Twenty years ago it was about $50,000 per pound, I shudder to think what the real cost actually is behind federal legerdemain. That particular subject is no longer talked about.

The Space Shuttle has been a symbol of national pride. The Russians even designed one that looked a lot like ours, but somewhere along the line they were smart enough not to launch it and scrapped the whole thing. Good for them.

NASA’s senior leadership is now about my age, which means they were watching Flash Gordon, or reading Tom Swift books about the same time I was, only they have ascended the heights of the Byzantine ziggurat of national politics to positions where they can take their dreams and make you and I pay for them.

Like most government programs the STS was a disaster, especially if you were a passenger (astronaut) on one of the two that took off but never landed. I still remember Frank Reynolds staring into space in 1986 as Christa MacAuliffe vaporized, asking what happened? Come Frank, are you really that slow? It is really a disaster for the taxpayers as we have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into this boondoggle.

I have read the Constitution (unlike most of our leaders) and I am pretty sure NASA and Space Flight were not covered. I guess the framers though that such activity (folly) would be a states rights or private individual’s thing.

Still the miracle was that all of the STS do not blow up. A rocket is a linear bomb, a controlled explosion. The sad truth about chemical rockets is that if the Earth had 10% more mass we could not get into orbit at all. Just not enough mojo in those covalent bonds!

The STS looks like a Recreational Vehicle being launched into space. Every time I see these “heroes” doing their somersaults in micro-gravity, I cannot help but think about Clark Griswold and Cousin Eddie emptying the chemical toilet in the sewer. We’re doing science here dammit get serious. Just how many bees can we launch into orbit and how many nearly spherical latex balloons can we make. “NASA is just workfare for the middle class," one on-site engineer told me.

Once you have been scamming this long, why stop? National pride is at stake. Americans got to the Moon in 1969. Guess what, nothing was going on, just as had been predicted. It was boringly exactly as the non-NASA scientists said it would be, a dead rock with permanent acne scars.

However in order to get to the moon you have to be able to design, develop and deploy systems that will also put thermonuclear payload in Red Square, a nice ancillary benefit.

Mars is the next logical step to the stars, the logical progression in man’s desire to explore the universe, so say the tenured bureaucrats. Yes, dear reader, you and I will get to pay for it once more. Failure never deters a bureaucrat: call failure a success and stridently demand money for enhancements.

Mars is a lifeless dead rock, no life possible, as we understand life. Oh but it could have been vigorously say a 100 million years ago when Mars was more earthlike! Whales may also speak French at the bottom of the sea, but I doubt it and trying to find funding to validate this hypothesis may be a little dicey. Go see if the Gates Foundation is willing to pay for it, or better yet get the Wizard of Omaha Warren Buffet.

NASA has wanted to go to Mars for 50 years even though they know, just as we all know, it is a dead rock (1% of the atmosphere of earth, vacuum for all intents and purposes).

Bureaucrats never let the truth interfere with a good story. Beat the drum about how important water is to life for 15 years and then disclose “what a surprise we found water after all, but it’s under the rock” now we really need to go to Mars. All that life is hiding.

The difference between going to the moon and going to Mars is the difference between a weekend in the drunk tank and a life sentence, in solitary confinement, in the dark, for the astronauts: weightlessness, bad food, weightless showers, and sensory deprivation, not to mention unshielded cosmic ray exposure. I quote Will Smith “And what’s that smell?”

A piece of rock the size of a pebble going 150,000 miles per hour or a rock the size of a car going only 100 miles an hour will turn the whole thing into dust in a few milliseconds. It would be so far away we would never see what happened, the radar would just loose a blip.

Halfway into the mission the comms will go dead, and then the real storytelling will begin. Technologically we are closer to the Stone Age than we are to interstellar travel. It is high time we got real and save the taxpayer from this folly.

Man cannot take the harsh environment of space. We spent 500 million years evolving in this nice cocoon created for us by evolution (notorious slow mover); just because we make movies about going to Mars, does not actually mean that we, as a species, are actually ready. Some astronauts, if not all, will go mad, kill one another, or kill themselves.

Perhaps one of the ten million moving parts let out to the lowest bidder or the Honorable Senator’s drinking buddy’s brother’s firm will fail at just the wrong time, creating a cascade of unintentional consequences leading to another investigational committee of questionable data, lies and a forgone conclusion: Our national pride means we must go back!

Still the NASA hype machine has been cranking for more than a decade about the necessity and the inevitability of a Mars trip, a base and ultimate colonization. Yes dear reader you know who is footing the bill.

It would be easier to cross the Rub Al-Khali desert naked on all fours in the summer time for the traveler, than it would be going to Mars. Maybe we should start that trip with the NASA’s top bureaucrat; when he gets to the Persian Gulf from the Horn of Africa, send him back the other way and on arrival we’ll talk about that funding. A hundred billion is just the down payment on this fiasco, with minimum payment due eternally after.

When John F. Kennedy declared going to the moon within a decade everybody cheered. It was a faade, a clever ruse. Russian rockets were launching transistor radios into orbit, beeping at us while our rockets were blowing up on the launch pad for all to see.

Demanding money for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for hydrogen bombs the size of a greyhound bus would have been far too crass for Camelot. Yet the technology is the same, just a new coat of paint and a couple bytes change in the trajectory computer and you have a first strike weapon. A nice ancillary benefit if ever there was one. Remember the immortal words of Wernher Von Braun: “I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London.”

Space travel is just another excuse for looting the taxpayers, the public fisc, to benefit overpaid and underworked stiffs that do not want to have a real job manufacturing goods or providing a service that someone would voluntarily actually want to buy. To quote Nancy Reagan, “Just Say No.”

I worked on-site for years at NASA’s "Space Port," which is actually a massive swamp selected to protect the neighbors from the fiery downside of some of this folly. In my 30 years of work in American manufacturing it is the only job site that I have ever been to where “workers," and I use that term loosely, carried pillows in to work.

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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One of my favorite movies is Angel Heart. It is about the ceaseless confrontation between good and evil, human joy and suffering, heaven and hell. It was an excellent movie adapted from a weak, out of print novel, titled Fallen Angel. Angel Heart is an apt metaphor for the current recession, credit crunch and housing debacle that all Americans now enjoy thanks to the political solution of real problems by our elitist central bankers and their cadre of sycophants.

The premise of Angel Heart is that a down-on-his-luck New York City private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke in his finest role) is hired by a foreign gentleman Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to find a missing person named Johnny Favorite. Favorite is a popular crooner that has disappeared. This tail sets Harry on a journey of torturous self-discovery and confrontation with his own evil past. The movie, set in the early 50′s takes place in New York City, the Jersey shore, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta. The casting, cinematography, and wardrobe are impeccable giving a vivid re-creation of the time.

Like all great movies this one is a tale is of transcendental discovery. The protagonist Harry is after one Johnny Favorite on behalf of Louis Cyphre. Harry starts this quest as the likable loser and ends as a brutal serial killer whose soul for transitory celebrity, was sold to the devil for all eternity.

Such is the fate of the body politic and the public fisc in contemporary America. Americans are some of the most generous people in the world as evidenced by the many charities, missions and disaster relief efforts that we fund. For decades America has welcomed the hungry, the tired and the poor yearning to breathe free. Yet at the beginning of the new millennium we find that only we believe this mythology anymore. Like Harry we move in a carefully crafted deceit that has fooled us far more than it has fooled the rest of the world.

Our President and our elected representatives (Ron Paul excluded) are raining death and destruction wherever and whenever they decide for whatever reason. Sadly, in a democratic republic this makes us culpable morally, if not physically.

As has been shown these crimes are perpetrated with other people’s money, bought in a devil’s bargain with fiat currency and bonds backed by the hollow promises of pathological liars. Half of the debt this once noble country has incurred in its entire history has been accrued during the Presidency of one ruthless man and his criminal associates.

The race is not over (one of the final scenes in Angel Heart is at a race track) but we are clearly heading toward a finish line very different than what we thought just a few short years ago. Like Harry Angel we may find an America broke, worn out, disillusioned and alone to face the judgments of history, Nemesis will soon be calling.

Harry is on a journey of self-discovery. As he moves through the film he comes to realize that he is Johnny Favorite, and he has murdered everyone that links him with his past. In the final scene Louis Cyphre (Lucifer/DeNiro) confronts Harry to take his soul. In his mind Harry has been making love to a beautiful Creole woman (Epiphany/Lisa Bonet), yet in reality, he has murdered her. The cops break into his hotel room, while Harry awakes from his dream, and the policeman intones: “Your gonna burin in hell for this.” “I know” says an enlightened Harry Angel cognizant of his fate, at last, for all eternity. So is it with our foreign policy that turned much of the world into an open air Hades.

America has one-party rule, and has had for almost a century. This was made obvious to enlightened Americans, that when during the debates as it was Ron Paul’s turn to speak, the television coverage went to commercial. This denied the majority access to a real conflict of ideas where principle, logic and true compassion can triumph over the deceit, hypocrisy, and brutality of the ancien rgime restored in contemporary America.

Our one party has two wings blue state socialists and red state fascists, they only disagree on minor conjectures like should we fleece the public fisc through the Federal Reserve, or the Internal Revenue service, or both?

It is a bipartisan effort in the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of the bailed, and in the military industrial congressional consortium. Only, when like peacocks mating, that the politicians strut, preen and intellectually head butt one another, does it seem that there is a real difference when it is a carefully crafted chimera.

During the eight dreadful years of the current administration the Democratic opposition provided no opposition at all. They sat back in awed silence as the Republicans boldly destroyed the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the good will of the modern world. All so that a few unindicted felons could implement their vision of a “new world order.”

The Democrats quietly licked their wounds while drooling in anticipation of their turn. The Obama administration is promising change all right, but the only change we will see is that the man with his hand on a tiller steers a ship of state with no rudder, crashing violently about in the maelstrom of their own creation.

I will give our current President the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he, like Harry Angel only had a dim recollection of history and was stumbling blindly through his life of privilege thanks to the noble birth.

Nonetheless, the President near the end of his term must recognize that something has gone hideously astray, and his primitive hind brain, if not his consciousness, knows that Nemesis and Kerberos await the reckoning with Lucifer.

He cannot save himself and his administration from the judgments of history but he may make a bold statement of regret and contrition. It will be a passive statement, but a powerful one: issue no pardons. Let the fate of the henchman be decided by the new administration.

If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty then Americans, as a culture, have been found wanting. The immense debt, the vanishing equity, and the struggling economic infrastructure are the waves upon which our ship of state sails. The Democrats still seem to be the party of no ideas other than all the old bad ones. The change is rhetorical only.

The Obama Administration has a brief time between now and the first quarter of their reign in which to implement a new direction. They will have to crawl painfully over the side and brave the crushing waves of history and re-attach the rudder; roll back the Patriot Act, close the secret prisons, withdraw from the occupation of foreign lands, stop the spying, stop the torture, stop increasing the debts that enslave our future. Detach all of the entrenched powerful and wealthy sycophants that have become a malignant symbiosis.

If they do not then the same old Nostrums of conventional wisdom will rapidly fail, and the new Administration, like Harry Angel, will learn of their fate well past the point of no return. God has mercy, the Devil does not.

A few quotes from Alan Parker’s excellent script will give us some perspective:

Toots Suite: “Have another two sisters cocktail and make it up any way you want. That’s what you [the press] do anyway.”

Louis Cyphre: “Are you a religious man Mr. Angel? It’s a shame that there is just enough religion in the world to make men hate, but not enough to make them love.”

Louis Cyphre: “The future is not what it used to be Mr. Angel”

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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Someone said always start a presentation with a little humor so I will attempt to summarize the last two centuries of European History as gently as possible:

"Heaven is when the Germans are the engineers, the British are the police, the French as the cooks and the Italians are the lovers.

Hell is when the Germans are the police, the English the cooks, the Italians the engineers, and the Swiss are the lovers."

The last couple of months have been a season of vindication for the "unpopular" opinions of Austrian Economics, individual liberty and free markets. Etatism and its failed doctrines have been paraded in all their human misery for the world to see. The disastrous policies of the Bush Administration, their "Conservative Republicans" (fascists) sycophants have finally been revealed for what they are. The complicit Federal Reserve Band, Alan (I should have known better) Greenspan, and the evils twins of fractional reserve banking and a fiat currency have sent world markets into inverted, flat, spin.

Spin-doctors and talking heads have been wagging their chins 24×7 trumpeting lies, folly, misunderstanding, bile, hate, and downright idiocy about the current predicament. Everyone has been blamed but the culprit: the United States Government and their Imperial President (buck stopping here for sure). As readers of LRC, Mises Institute, and Antiwar.com you already knew all this.

Bad housing loans, easy credit, derivatives, speculation, and human greed have all been blamed, but the truth is this mess is precisely because the market does work. The hot air had blown the balloon too big and it popped. Austrian Economics says what will happen (pop) not when (election 2008); it is after all, a qualitative theory. The illusion was the insane valuations the fact is the wealth never existed. (The old don’t count your winnings while you are sitting at the table thing.) The big pop was the inevitable restoration of sanity and responsibility. The truth is that the Federal Government is a deadbeat and should have a credit rating under 100. What is a surprise is that so many other countries bought into this folly and are now suffering the hangover of the big party as well.

Human Action being both inexorable and inevitable the market restoration is now in process. Lots of my mates have always thought I’m a little off kilter, but no matter, let’s look at some proof of the process at work. Along the way we will see the beauty of quantitative finance, the shrewdness and power of the solvent in time of a liquidity crunch, and how the market operates efficiently on a grand scale and how hubris always invites the reckoning of Nemesis. German engineering will be revealed in banking, derivatives, hedge funds, and corporate organization.

Last weekend brought fall color, the latest inane observation of the irrelevance of Sarah Palin, and an astute and bold move by Porsche to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. Porsche, using old-fashioned virtues of thrift by saving its money, knowledge by not compensating failure, and patience by biding its time rocked both the banking world and automotive. The European bankers were caught asleep at the wheel, pants around the ankles, and beaten like a government mule at their own game: quantitative finance, regulatory legerdemain, and cash reserves: a real thing of beauty.

Porsche is a manufacturer of fine automobiles, the epitome of German engineering acumen. They have always been a peripheral player on the world scale. Volkswagen manufactures for the benighted masses, the Chevy of Europe. Porsche has held a 34% share in VW for some time. They also have a lot of cash (German financial engineering) and over the weekend they quietly bought up large amounts of derivatives that when paid deliver VW shares at the end result of the transaction. Hedge funds: perennial media scapegoats, speculators, and market predators (necessary) have been running wild in this bear of bear markets (revaluation and write down) selling everything short. Derivatives are as pure capitalism as you can get in the modern world, the market is always open and you can buy so many ways as to go mad with the combinatorics and valuations.

Porsche on the other was not speculating, they were out hunting for a major score, a kill, not shaving fractions of a point in a quick transaction on an instantaneous perceived change in market momentum. They were buying while the hedges were selling VW short.

Dawn on Monday the Oct 27, 2008 saw the market surge with a price rally in VW stock. The Hedge Funds involved began to panic as they realized that they were moving in the wrong direction on a massive shift in VW valuation. By market close Porsche owned 74% of VW by boldly risking cash certain in the knowledge of their analysis of the situation. They moved on the weekend when the derivative markets are open (always like Denny’s) but redolent as the players are often living life in the fast lane, inattentive.

Tuesday morning (28Oct2008) and the hedges involved are selling other assets off to cover their positions. It is margin call time and when the bell rings you are out of the game for good unless you answer it unambiguously with cold hard cash or cash equivalents, payment in full. Some will fail, some will survive, many will be shattered. Billionaires became millionaires, millionaires became ordinary people, and in the Porsche organization new legends have been born. All because some engineers understood quantitative finance (applied differential equations), market timing, and valuation better than all the bankers, lawyers, regulators, and financial sycophants in a time of rapid change.

The Porsche team involved in this exploited a regulation they had no part in creating: that German regulations required disclosure of major stock purchases in publicly traded companies regardless if they were direct share purchase, through an intermediary, or derivatives when financed with credit. No disclosure is required when share acquisition is via derivatives when paid in cash. Classic regulatory legerdemain that benefits the regulated, after all who would want to buy derivatives with cash? Nemesis punishes the wicked for their arrogance and hubris.

As a libertarian, an Austrian devotee, and a connoisseur of edge work the Porsche move takes my breath away in its audacity, its timing and perfect execution. The market worked and it worked perfectly taking cash from the inattentive and arrogant and handing it to those with a better understanding of reality at this moment in time just what it is supposed to do!

Stockholders of Porsche and Volkswagen have certainly taken grateful notice of how the market works efficiently and impartially. The rest of a grateful world should too as Germans are engineering in this world and not trying to police it.

P.S. If you think that the Navier-Stokes equation is sexy, and nothing is more of a turn on than the plotted display of time evolution solution surface. If you can see the meaning in a system differential equations than Paul Wilmott may have a job for you. The market is always looking for a few good quants.

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not in Cleveland anymore, it has moved online to cyberspace, to You Tube, it’s never closed and admission is free. All musical innovation of the last century has been a uniquely American creation, another triumph of ingenuity, passion and creativity, yet another monument to Human Action.

Everyone has their own musical list that uniquely represents their feelings, passions, and experience of their world line traversing Human Action along their space in time. Whether it is favorite love songs, tear jerking heartache, or backseat drive-in movie passion play, it can be found on You Tube. Here, in no particular order, or meaning is my “Top Ten Historical You Tube Videos” guaranteed to brighten my spirits anytime that I have a case of the Mondays.

1. Statesboro Blues Duane Allman and Dickey Betts brilliant opening number for their sets from “Live at the Fillmore East” recorded in March of 1971. This album set the standard for all live albums to follow showing that the emotional stature of original composition as exposited in performance can surpass studio creations. Duane passed away later that year leaving a brilliant musical legacy, long before the age of video, you can only see him live on You Tube. Thirty five years after he died Duane was ranked number 2 on the Rolling Stone top 100 guitarists of all time.
2. It’s Man’s World James Brown, the Godfather of Soul teams up with Tenor Luciano Pavarotti in an orchestral duet of his classic love song. Recorded shortly before their untimely deaths. If James Brown doesn’t get you up offa that thing, then check your pulse you may be dead.
3. Kick Out the Jams Detroit’s original American Punks live in 1970 (I-94 is in the background). Fred Sonic Smith and Wayne Kramer paved the way for the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Clash. The live album by the same name is finally available on CD. Ramblin’ Rose is another classic, Wayne Kramer teaches Michael Jackson a few steps. Iggy Pop was in the crowd taking notes.
4. Apolitical Blues Rolling Stone guitarist Mick Taylor sits in with Lowell George and Little Feat in London in 1977. According to Keith Richards, Mick Taylor was “the most melodic guitarist he’d ever heard." Mao is dead and gone, and his ideology crushed in the garbage compactor of history, but this gem lives on. Sadly Lowell George has passed on but is still alive and well on You Tube, don’t miss Dixie Chicken with Bonnie Raitt.
5. Dock of the Bay The immortal Otis Redding studio classic. You will not want to miss his performance videos to be found on You Tube as well: I’ve been loving you to long. “May God have mercy on his sweet soul” ~ Jimmy “the lips” Fagan.
6. Goin Home Alvin Lee, a guitarist’s guitarist, hitting the 128th notes as only he can. Live in Woodstock in 1969. He stole the show again at the 25th anniversary in 1994. The acoustic version can be found there as well.
7. Miles Davis The Jazz King holds court on You Tube, too many favorites can be found here, if I picked mine that would be all that would be on the list. Find yours.
8. King Curtis and the Kingpins Live at the Fillmore West a classic of jazz improvisation. Duane Allman played at his funeral along with Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin.
9. She Came in through the Bathroom Window Joe Cocker and his Mad Dogs and Englishmen perform the Beatles composition. Leon Russell put this band together for a quick tour in 1970. They were fresh off the Delaney and Bonnie Tour immortalized live. The formed the backbone of Eric Clapton’s first solo album in 1970. They later became, sans Leon, the Rhythm section of Derek and the Dominoes. This band rehearsed for a week and then went on the road, this song and the accompanying album was recorded on their 4th gig. Brilliant, now available on DVD.
10. Star Spangled Banner the anti-war version by Jimi Hendrix closing out Woodstock in 1969. It does not get any better than this. I much prefer this than the imperial swing version Americans are subject to at most sporting events. I always put my head down, like John Carlos at the Olympics, in memory of the fallen legions; dying in vain so that the elite can steal more!

As you can tell I am partial to the live performance, much preferred to the high sound pressure renditions popularized on modern CD’s. Live performance brings the emotional stature of live performance with spontaneous innovation as co-creators. A live performance cannot be faked. Studio musicians, Auto Tune and digital remix technology can turn the talentless and dissonant (Madonnna, and Kenny Chesney come to mind) into superstars, live on stage is always an original composition unique to the audience of those present.

Classical music aficionados always like to believe that their music (largely created by dead european white guys) is deeper, more sophisticated, more important, more complicated, or just plain better. These discussions always devolve into arguments of definition, which as any logician will tell you is arbitrary. I find much of it to be musical wanking, three chord riffs with a lot of filigree.

The American 20th Century witnessed the creation of rock’n roll, jazz, blues, gospel, r&b, soul and hip-hop. The world held it’s breathe and joyously created a multibillion dollar steamroller of peace, joy and love enriching the lives of billions. An empire of Human Action as musical creativity that will outlive the piteous Pax Americana by a thousand years.

Res Ipsa Loquitor

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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Microsoft Research has released the Beta release of their wondrous WorldWideTelescope software. It is another victory in computational freedom for Human Action. Microsoft has integrated many domains of publicly funded data sources in a variety of mediums for presentation via their free software.

All that is required to use this product is a cheap PC and an Internet connection to download the program and connect to the data sources.

The Solar System, our Galaxy and the Universe at large come to life with this sophisticated tool. Microsoft has done for astronomy lovers what Google has done for Map lovers, provided copious data and tools at their expense. Unlike Google the telescope program is not a web interface but a rich fat client thus necessitating a local installation.

The tool comes complete with online video tutorials, tours, samples of destinations, as well as a generalized point-and-click interface to the celestial sphere. Tools are provided for building your own tours of the Universe.

Rather than wax eloquently, I encourage the reader to go to the source where a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words!

Statist Warning: virtually all of the imagery from here comes from publicly, i.e., tax-funded, sources. The vast majority of these images are single or multi-spectral sensor fusion of light intensity images integrated over various time scales. These are then mapped to false color images giving the spectacular color display. For example if you fly near the crab nebula with your starship it will look a lot like our night sky, white dots against a black expanse. Many of the spectrums are not viewable with human eyes at all (x, gamma, infra-red, ultraviolet). It is only the integration of very large spatial extents over long periods of time that produce the data which is colored artistically for public consumption. Users can even select imaging source in the lower right-hand window of the Microsoft tool for looks at the original data.

Tech Note: if you use Internet Explorer 7 as a browser, click no on any web page errors if they appear.

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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One of the greatest industrialists of all times, certainly the greatest of modern times retired last Friday. William Henry Gates, after 33 years as the Chief Executive Officer, Software Architect and Chairman of the Board of the Microsoft Corporation called it quits. His retirement closes out the era in which the microprocessor-based computer went from a hobbyist curiosity to the ubiquitous device of the modern world. Distributed computing grew from an obscure niche in computer science to the communication fabric of the current digital millennium.

Bill Gates’ vision took Microsoft Corporation from a group of young, wild-eyed, enthusiastic iconoclasts to being one of the most valuable corporations in the world. He did it without a dollar from the taxpayers, without the assistance of any government agency, asking only to be paid for his product. It is a classic story of creating wealth from nothingness through the power of vision, human creativity and hard work.

Gates’ detractors were largely competitors that fell by the wayside as they could not keep up with his vision as he redefined the modern corporation in its abilities to respond to customer needs and input in a rapidly changing market and technological infrastructure. Xerox, Apple, IBM, Digital Equipment, and Sun all at one time or another had superior technologies, higher market valuations and larger capital pools than Microsoft. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, after only 25 years they had all been left behind. Xerox was out of the computer business entirely, after having invented the graphical user interface, networking and the mouse pointer. Digital Equipment and the VAX architecture are dead and buried. Sun is on life support as it watches market share crumble away. IBM dramatically reinvented itself when it had one foot in the grave but now sells more services than hardware. Apple emulated Microsoft by remaking itself with its multimedia products, the iPod and iPhone.

When Sun and Netscape conspired successfully to get the justice department to consider Microsoft as a monopoly, there was a momentary hesitation by Gates as he was dragged in to a world that he had never considered relevant: the politics of envy in Washington. When this happened Microsoft did not even have an office in Washington, let alone any lobbyists. That was as foreign to Bill Gates mentality as alchemy. The world owes a debt of gratitude to Judge Robert Penfield Jackson when he struck a blow for economic freedom by ruling in favor of the defendant, Microsoft.

Along the way Bill Gates created more billionaires and millionaires than any firm in history. Microsoft has extended his vision of distributed computing in a networked world from the Ivy League towers of Harvard to every country and continent on the face of the earth, from outer space to huts in the third world. All he asked was that people pay for his product. Don’t steal it he implored: a voluntary transaction between vendor and customer.

Microsoft, when sued by Sun et al., had not had a price increase in many years. They continue to donate millions of dollars of hardware and software every year to charity. Their development tools and libraries are available for free on the internet to anyone that has the desire, the knowledge and the ability to make the next killer app and join the millionaires club.

There could be no Google unless there first had been a Microsoft. Linux is only viable because of it’s devoted copying of Windows. The internet started as a device for laboratories to communicate with one another rapidly if primitively; now it has come in multi-media splendor to your living room. Only providence knows where it will go next.

Bill Gates ennobled mankind by empowering it to see deeper, to stretch its imaginations farther, and to connect with others from different faiths, philosophies, and continents by sharing the joint intellectual property of knowledge. A classic positive-sum economic game where the whole is greater than its parts and no one loses because all commerce is of free will and voluntary. Bill Gates is a giant of capitalism.

Thank for your effort.

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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The death of comedian George Carlin came as a shock. Not because I knew him personally, but as a visceral reaction to the end of an era, the era of my childhood. I am a baby boomer, born in the 50′s and coming of age in the 60′s and 70′s. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll: that great cultural leap off of the cliff like a horde of burnt out lemmings. This was the age in which dogma was criticized and overthrown: mass protest brought the Vietnam War to an end, women’s liberation, and civil rights stepped to the forefront of public consciousness. A vigilant media, tired of the lies of Richard Nixon, effectively brought his Presidency to an end. The state was staggered with body blows and sent reeling against the ropes.

George Carlin owed his livelihood to his unique ability in skewering the dogma of conventional wisdom on prime time in front of millions. We all knew what he was against, and as such he was one of us, a David throwing rocks at Goliath. As a man of little formal education, which is to say he did not have a PhD from an important school in an important discipline, Carlin was able for more than 40 years to identify the big lie and how it masquerades behind the mask of scientistic and legalistic façade. Dogma to Carlin was a dragon to be slain whenever and wherever it reared its noxious head.

The first step to solution of a problem is identification, and George Carlin was a master at identifying many of them. Carlin used humor as his primary tool in ironic perception, and with that lever he pried open many a mask over the façade of conventional wisdom. His cultural role was not to solve problems, but to identify them. No matter how bad things were he could always bring a smile and a laugh as one of the benighted speaking his mind regardless. He kicked political correctness right in the teeth while Bill Maher was still wearing diapers.

My favorite Carlin quote came from a monologue I watched in the 70′s one night at a friend’s house after a multi-hour skull-cracking study session in Angell Hall.

“I love people, I hate groups.
People are smart, groups are stupid.”
~ George Carlin

These simple words embodied Carlin’s philosophy of opposition to the status quo, the conventional wisdom. He rarely articulated who the enemy was, since his audiences knew it a priori. For baby boomers it was clear who it was, the man, the establishment. His philosophy embodied all that economic freedom and individual liberty enshrine. For Carlin individuals were sacrosanct and groups to be despised.

Individuals provide mankind faith, science, culture, music and philosophy. Groups take it away with lies, deception, theft and murder. While an avowed atheist he was, paradoxically, a man of deep faith. Faith in the ability of the individual to create meaning in life, despite one’s brief duration of life, despite the opposition of the privileged and the powerful. He stood on their stage and spat right in their eye.

Carlin knew that groups exist to imprison the individual, to place them in castes, to assign them limited possibilities, to dull their senses into acceptance of the inevitable, to use rape as the powerful desire. He recognized that in groups we find the bestiality of primitive man ascendant to run roughshod over the benighted masses. The cowardly hide behind groups as protection against being held accountable for their deviant behavior. During his professional career he saw Richard Nixon pervert the mantle of the leader of the free world for cynical personal ends. In the last decade of his career he saw the draft-dodging duo of Bush II and Evil Dick Cheney reincarnated as Nixon gone wild with an unlimited budget (4 trillion dollars in fresh debt for the unborn) and a façade of legitimacy to maim, crush or kill anyone desired.

Carlin railed against war, poverty, racism, sexism, how the privileged dupe the commoner in order to fleece them. He had no answers for these problems; only a firm conviction that group dynamics keep these perversions alive across the generations. The answer lies, where it has always lain, in the politics of Eighteenth Century Jeffersonian Democracy, that is to say, in the individual.

The world is a grayer place without George Carlin in it. Still I take comfort in the image of George Carlin standing with St. Peter in front of the pearly gates keeping the assholes out.

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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Waves are periodic phenomena so popular with scientists because they provide accurate models of many phenomena. While I am doubtful of their use in prudent investment strategies, I do think they aptly characterize the political class; that subset of humanity that makes their living at others expense. A parasite so to speak on the body politic. Politicians rise and fall time and time again. It is rare that a politico rises and then falls on the same sword that has been used to skewer others. Who can resist the savory taste of revenge?

The Governorship of the Empire State has long been a coveted plum for the appetite of the rising politician. Some of the worst Presidents in history have come from the aptly named Empire State. Franklin and Teddy, both Roosevelt’s both cut from elitist cloth were at one time Governors there. There were also a couple of near misses with the failing candidacies of Mario Cuomo (socialist) and Rudi Giuliani (fascisti). Rudi wasn’t actually the Governor, but in his shameless self-promotion since 9/11 he certainly acted like one.

For a politician on the rise, the New York Governorship is a springboard into the pool of public consciousness. This is all courtesy of the ubiquitous media presence there. Diligently cramming the conventional wisdom down the American populace’s throat from their exalted position in NYC.

This is where Hillary and Bill went after his flail in the oval office was over. They sure as hell weren’t going back to Arkansas. The ever popular Council on Foreign Relations are squatters there as well, enjoying pricey real estate, and tax-free perks courtesy of the IRS. They "serve" the American public, as a non-profit organization but remain on a short leash to their masters at the Morgan/Rockefeller banks. Sorry, my bad, I mean as cultural mavens in the nexus of Western Civilization.

Nonetheless, an up-and-coming bag man could certainly do worse for his career. Eliot Spitzer was Hahvaaard educated, a blue blood. He cut his teeth as a gutsy law and order prosecutor just like his mentor Combover Rudi. Unlike Rudi, who made his bones at the expense of the "Teflon Don" John Gotti, Eliot made his by picking on girls, I mean, women. He stalked and then bagged the first American woman in history to be a self-made billionaire: Martha Stewart. Never mind that the charges against her were ridiculous. They were also completely unintelligible from a constitutional perspective, the same constitution that Spitzer, as a federal prosecutor, is supposed to uphold. Eliot, like so many aggrandizing politicians before him, was never one to let the truth interfere with a good story, even if under oath.

Still Martha was never convicted! She plea bargained for a reduced sentence, that as a shrewd businesswoman, knew would be better for her and her stockholders capital in the long run than adhering to her principles and fighting to the end. As to why the activist feminist media did not crucify Spitzer for this cruel charade I’ll never understand.

The conviction of Martha Stewart was just the necessary and protracted media event that an opportunist like Spitzer can use to get their persona the publicity so essential to a national campaign. Eliot rode this wave right into the governorship. It was the crest of the wave, but no one could see it then, he was just getting started.

As many waves do, this one broke up on the rock of negative public opinion. Pride goeth before the fall. I do not think that Americans are a particularly moral or pious tribe in the modern world. Yet the self-appointed nannies of political correctness, ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX/CNN certainly reiterate this illusion through their distorting lens of disinformation. The demise of Eliot Spitzer is every bit the historical non-event as the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton.

The glaring hypocrisy of what really is nobody’s business, the consensual behavior between consenting adults is transformed by this charade into a mirror that illuminates the degraded hypocrisy that the media circus pontificating the conventional wisdom has become. Seventeen years, and hundreds of thousands of dead souls, whose only mistake was to be born in Mesopotamia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, stare back at us, and we look away.

Still Americans self-righteously puff up our collective chests at this sinner who is guilty of the non-crime of indulging his basest appetites. The only person that had any interest in Eliot’s sordid behavior was his wife. Not only does she have to be humiliated by marriage to this buffoon, and then secondly to stand by his ignorant ass as he fesses up into the cycloptic eye of public opinion. The first time you spend $4000 on a hooker the Devil made you do it, after that you done it on your own.

The rise and fall of politicians have become a regular and sadly predictably periodic event in American history. They set the bar so low that you have to be careful not to trip over it. Despite the non-stop prattle of the mainstream media gushing effusively about the great joy that the political classes bestow on the whole world, we seem to continually elect dolts. Dolts that have an eye for the skirts and a taste for the sauce nonetheless. The vast majority of Americans would not trust most of these people to walk their dogs! Why do we let them run things (even when they time and again run them into the ground)?

If only we had actually adhered to the Founding Father’s principle of liberty and justice for all (that we trumpet loudly from sea to shining sea, while ignoring it perpetually) this would never have occurred. Martha would never have gone to jail, and Eliot Spitzer would be just another unknown political hack in a dead-end job.

This is just the start. There will be obligatory and expensive investigation (paid for by you and I) to get to the bottom of this. This is a field day for the network talking heads. The late night chins will be wagging over Elliot’s peccadilloes even as history relegates him to the dustbin, right beside Richard Nixon, Wilbur Mills and the intellectually flaccid Billy Buckley.

At the end of the day it was a cruel yet wonderful irony that this arrogant, moronic Hahvaaard man had his throne yanked out from under him just as he had ascended on it. He fell flat on his face in front of 300 million Americans because he wasn’t man enough to keep it in his pants and show a little of what we adults call self-control.

Few things are as sweet as revenge publicly inflicted on the deserving. I hope this trough of the Eliot Wave brings a smile to Martha Stewart’s face and a spring to her step. I know it sure did for mine.

George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN.

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Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics is a well-known saying attributed to Benjamin Disraeli. It was popularized in the U.S. by the author Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This statement refers to the persuasive power of numbers, and describes how accurate statistics can be used to bolster inaccurate arguments.

The state is the most infamous of liars. Even though myriad penalties exist for punishing individuals for lying (perjury) to the state in all its myriad forms there little to no enforcement or even statutes for the converse. The 21st century should be called the Digital Millennium because of the ubiquity of computers in virtually all forms of human interaction. Digital computers provide the perfect conduit for deceit, for institutionalizing prevarication (lying, fraud, perjury) and making it completely unaccountable. When the history of the 21st century is written, I assert, it will be noted that digital data, all its forms, will be inadmissible in court for any reason. It is always invalid beyond any reasonable doubt. Here’s why.

The argument is simple: digital data has no ownership criteria, it cannot be attributed unambiguously, there can be no chain of authorship, the creation costs are close to zero including forgery costs, and there can be no chain of evidence. Because of these characteristics digital data can only be trusted based upon the word of an individual that attests to its integrity. A single individual’s attestation to fact is the legal equivalent of hearsay and cannot be admitted into a court of law. Let me present these bold assertions in detail.

The well-known Moore’s Law phenomena demonstrate that the number of transistors which can be placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, thus doubling approximately every two years. The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. This trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop in the foreseeable future. This means that increasing amounts of computational power can be had for less money as time goes on. This is perhaps the finest example of human ingenuity dropping prices from productivity increases due to Human Action in conjunction with private capital and private ownership of property.

The new Itanium chip will have over two billion transistors on a single chip. Long-term storage prices are on the decrease as well. A terabyte (million megabytes) disk drive is now under $200, terabyte flash drives are expected soon, and petabyte and higher storage densities are in the lab thanks to breakthroughs in solid state physics. Look for them at a consumer outlet near you soon.

I have been a professional computer systems architect and developer for more than 20 years. Everything I have ever worked on including CAD models, simulations, programs, development tools, documentation, sample images, pictures of my family, all my favorite eBooks, email archives, and much of LRC and Mises web sites occupy less than 200GB. I will probably not live long enough to fill my 400 GB disks with meaningful data.

For data to be usable it must have a producer and a consumer, even if they are the same individual or computer system. Some physical device like a camera, keyboard, or another computer system interface will source (generate) some digital data. This transducer converts a physical act like snapping a picture into a digital representation of the act. Many cities are now adding digital cameras into the traffic light system. For a typical city street intersection this means at least four cameras are required to digitize traffic. A high-volume intersection might want 8 so there is a camera dedicated to each traffic direction. Big city roads with service drives that run alongside the thoroughfare could easily double this number.

Many cities are planning or implementing a ticketing system where the traffic light state (red, green, yellow) and traffic captured are used to generate automatic moving violations which are then mailed to an offender based upon an optical character recognition system (OCR) that reads the license plate of the offending vehicle. The license database then provides the owner information and the ticket is sent. If the ticket is not paid the legal machinery of summons, absentia judgment, and warrant for arrest can now swing into motion. This is obviously a potential revenue gold mine for the “owner” (city, county, state). Since there is no officer to be sworn for testimony these tickets, while monetary penalties, are not given as “points” against the driver or sent to insurance companies to effect insurability or insurance rates.

This example raises the first problematical issue. The sequence of events is known as a graph. Graphs are simple mathematical entities that consist of vertexes (points) and edges (lines). Graph Theory is a deep and powerful field of mathematics that is easily understood by almost anyone. This type of graph is directed, the direction is actually time that properly sequences the events. The vertices connect the events in the proper temporal (time) order. The graph is (a) Light Turns Red-> (b) Camera Catches Car in Intersection->(c) License is Read-> (d) Owner is Identified->(e) Ticket Is Printed and Mailed-> (f) Fine is Paid: A->B->C-D->E. This graph forms a crucial piece of legal doctrine called the Chain of Evidence. It is also known as the Chain of Custody. The Chain of Evidence provides the ordering of the events, the arrows (vertices) sequence events in time.

The Chain of Custody is actually a misnomer in common usage. It is the graph of ownership or attribution of the Chain of Evidence, not the same so conflating the two is an error of fact. This will be important later on

A police officer testifying in court about events personally witnessed is attributing the chain of evidence. A great deal of legal precedence has been established as to the quality of this testimony. If you are a convicted criminal testifying that the sworn officers’ testimony against you (his version of the Chain of Evidence compared to yours) is false and yours is correct, the weight of jurisprudence falls squarely on the side of state. One against one testimony between private persons is considered as equal and no verdict can be rendered, unless third party evidence proves one or both are perjuring themselves (lying under oath). Logic actually dictates that an officer and a convicted criminal testifying about their versions of the same event are equivalent, but the “law” mandates that the officials prevail. This will be a recurring pattern.

If we consider the traffic light system there are likely to be multiple independent computer systems that provide event data. Each system has one or more individual system administrators that certify to the integrity of the system behavior with respect data captured, stored and retrieved. Very large systems can have entire system that just monitor and administer other system. Nonetheless attribution ultimately always comes down to one or more individuals whose sworn testimony provides the Chain of Custody verification required.

They key here is that the systems and their administrators provide the attribution/attestation as to the integrity of what the data. The National Institute of Standards and Technology provides traceable standards for many facts physical entities of interest with respect to computer systems like time. This attestation process is the logical equivalent of two testimonies between individuals. In a debate these are equivalent, but in a court of law legal precedence again comes down on the side of the state. This precedence has been appealed to the highest court and the state always wins on principal.

The source and destination of the events in a graph (Chain of Evidence) and attribution of the data (Chain of Custody) are only part of the problem. In the case of our traffic system the camera captures the reflected light from the moving vehicle and stores it as an image (picture). A pictorial image is a field (a set whose members are positions and at each position is a value (color or intensity for black and white images) that forms the data. A picture can thus be considered as a fact devoid of context. Author Neal Postman has written eloquently on pictures de-contextualizing information.

If we take a picture of a group of people then those in picture know the context: party, celebration, and some attributable “fact” about the circumstances of the picture. The photographer can be completely devoid of context yet capture successfully an image (think wedding photographer). It is the context of the image that provides the meaning. For our traffic monitoring system the image is the fact of a car reflecting light in a particular intersection. External attestations are required as part of the chain of evidence in order to provide meaning to the context.

For our example the traffic light state (red/yellow/green) may not be visible in the image so the image has to be “tagged” with the light state externally. How close in time can the image acquisition and event state be synchronized? At 30 miles per hour the car is moving at 44 feet per second (roughly two car lengths). If the synchronization is 100 milliseconds positional uncertainty is 4.4 feet and this may be enough to determine if the vehicle is in our out of the intersection at the moment the offense is deemed to occur (when the pictures is snapped). If the light is poor or if the camera is slow it can blur the image and the error margin becomes greater.

The image must show the light to be in only one state, if it is in multiple states the legal model itself becomes devoid of meaning. If it is red, an offense may not have occurred if the operator entered the intersection on a yellow. If the light state information is wrong then the context and chain of evidence is different and no offense can be detected.

Even if the system is perfect (idealized) and my car is running a red light thus a traffic offense is occurring. The system does not know who is driving my car. It could be my wife or a family member or a car thief. It could be the same model car with a fake license plate with my number on it being driven by a group of criminals in a getaway from a crime scene when I am actually in Tahiti on vacation and not capable of driving the car, or my car could be in the junkyard because I scrapped it the day before the offense occurred. These all illustrate how difficult it is to make a meaningful attestation to a physical event when the context cannot be established either logically (could be established in principle) or actually (was established).

We have not even gotten to optical character recognition system and what its limitations and accuracies are. Nor have we discussed communication network bandwidth and latency for synchronizing cameras and time measurement. Being a physical device and a computer system it will have similar limitations on the Chain of Evidence and Chain of Custody. Reading the license plate before the image is snapped would certainly make an offense of little value in terms of proof, but could in fact occur in the case of a legitimate of offense

In addition to the physical limitations of the system consider how it could be deviated from its designed purpose. It would be an elementary effort to take an image of an empty intersection, take an image of a car legally in the intersection and subtract the background leaving the car only. This image could then be added to an intersection only image giving the impression of the car in the intersection at a particular moment in time. If the car is translated with respect to the image slightly it can take a position from one of legality to illegality. The same methodology could be applied to any particular license plate for owner identification, as well as driver.

The diligent reader might argue that lighting/shading models would prevent this from occurring. That is an “expert” witness could tell the real from the fake. Upon which point I disagree for the following reason that since many types of image processing software are available which provide for pixel by pixel image editing (Photoshop, GIMP, Image Magick) it is possible if someone is willing to spend enough time on the edit. Given the massive computational power now available cheaply it is certain that this is not only possible but probable.

This is example illustrates all of the problems with digital surveillance: data model provides evidence, data system has systemic errors, Chain of Evidence and Chain of Custody cannot be attributed beyond a reasonable doubt. Furthermore that the nature of attribution essential to linking the vertexes in the graph always trace back to an individual attestation based upon a definition of what is true. When it is one third party testifying against another third party the legal conclusion cannot select between one and the other and hence is an admissible. In the case of a trusted member of the state of the state (police officer, agent, service man etc.), the legal benefit of truth will accrue to where it is logically not valid.

Systems of these types are in widespread usage in the United States and many other countries. Many cities install them but do not use them as revenue sources, but as data collection systems for traffic flow information. There are many more governmental entities with envious eyes looking at the cost benefit/ratio and awaiting the legal issues to be resolved before implementation. It is only a matter of time before these are ubiquitous and become another arsenal in the states pilfering of the individuals.

Regardless if it is satellite photos, hidden cameras recording criminal activity, airport cameras performing facial recognition, automated gas chromatographs detecting drugs in passersby or tailpipe emission violations, and the list is literally endless. If the data acquisition, transmission, storage and retrieval is digital then the data has no validity in a court of law because of the inadmissibility of evidence in the either The Chain of Custody, the Chain of Evidence, or both. That the low cost of fraud and the fundamental inability to detect real from fake make digital technology inadmissible from a legal standpoint for public purposes.

Just as the Constitution provided limited powers to the Federal Government with all other rights being reserved for the individual, usage of digital technology for private affairs is purely up to the user’s discretion for whatever purpose they desire, as long as it is not offered as evidence of a crime.

It is not my assertion that this is at all reflected in law since just the opposite it true. The preponderance of fact is that the state, in all its forms, is spying (surveillance), on a continual basis, everything possible, for whatever legitimate and illegitimate reasons. The damage to a free society is unlimited with this perversion of technology as it usurps the fundamental constitutional principle of innocence until proven guilty. Guilt is assumed before the act of surveillance which then provides a foregone conclusion regardless of the actual surveillance system fidelity and integrity with respect to purpose and design constraints.

In closing I would add the following, and I think it equally applicable to your family as it is mine. I have repeatedly admonished my children that they should expect to be under video and audio surveillance at all times when in public or private (outside of the own home) as this is the state of the world in which we live, and to act accordingly. Additionally complete digital surveillance of Internet should be assumed at all times. There is no anonymity on the Internet.

Having been professional technologist for over 25 years I am completely agnostic as to the merits of digital technology. It is irrelevant. What matters is human nature which remains the same across cultures, faiths, creeds and over the millennia. Specifically that perversion of human nature that accrues with political power and the desire to hold sway over others. This technology because of its low cost and fungible nature will eventually be deemed to be valueless by a free society. The road to that point may be rough.

Ironically it is the aging analog technology like film cameras, video tape recorders, fingerprints, typewritten and hand written documents that are exactly the opposite. For them forgery is difficult to execute and expensive to reproduce. The fraudulent is always detectable! Like the ballistic signature from a firearm is unique. So to do analog technologies provide authentic signatures beyond a reasonable doubt. The old is better than the new.

The real question is what is surveillance in a free society for? If we lived in a neutral country that had free trade with all and encumbrances with none there would be no need for internal or external surveillance as we would have no enemies. A vigilant national defense using digital technology is reasonable because there would never be a criminal prosecution of an individual so the flaws are irrelevant.

As always the Founding Fathers provide guidance:

“Those who would trade liberty for security will soon have neither.”

~ Attributed to Benjamin Franklin

I know there are many who will disagree with discussion on the lack of integrity in digital data. Feel free to email them to me for analysis and discussion.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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The Nashville Tennessean headline for Feb 29, 2008 was "Bush, Bernanke banish R-word." The sub heading was "They see no recession on horizon, but concede economy is slowing." The article was a pickup from Associated Press writer Jeanine Aversa. Just what exactly is the functionality of banishing a word? Are we to no longer use it? Has it become meaningless? What powers over language and meaning do these two men have?

Having actually read the Constitution of the United States and understanding what those words mean I can only conclude that neither of these men have any public power to banish words. What they do have the power to do, thanks to a complicit mass media, is pervert the meaning of the words to deceive the populace.

A recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of negative GNP growth, a depression of 4 consecutive quarters of negative GNP growth. This means the economy is shrinking, less business is being transacted for whatever reason, fewer goods and services are produced. Some people actually start saving and stop spending, or pay down accumulated debt. Maybe it is time to pay the Visa bill down and not by Junior a new Hummer.

Business and individuals have had sufficient malinvestment that failures get liquidated and a retrenchment occurs. Factories draw down inventories to lessen carrying costs, prices drop to woo consumers less willing to part with hard-earned money, layoffs occur, businesses fail, personal bankruptcies rise. It’s been a good party, but they do come to an end.

In an election year, recessions are the kiss of death for the incumbent administration, hence the banishing of the R word. Maybe they want to send it beyond the Pale as the Czar of all the Russia’s once sent Jews. Wherever the pale actually was is not certain, but in Russia it was probably cold and certainly harsh. Not exactly a winning ticket for an American President.

This is an American President who’s entire Presidency, mercifully for the entire planet in its final year has had a hard time with words. Accuracy and precision of the spoken word has been lax. Prevarication, mendacity, and outright mangling of the English language have sadly been the norm. If these guys are moving their lips the truth is going to have a poor showing. For Lil Bush the truth has been a fungible concept: it is whatever he wants it to be, whenever he wants it to be, and as stated in the past can reinterpreted in the future as something completely different. I would speculate that much of the time the truth is not even apparent in thought as the words flow past on the teleprompter and he struggles not to move his lips when approaching the really big ones (3 syllables and up). The Vice-President says nothing which is usually good because when he does it is usually a lie.

Still let’s look at other words we might want to banish.

Weapons of Mass Destruction aka WMD’s gone. They cannot be talked about because since they never existed we did not have to invade Iraq and wreck what remained of their infrastructure from a decade of sanctions and repeated bombings of second-world country put on a steep descent down to the third rung by the world’s only superpower.

The D word democracy is not banished. The Iraqi’s clearly invited us to trade, their oil, hundreds of thousands of dead and missing sons, wives, fathers and daughters for a ballot box stuffed with our hand-picked, cream of the crop, intelligentsia of Iraqi culture. Why they need so many bodyguards, armored vehicles, and high walls around their fortresses, I mean homes, is unclear. Perhaps it is to keep the throngs of satisfied citizens off the grass or from scaring the pets in their zeal.

The L word as in a lie, a falsehood or the act of lying is definitely banished. Jesus has touched the President’s heart, as he has said many times. Since lying is forbidden in the Ten Commandments this one had to go, since he was "born again."

The B word as in bear market is out, all markets are bull markets, the time to buy stocks is now. Invest in your and America’s future.

The G word as in Gold Standard is out. The worst thing an economy can do is cling to this false idol of a bygone era. President Roosevelt so kindly spared us from this. The dollar may be asymptotically approaching zero when compared against the Euro, gas prices are rising because of cosmic rays, the work of Lucifer in league with Al Qaeda as many speculate. Not because of any fiscal malfeasance on the part of our Bi-Partisan leadership and their complicit Federal Reserve.

Stable prices are mandated which means printing more money to give first to your friends, where it is stable, but by the time it gets to the rest of us inflation has somehow crept in, even after 90 years of central banking. Still Lockheed and Halliburton see a rosy future.

OBL as in the criminal Osama Bin Laden is definitely out. We are seeking to end an adjective, terror, not a criminal. It is no one’s interest for this man to be found, because then the war would actually be over. OBL will be 120 years old and our garrisoned troops in 700 different overseas locations, with a trillion dollar a year budget will not be able to catch this wily old dodger as he crawls around some of the harshest terrain on the planet, trailing his dialysis machine, the generators that run it, his satellite phone from which to call forth willing thralls, and last but not least the low-quality audio equipment from which he makes his recruiting pitches that chill us all to the bone, but not speaking Arabic we let the CIA tell us what he said.

The H word as in housing collapse is out. No time like the current time to buy more real estate! All those for sale signs, that rarely ever say sold anymore are proof of the vigor of the American economy under Lil Bush and Deadeye Cheney. Reagan proved that deficits do not matter! In true faith as Republicans they have graciously added 4 trillion dollars more of them to the backs of our children.

The A word accountability is out. The President will not be able to do anything in what remains of his term other than write pardons if this word is allowed.

The C word, Constitution is not out, it is very in. What is out is actually adhering to it under the rule of law. All of the thousands of Presidential directives have made this a venerated if quaint antique. Something you salute, like the flag, Mom and apple pie. You talk about it in speeches and at rallies, or when you are praising the vigor with which we protect our freedom that our enemies hate. What is really done is classified under the Patriot act so that our enemies cannot know what the plans for implementing freedom actually are, but then neither do the rest of us. This is probably not an accident.

The P word for police state is clearly out. This is the land of the free, as we are now free to be subject to electronic surveillance from almost anywhere, continuously. From the street corner spy cameras, to the myriad satellites in space. From the Echelon system in foreign lands and the military drones flying over our cities we are watched. Internet routers can now direct digital data to the great NSA packet sink courtesy of all those wired closets that big Telco’s graciously supply in return for immunity.

Prior to the Internet the DEA could activate their own switches in the telephone system as desired in the War on Drugs. We are now almost a century into losing. Still the local police have been militarized with advanced training, state-of-the-art vforensic labs, Kevlar vests, Tasers and automatic weapons. Programs for spying on neighbors and testifying anonymously with hearsay have been codified into law.

Private property can now be confiscated by multiple authorities for any of a myriad of allegations, I mean reasons. It is up to the property owner to prove that they are innocent (at their own cost of course). I cannot resist the brilliant line from Sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven: "Innocent? Innocent of what."

The W for War Department is banished as well, even though we actually now have two of them, since one was not enough, a baby has been birthed Homeland Security, equally incompetent and just as wasteful if only on a smaller scale. At least in a bygone era the name War Department was an honest expression of intent.

In the 21st Century there are well over a billion arms in private hands in America, and by count that’s a little over one for each hand, and one for the back of our Levi’s for every man women and child citizen of our peace-loving nation.

There are trillions of rounds to go with this arsenal. Personally I think it would great fun to break up the tedium of the regular workday and go to the beach and have a shootout with the invaders. "Pack a picnic basket Ma, all this killing is going to make me hungry and thirsty" But never in American History have we been invaded. The closest we came was to ride over with the British and then rudely send them home. Apparently failing to learn the attendant lesson of the length of supply lines, logistical nightmares of foreign occupation, and the recalcitrance of people that have their homes invaded and their families and neighbors murdered. We are in good company Napoleon and Hitler also failed to learn this social studies lesson as well, much to the chagrin of their troops.

I think by now you can see where this is headed, but still there is so much material to work with thanks to these four-star clowns intent on giving it all away. Platoons of comedians and late-night talk show hosts are making personal fortunes keeping us laughing to keep from crying over the mess we are in. Even if they mistakenly conflate socialism with liberty, and believe that Republicans and Democrats really are of different ideological frameworks.

These cultural mavens are largely Democrats, yet to their credit they by and large openly advocated a policy of socialism and more intrusive programs and wasteful spending. The Republicans with the lone exception of Ron Paul just lie, cheat and steal about everything kind of like Lincoln, Mussolini and that German with the funny mustache.

This bile-filled screed could go on all night; the article that sent me into this tirade was only about 200 words, all of it denying the obvious. I quote some more of it from Miss Aversa:

WASHINGTON — When it comes to the economy, President Bush and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke see the glass half full, rather than half empty.

The economy is in turmoil, yet Bush and Bernanke say the country will weather the storm. Neither sees a recession on the horizon.

Bush and Bernanke are on the front lines of the government’s efforts to right an economy that increasing numbers of economists fear is on the verge of its first recession since 2001, if it hasn’t fallen into one already.

The housing market’s collapse, a credit crisis and galloping energy prices are crimping spending and investing. Those are mighty punches to a teetering economy that nearly stalled at the end of last year.

Bush and the Federal Reserve chairman acknowledged the dangers Thursday. But Bush, at a White House news conference, and Bernanke, in congressional testimony, seemed to strike the same hopeful note that the economy should be able to survive its ills.

“I don’t think we’re headed to a recession, but no question we’re in a slowdown,” Bush said.

The Federal Reserve is not forecasting a recession. It does predict slow growth and higher unemployment this year.

“I realize that my testimony wasn’t the most cheerful thing you’ll hear today … but I do very much believe that the U.S. economy will return to a strong growth path with price stability,” Bernanke told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. It was his second day in a row on Capitol Hill discussing the economy."

My experience with the current administration is that every single word that is uttered is to be suspect. If you ask them the time, check your watch. If they tell you the weather report look out the window, if you shake their hand count the fingers you get back. They won’t ask for your wallet they have already emptied long before you were born and long into the future.

Given the Orwellian promiscuity with what Fox News loosely calls the truth, it is a safe bet that literally everything Miss Alversa writes about will not come true. These statements are just deflections of the obvious, cruel antonyms of the reality. What everyone I know and talk to is worried about is the crumbling value of the dollar and the flip side of that coin, the skyrocketing price of energy. That our government, under the Presidency George W. Bush, has become completely and callously unfettered by the rule of law enshrined in the Constitution. It is out of control, and that his imperial hegemonic empire expansion will drive us to the brink of history’s largest bankruptcy. We continue to borrow $2 billion dollars each and every day, adding to that $9 trillion dollar mound of government paper and promises

Bush is correct about one thing: there will be no recession in his future. He can be a salesman for the Carlyle Group, he’ll ghost write a book he won’t read for a multi-million dollar payday, then there are the $100,000 an hour speaking engagements — why anyone would want to hear this inarticulate lummox speak once out of office I cannot fathom.

The best I can hope for is that maybe in a dark hour of the night his conscience will awaken him to what he has done and he’ll return to his besotted youth to drown the pain and the shame. Maybe all the brown corpses he has created from living beings will call his name from deep and troubled shadows of his mind, but I doubt it.

The last 8 years have been a miserable time for freedom-loving Americans. What I see is that the Democratic "opposition" has watched Lil Bush with envious eyes, salivating at their chance to get the levers of power. The Socialism they so openly advocate, as Ludwig Von Mises has demonstrated so clearly, will wreck this country. Perhaps in closing that is the only thing even mildly positive about the Republicans, that their agenda is to wreck other countries so that they can stand tall and pronounce victory.

"What’s that smell son? Napalm sir. Smells like … victory."
~ Robert Duval (Apocalypse Now)

Everyone deserves a better future.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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In the wake of the Global Warming , and the (perennial) impending Eco-tastrophe Hysteria, people are longing for a quick, safe, and cheap solution to these problems. It is alleged that global warming is due to a net carbon increase in the atmosphere and that the major contributor to the carbon is the internal combustion engine specifically when used in personal automobiles. As always the political class and their embedded and tenured supplicants are quick to proffer these answers to an ill-posed question. One of the more popular of late has been electric/hybrid vehicles along with the Hydrogen Economy. As usual, this is just another mendacious facade, masking the real agenda: socialism.

Hydrogen is advocated as a fuel becuase is it is clean. Hydrogen is burned with oxygen that produces pure water as the combustion by-product. The Space Shuttle main engines burn hydrogen with oxygen because it is the highest energy density available for a liquid fueled rocket motor. The big orange tank on the space shuttle has two compartments internally: one for liquid oxygen, and the other for liquid hydrogen. The 1986 Challenger explosion showed vivldy what happens when that combination gets together with a spark. Using hydrogen as a fuel is not a good idea.

“The Emperor’s New Hydrogen Economy” by Canadian Darryl McMahon in 2006 casts a critical eye on the assertions of Hydrogen economy gadflys.

From the Preface:

• “I am not saying that the hydrogen economy cannot work at a mechanical level
• I am not saying that current practical obstacles cannot be overcome
• I am not saying that we should stop all research and development into improving existing technologies for the production, storage, transport and use of hydrogen.
• I am not saying that hydrogen cannot be a viable fuel in some specific circumstances (e.g., space exploration).

What I am saying is that given the current state of technology and the extremely limited penetration of sustainable energy sources throughout the industrialized world, the hydrogen economy is a really bad idea.”

I agree completely with this statement, it is a really bad idea, but for fundamentally different reasons.

Hydrogen does not exist naturally on earth. All hydrogen, because of its low density, thus high buoyancy, long ago escaped from the earth’s gravitational field as would helium were it not captured mechanically from “wells." So hydrogen has to be produced, with the most popular method being electrolysis, that is, splitting water with electricity, producing hydrogen and oxygen. Current worldwide production of hydrogen (according to author McMahon) is 5 million tons annually. For a hydrogen economy it would have increase by 100 fold

The book points out correctly that hydrogen is a carrier of energy, and that the energy itself must be produced elsewhere. Every thermodynamic change in energy state incurs a loss since no process is thermodynamically 100% efficient. He correctly points out that the hydrogen in your car or fuel cell may have undergone multiple conversions and losses during the production and delivery to the consumer. Some of these he estimates are as low as 30% efficient overall. Water is electrolysed to cleave the water molecule to form the gases and then store the hydrogen as a fuel for later use. Simple thermodynamics (the physics equivalent of Austrian economics, ie there is no free lunch) tells us that we will always use more energy making the hydrogen than we get out by burning. If not it would be a perpetual motion machine. The only exception to this is if fast breeder reactors are used to make electricity and then refueled with the breeder reactor fuel.

The politically desirable goal of clean-burning energy is covered up by the remote coal to steam to electricity to hydrogen process that happens somewhere else (electric cars always just move the pollution, not eliminate it). Multiple versions of this can occur depending on what the energy starting point is (fuel oil, biomass, nuclear, wind, etc.). All true, but then fossil fuels are just energy carriers as well. They carry from the sun to the earth and are stored. They come from the sun and whether you ascribe to the biogenic theory of petroleum origination from decomposition of the food chain itself over long periods of time, or from the bowels of the earth from gravitational collapse during planet forming (abiogenic). The sun provides the energy source. Petroleum has such a high energy density because it is just distilled and then transported. The amount transformed (always subject to losses) is small.

As I have said elsewhere, energy density is what matters; the following graph illustrates this nicely:

Figure 3. The energy densities of hydrogen fuels stored in various phases and materials are plotted, with the mass of the container and apparatus needed for filling and dispensing the fuel factored in. Gasoline significantly outperforms lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen in gaseous, liquid, or compound forms. The proposed DOE goal refers to the energy density that the US Department of Energy envisions as needed for viable hydrogen-powered transportation in 2015.

All the technologies in the lower left-hand side have an energy density that is too low to perform work efficiently for modern industrialized society. Some may actually consume more energy than they produce. Only fossil fuels and nuclear have sufficient energy density. Nuclear is off the chart so to speak!

The nuclear reactor has proven to be one of mankind’s safest devices. There have been no fatalities in the United States due to radiation exposure. Our future is clearly nuclear power once the fossil fuels price themselves out of mass consumption. Critics point to the disasterous Chernobyl reactor as evidence of the inherent safety risks. This is not a viable argument as multiple critics have pointed out the efficiency failures of socialism that led to gross levels of pollution in every country where it has been adopted as a means of social organization.

The point McMahon correctly makes is that the efficiency of multiple conversions is always poor and the true energy source is hidden, the net results are negative given current and foreseeable technology. That is the rub, negative foreseeable is always true right up until a revolution occurs and then a new technology becomes dominant.

The remainder of his book, and the major portion of it is just retreaded silly old nostrums about low carbon footprint, riding bicycles, wind, solar and geothermal power that have been offered up uncritically since the first Earth Day in 1970. This event of great mendacity brought the impending eco-disaster to public consciousness and has been exalted as conventional wisdom ever since.

The 90′s came and went, and we did not have to wear gas masks as that perpetual gas bag Paul Ehrlich predicted (still he did not return the profits from his book which got it largely wrong), nor did hundreds of millions starve to death as predicted. Ehrlich did pay off his bet with Julian Simon (Simon’s readings are essential for any serious Austrian Technologist). Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb is a classic book of the impending catastrophe that just never seems to occur even though it is always right around the corner. Save your money and borrow it from a library.

If the aforementioned is not reason enough to ignore the “Hydrogen Economy," then consider the fact that President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Address said this about hydrogen:

“In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation. Tonight I’m proposing $1.2 billion in research funding so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles. (Applause.)

A single chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car — producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom, so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free”

The seven years of his presidency has been so disastrous on all fronts that anything he advocates should be opposed a priori. Yet his “experts” wanted money for research. He planned on a modest $1.2 billion dollars but this was later increased to $2.0 billion dollars.

The largest industry in the world (Petroleum) needs a pitiful two billion dollar grant, less than a day’s revenue, to create their next technological wunderkind? George W. Bush gives money to the oil industry as a reflex like most people yawn when tired. He can’t not do it. This pittance is just showing that he keeps the faith, but it does get the latest scam into the lexicon of conventional wisdom. Soon after his Presidency comes to an end, expect to see W and Al Gore arm-in-arm, just like his father was with Bill Clinton. It is after all, all about fleecing the public.

Spare yourself the cost of buying this book. The first seventeen chapters (112 pages) are a nice overview of the hydrogen economy and its potential limitations. You can get all of that here for free with a lot more physics and a lot less regurgitated and unproved assertions about the cause and effect of mankind (with fossil fuels as the bogeyman once again) on our ecosystems.

There is one illuminating chapter on the Hindenburg disaster and how it was attributed to the refusal of the Federal Government to sell helium to the Germans because of the 1925 Helium Act. The United States had all of the world’s helium reserves at that time. Helium cannot be manufactured; it comes from radioactive decay and the Universe-forming big bang.

The explosion was due to an electrostatic discharge when attempting to land that caught the cover on fire and subsequently ignited the hydrogen. The hydrogen burned up, as the passengers were below the hydrogen filled gas bags, yet only 2 victims burned to death; the remaining deaths were attributed to the fall to the ground and mechanical structure damage upon impact. Many survived.

One chapter that is tangentially related to the topic is not worth the price of an entire book. How many trees have to die for bad ideas to keep getting print? Perhaps that would be a good project for a graduate student of economics. Calculate the net carbon footprint of bad, and proven to be incorrect, works like Silent Spring, The Population Bomb and The Emperor’s New Hydrogen Economy.

Austrians are quick to point out that current “high” petroleum prices are a result of the destruction of the dollar against other currencies during the tenure of Greenspan/Bush II, not as a result of any petroleum shortage. Peak Oil, the Hubbert Peak is still (as they always seem to be) in the future. Nobody lives in the future; only the free market, human action, has a proven track record of making a better today.

The hydrogen economy is just another fad that will fade in time as it has no substance. I am not saying that hydrogen technology will fade, just that the fad of it being a solution to an ill-defined problem will.

Only the free market sorts out what does and does not work. The market iterates ten of billions of times every day, day in day out, year in year out, all over the world in finding solutions to mankind’s problems (many of which are government contrived). Mankind has been aggregating in voluntary social groups transforming the face of the earth for tens of thousands of years. This is where all of our viable technology comes from, individual creativity and hard work transforming scarcity into abundance, not from the political process of socialism (red or blue state variety).

The candidacy of Ron Paul this year is the most vibrant statement of this truth in a century. Mankind needs him as the next President of the United States, so we can continue the peaceful and cooperative agenda of Human Action.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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Poor Hunter dead and gone left me here to sing his song. Author Hunter S. Thompson (HST), the original Gonzo journalist, died by his own hand in February of 2005. His most famous work was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. It introduced the world to the concept of Gonzo Journalism. After watching the epic Meet the Press interview of Ron Paul last weekend Hunter has been much on my mind, reincarnate as the "filthy bearded raven croaking nevermore."

The campaign kicks into high gear next week as we enter the New Year and it promises to be a real animal act, the kind that Hunter would revel in. The mainstream (straight) press has been voraciously devouring the campaign to date. Like malignant hyenas they are dieting on the bones and gristle of failed and failing policy nostrums from all the usual suspects.

Like Christmas, political campaigns seem to start earlier and earlier in every election cycle. The quest for the Holy Grail of Politics, the American presidential nomination from the major parties is no different. The frenzy is already in full regale as the "leading candidates" swagger, stagger and bluff towards the finish in November. A lot of heat and noise is being generated but little light from what Hunter called the Straight (Linear) Press.

The Democrats, as they have since JFK was assassinated, are dragging up career political hacks with the morals of hammerhead sharks. Edwards, Clinton and Obama are just the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of political devolution and the near suicide of the Democratic party. They offer nothing different than their long line of predecessors: Mondale, Biden, Bentsen, Ferraro, Kerry, Clinton I, Gore and the ubiquitous Hube. A steady dose of statist pablum: soak the rich, help the poor, free health care, lower taxes, higher spending. Roast ducks will fly into the open mouths of the proletariat if they just elect them! Habitual LRC readers and Austrians know that this thin gruel of economy-busting inflationist fiscal policy, taxation, profligate spending, and increased regulation are the recipe for ongoing disaster. The Democrats are truly the party of no ideas. Every one of these "thought leaders" is proffering the eerie reincarnation of Hubert (I was a Jew once myself) Humphrey, a massive dose of prevaricating atavistic swill.

The Dems at least are consistent, reusing, yet again, the same dog-eared and tired platform of the ghosts of elections past. This time they are fielding, in my humble opinion, the least electable candidates yet. This says a lot given that this is the party of LBJ, Humphrey, Mondale, Dukakis and Kerry, career stiffs with the charisma of a wax mannequin. They would have been better off stuffing the corpse of a Democrat that has actually won an election and hiring Disney Imagineers to bring it to life with the desperate hope that 2-minute sound bites, and content-devoid debates, would again fool a dulled and somnolent populace into voting the creaky and soulless party machine back to power.

What about the first Clinton election? Well in my opinion, it was a mass media—orchestrated knee-jerk, socialist, statist, media-crafted platform of the fabric not being Ronald Reagan. Bush the Elder was another unelectable candidate, but ran as 4 more years of Reagan which the country still wanted. The masses always prefer economic growth and lower taxes which is something that the Democrats have failed to learn in the last half century.

An unelectable Democratic candidate is a recurring theme. The successful ’76 campaign of Carter was of not being the Nixon/Agnew/Rockefeller axis. Walter Winchell’s dummy could have beaten that crew. Gerald Ford was dragged in by the party machine as Nixon’s replacement who was squeaky clean (politically), but then the scales of justice would tip in Jack the Ripper’s favor when compared with that Devil’s Trilogy. Ford does occupy a special place in my heart as the President who vetoed more bills than any other in history (a record he still holds). When Blow Dried and Toothy Jimmy had to run on his own merit he was quickly relegated to the dustbin of history. Jimi Hendrix’s leather fringe coat would have won the election of ’76 against the malignant and rotting corpse of Nixon’s disastrous Presidency. Nixon was, after all, the candidate who prolonged the Vietnam War an additional four years just so his mean-spirited cadre could get another 4 years of their hand in everyone’s pockets and rent-free living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Conservative Nixon Presidency that featured wage and price controls continued his folly as Cambodia and Laos got more craters than the moon (Nixon wasn’t bombing he was just relocating scrap steel for the DoD). So much shrapnel was disgorged that magnetometers will never work there. This sideshow brought Pol Pot to power with collapse of the Cambodian government thanks to Nixon’s criminal non-bombing. Sadly in the seventies this was actually understandable given that most everyone was stoned, and relieved that the Vietnam War had finally ground to a halt on the nightly news (even if the forces of socialist darkness were slaughtering millions more as another monument to failed European nation building that had gone completely sideways).

America has passed way beyond the Do Long Bridge! This brings focus to the mainstream Republicans: Thompson, McCain, Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani leapfrogging one another in taking up the mantle of Bush the Lesser. Bush II’s presidency has been a cruel charade of Nixon/ Kissinger diplomacy with lie and kill in center ring as the main event, second only to borrow, borrow, and borrow again. As if the 4 trillion dollars in additional debt that the Neocon-Military-Congressional-Complex has yoked Americans with isn’t enough. These candidate golems are playing the foolish and desperate game of trying to one-up one another in offering acts III and IV of the same debacle. Numerous LRC contributors have beaten this platform into dust; I’ll spare readers kicking up any more here. Which brings me around to the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson, aka Dr. Gonzo.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was Thompson’s finest work. During the presidential campaign of 1972 Hunter diligently filed bi-weekly reports on what the candidates, the press corps, their entourages and fellow travelers were doing. It was later packaged as a book replete with Eagleton breakdowns, Muskie’s ibogaine allegations, backroom/bar-room shenanigans and Peter Sheridan as the first evangelical neo-con to trash a hotel room. The work had brilliant allegorical references to the deviant behavior that Hunter watched, and whole-heartedly participated in, as all concerned showed how low they could stoop on the road to becoming Potus Imperious. While Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas proved to be a self-indulgent and empty diatribe against Thompson’s perception of American Corporatism, it did awaken a journalist spirit to strike at the enemy ("I kicked Nixon … every chance I could") hard and often. Dr. Gonzo’s obituary is a classic bile-filled screed against the Nixonian monstrosity. The current campaign trail goes from a footpath to a superhighway this January. This necessitates full Thompsonian disclosure to cut through the fog of the Linear Press. It’s hard to tell if they (linear press) are drunk or just stupid as they witlessly perform the Ruling Party’s attempt at suppression of dissent and the promulgation of relevant ideas. Neocons, like Nixon, do not see dissent, they see criminals when they look beyond their many moat’s at the rebelling populace.

Nixon may be dead, but his legacy of hate and malfeasance lives on in the mainstream Ruling Party in both of their malignant wings with Bush the Lesser as Nixon reincarnate.

Still Hunter Thompson was a pitiable soul. His multi-faceted addictions were a poor compensation to his awareness of the deconstruction of the American dream. His prose brought this to millions, as he wielded the adjective like a double-edged sword. As his Gonzo became integral to the process that it was observing, it perturbed both outcome and observation such that the vision of the potentialities got obscured. As criticism it lacked the essential ingredient of offering an alternative. As the years went on he sunk deeper and deeper into a drug induced fog. His writing became schizophrenic as he was able to produce less and less as time marched on. He could still occasionally spit out epiphanies but they were often lacking in wisdom. As a methodology his results were nil, even if the process became hilarious (try reading Campaign Trail in public, you’ll soon be "cackling like a hen full of amyls"). The only real benefit was inculcating readers in the quest to seek the reality lurking beneath the increasingly crude façade. This quest is become a conflagration igniting countless blogs, web sites, and grassroot candidacy worldwide.

In college I tracked down and read every single word he had written for publication, and savored most of them many times. He still had his talent. Hunter and his Gonzo methodology had brought into the media spotlight an arena that had assiduously shunned it for almost a century. Yet Hunter never saw the bigger picture that was grounded in ironic perception, revisionist understanding of history and the Austrian economic policy that is the logical end result of the same. The spotlight turned from his writing to his behavior, and his message got lost for a time. His suicide was his last futile, poignant but nihilistic vanguard of Gonzo.

Hunter died unaware that the Internet was a reincarnation of his Gonzo method. Still his Great Shark Hunt lives on. The Internet is streaming uncensored information at light speed around the planet and is starting to drive the media and the campaign process. It is now continuously available to billions almost everywhere. Uncountable numbers of blogs are the vigorous implementing the HST vision of Gonzo. The Ruling Party with its opposing wings are cranking up the volume on their one-note song: Blue State Socialists want two clicks of the statist ratchet of ruining this country while the Red State Fascisti are determined on ruining all others. The cacophony of their death throes will be deafening as the reigns of power slip from their claw-like grasp.

Power, like a championship fight, must be taken from the titleholder. The Ron Paul revolution has the ruling elite on their heels, back to the ropes, weakening with every blow. Last weekend bore witness to something previously never thought possible in the age of media-controlled candidacy and disinformation dissemination: a viable candidate at the national level discussing actual issues, with thought-provoking and cogent arguments based on both a moral and a historically accurate basis.

Dr. Ron Paul represents a limited government conservative, classically liberal. The only platform of consistent and ideological Republicanism. This is the American Dream that Hunter longed for; it is not dead. This is what HST wanted Gonzo to be, a viral force that changes the process yet does not get compromised from the participation. He wanted a free America, free of war, free of racism, free of corporatism, free of fear and devoid of loathing.

The viral Ron Paul revolution is gaining momentum everywhere but in the linear press (whose audience dwindles daily), which is still working overtime denying the viability of the candidacy. Dr. Paul is viral on Meet the Press (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV)

Ron Paul Presidency is a head-on assault to the Ruling Party, government bureaucrats and their many supplicants. It is where Hunter Thompson wanted to go. I urge you all to join me in supporting him in the Republican primaries and, if he is nominated, the general election.

In closing I quote HST from his last great work:

Jun 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER… HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA… BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” ~ REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

Res Ipso Loquitor

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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In 2006 I wrote a little op-ed piece for Lew Rockwell about the fallacies of Peak Oil. I asserted that proven oil reserves seem to go up every year in spite of both the warnings that we are running out, and that we are consuming it at an every increasing rate. Let’s Google a little and see what the state of the reserves is at the end of 2007.

In June of 2006 I asserted: "According to oil industry sources, the commonly accepted proven reserves are 1.226 trillion barrels of oil." What do we find today (December of 2007)?

Radford University offers up a nice comparison of "proven resources and recoverable resources". The high is 2272.5 billion barrels with a low of 981.4. This gives us a median of 1060, an average of 1343, a variance of 386, and standard deviation of 621. Not exactly accurate data, but these are government statistics and may be prone to some inaccuracy. I can interpret this data as either proving or disproving my assertion depending on whether we like the mean, high end of the low end. A variance of 25% of the average might be considered unsure. This is an elegant web page that even Edward Tufte would be proud of.

The Department of Energy has web data on oil reserves. One of them states that total world oil reserves at the end of 2007 is 1.317 trillion barrels of oil. I am a clear winner on this one, assuming we accept the statistics as factual.

Canada is a major producer of oil. This Canadian web site (not official) has a nice, albeit hodgepodge, compendium of statistics that can be found here. This site represents that Saudi Reserves could be as high as 900 billion barrels of oil which is more than half the currently accepted figure of 1.2—1.3 trillion barrels of oil. Graphics representing the difference between proven, probable and contingent resources, which hint at the fact that market forces will determine capacity as a function of price and recovery techniques.

The Oil Crisis is a Chicken Little (the sky is falling, i.e. wells are drying up) web site that advocates solar energy as a savior for civilization. This clearly demonstrates that they have no understanding of the concept of energy density. Energy density shows that fossil and nuclear (fission/fusion) are the only feasible techniques given current technology.

Nature depends completely on fusion from gravitational collapse for thermodynamic energy input on a planetary scale throughout the known Universe which is a very broad statistical sample. Solar is nice for heating your pool, and good for plants with several hundred million years of technology development via evolution, but will not cut it for our technological society. We need the higher-density deposits from planetary collapse (abiogenic oil source interior to the planet seeping into rock caps that we drill holes through and suck out). I find the biotic theory which is based on a single fact (chirality) to be specious.

This site asserts that the concept of proven oil reserves is meaningless, given that many of these statistics are from governmental agencies and are prone to institutional bias, that is, prevarication. This is not an unreasonable concept.

The critical reader might comment that I am only using web resources which run the gamut of credibility from high, to questionable, to silly. This is a point well taken, but most reliable sources of information now post to the Internet, and the Internet has hundreds of millions to billions of "fact checkers" that the diligent reader can quickly consult for guidance.

I am inclined to agree with the proven reserves concept being meaningless. The statistics of proven oil reserves are largely from government agencies, petroleum industry concerns, and cranks like oildrum, peakoil, and hubbert. It is my opinion that history has demonstrated they are wrong, that proven reserves go up over time, and currency-adjusted prices go down. However, the sad commentary is that our society is becoming reactionary: dramatic adjustments occur through crisis which lead to poorly planned and executed government programs (Iraq and Katrina come to mind). Oil cartels have little incentive to admit that their product is a low profit margin commodity item whose supply is increasing thus forcing prices down.

In closing I offer up two facts: first that oil is denominated in dollars worldwide, and second that the dollar has lost more than half of its value against gold during the Bush II Presidency. This extrapolates that oil is actually getting cheaper. During the past eight years the price has basically doubled to the American consumer, yet purchasing power has decreased at a greater rate. Ron Paul talks here about purchasing power of the dollar with respect to gold.

At years end of 2007 it looks like my assertion that oil supply is increasing and not decreasing is more credible than Dr. Hubert’s peak oil. My facts are unchecked and statistically insignificant which puts me on an equal footing with government agencies and cranks. So let your wallet do the talking at the pump and rely on the dispassionate market to iterate through supply and demand via the price mechanism (billions of daily fact checkers here). It sure works better than the Synfuels Corporation!

P.S. Ecologically conscious drivers of hybrid cars, they do not cut down CO2 emissions they just change the location of where it is emitted (tail pipe or electric power plant) when fossil (oil and coal) fuel fired plants are concerned.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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American History X is one of my favorite Edward Norton movies. He plays a fatherless, LA skinhead, white power zealot that is involved in a racially motivated homicide, serves prison time and is released. He has a transformative experience as a result of all this and learns the error of his ways and sets out to make amends. Sadly it ends in tragedy. This is a powerful metaphor for learning revisionist American history during these turbulent times

As you are reading Lew Rockwell’s daily web site, probably support Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy, and have a revisionist historical bent (even if currently unrecognized) I welcome you to peruse my own American History X. It is a personal blueprint of how to overcome mass media and 19 years of public education. These will make beautiful Christmas gifts for the revisionist, neo-Austrian, dedicated Misean or Libertarian on your shopping list. Give the gift that shows you care. I present them in chronological order from the oldest first to the most recent to follow my personal path of growth from the watery gruel of etatist swill that is passed off as history in public schools. You can support the cause of freedom by purchasing these from Amazon through the embedded links, or from the Mises Institute directly.

I consider myself an educated man yet I was able to graduate from an American University with only 3 credit hours in history required, a weak survey course in Western Civilization. These intellectual jolts run up your spine and set the brain ablaze.

1. Socialism by Ludwig von Mises. This is the finest exposition of liberty proof by negation of the converse, etatism. This opus clinically dissects the state in its most virulent form. Mises’ singular deductive logic predicted the demise of the Soviet Union in 1922, 5 years after its inception. His prophesy was realized 69 years after this presentation. I find this to be his finest book (a much easier read than Human Action).
2. Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises. Interpret the events of the Second World War from the Austrian perspective. This is a fine companion to William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer exposits on how, Mises explains why. After reading Omnipotent Government it will be obvious as to the reasons for the SS raid on Mises’ home during the Austrian occupation.
3. Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. Finance, Money and Economics are confusing subjects for many. This work peels the cloak of mystery back and demonstrates that these really are for the common man. Economics is what all governments do with everybody’s money. If this is heady stuff, you might start with Gene Callahan’s sequel for everyman: Economics for Real People, differential equations and Riemannian geometry not required.
4. The New Dealers War: FDR and the War within World War II by Thomas Fleming. Fleming starts with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s treasonous collaboration with British agents against the people and the Constitution he was sworn to protect and preserve. The prose is excellent: it reads like a novel, I was compelled to read this in a couple of sittings. His economics is Keynesian and elementary but is kept it to a minimum and will be easily overlooked by Austrians.
5. Illusion of Victory: America in World War I also by Thomas Fleming. His previous work was so good I bought this immediately when I saw the title. It is actually a better book as it lays bare, in contemporary language, the perfidy of Woodrow Wilson et al., and how they deceived the country while planning for involvement in needless war to bail out their British co-conspirators on behalf of the Morgan bank while preaching peace.
6. The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo. This is a brilliant recitation of Lincoln’s role as America’s first military dictator. Honest Abe was anything but, and here you will read as to why. The lawyer Lincoln cuts his teeth in the art of prevarication as he represented railroad interests that fleeced the Illinois taxpayer, which provided the training ground for what came next. The unnecessary deaths of 600,000 Americans were required for Lincoln to realize Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay’s vision for America, and DiLorenzo pulls no punches. The cult of Lincoln is still on the ropes after this one.
7. The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn This is one of the finest muck-raking works of the Twentieth Century. Flynn drives a stake into the heart of the cult of Roosevelt worship: from his wife’s boarding of card-carrying communists (McCarthy did have a point on this one), to his son’s extortion of war-times suppliers, to his senile capitulation to Stalin that doomed millions as a result. You’ll like this one so much that his earlier work targeting robber barons can be had for free.
8. Washington’s Farewell Address 1796 by George Washington. The previous 7 books are what our first president was presciently warning about. His Excellency is an excellent follow-up to this speech. Read how Washington diversified his crops thanks to actually understanding something about finance (Jefferson did not and died almost broke), freed his slaves, and spread his wealth ensuring that hegemonic economic dynasty would result (he was America’s wealthiest individual at his death according to Ellis).
9. Reassessing the American Presidency by John V. Denson. Freedom has suffered at the hands of these ruthless men. He ranks them in order, and by now it should come as no surprise that the picture painted is not what most of us learned in school. I highly recommend his other excellent works: A Century of War, and The Costs of War.
10. Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley The previous nine books will prepare you for Quigley’s expos of the power behind the power during the American Century that has lead us to the American Empire. Quigley’s presentation of history is crystal clear. Quigley is no apologist for the powers that be, but is a confidant at the highest level. He wrote this book out of a belief that Americans had the right to understand what is going on under their noses, and in their pocketbook.

I became a life-long Libertarian in 1972 with the candidacy of John Hospers and Tonie Nathan. This was a visceral decision for an 18-year-old, that turned out to be correct. You can undergo your own transformative experience by reading some if not all of the above works. Many of them are available for free at Mises Institute web site. Yet I personally find reading books on the computer to be tiring. Nothing invigorates the mind like the heft of a fine book, the feel of the cover, the gentle caress of the paper as you turn page after page. The satisfaction of sitting at the feet of intellectual giants is palpable. These are old friends you will visit again and again.

These will compel the necessity of the Ron Paul candidacy from a historical perspective.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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The sports world is fascinating. It is a complete culture in and of itself, and the cultural doyens of this niche have had their chins wagging mightily over the last week what with Michael Vick, Barry Bonds, and the Mitchell report on sports doping. Upon closer examination I find that it is much ado about nothing, yet the consequences of this circus should be disturbing to critical-thinking Americans everywhere, as it represents yet another degradation of the right to private property and concomitant right to freely choose private behavior.

The beginning of the week saw Michael Vick plea bargain a sentence for his alleged "criminal dog ring" activities. Michael Vick is a superstar, black quarterback, and was the franchise player for the Atlanta Falcons. He will lose millions by not playing while he is interred. It will cost him more in legal and caretaking fees to guard his estate, his wealth, and his family while he is gone. A double whammy for sure. He also loses two years of prime playing while he serves his sentence. The average career in the NFL is only four years so by that metric it is really a triple blow, a heavy penalty for sure.

What was Michael Vick guilty of? He was doing as he wished with his and his associate’s private property. They were having dog fights. Dogs are property in every state of the Union. Animals are not regarded as having any inalienable rights. They belong to their owners who are free to do as they please. Americans have never cared much for dog meat so dogs are not used for nutrition. Dogs are domesticated and inbred wolves. They are owned, and have no rights to own anything in return. Leona Helmsley’s dog did not get its inheritance because of this. It is the proper word; as dog is a thing, property in view of the law, not an individual with any rights. The bible says that God gave man sovereignty over the animal without limitation.

Michael Vick’s property rights were stripped, along with the rest of ours, when legislators and courts have deemed animals to have "rights." What these rights are, like so many things, are to be politically determined by the local DA and their cadre of taxpayer-financed associates. I think dog fighting is stupid and cruel, certainly in poor taste, but it should not be a crime. There are many corporations in America that execute millions of animals every day, horses, cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys as part of their ongoing and legitimate private business activities. Clearly the determination of what is proper and legal is a fungible concept following this reasoning. Meat packers treat animals as property, yet when Michael Vick does it, a serious crime occurs.

Baseball superstar Barry Bonds has been hounded by the steroid allegation for years. As he slowly but surely encroached on the home run record the allegations circulated. It has been noted by many talking heads that his home run production increased in his thirties when most big hitters decline. No one gives the man the credit he deserves for being the best that has ever played the game.

Physicist’s long ago proved that home runs come from the pitcher, not from the hitter. A home run hitter successfully inverts the momentum vector of the thrown ball. The kinetic energy of which, comes from the pitchers arm. The bat is elastic and on impact distorts. The sweet spot is the node of the elastic wave formed by the bat and the hitter. It is the point of zero movement on impulse and reverses the vector nicely (to the pitcher’s dismay). The antinode is the point of maximum deflection. It is where the label on the bat is and provides the sting of any hitter who has ever made contact there. Broken bats are often the result of this momentum transfer.

Barry Bonds finds the sweet spot, more often, on more pitchers, than any player in history. He has also won a few golden gloves as well. He is the consummate player, a real natural. The allegation that his home run rate and totals got better in the later years of his career, denies the obvious assertion that he got better over time (true of most skilled workers), and this denigrates both his proven ability, and his dedication to the game.

Former Senator George Mitchell has been investigating the usage of performance enhancing drugs in Major League baseball. The assertion is that usage is both illegal, and worse unfair. Nothing could be sillier. Sports doping is a victimless activity, and is only a crime since American politicians have been deeming spatial arrangements of bonded carbon atoms to have a morality of their own and a licentious effect on the populace. They have been defined to be evil incarnate.

It is a reasonable contractual relationship between employer (owner) and employees (athletes) for certain behaviors to be prohibited. Nude athletes are forbidden, but that is an easily verifiable objective contractual abrogation. Performance-enhancing drugs are an ill-defined concept, and as such, are quite fungible. As a result of this indeterminacy it is not the proper role of politics to determine what is and is not a drug. The truth is virtually every prescription "drug" has a mode of action that is actually unknown (if you do not believe me, read the fine print on the clinical trials results of your next prescription). Drug’s symptoms are known, their physical causes are unknown. Performance enhancing drug use by employees is ill-defined. To be suspected of something without proof is a violation of our constitutional rights to unfair search and seizure (a right that has faired rather badly over the last century I admit). Most drugs are detected indirectly via metabolite secretion into the blood, the urine and the hair. While there is a high correlation between ingesting and excretion, it is not absolute, as the enzymatic machinery of the liver produces thousands of metabolites on an ongoing basis, the upstream source of which is difficult to prove.

Performance enhancing drugs are available to all; there is no better way to level the playing field for everyone. Any momentary advantage will be quickly spread thanks to modern communication technology. It is only when they are subjectively denied that an unfair advantage accrues to the secretive cheater. Given the rich rewards available to superb athletes this has the effect of tilting the playing field, that the sports talking heads so assiduously want to level.

Former Senator George Mitchell is a private citizen, and as such his investigation carries no more merit than my assertion that whales speak French at the bottom of the sea. It has no proof, it is all conjecture, and third-party assertion, a rumor. Gossip is not admissible in a court because it carries no weight as evidence.

Barry Bonds and Michael Vick are both superb athletes that have never given much truck to the sports media hysteria. They are private men and they protect their private lives which are after all private affairs of free citizens, and thus no one else’s business. They did not court the media hyenas, and as a result will pay a stiff price.

This degradation in the boundaries of proper and legal behavior should concern all Americans. The sports world is a tempest in a teapot, it is entertainment, a luxury good of a free society. Yet when property becomes personage, and the inanimate gains morality, the enforcement of which is political, and fungible, another threat to freedom advances its cause. That is a tempest that threatens all of us, our lives and our property.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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Fossil fuels are to blame, world scientists conclude, blare the headlines on USA Today. It’s obviously a slow news week, the Iran nukes fail to spark into flame, the Hillary/Biden candidacy is a non-starter, the plunging value of dollar on world markets is ignored (again), and oil prices are falling (again). So why not fan the flames one more time on the global warming hysteria dead horse? This strident moan from government scientists for greater funding and wider powers is deafening, and it obscures the science.

It hurts to admit that I read USA Today, even if infrequently and always for free in a hotel lobby or looking down on a pile of them while waiting in a check out line at the mini-mart, but yes I do. As a devotee of LRC, Mises Institute and a fair amount of mathematical physics, this is tantamount to admission of a paid subscription to the Weekly World News (WWN). The painful truth is that both the McPaper and the WWN reach a wider audience than any of my favorites and that is the rub: allegation, posed as science, repeated uncritically ad nauseum, will be mistaken as science, and accepted as fact when it is not.

Patrick O’Driscoll and Dan Vergano, in USA Today report the finding of the "gold standard" Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents “a real convergence happening here, a consensus that this is a total global no-brainer,” says U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, former director of the federal government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey.

They go on with another bold quotation from this statist shill, I mean impartial scientist:

Mahlman, who crafted the IPCC language used to define levels of scientific certainty, says the new report will lay the blame at the feet of fossil fuels with “virtual certainty,” meaning 99% sure. That’s a significant jump from “likely,” or 66% sure, in the group’s last report in 2001, Mahlman says. His role in this year’s effort involved spending two months reviewing the more than 1,600 pages of research that went into the new assessment.

Among the findings, Tebaldi says, is that even if people stopped burning the fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas blamed most for the warm-up, the effects of higher temperatures, including deadlier heat waves, coastal floods, longer droughts, worse wildfires and higher energy bills would not go away in our lifetime.

“Most of the carbon dioxide still would just be sitting there, staring at us for the next century,” Mahlman says.

Where is the science in this report? The claim that 66% has gone to 99% and is thus certain? The 1,600 pages are all government-funded research with funding allocated to those that already believe in the conclusion else there would have been no funding to begin with. This is a club after all and divergent opinions are not welcome and definitely not funded. The smacks of statistical legerdemain: questionable data followed by a foregone conclusion.

Let’s look at some secondary school science. Carbon Dioxide is a basic food for the plant kingdom. The process of photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide into complex carbohydrates using sunlight as the free energy input on which the entire animal kingdom ultimately depends for food. The increase in carbon dioxide is measured in a few parts per million, whereas the oxygen content is almost 20%, a massive differential. Anybody think having more oxygen is a bad idea? Oxygen is the waste product of plant respiration.

We learned (should have anyway) in junior high science that a system which is disturbed from equilibrium will tend to oppose the disturbance over time. This might occur through higher crop yields which will mean more food produced at a lower cost for the world’s hungry. Anybody think this is a bad idea?

The earth is near (in astronomical terms) a large fusion reactor we call the sun. One half of the surface of the earth subtends a very small solid angle of the solar sphere absorbing the life giving energy flux (we call this daytime). The amount of energy produced by the sun is immense and what the earth can absorb is tiny. The amount absorbed is proportional to the solid angle subtended of the solar flux. A reasonable estimate is 6 ten-billionths, a very tiny fraction overall. A miniscule variation in solar output would thus have a dramatic change on the earth and its ecosystems.

Solar models are notoriously poor, just like weather models. Why? The models are incomplete, inaccurate, with poor quality input data, with initial and boundary values conditions that are primarily designed to allow model convergence rather than to properly represent physical reality. To get a feel for the true dynamism of the sun you might check the Space Weather site, a quick perusal of its data and links will rapidly convince the skeptical that it is inherently a dynamo and little understood except in the crudest term. The sun actually has no physical boundary but is a gas polytrope so any boundary value condition is a figment of the user’s imagination.

Global warming models fundamentally depend upon the rate with which earth radiates waste heat into space with the problem being that the heat is trapped by the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus warming it. The problem with this is that the carbon dioxide molecules have no directionality with respect heat flow, and just as they will keep ground radiation in, they will also keep incident solar radiation out (cooler on cloudy days), that old equilibrium thing again. In the long run, these effects may cancel.

I will spare readers any further diatribe about the bad math, bad modeling, and erroneous conclusions resulting from same. I covered those in a previous LRC article. They are true for these assertions as well. Serious climatologists can send me their models and I will critique and publish my comments on the LRC blog for this article.

I do agree with the data that lately things have been warming up, it’s the weather after all and even most children know how unpredictable the weather is. I was raised in Michigan during the sixties and seventies when a return to a little ice age was feared by the scientific community. However, the same people that cannot get weather right for next week, or next year, should not be given free reign as omniscient experts for the future weather indefinitely, that is an obvious paradox.

It does not take a great deal of technical expertise to raise viable and serious objections to the unproven and unprovable assertions of statist scientist and environmentalists alike. The problem is that the unscientific and uncritical mass media accept this tripe as fact. This repetitious braying at the national level condition the populace to accept these assertions as fact which then rapidly turns into legislation which is quickly accompanied by the inevitable legions of bureaucrats, regulators, monitors, and agencies (real threats). These are all funded from the productive economy impoverishing the rest of us, all to save us from the peril of warm weather, and cheaper food.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

However, in climatology and environmental science we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like “This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to qualify as a dead horse rider.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Pass legislation declaring that “This horse is not dead.”
9. Unilaterally declaring, “No horse is too dead to beat.”
10. Blaming the horse’s parents.
11. Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
12. Do a Cost Analysis Study to see if government labs can ride the horse cheaper.
13. Declare the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead.
14. Revise the performance requirements for horses.

George Giles [send him mail] thinks heavily, drinks heavily, and makes many heavy notes in Nashville.

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In a previous LRC column I touched on the subject of Mythology, arguing that mythology gets discarded when it no longer serves the needs of society. In this essay I want to further that theme by touching on the subject of Republican Fiscal Conservatism, a myth that is a fallacy that needs to be discarded for political dialog and to provide data proving this assertion.

One of the main themes of the Republican Party since 1980 has been that Democrats are profligate spenders of tax dollars, irresponsibly incurring immense debt, and that electing Republican Administrations is a simple remediation for this vexing problem. Presidents Reagan, Bush (Father) and Bush (Son) all vigorously campaigned using these arguments in their platforms. This has been repeated ad nauseum by the talk radio pundits echoing this fallacy. Repeating a lie does not make it true, even if it is believed.

American historical memory is notably fleeting; fortunately the Federal Government records copious amounts of data, including the economic and financial. A lot of this can be found on the Internet and can be used to remind those of us that are unable to commit this to memory. I am not here to argue the precision and accuracy of this data in the statistical sense but to assume for arguments sake, that it is accurate within a few percent. The conclusion shown will not be effected by a few percentage points of error in the input data.

The data source for all discussion herein is the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis MO. The interested reader can find reams of data including what is presented here.

Public debt has been aggregated quarterly since 1966. The basis of my argument is that the public debt prior to 1966 will be ascribed to Democratic Administrations, just to give the Republicans a head start. There have been many Republican Administration’s since Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee hero, was the last President to pay off the National Debt. Unfortunately, the St. Louis Fed does not have data available during this period (that I could find) and so in the spirit of Rush Limbaugh I will blame it on those Blue State Democrats (it will not change the outcome).

United States Federal Government public debt data is updated every quarter here. A plot of this is shown below:

The public debt when the current data set begins was approximately 320 billion dollars, a small fraction of what is today at over 8 trillion dollars.

A spreadsheet of the quarterly data, in multiple formats can also be found at this site. I used this spreadsheet to allocate by quarters the occupancy of the White House by Democrats and Republicans in the intervening forty years. The Democratic results are shown, and then followed by the Republican.

If we take percentages of the aggregate debt on a partisan basis we get the following table:

(Millions USD)

% Total debt

Republican Debt Since 1966

6408637

78.16

Democrat Debt Since 1966

1790704

21.84

Bipartisan Total Since 1966

8199341

The results are astonishing, Republican Administrations have accrued, more than 3 fold, the debt that Democrats have. This demonstrates that the self-applied rubric of "fiscal conservative" is not true for Republican Administration’s unless we invert the accepted meaning of these words.

What about inflation? Will the varying value of the dollar (downward sadly) skew these results unfavorably? Since I am using Fed data, I will use another government statistic to gauge inflation, the consumer price index (CPI). The basis year is 1967 as 100, which is close enough, for my argument to 1966. The data I used found 1966 at 97, and 1998 at 475. I will be generous and blame Bill Clinton for another 125 points to be tacked onto the Bush years since 2001 to total 600 (a nice Rovian touch). Thus the initial Democratic debt in 1966, in 2006 dollars is 1.8 trillion which when added to the unadjusted since 1966 dollars totals 3.6 trillion. This is still a long way short of the Republican debt of 6.4 trillion dollars of just six Republican Administrations (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II).

These results demonstrate the mendacious nature of the assertion of Republican Fiscal Conservatism. What does this bode for the republic? I cannot tell since I am not clairvoyant; however, in the known history of the world a debt this large has never been paid off.

"The future is not what it used to be." ~ Louis Cyphre Angelheart

George Giles [send him mail] reads, writes and thinks in Nashville Tennessee.

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Conventional Wisdom (CW) is a term coined by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society, to describe certain ideas or explanations that are generally accepted as true by the public. In recent years it has gone beyond being the driving, to being the only, force in American politics and policy debates (the term debate is used really loosely in the classical grammar, logic, rhetoric sense).

The CW since 1991 is that the United States as the only world’s superpower has certain obligations. The obligations are fungible depending upon the media dialog of the moment. We can fix poverty, AIDS, genocide, terrorists, drug lords, just pick your favorite from a tableau of the usual suspects, and if we can’t fix it we will certainly spend prodigiously while trying. Behind all the trying is the coercive might of the world’s most powerful military machine. The United States may no longer be the world’s wealthiest nation, but we can apply some powerful leverage when the "leadership" decides.

In 1992 Robert Parry wrote presciently about this:

Yet even as America’s economic wealth is drained the smashing military victory of the U.S.-led coalition forces in the Persian Gulf established the United States as the undisputed military power in the post-Cold War era. High-tech American weaponry crushed Saddam Hussein’s army, inflicting tens of thousands of dead while holding U.S. casualties to a bare minimum.

With the impressive American military victory, the war marked a historic widening in the relative power between the First and Third worlds. The qualitative difference between the American arsenal of force multiplier weapons (designed to counter a massive Soviet invasion of Europe) and what is available to Third World countries was comparable to a fight between one army with machine guns and the other using bows and arrows. No Third World nation, not even one as heavily militarized as Iraq, could think it stands any chance against American might, whatever the merits of the cause at stake.

The American military power that President Bush [the first] unsheathed in the Arabian Desert was an awesome warning to the poorer nations that, as Bush put it, "what we say goes". The president envisioned the crushing bloody defeat of Iraq as the first policing action of a new world order which would place international law at the center of relations between nations.

But amid the CW-silly American political debate there is no guarantee that the United States will use its terrifying military power wisely or even within the tenets of the United Nations charter. A trivialized absorption with the latest CW, mixed with the cynical application of advertising skills, could make America a dangerous home for these massively destructive weapons. They could be brought to bear to prop up pro-U.S dictators facing domestic unrest, or to overthrows troublesome enemies who somehow angered the protectors of this ill-defined new world order.

The only meaningful check on possible abuse of America’s awesome military might in this unipolar world is the sophistication and vibrancy of the nation’s democratic institutions. Issues as grave as war and peace demand a thorough debate by a population given as much relevant information as possible, not a country governed by a tyranny of conventional wisdom, not an opinion elite satisfied with viewing enemies as comic book villains.

Without a recommitment to its own democratic values and an appreciation of other people’s history, the United States could flick on its unprecedented killing machine casually. It could grind up some geopolitical nuisance who simply found himself on the wrong side of the Washington CW, a punching bag of the talk show pundits. The nation would awake with blood-covered hands, realizing too late that it had slaughtered the wrong people."

~ Fooling America 1992 p 19—20

On the eve of Saddam Hussein’s execution these words forewarn of the demise of our Democratic Republic as an Imperial Presidency commits military force ad hoc. The current Iraq debacle has taken this to the penultimate as lies, dressed up as truth with Conventional Wisdom, lead us to tragedy.

George Giles [send him mail] reads, writes and thinks in Nashville Tennessee.

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The lure of mathematics, for many, has been its esthetics, the innate beauty. It has been called the Queen of the Sciences. Mathematics is the lingua franca with which Physics has been used to create an increasingly accurate model of the physical world in which we find ourselves. Math, Physics and Chemistry are the diamond hard pillars that Human Action has created to understand reality. A continuum exists of less rigorous disciplines like Medicine, Biology, Economics, and Law until we approach the vapid gruel of Political Science, Literary Criticism, Religious Studies and Sociology. The value of a science is the accuracy of the theoretical model with respect to making correct predictions as are verified by independent experiment. A science that cannot make predictions is not a science at all, but a faith.

Like so many things in the contemporary world, hard science, in some sectors has become a "political science." Political Science is a discipline where resources are allocated not based upon achievements, a meritocracy, but rather upon relationships, connections, and friendships: what Ayn Rand called the "Aristocracy of Pull."

A brief synopsis of millions of man-years of human effort in physics and math with respect to modeling the physical world is in order. Sir Isaac Newton’s famous three laws are the basis of Classical Mechanics. Classical mechanics was found to be inaccurate under certain conditions: large mass, high velocity or small size. This limitation gave rise to Quantum Mechanics as a method to make better predictions under some of these conditions. Quantum Mechanics was extended to Quantum Field Theory by incorporating Special Relativity. The General Theory of Relativity was created to take into account gravitation with the precepts demanded by Special relativity. The Standard Model of Quantum Chromodynamics was developed to extend quantum mechanics to the nuclear level. All of these theories provide increasingly accurate models of physical reality within their domains that have been verified to high levels of accuracy by many independent investigators.

These theories provide predictions (laws) that are as true in Iran, and North Korea, as they are in the United States, even though our political models and systems of government based resource allocation (politics) are not. The beauty of these sciences is that their predictive power is independent of the political structure. For many, this is one, if not the fundamental allures of the disciplines: the pursuit of truth and beauty without the attendant degradation inherent in the political process.

Einstein was one of the first to search for a Grand Unification Theory (GUT) where a single law or set of mathematical relationships can be ascertained that predict all observable natural phenomena. He failed, as have all who followed in his footsteps, but not for any lack of genius or trying. Hermann Weyl, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, was one of the first to recognize that symmetry was a powerful tool to use in physics specifically in quantum mechanical investigations. One of the great successes of this was the Eightfold Way of Murray Gell-Mann in elucidating particle physics data in QCD. The depth and beauty of these successes has led many others to seek to use these tools in the search for a GUT. In the intervening years we have had many flavors of GUT’s: supersymmetry, string theory, m-theory and d-branes just to name a few. These theories are posited to be elegant because of the fact that their beauty that derives from group representation theory, Riemannian geometry and topology. Symmetry properties, it is exposited, being natures’ most fundamental aspect and thus a milestone on the march toward a theory of everything (TOE)

History is replete with romantic imagery of the great genius working alone to plumb the depth of nature’s secrets in the physical world. Nonetheless mathematics and physics have become team activities, where many of the great breakthroughs of the second half of the twentieth century have come from large groups with massive amounts of funding working in concert. The nucleus in the small, and cosmology in the large have required copious resources (hundreds of billions of dollars to date) to collect the experimental data required by the theorists to get us to our current state of knowledge. Virtually all of this has come from the public fisc via taxation with the majority of it coming from the taxpayers of the United States, the European Union and Japan.

The problem is that in the past 20 years faith has crept in dressed up as science. Faith is belief in the absence of proof. The theories of supersymmetry, string theory, m-theory and d-branes have no experimental data to back up their assertions, and there is none on the foreseeable horizon either according to Peter Woit. Dr. Woit has written an excellent and readable book, for the layman, called Not Even Wrong wherein he discusses this issue at length from the perspective of an expert in the field.

In addition to the lack of experimental verification of the theory it has developed into a cult of personality where devotees follow thought leaders irrationally. The most highly regarded of these is Dr. Edward Witten, a Fields Medal winner and Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study (Einstein’s old gig). Dr. Woit’s critique of Witten’s influence:

"The fact that Witten took up superstring theory with such enthusiasm in 1984 had a lot to do with it becoming so popular, and his continuing belief that it remains the most promising idea to work on has huge influence. A major reason for this is that many people rely on his judgment because they find the state of string theory so difficult to comprehend that they are not able to reasonably form their judgments of the situation.

Besides raising a huge barrier to entry to the subject, the difficulty of superstring theory also makes it hard for researchers to leave. By the time they achieve some real expertise they typically have invested a huge part of their careers in studying superstrings, an investment that is psychologically and professionally difficult to give up."

~ P. Woit Not Even Wrong p. 201 Basic Books 2006

Legions of theoretical physicist’s and their graduate student thralls are devoting their professional livelihoods to following these thought leaders on a program that has been both a failure to date, and has no prospect of change based upon experiment. Failure is not a bad thing. It tells us when something is wrong and a course correction is required.

"Recognizing failure is a useful part of the scientific strategy. Only when failure is recognized can dead ends be abandoned and useable pieces of failed programs recycled. Aside from possible utility, there is a responsibility to recognize failure. Recognizing failure is an essential part of the scientific ethos. Complete failure must be recognized eventually."

~ D. Friedan; "A Tentative Theory of Large Distance Physics "

Another critic has said that:

"A few diehards dedicated to truth rather than practicality will practice physics in a non-empirical, ironic mode, plumbing the magical realm of superstrings and other esoterica and fretting about the meaning of quantum mechanics. The conferences of these ironic physicists whose disputes cannot be experimentally resolved will become more and more like those of that bastion of literary criticism, the Modern Language Association"

~ J. Horgan; The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge
in the Twilight of the Scientific Age Addison Wesley, 1996, p. 91

From the perspective of experts in the field Dr. Woit is not alone. Nobel Laureate (Physics 1979) Sheldon Glashow wrote a paper more than 20 years ago predicting the current fiasco entitled "Desperately Seeking Superstrings" where he discussed the current dilemma with prescience.

Literary criticism is about as watery a gruel that academia can promulgate and still be called academic. Are any Experimental results known here by anyone? Literary criticism is a Higher Superstition where words are strung together sequentially and thus stripped of all meaning. It is deeply disheartening to recognize that some of the mathematics and physics community have gotten themselves into a position where this can be reasonably said of their work, irrespective of their educational credentials and how zealously they prosecute it.

The brutal history of the 20th century is testimony to the disasters that can occur when dogma masquerades as science with the power of the state behind it. Communism was purported to be scientific, but was in fact a religion. The experimental results of its theories killed a hundred million while failing to achieve the advertised workers’ paradise.

Keynesian economics has all the trappings of science yet it is a faith practiced by the privileged elite, politicians and their doyens, the academic economists. I do not consider business cycles, banking failures, inflation, fiat currency or deficit spending to be experimental verification of a theory, but rather the lack thereof.

The current Iraq mess is another example of a political process where a defective theory was coupled with experimental results that contradict said theory and result in a disaster for all involved.

Citizens and taxpayers should be alarmed at the huge effort of a privileged minority in masquerading their religion as a science. The current state of string theory is that it is on an equal footing with creationism, intelligent design, and scientology in being unable to provide any experimental verification of the "truths" posited. This worry is two-fold, first that alternative lines of thought are not being pursed, like loop quantum gravity, because of the power of this privileged elite and secondly, that this all is being pursued as publicly funded scientific research.

Belief in the absence of proof is the basis for religious thought, and all individuals should be free to pursue their beliefs privately. In the United States we have a history of separating the church and the state. Yet it is clear to this taxpayer that String Theory has become a political science where connections (pull) matter far more than results. Given the tremendous filtering capability of the tenured elite to squelch dissenting views, science thus enters the territory of diminished (vanishing) returns because of the taint of the political process. Science is degraded as a result of this confluence.

Once physical reality becomes the province of the political we all suffer. When physical problems are to be solved politically then the down side becomes unbounded and that is a danger that concerned citizens need be aware of!

Dr. Woit’s Blog is an excellent read for all concerned.

George Giles [send him mail] reads, writes and thinks in Nashville Tennessee.

Dalrymple prose is like reading Shakespeare where every moment is a pleasure. You find yourself reading and re-reading just to enjoy the beauty with which the English language can represent ideas with simple words strung together sequentially. The enjoyment is all the more ironic when we consider the subject of much of his writings, the failure of socialism, and his personal dealings with those that have failed under it.

He currently works within the prison system where he comes in daily contact with current (new prisoners), existing and former addicts. He has recognized that they have two faces when discussing the drug problem, that of the truth and that of the faade. The truth is reserved for other addicts and Dr. Dalrymple once he gains their trust. The faade is presented to the addiction bureaucracy. Much of the book documents this well.

Romancing Opiates also covers the romantic history of opiate-based drugs (dolophine, heroin, morphine, opium, and methadone) and their cultural icons, William S. Burroughs and Thomas DeQuincey. He goes through the Romance era of Rousseau where man’s animal nature is glorified as the pursuit of pleasure with drugs being the chemical pursuit of a natural hedonistic desire. He vigorously debunks the flaws in these popular arguments about enhancing creativity and providing insight not available to those who do not partake.

Where the book really gets interesting is when he relates individual stories of the addicts and how mild addiction to heroin/opiates really is. The “illness” is minor, passes quickly and is not at all the hideous ritual as is popularly portrayed ad nauseum by the addiction bureaucracy and their sycophants. He also provides ample evidence, from first-hand experience as a medical expert, both observation and expert witness testimony, that the addiction is not easily acquired and is easily shed when circumstances mandate. Most addicts eventually tire of the lifestyle and prison as they grow older. This contravenes the conventional wisdom of the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical addiction bureaucracy that in many cases provides both the product and the treatment for the kind of exorbitant profit margins that only a government-mandated cartel can provide.

The individual stories are heart wrenching but always presented as choices actively made by the participants in their lives. They are thus a natural consequence of human action. He provides enough evidence in the book to support his assertions of the falsehoods of the system that depends upon addiction for its livelihood.

Dalrymple is a vigorous critic of British Socialism and the traps that it ensnares much of the country in, along with the crushing social costs. He goes light on the tax implications. I look aside at his lack of financial arguments since he is a medical expert who talks the talk and walks the walk, which is he works day in and day out with societal flotsam and discards, knows them personally, lives in their neighborhoods. He could drive a Porsche, pop zits in Beverly Hills or find significantly greater economic remuneration if that was his motivation, but he is a healer instead. When you read his books you, like me, will believe he is a heroic one.

My criticism of this book is that he does not apply Thomas Szasz’s logic of self-medication as an alternative to established therapeutic practices which are the product more of privileged elite thought leaders than scientific reality. He does not address the immense societal cost of drug criminality due to cartel-mandated exorbitant prices, enforcement, and interdiction costs or the costs that “drug wars” impart on the citizenry of most countries of the world. He also does not criticize the existence of the cartel of which he is a member. This is all forgivable if not excusable when you look at his extensive record of truly helping the downtrodden.

He also does not discuss or criticize the massive and expensive Reagan/Thatcher drug crackdown that filled prisons, drove crimes rates sky-high, and was ultimately turned back when cooler heads prevailed. It is possible that this was the decade or so he spent on other pestholes around the world like Ethiopia, Sudan, etc.

This is actually his weakest book to date, even though it is still an excellent read. He describes the socialist system flaws at the human level but not at the theoretical level and does not offer a critique that includes a viable alternative, decriminalization and legalization of voluntary individual behavior that should be a natural outcome of human dignity and liberty.

While Dalrymple is neither a libertarian nor an Austrian, he is a firm believer in human dignity and salvation through compassionate, individual and not state-backed human action. His writings make these points clearly and without moral judgment on contravening opinions. I recommend his books for the prose, the human stories and to see a side of Socialism that most opponents can only imagine but not experience. Dalrymple is well read and if I had his address I would gladly purchase and ship a copy of Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism in gratitude for his literary contributions and the pleasure I have derived from them.

He has written several other books that I have enjoyed immensely:

• Our Culture What’s Left Of It
• Life at the Bottom
• Exposing Shallowness: a must read for the parent and any child/young adult that thinks about tattooing!

George Giles [send him mail] reads, writes and thinks in Nashville Tennessee. He was born a Northerner but got to the South just as soon as he could.

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