New Objectivist Psychology Website

I have learned from HBL that Dr. Scott Adams has taken over a psychology website and re-oriented it to a "decidedly Objectivist perspective." The home page of Fire Fly Sun is here. From there you can access other departmental pages. I highly recommend blogrolling or bookmarking it.

Government Worship

In the sunday 08/27/06 opinion section of the Detroit Free Press is an op-ed by James Lee Witt CEO of James Lee Witt Associates, a public safety and crises management consulting firm in Washington D.C. who served as FEMA director from 1993 to 2001, and Max Stier who is the president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service in Washington D.C..

For reasons known only to the Free Press, this op-ed is not in the online version so I can't link to it. Anyway it's titled "Learn the right Katrina lesson." What might the right lesson be? Well, if you're thinking that the human disaster that was New Orleans is proof of governments' failure and inefficiency, you just get those thoughts out of your mind right now.

"...we had better accept that good government is essential and start looking forward to getting things right."

Good government to me means protecting people's individual rights. To sirs Witt and Stier it obviously means providing for people's needs, not rights. But what is meant by 'getting things right?'

"Levees require sound engineering, investment and upkeep.[which would have happened in a laissez-faire economy. Insurance companies would have required it--ME] Advanced preperations need to be made to ensure the prompt delivery of relief supplies. More attention needs to be given to ensuring that those who need it most are being helped."

This paragraph, in fact the whole article, reminds me of the commercial where Bret Favre walks past a lady whose grocery bag just ripped apart and says "I would have double-bagged it." I take these gentlemens' solutions just as seriously as that commercial. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20-20 and that is what these admonishers are exercising.

"But we also believe the failures suggest some longer-term, more consequential, attitudinal lessons on the part of government and citizens that must be learned if we are to do better in the decades ahead." (my em)
They then offer 5 lessons that must be learned.

1. "Good results require good people." Sure sounds reasonable to me. But what is meant by 'good people'?

"The greatest assets of any organization are the ability and passion of its people. Just like the private sector, our government must attract quality people to its ranks by making government a place where public servents are well led, well trained, empowered and rewarded for their service." (my em) In other words, we must stamp our feet and demand that our government act and become just as effective as the private sector.

Obviously, these gentlemen never sat down to figure out what is the essence of government (force) and what is the essence of the private sector (trade) and that what motivates one doesn't motivate the other. They never learned that the government is (or should be) motivated by the task of protecting everyone's individual rights and that the private sector is motivated by the profit motive which is the exercising of those rights.

2. "Coordination matters." Again, *I would have double-bagged it.* "The federal government must play the role of coordinator as well as responder in a crises." Why? Why not let private sector handle it? The profit motive would ensure all kinds of 'coordination' and the money would come from insurance companies who would love the chance to save millions in liability claims. Evidently, these guys think that the lady should not be responsible for double-bagging her own groceries, rather the government should coordinate that aspect of her shopping routine.

3. "A long term perspective is necessary." Yeah, I would have double-bagged that too.

4. "There is no cheap fix." (Get ready, here it comes!) "The damage to a region like the Gulf Coast is almost incalculable, but taxpayers often bristle when told billions may be needed for some mundane sounding necessity like levees and restoring wetlands. If we don't learn that lesson now, we are doomed to repeat it."

This is obviously one of those "attitudinal lessons" we citizens must learn. So when the government comes to loot more billions from our wallets, no more bristling. We must shut up and take it.

5. "Understand and build on successes." Another one for the double-bag.

It doesn't occur to these gentlemen, and most Americans for that matter, that when government assumes such responsibilities, large sacrifices will be required. But when the private sector does so, no sacrifices are required. So why the insistence on a system that requires sacrifice? Because these gentlemen, like most of us, were wrongly taught that sacrifice is virtuous and that trade, because it does not require sacrifice, cannot be virtuous. Thus it becomes obvious that these gentlemen are pursuing what they think is the virtuous rather than that which is effective. Which means performing the altruistic ritual rather than getting results. This in turn, supports the identification of altruism as a morality focused on ritual rather than results.

Or to put it another way; a rational, objective, non-sacrificial way of caring for others is unaceptable to thier minds when in fact, such a morality of rational self-interest is far more virtuous than any sacrificial one.

That is why these men are so blindly attracted to government (force). It can provide them with the forced sacrifices they believe are needed in order to be virtuous.

Review of Surviving Katrina

This is a review of the documentary Surviving Katrina which was shown on the Discovery Channel Sunday night 08/27/06. At first I thought this was going to be another Bush bashing or perhaps another American way of life-bashing documentary like the recent global warming docs. For the most part,it wasn't.

The documentary starts with an explanation of how Katrina formed over the Atlantic, moved across Florida then turned north towards New Orleans (N.O.). A sizeable portion of the documentary is devoted to the warnings given by Dr. Ivor van Heeron, Louisiana State Climatologist. to evacuate N.O. and how these warnings were not heeded at first.

Mixed in with the warnings of impending doom is a human interest story as the documentary shows scenes of Katrina getting stronger and closer to N.O. mixed with scenes showing interviews with citizens who were refusing to evacuate. One lady said "I've been living here 34 years and it never flooded." One man said past huricanes have always veered away from N.O. and this one will too and because of that he saw no reason to leave. Here, the documentary makes no judgements or statements. It just shows that some of the future victims refused to move out of harms way. Period. Of course also shown were the disabled and old and infirm who were not mobile and because of that were stuck.

Narrator Mike Rowe tells us that "Through out Saturday, Mayor Ray Nagin urges people to evacuate New Orleans, but he does not issue a mandatory evacuation order. The city has no plan in place to order and enforce an evacuation and it is taking time for officials to create one."

The documentary also spends time interviewing FEMA director Michael Brown. He tries to explain away why things weren't working out. Evidently, Mayor Nagin asked for 500 busses to be delivered to N.O.. Mr. Brown said he gave the order to staff to arrange it. But the busses never arrived and no one knows why. Michael Brown is quoted as saying the order for the busses "...fell into a black hole."

There was one part I thought was a little disingenuous. It was when the narrator mentioned that 'Governor Kathleen Blanco speaks with president Bush and told him "We need your help. We need everything you've got." But their conversation is vague. The Governor makes no specific requests and the President makes no specific offers.' If this is designed to indicate that both people were irresponsible, I disagree. An offerer of help cannot know in advance what kind of help is needed unless those in need tell him. This tells me that Gov. Blanco didn't know what was needed and was hoping Bush somehow would.

Katrina makes landfall and the damage is extensive. Hospitals lose power. Their back up generators were under water and useless. It's total chaos everywhere. Some levees are topped and others break under the force of the storm surge. The city floods. I think drama director Jonathon Dent did a good job of dramatizing the utter chaos that resulted in the storm's wake as looters tried to cash in on the confusion and destruction.

All in all, the documentary shows that all three levels of government failed at the task of disaster prepardness, and relief. I was a little disappointed though, that the question "Should the government be in the business of disaster prepardness and relief?" was never asked. It is just assumed that such is the government's natural role. But Charity Hospital had lost power and for several days staff were hand ventilating some of the critical patients. When it became clear that the government-at any level- wasn't going to transfer them to another hospital, they appealed to CNN who did a report. Seeing the report a private air-lift ambulance company volunteered its services and quickly transported the patients to other hospitals. To me, the the utter incompetence of government compared to the efficiency of private enterprise was glaringly obvious. Yet it is the government we are told to depend on. It makes no sense.

Yes there were heros. The rescue workers, the National Guard soldiers called in to restore order, the doctors and staff at the hospitals and nursing homes and the people whose own stories of survival were told. For some, the human aspect of the documentary might be tear jerking.

But there were also villians and victims. The obvious villians were the looters and thieves. But these were just the parasites cashing in on the disaster. If the victims who lost everything in N.O. are angry, they should be, but not at those who were unable to save them from the consequences of past bad ideas. Let them be angry at the Senators and Congressmen of many years ago who saw that private insurance companies would not underwrite the building of homes and businesses on nothing more than delta silt, who stood on the floors of congress and used altruism to justify interfering in the market place by deciding to give federal insurance to builders and by building levees so millions of people could live in a paradise. 1800 people died so those politicians could go to bed feeling good about themselves.

They should also be mad at the intellectuals and editorial writers who told them it was ok to let government take care of their needs and some of them should be mad at themselves for believing it.

The documentary does a splendid job of demonstrating the inefficiency of all levels of government. But it doesn't ask or address the question "Why is this so?" It's leaving that up to the viewers to discern.

In a laissez-faire economy, Katrina would still have happened. The human disaster that was New Orleans would not.

It's the Curriculum...

Sometimes a newspaper can run several stories on the same general subject, each one making a different point, sometimes seemingly contradicting each other. Such was the case in the 08/25/06 Detroit News regarding two news items and one op-ed.

First, the front page article "More Schools Flunk" with subtitle "544 schools fail to make progress." These are Michigan schools and that number is up from 436 last year which was up from 297 in 04. So why are they getting worse?

One of the biggest reasons given is 500,000 more students took the Michigan Educational Assessment Test. So? There shouldn't be any schools failing to teach kids how to read and do math. The existence of such large numbers can only mean that the school system has been failing miserably for some time and the new standards are just bringing that fact to light.

Nowhere in the article is there any mention of curriculum. But there is this:

"This is an eye-opener," said Sharif Shakrani, co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University. "We need to do a thorough analysis of where the problems lie and what we need to do about it."

How much do you want to bet curriculum won't get 'analyzed'? Setting high standards is a good thing, but it means nothing if teachers are given a curriculum that stifles childrens' minds. You cannot stamp your feet and demand that carpenters build a stronger house if all you're going to give them is balsa wood.

The second item of interest is an op-ed by Iris Salters who is president of the Michigan Education Association, a teachers' union. It's titled "Union only improves public education." Boy what bad timing!

Ms. Salters op-ed is partly in response to an ad campaign by the Center for Union Facts which "incorrectly accuses union leaders of irresponsible education spending."
I know nothing about the Center for Union Facts but I will look into them. In any event, it seems even they are not concerned with curriculum but with waste.

Ms Salters doesn't mention curriculum either but claims: "Employee unions have helped to create a tradition of high-quality education." I'm sorry but 544 failing schools is anything but 'high-quality.' Again, it doesn't matter how skilled a workforce is, it can't build a solid structure on a foundation of quicksand which is progressive education.

The third article is a news item titled "Anti-psychotic drug use soars." For me the key quote is:

"The findings augment earlier studies that have documented a sharp rise over the past decade in the prescription of psychiatric drugs for children, including anti-psychotics, stimulants like Ritalin and anti-depressants, whose sales have slipped only recently. But the study is the most comprehensive to examine the increase in prescriptions for anti-psychotics.

"The explosion in the use of drugs, some experts said, can be traced in part to the growing number of children and adolescents whose problems are given psychiatric labels once reserved for adults and to doctors' increasing comfort with a newer generation of drugs for psychosis. Shrinking access to long-term psychotherapy and hospital care may also play a role, the experts said."

And this which appeared in the print edition but not the online one:

"Anti-psychotic drugs also carry risks, and experts said that little is known about the use of anti-psychotics in minors: Only a handful of small studies have been done in children and adolescents.

'We are using these medications and don't know how they work, if they work, or at what cost,' said Dr. John March, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Duke University.

'It amounts to a huge experiment with the lives of American kids, and what it tells us is that we've got to do something other than we're doing now' to assess the drugs' overall impact."

Yes. We need to do something other than what we're doing. That something is taking a look at the crippling effect progressive eduction has on a child's mind and to replace it with a rational hierarchically structured curriculum.

I'm not a epidemiologist. I only know from my own experience that things like ADD and dyslexia were either non-existent or very minor problems back in the 1950s. But I believe that the introduction of progressive education was the cause of the subsequent rise in these disorders. I can't prove it but my theory is that when pro. ed. was first introduced in the 60's and 70s, some teachers were still of the kind that knew how to think and even though saddled with an irrational curriculum, could help students get around or somehow compensate for it.

The next generation of teachers however, would have been products of pro. ed. themselves and did not possess rational teaching skills. The fruits of their labor would show up around the early 90s as the article above mentions. I would like to see statistical studies done to verify the time line of pro. ed. followed by increases in the disorders. If anyone knows of such existing studies, please let me know.

Katrina Doc.

This Sunday Aug. 27th The Discovery Channel is showing a documentary called Surviving Katrina. I will watch it and post a review on it probably Monday. More info can be had here.
Im told it will show man as a hero. I'll be watching a trailor later tonight.

Objective Standard Recommended

I just finished reading David Harriman's excellent essay The 19th-Century Atomic War in the Objective Standard. Mr. Harriman shows how philosophical ideas have a direct effect on practical and theoretical science. In particular he demonstrates the disasterous influence of the philosophy of Immanual Kant and his followers on the evolution of the Atomic Theory.

I highly recommend getting a subscription to the Objective Standard which can be had here. The fall issue is due out shortly so I urge signing up now.

Pluto Demoted

Well, it's official. Pluto is no longer a planet. According to an AP report that appeared on my Comcast news page scientists have decided on what is a planet. The new definition is:

"a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Astronomers have decided that Pluto and other small bodies are to be classified as "dwarf planets."

Now if we can just get them to adopt "rational animal" as the definition of man, it would clear up a lot of things.

A Busy Week

Have been very busy this week. Blogging should resume Thursday I hope. Meanwhile:


Amanda Carlson at The Ivory Tower posts her first LTE. It's on the topic of the minimum wage and I thought she did well. She asked for opinions on her post as an LTE so I left mine in the comments. There certainly is a need for more rational LTEs.

Lil' Round Up

Morgan Freeberg has a post on the hipocrisy of Barak Obama who preaches to others not to drive gas guzzling SUVs but drives one himself. It's titled Missing the Smugness.

Greg at Noodle Food reports on Nicole Kidman and 84 others taking out a full page ad in LA Times blaming Hezbollah and Hamas for lives lost in ME. I left a comment about how I didn't know there were 85 people in Hollywood who thought that way. Greg also has a quote from Jimmy Carter showing how pathetic a person Carter has become. The interview from which the Carter quote was taken is here at Witch Doctor Repellent.

Craig Ceely at The Anger of Compassion reports on how Duranty lives in regard to Castro.

Fellow Detroit blogger P. Aaron at The Motown Blog has a rant on the recent cease fire in Lebanon titled "Joe 6-Pack Knows What It Takes To Win" with which I agree. But, as a side thought, the fact that Joe 6-Pack knows the score and the educated class doesn't, is a damning indictment of our government school system.

Dennis Chamberland at Quantum Limit has a post on how the scientific establishment is having a problem with defining what is a planet. Why don't they just use Aristotle's rules of definition and identify a genus and a differentia? It seems that the problem lies with the smallness of some of the newly discovered planets which are smaller than our moon. Anyway, to me, it looks like they need not a new concept of planet but a sub-concept like planetoid which could be any planet smaller than say Pluto. Then the scientists could safely say the Sun has 9 planets and 3 planetoids. See, all confusion gone!

Scotland Returns To The Primative

The following reminds me of the scene in Atlas Shrugged where a caravan of covered wagons comes out of the night to pull up along side the last train of civilization, the John Galt line. The lead wagoneer says his mode of transportation is "Slow, but Sure!"

From the website of Junk Science.com, Steven Milloy links to this article by John Stewart at The Scotsman.com.

Here is the main quote:

"ON A broiling afternoon recently when anyone with a reasonable excuse was
lying in the shade with a cold drink, I watched a performance in a
Perthshire field that made me as angry as I have been in my life. The
apparatus involved wasn't much to look at, consisting of ten stretchers of
the sort used by the medical corps, but covered in webbing instead of
canvas and mounted side by side on a steel frame with wheels at each end.
The whole thing was surmounted by a light steel frame supporting a canvas
awning and hitched to a tractor. I watched, at first incredulously, then
with mounting fury, as ten workers face down on the stretchers, heads
supported by a small webbing strap, were pulled slowly up the rows of an
organic vegetable field to pull weeds by hand.

This, I thought, is not so
much exploitation as degradation and a disgrace to Scottish agriculture.
To use human beings to do by hand something that horse-drawn scufflers did
a century and a half ag o, or spring tine weeders were invented to do 60
years ago, is the antithesis of everything I consider worthwhile."

If that weren't bad enough, check out the comments in favor of organic
and against modern technology in the comments section. These people
deserve to have Atlas shrug.

A Bolton Interview

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has an interview with John Bolton which she links to at Politics Central here.


At the beginning of the interview, IIRC, Bolton said the U.S. is not asking for a cease fire but rather a "cessation of hostilities." How is that different than a cease fire? Unless it forbids swear words too! Mr. Bolton went on to say: "Everyone wants a cessation of hostilities." Actually John, no they don't. Hezbollah doesn't. In fact the leader of Hezbollah said that Hezbollah will keep fighting until all Isreali troops are withdrawn. That's neither a cease fire nor a cessation of hostilities. It's a surrender.

Mr. Bolton says that the U.S. is adamant in its demand that there be a Hezbollah-free zone set up in Lebanon. That is a pipe dream. It was the Lebanese government that allowed Hezbollah to set up camp in Lebanon and has allowed Hezbollah terrorists to be members of the Lebanese government. I don't see how the Lebanese government and Hezbollah will be willing to let a foreign force come into Lebanon for the purpose of protecting Isreal. It isn't going to happen. If it does it will be nothing more than a charade.

Mr. Bolton also reiterated America's policy of bringing *democracy* to the ME by pointing out that Lebanese Americans are also committed to bringing democracy to Lebanon. Our leaders, including Bolton, don't know that democracy always leads to unlimited majority rule. In the ME that means Isreal is not supposed to exist.

All attempts at cease fires and truces are evasions of reality. Being evaded is the cause of the hostilities, the Muslim desire to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. Hezbollah will agree to any peace plan as long as it results in the West allowing them to continue to exist. Even though Hezbollah knows it can never destroy Isreal by itself, it just wants to continue to exist so it can kill more Jewish civilians. That is all Hezbollah wants and the real evil is that America and the Western press is willing to let them do it.

Force vs Reason

In my post The Science Establisnment II I wrote:

"The essence of government is to maintain a monopoly on the retaliatory use of force. The essence of science is to maintain a pursuit of truth through a processes of experimentation and verification. In short, the essence of one is reason and the essence of the other is force. It seems obvious to me that to mix these two in terms of fundmental principles can only have the result of reason being slowly forced out."

Some pretty good supporting evidence comes from George Reisman's blog in an article I highly recommend. A key quote:

"State control of science is the attempt to combine opposites. In essence, science is mind; the state is physical force. Science makes its way by means of the voluntary assent of the individual human mind to its recognition of truth. In contrast, the state and what the state sponsors makes its way by means of the use of physical force and the threat of physical force."

Did the congressmen and pundits who advocated the creation of government science know they were creating an establishment? Probably not. Pragmatism has taught them to consider only what is immediately in front of their noses and to disregard consequences because they are not knowable anyway. Oh but they are knowable, and thinking in terms of principles will give them that knowledge.

Update to Obsession

Evidently, the link to the movie Obsession in my last post doesn't work anymore. Two days ago it worked fine as I watched a version of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West called Obsession: What The War on Terror Is All About. For reasons unknown to me (probably legal) Google has pulled it.

You can watch a short trailer and order DVDs of the movie here. If any readers know of a workable link to either version above, I would appreciate it.

A Short Review of Obsession

A friend asked if I would give my opinion on the movie Obsession: What The War On Terrorism Is All About. With a few small changes, here is what I e-mailed him.

I watched the movie and I do think it did a fair job of presenting how dangerous Islam is. They did a good job of showing how Islam seeks a global submission to it and how it preaches hate in all its schools.

I liked the way they showed the paralells to 1930's Germany and how futile and immoral appeasment was then and is now.

The movie also claimed that most Muslims are peaceful and have no desire to run around killing infidels or Jews. I take this however with a large grain of salt. Sure, some no doubt are very peaceful people. I have met some. But the problem is these people are not in charge of the religion today. The jihadists are. So, the religion has to be treated as a terrorist religion. In fact, it should be treated as a state whose leadership needs to be overthrown. (This is how Bush should have presented it to the American people shortly after 9/11.)

I think Islam needs to be treated the same way Sherman treated the South in the civil war: take out major supply centers like Atlanta, cut off supply lines to the rebel armies and let them collapse. This means Bush would have to topple Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia, and he doesn't have the moral clarity to do that. Just toppling Tehran would cause Damascus to fall shortly thereafter I believe.

I do think more people need to see the movie. I don't think it will make television due to the graphic throat slitting scene unless they edit it out. Too many people believe Bush when he says Islam is a "religion of peace." That needs to change.

The one hour and 17 min movie can be seen here.

This and That August 8th

If you haven't been there already, LGF and Powerline and Michelle Malkin are exposing doctored photos of Lebanon by a Reuters photographer. Evidently, Reuters has retracted the photos. EU Referendum looks at more doctered photos. And for a crituque of same try here. (Hat tip to John Brignell at Number Watch, go to August scroll down to Props.)

What gets me is not that some reporters are dishonest from time to time but that this stuff gets by the editors. We are constantly told that bloggers lack the checks and balances of having a crew of fact-checkers or "gatekeepers" as the BBC likes to call them. There can only be one reason for this getting past the editors so easily, they want it to be true so they go with it. So much for the integrity of the MSM.

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In a similar vein, Steven Milloy at Junk Science.com says that global warming advocate Ross Gelbspan is still claiming he won a pulitzer prize even though he didn't. Figures, people who don't care about the truth of global warming won't care about the truth of other things as well.

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Why is NASA flying around looking for woodpeckers?

While at Junk Science.com I found this article. "NASA assists in hunt for woodpecker thought to be extinct." Ok I can see NASA helping out the university with their vertical imaging technology but I hope the university is paying NASA for its use. There is also this sentence:

"But last month scientists from NASA and the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., launched a project to identify possible areas where the woodpecker might be living."

It seems to me our tax money would be wiser spent on finding one of the birds for sure then examining the environment around it rather that maping possible areas where the woodpecker might be living.

I Feel Better Now

A few days ago Andy Clarkson at the Charlotte Capitalist had a good post tying Hezbollah's desire to wipe out Isreal and Michigan Senator Carl Levin's desire to loot profits of off-shore based companies as both instances of attacks on the producers because they are producers. Andy is right of course.

But Sen. Levin is my Michigan senator and watching him perform-just listening to him talk-over the years is an exceedingly frustrating experience. Perhaps I'm letting myself get frustrated too easily. Maybe I should console myself that I don't live in Mass. But I'm telling you, Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin could give Sen's Kennedy and Kerry a run for their Robin Hood credentials anyday.

I left a comment to the above post telling Andy that sometimes I feel like I want to join the repub party just to help get Stabenow and Levin out of office. Then again sometimes I feel like voting for more people like them so the economy will crash sooner and people will get what they deserve. But that is just me being spiteful and naturally, being spiteful is irrational and I must avoid the irrational even though it can feel good which of course it shouldn't. Sigh. (Andy was sympathetic.)

So, when I get thusly frustrated, I have decided what works best for me is to visit as many Objectivist sites as possible as well as taking another look at reality.

At the Noodle Food site Diana has the really good news that two of Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses are now for sale at a discounted price. I'll be taking advantage of that shortly because the offer expires Oct. 1st.

Blair at The Secular Foxhole recommends two books for good August reading. One fiction and one non-fiction. The book on coincidences and math seems interesting to me.

Jennifer Snow at Literatrix recommends Six Plays by Henrik Isben for more enjoyable reading.

Danielle Clark at I Blog can post on serious subjects but also likes to be a little lighthearted now and then which I find relaxing.

Toiler at Acid Free Paper recommends The Enemy by Lee Childs.

In addition to the sites above I recommend Cox and Forkum or go to any of the above sites and checkout their blogroll or mine on the right.

In regards to taking another look at reality, my second grandchild was born Friday morning and such an event helps one see the world in a different light, a most precious and value filled light. To see my son beaming with happiness at having a healthy son (the way I did when he was born) and the loving look of the mother as she cradled the little guy in her arms was, well, a scene of complete goodness.

I feel much better now.

Gramps again!

There hasn't been any bloging lately for several reasons the biggest of which is-- Mrs. Eyes and I are grandparents for the second time. Mommy and baby boy are just fine. Needless to say, the grandparents are eager go-fers as well as official picture takers.

Posting should resume Sat. or Sun. I hope!