Tag: politics

“This is not science; other forces are at work.”

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Another Martin Luther 95 Theses moment.

“Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, Chairman of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety, Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)”

Professor Lewis has resigned from the American Physical Society. Here is his letter of resignation:

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

That took balls.

In Response to That Video . . .

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. . . the one about “I’m voting Republican because…” I give you this email I just received from my brother:

A Flood of American Liberals

The Manitoba Herald as Reported by Clive Runnels, Oct. 6, 2010

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The recent actions of the Tea Party are prompting an exodus among left leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and to agree with Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.

Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night. “I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota . “The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry.. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay”.

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields. “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn’t give any milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers — the so-called northern coyotes — who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves.” A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a single bottle of imported drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley Cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.

In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans in powdered wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the ’50s. “If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age,” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and are renting all the Michael Moore movies. “I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada, Vice President Biden met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals. A source close to President Obama said, “We’re going to have some Paul McCartney and Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we might even put some endangered species on postage stamps; The President is determined to reach out,” he said. The Herald will be interested to see if Obama can actually raise Mary from the dead in time for the concert.

Turnabout is fair play, no? Interestingly enough, this dates back to at least 2006.

Quote of the Day – Conservative/Libertarian Edition

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From the comments to How Could They? Ed Heckman linked to Theodore Dalrymple’s essay The Frivolity of Evil (worth your time, BTW). In that piece Dalrymple writes:

When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.

And in response, Sarah “Stickwick Stapers” writes today’s QotD (my emphasis):

And thus the conservative/libertarian ideology. When you recognize that everyone has a tendency to evil, you resist the notion of concentrated coercive power for any group. When you think only the other guy is evil, it becomes your mandate to have all of the coercive power for your group only.

Yup.

How Could They

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David Burge (Iowahawk) made this observation about the recent 10:10 Campaign “No Pressure” television ad:

(S)omehow, throughout this entire process, not one of the hundreds of people involved seemed to have questioned the wisdom of an advertising message advocating the violent, sudden death of people who disagree with it.

Many among those of us who disagree with the message have spent much of the last week obsessed with the question, “How could they?” As in “How could they not see what the reaction would be?” “How could they think blowing school children up would be funny?” Etc., etc.

But that question was answered long, long ago. In 2002 Charles Krauthammer put it in modern terms:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

But it goes back much earlier in history.

I’m currently reading Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, volume III in his Conflict of Visions trilogy. The second book in that series is Vision of the Anointed: Self Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy. In Sowell’s lexicon, “The Anointed” are the Leftist intellectuals who believe they know best how the world ought to work. In the section of Intellectuals and Society entitled “Unworthy Opponents,” Sowell has this to say (long excerpt follows):

Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls – and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their visions are not surprising under these circumstances. But for people with opposing views, who may for example believe that most things work out for the better if left to free markets, traditions, families, etc., these are just a set of hypotheses about external events and there is no huge personal ego stake in whether those hypotheses are confirmed by empirical evidence. Obviously everyone would prefer to be proved right rather than proved wrong, but the point here is that there is no such comparable ego stakes involved among believers in the tragic vision. (That would be those of us on the putative “right.” – Ed.)

This difference may help explain a striking pattern that goes back at least two centuries – the greater tendency of those with the vision of the anointed to see those they disagree with as enemies who are morally lacking. While there are individual variations in this, as with most things, there are nevertheless general patterns, which many have noticed, both in our times and in earlier centuries. For example, a contemporary account has noted:

Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil.

Supporters of both visions, by definition, believe that those with the opposing vision are mistaken. But that is not enough for those with the vision of the anointed. It has long been taken for granted by those with the vision of the anointed that their opponents were lacking in compassion. Moreover, there was no felt need to test that belief empirically. As far back as the eighteenth century, the difference between supporters of the two visions in this regard was apparent in a controversy between Thomas Malthus and William Godwin. Malthus said of his opponents, “I cannot doubt the talents of men such as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.” But when Godwin referred to Malthus, he called Malthus “malignant,” questioned “the humanity of the man,” and said “I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the mad was made.”

Edmund Burke was a landmark figure among those with the tragic vision but, despite his all-out attacks on the ideas and deeds of the French Revolution, Burke nevertheless said of those with the opposing vision that they “may do the worst of things, without being the worst of men.” It would be hard, if not impossible, to find similar statements about ideological adversaries from those with the vision of the anointed, either in the eighteenth century or today. Yet such a view of opponents – as mistaken or even dangerously mistaken, but not necessarily evil personally – has continued to be common among those with the tragic vision. When Friedrich Hayek in 1944 published The Road to Serfdom, his landmark challenge to the prevailing social vision among the intelligentsia, setting off an intellectual and political counter-revolution later joined by Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley and others intellectually and by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan politically, he characterized his adversaries as “single-minded idealists” and “authors whose sincerity and disinteredness are above suspicion.”

Clearly, however, sincerity was not considered sufficient to prevent opponents from being considered not only mistaken but dangerously mistaken, as illustrated by Hayek’s belief that they were putting society on “the road to serfdom.” Similarly, even in the midst of a political campaign in 1945, when Winston Churchill warned of authoritarian rule if the opposing Labour Party won, he added that this was not because they wanted to reduce people’s freedom but because “they do not see where their theories are leading them.” Similar concessions to the sincerity and good intentions of opponents can be found in Milton Friedman and other exponents of the constrained or tragic vision. But such a view of ideological opponents has been much rarer among those with the vision of the anointed, where the presumed moral and/or intellectual failings of opponents have been more or less a staple of discourse from the eighteenth century to the present.

While sincerity and humane feelings are often denied to ideological opponents by those with the vision of the anointed, whether or not opposition to minimum wage laws or rent control laws, for example, is in fact due to a lack of compassion for the poor is irrelevant to the question whether the arguments for or against such policies have either empirical or analytical validity. Even if it could be proved to a certainty that opponents of these and other “progressive” policies were veritable Scrooges, or even venal, that would still be no answer to the arguments they make. Yet claims that opponents are racist, sexist, homophobic or “just don’t get it” are often advanced by the intelligentsia in lieu of specific refutations of their specific arguments.

In other words, they don’t need to argue the merits. If you oppose them, you’re morally repugnant and can be dismissed on those grounds alone.

Carried to its logical conclusion you get “No Pressure” – first as “humor” and later on as policy.

The Vision of the Anointed has existed since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it has survived (I would argue) largely because those of us with the tragic vision attribute sincerity, idealism, and good intentions to our ideological opponents.

This has to stop.

Hayek called it “the road to serfdom” for a reason. Those with the vision of the anointed believe they are doing what is necessary to drag humanity into Utopia. Those of us with the tragic vision believe that what they are doing is dragging us into hell. I don’t care how good their intentions are, I WANT THEM TO STOP. As James Lileks put it many years ago,

Personally, I’m interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process.

Or blow up children.

I Find I Dislike Cass Sunstein Very Much

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…despite the fact that Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh (both men I admire) seem to think well of him.

I heard an audio clip on the radio on my way home this afternoon. (Yes, I was tuned into Glenn Beck for the 15 minute drive home. My iPod is on the fritz until I can reload the operating system.) That clip was taken from this C-SPAN interview:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLJyWgb-8F0?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=480&h=385]

Here’s the key portion of the transcript:

Let me explain the division among conservative legal thinkers. Some conservative legal thinkers like Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas think that the Constitution means what it originally meant. That means we should understand the document by going into a kind of time machine and capturing the public understanding of the public that ratified the document a century, or more than a century ago.

So that is a very distinctive approach. It would involve quite radical changes in our existing Constitutional understandings, and Justice Thomas is entirely clear on that. He’s voted to overturn the Supreme Court’s own precedents over twenty times.

He says that like it’s a bad thing. I’m sure Professor Sunstein doesn’t object to Brown v. Board of Education in which the Supreme Court overturned its own precedent.

I’ve stated precisely where I stand on the question of Originalism and why in Cut-‘n-Paste. Let me repeat some of the quotes that piece opened with:

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. –Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 Paul K. Sadover

—

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those intrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism…. If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield. – George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

—

Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government. – James Madison

—

The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when it was adopted, it means now. — South Carolina v. US, 199 U.S. 437, 448 (1905)

—

A provision of the Constitution, it is hardly necessary to say, does not admit of two distinctly opposite interpretations. It does not mean one thing at one time and an entirely different thing at another time. – Justice Sutherland (dissenting), Blaisdell (1934)

—

I quite agree with the opinion of the court that whether the legislation under review is wise or unwise is a matter with which we have nothing to do. Whether it is likely to work well or work ill presents a question entirely irrelevant to the issue. The only legitimate inquiry we can make is whether it is constitutional. If it is not, its virtues, if it have any, cannot save it; if it is, its faults cannot be invoked to accomplish its destruction. If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch, as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned. – (Ibid.)

—

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. – West Virginia v Barnette (1943)

—

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or…the press” also means the Internet…and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths….When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences. – Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v Lockyer denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, (2003)

—

I respectfully dissent from our order denying rehearing en banc. In so doing, I am expressing agreement with my colleague Judge Gould’s special concurrence in Nordyke v. King, and with the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in United States v. Emerson, both taking the position that the Second Amendment secures an individual, and not collective, right to keep and bear arms.

The panel opinion holds that the Second Amendment “imposes no limitation on California’s [or any other state’s] ability to enact legislation regulating or prohibiting the possession or use of firearms” and “does not confer an individual right to own or possess arms.” The panel opinion erases the Second Amendment from our Constitution as effectively as it can, by holding that no individual even has standing to challenge any law restricting firearm possession or use. This means that an individual cannot even get a case into court to raise the question. The panel’s theory is that “the Second Amendment affords only a collective right,” an odd deviation from the individualist philosophy of our Founders. The panel strikes a novel blow in favor of states’ rights, opining that “the amendment was not adopted to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership or possession,” but was instead “adopted to ensure that effective state militias would be maintained, thus preserving the people’s right to bear arms.” It is not clear from the opinion whom the states would sue or what such a suit would claim were they to try to enforce this right. The panel’s protection of what it calls the “people’s right to bear arms” protects that “right” in the same fictional sense as the “people’s” rights are protected in a “people’s democratic republic.”

. . .

About twenty percent of the American population, those who live in the Ninth Circuit, have lost one of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights. And, the methodology used to take away the right threatens the rest of the Constitution. The most extraordinary step taken by the panel opinion is to read the frequently used Constitutional phrase, “the people,” as conferring rights only upon collectives, not individuals. There is no logical boundary to this misreading, so it threatens all the rights the Constitution guarantees to “the people,” including those having nothing to do with guns. I cannot imagine the judges on the panel similarly repealing the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the right of “the people” to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, or the right of “the people” to freedom of assembly, but times and personnel change, so that this right and all the other rights of “the people” are jeopardized by planting this weed in our Constitutional garden. – Judge Andrew Jay Kleinfeld, dissenting, also from Silveira v Lockyer denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, (2003)

—

It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution.

What ‘we the people’ want most of all is someone who will agree with us as to what the evolving constitution says.

We are free at last, free at last. There is no respect in which we are chained or bound by the text of the Constitution. All it takes is five hands.

What in the world is a ‘moderate interpretation’ of the text? Halfway between what it really says and what you want it to say? – Antonin Scalia, excerpts from a speech quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 3/10/04

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Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. – Clarence Thomas (dissenting) Kelo v New London (2005)

—

Obliterating a provision of the Constitution, of course, guarantees that it will not be misapplied. – (Ibid.)

The interview with Sunstein seems to be from 2006 during or just previous to the Alito Supreme Court nomination hearing. Sunstein had just published his book Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America. You’ll note that he doesn’t seem to have a problem with extreme Left-Wing courts.

Some of Sunstein’s other books:

Free Markets and Social Justice. – I’d like it if someone could just define “social justice” and illustrate how it differs from plain old everyday justice.

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness – Co-written with Richard Thaler, this book is described at Barnes & Nobel thus:

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice.

Who is this “we” that is entrusted to do the “design(ing) of choice environments”?

I suspect that it would be Thomas Sowell’s “Anointed” – the intellectual elite.

Or, how about:

Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, described at B&N:

Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum bring together an all-star cast of contributors to explore the legal and political issues that underlie the campaign for animal rights and the opposition to it. Addressing ethical questions about ownership, protection against unjustified suffering, and the ability of animals to make their own choices free from human control, the authors offer numerous different perspectives on animal rights and animal welfare.

What, we humans get “nudged” but animals don’t?

And then there’s:

A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before – Like HELL it doesn’t.

And finally, this:

The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever – If you needed any more evidence that Cass Sunstein doesn’t understand the founding philosophy of this nation, that book title is enough all by itself.

“We Know the Warning Signs”

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Back before the third Gun Blogger Rendezvous, attendees were invited to come to a special media event put on by the National Rifle Association. The NRA decided, for whatever reason, to announce its support for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election in Reno. Several of us attended, filling seats in the small conference room along with many residents of the Reno area, and a few (damned few) members of the local media.

After the announcement (while the media packed up and left), Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox invited questions from the audience. One young woman stood up and asked a very pointed question that both men deftly avoided. Her question struck me so much that I interviewed her. Her name is Ly Chho. Her family is Chinese, but she was born in Cambodia, raised in Taiwan, and is now a naturalized American citizen. Her question?

I am a new NRA member. I have been a citizen for only fourteen years. I believe in the Constitution and the Second Amendment, and when I see Obama, I see Communism, and I am afraid. I believe he is going to win the election. Do you have any plans in place if this happens?

Today, Instapundit linked to a piece by DaTechGuy on what he found at the 9/12 Tea Party protest in DC. Of all the people he spoke to at the rally, he took only one video interview. His subject was Clara Csiong, another naturalized American of Chinese descent. Her path to this nation was from China through pre-Castro Cuba.

Watch the video. Listen to what she says. Remember: she is what’s known around these parts as a “primary source.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYH-98agjis&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3&w=640&h=390]