Paul M. Jones

My first bite of meat after 3.5 years of veganism was both the hardest and easiest thing I’ve ever done. Tears ran down my face as saliva pooled in my mouth. The world receded to a blank nothingness and I just ate, and ate, and ate. I cried in grief and anger, while moaning with pleasure and joy. When I took the last bite I set back and waited to feel sick. I had just devoured a hunk of dead animal, the most evil thing I could conceive of, surely my body would reject this debasement and I would feel vindicated that I truly was meant to be a vegan.

Instead, my face felt warm, my mind peaceful, and my stomach full but….I searched for a word to describe how it felt….comfortable. I realized that for the first time in months I felt satiated without the accompaniment of stomach pain. I had only eaten a small piece of cow flesh, and yet I felt totally full, but light and refreshed all at once. I reveled in that new and unexpected combination of sensations. How amazing it was not to need to eat for an hour solid till my stomach stretched and distended over my pants just to buy an hour or two of satiety. How beautiful it felt to be able to eat the exact thing that for so long my body had been begging for. I felt profoundly joyful in finally listening to the wisdom of my body. What a revelation.

via A Vegan No More | Voracious.

Politicians fear lots of things -- honest labor, easily understood and headline-friendly scandals, constituents who read Hayek -- but above all they fear having their credit cards taken away.

via Why Is the World Bailing Out Ireland? - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online.

... there is a longstanding tension between conservatives who are focused on limiting government power and conservatives who are focused on wielding government power. I would put it this way: some of us are focused on keeping government small, and we are not particularly concerned with who has power. Other conservatives are focused on having conservatives in power, and they are not particularly concerned with whether government is small.

To those of us in the libertarian camp, the "neocons" come across as corrupted by liberal statism. To those in the conservative camp, the "libertarians" come across as corrupted by liberal nihilism.

via Two Strains of Conservatism, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

The theory behind most of what the Federal Reserve does to stimulate the economy is this: If we make money cheaper, people will borrow more of it--and then they'll start spending again.

That theory works in most recessions. When the economy begins to weaken, the Fed cuts interest rates. Banks, companies, and consumers see that it now costs less to borrow money to buy the things they want to buy. So they borrow money and buy them. And the economy strengthens again.

But we aren't in a normal weak economy, says economist Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co. We're in a "deleveraging" economy. And that means that we will keep reducing our debts and borrowing, no matter how cheap money gets.

via GARY SHILLING: Of Course The Fed's Plan Won't Work -- We're Deleveraging!.

People who decide to drive rather than take a short-haul flight will face approximately 80 times the fatality rate per mile that people on commercial airlines face. The TSA is killing people.

via Abolish the TSA, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

The Republicans control the House of Representatives and are bracing for a long battle over the President’s health care proposal. In the spirit of bipartisanship and sanity, I propose that the first thing on the chopping block should be an ineffective organization that wastes money, violates our rights, and encourages us to make decisions that imperil our safety. I’m talking about the Transportation Security Administration.

via Full Frontal Nudity Doesn’t Make Us Safer: Abolish the TSA - Art Carden - The Economic Imagination - Forbes.

From a black Ford Explorer Sport Trac, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Memphis native, watched two soldiers in fatigues smoking outside a military recruiting center in Little Rock. He aimed an assault rifle out the window and fired.

Muhammad sped away, hoping to flee 150 miles to Memphis where he would switch cars. But a wrong turn in a construction zone led him to police.

He stepped out of the SUV wearing a green ammo belt around his waist.

"It's a war going on against Muslims, and that is why I did it," an officer heard him say.

via Muslim who shot soldier in Arkansas says he wanted to cause more death » Knoxville News Sentinel.

When I started this blog six years ago, I began with a tagline motto of "If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing." Its origin was a comment about me from one of the graduate students at the College of Business at the University of Memphis.

I had just finished doing some tech-support work to a ridiculous extreme. The PhD candidate, knowing about my Air Force background, remarked, "All you military guys are the same: if it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing." I recognized it certainly was true for me, and adopted the phrase almost immediately.

While I love the phrase and will continue to use it, I think it's time for a change.

Over the past couple of years, I have begun to notice what I call a "fetish for 'smart'" among my peers. It is as if being smart is somehow a good thing all by itself, and that merely being smart is enough to ascertain good will, good intentions, and/or good results. This bothers me.

Merely that you are smart does not mean you know enough to be useful. A lot of the time, smart people think they can solve human problems by reason, formal logic, or rationality alone, without relevant knowledge of historical experience, localized information, dynamic feedback, emergent behaviors, emotional reactions, bad actors, black swans and a host of other similar real-world factors.

There is no amount of "smart" that can replace that kind of knowledge. Without it, the true usefulness of being smart is strictly limited. Often, it is not possible for any one person or group of persons to have enough of that knowledge to use "smart" effectively. (This is the fundamental idea behind Hayek's "Use of Knowledge In Society.")

A lack of these kinds of knowledge does not stop smart people from trying use "smart" outside its effective bounds. They are confident being smart is enough, that logic and reason are sufficient tools to solve human problems. Then, when a smart person's rational and logical plans fail from a lack of relevant knowledge, the refrain from other smart people is "But he's so smart! It must be the rest of the world that is wrong" -- or variations on that theme.

I am very much opposed to that attitude in all its forms. My shorthand for this opposition is taken from a Megan McArdle essay to which I no longer have the link: "It's not enough to be smart. You have to actually know things."

To get the facts is impossible. There are no facts unless one has a criterion of relevance. Events by themselves are not facts.

People inevitably start out with an opinion; to ask them to search for the facts first is even undesirable. They will simply do what everyone is far too prone to do anyhow: look for the facts that fit the conclusion they have already reached. And no one has ever failed to find the facts he is looking for. ...

The only rigorous method, the only one that enables us to test an opinion against reality, is based on the clear recognition that opinions come first -- and that is this is the way it should be. Then no one can fail to see that we start out with untested hypotheses -- in decision-making as in science as the only starting point. We know what to do with hypotheses -- one does not argue them; one tests them. One finds out which hypotheses are tenable, and therefore worthy of serious consideration, and which are eliminated by the first test against observable experience.

From "The Essential Drucker" (2001) page 252.

A great article from last year that bears re-reading, especially in light of the election a few days ago.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic/article_print

The Special Interest State that has shaped American life for 70 years is dying. What comes next is uncertain, but there are grounds for optimism.

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The real-world answer imposed by the New Deal and its progeny turned out to be special interest capture on steroids. Control comes to rest with those with the greatest interest or the most money at stake, and the result was the creation of a polity called “the Special Interest State” or, in Cornell University Professor Theodore Lowi’s terms, “Interest Group Liberalism.” Its essence is that various interest groups seize control over particular power centers of government and use them for their own ends.

It is this combination of plenary government power combined with the seizure of its levers by special interests that constitutes the polity of the current Third American Republic. The influence of “faction” and its control had been a concern since the founding of the nation, but it took the New Deal and its acolytes to decide that control of governmental turf by special interests was a feature, not a bug, a supposedly healthy part of democratic pluralism.

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Whole departments are dedicated to special interests--Labor, Education, Energy. Money is important, but regulation is every bit as useful, especially because regulations can shift property rights from third parties without going through the budget process. For example, environmentalists successfully combined a vaguely worded Endangered Species Act with control of the Fish and Wildlife Service to shift the costs of their no-development ethic onto random land-owners, regardless of costs, benefits, or fairness.

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In Washington, the debate has atrophied, and few lawyers and lobbyists even know that it was once questioned whether the Special Interest State is an appropriate form of organization for a polity. The theory that government is and should be a contest among alliances of special interests has swept the day. Of course groups struggle to grab and exploit levers of power for selfish ends and then use these to the maximum, and of course agency and congressional staff ally with one or another of these mercenary armies while in government, and of course they then go to work for the interests they used to “govern” (wink, wink), and so what? Do you have a point here?

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Public employees have become perhaps the largest and most powerful interest group--20 million strong, politically active, and dedicated to the ideals of no cuts in employment, absolute pension safety no matter what happens to everyone else’s retirement accounts, and little accountability.

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Ever since the New Deal, however, the Court has managed to erect a jurisprudence that is blind to the fundamental nature of the polity of which it is an important part. For example, under “the Chevron doctrine,” each special-interest-captured federal agency gets to decide the scope of its own power if Congress leaves any ambiguity. So Congress leaves the limits ambiguous and allows the agency to press to the utmost.

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In the United States, legitimacy is conferred by elections, but it is not total. Through the ages, the basic question mark about democracy as a form of government has been that 51 percent of the electorate can band together to oppress the minority--“the tyranny of the majority” is a valid concern. To address it, the United States has a formal written Constitution to guarantee basic rights, but it also has an unwritten constitution that sets limits on how far the winners can push their victories. Exceed the amorphous bounds, and not only does the minority no longer accept the legitimacy of the government, many members of the majority coalition will have a guilty conscience as well, knowing that their acquiescence to the demands of one of their allies was a bad deed. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

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So all patriots would be well advised to pick up a copy of Crane Brinton’s classic The Anatomy of Revolution, and figure out how we can achieve the necessary segue to the Fourth Republic without becoming a chapter in the next edition.