geriatric pastures for trannies

"Barbary Lane Communities at Lake Merritt, one of the country’s first urban independent-living communities for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) seniors is being developed in Oakland, Calif...

According to BLC, the needs of LGBT seniors are currently unaddressed in the senior housing industry largely due to lack of awareness, discrimination and homophobia. There are presently over 3 million LGBT seniors over the age of 65, and that number is expected to double by 2030." - Article Link

eine kleine nachtmusik im museum

Just in case you didn't catch this- in the very first scene introducing Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) to the night life in the museum, a tyrannosaurus-rex exhibit mysteriously goes missing.

If you listen carefully to the accompanying soundtrack, you can hear composer Alan Silvestri's tribute to John Williams, as he uses the theme from Jurassic Park's "Dennis Steals the Embryo" to highlight Daley's confusion as to whom might have pinched the exhibit.

map-line worship

Though I was less than satisfied with this novel, it did have its redeeming parts. This following passage questions the rationality of nationalism; the illogical and evil religion worshiped by billions millions in their fervor to violently exclude immigrants, block free and voluntary exchange, and of course, to wage murderous wars.

For all of humanity's sake, I hope we can advance beyond this childish notion of fixed-pie economics, where unfortunately the bulk of grownups live a nightmarish reality, feeling threatened by the mere existence of other people.

"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in the autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

What is love of one's country? Is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...

Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate."

For Sale: One Brooklyn Bridge

More on the faux privatization front:

"Investment bankers are blitzing the Spitzer administration with proposals to sell state assets to private firms, as investors seek to buy toll roads, bridges and even Off-Track Betting.

Bankers are making the rounds at the Thruway Authority, the Empire State Development Corp., the state Department of Transportation and the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. They seek to capitalize on statements by the new governor that he is open to public-private partnerships." -Article Link

misplaced aggravations

"Merck & Co. said it would stop lobbying states to pass laws requiring that preteen girls be vaccinated against cervical cancer in the face of a growing backlash among parents, physicians and consumer advocates." - Full Article

Sure, it's easy to get all pissed at Merck for a little rent-seeking, but if this doesn't get your blood boiling against the state mechanism which makes it all possible, you have nothing to complain about.

fiction[-writer] versus [economic] reality

On a topic I hold dear, Mises blog authors discuss the economic and aesthetic repercussions when the real estate market is disrupted via the political process in an attempt to craft a city more to the liking of the planning czars.


Mises.org
Can We Trust the State with Preservation?

By Gene Callahan and Julius Blumfeld

"Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, commenting on the controversy surrounding 980 Madison, sensibly noted that blocking the construction of new Manhattan residential space will result in housing costs being higher than they would be if the apartments were built. Wolfe's response demonstrates his ignorance of the fact that his pet cause entails very real costs: "[The proposed 980 Madison Avenue project] certainly isn't going to help the housing situation. Just more people who have the money will be able to move in" (Gillette, 2007, p. 21).

Wolfe apparently has never considered the fact that, when very rich people move into those new apartments, that will ease the demand for the residences they would have occupied otherwise, allowing the slightly less wealthy to acquire those spots. That, in turn, will free up the housing those people would otherwise have chosen, making them available to yet others, and so on. An increase in the housing stock at any price level will tend to lower housing costs in general, although, of course, that effect might always be offset or even swamped by some other factor working in the opposite direction.

Wolfe, not content with this first display of economic naïveté, continues, "To take [Glaeser's] theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park." Here, he confuses the recognition that action X would act towards lowering the cost of good Y to imply that, therefore, X must be done! Without a doubt, filling Central Park with apartment buildings would lower New York City rents. Similarly, butchering all of the dogs and cats in the United States for food would lower meat prices. But that in no way implies that either course of action is indisputably recommended. People quite sensibly prefer not to eat their pets, even though doing so would reduce their meal expenditures, just as New York City residents might prefer a bucolic respite in the midst of their urban environment, even given the higher housing costs that entails.
Glaeser is doing nothing more than noting that the elementary principles of supply and demand apply even to virtuous causes, while Wolfe, by refusing to concede such a basic truth, raises the suspicion that his campaign may have more to do with his public image than with concern for the greater good."

I've argued this very same point in the past, as evidenced, here, here, and here that some people would like to have their cake and eat it too.

I guess it's just that some fiction writers have no grasp of reality.

whence order arose

"I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe."

"But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . ."

"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelichesame die leiter abewerfen sô er an ir ufgestigen... is that how you say it?... It's hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence."

kitchen unwisdom

I think I've come up with a novel way to end the timeless recipe mix-up involving baking soda and baking powder - just swap their respective containers and go on making your mistakes.

eudaemonic

Holy crap- one of my favorite authors- George R.R. Martin has just signed a deal with HBO giving them rights to produce his "Ice and Fire" series. I'm seriously hoping that his books will gracefully survive the treatment to this newfangled audiovisual media device.

beyond the grave

(what might be an inappropriate title based on something you will read shortly)

In a very personal spell of synchronicity or perhaps merely coinci-dance, I've just finished off Robert Anton Wilson's "Email to the Universe". At the near end of the book, it recounts an interview from 2002 with Paul Krassner that ends with this:

Paul Krassner: Recently, when I spoke at a college campus, a student asked what I wanted my epitaph to be. I replied, "Wait, I'm not finished." What do you want your epitaph to be?

Robert A. Wilson: I have ordained in my will that my body will get cremated and the ashes thrown in Jerry Falwell's face. The executor of my will should then shout one word only: "Gotcha!"

Since this book is classified as non-fiction, I patiently await Reverend Falwell's decoration by a guerrilla ontologist.

R.A.W., R.I.A.

With much gloominess, I learn of Robert Anton Wilson's transcendence from his mortal coil.

R.A.W. will be sorely missed by all, to use clichéd verbiage, and fnord I not-so-humbly offer my sincerest condolences to his family, close friends, and all his extended readership who are all surely saddened by his passing.

Kallisti, rest in anarchy.

petty potty patrol psychotics

What happens when busybody lawmakers prohibit food establishments from having their sole restroom located behind the counter?

According to The Brooklyn Paper's Gersh Kuntzman [is that even a real name??]:

...But not any more, because Roma ripped out half of its seats rather than fight a law that requires restaurants with more than 19 seats to “provide toilet facilities for the public.”

And “public” means that the crapper can’t be in the food-preparation area because the dirty, filthy public (again, I’m not talking about myself here) is not legally allowed to be in the food-preparation area — except in restaurants with fewer than 20 seats, apparently.

So Roma now has only 16 seats — and the bathroom remains behind the counter. The result? I still have to ask the counterman to let me go into the kitchen to use the can — and now I can never find a seat at my neighborhood pizzeria!

Don't you love the unintended consequences of road paving to hell (i.e., all lawmaking)- it also manages to create hell on the way there too.

pseudos etumos-logos

Wherein I pretend to dabble in the dark arts of etymology, I tend to discover inner meaning when there really isn't any. For example, a common slur against Iranian Jews is to stereotype their frugality. Hence, the term parsimony has special meaning to me as it may be broken down to the [false] roots 'parsi' + 'mony', 'Parsi' being the Hebrew word for "Persian".

Another such example would be to relate the word "Hasidic", which in its original Hebrew sense did not depict a Jew wearing a funky hat, curly sidelocks and a black frock. Instead, in Mishnaic terms it referred to a person who refrained from the pleasures of the world, choosing to live the most basic, ascetic life.

Where am I going with this? Well I wanted to devise an explanation for the division of man-made law into two categories:

1) common law
2) private law

The difference between the two is lies in it's origination. I reckon that the typical origination of common law was a spontaneous arrangement of acceptable, universalized principles which civilized society could easily agree to, such as prohibition against murder, enslavement and robbery. These are such prohibitive laws that from the viewpoint of the individual are obvious (since the prohibited action is clearly harmful to another party), and need not to be instilled for one to be aware of them (and I stop short of referring to these as 'natural laws'.)

Private law, or positive law on the other hand, is comprised of laws which are many times non-obvious, and therefore to be known must be learned (although one will be found guilty in unknowing transgression, since ignorance of the law is not an excuse.) The law's prohibited action might be seemingly or truly harmless, and one might be found guilty in the nebulous sense of committing a "crime against society". These laws, even if well-intentioned, will favor the interests of a private few, required active legislation to define them, coercion to gain their employ, and in effect lead to the breakdown of, and de-civilize society.

R.A.W. (and R.S.) said it squarely, or rather, Hagbard Celine did:

PRIVILEGE: From the latin privi, private, and lege, law. An advantage granted by the State and protected by its powers of coercion. A law for private benefit.

With this historical background, we can better grasp the typical hurdle often encountered by many an anarchist in the conflation of these two types of law. It is the difference between the two law types that anarchists object to when they object to rulers, but not rules.

What anarchists may or may not realize, privilege-private laws are those "rules" which beneath the print are just rulers disguising themselves in the rubric of rules in order to demand obedience and/or enslavement. These pseudo rules do not arise from conflict-reducing norms, and in fact create more conflict.

Private laws are those which anarchists are most confident will not arise in a market-anarchy, whilst the common law they hope will be rigorously obeyed, whether out of a sense of common decency (in my belief), or because of an expectation that the market institutions will have a much better replacement to the state's pathetically useless enforcement agencies.

impromptu thoughts

In the never-ending debate of nature vs. nurture; doesn't the latter approach run into a regression problem? What I mean is that if we consider a man's behavior to be the product of the inputs of his social environment, where did the social environment originate those inputs?

quixotic exotics

Catallarchy commenter Sam writes in regards to so-called 'exotic' goods:

"This is an issue for semantics only. A good is not merely a physical commodity, but a commodity acquired for the purpose of providing satisfaction to the consumer. If “$20k Rolls-Royce” and “$60k Rolls-Royce” provide different levels of satisfaction, then they are, in fact, different goods."

From a March 16th 2006 email to Professor Emeritus Walter Block,

"My thoughts about the phenomenon of veblen and giffen goods are such and I would like your comment. In economics, goods can be said to be homogeneous if the units supply the same exact service. If there is any differentiation, even if but a psychological differentiation (such as ice in the winter being a different good than ice in the summer), under the scope of economics they are considered to be two different goods.

So too, "goods" as regarded by economics should not include special categories for either veblen or geffen goods, because the goods in question (either a veblen status-good, or a giffen substitute-good) have essentially transformed into another type of good providing a different array of services. There is nothing special about either of these to qualify for an "exotic good" category, as the theory only gives an explanation why the good transformation should occur.

Any child could come up with examples of goods which transform into other goods and provide a sound explanation; for example, a fur coat in the winter and summer, a pastrami sandwich before and after eating a filling meal, popcorn during a movie and afterwards, a discount coupon before and after making a purchase, etc.

If this is so, would it be correct to ignore such so-called exotic goods, despite the mainstream acceptance of these concepts?"

Sadly enough, he never responded to me on this particular point.