World to end at 11:47AM. News at 12:00.

" To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil." [more] from Charles Krauthammer in the WaPo.

The internet never fails to amaze me. It contains entire worlds that you can be completely unaware of until they are brought to your attention. I just finished reading the book "Creation" by Steve Grand which describes artificial life simulations and specifically the game he developed called "Creatures". It is an agent based game that lets you 'create' creatures in a virtual world. The creatures then interact with their environment, breed and improve. Evolution in a box, very cool. Once let loose they are basically autonomous but they can interact with you in limited ways. After checking out the website for the company that sells the game (now in it's third generation, I bought it) and doing some other searches I have discovered a vast online community that maintains, shares info about their creatures and lends the created creatures out for breeding (online stud farms). There are toolkits for modifying the genetic codes of the creatures or their environments. This is sort of like the vast online communities of MMORPG's (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) like Everquest which I have long wanted to explore but haven't had the time. The difference is that those are games between live players using avatars with certain characteristics that are acquired through gameplay, while the Norns, Grendels and Ettins in Creatures are self-developing autonomous creatures. The MMORPG's are fascinating places also though, where avatars with particularly desirable characteristics get sold on Ebay for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The 'real-world' sale of characters and loot from Everquest would make the virtual world of Norrath "...the 77th largest economy in the [real] world! [It] has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, making its economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughly comparable to Russia's economy". And I remember when I thought "Space Invaders" was a really cool game.

Count de Monay on why we're living on Bizarro world.

• Strong religious beliefs
  
• Parental Approval
  
• Ability
  
• Encourages Others
  

The boy scout code, Confucian virtues? No, the four main requirements of a suicide bomber according to Hamas leader Salah Shehade. (via LGF)

I made a prediction about this awhile ago. WSJ article on how hard Mugabe is working hard to create a massive famine in what used to be Africa's breadbasket. He joins other socialist luminaries such as Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il, Mengistu Haile Mariam and Pol Pot in starving large portions of his population on their way toward a socialist utopia.

It begins...now that the tobacco golden goose has been pretty well plucked, the fast-food industry is the next target. Within 5 years there will be a hefty tax on Big Macs. [more]

An old European joke (one of many variants) goes: Heaven consists of French chefs, English police, Italian lovers, German engineers and Dutch bankers while Hell consists of French engineers, Italian bankers, German police, Dutch chefs and English lovers. Here is an article about the English lovers.

Copy of an article written in 1972 about the IBM anti-trust case. The parallels with the Microsoft case are amazing. It is particularly interesting because some have suggested that the tech-wreck was precipitated by the successful prosecution of Microsoft on anti-trust charges. And while I don't think that is the whole story (or even most of it, there were plenty of excesses in the system, something which happens in every period of enormous and fast growth), I do think, however, that it is part of the story. Major innovations require a lot of investment with a high chance of failure. The reason people participate is that there is also the chance of very large profits mainly through temporary monopolistic pricing power which comes to early innovators who end up creating standards which they can protect. But innovation moves on and dominant companies don't remain so (a quick look at the companies mentioned in the article cited above will quickly attest to that as will a glance at the Dow components in 1939 or 1969). If entrepreneurs feel that if their product is successful and when they are about to enter the period of extraordinary profits that the government will step in to force them to give up intellectual properties or curtail their profits, those entrepreneurs will be less likely to create new risky businesses to begin with and the markets will be less willing to fund them.

Hmmm... Don't most of these countries have despotic kleptocratic authoritarian socialist governments in place. Could there be a connection?

Another great piece by Mark Steyn on attempts to blame Bush for current corporate misdeeds:

"So Bush critics have instead dragged up a low-interest loan the President got from some oil company he was a director of over a decade ago. "President Bush likes to preach responsibility," said Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. "When it comes to his own records, the motto is: 'The buck stops over there.' " "It is hard to lead when you haven't done the things that you're asking others to do," tutted Dick Gephardt, House Democratic leader. This is the same Terry McAuliffe who founded Federal City Bank, which was deemed by regulators to be using unsound banking practices and which, while Mr. McAuliffe was also serving as finance director for the 1988 presidential campaign of one Dick Gephardt, gave said Gephardt an "unusual and unsecured" loan for $125,000.

So, if the low-interest loan won't jump, the only outrageous Bush-toppling scandal left in play is the fact that in 1990 Harken Energy Corp was a few months late filing a routine letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming that Mr. Bush had divested some stock and was blah-blah-blah ... growing drowsy ... zzzzzzzz ... impenetrable technical violation ... losing the will to type ...
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By the end of last week, the ethics bores were whipped up over the SEC's latest investigation -- into Bristol-Myers Squibb for practices that "inflated sales by $1-billion." What this boils down to is: Their sales guys went around saying hey, you should buy our products now because they'll be going up next year. According to the New York Daily News, "Critics charge the company knew the resulting, incentive-driven sales exceeded demand but encouraged the stockpiling anyway as a way to meet profit projections." "Bristol-Myers may be forced to restate its revenues," said Steven Tighe, drug analyst at Merrill Lynch. What for? No one's suggesting they didn't sell the stuff. Actual product changed hands: the customers have the drugs; the drug company has the money. That puts Bristol-Myers' customers one step ahead of, say, GroupAction Marketing's customers -- or, at any rate, the government ones. So in what sense is this "inflating" sales? Talk about a damp Squibb.

More to the point, it's a model of rectitude compared to what passes for bookkeeping in your average U.S. Government department, especially the "sensitive" ones (Office of Civil Rights, Bureau of Indian Affairs, etc.). A good rule of thumb in government budgets is: no figure means nothing. I mean, it looks nice, it fills the dollars-and-cents box on the spreadsheet, but for all the relationship it bears to anything you might as well enter Anna Nicole Smith's breast size on every line. At least that way, we'll know they're artificially inflated.

No accountability? Missing billions? Fantasy bookkeeping? Pick any Federal agency you like. WorldCom's $4-billion is less than a third of the $12.1-billion Medicare misplaces every single year. It's less than a thirtieth of the $142-billion the Federal Government has overspent its supposedly binding budgets by in the last five years. It's less than one-sixtieth of the new US$248-billion farm subsidy bill, three-quarters of which goes to a bunch of multimillionaire play-farmers like Ted Turner and David Rockefeller."

I suspect this is a hoax, but I am willing to try it anyway.

Thomas Sowell on why we should be worried about governments attempts to fix the the stock market.

Jonah Goldberg on the new food cops. They can pry my bacon-cheesburger from my cold, dead hands.

Michael Kelly tries to be nice:

" Allen Iverson, I have written unkindly about you, too, suggesting that you were a dangerous thug. Mr. Iverson, you are a fine man and a role model to our nation's youth, and you have every right to allegedly threaten people with guns if you need to find out where your wife is. Or for any reason at all, sir."
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When I wrote that our captains of industry were "the greediest bunch of no-talent morons the world has seen since the Harding administration," I was talking through my hat. You guys are awesome. You made a few mistakes -- but, look, am I so perfect? On behalf of our nation's investors, pensioners, widows and orphans, and also on behalf of your many, many thousands of grateful former employees, I would like to thank you all for your years of hard slogging as stewards of our great corporations. You deserve every penny you got your sticky mitts on, and I, for one, am happy to be left holding the bag. I would invest my little all with you again, if I still had a little all.
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John Walker Lindh, your father says that you are "a really good kid," who "loves America." Right-o, all is forgiven; sorry. John Henry Williams, don't listen to the critics. There is nothing shabby about freezing your dad and selling off his DNA."

See, anyone can be nice if they just try.

Fine piece in TechCentralStation on why it is not always better to be safe than sorry.

Has anyone on the design committee noticed that the design for the new Clinton Presidential library looks like a double-wide trailer?

Information Week notices blogging.

Lew Rockwell has a fine essay in defense of the increasingly maligned benefits of capitalism:

"Must we compare the record of capitalism with that of the state, which, looking at the sweep of this past century alone, killed hundreds of millions of people in its wars, famines, camps, and deliberate starvation campaigns? And the record of central planning of the type now being urged on American enterprise is perfectly abysmal.

Let the state attempt to eradicate anything--unemployment, poverty, drugs, business cycles, illiteracy, crime, terrorism--and it ends up creating more of it than would have been the case if it had done nothing at all.

The state has created nothing. The market has created everything. But let the stock market fall 20 percent in 18 months, and what happens? The leading intellectuals discover anew why the Bolshevik Revolution was a pretty good idea, even if the results weren't what idealists might have hoped. We are told that we must rethink the very foundations of civilization itself.

In every society, there is greed, fraud, and theft. But let these vices rear their heads in a socialist society--though the norm is a continual and brutal struggle for power--and the fact goes unnoticed or is attributed to the remnants of capitalist thinking. Let these vices appear in a largely free economy, and the cry goes out: take away the freedom to trade and put the state in charge! "

Meanwhile Den Beste takes on some new nutty auto legislation proposed by Grey Davis and in the process points out that, in fact, everything can't be free for everyone. In fact, nothing is free (including energy from the sun), everything costs something and life is an optimization problem of getting the most out of scarce resources.

Notes from the 24th annual "intensive study" of Marxism:

"Factions weren't really in evidence, but disputes did break out. During a heated discussion of racist elements within Marxism itself, Brenda Stokely, chairman of the New York Labor Party, broke through a crescendo of exasperated voices with the cry: "There should be free everything for everybody!"
...
At this point, Mr. Smith warned that participants should not content themselves with imagining alternatives to capitalism. Such alternatives "are inevitable," he said. "I've never seen the U.S. ruling class so out on a limb." But "there's nothing that says egalitarian socialism or a feminist society, and not global military control, is the next step."

Other lecturers were less gloomy. An articulate, if chirpy, young woman named Lisa Featherstone gave an update on the anti-globalists who disrupt meetings of the World Trade Organization or "wherever else global bourgeoisie get together." She said that the slogan "another world is possible" had become "ubiquitous" on campuses. Young people had even taken to "anti-capitalist lifestyles." She cited the Anti-Authoritarian Baby-Sitters Club, where "the fiercest looking men" give up a day of protesting to stay at home and watch the kids.
At the mention of this novelty, an argument erupted in the back of the room. Josh, a graduate student, said that the lives of the protesters were shot through with what Marx referred to as the fetishism of commodities. Their love of organic food, he implied, was greater than their love of the oppressed who grow it. Ms. Featherstone conceded the point. She mentioned that organic farming might actually be "more exploitative" than large, mechanized farms, "because it requires more stooping."

Several people nodded their heads approvingly, happy to learn something new. Finally, "Capital" had something fresh to teach! Another world is possible indeed. "

Hmmm...no mention of the 100+ million and counting victims of the various 'Marxist' experiments in the last century or the overwhelming increase in living standards by all of the residents of the evil capitalist countries (although Ms. Featherstone did concede that the big, evil capitalist farms might actually require less stooping). But I think the grand philosophy of this crowd was best summarized by the line shouted by one of the participants: "There should be free everything for everybody!". Here, here! I would like my Ferrari delivered to my home please.

Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed by Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby. [more] (from the Onion).
Better mortgage rate and breast-size increasing lobbies expected to join the fight. In fact the breast-enlargment and penis-enlargement groups would make natural allies.

File of Unintended Consequences

It seems that Boston's 'Living Wage' statute which requires local contractors to pay a minimum wage of $10.54 an hour may force multiple child care facilities supporting low-income families to close because they can't afford the increase. [more]

Blog Watch:

Interesting post on the Qu'ran (Koran) and the problems of translation at Ideofact.

Another fine post by Den Beste on why the ICC is a bad idea.

Also, taking on the premise of "Reign of Fire" he comments on how dragons would actually fare against modern military equipment.
He thinks we would win easily although as one of his readers pointed out:

"Update 20020715: Robert writes as follows:

You're forgetting the dragon's most dangerous weapon -- our own stupidity. Any species reduced to a handful of individuals is endangered, and thus would immediately be protected -- never mind the danger they pose! Clearly, humanity hunted them nearly to extinction, and there's NO WAY it's gonna happen again.

Dragons would be protected from all hunting, and having one move onto your land would mean you lose all control over that land. And there SURE ain't no way to "shoot, shovel, and shut up" with a dragon!

So, much like Florida alligators, dragons would go from fascinating curiousity to minor pest to major menace in, oh, twenty years or so.

Unfortunately, his point is well taken."

Will Wilkinson takes on Stanley Fish and post-modernism.