I Need To Concentrate ...

(To the tune of "You're All I Think About These Days," sung by Patty Loveless, written by Gary Scott Burr)

I try to think about Freedom
Owning
Self-posession through the day
I try to think about indiv-
idu-
ality built in the clay
I try to think about ideals
And real deals
Anything to get me through
I need to concentrate
Free will, I think about these days

I try to contemplate the cosmos
Mottoes
Self-possession through the night
I try to rely on my brain
All reigns
Finally going out of sight
I try to avoid the headlines
News whines
Every time I think I might
I need to concentrate
Honesty, I think about these days

My mind wanders where I will
When it sets on what to do
I well know what I should say
I well know what I should do

I try to think about Rothbard
Life's hard
Tardigrades, Robert Heinlein
I try to think about don't-do's
Real news
Quotations and well-wrought lines
I try to think about podcasts
The past
But I guess I should have known
I need to concentrate
Voluntarily I think these days
Voluntarily I think these days

Ireland #3

Ireland is under the radar.  So the nation quietly approaches over our shoulders.  Ireland never meant to set the world on fire, it meant only to expel interlopers.  Ireland and the Irish people are content with what they have been dealt ... which has become quite a lot, actually.

This despite the probability that the Irish diaspora is among the largest in the world, per capita of the peak population in the native land -- Wikipedia has said this:

[The diaspora] ... consists of Irish emigrants and their descendants in countries such as the United States (see Irish Americans), the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa, and nations of the Caribbean and continental Europe, where small but vibrant Irish communities continue to exist. The diaspora contains over 80 million people and it is the result of mass migration from Ireland, due to past famines (especially the Irish Potato Famine), poverty, and political oppression. The term first came widely into use in Ireland in the 1990s when the then-President of Ireland, Mary Robinson began using it to describe all those of Irish descent. Notable people of the global Irish diaspora are United States presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton ...

 --  I have heard that more than 40 million of the USA's population has some Irish ancestry.  I count myself among that number, as my father was a Carigan and my mother was a Ryan.  Half of me arises in the lost province of Ulster, from Protestant stock, and the other half comes from the Republic where the Catholic church is predominant.

Irish-Americans today outnumber the inhabitants of Ireland nearly 9-to-1, and the combined population of the Irish island (including UK territory, Northern Ireland) by more than 6-to-1.  So, even though many had to leave Ireland because of a combination of illegitimate rule and famine (which in turn was likely caused by the illegitimate rulers), as many stayed to sue for freedom as could manage.  Today, more than 4/5th of the island, politically, has both freedom and a native land.  My point is that even though large portions of the native inhabitants had to leave, those who remained did not let their depopulation stand as an excuse for surrendering to the the invaders.

Nearly every place in the world has pockets of separatist or secessionist spirit, but the majority of Ireland itself has shown a tendency to resist invasion with low profile libertarianism.  I used to write a blog at Nolanchart.com titled "The Easter Rising," and that name referred to the Easter occupation of the General Post Office (GPO), an arm of the British Empire, in Dublin in 1916.  The English forces crushed that uprising but it was the forerunner to the founding of the Free Republic of Ireland in 1922.  The interlopers from the UK maintained an extortion of territory, called Northern Ireland, in the aforesaid Ulster province.

I named my column after this signal event because the Irish seem to me to be the most libertarian culture, not country, but culture.  When the Irish talk about nation, in my view, they talk about common birth and culture, certainly not territory or government.  Here I use territory as the political jurisdiction of a government as opposed to the beautiful land that is coterminous with the state known as Ireland.

A recent entry at Wikipedia states that Ireland's government has about 300 thousand employees, at all levels.  Meanwhile, the USA federal government alone has over 4 million.  It would be interesting to see how many of the Irish bureaucrats are holdovers from the British bureaucracy that held sway for more than 800 years.  As we know in this country, from the FDR era alone, once established government entities hardly ever go entirely away.  It looks like there are 14 private sector Irish people for every Irish public sector employee.  Comparable Figures between the USA and Ireland are difficult to find.

As time goes by, it seems to me, bureaucracies tend to embed themselves by hiding from popular scrutiny.  They achieve this by ever refining the arcane know-how that is necessary to navigate their bailiwick.  The number of government bureaucrats is hidden from the general constituency.  By the same token, the general constituency finds workarounds to limit the effect of government.  Bureaucracy and constituency become two ships passing silently in the night.  I expect that the Irish culture has gone much farther along this road.  Bureaucracies never go away, they just appear to be occupied by ever more picayune details, to the point that the minutia has a fineness that is overlooked by the most fussy.

The point is that the only place in Ireland where I even saw statist functionaries was in the confines of the American TSA at the Dublin Airfield (outgoing).  Otherwise, the country was a grand retreat from the sense of constant officious herding that I get at home.  As an interesting sidenote,  I have seldom met a more agreeable genus of people in the street than in Ireland.  But, though the USTSA employees were mostly Irish, they had been converted into mean-spirited wretches by the process of harassing would-be passengers to America.

Of course we were already being herded, since we were on an organized tour.  But here is the difference, our tour was voluntary.  Given the history of Ireland, I guess you could say the same thing about the Irish.  Once the technology of travel reached a certain tipping point, it was easier voluntarily to join the diaspora than to stick around and be treated like a dirty dog.  Nowadays, there seems to be a nice balance of population and wealth and enjoyable living, so the Irish have no chip on their shoulders, except for those who toil as authoritarian minions for the American Transportation Safety Administration.

 -- Verbal Vol

Principles

Part of the challenge of lifelong learning is to understand that the goal is not to add to your collection of "well what do you know's", but to assimilate your new knowledge with the creation of, revisiting, modification of, or withdrawing (shedding) from your current set of principles.

It does one no good to regard new information as just "interesting," one needs to test that new learning against the structure, the principles, of one's information system.

For instance, my information system is built, in the main, on the principle that all human interactions should be one-to-one and voluntary on both sides.  An incorporated principle is the Golden Rule.

I have other principles that are complementary to the above.  I believe that I am personally responsible for myself.  I believe that I own my space and time.  I believe that unnatural violence is always wrong.  I believe that it would be wrong to infringe on others' space and time unless they give them voluntarily in full view of consequences.

What is the structure of your principles.  First of all, your principles should be connected, each to each of the others.  This is the way the Internet is structured.  If a node on the Internet becomes inoperable then all of the undamaged nodes can still reach all of the other undamaged nodes.  The Internet can survive the temporary nonavailability of any node, part, or segment, short of total loss.

Voluntary individuality works the same way.  For every relationship that a voluntaryist keeps, all of the dependencies should be strictly on a one-to-one footing.  All features of the relationship are voluntarily agreed upon between the two parties.  Each party is able to maintain as many similar relationships, independently, as she chooses.  One-to-one relationships do not require license from some 3rd party individual or collective.  In software engineering, my professional calling, we refer to a system having high cohesion and low coupling.  Cohesion is the degree to which an object fulfills a single function (desirable).  Coupling is the degree to which an object is dependent on more than one other object (undesirable).

As one's set of principles is an interlocking complex, effectiveness and efficiency are raised by high cohesiveness, but low coupling.  Let's look at some examples.  

The non-agression principle (NAP) is a mainstay of libertarian voluntaryism.  It is cohesive in that it governs only one aspect of any human relationship.  Is it violent?  Yes or no?  I define the NAP as prohibiting violence, in all cases.  If the relationship is violent it cannot be under the NAP, because it does not follow the principle.  The rest of this piece concerns itself with coupling.

There are a few critical subsets of the principle.  Has the individual initiated the violence -- as children may insist, "he started it it?"  And, did one party act in self-defense.  Note that self-defense does not comply with the NAP; it is only an exception by which the perpetrator may not be condemned (dependent on the clear cut definition of the behavior).  I repeat, for clarity in a seldom acknowledged fact, self-defense does not comply with the NAP, it is merely a condition under which the NAP may not be applicable.  Likewise, non-initiation is not an excuse for ignoring the NAP.  It is merely a possible mitigation for analyzing the NAP.  If either party initiates violence, the NAP is moot -- it cannot be stretched to fit the case.

Some people will say that the NAP is not a pacifist doctrine, but despite popular opinion to the contrary, it is pacifist.  The composition fallacy often arises because self-defense (in a true sense) is a natural right, and it appeals to common sense when considering complex or fuzzy cases.  Some extend this composition fallacy to cover retaliation (committing delayed violence in retribution for an earlier violence).  It is not true that capital punishment or any form of revenge is under the wing of the NAP.

The NAP is a principle that requires very careful and close parsing or expression.  This is true as well for its associated principles: self-defense is a natural right and if violence is initiated then the NAP is out of the question for the initiator.

The purpose of a principle is to set a plan for action for similar cases in the future.  The NAP, for instance, gives us a narrowed selection of choices when we encounter violence from another or feel compelled to initiate violence.  But all cases do not fall into neat rows.  The ability to deal with fuzziness arises from a multitude of highly general (one size fits most) principles, along with very few and very specific exceptions.

Every event in the present and past should be reviewed with principle in mind.  Important questions are these:

• Does the event invoke a principle?
• If the event is not within the four corners of a principle, are there associated principles that account for the differences?
• Are there other principles that come into play?
• How do these other principles relate to the primary principle?
• How clear is each of the principles that apply to the event?

In consideration of the last question above, let's look at an example, the Golden Rule:

• The Golden Rule is "Treat others as you wish to be treated."
• Treat others as they’d like to be treated.
• Treat yourself as you’d treat someone else.
• Don’t let other people treat you badly.
• One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated (negative or prohibitive form).
• What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself (empathic or responsive form).

As we can see the Golden Rule covers its own scope, but there are related maxims outside of its literal scope.  The individual must decide for each rule and the area covered by it.

Lastly, we might considered the mathematics of interacting entities.  If two individuals interact on one principle, there are 4 possibilities; both are right or A is right while B is wrong or A is wrong while B is right or both are wrong.  If two individuals interact on 2 related principles:

		Principle Y True	Principle Y False	Principle Z True	Principle Z False
Individual A		TRUE	TRUE	TRUE	TRUE
Individual B		FALSE	FALSE	FALSE	FALSE
Individual A		TRUE	FALSE	FALSE	TRUE
Individual B		FALSE	TRUE	FALSE	TRUE

Horizontally, there are 16 cases, while vertically, there are 16 cases; 32 in total.  By adding one related principle, we have increased the possibilities by eightfold.  

If we add a third related principle, we multiply by 8 again, arriving at 256 different sets of agreement/disagreement.  The same kinds of multiples show up if we increase the number of individuals.

It is very daunting to keep multiples of principles straight, or multiples of individuals straight.  That is why a voluntaryist wants to keep interpersonal relationships on a one-to-one footing, and principles as close to Ockham's Razor as possible.  My version of Ockham's Razor is:  the simplest set of matters which fits all of the facts, no more, no less.

Influences III

If I were a guest on a podcast or an interview broadcast, when asked about my major influences, I would stick close to the names repeated by voluntaryists -- Spooner, Bastiat, Jefferson, Mencken, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Higgs, and Woods. But in this more expansive context, I can stretch out to discuss the influences whom made me a voluntaryist before I knew I was one, before I knew to read the internal literature of the voluntaryist, libertarian, individualist mainstream. Three such influences are Alan Turing, Dan Carlin, and Ruth Rendell.

Alan Turing

Recently, I watched the great movie, The Imitation Game. First, this caused me to check my list of influences to make sure that Alan Turing was there. The movie focused on Turing's cracking of the Enigma Code, and it nodded toward the sexual preference in Turing's life. It did not mention in any concrete way that Turing changed our lives forever beyond saving the world from the Third Reich.

I often play "Stump the Professor" with my students by challenging them to name a walk of life that functions without computers. The last serious suggestion was farming, about 20 years ago. That was mainly true at the time -- not anymore. The last desperate guess was hairdresser, about 10 years ago (I responded to that by asking how the hairdresser communicates -- by telephone then, by multiple electronic means now).

I am a pilot of Turing Machines. As are so many of us in the modern world. Many more are passengers, but I know where some of the nuts and bolts are.

Because of people like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Vannevar Bush, I returned to school at the age of 45, to get more degrees, in computer science, after my first in English two decades earlier.

Of the three great men, I must choose Alan Turing even though he was the most troubling (I do not refer to the aspect of his life for which the British government killed him). His intellect is so vast it is impossible to judge his potential, or the potential affect going forward.

While the cracking of the Enigma code changed the course of human events, it is beyond our grasp what Turing may have wrought if he hadn't been immersed in the Enigma problem, or if his creative space had not been constrained by persecution and early death at the hands of the very government and culture that he saved.

It would be a thankless toil to estimate the effect of his codebreaking accomplishment, but it would be an endless loop to delimit his growing influence on the world of tomorrow. This is the idea that has influenced me and my life so much.

Can you imagine what you would not be doing if your actions were not related to the Turing Machine?

We have called them computers for the last 50 years, yet they are Turing Machines. We recently have changed to calling them devices, because they come in so many shapes and sizes, yet they are Turing Machines.




Dan Carlin

It was almost 8 years ago, when I discovered the power of podcasts in the hands of a personality, such as Dan Carlin. Eight years later, I still think of him as the best podcaster, the most professional and the most dedicated to the new medium. Not only that, he is articulate, blessed with a unique view, and scholarly without pedantry. His main work is Hardcore History by which he has delivered what, in my view, are indelibly memorable and gripping recountings of World War I, Genghis Khan, and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. He enlivens these marathon works with exhaustive research. Just look at the bibliography at the foot of this page. He is not a professor; he's the best history nerd you have ever heard. He has rekindled the history nerd in me.

Secondly, Dan uses his particular perspective on history to make commentary on current events in a podcast called Common Sense. The web site promotes it as follows:

What is Common Sense? Dangerously thoughtful. Common Sense with Dan Carlin isn’t a show for everyone, and that’s what makes it so great. It’s a smart, deep, passionate, engaging, inquisitive and of course, politically Martian view of news and current events. There’s nothing else like it.

I cannot tell you a fraction of what you will realize on your own listening. Most other podcasts will try to entertain you, with the personalities even acting buffoonishly to try to distract you from the pedestrian content. Not so with Carlin. Dan keeps you attending every word with all the sweep, emotion, mystery, and surprise of the real events as though you are there and your fortune hangs from those events (it does, and Dan knows it).

The blurb above mentions a Martian outlook. One of Carlin's tools is to adopt the kind of objectivity that a wise visitor from another planet might have. He has no earthly political axes to grind. His only agendum is a desire to end the corruption that sullies human behavior, but makes no common sense. Even though he is a self-labeled military history aficianado, he does not shy away from the central question of war and its place in the moral landscape of history.

Dan Carlin's shows occupy a place in my mind that makes him one of the most influential people in my history. I have only been exposed to him for just under 8 years, but he has a primary place in my 7 decades of experience. I could offer you no better advice, if you don't know this man, than that you go, immediately upon reading this piece, to DanCarlin.com, to discover a new world of insight.





Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell is the first woman about whom I will have written, but not the last. It is fitting that I begin with her, since before Rendell, discovered by me in the early 70s, my encounters with literature consisted entirely of male authors.

Rendell is also the first mystery writer about whom I will have written, in this series, but not the last. In the sixties I had found Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald, and in the 50s, my schoolboy years, I was a ravenous reader of Sherlock Holmes, as envisioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But Ruth Rendell's work was a significant departure from these works. Maybe she wasn't better a mystery writer, but in terms of art and a grasp on the human pageant, she took no back seat.

While Doyle was a master of structure, logic, and ingenuity, and the three mid-century Americans (although MacDonald was born in Canada) were purveyors of mood, atmosphere, surprise, and personal moral codes, Rendell added so much more. Color and richness were the least of her strengths. She dealt in psychology, individuality (even eccentricity), happenstance, and unforeseen consequences.

Ruth Rendell also is probably the only politician, in a customary sense, that I number among my major influences. She was a member of the British Parliament's House of Lords from 1997 until her death in 2015.

Her literary fortes were complexity (even the simplest events had deep undercurrents) and the more complex unforeseen consequences stemming from them.

To name 3 of her best books:

• The Speaker of Mandarin -- the first Rendell volume, for me, introduced me to her one recurring leading character, Inspector Reginald Wexford, a staid but wise observer of the contemporary scene. Her police procedurals are excellent, obeying the rules, but are not the most spectacular of her books, satisfying more than thrilling. 
• King Solomon's Carpet -- this was my personal favorite, written under her pen name of Barbara Vine. This is a novelized history of the London Underground, set within a multi-plotted modern mystery, which appealed to my jonesing for both urban rail and whodunits. 
• Portobello -- Here Rendell celebrated a market street through the center of Notting Hill, draping upon it a stunning collection of characters from many walks of life, whose experiences converged through complicated happenstance. 

Her writing excels via the McGuffins (compulsions) that she attaches to each major character.  Each has his or her own quest, very idiosyncratic quests.  Most other writing does well to have one McGuffin.




Conclusion

Of course, Alan Turing is well known and unique in the history of the development of humanity. He made a major breakthrough in the way the future would evolve. His contributions cannot be reversed as long as humans survive as a species. On the other hand, Carlin and Rendell are neither widely known nor the only purveyors of their ideas. But they are unique and powerful conduits of those ideas. Dan Carlin examines the corruptibility of statist society, from a point of view informed by a powerful grasp of history, coupled with an undying hope that objective review of facts will move us forward. Ruth Rendell weaves her tales through the endless, kaleidoscopic possibilities of human interaction among singular individuals.

Math Conundrum

In this meme presenting a sentiment from F. A. Hayek, one of the reasons why no two individuals are alike is that each has an infinite number of characteristics which have values, as well as an infinite number of relationships among those characteristics. 

If I were to begin to tell you how A was a distinct individual when compared to B, I would never complete the task of identifying all the differences.  Most characteristics are not atomic, ie. Broken down to its smallest component, an indivisible piece.  Most characteristics are complexes of systems and subsystems.

For instance, no two sets of fingerprints, irises, retina, or dna are the same.  The differences for slow-motion mankind are infinite, not to include the complexity that each object must occupy its own exclusive location in space/time/probability.

Given the profundity of these differences, how could you devise rules that would separate two uniquely born creatures for purposes of making one a master and the other a slave?  How do you decide that the person with the redder skin must forfeit land to the person with less red skin?  Color itself, if not infinitely variable, has as many possibilites as there are living individuals on the Earth.

Let's say for the sake of argument, that all human characteristics are equal and each can have only one value, out of two -- black or white.  Now, posit that there are only two characteristics, hair color and skin color.  With an individual there are 4 possible combinations.  A has black hair, black skin or white hair, black skin or white hair, white skin or black hair, white skin.

For two individuals, there are 4 chances to be alike, but 12 chances to be different.  With only 3 individuals or 3 characteristics, the numbers get out of hand very quickly.  Of course, there are billions of individuals and likely an infinite number of characteristics, some of which can have an infinite number of values.  Where to begin to make rules (legal fictions) which can separate one individual from another.

We normally stoop to the practical measure of declaring one or a few characteristerics to be more important than other combinations.  But how do we do that?  Is height more important than width.  Maybe.  Is age more wise than youth?  Maybe.  Is experience worth more than intelligence, or is a combination of the two worth more than either alone?  What are the scoring rules?

What combination of characteristics gives us an effective probability of identifying the better master compared to the better slave?  Is there a combination of tweaks or random generators that will magically refine the results?

Many of us cite Ockham's Razor, which we believe says "Keep it simple, stupid -- KISS," but this heuristic rather says "Make it complete -- don't omit the necessary, but don't attach the unnecessary."  How do we guage the "necessary."

We have recently seen Congress tie itself in knots trying to please a POTUS who has no idea what he wants, who is at a loss as to which values belong to which characteristics of which yearnings.  This is to say nothing about the arcane rules of procedure and counting that confound a determination of truth in any concrete way.

Sometimes, it appears that we do things to hedge against results.  If our procedure is kinky enough, it can explain away all of the unforeseen consequences.  And we are left with excuses to try even more ridiculous flights of stairs in buildings other than the one we would hope to climb.

Influences 2

With every week that passes, I think of new names to add to my list of influences.  But the thinkers shown in today's effort are those with the names that I carry around in my head -- writing them down as a reminder is not needed.  Today, I will write about Dr. Robert Higgs, Henry Louis Mencken, and Mark Twain, whom I have mentioned, probably, in reverse order of each's world reknown.  Is there anyone on the planet who has not heard of Mark Twain?  He very well could be the most famous American.  H. L. Mencken should be known everywhere that humans engage in thought.  And I have a reasonable expectation that some day, Dr. Higgs, who is now slightly younger than I, will have fame among a wider scope -- he is currently well-known among most people who champion voluntaryist principles.

Robert Higgs

He lives now in Xcalak, Mexico.  I discovered him while he was still in Louisiana, USA before he retired.  But I follow him every day.  He posts regularly on Facebook.  Of all the current stars in the libertarian/voluntaryist/Austrian economist/anarchy firmament, his is the brightest, to me.  I'm talking about comparing him with Ludwig von Mises, Frédéric Bastiat, Murray Rothbard, Lysander Spooner, Henry Mencken, Harry Browne, Don Boudreaux, Walter Williams, Lew Rockwell, Henry Hazlitt, Sheldon Richman, Scott Horton, Skyler J. Collins, too many others to mention, ... even Tom Woods.  Bob Higgs is the man who writes among economists as Robert Penn Warren wrote among novelists.  He will be famous, if for no other reason, for his exposition of the Ratchet Effect.

The Ratchet Effect concerns itself with the idea that each time government finds an excuse to expand, when the excuse has expired the expansion remains (see Homeland Security).  The Pentagon is a monument to the Rachet Effect.  At any level of government, one can find a dizzying array of agencies that must have seemed like a good idea at the time.  The trouble is that these agencies never go away, remaining permanently and independently of the initial intent.  Can you name a compartment of government that has gone away?  Not so fast there.  It cannot just be subsumed into another agency.  We may have outlawed something like dueling, but if it had been regulated by an agency, that agency would have been a survivor of every duel.

Robert P. Murphy writes of Higgs as follows

One of economic historian Bob Higgs's outstanding contributions is the "ratchet effect." During a crisis, the size and scope of government grow tremendously. After the crisis subsides, government shrinks, but not to the precrisis level. In consequence, leviathan expands over the decades, leaping from one crisis to the next. ... We see Higgs's thesis of the ratchet effect on brilliant display with the Federal Reserve in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.

More than anything else, Dr. Higgs has taught me proper disrespect for propaganda and political bloviation.  For instance, he writes

Every year, on Veterans Day, orators declare that our leaders have gone to war to preserve our freedoms and have done so with glorious success, but the truth is just the opposite. In ways big and small, direct and indirect, crude and subtle, war—the quintessential government activity—has been the mother's milk for the nourishment of a growing tyranny in this country, and it remains so today.

Mark Twain

Following the Equator is not Mark Twain's best book.  It would be hard to pick one, and even harder to not pick Huckleberry Finn.  But I think the passage that most affected me in a Twain book was his account of the genocide, the total annihilation, the complete eradication, the wholesale murder of the natives who lived on the islands of what are now called Tasmania.













In a few short paragraphs, Twain said everything there was to say about one class of humans presuming to be the betters of other humans,

These were indeed wonderful people, the natives. They ought not to have been wasted. They should have been crossed with the Whites. It would have improved the Whites and done the Natives no harm. 

But the Natives were wasted, poor heroic wild creatures. They were gathered together in little settlements on neighboring islands, and paternally cared for by the Government, and instructed in religion, and deprived of tobacco, because the superintendent of the Sunday-school was not a smoker, and so considered smoking immoral. 

The Natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular hours, and church, and school, and Sunday-school, and work, and the other misplaced persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and their wild free life. Too late they repented that they had traded that heaven for this hell. They sat homesick on their alien crags, and day by day gazed out through their tears over the sea with unappeasable longing toward the hazy bulk which was the specter of what had been their paradise; one by one their hearts broke and they died.

In a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained alive. A handful lingered along into age. In 1864 the last man died, in 1876 the last woman died, and the Spartans of Australasia were extinct. 

The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. He cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family’s naked bodies, and nothing to eat but snakes and grubs and ‘offal. This would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage—but he hasn’t any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them. One is almost betrayed into respecting those criminals, they were so sincerely kind, and tender, and humane; and well-meaning. [from the Gutenberg Project PDF file of the book, Following the Equator: A Journey Around The World]

 Mark Twain was anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist.  It was through my lifelong reading of his works that I developed his sense of the absurd when it came to man's inhumanity to man.  Most stories about genocide of a small but valiant vestigial remain, are absurd.  One subspecies does not need to wipe out another subspecies for the latter's survival.  At worst there may be a semi-important difference of economic schema -- a clash between styles of possessing.  But it is absurd that one element must obliterate the other.

Henry Louis Mencken

 I cannot remember when my favorite saying, of all of those of all of the wits in the world, became H. L. Mencken's observation that " ... there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."  But I do know it was the day on which I changed my view of the world.  It was also the day upon which I became an avid reader of  Mr. Mencken's work.

Henry Louis, this great titan of journalism from Baltimore, seemed then and seems still among the brightest human minds, ever.  If a gigantic reason such as that held by this man saw many problems as too complex for neat and plausible explanations, then life must really be about complexity.  Life is not simple, humanity is not straightforward, human nature is not easily unpacked, and human error has confounded for ages.

Some will say that Mencken was just a cynic.  But there is not a hopeless misanthropy here (a trait he shares with Twain), how could anyone write so eloquently of the endless pageant, as beautifully and as long as did Mencken, and not in the end be guilty of holding out infinite hope that someday we would catch on?  Could it be that on some bright day we would stop being so half-baked about everything?

What's with IP?

[Kenny's Intro]
Kilgore Forelle and I have had another discussion. This time about intellectual property (IP) laws and their role, if any, in a free society. This EVC is not as much of a debate as the last, but still worth having.

[Verbal's Intro]
Kenny Kelly and Kilgore Forelle got together, again -- this time to discuss the thing inadequately labeled as intellectual property.

As H. L. Mencken once wrote, " ... there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."  He must have been addressing the statist response to 'IP,' copyright, and patent.

[Kenny's] thesis: Intellectual property (IP) is defined by Merriam-Webster as that which "derives from the work of the mind or intellect; also :  an application, right, or registration relating to this."

In other words, IP is intangible property that an individual has yet to mix labor with land to make an actual thing. "Property rights," as understood by libertarians, are claims to ownership of tangible objects. Not ideas.

[Kilgore:] Kenny, it looks as though we are going to agree, but perhaps for different reasons -- not that the reasons are incompatible.

I take the very empirical view that an object has to occupy a distinct locus on a space-time continuum.  I would state it this way -- ideas do not occupy space and cannot be a thing until they do.  An object is a person, place, thing, or event.

Although an idea could be called a thing, it is an abstract thing until it is connected with something concrete.  Often the concrete association is achieved by monetization.

If you can get someone to pay you for the right to use your idea then it has taken its place among the set of things that occupy unique addresses in time and space.

For example, the Beatles had an idea that became "Back in the USSR."  It is ironic that Paul decided to borrow ideas from Chuck Berry (Back in the USA)

and the Beach Boys (California Girls),

but to craft these into a third, unique product.  So, who owns this musical gem?  It is the belonging to an association that makes it an owned combination of things, a thing itself.  It is owned by Chuck Berry, one or more of the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, the Studio, the minions, the recording company, the crafters of the Beatles' instruments and equipment, and anybody who bought an instance of the song (ie a track on the "White Album").  The free market took care of those single relationships that needed more defining.

[Kenny:]  Yeah not incompatible, because I agree. I guess the question is: do you believe IP should be abolished or reduced?

[Kilgore:]  I believe that IP cannot be codified by the fictions of legislation or regulation.

As we see from the Beatles example, relationships are 1-to-1 but can become very complex.  We cannot devise a one-size-fits-all model.  The voluntary, individualist market arrangements that arise naturally for the least complex part will suffice to self-govern that part.  Complexity only accumulates one relationship at a time.  Each relationship has simple self-governance, or else it is a complex relationship where all objects do not have natural, balanced participation.

I don't intuit that we need IP.  An idea that is just a thought exists only within 1 person.  It is not shared.  Until it is shared, the question of ownership does not arise.  When the first question of ownership arises, it is within a 1-to-1 relationship, therefor voluntary agreement can take place, without compulsion.  Added relationships may bring complexity, but if each relationship is voluntary 1-to-1 the complex will be simple in principle.  Any addition of unagreed rules adds complexity, necessarily.  It does not simplify the complex, rather it confounds.

[Kenny:]  I agree. I mean, ideas are finite and are not subject to "stealing."

[Kilgore:]  Ok, so where does this leave us now?  I think we are both opposed to locking down the access to an idea.  But don't we also respect the person who has committed his idea to a form that can be transferred.  Do we, as free marketers, tell anyone that they cannot offer an artifact for sale on the open market?  Isn't that free marketer also entitled to say, "Pass on by if you do not value my product enough to pay an agreed upon price for it.  The seller can only create a small monopoly within the bounds of his marketed goods.

Where I have a problem is when middle men become involved, to create an artificial scarcity where one would not naturally exist.

Here's an example.  As a software engineer, I specialized in usability.  But an overwhelming part of the research literature was hidden from the public, because it was being held hostage by the two largest research organizations for the purpose of selling annual dues agreements.  I was a student at the University of Kentucky (UK), and as such, I could tap both of these sources by going in person to the Engineering School Library.  I could not access them at my own school where I worked because the Library at Kentucky State University (KSU) would not pay the steep institutional price.  I personally felt that the price for an individual membership was astronomical (probably done to maintain the lucrative major institution gravy train).

The upshot was that I was not a subscriber to either source of material.

I am struggling with isolating the principles that are involved here.

[Kenny:]  The "monopoly" isn't the issue. The issue is how that monopoly is formed. If it's from a producer, that's okay. If from the government by force, then not so much.

[Kilgore:]  How do you address the example I gave?

[Kenny:]  As long as the organizations didn't have government protection then it's a free market thing. If they did, then it's an artificial monopoly that ought be ended.

[Kilgore:]  Weren't the teeth behind their withholding of ideas supplied by governments' willingness to enforce copyright laws?

[Kenny:]  In this case, I don't know. If so, then it's an artificial monopoly. If not, it's the free market.

[Kilgore:]  I think the question is:  if there were no government threat of violence would copyright and patent be implementable?  A following question is:  would civilization disintegrate?

[Kenny:]  No and no. People would have to learn to be more strategic with their work.

[Kilgore:]  So what I'm hearing is that people who learn would become more strategic.  It is like the market itself -- it changes to fit the situation.  If copyright and patent are not there as artificial protections, then creative people will arrive at creative solutions to derive value from their labor.

It sounds as if it could be self-organizing, without threat of government enforcement.

In a voluntaryist society people would either make person-to-person agreements to exchange money, goods, or services for creative artifacts, or the creator who wanted to sell to mass consumers would have to accept the risks of putting a copyable format out there in the big world.

[Kenny:]  Exactly. Rothbard talked about how IP can be protected without government.  Rothbard wrote a lot of articles about it. This is one that's easier to read. http://cdn.whipups.net/uploads/236/7patents_copyrights.pdf

[Kilgore:]  That's an excellent reference, Kenny, wherein Rothbard emphasizes the organic nature of property holding in an open market with polycentric law.  If the property exists concretely it can only change ownership through voluntary transaction or theft.  The most basic, natural laws against theft will suffice.

Apart from that, a second market principle applies.  A creator must consider comparative advantage when deciding how to protect his own interests.  Is it more effective to pursue the casual copier/downloader or the for-profit pirate?  Is it more rational to pursue the pirate in the bigger market or the smaller?  Does one get more bang from chasing the pirate in the market at hand or in the distant one.

Someone once told me that he was advised to protect all frontiers of copyright or risk being deemed to have waived the copyright.  Is this a thing?  If so, wouldn't it make far more sense to rely on common law relating to theft?

[Kenny:]  I don't know, IP laws are based on coercion. That's why in today's market if I record or publish anything I'd put it in public domain so no one can claim ownership of it.

[Kilgore:]  Public domain it is.  Anything I do is in the public domain.  The fictional legislative interventions bring on a market response -- it is too costly in terms of time, effort, and hassle to use copyright procedures.

If I suffer insupportable damages, ie. a real crime has been done, then I can avail myself (having awaited an actual event) of ancient common law, natural law and ethics as they apply.  This is an instance of observing Ockham's Razor.

[Kenny:]  In conclusion, IP laws would be unnecessary in a free market. If you take pride in your work it would be prudent to be patient and form a business strategy. IP laws seem to be supported by impatient people or those who lack business savvy, from the average Joe to corporatists.

Meat Puppets

Recently, I listened to the podcast of Skyler Collins' interview with Aaron White.  Since they both have daughters, Skyler asked whether Aaron agreed that girls need to be toughened to deal with life.  Aaron's response was, to my way of thinking, that there are a lot of jerks in the world so we all need to be prepared -- no need to toughen particular people beyond that which they would normally develop in their own passage through life.

This got me to thinking about a long-held theory that I have had.  The facts are that there are way too many damaged people.  How does a voluntaryist navigate the minefield?  I propose the meat puppet theory as a way to quantify the existence of jerks, warmongers, and other broken people.

The fundamental assumption is that we are very close to the Pareto Principle when dealing with statistical groups.  The Pareto Principle, stated generally, says that phenomena divide themselves at an 80-20 distribution.  For instance, 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.  For another instance, if a bus fleet is 20% new, you might expect 80% of buses to be from older model years, and of the older ones, 80% of the older ones are more than two years old.  And so forth.  You can see this formulation has a recursive element too.  Each 80% segment is divisible into 80-20, as is each 20% segment.  But this is practically finite, if we just stick with whole numbers.

My thesis is that out of any statistical group of people, relative to the nature of the group, there are 80% below a marker, and only 20% above.  I'm saying that Skyler, Aaron, and myself, who all have daughters, have a prospect that 80%-96% of the people our daughters will encounter will be jerks, or other types of broken people.  These people are results of the genetic and memetic environments.  Looking at the ascending 20%, we can also see that 80% (or 16 in a group of 100) may be impaired relatively by bad luck, substances, and/or relationships.  That leaves 4% unimpaired, but 3% will be unfortunate compared to the 1% at the top of the heap.

A practical effect is that of all the babies born in a time period, 20% will be born into optimum circumstances, and of that 20%, only 20% will take advantage of the situation.  So the odds will be high that there will be many jerks or other broken people -- 96 out of 100.  Of the original number 80% will stay as they are because of accident of birth, while they will be joined by another 16% who dropped the ball on winning the cosmic birth lottery, failing to take advantage of being born in better circumstances.  The quid pro quo, however, is that approximately 20% of the lower 80% will, one way or another, overcome their original disadvantage to become reasonably functioning members of the whole.  If you remember Hitchhiker's Guide, you may equate the upper 20% of the lower 80% with the Golgafrinchan colonists who originally inhabited Earth.

So, attempting to summarize, any group is made up of 80% meat puppets, of the remaining 20%, 80% (16% of the original group) has become the equivalent of a meat puppet through misadventure.  That leaves 4%.  What are the odds that they will function together at all well?  20% in favor and 80% against.  There is also only a 20% chance that there are leadership traits among the top 4, there being an 80% chance that quasi-leaders will emerge from the meat puppet regions.  By the way, there is nearly a 100% chance that no one in the top 4% will want to become a leader.

So tread lightly out there young ladies, and young gentlemen as well.  The path is tortuous and steep.

Ireland #2

Blarney Castle

The grain is in the wood before the sawyer gets to it.  It doesn't matter how you crosscut or rip or turn it, the grain reveals itself, predictably but in an unique way.  The history of the wood is there to see.  Such is the spirit of the Irishman and the Irishwoman.  The Túatha is part of how the stock will be seen, no matter how it is turned.

Most of the history of these people came from this small island on the lefthand upper end of Europe.  The people go back to the originals.  How they got there is hidden in the fog of the past.  It is only speculation how, but somehow Celtic and Gaelic peoples got this far from Europe.  Their common trait was a language, and the Irish version of the language is spoken in no other quarter.

I am not a folklorist nor an anthropologist.  I am not an expert on how these people arose, but I am an Irishman, by as many as 7/8ths of my great grandparents.  My family tree is scattered with Carigans, Ryans, Allens, and Fitzpatricks.  I come from Protestant Northern Ulster Irish coalminers as well as from Catholic potato famine refugees from Leinster, Munster, and Connacht.  Although I did not get to set foot on Ireland's sod until my 74th year, I have been all my life part of one of the greatest diaspora in human history.  Curiously, I am also part of one of the few grand derangements that approach it.  That other 1/8th is Acadien from Chaleur Bay on the maritime reach of the St. Lawrence.

But let us return to the Túatha and why it is different.  The Túatha, among other things, are organizational entities, social groupings of people but not ones that subverted the people to the maintainance of some organizational imperative.  Most simply stated, the Túath is a social structure likely based on kinship.  Its primary purpose seemed to be as a dispute resolution structure.  A typical Túatha was limited in size so as not to overtax the structure.  It was often limited by delineation of one or more of kinship, tribe, territory, birth and/or origin.  Each Túath may have had different dispute resolution methods from other Túatha, and the constituents of one Túath were not individually bound to one Túath.  A plaintif could choose any dispute resolution mechanism from whichever Túath he or she chose to join and support.  But it was not unusual to see most Túatha go unchanged for trans-generational time periods.

These arrangements tended to support individual freedom.  Non-binding dispute resolutions, in the form of restitution, were suggested by a Brehon.  Brehon law, the term for Irish native law, was administered in Ireland down to almost the middle of the seventeenth century, among the native Irish until the depth of the English conquest.  Administrative structures tended to remain as small as the structures of the Túatha themselves.

In any event, the people of Ireland were relatively relieved of oppression and suppression until the Viking invasions about 1300 years ago.  Previously, there was not much call for bringing segments of the population to heel.  And the Túatha were unlikely ever used for conquest.  But those days were now gone.  A succession of overlords influenced the veneer of Ireland.  In the 12th century, the Norman invasion brought the most onerous period of foreign administration.  The Irish were ruled for 800 years by interlopers from England.  What does it take for a people to still want their freedom after so long?  Why are the overlords so willing to be pinned down themselves to oppression and suppression for so long?  I believe the answer lies in the grain of the people on both sides of the question.  The pattern was likely ingrained in the Irish by the long influence of the Túatha.  What compelled the British to pursue empire, apparently at all costs, lies beyond the scope of this writing.  The Irish descendents of the Túatha, however, never failed to keep the flame of independence alive for nearly a millennium.  Their history is on the lips of every Irish, and their modern memes still call for re-unification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.  A general cry is "32!," calling for the 6 Ulster counties to join the 26 counties of the current national configuration.

Every tour guide, from the brewhouse to the marketplace, bemoans the injustices of the British occupation, while taking a curious pride in the landmarks left behind.

We saw the multi-dimensional labyrinth of history, wherever we went through the South -- Dublin, Waterford, Midleton, Youghal, Cork, Cobh, and Kinsale.  And into the west, we saw it again at Blarney, Dunloe, Killarny, and Dingle.  As the trip wound down, the complexity of the past, the present, and the future played along the road through Limerick and Adare to Dunboyne (a lovely village on the northwestern edge of the Dublin conurbation).

I have been to many locales, but I don't believe I have been anywhere in which the individual is a stronger part of the common peoples' makeup.  Ireland is the shockwave rider in the global economy now.  Constantly reinventing itself to stay in the forefront.  There is still a bastion of English oppression, however, in the 6 counties of Ulster -- a ransom that was demanded at the time that England released the rest of Ireland to nationhood in 1922 -- giving rise, as I have written above, to the frequent meme, "32!" which symbolizes the joining of the 26 counties of Ireland with the 6 counties of the Ulster Province of Northern Ireland (UK).

This is not a matter of dreams so that all Irish will become one with a collective, but that they all might live in a similar self-sustaining freedom.