Libertarian Man of Mystery

Bad meteorology costs money

The Mayor of Moscow wants to fine meteorologists when they get the forecast wrong.

Perhaps we need the same thing to happen here. Those meteorologists predicted a huge winter storm for the Washington, DC area, and so far there's hardly enough snow to cover the grass. They made all the schools close yet again, wasting a lot of taxpayer money, when the main roads don't even have a speck of snow on them.

Resisting the urge to be free

Bard DeLong seems to agree with a Wired article proclaiming that the Wall Street Journal will become irrelevant because it’s not free.

I’ve been wondering for a long time how newspapers will make money at all if you can read the news for free online. These days, the only time I buy a newspaper is if I want to read something when I’m away from my computer.

The Wall Street Journal is the only newspaper that can get away with charging money because it has unique content not available anywhere else. Most other newspapers all have the exact same news. If the New York Times started charging, I’d probably just settle for reading the Washington Post.

If I were running the Wall Street Journal, I wouldn’t mess with a successful business model just because some guy at Wired is whining about paying for the content which, in my opinion, is well worth the money.

Credibility and blogging

Aaron the Atheist says that my blog has no credibility:

One has to question whether this person should be allowed any credibility now. The internet is full of frauds and it seems to me that once exposed, he should just go away. But he goes on as though he simply had one over on everyone (haha on everyone). What some people will do to get attention (and traffic to their blogs)!

And then he makes a point of saying how he’s not going to include my blog in his blogroll, which is a point that’s become very tiresome to read. If people don’t want to blogroll someone then they should just not do it, but it doesn’t merit a big announcement to the world.

But about credibility, I don’t need to have any because I’m not a journalist. Dan Rather needs credibility because he’s supposedly reporting to you true facts that you have no way to verify on your own.

Bloggers, for the most part, aren’t journalists, but rather we link to real journalistic sources and we provide commentary on the news.

I like blogging anonymously better because I never have to take personal risk for anything I say. It gives me the freedom to write editorials that I don’t actually agree with but have the purpose of making people think. I have the freedom to write about topics that are otherwise too politically incorrect for me to touch, and I believe my post about why Jews are liberal falls into that politically incorrect category.

The United States has a long history of anonymous political speech, going back to the hoaxes of Ben Franklin and the Federalist Papers that were anonymously written by three people pretending to be a single author named Publius.

Sex, power, and Condoleezza Rice?

I have absolutely no clue what the following paragraph, written by Ann Althouse, is supposed to mean:

Women with power easily unleash ideation about sex -- and sex and power. If the woman can't be contained by the thought that her powerfulness has removed her sexuality altogether, then the thought becomes that her sexuality has merged with her power. In the case of Condoleezza Rice, who has a high position of power and is distinctly attractive, she seems to become a strange new being -- a superhero – like Neo in "The Matrix"!

However, I would recommend the book Power Money Fame Sex written by Gretchen Craft Rubin (who is married to the son of former Clinton Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubin). Gretchen explains, among other things, that men use power, money and fame to obtain sex, while women use sex to obtain power, money and fame.

This would also be a good time to plug the website Hookup Culture which has good articles about how evolutionary biology relates to gender relations and recent changes in society.

Being a Libertarian with a big "L"

I was once a card carrying member of the Libertarian Party, but I never actually attended any Libertarian meetings. On the other hand, I’ve done real activist volunteer work for Republican Party organizations.

I gave up on the Libertarian Party when I realized they were not serious about winning elections. In a state I used to live in, the Libertarians refused to accept public campaign financing. Now it’s fine to say that, in theory, the government shouldn’t fund political parties. But if you want to win an election in the real world, and the other parties accept free government funds and you refuse them, then this makes you a big idiot.

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey writes:

I occasionally (after this most recent election, for example) do some soul-searching about remaining a Libertarian Party member/activist versus joining either the Democrat or Republican parties in an attempt to make them more libertarian from within. It does seem rather pointless to be a Libertarian when we rarely win partisan office, and I wonder if perhaps I could have a bigger/better impact if I allied myself with either the D's or the R's.

Jackie is staying a big “L” Libertarian, which is good for a single women because the Libertarian Party has a lot of single men. But for a single man, I’m sure there are much better social opportunities in the other two parties. Maybe I should try becoming a Democrat in order to meet hot babes? Of course, I suspect that women from neither party would be interested in a man who’s unemployed and lives with his parents.

Common sense libertarianism vs. whacko loonie libertarianism

Common sense libertarian	Whacko loonie libertarian
Reducing government spending by 30% would be a great accomplishment (yet even a 30% reduction is hard to imagine happening in our current political environment.	Believes guy on the left is an evil statist for endorsing the other 70% of government spending.
Getting our nation's budget deficit under control would stop the value of our currency from falling.	Replace all paper money with gold coins.
America needs a military to protect us from enemies.	National defense should be left to the free market.
The government has no choice but to ensure that all children receive enough education so that they can become productive members of society (but does not necessarily believe our current systm of public schools is the way to go).	Children should run free.
Slavery is wrong.	Southern slavery was a glorious example of libertarianism.
Taxes should be changed to make the system more efficient.	Suggesting anything but complete abolition of all taxes is cooperating with the evil statists.
Police are unfortunately necessary to prevent criminals from preying upon the innocent.	Crime and punishment should be left to the free market.

Libertarian Party bad for libertarianism?

Randy at the Volokh Conpsiracys suggests that the existence of the Libertarian Party is detrimental to the influence of libertarians because it drains libertarians from the main parties where they might have influence.

I disagree with this concept in general. The minority voice of libertarians gets lost in the big party. As their own party, theoretically, libertarians have a chance to be heard and influence public opinion.

That is the theory anyway. In practice, the Libertarian Party is made up of a bunch of whacko ultra-extremists who take libertarianism to an extreme that turns off nearly all voters. This is the real reason why the Libertarian Party has failed to have any impact on the nation's political dialogue.

The only hope for reducing the size of government is if a new party is formed based on common sense and not explicitly libertarianism. Is this a big enough an issue for a new party to form? The last time a successful new party formed, it was the Republican Party, and the big issue was slavery.

Gender Genie and blogs

TigerHawk says:

Eager to learn whether Gender Genie might have helped uncover the blogosphere's latest marketing scheme, I ran a few randomly selected 'graphs from the old Libertarian Girl blog through Gender Genie. Two out of three came up as "male."

Actually, I don't think that TigerHawk used it correctly, because I wrote my "Libertarian Girl" posts aware of the Gender Genie's existence, and I purposely made sure that the posts used the gender-correct keywords.

The Gender Genie has three settings: fiction, nonfiction, and blog entry. The proper setting to use is, strangely enough, non-fiction. The blog setting was cleary based on a statistical analysis of non-political blogs. Imagine a teenage girl writing about her boyfriend; the type of words found in that post would show up heavily female. It's impossible for a serious blogger to ever show up female using that setting.

By using the words "if", "with" and "not" as often as I could, I made sure the majority of posts scored female on the nonfiction setting.

Most female political blogs are male authored according to the Gender Genie. I tested Michelle Malkin once, very male. Writing about politics obviously requires the use of male keywords.

Cassandra put her own posts through the Gender Genie and determined that she was male too. Julie B also reports that she is male.

Of course it's possible that there are actual zero female political bloggers, they are all men pretending to be women, and I was the one caught because only I was dumb enough to use a photo of a Russian bride.

UPDATE

Karen also reports being a male according to the Gender Genie.

Was James Guckert a danger to the president?

I recommend this common sense blog post about the James Guckert/Jeff Gannon story as a good source of background.

The left-wing idiots of the blogosphere are making a big deal about how giving James Guckert access to the president was a big security violation. Why? Because he sold his body to other gay men? Exactly how does this make him dangerous? Are the left-wingers afraid that Mr. Guckert was going to unzip his pants and stick it into the part of W's body where the sun doesn't shine? The fact is that Guckert may have had a sleazy sex life, but he was no danger to the president.

As I am blogging anonymously, you may choose to ignore the following if you wish and call it a made up story. But yours truly, the Libertarian Man of Mystery has a Secret Clearance and a Public Trust clearance. Now, before you bow down in awe, know that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, have these clearances, so it's really no big deal.

Now, if the process required to get a White House press pass is similar to what's required to get one of the clearances I have, I doubt that Mr. Guckert would have been spotted as a risk. What is the security clearance process looking for? Bad financial history, drug use, alcohol abuse, criminal history, connections with radical or anti-US groups (Guckert's connection with the Republican Party wouldn't have raised any red flags) and unaccounted for absences from employment.

Guckert may have been a "homosexual prostitute" (whatever that is), but unless he was arrested for it, the investigator wouldn't have known about it.

Some have said, "if bloggers could use Google to find Guckert's sordid sexual history, why didn't the government investigator(s)?" Well first of all, it hardly suprises me that hundreds of internet-savvy idealogically motivated bloggers could find dirt where a single retired FBI guy in his sixties (the typical security clearance investigator) with a big caseload of clearances to work on would not.

And even if the FBI guy found a gay website operated by Mr. Guckert, well, being gay isn't a crime, is it? I don't think the security clearance investigators look into this anymore; no one ever asked me my sexual orientation.

Innate differences

Brad DeLong has a big headline, The Math Test Score Upper Tail: Is There Reason to Believe That Sociology Swamps Biology? And he then presents us with the following data:

In 1992, 2.8% of Asian-American women who took the Math SAT scored 750 or above.

In 1992, 2.1% of white men who took the Math SAT scored 750 or above.

In 1992, 0.4% of white women who took the Math SAT scored 750 or above.

In 1992, 0.2% of African-American men who took the Math SAT scored 750 or above.

Why did he fail to mention that 7.4% of Asian-American men scored 750 or above, or that only 0.0% of black women scored 750 or above? (Not a typo, 0.0% is the correct figure.)

These statistics show us absolutely nothing sociological. They show us two things:

(1) For each of the three races, men outnumber women on the upper tail of the distribution.

(2) The difference between races is greater than the difference between men and women within a race. Asians are the best at math, whites in the middle, and blacks at the bottom. This explains why, in the engineering classes in college, it seemed like everyone was Asian.