Sunday, January 06, 2008

Thanks to the efforts of the 2 parties, the standard of living in Britain will surpass the US for the first time since the 19th century. But we'll keep voting for the 2 parties and ever bigger government, and we'll keep going over that cliff.

FBI whistle-blower claims widespread corruption of our officials leaking nuclear secrets to foreign governments. This is the inevitable result of big-government and unaccountable bureaucracies.

Solar cycle 24 has started with many predicting a quiet solar cycle that will lead to cooling on the earth. It better be a low cycle, or Al Gore and his global warming cultists may do irreparable damage to freedom and every non-rich person in the world. Steady global temperatures contradict Gore. Duh.

US considers increasing covert ops in Pakistan.

Yes, Islamic radicals want to establish a new Caliphate, but they can't even control their own countries, let alone the Middle East, let alone the western world. Radical Islam, though dangerous, is not an existential threat to the US or the west. The threat from radical Islam is better expressed as the threat of nuclear proliferation. China and Russia's new Cold War of Terror is an existential threat, but nuclear war is much lower risk today than it was in the first Cold War. The biggest existential threat we face is big, unaccountable government bankrupting all of us in the near future and surrendering our country to flood of illegal immigrants, and not just Hispanics. Another existential threat to Europe is moderate Islam taking it over.

Edwards is tapping into the politics of envy, which is what he did to make his fortune in the court room as well.

In practice, this range voting system would immediately devolve into the system we have now as voters would give their favorite the highest possible rating and everybody else the lowest possible rating. The people who designed this system have no concept of human nature.

Scientists discover breakthrough regarding flu transmission.

When the Constitution was written, hanging was the accepted method of execution. Obviously the founders did not consider it cruel and unusual. This lawsuit attempting to block lethal injections as cruel and unusual are back door attempts to block all executions. It's baloney. There is no requirement that punishment for a crime be perfect or completely painless.

50 scientific discoveries of 2007.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:23 PM

    Your comment about Range Voting demonstrates a common misconception by those newly introduced to Range Voting.

    Picture the 2000 election, where 90% of voters who supported Nader proved you wrong, and did not vote for their favorite, but instead for their favorite front-runner.

    Now say you allowed them all to also score their true favorite. Why wouldn't they do that? An elementary understanding of human nature says they will.

    As for the 10% who chose to express their sincere preference for Nader, many of them would probably still want to express their preference out of the major candidates: "Now that I've voted for my man Nader, I think I'm going to try to prevent the election of that Bush guy."

    And if only a small number of them would have done that, then no spoiler effect would have happened, and Nader would have received dramatically higher and more representative numbers.

    You have to understand that the Princeton math Ph.D. who founded the Center for Range Voting, as well as numerous supporters of Range Voting who spread the message online, encounter this and other novice objections day in and day out. We've considered them, and looked at the evidence quite rigorously.

    We've looked at historical election data, like that from Bucklin elections long ago (Bucklin is sufficiently similar to Range Voting that we can see whether people really did bullet vote). I've done exit polling in Texas, to see how the average person would handle Range Voting.

    If you think you understand voter psychology and behavior better than people who study it religiously, maybe you ought to be a little more realistic.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous5:26 PM

    Since you're a libertarian, you should read this article I co-authored.

    ReplyDelete

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