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I knew I could use this topic. My wife’s car is coming off lease and we need to find a new car before January. The old car is a Mercedes E something AWD, so we went to the Mercedes dealer first.

She drove then I drove. The 2006 E series is pretty nice. Edmunds says the positive is basically it is a fine car, the negative is it is expensive. True. I drove Honda to Porsche and the Mercedes inspires confidence. I drive the old one a good 10 mph faster almost everywhere when driving it. The 2006 has better tires which makes the car feel like it is on guard or ready.
I feel more capable when driving it - 140 KPH in a Paris traffic tunnel would not phase me in that car.

I also drove the “S” series and I was let down. It is HUGE, much larger sitting in it or driving it than you would guess from outside. It drove like a large car, no feel for the road, no spirit. The only feature was it was big- rear seat leg room was a football field. I did not like it because I like driver’s cars.

Next week we try the BMW 5 series. I think we will pass on the Audi, over the years we had three Audi and never liked the experience. The car was good but the resale, service, overall experience of ownership was lacking to me. Don’t ask about the Lexus, Infinity, Honda, Kia, Chevy, Nisson, &etc. As for cars - the Germans make a serviceable line, the Italians can do an handmade exotic and if neither is possible I would not buy.

By the Way, I hope to be buying an exotic and I will post a picture here when I do. I am just very busy trying to survive right now with business issures and trying to be a good father &etc. I’ll post pictures as I progress.

Amother aside, the local Acura dealer has a 1994 NSX selling for about $34K. It is a ten year old car but the platform has not changed since it was introduced and $34K is way below what this car sells for. If it were not an automatic, I would be test driving it. All NSX acuras are equal, one case when the year manufactured is of little import since the platform has never been upgraded.

Sometimes someone phrases it exactly right, Steve Sailer:

I, for one, welcome our old invincible overlords. I look forward to the exact same legislators and Congressmen ruling us into their senile years, with absolutely no chance of the public mobilizing to defeat any of them unless, as the saying goes, they are found with a dead girl or live boy (and that didn’t stop Congressman Gerry Studds).

I could not get that paragraph out of my head until I had to look it up and post it. My feelings exactly.

By the way if you wonder, as I do, how Steve can be such an original thinker and have such insight yet frequently end up in such bizarre places read this.

Random notes:

The Internet cannot be controlled. It is time to face up to it. Many powerful people have an interest in controlling the Internet. Their tentative feelers have all led to nothing. The powers that be can limit credit card payments to gambling sites, and autocratic governments can block individual web sites, but there are other means of payment and blocking web sites disadvantages your nation state. It’s Frankenstein, created by human ingenuity, grown beyond human control. It is time everyone fess up to this cold, hard fact. It is not free by generosity; it cannot be controlled.

Every institution that exists to control and disseminate information is suddenly antiquated. Assistant VP’s of Citibank are making cold calls in office parks. Banks used to be machines of information which made a good easy living for those involved. A smart person once told me that my Dell Poweredge server was equal to/capable of being the information processing tool that is a bank. I was slow on the uptake.

I’m loving every minute of this, there is a thing that bows before no master. People who think that they direct it now are probably mistaken.

This guy is doing it. Or maybe without the blaspheme, he is doing good; it always cheers me to see from his perspective.

Today almost all email travels by SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol). It is insecure. The sender can forge anything, the “From:” line, the “To:” line, even his own hostname. It is analogous to allowing anyone connecting via SMTP to write to the disk drives of the receiving computer, in a protected area called the mail spool. You can understand why the data in your mail spool is full of trash. Since SMTP itself is the problem, filters and blacklists are an imperfect solution.

I propose a new email transport protocol: MMTP. Micro-Payment Mail Transport Protocol.

Here’s how it works. Anyone wanting to set up a MMTP server on the Internet uses modified mail transport software with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) built in. The modified software sends all email containing a PGP signature of the sending mail server. The receiving mail server can tell if the sending mail server told the truth about its identity. You don’t have to understand how PGP works to follow this. The point here is, when two computers talking to each other over the Internet use PGP, they each can identify the other with no possibility of error. You can’t break PGP - it is so strong it is classified as a munition by the government. It is the mail server that adds a PGP signature, the mail user does not have to deal with it at all.

What good is this? Every good. Since the administrators of mail servers can control who has accounts on the server and identify when they send mail (from logs, etc.) accountability is imposed on each mail sender.

The idea up to here is nothing new. Many have proposed a secure mail protocol to control spam using PGP. There are reasons it has never caught on. You have the problem of switching everyone to a new protocol. Tens of millions will not switch, and you will want to be able to exchange email with them. If the new protocol is backward compatible and you can still receive SMTP, there is little incentive to invest in a new server and you will still get all the spam. The benefit, the increased security of email, is pretty much a public good if it is put in place. There is no competitive advantage for an ISP to invest in new mail servers and software if everyone else can have the same benefits by matching the investment.

That’s why I call my proposed solution Micro-Payment. Imagine a bunch of ISP’s contractually join and form a clearinghouse. If you want to put a server in the new private MMTP network you open an account with the clearinghouse and deposit $10,000. You run the modified software and register your PGP data with the clearinghouse. The clearinghouse knows who you are and holds your money. If you don’t set up an account with the clearinghouse you can run the protocol, but you are not in the database of the clearinghouse. When your server tries to send MMTP email to a member of the private network the receiving computer will naturally check instantly with the clearinghouse over the Internet and make sure your server is in good standing with a full deposit account before accepting MMTP email from you.

Part of the account agreement with the clearinghouse is you agree to pay one cent for every MMTP email you send to another member of the network. That is, the mail server sending an email agrees to pay the mail server accepting the email one cent each, to be deducted from one account and credited to the other account with the clearing house.

You sell email accounts requiring a $10 deposit from each customer, or a credit card. The operator of the mail server has a contract with each customer specifying that each time the customer sends an MMTP email his account will be debted one cent (and he will be credited one cent for each MMTP email he receives).

When a MMTP email is sent, the sending person’s email account is debted one cent by his ISP, the sending ISP’s deposit at the clearing house is debted one cent, the receiving ISP’s deposit at the clearinghouse is increased one cent, and the receiving person’s email account is credited one cent by the receiving ISP.

Most people probably send about as much email as they get so the $10 deposit should cover email use for a couple years. Many people may make a small profit because they get more email than they send. Spammers send millions of email hoping to get one response, uneconomic in MMTP.

Finally, MMTP runs parallel to SMTP. Keep you old SMTP email account for worldwide connectivity, but get an MMTP account for important email which can be read knowing the sender valued your time enough to send you a penny. The other, larger. incentive to get an MMTP email account is it allows you to send micro-payments.

If you haven’t noticed I have created a private bank clearing house by voluntary contractual agreement. One which is not regulated and requires no regulation. (Internet providers often settle traffic differences so a settlement for email difference should be no different.) A micro payment system that allows you to send the author of Eternity Road a one cent email in appreciation or to buy a book on Amazon by sending 1299 emails. Or blogs could require one MMTP email before access for that day. I would pay one cent each to read a few score blogs I enjoy.

UPDATED 11-17-05

Round 1 between the MSM and Blogdom was “Rathergate.”

Round 2 between slightly differently aligned parties was “Miers,” but most bloggers were on the winning side.

Round 3 between the MSM and Blogdom is “Bush Lied about Iraq.”

Of course there are more parties to each battle.

First question: Why wasn’t this brought up in the last Presidential election? Nothing I hear of as being evidence of misrepresentation is new information.

As a side note, my local paper has an above the headline headline: “Anonymous blog can’t find judicial funny bone.” One individual shuts down his hobby web page, out of about ten million who are self-publishing, and the newspaper is screaming it on the front page. Well, their victories are few and far between. Plus the article may give other people “outing” ideas. Any blogger who is employed is probably susceptible to that.

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I certainly agree with this from The BIDINOTTO BLOG:

It is premature to expect political reform in this country anytime soon. Politics stands on a foundation of moral principles and values, if only implicit: what we think government “should” do depends upon our definition of the word “should.” Right now, that “should” amounts to a philosophical stew, whose unintegrated lumps include traditional values, PC values, pre-modern Christianity, postmodern relativism, cynical pragmatism, and “idealistic” altruism. This values mess is reflected perfectly in our incoherent politics. How could we expect coherent, principled public policy — or politicians — to arise from such a bowl of ideological goop?

The answer to this mess lies not in politics, but in a different arena: in the realm of philosophy. Moral philosophy, in particular, establishes and validates the values underpinning public policy debates. Consider the example of Islam: in cultures where that religion has become dominant, the governments reflect it, wagging obediently like the tail of a dog to express Muslim values.

Likewise, if the moral philosophy of rational individualism comes to cultural ascendancy here (and there is no other place than America where that has a prayer of occurring), then our politics, and politicians, eventually will begin to reflect that value system. And not a moment sooner.

It seems to me to still beg the question, why are rationalism and individualism losing the debate at the moral and ethical level?

Part of it may be that most people are never exposed to it in anything other than a caricature. For me, it was pure accident to be exposed to a Philosophy Department comprised of an Objectivist, an anarchist, a Christian and one lone Marxist. The total lack of logical positivism and neo-Kantians alone was fortunate. Maybe that accident is more responsible for my moral views than anything else, but I like to think not. Until the Internet, I never knew how many other people shared fundamental ideas with me. In the late 1970’s I actually stopped saying what I thought when in the company of other people, my views were so routinely dismissed.

You cannot lose a battle of ideas if your ideas are better without doing something wrong.

It has finally hit home to me: along with academia, the mainstream media and the political class, big business is essentially hostile to American and Western values.

Witness this:

It looks like VDARE.com’s annual “War on Christmas” contest may have a contender already: that dominant institution in Red State America, Wal-Mart!

Go to www.WalMart.com and search on “Kwanzaa.” You get:

77 items found for “kwanzaa”

Fair enough. Now, search Wal-Mart’s site for “Christmas.” You get:

We’ve brought you to our “Holiday ” page based on your search.

Wal-Mart’s War on Christmas . There is its more evidence there, but most of it is exerpts from other sources so I do not want to quote extensively.

When some large corporations filed a brief in support of affirmative action I thought they were primirly motivated by simple self interest. If affirmative action was illegal racial discrimination, then they would be in a bind. It is settled law that disparate impact can prove racial discrimination, but what if merit standards led to disparate impact. What if you ended up with too many Italian opera singers?

I now think that large businesses are institutions which house their leaders in powerful lucrative positions, but under capitalism their position is always under threat. Unless you constantly please customers better your business can be blown away like dust. AOL, General Motors, AT&T, The New York Times. It is under socialism or fascism that big business leaders enjoy the most security. Big business is against capitalism, therefore they are in favor of every sort of government intervention, even burdensome interventions.

I do not mean to say that there will never be a day when a free market in transplant organs arrives.

The work of Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell in educating the general public is impressive.

It is almost parody that only economists speak for freedom in our pubic dialog. When I went to law school, only law and economics people had any concern for liberty. The profesion that created the Constitution and many othr institutions of freedom was reduced to utilitarian arguments for any freedom at all.

Everyone believes that a mention in the MSM will increase their power and influence. If Greta or Barone mentioned my blog on TV before nine million viewers, than I would have real influence. I could be a player.

I think about Nietzsche, who self published. Probably a press run of a few thousand copies. Probably sales of a few hundred. Yet, the ideas took flight of their own and now there is not an educated person in the West who lacks passing familiarity with Nietzsche. Some would say much more about his influence.

If a blog reaches a dozen readers, probably six of them arrived by mistake. That is pretty good performance, and the reason things are changing much more rapidly than ever before.

All I want is to put my ideas out there. It is easier than ever.

Howerd Veit is a provocative, articulate writer who apparently draws on some very interesting life experiences. Yesterday he wrote:

As an example of consumer discipline: those of you who pick up your kids from school see the car lines outside of the school that are largely composed of SUVs that pick up ONE kid. Think of the excess consumption in just that area.

Forgive me as I piss off another blogger (assuming he notices), but I cannot resist comment.

It is not excess consumption if I am consuming my money by buying things I value and want. Some would say, “oil is different, we do not have enough and must import it, we become dependent on oil imports and we cannot run an economy, wage war or defend ourselves without adequate oil.”

As I see the facts, I cannot make anyone other than me dependent on foreign oil by buying lots of gasoline for my personal consumption. It is not excess consumption if I want it and pay for it. I see consumption of excess food, drink and housing all around me, by my standards. Unless you want to chuck capitalism completely and and impose rations, whatever people want and can afford is “perfect.”

I was writing about the shortage of organs available for transplant and the organs turned into garbage each day because the only incentive to donate organs is altruism.

About the time this became important to me, I started thinking about England. I thought how an Englishman of the 18th century would have a different approach to this sort of problem. Although I am no historian, I believe that the Englishman would have fewer explicitly guaranteed freedoms and a less effective government. Yet he would be ingenious in using the tools available. If a road needed to be built, there might be a corporation formed to build a private toll road, a stock subscription, profits and dividends. I was blown away when I learned that the Virginia company was formed to settle Jamestown and make a profit for its investors.

Now, the proper solution to a shortage of human organs would be a free market in their sale and purchase, as Walter Williams has written:

Who gets what organ transplant should be decided using the same mechanism as we use to decide who gets what house, car or hotel room — namely, prices. In other words, there should be a market for buying and selling organs. The greatest salutatory effect of an organ market would be a massive increase in the supply of organs. For example, I should be able to write a contract to sell my organs, say, to Body Parts, Inc., for $300,000. The proceeds might become a part of my estate. At my death, my organs would be harvested and the $300,000 paid to my estate. Most people think organ donations are the way to go. For those people, I’d like to ask: What else would they like to see provided through donations? Cars are important. Why not provide them through donations? What about houses, food, clothing, medicine, doctor and plumbing services? If these goods and services were mandated to be provided through donations, we’d have the same supply problems as we have with livers, hearts and kidneys. An organ market would eliminate the arbitrariness of doctors and bureaucrats sitting around like gods, deciding who will die and who will live. You say, “Williams, with market allocation of organs, only the rich would be served.” Nonsense. I’d like to see the evidence for such a conclusion. Is it only the rich who have cars or homes or hotel rooms and are able to acquire loans? The great unappreciated advantage of market allocation of goods and services is that it reduces the potential for human conflict. Why is it that we see conflict in who gets what organ or what’s taught in public schools, and no conflict in who gets what car, home or what’s taught in private schools? The answer ought to tell us something

Of course, as a political reality today, there is no chance of a market in human organs suitable for transplant. The price is actually set by law at $0. If you read my prior Prescription posts There are links to the agencies and NGO’s who control the allocation of organs and decree that no market shall exist.

When I cited Billy Beck’s Blog it was prelude to introducing one of my ideas for increasing personal autonomy, ex-political process.

The last two hundred years have not been friendly to people who value individual freedom. Someone referred to the “well deserved despair of conservatives” which, setting aside the equivocation of conservative with freedom-loving, struck me as adept.

Now this is solely my reading, and I provided a link to his blog so you can judge for yourself. Comments are open too. It seems to me that some people who share my value of rationality, autonomy, capitalism and individual freedom nonetheless feel that it is hopeless to try to forward those values.

The comments of Francis Porretto to my last post seem to support this reading. How could he accept that his children will have a worse life than he in terms of political freedom unless he feels that resistance will be futile?

I think neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Porretto believe that the result is predestined. I do not think that they attribute the ascension of collectivism to a deterministic pattern of atomic collisions. That is the source of my three rambling questions. If the result is not determined than it is ideas that drive people. Ideas matter.

It is an incontrovertible fact that Rousseau was wrong, Man is not born in freedom and found everywhere in chains. Mankind both as individuals and in cultures, is born in slavery and must earn and work up to his independence and freedom. There definitely were periods of increasing freedom, the development of the common law, which in its predictability gained so much prestige that the King was subjected it, ancient Greece, the United States of America. These are historical facts.

Are collectivists smarter than classical liberals? Do they have better tactics? Was their going for MSM and academic positions the turning point? Is the dumbing down of public education responsible? Why the fatalism, is it our supply lines are too long and our supports lacking?

It seems to me that the Internet has kicked the table over yet people in debt continue to lament that the game is somehow fixed against them.

I respect Billy Beck’s brains and thesis. He’s an anarchist and while I tended to make fun of the professors who were anarchists at my college, at least we had some, and my view matured as I did.

If I may be so foolish as to try to reduce it to a single sentence.

He says when more and more things are determined by the political process, control of the political process will become of supreme importance - more important than anything else. It will become, not only wealth and pleasure, it will become survival, and everything will collapse like a black hole into 1984, or Saddam’s world, where everything is decided by political power, the holders of political power become totally ruthless (because of the stakes if no other reason) and power becomes everything. Did I get that right?

My question for Billy is why did it take 200 years for the United States to collapse into the black hole? Should not, as soon as things are staked out, the effect of gravity become immediate? How did the United States come about at all?

Man, the Anal Philosopher missed the best part, the correct use of who and whom, it is a grammer lesson in a nine paragraph speach:

I owe a great deal to many people who have taught me over the years about the law and about judging, to judges before whom I have appeared, and to colleagues who have shown me with their examples what it means to be a fair and conscientious and temperate judge

AnalPhilosopher Judge Alito’s Impeccable Grammar. He says “I love this man”.

There is a shortage of organs available for transplant. Many people die every day who could probably be saved were organs available. Presently, the United States Congress through oversight of a non-profit determines who receives an organ and who waits.

Whenever allocation of goods is turned over to the political process, it becomes political. Witness this:

Given the extreme shortage of organs, a national debate has erupted over who should receive life-saving transplants. Unfortunately for those waiting for them, the debate has focused almost entirely on the relatively less important concern of equity, as opposed to efficiency. For example, HHS has highlighted the unfairness of patients waiting two to three times longer than others simply because of where they live. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have complained that the proposed regulations would increase further the wait for blacks, compared to whites. Legislators from small states have responded that large states would benefit, while others have complained that the new rules would favor large transplant centers.

The most important aspect of the mandate, however, is missing from the debate: Will it save additional lives? There is an unspoken belief that allocating organs is a zero-sum game–that the method doesn’t affect the number of lives lost. In reality, the allocation method greatly affects the number of patients who survive. The effect that transplant regulations and allocation methods in general have on the number of lives lost while awaiting a transplant is critical to analyzing the proposed change in legislation by officials at HHS.

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education): ORGAN TRANSPLANT SHORTAGES: A Matter of Life and Death

The majority of blogs make no significant money. Some think it is just like the early stages of the Internet, hobbyists to be followed by big money and eventually IPO’s. Many people thought TV would be the next radio, many think blogs will add sound and video and become newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television stations. Why are they sure blogs won’t become the next CB radio? Breaker, Breaker, we’re forming a CONVOY.

A big new technology will affect everything, in ways I can’t foresee, I just doubt that the extrapolation model has more predictive value.

For one thing, I suspect that the inability of even popular blogs to make money might be a feature instead of a bug. The world definitely has too much information for any consumer to soak up one hundredth of one percent of daily output. The information consumer is in effect paying by paying attention. As the Maverick Philosopher writes so well, everything of value does not earn money:

Suppose there were no way to make a living from philosophy, or that one’s chances of making a living from it were about as good as a chess player’s from chess. Suppose, in other words, that philosophy had no place in university curricula and that there were no teaching jobs. How much philosophy would be published? How many journals and presses would go under? How many introductory texts would see the light of day? What would become of the professional organizations, the conferences and congresses and the rest of all that philosophically marginal busy-ness? How many ‘philosophers’ would abandon philosophy and end up in real estate?

People say the singularity is rushing upon us. Has anyone asked, “did it already occur?”

Do you think that the population of the world will know and acclaim when the singularity happens? Is it possible the singularity will occur in a way not exactly as expected? Will it happen and take years to recognize, as have most world historical events.

The singularity is supposed to be when mechanical computing power increases beyond human biological computing power. Mechanical computing power is on an exponential curve so the passing point will soon be “in the dust” and we will be irrevocably into the unknown with machines in the drivers seat.

But suppose the singularity is more prosaic, a better communication medium magnifies the power of the human intellect transforming political, economic, scientific and aesthetic knowledge.

Perhaps it already happened. Perhaps we are simply blind to it because we have not seen it play out.