The Binary Circumstance

I was surprised and very happy that this announcement made it to MSNBC.

Michael Badnarik, a computer programmer from Texas, won the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination on Sunday.

Badnarik, 49, of Austin, defeated former Hollywood movie producer Aaron Russo on the convention’s third ballot, after former radio host Gary Nolan, who was eliminated on the second ballot, endorsed Badnarik.

It’s next to impossible that a Libertarian could be elected to high office in this country. But with Bush and Kerry on the big party tickets, this could be the year that people pay more attention to what the party stands for.

Personally, I can’t vote for Bush, having made that mistake once already. Kerry is like a big bag of hot air with little going for him but Bush’s mistakes and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who seems refreshingly honest. If I cast a vote for Badnarik, at least my desire for a big change will show up in the election statistics. That could be the very best use of my vote.

If a large percent of voters vote Libertarian, it would make the major parties wake up and smell the coffee. A vote for Kerry or Bush would be a vote for more of the same. We’ll see how the summer goes.

Formed in 1971, the Libertarian Party stresses the rights of individuals over the power of government, and a foreign policy of noninterference. It claims nearly 600 elected officials nationwide, almost entirely in city or county positions, and has been on the presidential ballot in all 50 states for the last three elections.

See the Michael Badnarik website for more.
Also my previous post: Michael Badnarik: Libertarian Candidate for President 2004

Tony Pierce complains about how Instapundit isn’t paying attention to the Riggs Bank money laundering scandal which I mentioned before.

I don’t read Instapundit on a regular basis, so I checked to see exactly what he’s not talking about today. I discoved that he’s given Tony some much-needed attention by mentioning an article in the New York Times that quoted Tony, but he still didn’t mention Riggs Bank or insert a hyperlink to Tony’s site.

The thing that struck me about about Tony’s post was just how good-looking these two terrorists are. Forget for a moment that they’re two of the guys who pulled off 9/11 and focus on their looks.

How can two men with such angelic faces be so angry and evil? Look at those eyes. They could have had all the sex, love and success that they wanted in life, in a free country.

So why would they sacrifice their lives by flying planes into skyscrapers and killing 3,000 people? What was it about their minds that made them choose death by terrorist act as a higher value than a good life? Until we understand that, we cannot get to the root of the problem.

The problem is mysticism and the inevitable loss of freedom that results from it. Mysticism makes people slaves to irrationality.

The Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan each get tens of thousands of hits per day. They have tapped into some very popular ideas and frustrations. Muslim fundamentalism does the same thing.

Just because ideas are popular doesn’t mean they have any basis in fact. It is the facts, not the popularity of an idea or viewpoint that sets us free from the mystical.

So if follows that bloggers who claim a contempt for terrorism and who are adamant in their support for a war against terrorism, should also be at war with irrationality and mysticism. They should be focused on the facts, all of them, as an antidote to mysticism.

Tony says:

the reason mr. reynolds gets so many hits a day is because he is generally believed to be a reliable news filter. as a law professor he apparently has enough free time in his day to read scores of newspapers and websites and as a free service to the web he links to many of those current event stories and news blurbs and provides insightful and reasonable commentary in short, readable chunks.

however when he refuses to do things like discuss the testimony that donald rumsfeld gave earlier this month, seriously discuss the accusations that pulitzer winning investigative reporter seymour hersh levvied against the defense secretary saying that the cia said that rumsfeld expanded a highly secretive operation originally intended to find Al Qaeda to include the aggressive and sexual interrogation of prisoners in Iraq, or even mention Riggs Bank and its relationship to President Bush’s uncle Jonathan (an executive of Riggs Investment), the illusion of impartiality is diminished.

To reinforce popularly held delusions to get traffic is to promote mysticism. But hey, somebody’s got to do it.

If they weren’t going to Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan they’d go someplace else to get their fix. I don’t think that Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan are influencing their readers as much as acting as a meeting place for people who already have similar values. And as all businesspeople know, there are some things you can’t say if you want to keep your customers.

I wish I could say that people are out there looking for the truth. Some are, but most don’t care. Most are just looking for agreement. Agreement makes us feel like we know the truth, regardless of independent facts. It’s a lazy man’s “knowledge.” I agree, you agree, it must be true. Right?

Wrong.

Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the two terrorists pictured above, thought they knew the truth. And a lot of people agree with them. That doesn’t make their beliefs true.

Comparing our beliefs to existents is the only objective measure of the truth. So readers shouldn’t look to my blog or anybody else’s blog for the truth, they should look to the facts. I can only do my small part to point out the evidence that I see, putting special emphasis on the facts I think they’ve overlooked.

That’s what Tony does when he talks about Instapundit.

And I love the disclaimer at the top of Tony Pierce’s blog: “nothing in here is true.”

Christopher Allbritton, my reporter in Iraq, reports on the difficulties of reporting from Baghdad.

It’s so difficult apparently that he’s now freelancing for Time Magazine. Sure beats PayPal donations.

Guess he’s not my reporter anymore.

Cafe Hayek explains through a wonderful use of metaphor, how politics compares to retail grocery shopping.

You must choose one of the pre-filled carts. Whichever one you choose will be chosen, in part, despite some of its contents. The cart you choose will be the best one for you given the other options – but it would not be as beneficial for you as would a cart that you personally rolled through the supermarket aisles and filled yourself, precisely as you wished, individually selecting and rejecting each item according to your preferences at the time you are in the store.

Perhaps that’s why so many Socially Aware people, so many Scolds, dislike retailing. In markets, each of us gets pretty much exactly the set of things we want (out of a vast set of possibilities). With each of us filling our own cart with exactly those items, and only those items, that each of us wants, there’s no role for busybodies who fancy themselves to be especially fit for choosing what millions of other people have access to and acquire.

Similar comparisons can be drawn between retailing and corporate “bundling” of products and services as well as Microsoft’s efforts to bundle every conceivable application into the operating system. Purchasers always end up getting a lot of stuff they don’t need or want in order to get what they do want.

If you get a shopping cart full of groceries you don’t like, you would have to give them away, sell them to somebody else, or throw them away. With Microsoft or say, phone company packages, or cable packages, you can’t discard or trade what you don’t want, you just throw your money away on it, which is a hidden price increase on the part of the package that really wanted.

I needed to buy some Krazy Glue yesterday and went to the local Ace Hardware. They had a big selection of glues. If you bought a double packages, you paid less per tube of glue. For example, one tube for $2.50 but two tubes in one package for $3.50.

The double packet seems like a much better deal. But if you never used the glue or it went bad sitting on the shelf, you actually paid much more for the one tube of glue that you would use. Rather than paying $2.50 for one tube, you paid $3.50 and a lot of glue went to waste as well as all the natural resources and human energy that went into producing it.

Fortunately, Ace had plenty of different sizes and types of glue so I didn’t have to buy more than I needed.

As Cafe Hayek points out, politicians and political parties are at a minimum forcing us to buy two tubes at a higher price when one at a lower price would have been sufficient. They’ll even bundle in the all the broken pieces that need to be glued back together as well as any tools you need to break it into pieces again.

And when you’re done with that project, you can go back to the market politic for some more glue. Extras included.

Pointer from Jay McCarthy.