UPDATED: “Are We Running Out of Resources?” Hell, No!

Barack Obama, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Markets

Most “resources” in nature are useless lumps of nothing. If not for man’s ingenuity, iron, aluminum, coal and oil would lie purposeless and pristine in the wildernesses; the matter and energy abundant on earth would come to naught. The ability to discover and transform natural resources into usable goods, and continue to develop “resource-enhancing and sustaining technologies,” is, after all, unique to man. At least to some men.

Watch this wonderful YouTube clip courtesy of economist Steve Horwitz, who demonstrates that, provided we allow profits and prices to serve as the street signs of the economy, we will not run out of resources. If only the “brilliant” Barack Obama, who keeps looking for ways to curtail production, would watch with you (or, at least, read Henry Hazllit’s Economics In One Lesson, which even BHO could grasp):

And this from “THE GOODS ON GAS”:

Purchasing patterns drive prices up or down. Through their “competitive bidding” people raise the price of a commodity. In an unhampered market, rising prices would have signaled to established oil companies and other entrepreneurs and investors that there are profits to be made in the industry.
Absent legislative barriers to exploration, enterprising capitalists would have defied central planners and turned from tinkering with ethanol to drilling for—and refining—oil. Forecasted profits would guarantee accelerated production. Had Exxon and the others been allowed to satisfy their only overlords, consumers, they’d have long since increased the production of oil. Increased supply would have brought down prices—and profits, eventually.
The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve. The price system—rising prices in this case—signals to consumers to adjust their consumption. …

UPDATE: Hybrid hypocrites. Yes, “State-sponsored ‘sexy’ technologies in the West have decidedly ugly outcomes for worker bees in the East. The Copenhagen Crowd’s cravings must be sated, but not by despoiling California, if you know what I mean. Enter the Chinese worker. Read “NIMBYs: Not-In-My-Backyard Environmentalists” for what’s involved in the screwy, skewed Prius production line.

As for the gaseous Bill O’s Theory of Oil, which Bob below alludes to by way of the reference to the cartel: Purchasing patterns drive prices up or down. The particular price of fuel, concomitantly, is determined by supply and demand. The general trend of price increases is a consequence of government-generated inflation. I understand that Bill O’Reilly believes otherwise, but the natural laws of economics cannot be suspended, not even by “Bill O.”

UPDATED: Wonder Woman In The Work Force (Beware The WASPs)

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

Distaff America’s claims of disadvantage can be easily dispelled: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.” [“Barack Against The Boys“] Yet the White House has preferred to perpetrate the myth, starting with a pay equity act the president signed at the beginning of his interminable term, and now with a new report affirming that “the earnings gap between men and women” is a result of all sorts of discrimination. HERE.

Scholarly reams have been written disputing this phony calculus, as it omits vital variables: How long the woman has been in the work force, her age, experience and education; or whether her career has been put on hold to marry and mother. Just as women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory, so too are they more inclined to enter lower-paying professions: education instead of engineering, for example.

UPDATE: BEWARE THE WASPS. It was interesting to observe the neoconservative programmed response to the news about a “Texas college scholarship that targets only white male students.” I am referring to the obligatory PC huffing and puffing of Greg Gutfeld and his crew, last night, as to the “low-life racists” who would dare dream-up such a scheme.

Tucker Carlson, a kind of paleoconservative, chimed in with a full-throated denunciation, but, at least, pointed out the obvious: how is this scholarship different to the affirmative action programs that have infested every nook and cranny of the American labor force, public and private, for decades?

The thing that makes these gilded, neocon elites mere retread left-liberals is the fact that they mock the brute fact that poor white men are extremely marginalized in the workforce. The data abound. They ignore the Frank Riccis of the country. In my forthcoming book, I cite, among other sources, sociologist Frederick R. Lynch’s “Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action”(1991).

But in case you need a reminder of the jeering contempt the neoconservative faction of the left-liberal establishment has for the plight of white (poor) males in American society, watch last night’s “Red Eye” segment (it’s generally very amusing, by the way).

Naturally, this element of the establishment has never bothered to expose Saint Bill Gates’ “No-WASP Scholarship” fund.

UPDATED: Shine On Mr. Sheen, You Crazy Diamond

Celebrity, Drug War, Ilana Mercer, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

During an hour-long interview with CNN”s Piers Morgan, Charlie Sheen had some choice words for the addiction industry (Sheen’s clearly an enemy of the Industry.) I loved every minute of it.

SHEEN: “I’ve been around them for 22 years. And they’ve been lying to me for two decades. … I’m a winner and their lives look like they’re — you know, ruled by losers. Just to put it in black and white terms. I don’t want their lives, and they want mine, but they want to criticize the hell out of it. … I don’t believe myself to be an addict. I really don’t. I think that I just ignore or smash or finally dismiss a model that I think is rooted in vintage balderdash, you know? For lack of a better word.”

Lovely.

And about the busybody public Sheen said this: “I wish people would shift that focus on to themselves and their own family and their own friends and just maybe spend a little more time on their home front.” [Transcripts.]

Watch out: The Shamans will be furious. Haven’t the likes of Drs. Keith Ablo and Drew Pinsky labored to create lucrative niches for themselves in the media by medicalizing all manner of misbehavior?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders started out with some 60 categories of disorders (not diseases). It now sports hundreds for which a biological origin is asserted (with little scientific backing). Good for Sheen for copping only to being a bad boy, not a sick boy in need of the ministrations of prissy prohibitionists.

From “Mel’s Malady, Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.
A teacher who seduces her underage pupil has to be “sick,” or else she’d not have indulged her fantasies. The same post hoc illogic is applied to the morbidly obese: if you overeat, you’re diseased!
Are you a dad who dotes on his kids when they are around, but fails to mail them child support money when they return to mom? There’s a Harvard professor by the name of Dr. John Ratey who’ll cheerily diagnose you with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: you remember your kids only when they are present.
And so it goes: the arsonist has “pyromania,” the thief is inflicted with “kleptomania,” and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a “sex-addict.”

From “Addictions Are About Behavior, Not Disease”:

“When it comes to thinking about addiction, opinions converge. Having bought into the addiction industry’s mantra, so-called social progressives and conservatives alike share the same ideological hangover from the Prohibition era, with a twist of AA sadism: all are religious about abstinence, and all accept as bible from Sinai the wisdom of coercing addicts into treatment regimens. But perhaps the greatest error made in the attempt at humane formulations about addiction is to cast as a disease what is essentially a problem of behavior. …

“The rationale for using the disease model to describe addiction even though it is intellectually dishonest is that medical treatment is effective. Yet another deception. An overview of controlled studies indicates that ‘treated patients do not fare better than untreated people with the same problems.’ Of note is a 4500-subject-strong 1996 US epidemiological study conducted by the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey. Treated alcoholics, it was found, were more heavily alcohol dependent on average than untreated alcoholics. Clearly a behavioral problem cannot be remedied by medical intervention. Addicts are cured when they decide to give up the habit.”

I don’t watch Sheen’s television. But as far as bucking a treatment industry that relies, for the most, on coercing addicts into rehabilitation—I say, Shine on Sheen, You Crazy Diamond.

UPDATE: Contemplationist: Dr. Thomas Szasz is a friend who is featured on these (BAB’s) pixelated pages. Do search for his articles under “BAB’s A List.” Tom has provided praise for my new book, to be released on May 10, 2011. Sign-up for my newsletter, befriend me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter for updates.

UPDATE II: Oscar Offal (Salutations From the Stutterers)

Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

If Kirk Douglas stole the show, you have got to know that there was not much to steal. So blared an MTV online headline describing the 2011 Academy Awards. (Headline here.) Previously, I watched the Grammys for you guys and came away with the conclusion that the winner was Auto-Tune, “the ‘holy grail of recording,’ that ‘corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments in real time,” and without which the tartlets I watched ‘sing’ would have been even more inaudible and tuneless. (Here.)

The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd proved too much for me. Stutterers are the cause célèbre (because of “The King’s Speech”). Helen Mirren, full of airs and graces, really does believe she’s a queen, and so does everyone else. When I see Mirren’s name paired with that of Simon Schama in the Financial Times, I ask myself what a well-known historian (and superb writer) like Schama is doing interviewing a woman who makes a living imitating other people? (Here) Shouldn’t she be interviewing him? I’m not in-sync with the times, I know.

The unfunny shtick, the specter of the poor, palsied Kirk Douglas spluttering incoherently while the pretentious onlookers cooed: You get the picture.

The last simply superb picture I watched was “The Secret In Their Eyes,” a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Naturally I will be on the lookout for more such gems in this category.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): TRUE PUKE.
Mike D.: For me film is not really about striking the right ideological tone; it’s about weaving a yarn and avoiding that wagging ideological finger. I will not be lectured by pin-heads. I’d like them to weave a story that I have not figured out in the first 5 minutes.

I would never watch—much less wax fat about (as some libertarians have been doing)–“Atlas Shrugged” when placed in the hands of Hollywood. (I believe Dagny takes to green energy, or something along those lines.) And the snippet I saw of the “You Go Girl,” aka “True Grit,” was the standard emotional rubbish from Hollywood. Mike, you seem no longer able to even detect the abiding themes that ought to repulse you: young courageous girl sets lax, libertine, drunk adult on the right track and awes all with her moral certitude. They should provide vomitoria in the cinema for this kind of fare.

Such hackneyed, corrupting pabulum ought to repel the intelligent viewer. It’s Hollywood’s revival of the Noble Savage, only applied to kids; they are always the prescient sages; adults are the dolts needing the guidance and direction of babes barely out of diapers. Puke.

And if saintly, snotty-nosed kids are not enough, then you have “The Social Network”: fast talking, hubristic Millennials, making, if to go by Mike’s advisory, “profound” statements about the Culture of the Commons. Yeah, that’s just what I crave. Wisdom from Meghan McCain’s peers. Remember the dot.com kids to whom errant adults were praying, not so long ago?! Get a grip!

UPDATE II: Salutations From the Stutterers. A disease has been born. A new adversity to diagnose, medicate, write soppy stories and scripts about overcoming, launch campaigns for, and discuss, if you are lucky, while plonked on Oprah’s load-bearing couch.