Jujitsui Generis

Closing The X File

Some of you wanted to believe so badly, but Douglas Kern (hat tip Alina) explains how the rise of the internet, the ability to rapidly transmit information, and other technological advances, like text messaging and cell/camera phones, shredded the tightly woven layers of the conspiracy:

The Internet showed this particular emperor to be lacking in clothes. If UFOs and alien visitations were genuine, tangible, objective realities, the Internet would be an unstoppable force for detecting them. How long could the vast government conspiracy last, when intrepid UFO investigators could post their prized pictures on the Internet seconds after taking them? How could the Men in Black shut down every website devoted to scans of secret government UFO documents? How could marauding alien kidnappers remain hidden in a nation with millions of webcams?

Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don't seem to happen very often these days. For an allegedly real phenomenon, UFOs sure do a good job of acting like the imaginary friend of the true believers. How strange, that they should disappear just as we develop the ability to see them clearly. Or perhaps it isn't so strange.

Kern is right.  Here's a personal anecdote: I was listening to the TV the other night while working.  One of the many cable travel programs - this one on the 'world's most haunted places' - was playing in the background.  One of the stories caught my ear.  The segment detailed some European monastery where monks performed unspeakable acts of (cue music) evil on the local townsfolk in the fifteenth century.  The scenario sounded implausible, like something out of a Wes Craven movie.  Skeptical, I looked the place up online, used every serach engine I know of.  Know what I found?  The story wasn't true at all.  The place existed, but it was cursed with no such history - though it is world-renowned for its rice production.

So long Scully.  So long Mulder.  We'll remember the 90's fondly.

Kiva: An Alternative to Charity

The giving season is just about here and all of us will soon be inundated with the usual requests for charitable donations.  Here's an alternative to keep in mind (hat tip: Jacob Grier): Kiva.

Kiva isn't really a charity.  It's another example, like The Wingbeat Project, of social entrepreneurship.  Kiva is a program that catalogs foreign, would-be entrepreneurs throughout mostly African countries, along with the amount of capital they need to start or improve their business, and then allows 'investors' to contribute micro-payments toward the entrepreneur of their choice.  Once established, the business owner then re-pays the micro loan.  Invest isn't really the right word either because lenders do not reap any interest from the amount loaned - they just get the original principal back (or can redirect that money to another entrepreneur).  So far Kiva has a re-payment record of 100%.

The unique character of Kiva is that it relies on a peer-to-peer network to bypasses corrupt government agencies and administration-heavy charities and goes 100% directly to the recipient.  The amounts requested, in comparison to other charities, are minuscule - often less than $500, and many give in increments of $25-$50.  Additionally, you get to see where your money goes, and exactly what it is being used for.

Is that charity?  Is that investment?  I don't know.  If you don't get your $25 back, I suppose it's charity.  If you do, it's more like investing in opportunity and social entrepreneurship, which is a welcome alternative to traditional holiday giving.

TV Break: The Office

For those of you who will admit to watching television, the best new show that you're not watching is NBC's The Office.  I know, I know, the British version is supposedly better.  But I haven't seen the Brit version and so have no such bias.  I am fortunate enough to work in an office that is not like the painful one portrayed in the series, but I have worked with hundreds of clients over the past few years and have witnessed quite a few offices that are exactly like the office in the series.

The show is shot documentary-style and follows the daily routines of the employees of a fictional office supply company.  Steve Carell plays the most awkward, loutish, clueless boss imaginable.  For those of you who have worked in corporate America, Carell's attempts to both manage and inspire his employees is so dead-on that, at times, it crosses from the comical into the uncomfortable.  Think Christopher Guest for the small screen.  The show airs Tuesday nights (9:30 ET).

Update: the program's nerdy sycophant, Dwight Schrute, has his own blog site here.

Quote of the Day

I'm re-reading The Fatal Conceit and so I was happy to stumble across Russell Robert's analysis of this quote over at Cafe Hayek:

Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within the different kinds of orders according to different rules.  If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it.  Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them.  So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once.

The first time I read Hayek, I breezed through, taking most of his arguments for granted.  This time I find myself asking questions and reading critically.  But this insight still seems to me to eloquently capture a crucial distinction that is responsible for the extended order which we did nothing to design, yet in which we all live.

Merry Christmas....

From the labor unions.  Yes, it was GM that did the wrapping, but it was the labor unions that bought this gift for their rank and file.  Happy Holidays.

The Safest Places In America

In case you're thinking of relocating, here's an updated list of the safest and most dangerous cities in America.  Making the Top 10 Safest list is Cary, North Carolina.  I live about fifteen minutes from Cary and can attest that it's one of the safest and cleanest cities in the South.

Taking #1 on the Most Dangerous list is Camden, New Jersey.

Sitting Ducks

Tragedy strikes in England.  This is what happens when even front line police officers are prohibited from using weapons to confront armed criminals.  While avoiding the entire issue of civilians and gun control, it seems self-evident that - if coercion and the use of force are the legitimate function of the state - this policy makes no sense.  It robs the state of the means by which to enforce its legitimate function.  And it puts the coercive power in only the hands of thugs and assassins.

Fashion Statement: Support Tyranny

The Harvard Institute of Politics has found that about half of U.S. university students claim to be politically active, though that activism manifests itself in mostly passive ways.  Seventy-nine percent reflect their political choices by the clothing, namely T-shirts, they wear.

That's sad.  As those of you who have spent long hours involved in local politics know, wearing a T-shirt or wrist band is a long way from the down and dirty work of grassroots political organizing.  Real politics is rarely fashionable - unless one qualifies the shirts that have become all the rage on college campuses.  I refer, of course, to the Che shirts.  They are as ubiquitous on campus as the M.C. Escher poster or the syncopated rhythms of any Bob Marley hit streaming from a dorm room window. 

One has to wonder if most of the students wearing the faddish Che shirts even know what they are wearing.  What kind of 'revolutionary hero' do they think he was?  Here's Catallarchy on the actual murderous legacy of Che Guevara - a legacy our Hollywood stars (hat tip: The Agitator), along with a depressing number of students, apparently find quite admirable.

I guess we should count ourselves lucky that so few students find much time for genuine political activity.

Idiocy of the Day

I couldn't resist linking to this latest piece of nonsense over at Huffington Post:

1) Pedestrians are twice as likely to be killed when they're hit by an SUV than when they're hit by a car.
2) While the total number of pedestrian deaths in NYC has fallen by 18% in the last five years, the number of deaths by SUV have surged 27%.
3) SUVs made up about 15% of the cars in New York last year—but caused 26% of pedestrian deaths from passenger vehicles.
4) When a car and an SUV collide and someone dies, 81% of the time the victim is the car driver.

When is someone going to take the logical and urgent next step, and file a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of SUVs? Irresponsible and dangerous in ways that their manufacturers surely knew, they have degraded the quality of all our lives.

Well, I'm no fan of SUVs, but SUV owners would probably disagree - unless Bradley just means that it's the lives of non-SUV owners which have been degraded.  But how many lives have been saved by the bigger bulk of SUVs, how many accidents have resulted in simple injuries for the families riding in SUVs rather than fatalities?  Not good enough for Bradley.  He'd like to apply his egalitarianism to safety and deaths.

Prior to automobiles, horse and buggy carriage mishaps caused a lot fewer fatalities than our modern day accidents.  While he's at it, perhaps Bradley should seek a class action lawsuit against all of the automobile manufacturers.

Rewriting History

Here's President Bush last week:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war.

These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions, citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat and a grave threat to our security."

That's why more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

And earlier in the same speech:

As president and commander in chief, I accept the responsibilities and the criticisms and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision.

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.

Norman Podhoretz supplements Bush's speech in the latest issue of Commentary by arguing that our conviction that Hussein had WMDs was a conviction shared by all - from the UN, to the State Department, to the CIA, to the Germans, to the French, to the British, to Bill and Hillary Clinton, to Sandy Berger, to Madeline Albright, to Bob Graham, to Al Gore, even John Kerry.  The list goes on and on.

Democrat's are now peddling the idea that Bush 'misled' the country into war.  But as Podhoretz argues in his detailed recounting of our intelligence in the run up to the war, that idea is the biggest lie of all.