Coyote Blog

I was helping a friend out with some links to virtual  projection keyboard makers.  Many of these are cool laser devices that draw a keyboard on the table in front of you and recognize where you put your fingers to capture keystrokes.  These are small and really sexy travel add-ons for your PDA.  In doing this research, however, I saw this input solution:

If nothing else, the guy on the plane next to you might get nervous as he prepares to be assimilated. 

By the way, here is what the laser keyboards look like:

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

Enough!  This series has slid well past the point of narcisism.   It has been fun setting this up, much like setting the light timers before I go away on a trip (for those that don't know, Typepad allows one to cue up posts with a series of future dates on which these posts appear.  I am actually typing this on Wednesday night.  The thought of light timers gets me thinking of home improvement, so in that spirit I will end with "Pocket Doors and My Manhood"

Our bathroom has a pocket door to save space - that's one of those doors that slide on a hidden rail in and out of the wall.
From time to time, usually because my kids go slamming into it, the
door comes off its rails and gets jammed, which is a problem as it can
bottleneck some very critical facilities.

The first time this happened, I tried to get it back on its track,
but I just could not.  The track is up in the wall and it is almost
impossible due to the lack of clearance to do anything with it.  I
checked in the Yellow Pages and saw there was actually a company that
specialized in pocket door repairs, so I called them out.  Well, Joe
(or whoever) shows up with his little tool kit, looks at the door for a
second, grabbed it in a certain way, and then gave it a quick jerk -
kabam - and it was back in its tracks.  It took him like 5 seconds. 

Well, there I stood, completely unmanned, right in front of my
laughing wife and family, by Joe the visible butt-crack guy.  Bummer.

Since that time, I have had the door come untracked two or three
times.  Thinking to save me further embarrassment, my wife tends to ask
any passing stranger to come in and fix it.  I can sit there for hours
fighting the thing, and then my wife brings in the guy painting the
house - kabam - fixed.  Next time she brought in the 60+ year old sales
guy who happened to be there - kabam - fixed.  I swear, if Paris Hilton
was dropping by for a visit she could probably fix that damn door.  It
is humiliating.

Well, this time I would not allow my wife get someone else to fix
it.  Every night, for about 10 minutes, I would take my innings with
the door, struggling to do what everyone else seemed to have learned at
birth.  I actually suggested to my wife that we should call out a
contractor and tear the thing out and install a real door.  She
suggested instead that she could have our 13-year-old baby sitter come
in from the other room to fix it.  Finally, tonight, when I was about
to give up, I tried holding it in a slightly different way and - Kabam
- fixed.  God I feel great.  My manhood is restored and I am at the top
of the world.

In case my plane is late and I can't blog on Monday - happy Memorial Day and many thanks to all those who have served in our country's military.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This post from last November was my first real research project I set for myself.  Today, there are a couple of flaws I see in it, and I would like to update it, but the results are still interesting.  Here is French vs. Anglo-American 'Imperialism'"

For some reason, a portion of our country has adopted France as the
standard bearer of "anti-imperialism" (or at least anti-US
imperialism). France publicly positions itself similarly, trying to
make itself the leader and counterweight to US "Imperialism". I will
leave aside for now the argument as to whether the US's recent actions
constitute "imperialism". I will instead focus on the French as a role
model.

The first thing that struck me was how long the French tried
desperately to hold on to their colonial empire. Both the US and Great
Britain either liberated or came to an acceptable living arrangement
with their major colonies within a few years of the end of WWII. Both
seemed to come to terms with the fact that the colonial era was over.
The French, in contrast, were still involved in bloody conflicts in
Indochina and Algeria to retain their empire through the late 50's and
even into the early 60's.

So, I decided to do a little research to understand the relative
success of French and Anglo-American colonies. Of course, when judging
the success of a former colony, a lot of things come into play, and
certainly the freed colony must take a substantial amount of
responsibility for its own success and political freedom. However,
after a bit of research, it is instructive to see how well prepared for
independence Britain, France, and the US left their colonies. Did they
leave the country with democratic systems in place and a capable local
ruling class, or did they just suck the country dry and try to prevent
any locals from gaining any capability.

To make this analysis, I have selected a number of each country's
key colonies. Some of the smaller African and island nations have been
left out. I also realize that I left off some of the ex-British middle
eastern colonies, but I am too tired now to add them back in.

I have used two pieces of data to judge an ex-colony's success.
First is GDP per capita, corrected for purchasing power parity, found
in the 2003 CIA fact book via World Facts and Figures. The second is the Freedom index prepared by Freedom House.

The results are striking. When arrayed in order of GDP per
capita, ex-French colonies occupy only 4 of the top 25 spots. And, if
you leave out Louisiana and Quebec, which one can argue are much more
shaped by the US and British, and if you leave out Mexico, where there
is arguably little French influence and none in the last 150+ years,
then ex-French colonies occupy only 2 of the top 25 spots. When arrayed
by the Freedom Index, and again leaving out Quebec, Louisiana and
Mexico, ex-French colonies only occupy one of the top 25 spots! The
ex-French colonies occupy 14 of the bottom 20 poorest slots and 11 of
the bottom 15 least free slots. Finally, one could argue that
none of the ex-French colonies have really grown up into world players,
while British colonies in America, Australia, India, South Africa,
Palestine (Israel) and even Egypt play a significant role on the world
stage.

Continue reading ‘Best of Coyote V’ »

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This
post was also from early December, and was my first step in writing about the roots of modern statism.  The post is called "progressives are too conservative to like capitalism".

Many in the left to far-left eschew the liberal title nowadays
(since they consider liberals now to be wimps and too moderate, like
that Clinton guy) in favor of the term "progressive".  This term has
gone in and out of favor for over a century, from the populists of the
early 1900's to the socialists of the more modern era.

Most "progressives" (meaning those on the left to far left who
prefer that term) would freak if they were called conservative, but
what I mean by conservative in this context is not
donate-to-Jesse-Helms capital-C Conservative but fearful of change and
uncomfortable with uncertainty conservative. 

OK, most of you are looking at this askance - aren't progressives
always trying to overthrow the government or something?  Aren't they
out starting riots at G7 talks?  The answer is yes, sure, but what
motivates many of them, at least where it comes to capitalism, is a
deep-seated conservatism. 

Before I continue to support this argument, I must say that on a
number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social
issues, I call progressives my allies.  On social issues, progressives,
like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions
for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others. 

However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop
trusting individual decision-making.  Progressives who support the
right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't
trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use.  Progressives
who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about
abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls
later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social
Security funds.  And, Progressives who support the right of third
worlders to strap on a backpack of TNT and explode themselves in the
public market don't trust these same third worlders to make the right
decision in choosing to work in the local Nike shoe plant.

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives
are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism.  Ironically, though
progressives want to posture as being "dynamic", the fact is that
capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall,
jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms.  Progressives want
comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are.
They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and
next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  That is why, in
the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek,
only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and
certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze
commerce, to lock this country's economy down in its then-current
patterns.  Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the
American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry.  They
wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of
Americans worked on farms.  I, for one, am glad they failed, since for
all of the soft glow we have in this country around our description of
the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk
endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it. 

This story of progressives trying to stop history has continued to
repeat itself through the generations.  In the seventies and eighties,
progressives tried to maintain the traditional dominance of heavy
industry like steel and automotive, and to prevent the shift of these
industries overseas in favor of more service-oriented industries.  Just
like the passing of agriculture to industry a century ago inflamed
progressives, so too does the current passing of heavy industry to
services.

In fact, here is a sure fire test for a progressive.  If given a choice between two worlds:

1. A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and
   technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic,
   chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly
   distributed, or...
2. A "progressive" society where everyone is poorer, but income is
   generally more evenly distributed.  In this society, jobs and pay and
   industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances
   that they will continue to have what they have today, with little
   downside but also with very little upside.

Progressives will choose #2.  Even if it means everyone is poorer.
Even if it cuts off any future improvements we might gain in technology
or wealth or lifespan or whatever.  They want to take what we have
today, divide it up more equally, and then live to eternity with just
that.   Progressives want #2 today, and they wanted it just as much in
1900 (just think about if they had been successful -- as just one
example, if you are over 44, you would have a 50/50 chance of being
dead now). 

Don't believe that this is what they would answer?  Well, first,
this question has been asked and answered a number of times in surveys,
and it always comes out this way.  Second, just look at any policy
issue today.  Take prescription drugs in the US - isn't it pretty clear
that the progressive position is that they would be willing to pretty
much gut incentives for any future drug innovations in trade for having
a system in place that guaranteed everyone minimum access to what
exists today?  Or take the welfare state in Continental Europe -- isn't
it clear that a generation of workers/voters chose certainty over
growth and improvement?  That workers 30 years ago voted themselves
jobs for life, but at the cost of tremendous unemployment amongst the
succeeding generations?

More recently, progressives have turned their economic attention to
lesser developed nations.  Progressives go nuts on the topic of
Globalization.  Without tight security, G7 and IMF conferences have and
would devolve into riots and destruction at the hands of progressives,
as happened famously in Seattle.  Analyzing the Globalization movement
is a bit hard, as rational discourse is not always a huge part of the
"scene", and what is said is not always logical or internally
consistent.  The one thing I can make of this is that progressives
intensely dislike the change that is occurring rapidly in
third world economies, particularly since these changes are often
driven by commerce and capitalists.

Progressives do not like American factories appearing in third world
countries, paying locals wages progressives feel are too low, and
disrupting agrarian economies with which progressives were more
comfortable.  But these changes are all the sum of actions by
individuals, so it is illustrative to think about what is going on in
these countries at the individual level. 

One morning, a rice farmer in southeast Asia might faces a choice.
He can continue a life of brutal, back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk
for what is essentially subsistence earnings.  He can continue to see a
large number of his children die young from malnutrition and disease.
He can continue a lifestyle so static, so devoid of opportunity for
advancement, that it is nearly identical to the life led by his
ancestors in the same spot a thousand years ago.

Or, he can go to the local Nike factory, work long hours (but
certainly no longer than he worked in the field) for low pay (but
certainly more than he was making subsistence farming) and take a shot
at changing his life.  And you know what, many men (and women) in his
position choose the Nike factory.  And progressives hate this.  They
distrust this choice.  They distrust the change.  And, at its heart,
that is what globalization is all about - a deep seated conservatism
that distrusts the decision-making of individuals and fears change,
change that ironically might finally pull people out of untold
generations of utter poverty.

In fact, over the last 20 or so years, progressives have become
surprisingly mute on repression and totalitarianism the world over.  In
the 1970's, progressives criticized the US (rightly, I think) for not
doing more to challenge the totalitarian impulses of its allies (the
Shah of Iran comes to mind in particular) and not doing enough to end
totalitarianism and repression in other nations (e.g. South Africa,
Guatemala, El Salvador, etc etc) 

Today, progressives have become oddly conservative about challenging
totalitarian nations.  By embracing the "peace at any cost" mantra,
they have essentially said that they can live with anything, reconcile
anything, as long as things remain nominally peaceful (ie, no battles
show up on the network news).  Beyond just a strong anti-Americanism,
the peace movement today reflects a strong conservatism -- they want to
just leave everyone alone, no matter how horrible or repressive, and
hope that they will in turn leave us alone.  They fear any change that
would stir things up.

There are any number of other examples of the strong conservative
streak in the progressive movement.  Here are a few more that come to
mind:

• Despite at least 40 years of failure in the public schools,
  progressives vociferously oppose any radical changes to the public
  education system.  In particular, they resist any program involving
  school choice, as they are totally condescending in their utter lack of
  faith in the average parent's ability to make the right choice for
  their family.
• Progressives refuse to even consider the possibility that
  individuals should be trusted to make their own decisions regarding
  some portion of their Social Security retirement funds.  They can couch
  their opposition in a lot of fear talk about benefit cuts, but at the
  end of the day (and take this from someone who has had this argument
  with numerous liberals and progressives)  the argument always boils
  down to "we don't trust people to make investment decisions that are as
  good as the ones we would make for them".

Well, I have again written too long, and I'm tired.  If you are not
ready to rush to defend the barricades of capitalism, you might read my
post from last week called "60 Second Refutation of Socialism, while Sitting at the Beach".  Most of what I have written here has been said far more eloquently by others.  Of recent writers, Virginia Postrel, in the Future and its Enemies,
has written a whole book on not just capitalism but dynamism and
progress in general, and why people of all political persuasions tend
to be scared by it.  Brink Lindsey addressed many of these same issues
as well in his book Against the Dead Hand.  Of course, the Godfather of individual choice and societal dynamism is Friedrich Hayek.

As a final note, my ultimate statement on this topic is here, called Respecting Individual Decision-Making.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This post was from early December, and commemorated the 60th anniversary of a facinating event in Arizona history.  Many people are familiar with the movie the Great Escape or the TV series Hogans Heroes.  Few know, though, that there was really a great escape ... by German POW's in Arizona!  Here is my post "WWII Great POW Escape -- In Phoenix?"

Many people have seen the Steve McQueen movie "the Great Escape",
about a group of 60 or so prisoners who cleverly dug a tunnel out of a
German POW camp and escaped in various directions across Europe, many
of whom where eventually recaptured.

I don't know if such an event occurred in Europe, but an almost
identical real-life POW escape (tunnel and all) occurred right here in
Phoenix, Arizona almost exactly 60 years ago.

Like many isolated western towns in WWII, Phoenix played host to a
number of German POW's, in our case about 1700 in Papago Park.
Phoenix, and in particular Papago Park, with its arid climate and red rocks, must have been quite a culture shock to the Germans.

Anyway, I won't tell the whole story, but it is fascinating and you can read it all here.  A short excerpt:

The
German prisoners asked their guards for permission to create a
volleyball courtyard. Innocently obliging, the guards provided them
with digging tools. From that point on, two men were digging at all
times during night hours. A cart was rigged up to travel along tracks
to take the dirt out. The men stuffed the dirt in their pants pockets
which had holes in the bottoms, and they shuffled the dirt out along
the ground as they walked around. In addition, they flushed a huge
amount of dirt down the toilets. They labeled their escape route Der Faustball Tunnel (The Volleyball Tunnel).

They
dug a 178 foot tunnel with a diameter of 3 feet. The tunnel went 8 to
14 feet beneath the surface, under the two prison camp fences, a
drainage ditch and a road. The exit was near a power pole in a clump of
brush about 15 feet from the Cross Cut Canal. To disguise their plans,
the men built a square box, filled it with dirt and planted native
weeds in it for the lid to cover the exit. When the lid was on the
tunnel exit, the area looked like undisturbed desert.

There
is some dispute about how many people actually escaped -- official
records say 25.  Others argue that as many as 60 escaped, but since
only 25 were recaptured, 25 was used as the official number to cover up
the fact that German POW's might be roaming about Arizona.

The prisoners who led this escape were clearly daring and inventive,
but unfortunately in Arizona lore they are better known for their one
mistake.  Coming from wet Northern European climes, the prisoners
assumed that the "rivers" marked on their map would actually have
flowing water in them.  Their map showed what looked like the very
substantial Salt River flowing down to the Colorado River and eventual
escape in Mexico.  Unfortunately, the Salt River most of the year (at
least in the Phoenix area) is pretty much a really wide flat body of dirt.  The German expressions as they carried their stolen canoes up to its banks must have been priceless.

It
never occurred to the Germans that in dry Arizona a blue line marked
"river" on a map might be filled with water only occasionally. The
three men with the canoe were disappointed to find the Salt River bed
merely a mud bog from recent rains. Not to be discouraged, they carried
their canoe pieces twenty miles to the confluence with the Gila river,
only to find a series of large puddles. They sat on the river bank, put
their heads in their hands and cried out their frustration.

I
know how they feel every summer when we go to Lake Powell and find the
water lower than the previous year.  Anyway, we shouldn't just make
light of the escapees.  Apparently the prison guards made Sargent Schultz look like Sherlock Holmes:

Although
the men left in the wee hours of Christmas Eve, the camp officials were
blissfully unaware of anything amiss until the escapees began to show
up that evening. The first to return was an enlisted man, Herbert
Fuchs, who decided he had been cold, wet and hungry long enough by
Christmas Eve evening. Thinking about his dry, warm bed and hot meal
that the men in the prison camp were enjoying, he decided his attempt
at freedom had come to an end. The 22-year old U-boat crewman hitched a
ride on East Van Buren Street and asked the driver to take him to the
sheriff's office where he surrendered. Much to the surprise of the
officers at the camp, the sheriff called and told them he had a
prisoner who wanted to return to camp.

One
of the last to be re-captured was U-boat Commander Jürgen Wattenberg,
the leader of the breakout.  Interestingly, Captain Wattenberg hid out
in the hills just a few hundred yards from my current home.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of
leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off
my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of
my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these
posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to
just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of
getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of
Coyote...

This post was from just after the last election, and was titled "Something Unusual Will Happen in 2008".  This was my first ever Instalanche (though the record books put an asterisk next to this one because it was from one of Glenn's guest bloggers) and I still think it makes an interesting point about the next election.

Assuming Cheney does not want to run for president, which I think is
a given, something will happen in 2008 that has not happened in 56
years since 1952: Neither of the two major-party presidential
candidates will be incumbents of the President or Vice-President jobs.
In 1952 we had Eisenhower vs. Stevenson. Since then we have always had
incumbents running, though not necessarily successfully -
1956: Eisenhower
1960: Nixon
1964: Johnson
1968: Humphrey
1972: Nixon
1976: Ford
1980: Carter
1984: Mondale and Reagan
1988: Bush
1992: Bush
1996: Clinton
2000: Gore
2004: Bush v 1.1

I guess the only exception you could make to this is if you called Hillary an incumbent.  Full list of presidents and VP's here

UPDATE

I didn't just bury the conclusion, but left it out entirely. The
point is that 2008 is likely to be a zoo. Not one but two wide open
nominating battles, plus of course the general election. Can we please,
please before then try to figure out a way to choose our candidates
other than just letting Iowa do it?

UPDATE #2

Welcome Instapundit (guess I need to send a check to my host for
more bandwidth). While you are here, you might check out my latest
roundup on Kyoto and Global Warming, as well as an interesting analysis on the economic and political success of ex-French vs. ex-Anglo/American colonies.  Short answer is that you didn't want the French as masters.

UPDATE #3

Check out the comments section, which has several good posts
handicapping the Republican candidates in 2008. Several people suggest
a Republican strategy to replace Cheney mid-term with their next
candidate. I know that the leadership of both political parties lament
their loss of control, due to the primary system, in selecting their
nominee, and this certainly would be an intriguing way of getting
around that and the Iowa/NH problem. However, the move is so
transparently Machiavellian, and I think unprecedented, that the first
party to try it will probably get punished in the court of public
opinion.

Well, it worked for Johnny Carson, why not for me?  Instead of leaving you with dead air (photons?) while I am knocking the rust off my beer pong skills back at Princeton, I will share with you a few of my favorite posts from my early days of blogging.  Since most of these posts were viewed by about 5 people, there is a certain temptation to just recycle them without attribution, given the unlikelihood of getting caught.  Instead, though, I will share them as my best of Coyote...

This post was from early last December, and is titled "60 Second Refutation of Socialism, While Sitting at the Beach":

Last week, there were several comments in Carnival of the
Capitalists that people would like to see more articles highlighting
the benefits of capitalism.  This got me thinking about a conversation
I had years ago at the beach:

Hanging
out at the beach one day with a distant family member, we got into a
discussion about capitalism and socialism.  In particular, we were
arguing about whether brute labor, as socialism teaches, is the source
of all wealth (which, socialism further argues, is in turn stolen by
the capitalist masters).  The young woman, as were most people her age,
was taught mainly by the socialists who dominate college academia
nowadays.  I was trying to find a way to connect with her, to get her
to question her assumptions, but was struggling because she really had
not been taught many of the fundamental building blocks of either
philosophy or economics, but rather a mish-mash of politically correct
points of view that seem to substitute nowadays for both.

One
of the reasons I took up writing a blog is that I have never been as
snappy or witty in real-time discussions as I would like to be, and I
generally think of the perfect comeback or argument minutes or hours
too late.  I have always done better with writing, where I have time to
think.  However, on this day, I had inspiration from a half-remembered
story I had heard before.  I am sure I stole the following argument
from someone, but to this day I still can't remember from whom.

I
picked up a handful of sand, and said "this is almost pure silicon,
virtually identical to what powers a computer.  Take as much labor as
you want, and build me a computer with it -- the only limitation is you
can only have true manual laborers - no engineers or managers or other
capitalist lackeys".

Yeah, I know
what you're thinking - beach sand is not pure silicon - it is actually
silicon dioxide, SiO2, but if she didn't take any economics she
certainly didn't take any chemistry or geology.

She
replied that my request was BS, that it took a lot of money to build an
electronics plant, and her group of laborers didn't have any and
bankers would never lend them any.

All
too many defenders of capitalism would have stopped here, and said
aha!  So you admit you need more than labor - you need capital too.
But Marx would not have disagreed - he would have said it was the
separation of labor and capital that was bad - only when laborers owned
the capital, rather than being slaves to the ruling class that now
controls the capital, would the world reach nirvana.  So I offered her
just that:

I
told her - assume for our discussion that I have tons of money, and I
will give you and your laborers as much as you need.  The only
restriction I put on it is that you may only buy raw materials - steel,
land, silicon - in their crudest forms.  It is up to you to assemble
these raw materials, with your laborers, to build the factory and make
me my computer.

She thought for a few seconds, and responded "but I can't - I don't know how.  I need someone to tell me how to do it"

And
that is the heart of socialism's failure.  For the true source of
wealth is not brute labor, or even what you might call brute capital,
but the mind.  The mind creates new technologies, new products, new
business models, new productivity enhancements, in short, everything
that creates wealth.  Labor or capital without a mind behind it is
useless.

From the year 1000 to the year 1700, the world's wealth, measured as GDP per capita, was virtually unchanged.
Since 1700, the GDP per capita in places like the US has risen, in real
terms, over 40 fold.  This is a real increase in total wealth - it is
not money stolen or looted or exploited.  Wealthy nations like the US
didn't "take" the wealth from somewhere else - it never even existed
before.  It was created by the minds of human beings.

How?  What changed?  Historians who really study this
stuff would probably point to a jillion things, but in my mind two are
important:

1. There was a philosophical and intellectual
   change where questioning established beliefs and social patterns went
   from being heresy and unthinkable to being acceptable, and even in
   vogue.  In other words, men, at first just the elite but soon everyone,
   were urged to use their mind rather than just relying on established
   beliefs
2. There were social and political changes that greatly increased
   the number of people capable of entrepreneurship.  Before this time,
   the vast vast majority of people were locked into social positions that
   allowed them no flexibility to act on a good idea, even if they had
   one.  By starting to create a large and free middle class, first in the
   Netherlands and England and then in the US, more people had the ability
   to use their mind to create new wealth.  Whereas before, perhaps 1% or
   less of any population really had the freedom to truly act on their
   ideas, after 1700 many more people began to have this freedom. 

So today's wealth, and everything that goes with it (from shorter
work hours to longer life spans) is the result of more people using
their minds more freely.

Look around the world - for any country, ask yourself if the average
person in that country has the open intellectual climate that
encourages people to think for themselves, and the open political and
economic climate that allows people to act on the insights their minds
provide and to keep the fruits of their effort.  Where you can answer
yes to both, you will find wealth and growth.  Where you answer no to
both, you will find poverty and misery. 

UPDATE

While it is not exactly a direct follow-on to this article, see my post Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism
for an analysis of some of capitalism's detractors.  For yet another
way to explain capitalism, at least libertarian philosophy, here is a new-agy approach that is actually pretty good.  Finally, Spontaneous Order
has an interesting post comparing religious creationism in the physical
world with progressives' statism in the economic/social realms.

Not sure why I didn't do it earlier, but I have added Google search for this site down on the lower part of the right nav bar.

Civilization IV is coming.  This is mixed news.  I am excited about the game, but the previous offerings in this series, as well as related Sid Meier games Alpha Centauri and Master of Orion, have probably been the greatest threats to my productivity, my sleep, and my marriage I have ever encountered. Hat tip to Jane Gault.

Two parts to this recommendation:

First, if you are still just using Outlook find or that horrible windows search function, get one of the free new desktop search programs NOW!  I have tried several, and in general they have been the most useful utility I have tried in years.  These programs index your email, hard disk files, and web history together for unified searches.  There is some overhead in the initial indexing (run it overnight) but from then on these utilities provide lightning search results to your whole hard drive.

Second, once you are ready to try one, get the Yahoo version.   Like Google's and others, it is free.  I have tried several of the others, including Google's, but the Yahoo version is faster, easier to use, and presents the results in a more useful format.  Also, I had conflicts between the Google version and Zone Alarm, and the Yahoo program got the editors choice award at PC Magazine.  You can download it free here.

A few weeks ago, in an interview about blogging, I was asked "why are there so many libertarian bloggers?"  My answer didn't make the final cut for the article, but I thought it was worth repeating here**:

First, I am tempted to answer with a variation of the argument that the left uses to justify why so many academics
are liberal "“ ie, that we bloggers are all smarter and therefore libertarians.  I will eschew that one though, because I think the real reason is that libertarians have never had a really good outlet for our opinions and it is a relief to have a channel to be able to express our views without distortion. 

Part of this is because there are few good organized outlets for libertarians.  In the past, libertarians could perhaps find a voice in one of the two major parties, but that tends to just end in frustration as about the 50% of what either party espouses is inconsistent with a true respect for individual liberties.  At the same time, the formal libertarian party has often been a joke, fielding some pretty bizarre candidates with some pretty niche priorities.

However, a major part of the problem is that libertarianism resists organization.  Libertarianism tends to be a big tent that attracts everything from anarcho-capitalists to Cheech-and-chong-esque hempfest organizers to Larry-Flint style pornographers.  For this reason, libertarianism defies efforts to brand it, which is a critical shortcoming since the two major political parties nowadays are much closer to brands than ideologically consistent philosophical alternatives. 

Libertarians revel in differences and being different.  Almost by definition, none of us have the same message, or even believe that we all should have the same message. Many of us are suspicious of top-down organization in and of itself.  Blogging is therefore tailor made for us "“ many diverse bottom-up messages rather than one official top-down one.

Finally, since libertarianism is really about celebrating dynamism and going in a thousand different directions as each individual chooses, in some sense the Internet and blogging are not only useful tools for us libertarians, but in and of themselves are inherently libertarian vehicles.  Certainly libertarian hero F. A. Hayek would recognize the chaos of the Internet and the blogosphere immediately.  For a good libertarian, chaos is beautiful, and certainly the blogosphere qualifies as chaotic.   The Internet today is perhaps the single most libertarian institution on the planet.  It is utterly without heirarchy, being essentially just one layer deep and a billion URL's wide.  Even those who try to impose order, such as Google, do so with no mandate beyond their utility to individual users.

When people are uncomfortable with the blog phenomenon, they tend to be the same people who are
uncomfortable with anything chaotic.  I have written several times, particularly here and here, that people across the political spectrum, from left to right, are united by an innate fear of and need to control chaos.  Conservatives don't like the chaos of themes and messages found in movies and media.  Liberals insist on a unified public education system with unified messaging rather than the chaos of school choice and home schooling.  Socialists hate the chaos and uncertainty of the job market, and long for guaranteed jobs and pensions.  Technocrats hate the chaos of the market, and seek to impose standardization.  Everyone in the established media hates blogs, which threaten to upset the comfortable order of how-we-have-always-done-things.

** Which just demonstrates another reason why we all blog- no editors!  There is a saying that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.  It may well be that we bloggers are in the process of proving a parallel adage about being our own editors.

Lynne Kiesling of the Knowledge Problem has been blogging on just what chocolates are the best in the world (her normal beat is economics and electricity markets).  In this post, she answers my question about my wife's favorite, Maison
du Chocolat, and how it compares to her favorites.

I am reminded of my kids' favorite Johnny Depp line from Chocolat:  "good, but not my favorite".

By the way (just to make this post totally stream of consciousness), I think it would be impossible to have Lena Olin's character in Chocolat be any different than her role as Sydney's mom in Alias.

A few weeks ago, I was admiring some of the recent art of my 8-year-old daughter (art being one of her passions).  Some time in the last year, her art ability crossed an imaginary line where her drawings are better than what I am able to produce (don't worry, I do bring this back to blogging before the end of the post).

I was telling her that the art was beautiful, and expressing what a relief it is to critique her art nowadays vs. when she was much smaller.  I told the story from when she was four or so of looking at a drawing she brought home from school with pride and my saying "nice bunny".  Of course, every parent knows what happened next - she responded "dad, that's a fire engine".  And my saying, "oh, yea, I see, there's the ladder" and her saying "dad, those are the wheels", and, well, you get the idea.

So about a week after I told her this story, she was telling me about something that happened that day at school.  As sometimes happens to her, she got excited and that made her story kind of disjointed and hard to parse.  At the end of it, I said something like "that's great".  She looked at me for a second in the eye and said "nice bunny".

The more I think about it, the more proud I am of her.  She was telling me, in two words, that she was self-aware enough to know that she had done a poor job telling her story.  She was also telling me that she realized that I was patronizing her and she didn't like it.  I am a little sad that she might be this cynical at such a young age, but really I am happy to move our relationship to a more grown-up level.

Today, "nice bunny" has become our family in-joke, and we all use it now (ex:  my wife comes home with a new haircut, that I of course totally miss.  She says "do you like my haircut" and I of course say "it looks great".  She now responds "nice bunny")

Last time I hosted Carnival of the Vanities, about 5 of the submitted posts made absolutely no sense to me, no matter how I hard I read them, but I dutifully included them with some kind of neutral introduction.  Next time I will be tempted just to say "nice bunny", but I am not sure anyone would know what the hell I was talking about.

Small Business Trends publishes weekly reviews of business-oriented web sites called "Power Blog Reviews".  This week, they have a very nice review of Coyote Blog:

The Power of the Coyote Blog
is the straight-shooting way its author comes right out and says what
he means, without dancing around subjects. And the real-life business
experiences he conveys are eminently helpful, providing information it
is hard to get elsewhere.

Thats really generous, thanks!

Update: I deeply resent the suggestion of several of my "friends" that some other blogger must have been spoofing my IP address the week I got reviewed.

This week's Carnival is up at Gongol.com. 

Continuing in the efforts of the host last week, Brian has tried to reformat that Carnival to make it more useful and user-friendly than the data-dump model.  I think he has done a really nice job, and I am not just influenced by the fact that my article this week gets an "editors choice".

Note that this has become, by accident, my growing post on the Canadian Sponsorship scandal.

The Right (justly) is criticized by the Left for interfering with First Amendment rights by trying to legislate morality in broadcast television. 

However, I find that most people who claim to be free speech supporters, well, aren't.  Here are a couple of examples.

First, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the very heart of the American left, is attempting to regulate political speech by licensing and regulating bloggers, (not to mention trying to reinvigorate the Fairness Doctrine).

OK, so if both the Left and Right are threatening free speech in GWB's Amerika, then I guess we need to run off to Canada.  However, now we get to watch Canada's ruling party suppressing reporting on its malfeasance, trying to hold off public disclosure long enough to call elections to keep their jobs.  Even Karl Rove might fear to try that.

UPDATE:  Captains Quarters reports that at least one Canadian web site that linked to their story on the Canada mess is being threatened with legal action by the Canadian government.  Here is the original story, with a description of what's going on.  Are you tired of Enron-like financial scandals where you have to take someone's word for it that illegal things are happening, because all the financial shenanigans are too complicated to understand?  Well, this will be a relief, because it is pretty easy to understand that this is bad:

The sponsorship program eventually became a huge slush fund into which over $250
million was poured, over $100 million of which was paid in fees and commissions
to these five advertising firms, with little or any evidence of work done or
value for money.

In exchange for these large contracts for little or no work, Brault kicked
back generously to the Liberal Party, putting Liberal organizers on his payroll
while they continued to perform party work (including, at one point, Prime
Minister Jean Chrétien's brother, Gaby Chrétien), paying invoices to other
companies for work actually done for the Liberal Party, and giving large
donations -- in cash -- to the Liberal Party through Renaud or Liberal Party
organizer (and close associate of Public Works Minister Alfonso Gagliano) Joe
Morselli.

Update #2:  Winds of Change has more detail about what is going on and the context of the Sponsorship program.  I remember a while back GWB rightly caught hell for using government funds to promote administration policies.  The sponorship program seems to have gone way beyond this:

An important note the Captain missed - the $250 million Sponsorship Program was
concentrated in Quebec, where it was used to undermine the separatist Bloc
Quebecois. I'll note for the record that I don't really have an issue with that
aspect of it, though the Bloc sure does; they're Canada's 3rd largest federal
party.

This scandal may well put the separatists in power in Quebec, leading to yet another separation test for Canada.  Its not clear to me how hard, if at all, the rest of the country would fight separation.

Update #3: More on Canadian (non)free speech here.

Update #4: San Francisco officials claim blogs are exempted and some of the quotes in the original article are suspect.  However, to be fair to the original author, there is nothing in writing that blogs are exempted from the regulation - only a verbal assurance.  When evaluating these verbal assurances, remember that when the nationa income tax was initially passed, the country was given the verbal assurance that the tax would never ever apply to more than then richest 1% of taxpayers.

In the beginning,  I tried to write a blog about my day to day experiences as a small business person.  That lasted about a day, mainly because I have the attention span of a 7-year-old boy mainlining Hershey Bars.  I still blog a lot about running a small business, but I also comment on political trends, mainly from a libertarian point of view, and anything else that happens to strike my fancy that day.

However, with Google out there, I have lost even more focus and control of my blog's positioning.  A lot of my traffic is Google hits, and it turns out there are two particular searches that drive a non-trivial portion of my traffic.  That means for many readers, my blog is defined by these two topics:

• Pocket Doors
• Spanking

Yes, call me the Pocket Door and Spanking Blog now.  LOL.  Anyway, if only to reinforce my strong Google rankings on these meaningful topics, here is how I became the Pocket Door and Spanking Blog:

Pocket Doors and My Manhood  (December, 2005)

Our bathroom has a pocket door to save space - that's one of those doors that slide on a hidden rail in and out of the wall.
From time to time, usually because my kids go slamming into it, the
door comes off its rails and gets jammed, which is a problem as it can
bottleneck some very critical facilities.

The first time this happened, I tried to get it back on its track,
but I just could not.  The track is up in the wall and it is almost
impossible due to the lack of clearance to do anything with it.  I
checked in the Yellow Pages and saw there was actually a company that
specialized in pocket door repairs, so I called them out.  Well, Joe
(or whoever) shows up with his little tool kit, looks at the door for a
second, grabbed it in a certain way, and then gave it a quick jerk -
kabam - and it was back in its tracks.  It took him like 5 seconds. 

Well, there I stood, completely unmanned, right in front of my
laughing wife and family, by Joe the visible butt-crack guy.  Bummer.

Since that time, I have had the door come untracked two or three
times.  Thinking to save me further embarrassment, my wife tends to ask
any passing stranger to come in and fix it.  I can sit there for hours
fighting the thing, and then my wife brings in the guy painting the
house - kabam - fixed.  Next time she brought in the 60+ year old sales
guy who happened to be there - kabam - fixed.  I swear, if Paris Hilton
was dropping by for a visit she could probably fix that damn door.  It
is humiliating.

Well, this time I would not allow my wife get someone else to fix
it.  Every night, for about 10 minutes, I would take my innings with
the door, struggling to do what everyone else seemed to have learned at
birth.  I actually suggested to my wife that we should call out a
contractor and tear the thing out and install a real door.  She
suggested instead that she could have our 13-year-old baby sitter come
in from the other room to fix it.  Finally, tonight, when I was about
to give up, I tried holding it in a slightly different way and - Kabam
- fixed.  God I feel great.  My manhood is restored and I am at the top
of the world.

Spanking Employees  (November, 2005)

Well, just when you think you have seen every way to screw up in a small business, there comes this story.

The owner of a shaved ice business was arrested after two employees claimed he spanked them for making mistakes at work.

And more...

One
of the women told police that on her first day at the Tasty Flavors Sno
Biz, Levengood made her sign a statement that said: "I give Gene
permission to bust my behind any way he sees fit."

Hat tip to Jim Rome, as I first heard this on his radio show, and to the Mises Institute,
of all places, where I found the link.  This story has been out and
about for a while, but I wanted to give it a few days to make sure it
was not a hoax.

To make this more bizarre, I did a Google search to see if
anyone had called this out as a hoax, and found that there have been
many similar stories in other places, including here and here.

Sigh.  Oh well, I guess a weird identity is better than no identity at all.

Doubt I will blog much - it is my kids' spring break and we are off skiing in Utah. 

As the owner of a small blog as well as of a number of small commercial websites, I spend a lot time trying to Google to index me higher (hey, you, down here, look at me).  So its strange to me when I see this:

WASHINGTON : Agence France-Presse has sued Google Inc. for
copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet search engine
included AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs published
without permission.

In a suit filed in a Washington court, AFP sought damages and interest
of at least 17.5 million dollars (13.1 million euros) and an
interdiction on the publication of its text and photos without prior
agreement.

I know several news agencies have tried this.  My guess is that this is a bid for payment rather than delisting.  It would be interesting to test them and see what their reaction would be if Google said "OK, we'll drop you".  My guess is that if Google purposely did not include AFP in their news index, they would probably get sued instead for anti-trust.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't.  Something Walmart is probably coming to understand nowadays.

This morning my sitemeter here at Coyote Blog rolled over the 50,000 visit mark.  I know that Glenn Reynolds gets more than this during his bathroom breaks, but it really exceeds my expectations after just 5 months online.  Thanks to all you readers!

Should Maureen Dowd have the right to more political speech than I?  Should George Will enjoy more rights than you?

I signed the petition from the Online Coalition opposing speech limits in the blogosphere.

We are concerned about the potential impact that Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly's decision in the U.S. District Court for the District
of Columbia in Shays v. FEC, 337 F. Supp. 2d 28 (D.D.C. 2004) and the
FEC's upcoming rulemaking process may have on political communication
on the Internet.

One area of great concern is the potential regulation of bloggers
and other online journalists who distribute political news and
commentary exclusively over the web. While paid political advertising
on the Internet should remain subject to FEC rules and regulations,
curtailing blogs and other online publications will dampen the impact
of new voices in the political process and will do a disservice to the
millions of voters who rely on the web for original, insightful
political commentary.

Under the current rules, "any news story, commentary, or editorial
distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station,
newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication," is exempt from
reporting and coordination requirements. It is not clear, however, that
the FEC's "media exemption" provides sufficient protection for those of
us in the online journalism community.

As bipartisan members of the online journalism, blogging, and
advertising community, we ask that you grant blogs and online
publications the same consideration and protection as broadcast media,
newspapers, or periodicals by clearly including them under the Federal
Election Commission's "media exemption" rule.

I have always been opposed to McCain-Feingold's limitations on political speech, so my objection to current law goes beyond just extending the media exemption to blogs.  I support a broader extension of the media exemption from political speech restrictions to -- call me crazy -- all citizens, something I thought the First Amendment took care of but I guess we have to fight for again.  Actually, what might be more useful is to fight for an elimination of the media exemption altogether - this would likely raise such a howl from the media that McCain-Feingold (also known as the incumbent and MSM protection act) would soon be overturned.

I'm finally back from a near week-long trip to Florida to visit our operations there and try to drum up some new business with the State of Florida.  I'm happy to be back, and I am working to catch up on what went on in the world the last few days.

Via Dave Berry, here is an addictive new take on the classic breakout game.

By the way, here is Dave's semi-serious take on what electronics he travels with.

In accordance with federal law, I also have an iPod. It has 15G of
memory, which is at least 14G more than I actually need, since I
realize in my old age that I really only like something like nine
songs. I have Bose noise-canceling headphones, which are wonderful on
planes. The plane could make an emergency landing in the ocean, and
those of us with Bose noise-canceling headphones wouldn't notice until
squid swam past our seats.

I have a couple of hours down time here at the hotel and was hoping to catch up on a little blogging.  Unfortunately, while the hotel has wireless Internet, it turns out to be the slowest connection of all time.  I finally switched to dial up and got a substantial speed improvement.  At my computer, I actually get a pretty strong wireless signal with a "11.5 MBPS" speed, so I presume there is another bottleneck further up the line.  My guess is that they are using a wireless repeater system and one of the jumps has a bad connection.  Actually, I am surprised this does not happen more often.  Today I am at the Red Lion in Redding, CA, which I will certainly avoid in the future.  I usually go with Hampton Inn, because I have always been happy with their high-speed service and Internet connectivity is more important to me than how nice a bed I get.

I have had a lot of questions about my experience hosting both the Carnival of the Vanities (COTV) and the Carnival of the Capitalists (COTC) in February.  For aspiring hosts, here is an FAQ:

What are these Carnival things?

In 2002 Silfray Hraka was looking for a way for smaller blogs to get more attention - kindof like rural electrification for the Blogosphere.  He came up with the idea of the Carnival of the Vanities, a weekly roundup of posts from smaller bloggers, hosted each week at a different site.  Today, the COTV is in its 128th week and dozens of other spin-offs have been created.

How much of a traffic spike did you see?

This seems to be the number one question.  As a submitter each week to both the COTC and COTV, I usually see between 100-300 new visitors for the post I submitted, depending on how compelling the post's description looks.

For hosting the Carnival, of course, the traffic spike is more dramatic:

My normal mon-tue-wed traffic (unique visits): 300

Day of COTC: 1680

Day after: 500

2 days after: 325

Note that I actually got a bit more traffic from the Carnival of the Vanities:

Day of COTV: 2400

Day after: 600

2 day after: 325

The key of course is Glenn Reynolds linking.  Glenn can't read every small blogger that would like him to link to them, but he does a good job of publicizing various Carnivals that highlight smaller bloggers.   Glenn deserves all of our thanks for this.  By the way, I am pretty sure I got more non-Instapundit traffic for the COTC than the COTV.

I think that I leave my Sitemeter stats un-password protected and that you can view them here (link is to the monthly page but you can navigate around).  Here are the hourly stats for the COTV.  Below you can see my daily visits and page views for February.  I will leave it as an exercises for the reader to figure out when I hosted the Carnivals (COTV was first):

I do not really know how to track RSS feed traffic, but I think that the above numbers do not include RSS traffic. I do know that in the month I hosted these two carnivals my Bloglines subscribers have gone from 2 to 25.

The only other traffic related observation I can add is that my page views went up even higher on these days.  I generally run at 1.6 page views per visit but on these two days I went well over 2.  Hopefully that means that new visitors were looking around.

Is it hard to host a Carnival?

No, not really, it just takes some time.  I probably spent about 6 hours each to host the carnivals.  The COTC is very easy - submissions end up in a Gmail account in relatively standard format.  About 6 days before the publish date, the COTC folks will send the host an email telling them how to get into the Gmail account.  The COTV doesn't have this submission system, and relies more on the host providing an email contact in advance that people can send submissions to.  Make sure at least a week in advance of COTV that you post on your web site, preferably sticky at the top or with a link high in the margin, instructions for bloggers who want to submit to the Carnival you are hosting.  (Here is my post - I fiddled with the date in Typepad so that it would stay on top of the page for the whole week).

When hosting, do you need a theme?  How about Categories?

Both are optional.  I did a theme for my COTC just for fun, but did not have time, or any good ideas, for my COTV.  I highly recommend categorizing the entries because it makes the reading experience so much easier.  It is not hard to do as long as you put them in categories as you are building the post.

When Hosting, how do you keep up with all of the submissions?

I had 50 submissions for the COTC and 47 for the COTV.  I took everything, by the way, even if the post was a little out of bounds of the rules.  It is not too hard to keep up with the submissions as long as you:

1. Create a draft template a week in advance and
2. Add submissions every day rather than waiting to the last minute. The COTC submissions were easier to handle than COTV - COTC submissions came spread out through the week whereas COTV all came in the last 2 days.

A lot of my time was spent reading all the posts.  Not only was this fun, but I preferred to create my own summary of the post rather than just using the submitter's summary (which was often waaaaaay too long).  I tried to be fair as possible to everyone, particularly those I disagreed with.  I will say there were a couple of submissions I just did not understand or get what they were saying in their post -- in these cases, I used their description.  By the way - after you publish your post, check the links!  No matter how careful you were, you will have made some mistakes.

When Hosting, what did you do to publicize the Carnival?

First, I was careful to collect as many trackbacks as I could.  Some submitters included these in their email, but some did not.  Since I read every post, I always skimmed down to the bottom to see if there was a trackback.

Second, I sent every submitter a reply email saying that their post was included and giving them the link and trackback where they would find it on my site.  This did not take as long as you would imagine, since I copied the first one I wrote and just hit reply-paste-send on all the others.  This also let submitters check their links to make sure everything worked.  By the way, you may have a different policy, but I claimed editorial privilege and did not accept an requests to change my summary of their post.

All the submitters will generally send you traffic, as well as a number of regular readers.  As mentioned before, Glenn will generally link as well, and you can send him a brief reminder with the link, though both times I hosted he had the post linked before I thought to email him.

How do I sign up?

Instructions for hosting the COTV are here.  To submit to the COTV, go to Silfray Hraka's main page, scroll down for the list of hosts, and visit the host site for instructions.  Instructions for hosting the COTC are here.  You can submit to the COTC by filling in this form.  A list of other Carnival spin-offs is here.

Good luck