Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway?

This is an excellent resource on understanding programming languages fundamentally.  It is also highly entertaining.

Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ

Review: Of Personal Liberty - Verl Engel

Few of you know that I have been actively involved in the authorship of a very important libertarian book project being written by a man who has become a close friend of mine, Verl Engel.  Of Personal Liberty was written to address one of the many avenues that the government is routinely violating our rights.  I would highly encourage all of my U.S. readers to buy and read this book.  It is an essential piece in the fight to defend our freedom as Americans.

I am going to repost my foreword here because it is the most impassioned plea that I can make for you to read this book:

Imagine lights flash behind you, red and blue, and in the moment of surprise and incrimination, you begin to pull over. The officer in blue walks up after you dutifully stop, according to seemingly countless years of custom. She immediately inquires as to your velocity, seeking to use her aura of authority to back you into confessing to a perceived crime. You relinquish your documentation when impudently requested, and in return receive a citation obliging your remittance for a state-ordained wrongdoing. 

What if you didn’t have to stop? What if the law was actually on your side? The author of this book is going to convince you that this is the case. The Constitution of the United States of America is explicit in its limitations on governmental power and authority. You—as a citizen of the United States of America—are the beneficiary of the trust that is the United States Constitution. The government—as the trustee—is forbidden from depriving people of their freedoms and unalienable rights without due process. Since the signing of the Constitution, the intervening centuries have quietly eroded the liberties of American citizens. 

The government, particularly in the new millennium, has been accelerating this process of depriving Americans of liberties. The War on Terror has overseen the greatest of deprivations, from dismantling privacy of communications to banishing the right to a fair trial—rights guaranteed in the Constitution—all under the guise of necessity and security. The specter of an omniscient state divested of any trust in its citizens and void of any duty to protect their rights is not a distant nightmare. This is the waxing reality of the twenty-first-century police state. A reality often ignored by the average man or woman on the street, who lives happily in his or her fishbowl, always under the watchful eye of the government. 

Our government, at this critical juncture, does not yet have full control of citizens’ actions, but it seeks to corral people into ill-fitting but easily definable “safe” and “dangerous” categories. The following years will testify whether history turns this intrusive government into a tyrannical government or—if the people demand—into a government that deals respectfully and honestly with its beneficiaries. 

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and with the continuing consolidation of power in the hands of the government, the future of the United States of America as the land of the free is in jeopardy. The crux of the matter lies in how much the people are willing to concede before they stand up and say, “Enough.” If the government can keep the apathetic populace adequately anesthetized to avoid questioning the accumulation of centralized power, then the transformation can continue undeterred. The government may then, and only then, fully take on the role of provider, controller, and dictator of not only what its citizens may not do, but also of what its citizens must do. This is the goal of a secure state, to dictate “good” behavior to its citizens and extirpate any residual resistance. 

This book seeks to awaken people to the emergence of this totalitarian state. Will America return to being the land of the free, or will it manifest itself as the latest echo of authoritarian regimes proudly arrayed throughout history? As Ben Franklin has said, “Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither and lose both.” Liberty depends on the responsibility of people to see and to act to thwart tyranny.

As one of “We the people,” I humbly implore you not only to read this book but also to spend time comprehending its implications. As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, they expect what never was nor ever will be.”

Patrick Cox on Aging and Richard Fisher on Orange Swans

I had two delightful Mauldin things come in this morning.  One by Patrick Cox on aging and biotechnology, which is hardly surprising given his constant harping on the issue.  He has a couple of savage lines that ring truly to me.  First he starts off by pointing out a recent article in the Washington Post:

Last year, we began to see articles in the press conceding that overpopulation wasn’t going to end civilization. This year, we’re seeing reports on the real population problems—depopulation and aging. 

For example, The Washington Post published an article titled, “The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out.”

And then he goes on to contrast this article with an article from the same newspaper from 1985 when people were freaking out about "overpopulation."

This is quite a change from pieces published in the same newspaper in the 1980s. Here is the lead from an older article titled, “Global Overpopulation.”

In the face of overwhelming evidence that there is no way of fighting poverty in the Third World without more extensive family planning, the Reagan administration is cutting back its support of the most tested and experienced organizations in this field, condemning wide areas of the globe to ever bigger, ever more hungry populations. 

The point of the piece above was that more US taxes should flow to national and international overpopulation experts. Politicians who disagreed were accused of ignoring or even causing mass starvation. 

Today, almost everything about that article has been proven wrong.

 And he is not wrong.  The environmentalists and overpopulation crazies have been at this for years.  They were wrong then.  They are wrong now.  They peddle fear with an agenda.  Nothing more.   Patrick Cox goes on to rightly assert that the movements like overpopulation and environmentalism are little more than secular religions, complete with swaying somnambulant masses, adoring pundits, and exalted technocratic priesthoods.

Today, the journalists, academics, and politicians who spread overpopulation hysteria have moved on to new doomsday scenarios. Oddly, they’re still demanding immediate and massive tax monies for “experts.” It seems they’re hoping that we’ll just forget how wrong they were about population. 

Personally, I’m not forgetting. Their irrational obsession has done serious damage. They have distracted us from that fact that the shrinking population of workers can’t support the growing population of older and sicker retired people. 

This is the flipping of the demographic pyramid. Warren S. Thompson first predicted it in 1929 in a paper for the American Journal of Sociology. 

Thompson’s textbook on demographics was standard in American colleges until the 1960s. Then, it was displaced by what I view as an apocalyptic environmentalist religion.

Anyway... enough about insane liberal media.  Let's move on to something more enthusiastically optimistic.  Richard Fisher has been a Federal Reserve President and has lived in the belly of the beast for sometime and shouted, rang cymbals, produced smoke signals, and probably every other imaginable form of objection noisemaking he could prior to various insane moves by the Fed in the past, which were promptly and completely ignored by those who made the decisions...  to all of our disadvantage.  Now are are neck deep in the dung with no shovel in sight.  But Richard Fisher is apparently an eternal optimist...  I hope--in my heart of hearts--that he is right.  I must admit that I feel the fire to resist and build independently of the mad government, but I am not confident that this fire burns in enough souls in the U.S. to save us as a country.

I am going to repost his speech in full, because it is a very worthwhile read.  The link to the Mauldin site is here too.

Law is inherently violent

Finally, other people are catching up on libertarian ideas regarding law and government.

This short piece by Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter states clearly that all law is fundamentally based on violence, and that we as a society need to have a serious discussion whether all of the laws that we have on the books are worth killing your neighbor over.

Are you willing to kill your neighbor so that everyone in the country can have free health care?  Because if not, then free health care should not exist.

Something to think about.