Sixteen Volts

Zach Braff, who plays the beloved doofus doctor in "Scrubs", has a new movie coming out, called "The Last Kiss". However, Zach had better be careful not to become typecast to one certain role the same way that Harrison Ford did to his role as a father who has to protect his kidnapped or otherwise threatened family, as illustrated in the post "The Gardening" at "The Not-So-Exciting Life of Brian Palmer".

Live and learn something new every day. I have seen the term "Turd Blossom" used to refer to Karl Rove, but I naturally assumed this to be totally made-up by his political opposition. But apparently it is not, but Dubya actually calls him that. Go figure. Perhaps one day I will also be mainly known by some sobriquet, though hopefully something cooler than what Mr. Rove is blessed with, something along the lines of "Diamond Tiger" or "Mr. Rapier".

The famous Coase theorem says that in the world of spherical horses that run in a vacuum, externalities will be efficiently bargained away regardless of how the property rights were initially allocated. The local news article "How The Province Plans To Protect You From Real Estate Fraud" reminds us of the reality of real estate title fraud,and the current sick reality of making the victims pay all the costs to correct the situation, instead of forcing the mortgage company and whatever lawyers were involved in the fraudulent deal to shoulder them, as any basic sense of justice would assume. I can't help but wonder if the mortgage companies and lawyers had a say when the laws were originally written, thus demonstrating the truth of the public choice theory. But hey, the homeowners can always purchase title insurance that reimburses them these costs in case they are victimized. This whole thing is so surreal that it is almost like something out of a position paper written by some autistic libertarian. Maybe the same idea could also be applied in other walks of life. For example, if your house is successfully burglarized, the burglar gets to keep all the stuff he took away, but if you have remembered to boy "stuff insurance" beforehand, it will reimburse you your losses. After all, negative externalities are symmetric.

Once you lose your home to title fraud and have to live in the great outdoors, there could be worse places to be homeless in than the one depicted in the news article "Homeless Live on the Beach in Hawaii". I think that the quote "Paradise is Hell to those without resources" is originally from Bertolt Brecht, but either way, I find it eeriely appropriate here. Surf's up, guys!

I came upon a new-to-me blog "Mighty Girl", read a a few pages and enjoyed it. The post "Cravings" sums up modern life in the big city in a fashion in a style similar to "Overheard in New York".

The post "Tim Attempts 5 lb Burger With 54 Toppings......In Under 30 Minutes" by James Lin tells us what can happen when you get to build your own burger.

The biggest crime of the Greens against humanity has been their opposition towards nuclear energy, recycling their tired scare tactics originally written by the same entities that financed the "Peace movement" that for some mysterious reason ever opposed Western military operations. For this reason, I actually hope that the global warming is real and will cause as much destruction as possible among Greens and their supporters and the nations that they admire the most, while I sit safe here in the Golden Horseshoe area. That would certainly be poetic justice. In the interview "Updating Prescriptions for Avoiding Worldwide Catastrophe", James Lovelock explains why it is crucial for humanity to move to use nuclear energy, instead of burning fossil fuels.

Steve Dutch has two old essays about the standard arguments against nuclear energy and the anti-science nutcases in general, "Nuclear Pseudoscience" and "Anti-Science of the 1960's and 1970's", the latter of which notes that

One of the most infuriating aspects of the anti-science movement is its Catch-22 technique. Critics assail technology for its shortcomings, then condemn any possible means of alleviating the problems. We often hear that certain types of technology, like computers or nuclear reactors, are overly prone to terrorist attack. One might think that such a problem might provoke serious questions about the moral legitimacy of terrorist movements and the ideologies that give rise to them, but anti-scientists prefer to fix the blame on technology for being there. The obvious remedy, better security for sensitive facilities, is condemned by critics as a threat. Ralph Nader claimed that nuclear power plants "are so vulnerable to sabotage or theft that a garrison state has to be built up to try and safeguard them ... Some observers believe there will be a million people with direct and backup assignments to guard the nuclear industry by the year 2000." The image of a million jackbooted storm troopers comes to mind at first, but what constitutes a "backup" assignment? Employees being asked to report suspicious happenings? Local police and National Guard units being available in emergencies? We could much more cogently argue that liquor stores create the need for a garrison state to protect them.

Indeed. If building more nuclear power is forbidden because it is too "risky" for the future of humanity, political leftism should also be forbidden and even more so. And just like Prof. Dutch points out, if nuclear plants shouldn't be built because they are good targets for terrorism, this is not an argument against nuclear power but against terrorism and the societies that tend to create terrorists, and their fundamental incompatibility with modern civilized and energy-intensive societies. Since nuclear power is absolutely essential in sustaining the Western civilization and its fruits in the future instead of returning to the 19th century the way that Greens would like us to do, this doesn't seem to leave very many options, does it?

By the way, the contents of Prof. Dutch's new essay "So You Want To Test Your Perpetual Motion Machine?" should be obvious to anyone except perhaps some postmodernists, but who knows, maybe it will silence a crank or two. Or not.

I didn't really write anything about 9/11 or its memorials, since I don't really have anything to say. In the post "The Moral Vacuity of Leftists", Tjic links to the post "Some Reflections On September 11 (Reprinted)" at Crooked Timber. Since I have a tendency to relate many events into irrelevant aspects of my life and ramble in tangents around the actual point, I think I'd better be quiet around here. I remember that day that I was going back up from the morning gym, and in the elevator this old couple asked me if I had heard anything about this airplane hitting the WTC. Of course, I first immediately assumed that some Cessna pilot had tried to play Flight Simulator for real, but then I turned on the news to see what was really going on.

I also couldn't help but think one old article in Mad Magazine about how things used to be different in the past (such as "When you went to movies, you had to fantasize of how the actresses look like naked"), and one panel of this article had a picture of an airplane that had crashed into a skyscraper, and some grinning guy was in the front talking into his phone, asking if the other guy had already heard the latest one about that 747 that hit that building. In the past, there was a period of delay between a horrible incident and the jokes about it. Ah well, many things were very different 9/10. Damn, if I could find this particular issue in the big box of Mad Magazines that my wife has saved from her youth, I would scan this panel and post it here.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 10:50 AM