StephanKinsella.com

Cool article on buzzword proliferation–If Using Buzzwords is How You Roll, Don’t Be Surprised by the Hatin’, by Nathan Johnson. Writes Johnson: “What is it about certain words that makes them so popular? Do you know what “krunk,” “off the chizain” and “fo shizzle” mean? Possibly. Would you use them in polite conversation – say, in a business meeting, during a parent/teacher conference, at church, during a job performance review? If you don’t know, let me tell you: No, not unless you were joking. Yet, I’ll bet you think you know what equally nebulous terms like “robust,” “end-to-end,” “turnkey” and “scalable” mean. A seemingly infinite number of corporations use them every day to describe products and services.”

From an article in the New York Law Journal (April 17, 2003): “The CIA recently estimated the gross national product of Iraq at about $59 billion. It’s a fair bet that the ultimate cost of the country’s postwar reconstruction will far exceed that figure. So while many issues relating to how Iraq’s reconstruction will proceed — and who will pay — remain unsettled and highly controversial, lawyers have already begun considering how they and their clients can get a piece of the action.” Wow, what a coincidence–I was just thinking the other day–the problem with Iraq is they have a shortage of lawyers.

Interesting article about “whether patents are an impediment to the industry, a necessary evil or just a high-visibility nuisance”. As a patent-lawyer friend said about this article, “It’s good that this is becoming a more mainstream public policy debate, but scary how ill informed and even illogical the debate is.” More pro-/con-IP resources and information.

What can I say–that’s the title I came up with for the latest patent to issue for my company, Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. Hey, I haven’t had any published articles to blog lately, this was the best I could do. More patents here.

New Harvard Study Heats up ‘Global Warming’ Debate–yes, HARVARD (another article: Greenhouse gases not culprit, study suggests). A few choice snippets:

A new scientific review of climate history contends that the earth was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today, supplying ammunition to one critic of the environmental movement who claims concern over “global warming” has been “sheer folly.”

A team of Harvard University scientists examined 1,000 years of global temperatures and reviewed more than 240 scientific journals from the past 40 years and concluded that despite man’s influence on our environment, current temperatures are not as warm as during the Middle Ages.

“This new study merely affirms the obvious: climate alarmism based on a few years’ or even a century’s data is sheer folly, reminding us again that geological cycles spanning millennia do not share the rush of agenda-driven scientists or activists,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, told CNSNews.com.

The Harvard study is set to be published this spring in the journal Energy and Environment. According to the study, a global medieval warming period lasting from about 800 to 1300 A.D. was followed by a Little Ice Age between the years 1300 to 1900. The study also states that the earth has been warming slightly since 1900.

The study is significant because it refutes the notion that current temperatures are the warmest ever and calls into question much of the warming effect caused by the so-called greenhouse gases from industrial plants and automobiles.

Green groups will be “devastated and panicked” by this new research, according to Horner, which he insists was not tainted by special interests or politics.

I LOVE IT!

A recent study of the controversial Atkins diet has concluded that the diet works, but simply because “people on [low-carb diets] are consuming less calories”. However, the study indicates that the diet also may not be unhealthy, as some critics have contended. A few snippets:

In the increasingly polarized battle over America’s bulge, counting calories trumps cutting carbohydrates, according to new research that debunks the nation’s hottest diet craze.

A sweeping analysis of studies dating back to the 1960s suggests people on low-carbohydrate regimens such as the Atkins diet lose weight merely because of the reduction of calories, not some miraculous metabolic process. […] “There’s nothing magical about carbohydrates,” said Dena Bravata, a Stanford University social science researcher and lead author of the study. “Low-carb diets are effective in the short run, but it’s because people on them are consuming less calories.”

The review, the first of its kind, appears in today’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It analyzed 107 articles containing data on 3,268 participants.

[…] But Bravata’s analysis of all existing studies found little evidence exists on the efficacy and safety of low-carb diets. Only five of the studies evaluated diets lasting longer than 90 days, and Bravata said adverse effects may not have shown up within the short period of the studies. She noted that losing weight typically leads to an improvement in some heart disease risk levels.

[…] Emphasizing that there is insufficient evidence that the Atkins diet is safe or unsafe, Bravata acknowledged that people having success on it might continue it as long as they do so under monitoring by a doctor. She said that for some people, Atkins is clearly “an effective strategy.”

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was arguably the most important thinker of the 20th century (or of all time, actually). His magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics is a comprehensive and systematic treatise on economics, social philosophy, and the social sciences, and the foundation for sound, truly scientific economics.

Also groundbreaking and fascinating is Mises’ Epistemological Problems of Economics, originally published in 1933. In this book Mises seeks to put the declining classical view of economics as a deductive science on a firmer foundation, and to show why positivism and empiricism is the wrong approach to understanding economics. This treatise, out of print for many years, is now brought back by the Mises Institute in a 3rd edition, with a comprehensive introduction by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, senior fellow of the Mises Institute and Mises biographer. Hülsmann’s introduction is a brilliant tour de force, and well worth reading in its own right.

Good tip from PC Magazine: “Recently, I began to receive spam messages that simply pop up on my computer screen. After a little research, I discovered that this spamming technique uses Windows’ built-in Messenger service, which sends messages in a broadcast across a network. The way to block these annoying messages is to disable the Messenger service. In Windows XP, you can do this through the Control Panel. Navigate to Administrative Tools | Services. Double-click on Messenger and click on Stop. Then set the Startup Type to Manual or Disable. Click on OK and the pop-up spam will be blocked.” I tried it, and it seems to work.

See also Pop-Up Stopper Pro (free version).

The Supreme Court’s March 26, 2003 decision, Brown v. Legal Foundation of Washington, addresses the constitutionality of state IOLTA (interest on lawyers’ trust accounts) programs. In these programs, attorneys are required by their state bar rules to deposit client funds that are too small to earn a “positive net return” into a pooled interest-bearing IOLTA account with the interest paid to groups that provide legal services for the indigent.

Certain clients whose funds were put into IOLTA accounts sued, claiming the Washington IOLTA program resulted in an unconstitutional “taking” of their property (namely, the interest on the IOLTA account) without just compensation, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment requires (a) that any governmental taking of private property must be for a “public use,” and (b) that “just compensation” must be paid to the owner. (IMO, the Fifth Amendment should not even apply to state laws, but due to the bogus incorporation doctrine (link2, link3) built up around the Fourteenth Amendment, it does.)

In a 1998 decision, Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation, the very same Justices held that any interest earned on client funds held in IOLTA accounts belongs to the owner of the principal, not the State or the State’s designated recipient of the interest. Despite this ruling, the court in Brown held that there is no unconstitutional taking (Justice O’Connor, in the majority in Phillips along with the four dissenters in the current case, apparently flip-flopped). The majority reasoned (sic) that there was no failure to pay just compensation, since the amount of just compensation was zero because without the mandatory pooling arrangements of IOLTA, the petitioners’ funds could not have generated any interest in the first place.

In a powerful dissent, Justice Scalia (joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Kennedy and Thomas) shows how nonsensical and poorly reasoned the majority’s opinion is (i.e., how inexplicable it is that O’Connor joined the majority opinion in Brown, despite its clear inconsistency with Phillips). He concludes,

Perhaps we are witnessing today the emergence of a whole new concept in Compensation Clause jurisprudence: the Robin Hood Taking, in which the government’s extraction of wealth from those who own it is so cleverly achieved, and the object of the government’s larcenous beneficence is so highly favored by the courts (taking from the rich to give to indigent defendants) that the normal rules of the Constitution protecting private property are suspended. One must hope that that is the case. For to extend to the entire run of Compensation Clause cases the rationale supporting today’s judgment–what the government hath given, the government may freely take away–would be disastrous.

The Court’s judgment that petitioners are not entitled to the market value of their confiscated property has no basis in law. I respectfully dissent.

As noted in recent blog posts, I proposed, in an October 2001 article, New Israel: A Win-Win-Win Proposal, relocating Israel to U.S. public lands such as Utah or the Anwar area of Alaska.

[Update: the image is missing from the original article; it is here: ]

I’ve seen similar proposals since then, including Ken Layne’s FoxNews.com piece How ‘Bout Relocating Israel to Mexico?; “Fight World War IV” – Or Let Israelis Immigrate?, by Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE; and Israel’s end-times gamble, by Gary DeMar, WorldNetDaily.com.

And now, in the April 2, 2003 issue of ReasonOnline, Brian Doherty has published the article New Exodus: Let Jews leave Europe for America. While the above commentators urge Israelis to immigrate here, Doherty makes the complementary argument that, due to “the resurgence of European anti-Semitism,” America should open our doors to any “any European Jew who fears anti-Semitic persecution”. According to Doherty, this would “pok[e] a sharp stick in the eyes of European critics of the United States,” and would further benefit us: “a cohort of highly educated European Jews would certainly be a plus for our society and our economy.”

Two cool websites (courtesy of a recent PATNEWS newsletter): “The first is www.californiacoastline.org, where you can view 10,000 photographs of the coastline of California from the Oregon border to the border with [Mexico].

The second site is www.Keveney.com/Engines.html, where you can see animations for 19 types of historical and modern engines.”