Updated in this post.
Off-topic, I know, but Enstrom‘s Almond Toffee is so good I busted my weight-watchers diet for it yesterday. Some evil friend sent it to me as a gift. Makes a great gift. Jesus, it’s good. And no, I don’t own stock in them.
MSNBC report on a fascinating experiment scheduled for this Sunday to measure the speed of gravity. Writes Alan Boyle, of MSNBC’s “Cosmic Log”:
How fast is gravity? The question seems so simple, but it actually generates a cosmic debate inside and outside the scientific mainstream. This weekend, astronomers will take a big step toward calculating the speed of gravity.
Relativity theory dictates that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and that such a cosmic speed limit would apply to gravitational influences as well. But there’s never been a definitive experimental test of that claim.
As it so happens, a line-of-sight encounter between Jupiter and a distant quasar at 12:30 p.m. ET Sunday represents the best opportunity in a decade for such a test, according to Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri at Columbia and Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The astronomers expect their data to confirm that gravitational effects move at the speed of light — and they hope to have the results ready to present to the American Astronomical Society in January. But if they come up with an unexpected answer, it could send shock waves through the scientific community and beyond. […]
There are other facets to the “speed of gravity” debate that may not be settled even if Kopeikin and Fomalont come up with the expected results. Iconoclastic physicist Tom Van Flandern has been saying for years that gravitational force acts at velocities far faster than the speed of light, and he engaged Kopeikin in a rather technical discussion of the quasar experiment. Suffice it to say that Van Flandern thinks this weekend’s observations won’t address his central claims.
This whole exercise isn’t merely a dry classroom debate over Lorentzian vs. Einsteinian relativity: Any evidence that gravity works faster than the speed of light would be seized upon by creationists to bolster their claim that the universe really could have been created 6,000 years ago. We saw this debate flare up in the wake of suggestions that the speed of light might have been faster in the distant past.
Click here for other “revisionist physics” links.
Fascinating new paper attempting to elaborate and extend Hoppe’s argumentation ethics defense of individual rights and its relation to Rothbardian Austrian economics, praxeology, and libertarian theory: Hopp(e)ing Onto New Ground: A Rothbardian Proposal for Thomistic Natural Law as the Basis for Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Praxeological Defense of Private Property, by Jude Chua Soo Meng.
If you are not familiar with the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe–well, you should be, as he is the leading social theorist, economist, and libertarian philosopher of our time (IMHO). Check out these classics: his tour de force Book Review of Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, published back in 1989, when he was just bursting onto the Austrian-libertarian scene; his Introduction to his latest blockbuster work, Democracy: The God That Failed; his summary of Rothbardian Ethics; a ringing defense of the justice and feasibility of anarchy, The Private Production of Defense; and brilliant sociological-historical-economic analysis, Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order.
Also not to be missed are Hoppe’s radical, realist, neo-Kantian/Misesian epistemological views, e.g. in Economic Science and the Austrian Method; In Defense of Extreme Rationalism; and On Certainty and Uncertainty, Or: How Rational Can Our Expectations Be?. And last, but certainly not least, his groundbreaking apriori, praxeological defense of libertarian rights, in his “argumentation ethics“.
A great interview with Ann Coulter, author of the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, by George Gurley. (Yeah, I read the book; a guilty pleasure, sort of like buttered popcorn at midnight.)
How do we (legally) damage our enemies, such as democrats and other socialists? One thing that occurs to me is: give a $10 donation to the next Democrat Presidential candidate. I guarantee they will spend multiples of that with follow up mailings trying to milk you for more. Give them $10 and it costs them $30–a net loss for them (and a net gain for liberty) of about $20.
But I had another idea yesterday. I have not researched the tax law on this, so may be off in my presumptions, but it is my understanding that income tax is owed if an American citizen is given something of value. If I give you a million bucks, you owe taxes (about $400k) to Uncle Sam. If you don’t file or pay, you are guilty of tax evasion. But if I give you, say, my Monet painting worth a million bucks, you still owe about $400k in taxes to Uncle Sam, even though you don’t have the money. Even if you don’t yourself subjectively value the Monet that much. This is government logic: it is void of economic sense (re subjective values) and fairness.
So here’s my idea. A millionaire libertarian individual sends a letter to a socialist politician, offering to give $1 million if the politician will only come spend the weekend, alone, with the millionaire on his yacht, so that the millionaire can explain to the politician why he thinks the government should be abolished. The offer should be made “irrevocable” for, say, a month. Now, the politician will surely decline the offer. However, that is not the point. The point is he was given something (an irrevocable offer) that had a monetary value. After all, receiving an irrevocable offer to be paid a million bucks for doing a relatively simple task, has a “fair market value,” just like the Monet has a fair market value. I would pay $100,000, for example, to be given such an offer, because then I would accept the offer and make a million bucks, off a $100,000 investment. So being offered money is itself being given something of value. By the logic of the income tax, the politician is now obligated to report the fair market value of the offer, and to pay income tax on it. If he does this (which is implausible), he has less money available and thus is damaged (which is good). If he does not, then the libertarian can call a press conference and point out that the politician is evading the very income tax laws he supports.
I think one flaw in my theory is that it might be difficult to make an offer irrevocable if there is no consideration given by the politician. i am not sure. But even a revocable offer is worth something.
Any millionaire libertarian volunteers?
William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, appeared Sunday morning, along with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, on a segment of ABC’s “This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts”. If I did not hear him incorrectly, he came out against lowering the capital gains tax. I don’t have the transcript, but I think his reason was something about such a tax cut not being the most effective way to get the economy going, that it would not have the greatest “stimulus,” something like that. I was aghast. I hope I misunderstood him. If anyone knows different, or has a transcript, email me and I’ll post a correction or follow-up.
Phil Hendrie had a character on a recent show who referred to Anna-Nicole Smith as a “hillbilly butter-hog”. You know, that’s pretty funny.
Another insightful, perceptive column from the libertarian treasure Joe Stromberg, taking warmongering libertarians to task: Liberventionism III: The Flight from History.
Recent US patent: Color coded tools (PTO version). This is a patent on a tool, e.g. a wrench or hammer, “having an outer surface wherein a portion of the outer surface is colored and wherein the colored portion of the outer surface is impregnated into the tool”. Utter genius. Call the Nobel committee. More ridiculous/obscure patents.
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