Positive Liberty

I’m sure the timing had to do with the (hopefully soon-forgotten) movie, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” An email, targeted at Christians, arrived in my Inbox that read, “In the Beginning… What Really Happened?” But it was the next sentence that jumped out at me.

“Science insists that life and the universe are nothing more than cosmic accidents.”

A link labeled “where does the evidence really lead?” led to a promotional video — starring the Intelligent Design movement’s Who’s-Who.

But that sentence about science is really troubling.

First, science never “insists.” That’s a straw man. Physical science involves constant questioning and never quite arriving. Each mystery solved unlocks several new questions to be resolved. Only a scientIST can insIST.

It is impossible for science to “say” anything. Science is not a person, nor is it a democracy. Science is practiced by a sometimes incorrigible, generally competitive bunch of people, often hell-bent on proving each other wrong and getting famous with some new discovery. Now, there is, generally, a scientific consensus, but science is always provisional. In most instances you are well-advised to place your bets carefully on the consensus, because it’s been known to change — even quite abruptly. But evolution, which is extensively researched, well-cataloged, and supremely-tried, is one of the safest scientific bets.

Second, statements about the purpose of life and the meaning of the universe are NOT scientific. They are philosophical speculations, outside the purview of science — beyond falsification. Science is mechanistic — obsessed with measuring material, unable to locate ethereal meaning. Science is a tool and, as we’ll see, it can easily be misused.

Third, can you see, hear, touch, smell, or taste a cosmic accident (no double entendre intended)? How would you quantify and define a cosmic accident? How would you test it and, most importantly, falsify that? Science, properly practiced, doesn’t involve metaphysical properties. Theologians and philosophers can interpret and speculate and, in my humble opinion, even have some degree of success. But there’s no materialist method for measuring what is and what is not a cosmic accident.

The great boogeyman of the Intelligent Design movement is Richard Dawkins — or as a hilarious, viral, spoof video portrays him, Dick to the Dawk.

But the supreme irony is that there’s another boogeyman on the field — Phillip Johnson, the intellectual godfather and chief strategist of the Intelligent Design movement. Johnson fundamentally agrees with Dawkins! Both shape the battle as evolution wins, God loses. As theologian John Haught put it, “…all in their own ways, carelessly tolerate a simplistic conflation of science with ideological assumptions, whether these skeptics be religious or materialistic.” (Haught, God After Darwin, p 31).

And let’s be candid here: Richard Dawkins’ movement, New Atheism, and Phillip Johnson’s movement, Intelligent Design, need each other. They are thesis and antithesis. They are the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, or Tom and Jerry.

Now the aforementioned email advertisement might have been accurate if it had read, “Richard Dawkins insists that life and the universe are nothing more than cosmic accidents.” But that probably wouldn’t have provoked a sufficient number of Christians to click the link, so they too could learn how to burn straw men.

But Richard Dawkins did indeed say something almost exactly like that. Here’s the quote: Continue Reading »

None of the experts were sure if there is a large market of early adopters who want to eat test tube meat for environmental, health or ethical reasons.

For all the talk of high-tech meat production, attendees of the first In-Vitro Meat Symposium didn’t put their stomachs where their mouths were. Instead of sampling early versions of in vitro meat, they stuck to local fare.

I’ll be an early adopter because it would just be really cool. Besides, I could tell my grandkids “You bet I ate it! I ate it the first day I could. I wasn’t afraid at all!” And then they would smile over plates of cultured filet mignon with truffles, and they’d wonder at the strange, primitive world I grew up in, and at how very progressive I still was, even despite being 132 years old.

I’d light a bioengineered cigar — cancer having been cured half a century ago — and tell them a story about how gross it was to drive by an animal processing plant back in the old days, and how uneasy we all felt about the fate of the poor animals. The great-great-grandkids would ask to see our digital photos of one of the first same-sex marriages ever performed, and Scott and I would tell all the old stories again, about how we wondered if the world had been suddenly populated by lunatics when dozens of people were seen talking to themselves on the first “hands-free” cell phones. (The great-great-grands meanwhile passing one another retrieved video clips of the old days via telepathy.)

I may not believe in the singularity. I don’t have much religion at all. But the future is going to be one very cool place.

From James V. DeLong’s “Defending Intellectual Property,” in Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age, p 31:

Reportedly, 19th century thinker Herbert Spencer invented “an excellent invalid chair,” and in an excess of charitable zeal declined to patent it. As a result, no manufacturer was willing to risk making it. If the chair failed, the manufacturer would bear the entire loss, whereas if it succeeded others would enter the market that the pioneer had developed and he would, again, be unable to recover the costs.

Let’s grant that for industrial products, manufacturing costs may or may not be recouped depending on the strength of the patent. If this is the case, then a strong patent regime is necessary to preserve specialization of labor in the area of idea-creation: There’s no sense specializing in something that will never pay, like unpatentable ideas, for just the reasons given above. Manufacturers who have new ideas won’t want to risk trying them out, and they certainly won’t want to risk hiring someone full-time to be the guy who just thinks up ideas all day long.

The situation seems very different with copyrighted works, however, because these nowadays are easily “manufactured” by copying them from an original – or even from a copy – onto a uniform medium, and because individuals have since the dawn of time created artistic works just for the sheer joy of doing so.

Thus, the sellers of tangible items, considered as a class, shouldn’t feel nearly as afraid of open-source music as they were of open-source invalid chairs. It might even seem that the opposite is true for intellectual workers vis a vis the manufacturers of media – The weaker copyright law is, the more manufacturers stand to benefit, since we will buy their blank media and carry out the last step of the manufacturing process ourselves, deriving an equal or even greater pleasure from it than we would from pre-printed media that are more expensive to them.

Or does the very existence of copyrighted products help guarantee the distribution chains, the marketing, and the general hype that keeps Madonna’s music selling? In a world without copyright, would we consume more or less media storage? (And would it even matter, given how rapidly storage technologies are improving?)

And then there’s Ponoko, which threatens to do to manufactured goods what computers have already done to the arts:

Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform. It’s the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand.

Were Herbert Spencer alive today, he might have simply uploaded his design.

My colleague Will Wilkinson is thought-provoking as usual:

A while back, on a lark, I googled my maternal grandfather, Leo Draveling. . .

Never met the man. He died when my mom was a teenager. He was apparently something of a brute and not entirely admirable. Roots mean somewhat less for me than for most people. That about a quarter of my genes are his makes his story part of mine only in a small causal sense. If this minimum of significance becomes meaningful or deep, then it is because I choose to make up a story about myself in which it plays that role. I don’t. My junior high English teacher (or the sum total of things I have eaten, for that matter) have more to do with what I am.

It reminded me of something I wrote a while ago, back in the time when no one read my blog and I was unafraid to take risks:

“Welcome to the new religion, my friend. Genetics. It’s the religion that everyone carries inside them, but that no one dares to acknowledge as such. Call it the hate that dare not speak its name. And tonight, I’m going to lay it all out on the table.

“Let’s start with the first principles: Each individual’s life is meager and finite. In the end, all of us are frustrated; all of us fail. Everything we do melts into muck and ruin. A couple hundred years from now, no one will remember or even care that you have been.

“But the species, the species can live forever. The species can succeed. The species can find its own fulfillment. O meager human, there is only one way that you can take part in that eternal life: Reproduce. Nothing could be simpler. If you pass on your genes, then a part of you lives to fight again–no matter what your failings in this life may be.”

“Meet the new boss,” the Cynic said dismally.

“Indeed!” replied the Devil’s Advocate. “God may well be dead–I mean, who really knows–but these days, DNA holds up the Great Chain of Being. Where mankind once found continuity in the stories of Heaven and Hell, now he’s not so sure anymore. But whatever you believe on that score, the Gene lets you know that you’re a part of something bigger than your own little life. And for small, worthless creatures like yourselves, that can be profoundly comforting.”

I should write like that more often.

The Best:

Blog Comment.

Blog Post.

Rant.

Blog. Yes, they’re back.

April Fools Articles. At least, I think they are. I mean, I hope they are. I mean… oh just GIVE ME MY ENSLAVED DOG YOGA INSTRUCTOR ALREADY!1!!

Would be nice if he were a robot, too.

Dilemma: If I like Tim Burton but hate Stephen Sondheim, what do I do with the film version of Sweeney Todd?

“I think our main problem is our unclear definition of value.”

I’d like to make a top-level reply to one of the most interesting comments we’ve gotten in weeks. Before we begin, readers should know that I’ve already laid my cards on the table in the global warming game: Several months ago I wrote that 1) global warming is apparently both real and manmade and 2) even so, the best option may still be to do nothing about it.

I argued that many people seem to become convinced on this issue — one way or the other — because they find a particular narrative appealing, even while discounting various possibilities that don’t line up neatly with the narrative they happen to like. “Scientists find a danger, stop it, and save the world” is a tremendously appealing story, even to me. “Scientists find a danger, try to stop it, spend enormous amounts of money, and we’re screwed anyway” — while not appealing — is also a possibility, and one that we should not dismiss. There’s even “Scientists find a danger, overcorrect it, and polar bears now rule the world,” which is a remote possibility, but then, the remote possibility of something horrible shouldn’t be discounted either.

The problem with seizing on a narrative is that it focuses our attention on one set of dangers and on one outcome only. This is unwise in the extreme, particularly when dealing with a system in which “we’ve warmed things up, but we don’t know how much” is the cutting edge of our knowledge. It might in fact be wisest to wait and see what new technologies — like cheap solar energy — may do to the question in the coming years.

Anyway, let’s get to Casey’s comment. I’ve interleaved my replies, so if you’d like to get the full effect of the comment before you see them, please do so now.

Continue Reading »

But nothing in the science of economics suggests any fundamental difference between a preference for the Book of Common Prayer and a preference for a powerful shower spray. - Steven E. Landsburg

Over at a different venue I had occasion today to link to what I think is the absolutely brilliant and must read Why I Am Not An Environmentalist by Steven E. Landsburg.

Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist pretty much started the contemporary “popular economics” trend, remains one of the very best of its sort and spurred me on to reading more academic economics. (No, not Samuelson, but Smith and Ricardo and Marshall and even Keynes.)

On the topic of environmentalism in general and global warming in particular, I remain a strong skeptic about the real underlying motives of the first as a political and quasi-religious movement for the very reasons Landsburg articulates better than I can. As for the latter, I have allowed my old (and rapidly aging) friend Ronald Bailey to be my bellweather, lightening rod and canary in the cage. (Some mix of these metaphors works, I’m just not sure which.) As his critics gleefully note with seasonal regularity, Bailey is not himself a scientist; but as those who know him well know, he’s a meticulous researcher whose passion for being correct far exceeds any of his real but mostly reasonable political biases. So when he became convinced that the evidence supported the anthropogenic global warming thesis, I considered his shift from skepticism sufficient evidence, myself, to concur. (This, by the way, raises various interesting questions about the uses and misuses of argument from authority, but we’ll leave that for another occasion.)

What has yet to be explained to my satisfaction, however, is what calculations support, for example, Mr. Bailey’s now favored carbon tax or, for that matter, any of the other proposed solutions, ameliorations, abatements or other fixes, quasi or otherwise, to global warming. As I see it, it remains a purely economic issue. That is, no one is seriously claiming, at least as far as I know, that the current worst case global warming trend would make the planet entirely uninhabitable for human beings.

If that is correct, then even such worst case scenarios boil down to how expensive will the damage be versus how expensive would the fix be. That’s an interesting question and I’d like to know the answer if one is available. I’d also like to know if the question doesn’t boil down (no pun intended) to whether my generation or some subsequent generation bears those costs. All I promised my kids was money for college. I never said a word about paying to save the whole damned planet!

In The City of the Sun, Tommaso Campanella comments on the future of modern technology, circa 1623:

GENOESE: Oh, if you only knew what they [Campanella’s Solarians, a utopian community] deduce from astrology and from the prophets — our own as well as the Hebrews’ and those of other people — about our present century, which has produced more history in a hundred years than the whole world did in the preceeding four thousand! More books have been written in the last century than in the previous five thousand years. And what they say about our stupendous inventions — the compass, the printing press, the harquebus — mighty signs of the imminent union of the world; and how they say that it was the apsis of Mercury, being in the fourth triplicity when the superior conjunctions were occurring in Cancer, that caused these things to be invented through the influence of the moon and Mars, which, in that sign, promote new voyages, new kingdoms, and new arms. But when the apsis of Saturn enters Capricorn, when that of Mercury enters Saggitarius and that of Mars enters Virgo, and when the superior conjunctions return to the first triplicity after the appearance of the new star in Cassiopeia, there will be a great new monarchy, reformation of laws and of arts, new prophets, and a general renewal. They say that all this will be of great benefit to the Christians, but first the world will be uprooted and cleansed, and then it will be replanted and rebuilt . . .

Know this: that they have discovered the art of flying, the only art the world lacks, and they expect to discover a glass in which to see the hidden stars and a device by which to hear the music of the spheres.

HOSPITALIER: Oh, oh, oh! I like that! But Cancer is a feminine sign of Venus and of the moon. What good can it do?

GENOESE: They say that the feminine signs bring fecundity and foretell that a less vigorous power will have dominion over us…

Just how long has the idea of the singularity been around? And why, oh why, is it still in the future? Or is it already past? Or is it never going to happen?

Textual note: Earlier editions have Hospitalier cutting off Genoese’s monologue before it has even gotten well underway, with the curt observation that the Solarians “astrologize too much.” The rhapsodizing about technology is totally absent, and it was apparently Galileo that prompted Campanella to add the above passage.

Yes, yes, abolishing time zones isn’t the greatest idea. The payoff — eliminating wasteful Daylight Savings Time — is small. The time police aren’t breaking down anyone’s doors for keeping odd hours. This particular regulation seems to work more or less as designed, and there are certainly other beasts for libertarians to slay.

But something became very interesting to me as I read the comments: The more I thought about the idea, the more it seemed obvious to me that a spontaneous order would emerge — we’d all find a convenient local institution and set our times to match, and these institutions would coordinate with others, and eventually we would just keep time as we all agreed to do by mutual consent. No, we wouldn’t have down-to-the-second accurate astronomical time, although we could. Instead we’d have the most convenient time we could find. We might even choose integer hour differentials, because they’re easy to calculate.

This is, in other words, the sort of thing that doesn’t need a law.

And yet, the more that others thought about it, the more it seemed obvious to them that a spontaneous order would not emerge. We’d all be powerless — or at least massively inconvenienced — without state coordination. Even some of the libertarians seemed to think this. …why?

I mean, I can tell you how it would play out in my case: I’d immediately set all my timepieces to match the Cato Institute, where I work, and where being late would be a serious problem. But they’d most likely set their clocks to match CNN or one of the other major TV networks, because that’s where they are most dependent on having precise timing. In two hops, I’ve adopted a time standard that’s likely to be shared by millions of people.

What’s so hard about this? I’m genuinely curious.

No, I’m serious. Zach Wendling beats the drum to end time zone absurdity in Indiana:

More news on the Daylight Saving Time Front: some enterprising economists took a look at energy-usage patterns in southern Indiana from before and after our State’s lamentable switch to DST and found, unsurprisingly, that energy consumption increased. Hoosiers may spend less on lighting but more than make up for it with more spent on air conditioning. Here is the Wall Street Journal article. Here is the PDF of the study (should I say, ‘the ungated version‘?).

The economists acknowledge that the ostensible intent of DST is energy savings, and prominent morons Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and Fred Upton (R-MI) loudly pushed for extending it to save oodles of energy. (Indiana, on the other hand, mostly switched to DST for reasons of business-oriented synchronicity.) The study of Indiana may not be decisive, but it is part of a mounting body of evidence pointing out that the essential purpose of DST is fantasy.

Here’s a crazy idea. Why don’t we just stop using (state-mandated) time zones?

Virtually everyone has a positioning device on them now — a cell phone, in other words, or many computers — and these can determine longitude down to a few yards just about anywhere on earth. We don’t need time zones anymore — we can have the exact time for wherever we are. Some things would need synchronized time, sure, but again, we’ve got these handy transmitters of information…

I mean, why not just do away with the clunky time zone? I’m actually curious about this one.

It seems like a flawed experiment to me. From a New York Times article by John Tierney:

In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy…

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

Yes, yes, I switched doors a few times the first time through (a total of eleven switches, to be honest). But it wasn’t because I was trying to keep my options open (not, in itself, obviously irrational, but I digress). It was simply that I was looking for a pattern, and this is a quite rational thing to do. Life is full of patterns.

I thought that finding a pattern could pay off really big, big enough to make up for the lost opportunities. It seemed reasonable to me that the numbers behind the doors would not be random. Perhaps that one of the doors would start to pay more if I clicked in the proper sequence. Or maybe there was some pattern to be found in the previous numbers in the reward totals. Or… something.

It seems to me that the experimenters are neglecting the extraordinarily small knowledge base that each player starts with. It’s hardly fair to conclude that ignorant people must also be irrational whenever they don’t behave optimally: For rationality to manifest, it has to have at least some data to work with.

In the end, the numbers just seemed random to me. I decided one of two hypotheses must be correct: a) there was no pattern or b) I couldn’t find it. After that I just clicked like mad on one door and racked up the points. But I guess because I didn’t choose this strategy from the very first click, I’m irrational.

How silly: If there had been a pattern, and if I hadn’t looked for it, I could easily see some other behavioral economist calling me irrational for not seeking out opportunities in the market. Or somesuch.

The underlying problem is not irrationality at all — only an acute lack of data, coupled with an inability to judge the worth of each marginal datum: If I click once more, I’ll gain some information (of how much value?). But if I don’t click once more, I’ll gain some points (of how much value? and what am I giving up in exchange?).

No one can answer these questions before they play. What if, on the third change of doors, the program were to reward the player with a million points, while if he never changes, he just gets a few dozen? Who would be the “irrational” one then? What if you got the most points for “rescuing” a closing door? What if it would have helped to change doors when the last reward total you got was even, or divisible by five, or prime? These hypotheses could be easily programmed into this experiment, along with an infinity of others. As a kid, I played computer math games with some of these features.

I’m not alone in thinking this way. Here’s a comment from John Tierney’s blog post on the experiment:

The first time I played, it took a fair amount of door switching (I chose 4 clicks on each door as optimal) to determine that the payoffs behind each door were approximately similar (and remained approximately similar), and thus minimizing switching was the best strategy.

The second time I played, it took less switching to determine that this payoff structure remained, so I switched less — but that was a path-dependent result not connected to any irrationality about the emotional loss of disappearing choices.

Yep. If anything, we didn’t do enough experimenting. There may still be a pattern, for all I know. Or maybe not.

In any case, I know the real point of the experiment: Paternalism. The point is to establish that people are irrational (as defined by men in lab coats). Then the men in lab coats get to make all the important decisions for us. The point of this experiment — if one can even call it that — is to convince everyone, from ordinary joes to policy wonks to legislators — that it’s perfectly okay to take away other people’s choices. My colleague Will Wilkinson reaches a similar conclusion here, with several direct quotes in support.

Yes, we’ve discussed recently some of the reasons why paternalism isn’t a rational response to irrationality: If these experiments prove anything, they show that the people in lab coats are irrational just like the people out of them.

Yet irrationality in the market is at least voluntary. It’s noncoercive. It also produces incentives to find more rational behavior, and it can be curbed with a secondary market in decisionmaking skills (lawyers, financial planners, and sommeliers are just three examples, but nearly all white collar professions have some element of this to them).

Legislated irrationality — the kind belonging to friendly gentlemen in lab coats and not-so-friendly ones in jackboots — well, that kind lasts a lot longer. It doesn’t provide the incentives for its own demise. And it can’t be kept in check by paying smart people to help us figure things out.

So even if we grant the premise that “people are irrational,” the state isn’t necessarily the answer. To return to the experiment at hand, ultimately what it shows is how weak the support is for the premise itself.

A very interesting comment to my posts (here, here, and here) on the Gold Leaf Lady (remember her?):

The problem I have with most skeptics is that if, say, a table floated in the air in front of them, they still would try to say that there are reasonable explanations for the table floating in front of them and that a table floating in front of them is not supernatural in origin (even if it appears so).

I have no way of knowing if this Katie person is a fraud or not. I have not witnessed anyone else spewing gold leaf materials from their skin. I do know from personal experience that there are things that go on in this Universe that I or others can’t currently explain.

In my opinion, you can be a thinking, open minded skeptic (such as I) on many purported paranormal phenom. But to say there is absolutely no such thing and/or try to debunk the entire genre on weak cases is not respectable. Unfortunately, I find too many skeptics travel that path far too often.

Not one of us knows anything, really, when it comes down to it.

I don’t think he quite gets the skeptical position right. Curiously, he does not bother to consider the alternative:

Confronted with a floating table, a skeptic says, “There is probably a reasonable explanation. Let’s do some tests and try to find one.”
Confronted with a floating table, a believer in the supernatural says (ultimately), “There can be no reasonable explanation. Give up on ever finding one. And believe in my particular dogma!”

If you don’t like skepticism, please at least consider how epistemologically poor the alternative is.

A fun marijuana fact:

If the risks of smoking marijuana are coldly compared to those of playing high-school football, parents should be less concerned about pot smoking. Death by marijuana overdose has never been reported, while 13 teen players died of football-related injuries in 2006 alone. And marijuana impairs driving far less than the number one drug used by teens: alcohol. Alcohol and tobacco are also more likely to beget addiction, give rise to cancer, and lead to harder drug use.

If the comparison feels absurd, it’s because judgments of risk are inseparable from value judgments. We value physical fitness and the lessons teens learn from sports, but disapprove of unearned pleasure from recreational drugs. So we’re willing to accept the higher level of risk of socially preferred activities—and we mentally magnify risks associated with activities society rejects, which leads us to do things like arresting marijuana smokers.

Tim Wu at Slate reports on how AT&T proposes to monitor the entire Internet for intellectual property violations. It’s a good example of how the line between “public” and “private” can often be pretty hard to follow.

Iterations, none of which I fully endorse:

1) It’s their equipment, their private property thus they may use it as they wish.
2) But intellectual property is indefensible on libertarian grounds. Increasingly, stories like this one are making me agree with that view. At the very least our intellectual property laws are vastly more inclusive than they ought to be.
3) But common carrier laws mean that even if someone commits a crime using AT&T property, the company is not responsible, so they shouldn’t really have to care about this stuff. Why are they doing it?
4) But… Who do you think lobbied for common carrier laws in the first place? And isn’t that rent seeking?
5) It may be what they want is to get the privilege of escaping common carrier laws, so that in the future they may regulate traffic however they please. This brings us back to point one. But it also raises many questions, since if AT&T is the only company able to do this, and if they carry a significant amount of net traffic, then they are being given in effect a government license to censor.

The Slate piece is definitely not from a libertarian perspective, and arguably it’s all over the map, but worth reading all the same. It seems first to argue that AT&T wanting to scan the whole Internet is totalitarian (yes, maybe it is), and then that it’s impossible to implement anyway (again, this may be true), and then that if they do, no one will ever use AT&T’s services anyway, so (maybe?) we shouldn’t worry.

What I’d worry about is that AT&T will volunteer to do it, and then lobby to make it compulsory. Rivals will either have to censor as well, or else go out of business.

First, the Strange:

The Indiana Department of Local Government Finance today launched an online toolkit for Hoosiers who want to object to proposed construction projects.

The Citizen’s Petition and Remonstrance Toolkit is available online at www.dlgf.in.gov/taxpayer to help residents understand the complicated process of trying to stop a local government or school project.

“Hoosier citizens have the right to object to local spending,” said department Commissioner Cheryl Musgrave in a statement. “This toolkit will help taxpayers navigate the complicated process and ensure their voices are heard.”

A government — a government — providing a means of limiting itself. Now that’s a revolutionary concept.

Now the Worrisome:

Zach Wendling nominates Maple Syrup Urine Disease as the illness he maybe wishes he’d made up himself, but didn’t. I’d like to up the ante by proposing, in the same category, Exploding Head Syndrome:

Exploding head syndrome is a condition first reported by a British physician in 1988[1] that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as if from within his or her own head, usually described as an explosion, roar or a ringing noise. This usually occurs within an hour or two of falling asleep, but is not the result of a dream and can happen during the day as well. Although perceived as tremendously loud, the noise is usually not accompanied by pain. Attacks appear to increase and decrease in frequency over time, with several attacks occurring in a space of days or weeks followed by months of remission. Sufferers often feel a sense of fear and anxiety after an attack, accompanied by elevated heart rate.

Full disclosure: I’ve had this happen. It’s not fun.

I also awaken, once or twice a month, to find that I have suddenly and very painfully bitten my own tongue. Sometimes I’ve been biting it for a very long time, and I’m even conscious and aware of the fact, but I’m unable to move. I just lie there, paralyzed, slowly biting my own tongue.

Is it punishment for my day-to-day activities? Does this happen to other bloggers?