Pun Salad

At the WSJ, Peter Robinson asks the big questions (maybe the biggest ones there are), about God, Creation and ‘The Story of Everything’. (WSJ gifted link)

The movie treads some well-known ground on questions of basic existence that don't currently have any good scientific answers.

We know about the Big Bang. What (or, um, who) caused it?

We know that if physical constants were just slightly different from the values they have in our universe, atoms, stars, galaxies, and planets would not exist. Were they set to those values, or were they simply the result of extremely improbable dice-tossing?

Our planet and solar system seem improbably suited to the existence of life. More coincidence?

And even the simplest living things, when you take them apart and study them, turn out to be extrenely complicated, and put together via strands of DNA. I know the "blind watchmaker" argument, but … come on.

And I would add: not just complex machines, but machines that seem to be self-aware, self-directed, capable of discovery and wonder about all this. So, again: just more very improbable accidents?

See the headline: Pull the other one, What kind of sucker do you take me for?

Not that I totally buy the "It wuz God" hypothesis either.

But… still.

Also of note:

• But would a merciful God have allowed this? Jeffrey Blehar says the obituaries for Commie Radio were premature: NPR Survives and Thrives After Fedeeral Funding Cuts.

  Good news for all those worried that the Trump-era GOP’s defunding of National Public Radio in the most recent federal budget might lead to the spontaneous combustion of human civilization: They’re doing just fine! In fact, better than that: As it turns out, the natural American spirit of charity — to be specific, donations from two billionaires — has bailed them out and then some.

  Connie Ballmer (wife of Clippers owner and professional dancer Steve Ballmer) has decided to use her considerable bride-price to donate $80 million to the theoretically beleaguered radio network. Another, anonymous, donor has chipped in a further $33 million (penny stakes, relatively speaking). That totals a smooth $113 million haul in one fishing trawl, and all for the goal of “ensuring NPR transforms its technology to meet the needs and serve the interests of public media audiences on whatever platforms or devices they may seek it.” Why, with such specifically contoured goals as that, you can rest assured it won’t be used as a general-purpose slush fund. (But then again these people knew what they were wading into: I hope both donors got something slightly better than the branded coffee mug I got when I foolishly chipped in $40 back in the day.)

  Bottom line for taxpayers, as Jeffrey says: they don't need your money now, and never did.

• Big news: the word "Trump" does not appear in this Kevin D. Williamson column! He could have opened with a Monty Python soundbite, And now for something completely different." How American Rock ’n’ Roll Changed the World. (archive.today link)

  “We are Motörhead, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”

  But there was a lot of American in Lemmy—it wasn’t just the cavalry Stetson. In one famous interview—one that I assume inspired his introduction—he was asked about his life fronting a “heavy-metal band.” Lemmy heaped scorn on the premise of the question: “We have long hair, so you call us a heavy-metal band,” he said. “If we had short hair, you’d call us a punk-rock band. As a matter of fact, we play rock ’n’ roll.” The singer and writer Henry Rollins, a longtime friend of Lemmy’s, makes it clear that Lemmy’s hell-bent-for-leather stage persona was no persona at all: “He did not own sweatpants, nor did he own sandals. That look wasn’t a stage get-up. He was in the hat and boots all the time. Those were the only kind of clothes he owned.”

  If you wanted to meet Lemmy, it wasn’t hard to do. He loved the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood—he lived most of his life in a tiny, memorabilia-crowded apartment just around the corner from it—where he would drink Jack-and-Coke and smoke and play video poker and, if it came to that, shake hands and take pictures with those who sought him out there. It wasn’t hard to spot the people who were there to see Lemmy. His gruffness wasn’t a put-on, either—but he knew his people.

  Rollins relates another telling conversation with Lemmy: “He said, ‘I remember a time before there was rock ’n’ roll, when you only had your mother’s Rosemary Clooney records.’” Before rock—that blew Rollins’s mind. “I asked him, ‘What happened?’”

  Lemmy’s answer:

  “We all heard Elvis Presley. And we never looked back.”

  Before you read the whole thing, and you should, try to fill in the blank here:

  The Gibson Custom Shop will sell you a nanometer-by-nanometer copy of Greeny, the famous 1959 Les Paul Standard owned by Peter Green, Gary Moore, and currently by Kirk Hammett, a guitar that has been played on everything from Fleetwood Mac records to Metallica anthems. It’s great. And it’s        

• It's one of those parties to which you don't want to be invited. One of the items in Nellie Bowles' "TGIF" column refers to The Luddite Party. (archive.today link)

  → The war on Waymo: The Luddite-ification of the Democratic Party continues. Here’s the group More Perfect Union arguing that Waymo is a scourge on workers: “If Waymo gets its way, 2 million workers will be out of work. When Waymo gets a firm hold on a city, wages go down. Some drivers now have to work 12 hours [a] day, 7 days a week just to get by. This isn’t inevitable—but Big Tech is spending millions to make you think it is.” The group profiled a bunch of Uber drivers who want to keep being drivers. First of all, I find it kind of funny that Uber is now the thing we have to protect. Dems are literally just against change. There’s no cohesive logic to it. Second, we have data now on what Waymo does in a city, and it makes driving a heck of a lot safer. As an Anthropic researcher posted: “A full-scale U.S. Waymo rollout would cost ~700 full-time jobs in the funeral care industry (by saving around 35 thousand young American lives per year).” Think of the trauma surgeons! Do they not need to pay the bills too? You spent so much time trying to cure cancer, you never considered how many people cancer employs.

  That is an excellent point. Frédéric Bastiat would approve.

Recently on the book blog:

I first read Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty back sometime in the 1970s, a $3.95 doorstop paperback published by Henry Regnery Co. I noticed recently that the University of Chicago Press released this "Definitive Edition" back in 2011, with (apparently) some minor fixes to the footnoting and other references. And the Kindle version was on sale for a "mere" $18.99! (It's more now.) So I snapped it up and it eventually worked its way to the top of my non-fiction to-be-read cyberpile.

Reader beware: Hayek was not the most sparkling prose stylist; he's truly an Austrian economist/philosopher. And this means long paragraphs full of long, meandering, convoluted sentences. I had Google pick out an example concerning the "rule of law":

It is because the law-maker does not know the particular cases to which his rule will be applied, and it is because the judge who applies it has no choice in drawing the conclusions that follow from his existing premises and the particular facts of the case, that it can be said that in such a system it is the law and not the will of particular men which prevails.

Yes, you can untwist and dig out some meaning from that, but it's pretty abstract. After page after page, and at my age, … well, I didn't get as much out of the book as I should have. I think I did a better job in my first reading half a century ago.

But Hayek's main points are easy to summarize: his desired polity is one in which "coercion" (carefully defined) is minimized. This is accomplished by that "rule of law": clearly stated, generally applicable rules and not subject to the whims or interpretations of government bureaucrats.

He goes on to criticize how this should (but mostly doesn't) play out in the "welfare states" of the real world: labor unions, social security, "progressive" taxation, monetary policy, housing, agriculture, education, and research. Some of his observations are prescient, others not. (For example, he thought private-sector unionization was likely a permanent feature; he didn't foresee its long-term decline in the US.)

But he clearly saw the menace of "progressive" taxation, and he attacked it on its underlying sin against democracy:

That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

Our tax system has long since allowed the infringement of that fundamental principle, and in fact has gone past merely allowing the infringement, but eagerly embracing it.