Commentary

The Gulf Spill: This ( “Beyond Pathetic”) is an absolutely not-to-be-missed article by Andrew B. Wilson, published in The Weekly Standard. He presents with much more evidence the thesis that I was trying to develop in an earlier blog post about the coporate culture of BP under John Browne. And there is a larger issue here: the dividing line does not run between corporations and government, but between pro-capitalists (businessmen and politicians) and--something else. My friend Rob Bradley calls them “political capitalists,” but I refuse to use that term because it was made popular in the 1960s by the infinitely odious Gabriel Kolko. Many people use the term “crony capitalists,” but that is wrong also--because it implies that a kind of capitalism involved. As a commenter on Ira Stoll’s blog “The Future of Capitalism” wrote: “Quit calling it crony capitalism. Just call it Cronyism—it's shorter, deletes the unimportant word, focuses on the important one. It is just the same as crony socialism or crony pflugerism. The issue is the cronyism, and it's the cronyism that causes all the rules of equal justice to break down.”

Jul 1, 2010

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On Cope’s book, Experiments in Musical Intelligence: “In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computer patterns of notes?

Jul 1, 2010

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The son of a frustrated concert pianist, Cope remembers crawling around under his father’s piano listening to the music of Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninov. “No matter how hard I tried I could not escape from the fact that I was a musician, and that was my destiny,” Cope explains. “Music is what I am.”

Jul 1, 2010

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Honest Services A story I missed yesterday: Seth Lipsky (of the always valuable Future of Capitalism blog) has an article at the WSJ called “Conrad Black and the Criminalization of Business.” W hat I don’t understand is why, if people have a forum in which to speak out, their blogs are not hammering away, day after day, about the injustice of putting such men in prison. BRC intends to. I hope we can avoid being tedious. But we cannot forget the victims of anti-capitalism.

Jun 30, 2010

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Honest Services The estimable Tom Kirkendall, of the blog “Houston’s Clear Thinkers,” performs a useful chore today: Reminding us how large a part the press played in the “Great Houston Rich-Hunt” that brought down Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and many others. (Kirkendall’s own Enron client, the company’s post-Fastow CFO, Jeffrey McMahon, was never criminally charged.) Kirkendall mentions, in particular, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, although it has, over the years, been the single least culpable voice in the media when it comes to business prosecutions—and in many cases it has done splendid work in opposing them. Thus, its apology the other day to Conrad Black was both the most expected and the least truly needed: The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won't write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us. I mentioned the other day that Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Research Institute and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the Skilling case, but I failed to provide a link. Here is it . The Gulf Spill Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post has a must-read article on the BP spill, called “The Avertible Catastrophe.” In it, he compares the American response to the Gulf spill with the Dutch response to oil spills--and what they could have done to mitigate the Gulf spill had their offers of assistance been accepted. Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on measuring the size of oil spills . Anyone listening to the chattering classes knows that many accuse BP of having systematically underestimated the extent of the Gulf spill, while others offer precise comparisons between the Deepwater Horizon spill and those of Ixtoc 1 and the ExxonValdez. As the Journal article points out, the figures calculated for those earlier spills are highly inexact, even long after the fact. spiderID=605

Jun 30, 2010

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Be it the public option (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op”, or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers. Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.

Jun 30, 2010

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Ilana Mercer

Piracy is thriving at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and no, I’m not talking about people playing fast and loose with intellectual property rights by illegally downloading music, films, or software. The past few years have seen a resurgence of actual, honest-to-goodness armed pirates terrorizing the high seas. They may have traded in their peg legs and eye patches for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but other than that, they’re back to their old tricks. Incidents of piracy have been increasing for three straight years, according to the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), with the global total shooting up to 406 in 2009, from 263 in 2008. Somali pirates accounted for over half of the 2009 incidents, including 47 of the 49 hijackings and 867 of the 1052 crew members taken hostage. On January 18 of this year, the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus was released by Somali pirates in exchange for a $9 million ransom, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Why, in this modern world of ours, has piracy managed to stage such an impressive comeback?

Jun 28, 2010

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The Atlas Society has now launched its ground-breaking Business Rights Center, headed by the brilliant editor, writer, and business analyst Roger Donway. The Business Rights Center (BRC) is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia.

Jun 27, 2010

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The Atlas Society Free Minds 2010 Summer Seminar is a week-long extravaganza of brilliant speakers and enthusiastic participants from all over the country, who come together to learn and to share the good life: the life of reason, freedom, and individualism--all within minutes of downtown Washington, D.C. When: June 30-July 8 Where: Embassy Suites, 1900 Diagonal Rd, Alexandria, Virginia (just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.) Who: The impressive line-up of speakers and topics includes: Anne C. Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Ayn Rand collaborator and author Nathaniel Branden, on "The Missing Link in Objectivism," Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer will be speaking on "Life and Work wih Ayn Rand." Computer scientist Peter Voss will speak on "Advances and Applications of Objectivism in Artificial Intelligence." Neera K. Badhwar on "Analyzing Ayn Rand's Ethics." Law professor David N. Mayer on "Rediscovering Freedom's Constitution" Nigel Ashford on "Changing the World for Liberty." David Boaz of the Cato Institute on "Ayn Rand, Cato, and the Battle for Reason and Freedom." ....and more.

Jun 27, 2010

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June 28, 2010 -- The new Atlas Society site is now live. Yes, we threw the switch and nothing blew up. We're delighted to be able to better serve our constantly growing web audience with a new clutter-free website. simple navigation, and streamlined architecture. Not to mention offering new tools like auto-podcasting and interactive webinars. For the remainder of the year new features and functionalities will be released. These include (but are not limited to): A much-improved online store (opening August 15th). For the first time, you'll be able to download mp3 files directly from the site. The product rollouts for the store will come in several waves, and the audio portion will steadily grow larger as we continue to convert classic lectures to digital format. Additional search functionalities. Video programs including live streaming.

Jun 25, 2010

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The big news of the day, clearly, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the current, extremely broad interpretation of the "honest services" doctrine, under which Conrad Black and Jeff Skilling were convicted. Congratulations to our friends at the Pacific Research Institute (Timothy Sandefur) and the Cato Institute (Timothy Lynch), who filed an amicus brief in the case. A lot more comment tomorrow.

Jun 24, 2010

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Al Gore’s Praise for Capitalism. If you want to hear it, why here it is . Personalizing Responsibility. Google and YouTube win a lawsuit against Viacom. A federal judge says it is enough that they strive to remove copyright-infringing material when they are made aware of it and ban infringers after three offences. The companies are not liable for providing a service that allows people to infringe copyright.

Jun 24, 2010

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Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. William McGurn offers the basis for a presidential speech on the subject: “Think of these bad loans as a nasty leak polluting our financial system.” The Gulf Spill. A federal district judge has blocked the administration’s six-month drilling ban. At a quick glance, it appears that the judge is saying that “the precautionary principle” is not a valid basis for such an action.

Jun 24, 2010

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Like the pastoralists’ suit against the Industrial Revolution, Comer v. Murphy, the paternalists at the Ralph Nader–spawned Center for Science in the Public Interest [sic] have launched a bizarre lawsuit against parenthood, based on similar Rube Goldberg–reasoning. “By advertising that Happy Meals include toys, McDonald’s unfairly and deceptively markets directly to children. When McDonald’s bombards children with advertisements or other marketing for Happy Meals with toys, many children will pester their parents to take them to McDonald’s. Once there, they are more than likely to receive a meal that is too high in calories, saturated fat, added sugars, and sodium, and devoid of whole grains. Developing a lifelong habit of eating unhealthy meals is likely to promote obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening or debilitating diet-related diseases.”

Jun 24, 2010

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Victimless Antitrust? Wasn't the original idea of antitrust that people could be harmed, economically, by acts that did not amount to coercion, most particularly when “monopolists” engaged in “anticompetitive behavior”? Of course, with the rise of the “law and economics” movement, the Left faced sophisticated opponents who were prepared to argue that in many cases no harm was being done to consumers. Solution? Eliminate the harm requirement. That, apparently, is the genius idea behind the Obama administration’s attempt to “reinvigorate” antitrust.

Jun 24, 2010

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According to Lynnley Browning’s story in the NYT, Switzerland has agreed to hand over information about bank accounts at UBS that may be used by Americans avoiding taxes. Inasmuch as I do not condone tax cheats, I should not care about this. And yet I find that I do. On one level, lawbreaking is just lawbreaking. And I favor the rule of law. People who disagree with laws should work to overturn them, not violate them.

Jun 24, 2010

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hopes will help stem the thousands of barrels escaping from its damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, an amount that scientists said could be as high as 60,000 barrels a day. The company is siphoning the oil through a series of pipes and hoses to a ship, which will then clean and burn the oil and gas mixture in a processing device.”

Jun 24, 2010

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Bhopal. A WSJ story does a round-up on the verdict: The Gulf Spill. Jacobinism, cont. This NYT article illustrates the continuing Jacobin demand that all normal life must be set aside in the face of whatever the media define as an all-consuming crisis. Inevitably, this psychology must lead either to a greater and greater hysterial pitch, or else to a “Thermidorian reaction,” in which people say: Enough.

Jun 24, 2010

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Reading the New York Times is an onerous chore under the best of circumstances, and reading Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday business column “Fair Game” must be accepted as a penance worth centuries in Purgatory. Still, if one reads Our Gal Sunday long enough, some small pleasures can be found. Today, I found one. Nominally, it was just a 300-word story by wretched Gretchen with the headline “A.I.G. Executive Won’t Be Sued.” Talk about a non-story.

Jun 24, 2010

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From Gail Collins of the NYT, another assault on Americans’ benevolent sense of life , comparing it to day-dreaming. “Americans have always raised their children to believe in the power of the dream. This is probably why hundreds of thousands of young people are certain they are destined to become the American Idol. Or Next Top Model. Or marry a Jonas Brother. A few of these dreamers grew up to run oil companies. They believed with all the power of their fierce, tiny hearts that they could drill farther and farther down into the ocean without ever having a really big accident.”

Jun 24, 2010

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