Paul M. Jones

Civil rights progress:

Wisconsin residents have overwhelmed the state Justice Department with so many concealed weapon permit applications agency officials say they probably won't meet deadlines for issuing approvals this month despite pulling dozens of employees from other tasks to help.

A state law that allows Wisconsin residents to carry concealed weapons went into effect Nov. 1. Under the law, state residents 21 or older who submit $50 to the Justice Department, pass an agency background check and prove they have received some firearms training can obtain a permit to carry. The law requires the agency to process applications received before Nov. 30 within 45 days. Any applications received after that date must be processed within 21 days.

via Wisconsin swamped by concealed-carry applications - chicagotribune.com.

Everything we know “based on evidence” is actually based on evidence together with appropriate theory.

via It’s a Fact that the Facts of the Social Sciences are Known Only Through Theories.

"Regulatory capture" means this: When you want government to regulate a complex system, you need people who know enough to do the regulating. Politicians and bureaucrats don't know enough, so they hire people from that system to do the regulating. Those people have a natural tendency to favor the system as it is, so they legislate in a way that is favorable to the system as it it. Thus, the system that was to be regulated "captures" the regulatory regime. Here's an example of what it looks like:

This chart of Venn Diagrams (New Year’s Day links) is a nifty visualization[1] that shows how many, many people, through the operations of Washington’s revolving door, have held high-level positions both in the Federal government and in major corporations. To take but one example, the set of all Treasury Secretaries includes Hank Paulson and Bob Rubin, which overlaps with the set of all Goldman Sachs COOs. The overlapping is pervasive. Political scientists and the rest of us have names for such cozy arrangements -- oligarchy, corporatism, fascism, “crony capitalism” -- but one name that doesn’t apply is democracy. On the flip, you’ll find a larger version of the chart (and a discussion of its provenance).

(This shows only Democrats; I guarantee the Republicans are just as bad.) Via Crowd-sourcing the revolving door « naked capitalism.

If the pre-1976 law were still in place then as of Jan 1, 2012 the following books, movies and music would have entered the public domain (from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain):

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the final installment in his Lord of Rings trilogy

C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth volume his The Chronicles of Narnia

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee’s play about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Inherit the Wind

Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity.

Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers

The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder; starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell

Lady and the Tramp, Walt Disney Productions’ classic animation

Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly

Richard III, Laurence Olivier’s film version of the Shakespeare play, co-starring Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, Nicholas Hannen, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud

Under the old law, the above works could not only have been consumed they could also at low cost and without requiring the express permission of the original copyright holder have been remixed, reworked and extended in new directions. Under the new regime, innovators will not be able to easily build on these works until 2051 and it could be well into the 22nd century before we get Star Wars prequels worthy of the name.

via IP Feudalism and the Shrinking of the Public Domain -- Marginal Revolution.

When I initially announced the Aura project, it was targeted at PHP 5.3. With a stable release of PHP 5.4 impending, we have moved the target to PHP 5.4. In addition, we have made 1.0.0-beta1 releases of almost all the component packages. (See an earlier announcement from Hari KT.)

The Aura repositories are a collection of high-quality well-tested independent library packages. (Test coverage is 100% at the time of this writing.)

The repositories include such packages as a dependency injection container, a PSR-0 compliant autoloader, command line tools, a data marshaling system, a view system, and a bare-bones web controller. These packages are truly independent: each is self-contained and has no other package dependencies.

Aura also comes with a repository that composes the independent packages into a framework, gluing them together into a cohesive system for project development.

So glad those damn Communists fell. Now waiting on North Korea.

With the demise of the USSR, we were spared a regime that slaughtered millions both within and outside its borders, inflicted numerous other human rights violations, and created a threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over the entire world. Compared to that, the very real dangers of the post-Cold War world seem minor by comparison. I recognize, of course, that the USSR in the last years of Gorbachev’s reign was much less dangerous and oppressive than it had been previously. But had the regime survived, it is far from clear that Gorby’s reforms would not have been reversed. Previous episodes of Soviet liberalization in the 1920s and 1956–64 had been followed by waves of repression at home and expansionism abroad. Moreover, Gorbachev himself was not as much of a liberal democrat as he is often portrayed in the West. He used force to try to suppress the independence movement in the Baltics, and otherwise sought to preserve the Soviet regime, not end it. He was certainly much less ruthless and repressive than his predecessors. But that is judging him by a very low standard of comparison. Nonetheless, it is fortunate that Gorbachev’s efforts at limited liberalization spun out of his control and led to a beneficial outcome that he did not intend.

Emphasis mine, via The Volokh Conspiracy » The 20th Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union.

#WORDPRESSFAIL: WordPress Takes Down “Bare Naked Islam” Blog After Threats From CAIR.

CAIR pursues this strategy regularly. Shame on WordPress for giving in. Note to bloggers: In a free-speech controversy, you can’t count on WordPress. Act accordingly. Meanwhile, an item on CAIR’s terrorist ties. More here. And its membership is minuscule. This is who you listened to, WordPress.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » #WORDPRESSFAIL: WordPress Takes Down “Bare Naked Islam” Blog After Threats From CAIR. CAIR p….

UPDATE (Fri 30 Dec 2011):

After reviewing this case I’ve turned your site back on. Even though this is the third Term of Service issue with your blog, you should have been contacted before your site was suspended by our Terms of Service team.

That said, publishing IP and email addresses of commenters with the invitation to harass them is a violation of our terms of service and your site harbors numerous examples that violate our ToS rule “does not contain threats or incite violence towards individuals or entities.”

Given that this has been an ongoing issue I think you should find alternative hosting. I realize that it is the holidays and happy to give you until Jan 6 to do so. You can use the “offsite redirect” upgrade to ensure all of your links continue to work and your visitors get redirected.

Finally although there was a press release from CAIR claiming to have been behind this I haven’t heard of them until today and as far as we can tell none of the ToS reports that caused the blog to be reviewed were from anyone involved with that organization. WordPress.com does not suspend blogs at the request of individuals or organizations, only for violations of our Terms of Service.

That sounds like the right thing to do. Via Instapundit » Blog Archive » A WORDPRESS / BARENAKED ISLAM UPDATE: The PR folks for WordPress sent me a copy of the email that M….

Another civil rights victory:

The number of Iowans seeking permits to carry handguns and other weapons has increased 170 percent during the first 11 months of 2011 -- a trend one Iowa sheriff calls “unbelievable.”

During the first year in which a new law gave sheriffs less discretion over which residents can be denied permits, 94,516 Iowans sought and received non-professional weapons permits from January through November, the Iowa Department of Public Safety reports.

via 'Unbelievable' rise in weapons permits | The Des Moines Register | DesMoinesRegister.com.

Oh crap: Stratfor Hacked, 200GB Of Emails, Credit Cards Stolen, Client List Released, Includes MF Global, Rockefeller Foundation | ZeroHedge. I mean, really, if Stratfor is susceptible, then I can only imagine damn near everyone is.

... [C]apitalism vigorously pursued has never produced the atrocities – starvation, tyranny, and genocide – that are produced by statism vigorously pursued.  Nothing remotely close.

Capitalism vigorously pursued might produce trade cycles and long periods of high unemployment; it might produce anxiety in yesterday’s successful entrepreneurs who now face competition from today’s upstart entrepreneurs; it might cause too many people to become obese; it might kill off animal species in unusually high numbers; it might cause the earth’s climate to change; it might create asset bubbles; it might spark envy and over-work in the Smiths who are trying to keep up with their neighbors, the Joneses.  It might do these things and others that reasonable people might regard as unfortunate in comparison with some imaginable paradise.

But we must never lose sight of this important asymmetry: complete or near-complete state control of the economy has proven to be a sure recipe for deep impoverishment and brutal tyranny, while historical periods that have been close to laissez faire – that is, much closer to laissez faire than is America at the dawn of 2012 – have produced nothing remotely of the sort.  Indeed, whatever problems might be caused by more and more reliance upon laissez faire capitalism are always accompanied by – and are at least partially (and arguably more than completely) off-set by – unambiguous benefits of capitalism such as the elimination of starvation, more abundant supplies of clothing, and better housing.

Any problems promoted by greater and greater reliance upon capitalism, in short, are first-world problems (which isn’t to say that these problems should be tolerated); they are problems incomparably more tolerable than are the horrors promoted by the elimination of capitalism.

via Cafe Hayek -- where orders emerge.