More than perhaps any other American political group, libertarians have suffered the blows of caricature. For many people, the term evokes an image of a scraggly misfit living in the woods with his gun collection, a few marijuana plants, some dogeared Ayn Rand titles, and a battered pickup truck plastered with bumper stickers reading “Taxes = Theft” and “FDR Was A Pinko.”

The stereotype is not entirely unfair. Even some of those who proudly call themselves libertarians recognize that their philosophy of personal freedom and minimal government can be a powerful magnet for the unhinged. Nor has recent political history done much to rehabilitate libertarianism’s image as an outlier.

The Libertarian Party’s paltry membership has never reached much beyond the 250,000 mark, and polling numbers for Ron Paul, the libertarian candidate the Republican presidential nomination, remain pitiable. Worse, despite Bill Clinton’s declaration that “the era of …

One of the most difficult things to understand about the 9/11/01 terrorist attack on the United States is why the terrorists did what they did. What drives people to kill themselves so spectacularly and commit mass murder at the same time?

Common theories of rationality do not help. It is obvious that when people fly into buildings, something else trumps their self-interest. The common tendency is to explain other people’s behavior as stemming from some internal predisposition. The conventional wisdom about terrorists falls into this line of arguments: terrorists are products of poverty, broken families, and ignorance who lack skills and opportunities; they are without occupational or family responsibilities; or they have weak minds and are vulnerable to brainwashing from madrassas (Islamist boarding schools) or their families of origin.

Alternative explanations of terrorism center on personality factors. Some claim that terrorists, especially those who commit suicide …

THE Conservatives will propose banning plasma screens and other energy-guzzling electrical goods in a report to be unveiled next week.

The proposals target white goods like fridges and freezers, as well as TVs, personal computers and DVD players that use too much energy or operate on stand-by.

The ideas come from a Conservative group set up by David Cameron to develop policies to protect the environment and although the measures to make household electrical appliances more energy efficient are not binding on Mr Cameron, they are thought likely to be warmly received by the Tory leader.

The group will also suggest scrapping Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of the nation’s success in favour of a model that measures people’s happiness drawn up up by Friends of the Earth.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007420012,00.html

Und erste Reaktionen:

The “climate change” …

Despite daunting challenges posed by global warming, water, energy, unemployment and terrorism, the world faces a brighter future with fewer wars, higher life expectancy and improved literacy, according to a report released Monday.

“Although great human tragedies like Iraq and Darfur dominate the news, the vast majority of the world is living in peace, conflicts actually decreased over the past decade,” says the 2007 State of the Future report.

Published by the World Federation of UN associations, a global network of associations in more than 100 member states, the study noted that the number of African conflicts fell from a peak of 16 in 2002 to five in 2005 and the number of refugees around the world is falling.

It said the world economy grew at 5.4 percent last year to 66 trillion dollars while the global population rose 1.1 percent, increasing the average …

It is tempting to dismiss these cosmic ruminations and historical lies as the irrelevant maunderings of a man who cannot use either the internet or a mobile phone, and whose once prodigious wealth has been spent or is frozen. They seem curiously detached from al-Qa’eda’s usual tones, more like an appeal to leading Western Leftists.

Perhaps this is having some effect: two of the recent suspects detained on the cusp of a terrorist attack were young German converts to Islam, who a generation ago might have joined a Baader-Meinhof gang whose moralising posturings against corporations are indistinguishable from bin Laden’s. [...]

Al-Qa’eda’s long-term aims have not changed, namely the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate on the ruins of existing states some time before 2020, if informed Arab commentators are to be credited. This will then wage the final apocalyptic battle against the West. In those …

Near the end of Carol Reed’s 1949 noir classic The Third Man, Harry Lime, played by a brooding Orson Welles, disembarks from a Vienna Ferris wheel and delivers the film’s best-remembered soliloquy. Pondering the relative merits of a libertine society, Lime muses that Italy was once governed by the House of Borgia, yet managed to produce “Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance,” while the studiously inoffensive Swiss “ had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” (Which, incidentally, is of German provenance.)

Indeed, Switzerland’s international reputation has long been one of neutrality, dubious banking regulations and superior watch-making; a remarkably harmonious, multilingual country with postcard vistas and little violent crime. And as such, it’s often invoked as a model to be emulated. For Second Amendment defenders, the country’s low murder rate negates the assumption that more …

The brain neurons of liberals and conservatives fire differently when confronted with tough choices, suggesting that some political divides may be hard-wired, according a study released Sunday.

Aristotle may have been more on the mark than he realised when he said that man is by nature a political animal.

Dozens of previous studies have established a strong link between political persuasion and certain personality traits.

Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.

The affinity between political views and “cognitive style” has also been shown to be heritable, handed down from parents to children, said the study, published in the British journal Nature Neuroscience.

Intrigued by these correlations, New York …

The Annual Energy Forum recently hosted by Montana State University outlined the challenges of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere while supplying the energy people demand at prices they’re willing to pay. I came away convinced that geoengineering, i.e., the deliberate modification of the Earth’s environment, will receive ever more attention as the steep and unavoidable costs of mitigating carbon emissions become more obvious. Here’s why. http://www.techcentralstation.com/

A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.
There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. …