Poll

I am quite undecided about this turn of events in the housing market. Banks’ mail jingles as borrowers walk is the headline on a commentary by James Saft. For anyone who hasn’t come across the phrase “jingle mail” yet, it describes the phenomenon of homeowners walking away from a home because the debt owed is greater than its current value—and so, they mail the keys to the lender. The unmistakable signal jingle mail sends is, “I’m done here. The house is yours.”—thus breaking the mortgage contract. Is that wrong? I’ve seen a fair bit of commentary arguing both ways; but none of it has been from a pro-freedom perspective.

One of the things some people are only now becoming aware of—and it’s happening now because of the increased focus on this sector of the financial industry, methinks—is that a nontrivial amount of Wall Street transactions are currently unregulated by federal and/or state law. As a New York Times article suggests, that seems about to change. Problem is, it won’t change in the direction that will help.

I discovered that Drupal has a built-in module for doing polls. Whee! However, I haven’t figured out how to have it automagically published, either here in the bloggy area or as a sidebar feature. So, for now, I’ll simply point to it from this post, and encourage relevant comments to be posted here.

The poll asks the question, “What do you think is the most important thing a parent can give to a young child?”. I think that anyone who wants to may vote—one needn’t be signed up here to cast a vote. If that is true and some of you wish to make a comment without registering, I’ll do my best to accommodate you. Please either email or PM me at GYHD or The Boondocks with your comment and some means of attribution—either a ’nym or just plain “anonymous” is fine with me. Although ... if we have 27 different anonymice it will be difficult to keep track of the conversation. Maybe label yourself Anonymouse #X? We can worry about the details should that become necessary.

Anyway, the poll will run for a week; and I’ll keep this post atop the blog for that duration. Have at it, if you wish.

Yesterday, I forgot to mention the most outrageous thing that I saw at the health food store. I picked up a box of Rice-Krispie type cereal to see how gluten-free it is, and was surprised to see something like this statement (not verbatim, but close): "This product has no ingredients that were developed with biotechnology."

Unless the people who provided the rice for this cereal went out into the wilds and foraged for rice -- an extremely unlikely possibility -- that assertion is patently false. The process of cross-breeding and selective breeding that has resulted in our current cultivated grain crops is very old, and is, essentially, primitive biotechnology. Countering with a claim that modern-day advances allow for far greater manipulation than what was possible back then is simply a dodge of the fact that the manipulations themselves are identical. It's gene selection -- back then a painstaking, often chancy proposition; today much less risky with the information available to researchers. The ability to do cross-species gene splicing is new, but that's a small subset of biotech which, to my mind, does bring more questions into play.

While I appreciate Freeman's recent caution against knee-jerk anti-leftism, and plead guilty to having done some of it myself, it's statements such as the one on that box of cereal that are so utterly ridiculous that they invite individuals to dismiss wide swaths of the organic/environmental movements. I'd been giving serious consideration to buying the cereal so I could make gluten-free treats for my Sweetie (regular Rice Krispies and knockoffs almost always have malt in some form, which in large enough quantities can be problematic for him), but after seeing that absurd statement, no way.

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I'm beginning to think I could quite easily fill this space just with my reactions to stuff at Montag. Yesterday I noted with appreciation that Richardson likes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is a movie I saw quite a while ago but still think about; the primary subject of his post, though, was a movie I'm now longing to see, Finding Neverland. A couple of years ago I read Peter Pan to the snolfs, and somewhat to my surprise, found that several of the more mature members of our family regularly listened in as well. In talking about the book later, I learned something of the story's intriguing pedigree. Don't know when I'll get to see the movie, but it's on my list. Thanks, B.W.!

Today B.W. offers a thoughtful post on The Bill of Rights as a social contract. Although I didn't say it at the time, the idea of social contracts was in my mind when I asked about morality and life (and I will return to that subject, once my brain is done working through some stuff). Two things stuck in my mental craw, though.

First, Richardson says, "But my friend is right when he points out that, yes, most times people do not act rationally ..." That assertion is put forward by researchers time and again, and I cringe whenever I hear it, for it's insidiously destructive. The first definition of rational in my dictionary is "based on reasoning". But any individual with a modicum of experience in human interaction knows that individuals' reasonings can be widely divergent -- sometimes even though they lead to the same result. A subsequent definition gives rise to the potentially harmful, judgmental aspect: "not foolish or silly; sensible". Some forms of reasoning are regularly judged as silly, such as a child's circular or leaping reasonings, or a "mentally ill" person's paranoid delusions or attributions for hallucinations. Others may seem silly to outside observers: I wonder at the thought processes of a person who'd consider remotes as valuables, but then I'm not a regular user of electronic gadgets that rely on remotes for full operational capability. And of course, there are times that, after the fact, I find my own reasoning silly. To think of or portray rationality as though it were some immutable, measurable Objective Truth is to tread on very dangerous ground.

Richardson begins his concluding paragraph with, "The time has long since come for free men and women to act as if the Constitution with its Bill of Rights is a contract that means exactly what it says." But the Constitution doesn't allow men and women their full freedom; it set up a system of governance and taxation that of necessity constrains peaceful people's liberty. I really can't say it any better than Lysander Spooner did:

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. .... And the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children.

Don't get me wrong -- living in a society where the Bill of Rights is respected would be much better than the current USSA. It just isn't the end point I'm working for.

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And last -- so's I can sneak this in before midnight -- I had the tables turned on me in November, and the results are now available for public scrutiny. Kirsten corraled me at the Freedom Summit and put me on the spot with the interviewing. The five-part epic chatfest is available at Poddy Talk. But wait, there's more! She's even put my Freedom Summit talk up there too. I haven't heard any of this since doing it, and as I recall I was coming down with whatever bug laid me low for nearly two months the day of the interview. So if I suck, that's my excuse and I'm stickin' to it.