The Bewilderness

Blogger bash at the ASI

I attended the Adam Smith Institute blogger bash last night where Guido Fawkes and John Redwood were talking the health of blogging in the United Kingdom. The good news is that blogs are flourishing and that the right's dominance of the blogosphere remains.

Conversation about recent trends in blogging included the gradual encroachment of the mainstream media on this new medium and the continued inability of the Left. The weakness of the Left is attributed to the command structures of their institutions and the "crowding out" of potential blogs' audience by their liberal-left dominance in the BBC and newspapers.

Still, Web 2.0 was not discussed at all; I suspect that the fortune of the blogs are tied to the fortunes of the parties.

The Ourobouros debt strategy

Ambrose Evans Pritchard may not always be correct: inflation rather than deflation, AEP, but he can spot a downer a mile off. His latest one is quite predictable; the large debt issuance from the ailing governments will crowd out the private sector, prolonging the credit crunch, weakening their cashflow, tipping more firms into bankruptcy and prolonging the downturn.

Governments are beginning to eat their own milch cows.

Bankrupt britain: even hoch will be unaffordable

We have had a recent lull in the series of bad news and doom-laden forecasts in the run-up to the G20 summit. Economists have been distracted by the various plans of mice and mice on the new international architecture and other cloud castles. It seems that we can not go one week without hearing of a public funded bank paying bonuses, annoying the public, and some other enormous luxury that only MPs or civil servants could hope to rival. This continual round of reform and announcement, linked into the permanent revolution of PR, gives the illusion of control. Hence the slight rise in Labour's poll rating.

In the real world, Labour has few options. It can try to tap the markets and issue gilts for further stimulus but their credibility with their new paymasters has run out. They will not even be able to afford hoch. The forecasts that they made are now attacked as implausible and as optimistic:

"The Bank's forecast is that there will be a strong recovery and that this will pick up later this year, but there are strong arguments about why that won't happen," he said. "The problem is that in forecasts [economists] tend to be over optimistic. Likewise, the probability is that unemployment of 3m is an underestimate."

Danny Blanchflower, leaving the Monetary Policy Committee, is now stating that the upper range for unemployment is four million. The figure for economically inactive will be truly horrendous.

It will be far worse for Germany. The economy has fallen off a cliff and could contract by 7% as a worst case scenario. Truly horrendous! But what pales beside this catastrophe is the myopic response of the European Bank. They have not yet learned that unprecedented means likely, although they put rescue packages in place for situations that will never occur:

Luxembourg's premier Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, said the EU had plans to rescue any eurozone state in serious trouble "within hours" but insisted that no such need would ever arise.

Like the rightly named Poos and his well-timed serve, "The hour of Europe is at hand", we can rest assured that the Juncker class of politico will be usefully shafted by this crisis. Good to have a silver lining!

Britain: not broken, just sleeping

Who should start to warn of a potential economic crisis amounting from the rise in national debt but the Leader of the Opposition himself, David Cameron. When an issue concerns me, there is a sense of timing, as events, pronouncements and debate will soon draw upon parallel thoughts.

No sooner had I done a post upon the incipient crisis that remains in the background of most people's thoughts, than Cameron used the pulpit of Demos to warn of another IMF intervention:

In remarks that are likely to provoke Labour charges that he is running down the economy, the Tory leader spoke of a "frightening and worrying" scenario in which the nation's finances run dry.

"If we continue on Labour's path of fiscal irresponsibility, at some point - and it could be very soon - the money will run out," Cameron said in a speech to the Demos thinktank in London. "Then you will see the return of what happened under Labour in the 1970s, including emergency cuts to many of the public services on which a progressive society depends."

Since Labour critiques any opposition as nihilistic or value-destructive, and are increasingly ignored as a consequence, Cameron is taking a prudent course by highlighting scenarios that upset Brown and appear prescient. Of more concern is the foolish reference to emergency cuts in oublic expenditure and public services, defining progressive as state provision. Bangs head against wall!

Being progressive, defined as an optimal framework in which people can make their choices without limitations in their liberties under agreed rules, is the hallmark of an open society. Britain is not a broken society, it is one that is hibernating until the frost of state intervention has melted away. Then Britain can open up.  

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Darwin gave us hope...

Darwin gave us hope, not God. We have an inbuilt Pandora's box that enables us to deceive not only others but ourselves. Deception is clearly linked to neural complexity and a positive perception of our environs is a deep-rooted drive. Without this, we cannot accomplish what we set out to do. Moreover, we have a tendency to deceive ourselves and deny the truth, since the alternative is depression and despair.

Evolutionary Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan is a great believer in hope as a evolutionary strategy.
    
According to Nesse, all emotions have an evolutionary basis, and for every negative emotion, there is a balancing positive one. Hope arrives on the coattails of despair, and without hope, we'd all be lost. Since everyone experiences bad stuff, and feels it deeply, our brains have adapted by also delivering hope. And without our inborn measure of hope, we fall into depression, where someone like psychiatrist Nesse has to remind us to be hopeful.

The rhetoric of hope adopted by Barack Obama and other politicians becomes more understandable as a strategy that draws upon deep seated biases within human societies. It is noteworthy that hope has formed a strong component of many religious messages: thus rendering the satirical embodiment of the Messiah in the President-elect more accurate in Darwinian terms.

Darwinian explanations add to the complex mix of our understanding of human action. They do not replace or simplify this complex cultural mosaic.

This small point does give us an insight into power: for those who truly love terror would deny hope to all. The true totalitarian states of the twentieth century tried to deny hope to all of their victims and even then, failed in their torture. Yet, the same horizons are also eroded and extinguished over the longer term by other systems, such as welfare. There is no comparison between the terror of the prison camps and the grey anomie of incapacity benefits. But both, I suspect, through different means, overturn this need for self-deception, acknowledging the primacy of politics and society over the weak orientation of our evolved psychology.

Libertarian Conference 2008

I attended the 2008 Libertarian Conference. It was one of the most successful events that I have attended, with Hans-Hermann Hoppe and David Friedman providing talks. Kudos to Tim Evans and Sean Gabb for their excellent event management.

"You will be recognised..."

The Guardian reports from a paper in Science that researchers from the University of Glasgow have developed software that increases the efficacy of facial recognition software to one hundred percent. The experiment was based on comparing faces with celebrities....

Jenkins and his colleague Professor Mike Burton tested the averaging approach using FaceVACS, a system that is being tested at Sydney airport.

The website MyHeritage.com uses the software in a celebrity lookalike service. Surfers submit images of themselves to the site, which matches them to the nearest celebrity picture on its database of more than 31,000 photographs. Jenkins and Burton submitted images of 459 celebrities they knew were on the database. The system matched them to the correct celebrity 54% of the time. When the pair created average celebrity faces from 10 images and resubmitted them to the website, the software was correct 100% of the time. "That's the first time anyone's reported anything like that level of accuracy on such a variable set of images," said Jenkins.

To make the test even tougher, they created averages using only those images that the software had been unable to match in the first test. In this test the software recognised the averaged faces correctly 80% of the time. "We have fixed the baseline at zero, so any improvement we can attribute just to the averaging process," he said.

This represents an important escalation in the efficiency of facial software and the capability of the authorities to track individuals in a surveillance society such as the United Kingdom. It does not require any upgrades to surveillance infrastructure. The improvement in software also serves as a reminder that restraints upon surveillance depend upon the laws governing the use of such cameras. The current incursions into our privacy will be worsened by the enthusiasm of government.

A progressive vision

I attended the annual Libertarian Alliance conference in London this weekend and refreshed my sometime hazy adherence to the faith, open-ended and open-minded of course. There was interesting red meat to devour as always, but my aim is to discuss the timely appearance of Progressive Vision.

They are still not high enough on Google as yet. I was sidetracked by some Idaho outfit and a loathsome vision that portrayed Fabian and Toynbee before my  At seven on the Google list comes in the new think-tank run by Shane Frith and Mark Littlewood. Not high enough as yet, since they MUST aim to displace the Miliband conference advocating social injustice and continual illiteracy.

The website is worthy and wordy, and a little too green around the gills for my tastes. Yet, they are not trying to persuade nutters like me. We would just condemn to the fringe, the word that only denotes quality in Edinburgh. They are already getting hits in the media and campaigning on a wide range of fronts where a classical liberal voice is wanting in the United Kingdom.

This welcome alliance of a think-tank with links to both the Liberal Democrats and the Tories warms a faint  heart and  makes me look forward to the day when we have crushed the socialist tribe of Labour. One to keep an eye on.

Support Freedom, Kill Death

The Edmonton Aging Symposium was held at the University of Alberta last weekend, and a number of important anti-aging scientists attended , such as Aubrey de Grey and Gregory Stock. The Symposium discussed the prospect of developing and implementing many anti-aging technologies, with the Methuselah Foundation and the  Supercentenarian Research Foundation providing positive positions on the technology.

The Symposium featured a debate between Gregory Stock and Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for Bioethics, on the  virtues and vices of anti-aging technology. Callahan's bioethics appears to be a code for denying individuals choice on the grounds that society has more urgent goals:

Dr Daniel Callahan, a renowned bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for bioethics, argues that focusing economic resources on aging science would be negligent for a society that’s faced with so many other pressing problems. 

“Are there any present problems in society that would be helped by longer life? Global warming? Terrorism?” he urges, adding that “individual desire [for a longer life] is not legitimate.”

Callahan further speculates that although we may be able to extend life, we are unable to predict what the quality of that longer life would be. He suggests that there are other means to pursuing health in old age, and that pouring money into radical life-extending science might not be the answer.

“Most of the improvement in the health of the elderly is coming from the background socio-economic conditions …. something like 60 per cent of the improvements have come from that directive, rather than from medical care or medical research. It seems to me that there would be a fundamentally greater value of putting money into improving our understanding of prevention, lifestyle and behaviour issues,” he asserts.

Gregory Stock provided a reported response that did not reject the bioethicist's assertion that research funds, usually paid for by us, be redirected to societal goals:

His opponent, Dr Greg Stock, director of the program Medicine Technology and Society at UCLA, predicts exactly the opposite economic situation. He contends that the economic gains achieved by eliminating the diseases and detriments of aging would outweigh the costs of research.

“The savings in [medicare and social security] of extending the human health-span would be … so immense that that they would justify the rather modest amount of money that would be spent on research,” Stock states.

These incidental benefits would be byproducts of the research. Yet, we should be grateful that anti-aging research is tarred as immoral by bioethicists. Research into lifestyles and prevention is a code for science that justifies directed diet and behaviour. This will ensure that controls are placed on those behaviours, foods and enjoyable activities which conflict with the list of societal goals, as decided by the state.

Supporting anti-aging research is a private and  public good.

Usurping Conception

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has increasingly wielded its regulatory powers in recent years, as infertility treatments have become more common and diverse. Some of the regulator's decisions have been criticised as arbitrary or inappropriate, using an ethical calculus to coerce parental choice when it is not required. Their latest intervention is controversial, though based upon clinical outcomes.

At present, multiple embryos are implanted in the womb to increase the probability of a successful birth. This has potentially undesirable consequences if the health of the mother or the children is impaired. Studies have monitored infertility treatments and demonstrated these drawbacks.

Half of the mothers of IVF twins give birth prematurely and the babies are below the minimum ideal birth weight of 5lb. They run a much higher risk of dying, lung and heart problems, having cerebral palsy or developmental difficulties and facing chronic conditions as adults. Many spend time in special neonatal care units in hospitals. Mothers who conceive more than one baby after IVF are far likelier to suffer a miscarriage or dangerously high blood pressure than women who have one child naturally.

This should be viewed as additional information that clinicians would take into account when advising their patients and making a  diagnosis or a recommendation.  If the regulator had drawn attention to these studies and noted that inspectors would wish to see these taken into account during diagnosis, no observer could criticise such diligence. However, we live in New Labour Britain, home of targets and micromanagement:

Shirley Harrison, the HFEA's chair, will this week defend the decision to put medical safety above the rights of childless women to choose how many embryos are transferred. She will cite research showing that having just one embryo implanted does not reduce a woman's chance of conceiving.

Doctors will retain the freedom to use their clinical judgment to decide if a woman rated a 'poor responder' to fertility treatment should still get two embryos. Clinics will be told to reduce the number of multiple births through IVF over time from 25 per cent to somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent.

This is a decision that should rest between the doctor and the patient. If the patient is aware of the risks and responsibilities, they may then take the difficult decision required in this matter. It is not up to HFEA to usurp clinical practice and private judgement in this matter.