Today we lost a soldier. William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of The National Review, died this morning. He was colossally important in bringing modern conservative ideas into the mainstream. Even in his old age, Buckley continued to impact conservative thought. My hope is that the conservatives across America can look at this sad event as a reminder of what the Republican party used to be. Buckley feared Obamaesque Statism as much as anyone. In 2004, conservatives rallied around the loss of Ronald Reagan, "Let's win one for the Gipper!" But before Reagan, and even before Goldwater was William F. Buckley. In 2008, let's win one for Bill Buckley.
Don Boudreaux is not afraid to take uncommon stances. He is brilliantly iconoclastic without being contrarian or cynical. Here are some humbling words to Reaganites and Obama-Fanatics alike, from a Cafe Hayek post of his from earlier this week.
"Being libertarian, I find no romance in collective action. The yearning to be part of a great collective "challenge or crusade" - be it conservative or "liberal" - reflects humans' tribal instincts. These instincts served a sound purpose during our hunter-gatherer past, but are today at odds with the individualism that makes us free and prosperous."
Also, Tyler Cowen wrote an informative post revealing some holes in the commonly expressed sentiment (I seem to hear it often) that Cuba is a somehow Utopian and care-free.
"The most shocking part is what small sums of money they would ask for or be made happy by. Or the numerous women -- and I mean ordinary women in the streets -- who would offer their bodies to a stranger (handsome though I am) for a mere pittance."
Awards shows like the Oscars seem to primarily exist to please celebrities. It becomes even more obvious what a bubble most of these people live in. Viewers at home watch in hopes of somehow entering the world of the rich and famous. The nominations and awards are secondary to the spectacle of "who's wearing what," and the possibility of drama unfolding on a national stage.
John Stewart is both necessarily refreshing and painfully awkward to watch in this setting. Unlike a Billy Crystal or even Ellen Degeneres, Stewart is not a celebrity's celebrity. He is expert at skewering the powerful and famous. It is fun to watch him juggle flattery, kind jests and some not-so-kind jests. Crystal and Degeneres did something similar, but were never nearly as blunt or caustic as Stewart is. He provides a dose of some much-need medicine.
Many actors and actresses are surprisingly bad at being natural and delivering lines from a prompter, considering the demands their job entails. Many try to be funny, few succeed. Everyone tries to look aloof, and even fewer succeed.
Heath Ledger's death was addressed almost too tastefully. The reference was so scarce and not deliberate that it almost appeared that they were trying to sweep the event under the rug. In any event, its better than not being tasteful enough.
I would not put it past Hollywood (the ever-powerful abstraction) to have intentionally selected especially young looking men and women in uniform to present the award for best documentary. Four of the five movies in the category were decidedly anti-war, the last was of course, Sicko. Nice going Oscar.
The fact that Juno won best original screenplay solidifies the irrelevance of the Academy in judging Independent films. I feel like the media latched on this movie in an attempt to play catch-up with recent movies of the same genre that it never recognized in the past; reparations of sorts. I maintain that while Juno was far from the worst movie of the year it was at best average and slightly annoying. Plus, the deepest problems with the movie were embedded in the screenplay: the painful dialogue, confused messages and lazy character development (Michael Cera's character probably had less than 15 minutes of screen time but was still treated as a main character whenever he was onscreen). I realize that this is becoming more of an informal review of Juno than of the Oscars, so I'll leave the rest of that rant for another post.
The silver lining of the whole show was definitely when Once won best original song for Falling Slowly. Of course I'm biased, Once was my favorite movie of the year, but the moment was so pure, unpredicted and detached from usual Hollywood grossness (that I also love). Actually, Stewart did sort of drop the ball by being a little bit condescending towards the duo of Hansard and Irglova. His tone seemed to say, "Isn't that great that even a funny looking bunch can make a cute little song and win our big prestigious award?"
This is all based on the two hours or so that I watched while half-concentrating on my Linguistics reading assignment. I wasn't even watching when No Country won best picture. Maybe I missed out on some of the big juicy bits.
I learned something about myself while watching the returns come in throughout the last night: I would love to see Mitt Romney make a better showing. Had I cast a ballot at all, I almost definitely would have supported McCain, but deep down, I'd like to see that conservative Republicans still exist in the numbers that they did just a few years ago.
If one thing was made clear last night, it is that Republicans don't trust conservatism to produce the prosperity they once thought it could. I disagree with that statement and can only speculate on why so many Republicans have taken a turn towards the moderate. Economic illiteracy is likely one reason. President Bush's inability to veto anything with a price-tag attached is probably another.
I don't think Mitt Romney can win against either of the Statists on the left, so I still would like to see McCain with the nomination. Unfortunately, if Romney garnered enough support to prove that America is still conservative but not enough for the nomination, then McCain would face an even bigger struggle in making it to the White House.
So it turns out that conservatives are less divided about John McCain than the right-wing pundits would have us believe. How conservative they are, though, is yet to be seen.
Last week, the Golden State Warriors very own Baron Davis was not selected to represent the best of best of the NBA at the 2008 All-Star Game in New Orleans. Warriors and non-Warriors fans alike were outraged. He got snubbed. Again.
Not only does Davis have higher stats than many guards that will travel to New Orleans, but he also performs on the court in ways that statistics don't measure. He turned one the biggest shames of the NBA into a power-house play-off team that can beat any team on any given night. So of course people are angry.
I don't care though. The Warriors, despite being 10 games over .500 with several months more basketball to come, still have an underdog spirit. A team does not just shake off 10 years of embarrassing basketball in a night (unless that team is the Celtics). Basketball coaches, commentators, and players alike are only beginning to take the Warriors seriously. The lone-wolf mentality (as a team, not as individuals) of so many Warriors players fuels victory night after night. When coach Don Nelson was ejected from a game in January we saw the Warriors play some of their best basketball ever. The day after Baron Davis was snubbed by the undeserving All-Star team, the Warriors had their biggest margin of victory of the season against a team with a 9 game winning-streak.
There's no denying that the Warriors play an exciting breed of basketball. Sometimes they break our hearts, but more often than not they make our days just that much more exciting. I predict that Baron and the Warriors will come back from this long break as the same team, but with more energy, spunk, and desire to prove themselves to the rest of the NBA .
Today, on the most super of Tuesdays, millions of voters in 24 states will cast their ballots for the candidate which they believe best represents their party. The culmination of too many months of non-stop election coverage is upon us. In less than 12 hours, clear victors on both sides will likely emerge, setting up the next 9 months of non-stop election coverage.
Selecting a candidate is a tiresome process. I've backed every remaining Republican candidate, except Huckabee, and a good number of candidates who either dropped out, or never even officially entered the race in the first place. Does every candidate look so good that I can't hold myself to just supporting one? Not even close. Rather, once I start backing a candidate, he becomes the subject of a great deal more scrutiny than the others in the race. After idealistically nodding along with Congressman Paul's solid libertarian record, I took a second look to find that he is far from a champion of free-trade. Oh, and he's kind of crazy. George Will's pseudo-endorsement of Rudy Giuliani got me to go as far as donate to his campaign. I had to take a second look at Giuliani's character, however, and what I learned was not impressive. Plus he sends me too much mail. When Senator McCain blitzed back into the race I saw a beacon of hope. But soon several respectable conservative columnists were at his throat for what seemed to be some pretty good reasons.
I received my absentee ballot a few days before the deadline for mail-in, Friday. My most recent whim had me supporting McCain, but only marginally. Friday came and went and I never made an effort to fill out the ballot. Quite simply, I forgot.
McCain will have my support along with most conservatives, moderates in particular. But why should those conservatives who find McCain to be tolerable at best "remember" to vote for McCain when it counts in November? Some won't, and I don't blame them.
This video sums up the typical arguments of proponents of net-neutrality. They make the typical assumptions and errors that tend to go along with criticisms of apparent flaws in an unregulated (free) market. Aside from the visually appealing graphics and models, the video really doesn't have a lot of substance and is incredibly misleading.
The first false assumption is that ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T (characterized as malicious UFOs) exist to manipulate, for monetary gain, a universally available service to young minorities who seek to one day become President. They fail to mention a key component of ISPs: the P, as in "Provider". Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon provide the means through which we are able to surf the internet. The day that these companies stop providing this service is the day that we can no longer stay connected with friends and family half-way across the world, post adorable pictures of our cats with ridiculous captions, and most importantly, read fine blogs such as this one.
In order to provide this service, companies invest capital. Shareholders provide the capital to the company, and the company repays its shareholders with dividends. It's through this miracle of capitalism that we are left with relatively affordable communications services such as cell-phones and the internet. Once the companies (in this case the ISPs) can no longer produce dividends for their shareholders, the investment goes away and so does our internet. The business policy in question is whether ISPs should allot more bandwidth to clients who pay the ISP more money, thus increasing their bottom line. In any other private sector, this policy would receive no attention whatsoever. The butcher gives preferential treatment (better quality meat) to the customer who pays her more money, regardless of the character of the patron. ISPs do not wish to discriminate against any particular content on the web (ex: Google over Yahoo), but rather against those customers who do not pay as much money. So where does the controversy come from?
Many people believe that the internet is somehow above the free market. The second misconception in the video is the notion that the internet is founded on a principle of neutrality. I challenge you to name one other business sector that has "founding principles" that guide all competitors (remember, these are also the providers). To go back to the butcher analogy, that is like saying that at the beginning of butchery, the proverbial community decided that butchers would sell sirloin, tenderloin and brisket for the same price. Sadly, even internet service is a scarce resource that must be allocated just like any other good or service on the market. The community does not get to dictate what service will cost how much money; that is left up to the providers, who base prices on supply and demand.
The video then makes the error of calling this an issue of monopoly. This confused me temporarily, because I still had an image in my head of four UFOs hovering around the capital building. My understanding of a monopoly was that it only occurred in the absence of competition among multiple firms. If AT&T suddenly only gave "fast-track" privileges to a handful of websites, I would soon get fed up with waiting for http://icanhascheezburger.com/ to load. As a rational consumer, I would not take to insisting that all sites were given neutral treatment, I would switch to Comcast. If Comcast did the same, I would pick up a book. In short, if non-neutral ISP policies become too restrictive, it will affect ISPs bottom lines adversely and the market will correct itself by becoming less restrictive.
The video leaves us with an image of the Insidious Space People being catapulted from Earth's atmosphere. Back on Earth, the picketers are cheering because at long last they have their unbiased internet service for everyone! Oh wait, no not everyone, only those who can afford the now exorbitantly expensive (if available at all) internet. The image of the African-American boy filled with high hopes for the future is diminished by the Pew Research center statistic that in 2005, only 13% of African-Americans had access to broadband internet in their homes as opposed to 25% of Whites.
The internet is an incredibly important resource for all Americans, in and out of the home. Our goal should be to get the internet in the homes of as many people as possible. The best way to do that is by keeping prices as low as possible. Net-neutrality raises costs for ISPs, which are passed on the consumers, hurting the lower class especially. I would like to revise/clarify the title of this post. Net-neutrality does matter. It hurts everyone.
Today we lost a soldier. William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of The National Review, died this morning. He was colossally important in bringing modern conservative ideas into the mainstream. Even in his old age, Buckley continued to impact conservative thought.
