GMO: Not Free Market

Thanks to Jack Spiriko I now know about the latest Big-Ag attempt to protect themselves from the free market:

The provision was slipped into the legislation anonymously. It explicitly grants the U.S. Department of Agriculture the authority to override a judicial ruling stopping the planting of a genetically modified crop.

So, I used to think pretty little conservative and even libertarian thoughts about this stuff. I used to think the GMOs were fine and people were just grousing too much, but it keeps getting more and more obvious there is a fundamental issue here- the companies keep insisting on selling us something we don't want to buy.

This is most clear in the realm of labeling. If we want tomatoes we should be able to buy them- and distinguish between GMO or non-GMO. It is also clear in the constant use of government to secure for themselves power. They are basically using one part of government to neutralize another part of government- essentially the U.S.D.A will now be required (not just authorized but required. Listen to Jack's podcast for the sneaky details) to override courts.

So even if the fears about GMO are overblown, even if GMO is super wonderful for you, these corporations are still using the government to destroy our freedoms. They get to put their seed out into cropland even if a court says otherwise. They get to sue you if any of their seed gets onto your land. They get to lie to you and market their product to you as if were exactly the same as the products you used to get.

I see more and more libertarians getting this. I hope some of the bigger beltway types can pay attention here and realize there is a basic problem with this stuff. We need to back up and re-analyze how these corporations get to interface with individuals, preferably before some sort of heinous situation occurs. Well, one could argue a situation is already here, considering the massive size of a lot of people these days, but I'm guessing folks with this much legal protection are much more likely to cause the sort of situation in which a lot of people die- much like in Russia, while they were building that stupid railroad.

They've minimized the risk to themselves, so naturally they will engage in more risky behavior, just like the banks have done in this too-big-too-fail era.

Novel Theology

I've mentioned previously that I find time questionable. I especially find talk about time and God questionable because it seems to me people tend to define God as over and/or against time. So, what basically happens is that folks end up talking as if the future actually exists on some level. They do so because inertia makes them feel it is so, and if it so, then God must know it, because God knows all. This is basically the definition of omniscience.

If, however, the future doesn't exist, then God can still know all, but not know the future. He knows probability. He knows what he's going to do, and those planets, stars, and whatever out there- all the non-conscious stuff, well he has the probabilities down pat.

Think about probabilities for a second. What is the probability that a probability will happen? Well, if it is a prediction based on probabilities in physics, like where the planet will be in 40 thousand years- and God has all the data, and all the number crunching capability- we are talking 100%. If it prediction based on the probabilities of what a human being will do- well, wouldn't it be less? Since we are conscious, there is a possibility that we do something less probable. Yes, it is unlikely that we do something less probable, but we are more likely to do something less probable than non-conscious things.

So, basically, I am saying that we might provide novelty.

Now why go down such a dangerous road? Potentially bad theology here- and then, of course, there are more traditional bad theologians who can easily tell me I am a heretic.
Why rock any boats?
Well there is a philosophical problem with a satisfied God. If God needs nothing, why does He act?

Education Reform: Explosives Needed

Your guidance counselor speaks:

The current education system has little to do with the reality of over half of my students' lives and futures. It is a poorly run circus and my job is to hold the one-sized flaming hoop at one predetermined height and figure out a way to coax them to jump, limp or crawl through it, if they can at all. If they can't we have to find a way to move them out so their performance doesn't "ding" our school's ratings. Education needs not reforming, it needs to be blown up and re-built from the ground up.

Incentives: Slave Owner versus Modern Systems

Nate just dropped some knowledge on me:

In today's dollars... those slaves were worth $420,000. Each.

Now tell me... how well do you care for something that is worth that kind of money?

Do you send your $400,000 horse to the cheapest vet you can find? Do you put it in the cheapest barn you can build and give it the cheapest food you can find?

In addition to the upfront purchase cost... slaves had to be fed, housed, and cared for. In the south for a long time the owners were obligated to teach the slaves to read so they could read the Bible and be saved. All of this...was very very expensive.

So, Nate's pointing out this meant slavery was on it's way out anyway, and all that bloody murder the North committed against the South can't be justified:

The fact is working conditions in the North were far... far worse than slavery in the South... and even though they were called "free" in the North... they were arguably less free than they were in the South. They worked more, for less, had worse living conditions, and often dealt with the same kind of punishments at work that they got from the cruelest slave masters in the South.

I am imagining what would happen if a slave owner paid $420,000 for me and then had to house, feed, and get me literate enough to read the bible. Would the outcome be better than what the modern school system/academia has managed? I think so. The slave owner has an incentive to make a return on his investment, which is why Nate's right. If you are using slaves for agricultural work, and they cost this much, well, that system isn't going to stand for long. Our current masters seem to have incentive to waste us- and that includes those who might take offense at this post. Just think about the U.S. prison system.

Of course, one could imagine a really dumb slave owner, but this is less likely. He'd have to be able to administrate land, people, and have money coming in- enough for such a purchase to make sense. This means he'd have to be smarter than most city, state, and national governments by default to even make the purchase. He can't take on a lot of debt and use fiat money to hide his incompetence.

Do You Want To Be Well?

Godzdogz put up a post about Jesus and the man at the pool in Bethesda, which meshed well with something I have been thinking about. This gospel is about someone being healed, and the post mentions things I don't see many others putting together:

He wants to see within this man a true desire to be cured; some affirmation of a desire to rise up and walk in a world which is full [of] uncertainty, perhaps greater uncertainty than he feels at the poolside.

This is the opposite to what many use Christianity for. They use it- and I suppose this is why there have been so many religions in the world- to reduce uncertainty. We don't know why x,y, or z happens, so lets create a myth about it. It doesn't matter if that myth is straight up pagan, comes in Christian clothing, or is created using scientific language. Conveying uncertainty to these people, at the very least, confuses them, perhaps like the man at the pool was confused.

He alone sees all that we do and earnestly desires us to be perfected.

Ah, to be perfected. You know, you'll find this desire in a gym before you'll find it in a church nowadays. On one level, this is an existential necessity- if you aren't struggling to improve, you are in serious trouble. It is a simple biological necessity- stay on that couch, watch crap T.V., and eat processed food- and you will suffer consequences. So, the need to perfect yourself is baked into to our biology. Meanwhile, we can see quite clearly, especially as we try to improve, that perfection is impossible under our own power.

Anyway, I think healing and being perfected are related. It seems extremely unlikely to me that someone would be healed of diabetes, for instance, so that they could go back to eating cakes and donuts with abandon. Diabetes is bad, but it is also a response to injury. You've got to stop damaging yourself, or else even if God did heal you, you'd just get sick again.

Marriage and Family as Health Indicator of a Society

Mystagogy on marriage and the state:

Without the family, there are no villages, which are associations of families, and without villages, there is no polis. “Every state is [primarily] composed of households,” Aristotle asserts. In other words, without households – meaning husbands and wives together in families – there is no state. In this sense, the family is the pre-political institution. The state does not make marriage possible; marriage makes the state possible. Homosexual marriage would have struck Aristotle as an absurdity since you could not found a polity on its necessarily sterile relations. This is why the state has a legitimate interest in marriage, because, without it, it has no future.

One hopes the modern super-state would have struck Aristotle as an absurdity as well. I err on the side of caution, and don't want the state to have any interest in marriage, for it has destroyed it, but then this is the modern state, and it is destroying itself.

A healthy society would endeavor to get young men and women married, and settled in some sort of household, with some means of providing for themselves. I do not see a healthy society. Anywhere. Where are the wise old men? Of the grandfathers I know, I can't think of one with a grandchild with his own last name. This implies a failure- well, it is a failure, though I suppose it may still happen for some.

And in my own life, conditions make it hard for me so see how I could raise children the way I think they should be raised.

The modern state, in it's avarice, seeks to break apart true marriage and recast it as a series of taxable transactions. It will also open the definition of marriage up, providing the divorce industry a way to extract money from homosexuals. Lawyers seem to be a class created and protected by the government- and lawyers are all over the place in government. As a note- if anyone decides try this silly republic experiment in future, don't let lawyers run for office. Your republic will eventually end, but it's life and usefulness may be prolonged. Of course, there is that other issue- that a representative republic is actually a city government and doesn't scale well- which, if you choose to remember, would do you well.

Anyway, I would suggest that if the state has any legitimate interest in anything, it should protect it, but otherwise not get involved at all. This would likely mean being rather awful to the people who try to destroy marriages, and the people who destroy marriages are not the few poor homosexuals who don't understand the nature of this ploy to raise their relationships to the status of 'marriage.' Very often the destroyer is female, taking advantage of the modern state to remove children from their fathers while simultaneously extracting money from them. Now, in a decent society, they could not do this, but in this society we have an entire industry set up to benefit from this sort of thing.

The Pope Is Not A Janitor

Christopher Gillibrand gave us a few quotes from Archbishop Chaput. These are the type of quotes that will comfort the thoughtless Catholic Republican. Indeed, Archbishop Chaput seems to be one of these, for his salient political commentary started happening about twenty years too late.
This notion that the pope needs to clean house is laughable. The Vatican is his gilded cage; if the pope must clean the house, we are in trouble, because he is prisoner to whatever filth is there. The only thing he could theoretically do is release us, as various popes have done when kings have begun to behave badly. Well, we've got governments, both secular and Christian that are being rather naughty, so he could release us from our perceived obligations to them.
That is about all he can do, and it isn't clear that he could do that. Can the Queen say a word that isn't vetted by Cameron or one of his buddies? We can assume the outreach to the SSPX was initiated by Benedict, but the subsequent discussion via the Vatican went nowhere. I suspect this is because the Vatican is nuts about Vatican II and wouldn't let the appropriate language pass from Benedict to the SSPX. Things immediately got changed from something the SSPX might be able to sign (after much prayer and deliberation) to something that made Fellay wonder why the gesture of conciliation was made in the first place.
So this is foolishness, a comic book version of reality. The pope isn't a janitor. He isn't superman either. The few powerful gestures he could make are desperate ones. He can't clean house, but he could flee it. The power of these questionable people is derived from being near the Papal throne. A 'cleaning' just means a shuffle of personnel, many of whom will continue to be untrustworthy. Decentralization is the only way, and with these sorts of cases the metaphor of a wrecking ball is likely to be more apt.