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Re: [OctDev] setting up for development on a mac
On Jul 15, 2008, at 4:34 PM, Søren Hauberg wrote: man, 14 07 2008 kl. 13:52 -0400, skrev Thomas L. Scofield: I have been doing some work on imread(). I'm not well-versed in the compiling/linking process, and have had trouble with this on my Mac. I have the image-1.0.6 package on my mac and can use it. What I cannot do is make changes to a file like __magick_read__.cc and then compile it on the Mac. It's not my changes which are at fault. For the last few weeks I've been using a linux machine instead, where I've got things setup correctly (I guess), and I can run something like mkoctfile __magick_read__.cc `Magick++-config --cppflags` - lMagick ++ -lMagick without an error. (My changes, which involve an effort to move away from ImageMagick and towards GraphicsMagick, compile, and the routine is usable on that machine.) But on the Mac I get all kinds of undefined symbol messages from ld (see below). I've never used a Mac in my entire life so what have to say probably isn't all that relevant, but hey... Problems with linking (ld) doesn't have anything to do with the headers, but with the link flags. You seem to compile with mkoctfile __magick_read__.cc `GraphicsMagick++-config -- cppflags` -lGraphicsMagick++ -lGraphicsMagick Here '-lGraphicsMagick++ -lGraphicsMagick' are the link flags. I'd try with something like mkoctfile __magick_read__.cc `GraphicsMagick++-config -- cppflags` `GraphicsMagick++-config --libs` which should give you the right link flags (at least, I think that's the idea with the GraphicsMagick++-config script). Søren Thank you for the tip. I only had to add to this a -L libdir switch to help it find another library, and it worked fine. Thomas L. Scofield Associate Professor Department of Mathematics and Statistics Calvin College - This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100url=/___ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
[Libertarian] Re: BTP or LP? Barr/Root or Jay/Knapp?
Bruce, I publicly pledged to support Barr/Root as long as they ran a convincingly pro-freedom campaign. Barr has declined to do so (including his latest, just a few minutes ago -- endorsing a federal bailout of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac on Fox News): http://knappster.blogspot.com/2008/06/of-our-elaborate-plans-end.html I haven't seen a lot of Wayne since the nomination, but he's coming to Missouri later this week and I look forward to seeing what he's up to. At this point, I'd have to say that he would have been a better presidential nominee than Barr. Regards, Tom Knapp --- In Libertarian@yahoogroups.com, Bruce Cohen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles Jay is a great guy. I consider him my friend, though I haven't spoken with him for a year or so. Tom Knapp, however, pledged publicly to support Barr/Root, as has his Candidate, Steve Kubby. --- On Mon, 7/14/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Libertarian] Re: Resignation from the Libertarian Party To: Libertarian@yahoogroups.com Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Monday, July 14, 2008, 11:53 AM In a message dated 7/14/2008 8:52:21 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] com writes: So, no hope left for Ron Paul?!?!?! I do have a 1988 blue and white Ron Paul - Libertarian for President yard sign that I will auction off to the highest bidder. It has the Statue of Liberty logo on it, on the left of the field. It is in good to better condition. A few bruise's and minor bends It was used for 5 months, in a store window, in 1988. It is a one sided sign. Speaking of you guys in Florida, are you running for state or national office? That would be state. Jay/Knapp? LP or BTP? Charles Jay is running for President of the United States under the Boston Tea Party banner. His nominated running mate is Tom Knapp. You would have to ask Mr. Jay as to campaign strategy. Further information will have to come from Mr. Jay or the BTP website. http://bostontea. us I will do my homework and Google Jay/Knapp and the BTP. Please do that. We invite your inspection and further questions. Thank You, John Wayne Smith 203 W. Magnolia St. Leesburg Florida 34748 CEO, 1000 Planets, Inc. Building a Private Road to the Stars! Http://www.1000Plan ets.com ** Get the scoop on last night's hottest shows and the live music scene in your area - Check out TourTracker. com! (http://www.tourtrac ker.com?NCID= aolmus000500 0112) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
[Libertarian] Re: Resignation from the Libertarian Party
Peter, I too would like more info about the Boston Tea Party Party. :) URL: http://www.bostontea.us Platform: The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose. [Yes -- that's the whole platform!] I think though that it should not tie to Boston - Tea Party is enough and certainly we can modernize it a bit. Washington Tea Party? :) Tea Party, without the Boston prefix, has previously been used. I think they mahve run candidates in Nevada, Utah and possibly Alabama some time back. I couldn't find much on them, but L. Neil Smith described them to me as (paraphrased, this was a long time ago) unpleasant cranks. We're pleasant cranks ;-) Really, the name is simply an artifact of me owning a domain name and thinking Boston Tea Party would be a cool name for SOMETHING ... and then the need/opportunity happening along. Best regards, Tom Knapp
[Libertarian] Re: Resignation from the Libertarian Party
Quoth Bruce Cohen (I think -- the quote nests are getting rather thickly woven): I'm also curious, if John felt to passionately, why he didn't show up in Denver to vote. If you're referring to John Wayne Smith, he DID show up in Denver, presumably to vote. Or at least I ran into a guy at the national convention who _claimed_ to be John Wayne Smith.
[OctDev] setting up for development on a mac
_FT_Outline_Get_BBox _FT_Select_Charmap _FT_Set_Char_Size _FT_Set_Charmap _FT_Vector_Transform _XDefaultGC _XCheckIfEvent _XCreatePixmapFromBitmapData _XFreeFontNames _XGetSelectionOwner _XListFonts _XSetClipRectangles _XSetSelectionOwner _XDPSCreatePixmapForEPSF _XDPSImageFileIntoDrawable _XDPSPixelsPerPoint _jas_cleanup _jas_iccprof_createfromcmprof _jas_iccprof_destroy _jas_iccprof_save _jas_image_addcmpt _jas_image_create0 _jas_image_decode _jas_image_destroy _jas_image_encode _jas_image_getcmptbytype _jas_image_readcmpt _jas_image_strtofmt _jas_image_writecmpt _jas_init _jas_matrix_create _jas_matrix_destroy _jas_stream_close _jas_stream_flush _jas_stream_memopen _jpeg_CreateCompress _jpeg_CreateDecompress _jpeg_calc_output_dimensions _jpeg_destroy_compress _jpeg_destroy_decompress _jpeg_finish_compress _jpeg_finish_decompress _jpeg_read_header _jpeg_read_scanlines _jpeg_resync_to_restart _jpeg_set_defaults _jpeg_set_marker_processor _jpeg_set_quality _jpeg_simple_progression _jpeg_start_compress _jpeg_start_decompress _jpeg_std_error _jpeg_write_marker _jpeg_write_scanlines _BZ2_bzCompress _BZ2_bzCompressEnd _BZ2_bzCompressInit _BZ2_bzDecompress _BZ2_bzDecompressEnd _BZ2_bzDecompressInit _xmlAddAttributeDecl _xmlAddChild _xmlAddDocEntity _xmlAddDtdEntity _xmlAddElementDecl _xmlAddNotationDecl _xmlCleanupParser _xmlCreateIntSubset _xmlCreatePushParserCtxt _xmlDetectCharEncoding _xmlFree _xmlFreeInputStream _xmlFreeParserCtxt _xmlGetDocEntity _xmlGetLastChild _xmlGetParameterEntity _xmlLoadExternalEntity _xmlMalloc _xmlNewCDataBlock _xmlNewCharRef _xmlNewDoc _xmlNewDtd _xmlNewReference _xmlParseChunk _xmlParseExternalSubset _xmlPopInput _xmlPushInput _xmlSplitQName _xmlStrdup _xmlSubstituteEntitiesDefault _xmlSwitchEncoding _xmlTextConcat _TIFFClose _TIFFGetField _TIFFGetFieldDefaulted _TIFFNumberOfStrips _TIFFOpen _TIFFReadRawStrip _TIFFReverseBits _png_create_info_struct _png_create_read_struct_2 _png_create_write_struct_2 _png_destroy_read_struct _png_destroy_write_struct _png_error _png_free _png_get_PLTE _png_get_cHRM _png_get_error_ptr _png_get_gAMA _png_get_header_ver _png_get_iCCP _png_get_io_ptr _png_get_libpng_ver _png_get_pHYs _png_get_sRGB _png_get_text _png_get_x_offset_pixels _png_get_y_offset_pixels _png_malloc _png_permit_mng_features _png_read_end _png_read_info _png_read_row _png_read_update_info _png_set_PLTE _png_set_bKGD _png_set_cHRM _png_set_compression_buffer_size _png_set_compression_level _png_set_compression_mem_level _png_set_compression_strategy _png_set_filter _png_set_gAMA _png_set_iCCP _png_set_interlace_handling _png_set_keep_unknown_chunks _png_set_oFFs _png_set_pHYs _png_set_packing _png_set_read_fn _png_set_sRGB _png_set_sig_bytes _png_set_tRNS _png_set_text _png_set_write_fn _png_warning _png_write_end _png_write_info _png_write_row _xmlFreeDoc _TIFFClientOpen _TIFFDefaultTileSize _TIFFGetConfiguredCODECs _TIFFGetVersion _TIFFIsByteSwapped _TIFFIsTiled _TIFFPrintDirectory _TIFFReadDirectory _TIFFReadEncodedStrip _TIFFReadRGBAImage _TIFFReadRGBAStrip _TIFFReadRGBATile _TIFFReadScanline _TIFFReadTile _TIFFScanlineSize _TIFFSetErrorHandler _TIFFSetField _TIFFSetWarningHandler _TIFFStripSize _TIFFSwabArrayOfDouble _TIFFSwabArrayOfLong _TIFFSwabArrayOfShort _TIFFSwabArrayOfTriples _TIFFTileRowSize _TIFFTileSize _TIFFVStripSize _TIFFWriteDirectory _TIFFWriteScanline _TIFFWriteTile _xmlNanoFTPClose _xmlNanoFTPConnect _xmlNanoFTPGet _xmlNanoFTPInit _xmlNanoFTPNewCtxt _xmlNanoHTTPCleanup _xmlNanoHTTPClose _xmlNanoHTTPOpen _xmlNanoHTTPRead _XInitImage collect2: ld returned 1 exit status Thomas L. Scofield Associate Professor Department of Mathematics and Statistics Calvin College - Sponsored by: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards: VOTE NOW! Studies have shown that voting for your favorite open source project, along with a healthy diet, reduces your potential for chronic lameness and boredom. Vote Now at http://www.sourceforge.net/community/cca08___ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
[Catalyst] Logo collision?
Hope this hasn't been discussed before, the similarities of the Catalyst logo to others. Look at http://www.geektools.com/ about two-thirds down the page, or more specifically http://www.geektools.com/images/udnsreseller.gif Strangely, I haven't yet found this logo at the Neustar UltraDNS site http://www.ultradns.com/ I suppose everyone has a powered by ... icon, and limited imagination for such pictures for network thingies, but this looks remarkably like the Catalyst icon file that I've got, dated 2005/07/31. I jus' worrying... -- I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities. Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) ___ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
[OctDev] octave contributor?
I have a general interest in contributing code to octave-forge. While it is possible I will contribute code to more than one package (or perhaps not at all, as I have to get accustomed to distributed programming---svn, in particular), my primary focus will likely be on functions for the image package, at least initially. Thomas L. Scofield Associate Professor Department of Mathematics and Statistics Calvin College - Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php___ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
Re: [IRCA] iPhones and IBOC
That makes me want to reach for a bottle of Gerotol. Hoperfully we will get 10 yrs of the real oldies first ( 1950-1962 ) before that. Dont see much of a future in MYL type stations with that generation sadly dropping like flys. As far as IBOC goes it must be all but dead. How many AM's are getting conned into it lately ? A bad dream almost over. Move over Mitch Miller make room for Big Joe Turner 73 Tom Jones Mason N.H. On Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:43:27 -0700 Bruce Portzer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In another decade, FM will be frequented mostly by elderly people listening to Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger tunes. Or possibly the talk/sports/ethnic stations will move from AM to FM as music-oriented stations succumb to shrinking audiences. All of which makes me wonder what will happen to the AM band in a few more years. Personally, I would love having fewer stations, since it would mean less interference . Beauty Product Reviews Read Unbiased Beauty Product Reviews and Join Our Product Review Team! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/JKFkuJi7Uvr72zCnnDG4sdbynngxNSOGXOSWF1xYZHETWGWke8wGtz/ ___ IRCA mailing list IRCA@hard-core-dx.com http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: irca@hard-core-dx.com
Re: [IRCA] OT TV converter boxes
I had a Samsung box at home got nothing. I have 2 strong NTSCer's and a ton of weak but watchables. From what I have seen with new Sony TV's is you do need a decent signal for stable pix. Stations 60 + miles away will not come in unless you are on a hill have a rotor good antenna. Ears will work 25 miles away but you get break-ups often on some stations. One thing many customers dont grasp is to use the parallel UHF channels to find a signal the auto program misses. In other words if you want WBZ ch 4 Boston HD you would enter 30.1 then fiddle wait ( often many times ) If you get it add it to your list of channels to scan. On the Rat Shack boxes we have been getting calls that they cant get them to work. Never checked one out, they just returned them not wanting to gamble a service call for us to prove what was wrong. 73 Tom Jones Mason N.H. On Wed, 28 May 2008 23:38:39 -0700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Patrick Martin) writes: Thanks Mike. I have heard both pro and con regarding digital coverage. Some say, it is better and others say it isn't. Out here on the OR coast, it may be years until the translators go to digital as the date is 2012. I have a Toshiba EDTV (30 inches widescreen that has a built in digital tuner I bought a year ago. I get nothing on it so far. I have satellite TV, Dish, 4DTV, DVB, Stat Choice (Canada), so the digital TV converter box is really nothing I am excited about one way or another, but I fiqured if I buy one for recording to a VCR, I should try and find the best for the money. Since the Toshiba TV has the digital tuner, I presume it will work when the time comes. Who knows digital TV skip may be possible here. Not really interested in HDTV. There is not enough out there as yet for the added cost. I read tonight about the Zenith Insignia converter boxes on another list and those seem to be the favorites with weak signal reception. If I lived in a city, it would be different, but out here, I will stick with SD TV for the time being, 73, Patrick Patrick Martin KGED QSL Manager ___ IRCA mailing list IRCA@hard-core-dx.com http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: irca@hard-core-dx.com Click here to find all of your computer accessories for less! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3m9eNxr7a29EMsufA9fwzehWf4r1C9K2mowEp2CNdAuTWTuB/ ___ IRCA mailing list IRCA@hard-core-dx.com http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: irca@hard-core-dx.com
Re: [IRCA] OT (Off-Topic) Question on TV Brand Reliability
I have been in TV sales service since 1971 I wouldnt touch it with a 3 foot #8 nutdriver Also if he has cable no need to upgrade anyways, wont see a difference. I recomend all looking at new TV's read this artical. Its a new ball game now. No more cheap repairs IF you can get the parts EVEN for a brand name set. Get the extended warranty from the manufacturer ( cheaper than the stores ) that way you are good for 5 yrs. http://hdguru.com/your-new-disposable-flat-panel-hdtv/107 Our Sony salesman sent me this link a while back 73 Tom Jones Mason N.H. On Thu, 08 May 2008 17:59:21 -0400 Mike Hardester [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: A friend of mine, who cannot get out and about, sent me a letter inquiring about a Skyworth SLV-1551 15 LCD Clear TV. He, like I, have never heard of the SKYWORTH moniker. Some online research reveals that the product is made in PR CHINA/HONG KONG, but no listing specifically for this model (SLV-1551). The price he has seen is about $290. Does anyone know about this company and the reliability of this brand? He's looking for a ready-to-go inexpensive TV after analog goes kaput: plug in, add cable, turn on, watch TV. Again, for those in the know, is Skyworth a trusted brand or would another brand (same size/price range) be better. Thanks. Very 73 and Best of DX de Mike ___ IRCA mailing list IRCA@hard-core-dx.com http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: irca@hard-core-dx.com ___ IRCA mailing list IRCA@hard-core-dx.com http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: irca@hard-core-dx.com
RE: [TMIC] time has passed but....this is for Every1 on the TMA list
In 2000 I was diagnosed with cancer, was teaching special needs kids, had 3 teenagers and watched my mom die of lung cancer while I was battling breast cancer. I am absolutely convinced this is why I fell apart with TM less than one year later. Stress! Cindy From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: RE: [TMIC] time has passed butthis is for Every1 on the TMA listDate: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:08:31 -0400 Hi,I was going through a terrible divorce and raising 3 young children. I also had pneumonia in Nov and the flu in January. I got TM on Jan. 3, 1991. My neuro was so good. He diagnosed me before any testing was done. He told me at the time that this could have been a virus that had been lying dormant in my body for years and the stress activated it.I have always wondered if this virus is somehow related to the polio virus. I was exposed in the 50's when my cousin got polio and a good friend of mine also. I remember their symptoms at the time and thinking back on it, it was a lot like TM. Could it be something in the polio vaccine that everyone gets? Patty Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:28:23 -0400From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Re: [TMIC] time has passed butthis is for Every1 on the TMA listCC: tmic-list@eskimo.com .Hi, I was getting over a case of very mild pneumonia whenever I got hit with NMO. I hadn't even missed work because of it. Had been taking antibiotics and feeling a bit poopy and tired, but no other symptoms to speak of. Gracie How well do you know your celebrity gossip? Talk celebrity smackdowns here.
[marketliberal] Re: The Purpose of the LP
Quoth Brian Holtz: - You anarchists are always trying to put us minarchists on a slippery slope to nanny-statism (or worse), but when I try to point out the slippery slope from anarchism to anti-partyarchism, you radicals -- Hogarth, Gregory, Starchild, even Knapp -- clam up. - Sorry if you perceive me as having clammed up -- I don't recall you ever posing the challenge that way before. If you're looking for me to deny the existence of, or refute the arguments for, a slippery slope from anarchism to anti-partyarchism, you're looking to the wrong person. I agree that said slippery slope exists. The only thing that keeps me from sliding down it is the hypocrisy which is typical to junkies.
[marketliberal] Platform Committee Report v. Restore 04 v. 2006
Quoth Rob Power: Outright Libertarians will be joining the coalition calling on the national delegates in Denver to reject the Platform Committee's proposal. It will take a 2/3 vote of the delegates to remove the Platform Committee's report from the agenda and replace it with the Restoration Caucus alternative (which keeps the 2006 Sexuality and Gender plank intact). At: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3512 The Restoration Caucus proposal would restore the 2004 platform, which does not include the 2006 Sexuality and Gender plank. On Steve Kubby's show recently (with Brian Holtz), I noted that that plank was one real IMPROVEMENT in the 2006 platform from the 2004. Since Outright's alleged open dialogue policy is no such thing, and since I am one of those to whom the dialogue is closed, someone else should probably let Outright's membership know that their chair is giving them bad scoop again. Regards, Tom Knapp
Re: [Catalyst] Book
At 08:09 AM 2/25/2008, you wrote: Hi, I am considering getting the Catalyst book and had a question or 2. Should it be bought from the Packt publishing site as opposed to anywhere else? Does buying it there help the catalyst project in some way more than buying it at another site that perhaps I am already registered on? I have been working my way though the sample chapter (3). I found it easier to follow then the tutorial that comes with the documentation. However the reviews at http://Amazon.co.ukAmazon.co.uk are a little negative. What does the list think about the books. Thanx, Dp. Whoa, just read those. Rough. Does fast to print meant skipping some steps? I'm still going to buy the book, after the previous posters question is answered (how _best_ to buy). I wish I knew more about publishing, because I've been intrigued by, evidently, how hard it is to get right. Even my most recent purchase, RESTful Web Services (O'Reilly) had irritating glitches. Is it the case that, along with every other industry shifting more and more responsibilities onto the lowest levels, that now the author has to do it all? Not only write and organize perfectly, but arrange their own set of editors, reviewers, and proof-readers? If so, can they ask for volunteers? I fix Wikipedia stuff for free, and helping on something like this would actually benefit me... -- I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities. Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) ___ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
[R] Possible overfitting of a GAM
The subject is a Generalized Additive Model. Experts caution us against overfitting the data, which can cause inaccurate results. I am not a statistician (my background is in Computer Science). Perhaps some kind soul would take a look and vet the model for overfitting the data. The study estimated the ebb and flow of traffic through a voting place. Just one voting place was studied; the election was the U.S. mid-term election about a year ago. Procedure: The voting day was divided into five-minute bins, and the number of voters arriving in each bin was recorded. The voting day was 13 hours long, giving 156 bins. See http://tinyurl.com/36vzop for the scatterplot. There is a rather high random variation, due in part to the fact that the bin width was intentionally set to be narrow, in order to improve the amount of timing information gathered. http://tinyurl.com/3xjsyo displays the fitted curve. A GAM was used, with the loess smoothing algorithm (locally weighted regression). The default span was used. http://tinyurl.com/34av6l gives the scatterplot and the fitted curve. The two seem to match reasonably well. However, when I tried to generate the standard errors, things went awry. (Please see http://tinyurl.com/38ej2t ) There are three curves, seemingly the fitted curve and the curves for plus and minus two standard errors. The shapes seem okay, but there are large errors in the y values. Question: Have I overfitted the data? Feedback? Tom Thomas L. Jones, PhD, Computer Science __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[LibertarianEnterprise] Kubby 2008: Open letter to Libertarians
Dear friends and fellow Libertarians, This weekend, US Representative Ron Paul announced his intention to scale back his campaign for the Republican Party's 2008 presidential nomination, acknowledged that he is unlikely to win that nomination, and expressly ruled out seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Party or another third party. As you are probably aware, I endorsed Dr. Paul's GOP presidential campaign, and promised to end my own Libertarian presidential candidacy if that campaign was successful. Many of you disagreed with that decision for various reasons -- reasons which I understand and sympathize with. Be that as it may, I felt compelled to back the play of the vast majority of my fellow libertarians and Libertarians who, like me, saw in Dr. Paul's campaign a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance freedom. While I certainly have my disagreements with Dr. Paul, I saw no point in putting myself forward as willing to split the freedom vote in the face of such an opportunity. I do not regret my endorsement of Ron Paul. I congratulate him on a hard-fought campaign which introduced hundreds of thousands of Americans to our ideas, and energized tens of thousands of new activists for liberty. I wish him the best as he returns to Congress and continues to fight for our freedom. Now that Dr. Paul has himself acknowledged that he will not be the Republican nominee for president, it's time for those Libertarians who supported him to turn our attention 100% back to our own party. While Dr. Paul's campaign advanced liberty on many fronts, it has left us, as a party, behind the curve and very much in need of catching up in the middle of what is likely both our most challenging and most promising election cycle ever. I hope to see my fellow Libertarians supporting the LP this spring with the same vigor that has characterized their support of Dr. Paul's campaign over the last several months. A number of candidates have stood forth to seek our party's presidential nomination. I believe myself to be the best of those candidates -- the most attuned to our party's platform and principles, the most well-known outside the party itself, the most credible with respect to actual past political accomplishments, and the most prepared to hold our party's banner high in the coming months. What I believe, of course, is less important than what YOU believe. I invite -- indeed, I implore -- you to take a close look at all of the candidates seeking your support. Examine our positions. Look at our records. Listen to our debates. Make your decision, and then ACT on that decision by getting involved. Stand for selection as a delegate to the national convention in support of the candidate you prefer. Write a check to the campaign you support. Talk to your friends and get them involved, too. My campaign web site is located at: http://www.kubby2008.com The Libertarian Party maintains a list of declared presidential candidates at: http://www.lp.org/libertydecides/alpha.html ... and offers the opportunity to support the eventual nominee, whomever that may be, at: http://www.lp.org/libertydecides As my campaign cranks up this month with a new round of public appearances and other campaign activities, I look forward to meeting many of you and working with you to make this the Libertarian Party's best year ever. Let Freedom Grow! Steve Kubby Libertarian for President
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] CA Prediction: 1. Root 2. Phillies 3. Kubby
Quoth Brian Holtz: In today's California LP presidential beauty contest, I predict that Wayne Allyn Root will come in a clear first, and that George Phillies will edge native son Steve Kubby. Even here in the Bay Area, I don't perceive a lot of the favoritism one would expect in the incumbent parties for a native son, but Kubby's name recognition could confound my guess here. There are all kinds of wild cards in LP primary elections. Name recognition (or similarity to a recognized name) can make a big difference in a primary where the vast majority of Libertarian voters don't see their options on the nightly news. Kubby has better name rec, especially in California, but it's hard to say whether that will play much. I suspect many of his supporters are registered Green or Democrat. Ballot order can make a huge difference among those voters who register and/or vote third party as a protest but who aren't involved much and who don't see their party's candidates on the nightly news. Wayne Root is, I believe, first on the Missouri ballot, and Phillies on the California ballot. As the candidate who endorsed Paul, here is one place where Kubby loses out -- those Libertarians who changed their registration in California, or who will be picking up a GOP rather than LP ballot in Missouri, to support Paul are probably somewhat more likely to have been if not for Paul, Kubby than if not for Paul, someone other than Kubby voters. Naturally, whichever candidate(s) win(s) will use their victory(ies) for whatever publicity can be gained. Naturally, the candidates who lose will point out that the LP primaries are non-binding and that the last LP nominee didn't win any of them (we had four in 2004, I believe -- the other two were Massachusetts and Wisconsin). And, naturally, I'll maintained an unconcerned air here -- and check the returns as they come in. It may be non-binding and it may be unimportant in the scheme of things, but Super Duper Tuesday is a junkie's second-favorite fix ;-) Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [DFC] Third Parties 96 declaration
Quoth Brian Holtz: - Whether free trade is good for workers in developing countries is not really debated any more by academic economists of any ideological persuasion. - It is, however, still debated by Libertarian presidential nomination candidates. Steve Kubby: The best incentive for improving respect for human rights in China comes from an upwardly mobile Chinese populace. A starving slave may lash out, but the people who come together in an organized fashion to achieve real change are those who have tasted freedom and comparative wealth and want MORE of both. Look at America's civil rights movement. It didn't gain its traction during the Great Depression. It took off in the post-war boom period. When we trade with China, we help ourselves -- and we help the Chinese people. They get food in their stomachs. They get money in the bank. They get leisure time from what used to be a hand-to-mouth existence. They finally have something to lose -- and the means to fight to keep it. http://www.2008electionprocon.org/candidates/stevekubby.htm#chinasanctions George Phillies: When a country is a dictatorship that suppresses labor unions and shoots labor organizers, the goods it exports are stolen property, stolen from the workers coerced to make them. Stolen goods cannot be traded freely. We should not engage in 'free trade' in stolen property. Furthermore, it is only fair that all manufacturers pay the same taxes. We may differ as to what those taxes should be. However, there should not be one tax rate for Ford Motors, and another much higher tax rate for General Motors. When we place a financial burden however labeled on American manufacturers, fairness dictates that foreign imports be subject to the same burden, a tax equivalent to whatever minimum wage and environmental restrictions foreign manufacturers are avoiding. http://phillies2008.org/phillies_on_free_trade
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] CA Prediction: 1. Root 2. Phillies 3. Kubby
Missouri: With 3,205 of 3,371 precincts reporting, uncommitted is victorious at 46.9%. The first name on the ballot, Wayne Root, is at 17.6%, followed by Steve Kubby at 9.6% and George Phillies at 8.1%. Of course, less than 2,000 votes have been cast in the Missouri primary and the separation between Kubby and Phillies is a mere 29 votes. The results are too muddled to declare anything resembling a winner. If there's a loser, it's George Phillies. He apparently invested considerable effort in the state, and even managed one newspaper endorsement (he polled three of the 20 LP primary votes cast in that newspaper's county of publication, tying with Wayne Root for second place after uncommitted). With only 5% reporting in California, it's too early to tell much except that being the only woman on the ballot and sharing the name of a supermodel is advantageous. Kubby is edging Root for second and Phillies is in a distant 6th place ... but it's very, very early.
[LibertarianEnterprise] RELEASE: Kubby delivers 2008 State of the Union
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 01/25/08 POC Thomas L. Knapp 314-705-3042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] LIBERTARIAN BEATS BUSH TO STATE OF THE UNION PUNCH San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) January 25, 2008 -- Next week, President George W. Bush will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, says Libertarian presidential candidate Steve Kubby in a speech released on his campaign web site and other Internet venues today. This week, I'm delivering MY State of the Union address to you, the American people. Speaking from San Francisco, Kubby predicts the content of Bush's speech, scheduled for next Monday. Kubby disputes what he contends will be a rosy but unrealistic portrait of the American situation. President Bush is going to tell you that the state of the union is strong, but that it can use improvement, says Kubby. What he's not going to tell you is that we are more disunited than we've been in a generation or longer, and that he bears a large share of the blame for making that so. Kubby cites civil liberties violations, the highest per capita prison population in the world, a failing economy, the war in Iraq and brinksmanship with Iran as signs that America is headed in the wrong direction. He urges Americans to take back the power that Republicans and Democrats have usurped and the freedoms that they have seized and promotes his own policy package: Withdrawal from Iraq, warmer relations with Iran, ending the war on drugs, pardoning those imprisoned for victimless crimes, rolling back government power, and repealing the income tax. Kubby, 61, of Fort Bragg, California, is best known as a medical marijuana activist who helped pass California's Proposition 215 compassionate use law. He's since fought a number of prominent legal and political battles on behalf of patients' rights. Kubby appears as a candidate for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination on February 5th primary ballots in California and Missouri. The party's national nominating convention is scheduled for Memorial Day weekend in Denver. -30- Kubby 2008 web site: http://www.kubby2008.com
[marketliberal] RELEASE: Kubby delivers 2008 State of the Union
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 01/25/08 POC Thomas L. Knapp 314-705-3042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] LIBERTARIAN BEATS BUSH TO STATE OF THE UNION PUNCH San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) January 25, 2008 -- Next week, President George W. Bush will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, says Libertarian presidential candidate Steve Kubby in a speech released on his campaign web site and other Internet venues today. This week, I'm delivering MY State of the Union address to you, the American people. Speaking from San Francisco, Kubby predicts the content of Bush's speech, scheduled for next Monday. Kubby disputes what he contends will be a rosy but unrealistic portrait of the American situation. President Bush is going to tell you that the state of the union is strong, but that it can use improvement, says Kubby. What he's not going to tell you is that we are more disunited than we've been in a generation or longer, and that he bears a large share of the blame for making that so. Kubby cites civil liberties violations, the highest per capita prison population in the world, a failing economy, the war in Iraq and brinksmanship with Iran as signs that America is headed in the wrong direction. He urges Americans to take back the power that Republicans and Democrats have usurped and the freedoms that they have seized and promotes his own policy package: Withdrawal from Iraq, warmer relations with Iran, ending the war on drugs, pardoning those imprisoned for victimless crimes, rolling back government power, and repealing the income tax. Kubby, 61, of Fort Bragg, California, is best known as a medical marijuana activist who helped pass California's Proposition 215 compassionate use law. He's since fought a number of prominent legal and political battles on behalf of patients' rights. Kubby appears as a candidate for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination on February 5th primary ballots in California and Missouri. The party's national nominating convention is scheduled for Memorial Day weekend in Denver. -30- Kubby 2008 web site: http://www.kubby2008.com
Re: [Catalyst] REST - like uri design for CRUD
At 01:56 PM 1/20/2008, Zbigniew Lukasiak wrote: I know this has been discussed already - but I can't find it in the archives. What I conjured is: /class/search /class/id//view /class/id//update /class/create Update and create use really the same logic and templates - so I just forward to a create_or_update action from them. What are your opinions? -- Zbigniew Lukasiak spew register=pedant The book RESTful Web Services has been very useful to me in understanding the confusion about what REST means when it comes to 'verbs'. And that I'm interested in how close one can come to 'strict' REST design using Catalyst. One important topic in the book is that people mix 'verbs' into their URIs when they shouldn't, or at least when they don't _have_ to. Using the book's concepts your URIs would become 1) GET/class?pattern=breadbox 2) GET/class/id/ 3) PUT/class/id/ 4) POST /class 1) is your /class/search and says let me retrieve the representation/list of the items selected by searching for the given pattern, where the base URI would indicate the set/list of items, and the pattern is kept in the query parameters because it could be anything. Note that the idea is that GET /class references the list of all items, and you here are just qualifying that search with the pattern. 2) Your /class/id//view would be seen in strict REST as just a GET of /class/id/. The HTTP 'verb' GET already says give me a representation of the item. Done. 3) Your /class/id//update would become a PUT of /class/id/, where the new representation coming from the remote client would _replace_ the old representation/data for that item. This strict use of the HTTP 'PUT' verb is actually the hardest to accomplish, as it assumes that the remote client can receive and update a representation on the client, and then send it back using PUT. It is easiest to picture this usage when the client completely replaces the old representation held on the server. (see farther below for why) 4) Your /class/create becomes a POST to /class. This was another concept brought out by the book. The matter of who determines the item's 'id' is important. Here we assume that the _server_ will determine the id of the new added item. You do a POST to the base URI of the data area, and the server determines the new id, stores the data into the item, and does a redirect to tell the remote client where the new item is, that is, what is the new item's URI, for instance /class/id/1234. Why is who determines the id important? Because it says what HTTP verb you should use to create a new item. If the server, you use POST to add another item. (Much discussion of that most misunderstood of HTTP methods: POST in the book) But if the remote client were to determine the id, say because the id is a license plate number input at the client, then strict REST would say the client should do a PUT to /class/id/STRWBYP and the client would send the complete data for the item. The server would create the item using the id 'STRWBYP as requested by the client. Creation using POST would say create a new item and tell me (the client) where you (the server) put it. Creation using PUT defines where to put it to the server, because the client knows what the id should be. So under some designs it is possible that PUT will be used for both creation of new items and update (replacement) of existing items. In both these cases (under such a design) the client knows the correct id for the item. Anyway this spew was prompted by the new pedant seeing 'REST' in the subject and then no mention of 'PUT', etc. The book tries to be clear that it depends on both your design and the capabilities of the client whether you can implement using the strict REST HTTP verb set GET, PUT, and POST, or whether you must compromise on a REST-like set of GET and POST. The authors discuss how to overload POST to effect PUT-like usage, because we have to implement in the real world. But they are clear about the goals of RESTful design, the problems it solves, and the benefits it brings in the real world. It looks to be very useful to consider URI design with a view towards how would I accomplish this by splitting my data objects into URI addressable data that can be manipulated using the full set of HTTP verbs GET, PUT, POST and HEAD. (And not putting verbs into URIs that might be cached) /spew ___ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] REST - like uri design for CRUD
At 04:06 PM 1/20/2008, =?KOI8-R?B?88XSx8XKIO3B0tTZzs/X?= wrote: One important topic in the book is that people mix 'verbs' into their URIs when they shouldn't, or at least when they don't _have_ to. Using the book's concepts your URIs would become 1) GET/class?pattern=breadbox 2) GET/class/id/ 3) PUT/class/id/ 4) POST /class Nice clarification, thank you! But is the /id/ part of url required? In most cases class would have only one primary identifier, so we can shrink it to GET /class/ - can't we? Oh definitely the naming URI's is very important, and can be intricate. The authors develop on a couple different example application cases illustrating how they would layout the URI namespace. And how they sometimes have to go back and redo the layout to eliminate conflicts. Their essential criteria are that each URI specify one 'thing', and that every 'thing' have (at least) one URI. That doesn't mean that a less-specific URI is not meaningful. If /class/ is one item, you might still allow GET /class to mean get me the list of all items under /class. And concerning case 3 - I think that rarely used PUT method could be replaced with common POST to avoid possible problems with proxies, etc. -- ó Õ×ÁÖÅÎÉÅÍ, óÅÒÇÅÊ íÁÒÔÙÎÏ×. The authors do take care not to be so rigid we can't _try_ to approach the one true way of REST. :-) They specifically allow that when PUT is not available or impracticable (clients, firewalls, and proxies can get in the way), you could 'overload' POST by, for example, adding a query parameter _method=PUT to pass-thru the real request method. The idea is that the handler would pick off this parameter and dispatch as though the HTTP method had really been PUT. But you try to use this request like you would a 'real' PUT, in what the data contains and how it is used. But this is a question I have, whether the REST dispatching modules have an capability like this, interpreting overloaded POSTs? ___ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] REST - like uri design for CRUD
At 04:11 PM 1/20/2008, Ashley wrote: On Jan 20, 2008, at 1:33 PM, Thomas L. Shinnick wrote: At 01:56 PM 1/20/2008, Zbigniew Lukasiak wrote: /class/search /class/id//view /class/id//update /class/create spew register=pedant One important topic in the book is that people mix 'verbs' into their URIs when they shouldn't, or at least when they don't _have_ to. Using the book's concepts your URIs would become 1) GET/class?pattern=breadbox 2) GET/class/id/ 3) PUT/class/id/ 4) POST /class /spew Clipped a bunch. This is great food for thought. I am missing in this scheme how you would know to serve the form for updating. That seems to be the real point of /class/id//update. I suppose that should be /class/id//edit instead and it would, if it could, properly PUT the form to /class/id/, yes? -Ashley Rats, I can't pinpoint the area where they talk about this (serving forms) in the book. Two points of departure: First, there is a difference when talking about how you go about implementing RESTful interactions where both the client/server are programmed, that is, where data is exchanged directly and people aren't involved. When you instead want to make accommodations for allowing more classical (non-Javascript) interactions it _does_ get cloudy. And if you want to serve _both_ programmed and human interactions it gets positively foggy. You don't want to start having alternate URIs just to specify what 'kind' of representations to serve. So... Second, if there are multiple representations for an item, how do we specify which representation is being requested? The authors ask that you try to use something like the Accept: header, so that a Javascript program can specify that it wants an XML or JSON representation, _rather_ than an HTML form representation. If you want to allow plain unenhanced browsers you could serve the form in HTML by default. But if the request specifically said give me straight data, the server would see the Accept: application/json (I think that's right) and respond with Content-type: application/xml. Program or person - the HTTP headers tell you which. Now they again mention real-world hiccups, where some component might not pass-thru or pay attention to headers like Accept. They offer that you could (if forced) specify the desired content type in either the query parameters or even the URI itself, where they suggest an extension. Thus GET /class/1234.xml would be what a program might request, rather than a plain GET /class/1234 which might default to HTML. Basically they keep coming back to the same theme: use HTTP to its fullest, both headers and methods (e.g. PUT), and much becomes possible that otherwise seems clumsy. (Didn't say 'easy'... :-) ___ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
Re: [Catalyst] Catalyst, REST and Firefox
At 12:03 PM 1/17/2008, Christopher H. Laco wrote:
Jonas Alves wrote:
On Jan 17, 2008 2:32 PM, Christopher H. Laco [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I've touched on this before, and posted about it on UP:
http://use.perl.org/~jk2addict/journal/35411
In a nutshell, Firefox 2.x Accept header totaly screws with the REST
controller when you use it as a base for View negotiations. If you have
a default type of text/html pointed to a View::TT, REST will see
text/xml from Firefox and try and send that instead, based on this header:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
What does everyone think about a config option/toggle to tell REST to
ignore the Accept header, allowing it to fall back to the default
content-type in config when no Cntent-Type header or content-type params
are specified?
-=Chris
I have a subclass of Action::Serialize that does this:
my $default = $controller-config-{serialize}{default};
my $pcontent_type = $c-req-preferred_content_type;
my $content_types = $c-req-accepted_content_types_qvalue;
my $ordered_content_types = $c-req-accepted_content_types;
my $max_qvalue = $content_types-{$pcontent_type};
my %max_qvalue_content_types = map {
$content_types-{$_} eq $max_qvalue ? ($_ = $default) : ()
} keys %$content_types;
my $content_type = $max_qvalue_content_types{$default}
|| $pcontent_type
|| $c-req-content_type;
And in a subclass of Request::REST mixed with Plugin::Flavour:
sub preferred_content_type {
my $self = shift;
if ($self-flavour) {
my $type = $self-{ext_map}{$self-flavour}
|| $self-_ext_to_type($self-flavour);
return $type;
}
$self-accepted_content_types-[0];
}
sub accepted_content_types_qvalue {
my $self = shift;
return $self-{content_types_qvalue} if $self-{content_types_qvalue};
my %types;
if ($self-method eq GET $self-param('content-type')) {
$types{ $self-param('content-type') } = 2;
}
# This is taken from chansen's Apache2::UploadProgress.
if ( $self-header('Accept') ) {
$self-accept_only(1) unless keys %types;
my $accept_header = $self-header('Accept');
my $counter = 0;
foreach my $pair ( split_header_words($accept_header) ) {
my ( $type, $qvalue ) = @{$pair}[ 0, 3 ];
next if $types{$type};
$qvalue = 1 unless defined $qvalue;
$types{$type} = sprintf '%.3f', $qvalue;
}
}
return $self-{content_types_qvalue} = \%types;
}
That way all works fine. If you add an extension to the uri (like
.json or .xml), it serves that content-type. Else it tries to find the
greater qvalue on the Accept Header and tries to serve that. If it has
more than one content-type with the same max qvalue it tries to find
the default content-type in that list and serve it. If it isn't in the
max qvalue list than it serves the first content-type on that list.
I think that is a sane approach.
Well volunteered! I can't speak for the flavour stuff, but I'd think
the q value logic would be well served in the REST package. :-)
I'd personally like the flavour stuff in there as well. In my case,
I'm half way there. I have a type= that takes a friendly name (atom,
rss, json) ... along wieh adding some of those content types to
MIME::Types since it's missing a few of them for type-extension mapping.
-=Chris
Just wanted to note that using extensions on URIs to select
content_type is a technique mentioned in the RESTful Web Services
book. I think it was touted as a way to be sure the right type was
returned. I hadn't gotten to seeing if it'd work with REST stuff
here. Color me interested ___
List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk
Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst
Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/
Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] Gold Buggery in the San Francisco LP
Quoth Brian Holtz: One of my strongest reservations about my recent conversion to hardcore geolibertarianism is why it doesn't have higher mindshare among libertarian intellectuals. That's an easy question to answer: The Georgist theory of property in land is radical in the sense that it goes very close to the root per se (property in land is one of the most basic political issues), and replacing the prevailing Lockean theory of property in land with it would therefore entail rethinking everything from that close to the root point on up. Intellectuals pride themselves on questioning basic assumptions ... but in practice that usually tends to mean the basic assumptions of others, not their own, especially if those basic assumptions command the almost unanimous loyalty of their fellows, too. It's like asking them to consider taking a wrecking ball to everything they've ever built and starting over. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] TNR Unearths More Racism, Homophobia in Ron Paul
Quoth dragonlord_kfb@ == This is not even taking into consideration that [Paul] has already said he did not write those articles in the first place. Well, yes, he's said that. On the other hand, as of 1996, he said that he DID write them. And that's part of the dilemma Paul is up against. One of Paul's strongest claims, when reaching beyond the libertarian and constitutionalist movements -- movements which are at present not large enough to fuel a presidential campaign to victory -- is his CONSISTENCY. Paul sells himself as a different kind of politician. He sells himself as consistent and truthful. Saying I wrote that content and I defend it (paraphrase) in 1996, and then saying I didn't write that content and I repudiate it (also paraphrase) in 2001 and 2008 means that he's been inconsistent, and that he's lied. It robs him of one of his biggest sticks. There was never any easy way out of this for Paul, once those articles were published. There was never any way out of it that would leave him smelling like a rose. IMO, he would have done the LEAST damage to himself by taking responsibility (real responsibility, not the Clintonesque kind of responsibility he's taking now) for that content, pointing out that it was fairly standard conservative Republican rhetoric for its time, and then pleading that his views have changed and highlighting his policy positions that are inherently anti-racist (he's done a little of that last bit). That would have dulled the edge of his consistency blade, but it would have had the ring of truth and he might have been able to move on instead of getting bogged down in this stuff. Of course, libertarians (and mea maxima culpa on this) tend to have unrealistic expectations of the politicians we support. They ARE politicians after all, and if they are SUCCESSFUL politicians it's a good bet that they've paid their obeisances to constituency sentiment, popular trends, etc. That's not to say that it's wrong to draw lines and refuse to support politicians who cross them, of course ... but it's unrealistic to expect that a successful politician will not, and will not ever have, crossed some of the lines that ideology might move a libertarian to draw. Ron Paul is a SUCCESSFUL politician, and his success is not attributable to a majority of the constituents in his US House district being committed ideological Rothbardians. He's often told those constituents -- and others -- what they wanted to hear, and what those constituents and others wanted to hear circa 1990 doesn't necessarily land sweetly on the national -- or the libertarian -- ear in 2008. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] Libertarians React To Paul Newsletter Scandal
Quoth Brian Holtz: The most bizarre thing about this whole sorry episode is the deafening silence coming from Ron Paul gadfly and disgruntled ex-aide Eric Dondero, whose extensive archive of movement literature would presumably have included some of these newsletters. Is he just sulking that he got scooped by Kirchik? Actually, Dondero comments extensively in a thread at Third Party watch, naming names on who had what role in the newsletter operation. He says that the content was written by two people: Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell. http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/01/10/ron-paul-to-address-race-issues-on-cnn/#comment-427989 The whole I didn't know, it was a ghostwriter schtick is falling apart big-time. Over at Hit and Run, Matt Welch documents a number of instances of Paul not just taking personal responsibility for, but defending the content of, some of the problematic excerpts: http://reason.com/blog/show/124339.html Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: pay raise
Wes, you write: For more proof that there are no differences between Republicans and Democrats, Congress just got a $4000 raise up to $169,300 a year. I wonder how many of them would vote themselves pay cuts, or live on the salries of the people they represent. If you want to cut taxes, this is a good place to start. I don't guess it's a specifically libertarian proposal, but in the past I've advocated a constitutional amendment to the following effect: SECTION ONE: The salary of members of the Senate and House of Representatives, prior to the taking of any federal taxes, shall be set each year in the amount of the average per capita income of citizens of the United States for the prior year, as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and less the average of total per capita federal taxes charged against said average income. SECTION TWO: No additional allowances or per diem reimbursements shall be made for normal day-to-day living expenses above the salary enacted in section one of this article; however, military barracks space of the 'squad bay' classification and per-person space allotment for light infantry enlisted personnel, convenient to and within walking distance of Congress's meeting place, shall be set aside to accomodate such members as may decline to procure lodging in the capital at their own expense. The less they tax, the more they make. The more pro-income-growth their policies are, the more they make. If they want a Washington apartment, they can cough up themselves. Maybe 535 employees is enough to get a decent group health insurance rate, if they want to have the premiums deducted from their checks. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [ca-liberty] Not run-of-the-Miller Ron Paul bashing
Brian (Miller) has a habit of seeing/hearing people say/do what he wants them to have said/done. But some of the material is damning is understatement par excellence ... ... and the worst of it is that Paul continues to indulge in the Clinton/Reno version of taking responsibility, which amounts saying I take responsibility [insert caveats and excuses here] and hoping it goes away. Let's be honest here: The initial newsletter brouhaha was, in my opinion, significant, but at least it could be talked up as an isolated ghostwriter screwup until this stuff came out. Now, depending on which material one considers offensive, the problematic time period involved may be as long as 17 years. Assuming even a low threshold of offendedness, it's probably at LEAST two years long. That puts a whole different blush on the oh, a ghostwriter wrote that and it just slipped out excuse. It's one thing to believe that Paul missed vetting an issue before it went out. It's another thing entirely to believe that Paul allowed a newsletter to be published under his good name year after year without ever once noticing what the hell was in that newsletter or taking action to put a stop to stuff he now says he finds repugnant. Furthermore, who is the ghostwriter? Was he fired once the repugnant material came to Paul's attention? Or does he remain one of Paul's closest advisors and most vigorous promoters? I can't PROVE that Lew Rockwell is the ghostwriter in question, but I'm not the only one thinking it. If Paul is elected president, will anonymous racist and homophobic ghostwriters be put to work churning out executive orders and legislative proposals, with Paul later taking moral responsibility AFTER the damage has been done? Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Huckabee peeling off Ron Paul support
Quoth Brian Holtz, quoting Brian Miller: - BM) Meanwhile, Barack Obama has been wildly successful at peeling off the new voters and voters seeking change that Libertarians should have been winning. [...] Meanwhile, voters will likely have a choice between tax-borrow-and-spend Big Mommy Government Obama [...] (BM One wonders in what sense tax-borrow-and-spend Big Mommy Government is a change that Libertarians could have been promoting to Obama voters. - Responded to at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LPRadicals-Debate/message/6
[marketliberal] Re: LPRadicals-Debate
Quoth Brian Holtz: - No thanks, I wouldn't stoop to debate on any radicals forum that would have me as a member. :-) - What's the matter, Colonel Sanders ... chicken? I confess that I hadn't pegged you as being willing to argue only so long as you knew you would be prevented from actually doing so. No problem. Any radical shots I have to take, including return fire, I'll take at LPRadicals-Debate. You're free to leave those shots unanswered if you like. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: LPRadicals-Debate
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) Any radical shots I have to take, including return fire, I'll take at LPRadicals-Debate. (TK Why only there? What's the matter Colonel Sanders ... chicken? :-) But far be it from me to tease you for graciously conceding me what will appear to so many (including me) to be the last word. - Not at all! I'll simply post my rebuttal at LPRadicals-Debate, then post the URL of that rebuttal wherever necessary so that those who are interested have the opportunity to read it, along with a few Pythonesque taunts. Your mother was a hamster, c. Regards, Tom
[marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Quoth Brian Holtz: - What Brian Holtz quoted was the dictionary definition of 'censor' - Everyone has bad habits. One of yours is quoting a dictionary definition of something, then blithely pretending that what you just quoted was the dictionary definition of that thing. Sometimes what you leave out is at least as important as what you include. For example, with respect to the word censor, you leave out the fact that from the very beginning, the word referred to compulsory/coercive action by government (it was the title given to two Roman officials who supervised public morals), and that it has always meant that except in some rarefied areas of leftist and conspiracy-theory dogma where it is asserted that a quasi-state phenomenon of similar effect exists (i.e the capitalists [or Zionists, or alien collaborators] control the media). If you're going to assert such a dogma, I'd be interested in seeing the entire dogma, not just one of its applications. If you want to bandy dictionary definitions, WordNet's first definition for the verb form of censor is forbid the public distribution of. Under that definition, the moderators' activities at lpradicals don't even come close to censorship, since there exist at least thousands, and probably hundreds of thousands, of other similar venues in which any content one might want to post can be freely posted, including one provided by the same group, and almost of all of which are more public than lpradicals itself. Your use of the word censor with reference to lpradicals isn't an accurate descriptive usage. Rather, it's an attempt to slip an association fallacy into your argument deck by illicitly broadening a long-established definition. I note that Mr. Cohen has not thus far chosen to post his piece at the lpradicals-discuss list, which is not moderated. From that, I can reasonably deduce that his purpose is not so much to have the piece read as to be able to falsely squawk (or have you falsely squawk on his behalf) about non-existent censorship. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Quoth Brian Holtz: TK) Merriam-Webster DOES reflect the governmental context of the word censor. Your second-tier designated American Heritage Dictionary also reflects that context. (TK Non-responsive. Your claim above stands refuted. Far, far, from it. The ACTUAL entry, as opposed to your context-stripped excerpt, includes no fewer than four references to the governmental origin and meaning of the term -- two to officials and two to magistrates -- http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/censor We can play make Brian Holtz look petty, trite and deceptive all day if you like. I prefer other games, but this is your sandbox. Best regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Fair Use is not stealing
Quoth Brian Holtz: - FYI, here is some input from an Outright Y! Group member (who was apparently deterred from saying this on the Outright Group itself, but whose support I nevertheless appreciate, and who I hope doesn't mind if this outs him to the Outright authorities) - If by deterred you mean moderated (or, in your idiosyncratic parlance, censored), no -- I did not attempt to post that to the Outright list. My last round of conversation on that list convinced me that a few of Outright's leaders are hell-bent on making their own organization look bad. Their call, but I decline to be their enabler. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Quoth Brian Holtz: - Suppressing dissent on their forum may be a lot of things, but it's not dishonest. Don't flatter their forum by being bitter for being censored there. Censorship is the highest honor an ideological opponent can pay you. Wear that medal with grace. - It's impossible to wear with grace a medal which one has not earned. The list in question (lpradicals) has never been censored. It is a private group workspace, not a public square. Not allowing person A to post content B on it is no more censorship than me telling you that no, you can't install your printing press in my garage is. The LP Radicals Caucus _has_ however, created a de facto public square at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lpradicals-discuss ... where (in addition to any number of other public fora) Mr. Cohen is free to post anything he wants to post. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Quoth Brian Holtz: I was a member of the group. No, you weren't -- at least not substantively, although the Yahoo! Groups setup does coincidentally refer to list subscribers as members. You were a subscriber to the group's (i.e. the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus's) list, not a member of the LP Radical Caucus. The list is a working venue for a group you oppose. The fact that you know how to fill out a subscribe form doesn't make you a member of the group the list exists to serve. If the list was Lincoln Park, it would indeed be censorship to prevent you from unfurling your reformer banner at the same time that people elsewhere in the park are unfurling their radical banner. But the list isn't Lincoln Park, it's a virtual office in an organization's virtual headquarters -- a purposed space. - It's silly to claim that a person or institution can never be aptly described as censoring just because its actions don't initiate force. - Not as silly as it is to claim that a group not allowing its online workspace to be used by a person opposed to the group, for purposes opposed to the group's purposes, is censorship -- especially now that there exists another room in the same building which you're free to put to such uses. In the past, I have encouraged the moderators of the lpradicals list to be more open to the posting of conflicting viewpoints. However, they now seem to be getting serious about turning the base list into a real workspace and moving all non-work-related discussion to another list ... an unmoderated list which I hope to see both yourself and Bruce posting to (I'll probably be posting more there than at the regular list myself, if the proposed march on the Fed is any indication of what can be expected in the workspace area). Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Steve Kubby, force initiator
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) In terms of long-range what would my libertopia look like? thinking, I haven't seen any great interest from him -- he's in presidential candidate mode right now, and his focus is on what could I accomplish if elected?(TK Right, and I want to know: what kinds of force would he initiate (or propose initiating or propose no longer being initiated) if elected? - If you're going to re-post private email to a public forum, at least have the goddamn courtesty to include the part of it in which you provide the context underlying the part you're posting, rather than pretending that you're just now adding that context to an otherwise contextless snippet. The question the quote from me above was written in reply to was one of the trick questions often thrown at Libertarian candidates for the purpose of forcing them to impersonate philosopher kings rather than simply be candidates: How do they believe government SHOULD be financed? To the extent that I was acting as Kubby's proxy in reply, I merely refused to be buffaloed into the philosopher king corner and pointed out that he's focused on the existing reality of how government IS financed, and what he could actually DO about that in a 4-year presidency. Then I said: TK) And in that vein, he's actually not particularly radical by comparison to many past LP candidates. (TK ... which is true -- with respect to the particular issue in question. Nice try at falsely generalizing the quote in order to de-radicalize Kubby, but did you really think I'd let you get away with it? On the issue of government finance, Kubby supports eliminating the income tax (like most past LP nominees), but acknowledges that Congress may very well decline to do so and then offers as his second swing at government financing a tax-cutting plan that fits within the mechanics of the existing system ... as opposed to recent nominees who've stuck fairly resolutely (Badnarik from the start, Browne after getting dressed down on the issue) to bluster about magically eliminating the income tax on their first day in office and then breaking for lunch. I'm not sure how radical you think Kubby tells radicals he is, but the evidence is in plain sight (or site!) for radicals and non-radicals alike to conclude beyond any doubt that he's the most radical of the even remotely plausible declared (as of today) candidates for the LP's 2008 presidential nomination. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] Radicals Unveil Restore04 Platform Petition
Quoth Brian Holtz: I've criticized the WSPP not only for its brevity but also for ruling out many of the proposals for decentralization and defederalization that bother moderate and radical libertarians support. The WSPP doesn't rule out anything. It simply lays out criteria for what the party adopting it as a platform will or will not support. Perhaps the brevity IS the problem -- I didn't see any need to include in the platform mention of the likelihood, approaching 100%, that any organization adopting it would be one party in a multi-party system -- the party that always stands for smaller, and never for larger, government. Nor did I expand it to make explicit the implicit but obvious fact that if government gets so small that a member of that party doesn't want it to get any smaller, he or she is free to leave that party and join a party that advocates government of the existing size, or bigger government. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] Phillies Claims Major Press Coverage
Quoth Brian Holtz: For the candidates we cover, here are the number of hits returned by a Google News search on 2007-2008 for the candidate name and the keyword libertarian: 16 Root 13 Kubby 9 Phillies 2 Smith The same search for Ron Paul yields 1,210 hits. The fact is that none of the LP presidential candidates have anything big to brag about when it comes to generating media attention yet. There's some merit to the argument that Ron Paul has fully occupied the token libertarian candidate niche in the mainstream media, making it harder for LP candidates to get a word in edgewise, but excuses are like ... well, you know. Google News results have become a less reliable indicator as they've expanded the number of sources they cover. Most of the LP candidate results are minor mentions, free newswire plugs, etc, except for Root's. Root has done a good job of parlaying his advertising purchases into complimentary coverage in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and on Fox Entertainment properties. Root is clearly the leader among LP candidates in terms of major media penetration so far. On the other hand, self-promoting blowhard, Libertarian Party presidential candidate and longtime braggart, liar and sports scamdicapper isn't exactly the kind of thing I like to see about our candidates in the New York Post. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] [ca-liberty] Re: Libertarian Encourages Voters to Register as Republicans
Quoth Brian Holtz: - Oddly, the spitting druid who had his LP gubernatorial nomination rescinded got 2.1% in 2002, while 2008 presidential candidate Steve Kubby got 0.9% running for governor in 1998. To Tom Knapp: you should have a response ready if an opponent cites this comparison to question Kubby's ability to draw votes. - And I do. Actually, I researched California's gubernatorial election results fairly early on, specifically because at one point it was rumored that Mr. Olivier himself would be entering the LP presidential nomination race. Put simply: Copeland's vote total fits neatly into a third party surge trend that year, and slightly downward from Kubby as a percentage of that third party vote, even though Copeland had fewer third party competitors. In 1998, Steve Kubby came in 4th with 0.88%, behind a Green candidate who got 1.24% and ahead of the Peace and Freedom candidate (0.71%), the AIP candidate (0.45%) and the Natural Law candidate (0.37%). In 2002, Gary Copeland (2.2%) also came in 4th, behind Green Peter Camejo (5.3%) and ahead of the AIP candidate (1.7%) and the Natural Law candidate (1.1%). In 2006, Art Olivier (1.3%) came in fourth (see a trend there?), behind Camejo again (2.3%), and ahead of the PF candidate (08.%) and AIP candidate (0.7%). In 1998, Kubby got 24% of the third party vote, competing against four third party opponents. In 2002, Copeland got 21% of the third party vote, competing against three other third party candidates. In 2006, Olivier got 30% of the third party vote, competing against three third party opponents. Before the Green Party came into existence, the LP candidate routinely came in third rather than fourth, but the LP's percentage of the third party vote was trending downward. In 1994, Richard Rider got 40% of the third party vote. In 1990, Dennis Thompson got 38% of the third party vote. And in 1986, Joseph Fuhrig got 33% of the third party vote. That trend continued -- and was accentuated by the Green entry into California politics -- with Kubby and Copeland. If I was in the business of attacking Kubby (I'm not), I'd say look, Kubby's performance was downward beyond the prior trend, and Copeland got more votes than he did four years later. If I was in the business of defending Kubby (I am), I'd say look, if it hadn't been Kubby in 1998, the LP candidate would likely have come in fifth instead of fourth, Copeland would have placed dead last in 2002, and we'd be behind the Peace and Freedom and AIP folks to this day. Instead, Kubby held the line remarkably well given the appeal of the Greens to many California constituencies, probably at least in part because he appeals to some of those same constituencies in a way that the LP in general is over-cautious about approaching. His 1998 campaign made it possible for even an unappealing candidate like Copeland to keep the LP in fourth place in 2002, and that in turn made it possible for Olivier to start bucking upward against the long-term trend in 2006. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] [ca-liberty] Re: Libertarian Encourages Voters to Register as Republicans
Quoth Allen Rice: Yes, mentioning Olivier's feeble election returns was a cheap shot. Intentionally, and, in my opinion deservedly, so. If an action is being suggested, in this case temporarily switching registration to vote for the most effective libertarian candidate in the Presidential race, it should be sold on its merits, and not because some supposed leader tells us we should do it. I think you're misinterpreting the purpose and value of such endorsements. Yes, the case for re-registering Republican to vote for Ron Paul has to be sold on its merits ... and Art Olivier is the kind of guy whose endorsement of that case is likely to cause those who hear of it to look into the case and its merits. Yes, Olivier turned in an underwhelming performance as the LP's 2006 candidate for governor of California (although, as I point out, that performance is an improvement on recent performances as a percentage of the overall third party vote, and possibly even the marker for a reversal of a 20-year downward trend for the LP in that respect). But: Olivier has served as an elected Libertarian on the city council of, and as mayor of, a reasonably large polity. He has served as the LP's vice-presidential candidate, and turned in a very credible performance in that role (I was impressed with his speech when he visited St. Louis as the VP candidate). I don't agree with him on everything by any means (and I supported Kubby rather than him for VP in 2000), but he's the kind of guy I'm inclined to lend an ear to when he wants to bend that ear. He's been more successful as an LP candidate than most LP candidates, which just might mean that he has useful knowledge to impart or that he has a perspective worth HEARING before accepting or rejecting. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: [cal-libs] The bi-dimenionality of Nolan Space isn't existential
Quoth Brian Holtz: BM) As for what is libertarian, it still remains unanswered. (BM The answer is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1976. It doesn't involve the Nolan chart. It's also not the answer. It's a list of competing answers and unsupported claims (such as the dictionary defines -- which dictionary, and why is its definition to be taken as definitive versus the other definitions, if any, in that dictionary, or the definitions offered in other dictionaries?). There are a number of possible definitions of libertarian -- and while I'm more than willing to admit that the 0apsolutist definition is not useful for comparatively rating candidates for political office, I don't see that a candidate's score on the World's Smallest Political Quiz is necessarily especially useful for that either. For one thing, there's no such thing as the World's Smallest Political Quiz. There have been various versions of WSPQ, with various questions used for the scoring. Change the questions, and any individual's score may very well change. For another thing, there's the question of weighting. Is there any particular reason to believe that no issue is more important, or more indicative of a libertarian orientation, than any other issue? For example, let's take two hypothetical politicians and give them the current WSPQ. Each of them scores exactly the same, except on two questions: - One politician picks the right answer to the question of the draft -- he won't support it under any circumstances. However, on the question of cutting taxes and spending by more than 50%, he fails -- he's only willing to go 49%. - Another politician picks the right answer to the tax/spending question -- he proudly advocates a 51% tax/spending cut. But, he also wants to make it the law of the land that every American, upon turning 18, be trained as a rifleman and pull a two-year tour as a grunt in Baluchistan, on pain of imprisonment for failure to report for induction. The WSPQ says these two politicians are equally libertarian. I'm pretty sure I could come up with a version of the WSPQ, and support my characterization of the questions/answers as indicative of a libertarian or non-libertarian approach to various issues, which would reverse the relative scorings of Paul and Kucinich. Not that I think that Kucinich is more libertarian or even as libertarian as Paul -- I don't -- but if the standard of proof is scores on a 10-question test which will necessarily cover only a small range of issues out of many, I could probably prove it. Question: Do prominent self-identified libertarians happen to score libertarian on the test as framed, or is the test framed to make sure that prominent self-identified libertarians DO score libertarian on it? No, I'm not questioning the personal integrity of Marshall Fritz, Sharon Harris, et al. But sometimes there's a tendency to design research tools in a way that gives you the answer you were looking for, rather than the answer that is correct.
[marketliberal] Re: [Knowing Humans] The Teflon Libertarian Moderate
Quoth Brian Holtz: LP radicals -- like Tom Knapp, Susan Hogarth, and perhaps the oh-so-conflicted Angela Keaton -- are immune to his Svengali-like powers of moderation. The Libertarian National Committee voted last weekend to endorse Paul for the presidency by making him the only LNC-invitee to seek the LP's presidential nomination. That vote was unanimous. Angela Keaton is an at-large member of the LNC, and she was present at the meeting. QED, she is not immune to the Paul phenomenon (I'm also told she has committed to making volunteer calls on Paul's behalf, presumably using the LP's BallotBase asset, which the LNC also voted to put at the disposal of Paul's Republican primary campaign in New Hampshire). Tom Knapp estimates a 90% chance of Ron Paul seeking the LP nomination Actually, I've increased that estimate to 95%. 90% was when the LNC invited him to do so, which I do not believe Bob Barr would have proposed if he hadn't already run the idea past the Paul campaign and been given the go-ahead. I upgraded the chance by 2% when instead of declining the invitation and doing so personally, Paul had a spokesman deliver the no intention line (which is politicalese for probably, but I can't say that in public yet). I upgraded it another 3% when Paul declined to put his won't run third party intention at 100%, instead giving it 99.99% (politicalese for I want to be able to say I told you there was a chance this would happen). The other 5% is an over-accounting for his (decreasing, with Huckabee's surge) chances of winning the GOP nomination. In early November, I had him picked for second in New Hampshire and to carry several small states. Now I doubt he'll carry any, although I wouldn't entirely write off his chances in Alaska, Nevada and Montana. I still haved McCain picked to emerge from Super Duper Tuesday with ~800 of the 1200 or so delegates he needs to nail the nomination down, and running the table after that. Don't call me timid on predictions, anyway. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: $1000 for the Outrights if Miller can substantiate his claim
Quoth Brian Holtz: - I'll grant you this much: when you can take an anarchistic scathing Paul critic (Tom Knapp) and a flamboyantly radical Paul cheerleader (Starchild) and a minivan-driving LP reform leader (moi) - You know, that recurring theme of yours bothers me. Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, I'm only seldom seen motoring around town on my solar-powered unicycle in fashionably black fatigues and beret, megaphone in hand. My family's last car was a mini-van -- and our current vehicle is even more mawkishly middle class (Volvo wagon!). Sometimes I even wear a fanny pack while smashing the state.
[R] Writing a file to the disk
I am having difficulty writing the code for the following operation: I have a numeric vector pred_out of length 156. (N = 156). Under Windows XP, I need to write it to the disk in text format. Perhaps some kind soul would provide the code fragment. The file name is sheet_vec.txt. Please see [1] for the complete pathname. Each number to be written out has the following format: LL.RR where LL is the integral part and RR is the fractional part to six decimal places. Example: 10.226207 The integral part, LL, is a maximum of two digits long. All numbers are positive. Another hypothetical example: 10.226207 6.556988 4.395678 etc. Each number is to be on a separate line. Please correct me if I am wrong: A \n (newline) character ends each line. After writing the file, it can be closed but not destroyed. (What I plan to do next is copy and paste the pred_out data into a spreadsheet.) Compressed formats (zip, etc.) should be avoided if possible. Your ideas? Tom Jones [1] The full Windows pathname is: C:/Documents and Settings/Tom/My Documents/Election Day Study Nov 7, 06/ sheet_vec.txt Sorry, but the pathname is too long to fit on one line. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[R] Function to tell you how an object is put together
Question: Suppose I have an arbitrary object. Is there a function which will accept the object as an argument and sort of give the format of the object, how it is put together, etc.? The analysis would include the attributes and the names of the attributes. Also, things like whether or not the object is an array; whether or not it is a matrix, etc. Tom Jones __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[marketliberal] Re: space stupidity
Quoth Wes Carr: Congress is pushing NASA to keep the shuttle flying till 2015, five years past it's retirement date. Those idiots are going to get more people killed, and if it happens the blame will fall on NASA and not the politicians. Every shuttle launch takes funds away from the Constellation Program, which is our only chance of going back to the moon or Mars. We lost our momentum 35 years ago, and it's past time to get it back. Actually, wasn't the shuttle program _originally_ supposed to be retired some time in the 1990s? They orbiter airframes were originally certified as useable up to 100 flights each, but I'm pretty sure a lot of the other components had a shorter projected lifespan and that retirement was intended as several systems reached the point where rebuild/recertification would be an expensive proposition at a time when we should long since have passed into new craft. I'm skeptical of Constellation. So far, it seems to be mainly a pulpit for more expensive versions of existing capabilities (not all of them originated in the public sector). It's far from the only chance, and I suspect that all things considered it's way down the list of good chances.
[marketliberal] Re: [CALPCandidates] Web sites
Quoth Brian Holtz: ) http://www.campaignsitebuilder.com/ ( Nice. That seems to have more features, and a lower price, than campaignhighway.com. I'm especially intrigued by the bulk email feature, and wonder if it can send to the thousands of email addresses in a candidate's voter registration tables. Pam, can you tell if it will allow sending to arbitrary lists of email addresses, or do they have to be addresses that opted in via their site? It's been awhile since I used CampaignSiteBuilder, but I wasn't impressed. My recollection is that their bulk email feature was useable ONLY with opt-in addresses processed through the CSB site. I'm pretty sure that's also the case with campaign donations, etc., i.e. you can't set up donations to a campaign PayPal account, or through Aristotle or whatever, it flows through their mechanism at their commission rate and such. Last time I noticed, CSB was $25 a month. If we assume that a campaign web site is going to be up for at least six months (general election in November, and I'm pretty sure most state filings for that election have closed by May), that's $125. You can get reasonably good standard web hosting, depending on bandwidth expectations, for $5-10 a month. It's a fair bet that you can find someone to design a unique site template for you for $100 or less so that your site doesn't look like one of the x number of available CSB templates. There are numerous free or cheap integrated (PHP-List comes with a lot of hosting packages) or third party (Yahoo or Google groups, etc.) options for building a campaign email newsletter list. There are numerous easily-plugged-in contribution processing options whose commissions are no worse, and probably better, than CSB's, and which can be used elsewhere than on your CSB site. That last thing, I think, is important. CSB creates kind of a bottleneck: If you use them, you're using their stuff, so unless you want to duplicate your efforts using other vendors of services, you have to funnel everything INTO the campaign site, and you don't capture contributions, data etc. from people who don't want to go there. With MySpace, Facebook, etc. playing a bigger and bigger role, it's better to be able to capture that stuff from anywhere using standardized tools than to have to find a way to push them to another site to do so. Based on the number of candidates California is likely to run, it might actually be worth setting up a dedicated party server, offering candidates free or cheap hosting, and having a staff member or volunteer set up a fairly standard Libertarian candidate template using DruPal or some other reasonably intuitive (once set up) Content Management System, then be available to help candidates customize as needed. The California LP has an advantage in being large -- if you run 100 candidates, and they all use CampaignSiteBuilder, that's $2500 a month. I suspect that the CA-LP could do something a lot better for a lot less (offhand, $10k or less for a six-month project), even if it required a part-time staffer on payroll to run it ... and I likewise suspect that dedicated funds for doing it could be easily raised. Or just charge: At 100 candidates, $10k would come to $100 per candidate, a 33% savings from what they'd pay at CampaignSiteBuilder for six months. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Why I am not a Rothbardian
Excerpt/link for those who might be interested: -BEGIN EXCERPT- I'm Misesian to the extent that I recognize the applicability of calculation problems. I can't tell you whether or not three thwarted border crossings, two criminal charges for consensual acts of sodomy between consenting adults, and $20,000 in capital gains taxes are less than, equal to, or greater than one murdered Iraqi in some hypothetical unit of force initiation. I'm happy to take the word of Justin Raimondo that the answer is less than -- but I'm not willing to take the next step, because it leads off a ledge. That next step is the Rothbardian proclamation, as trumpeted by Raimondo, of the primacy of foreign policy in determining the politics and direction of an ideological movement. I certainly give great weight to foreign policy issues, and have generally agreed with Raimondo and with the editorial line of AntiWar.Com on those issues. But primacy -- the state of being first in importance? No. At least not if that means in action what Raimondo now seems to be saying it means: That it is the affirmative obligation of libertarians to support a candidate who is libertarian on foreign policy, even if that candidate is anti-libertarian on other issues. That seems to be the gravamen of Raimondo's approach to the matter of libertarian non-support for Ron Paul, as well as the approach of the paleo-libertarian bloc. To be honest, it strikes me as a mirror image -- admittedly distorted, but discernible -- of the Eric Dondero line on supporting Rudy Giuliani: Who cares about the war, dude? C'mon -- he's pro-choice on abortion! -END EXCERPT- Read the rest at: http://knappster.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-am-not-rothbardian.html
[marketliberal] Re: missing the point
Wes, You write: Regarding my earlier post on abortion, my point was that even those who are opposed to it will like the alternative even less. You give the government the power to outlaw it and you will have even more of a socialist nanny state than we have now. Which means creating another federal agency to enforce the law,no-knock raids on homes and offices suspected of giving abortions, jailing women who go out of the country to have the procedure. Far fetched? Giving whats happened in the last six years I dont think so. For the past few years, my tendency has been to scream OGNAAT! (Oh God, Not Another Abortion Thread!) and just walk away when the issue comes up -- it seems to be one on which most people are firmly decided and disinterestd in becoming decided otherwise before any such threat starts -- but this thread seems to be hitting on interesting political aspects, so I'm going to give it another go. First, let's think about where it's coming from in order to discern where it might go. Brian's advocacy of seizing the undefended high ground on the issue is essentially a political statement: This may be a way the LP could appeal/succeed. If that's the case, then presumptively any such success would not be limited to the abortion issue. If America elected a Libertarian congressional majority/executive administration because the LP took the position Brian recommends on abortion (that I doubt that would happen notwithstanding), that majority/administration would not be limited to action ON abortion. Presumably, in tandem with any action it might take on abortion, that majority/administration would be working to ROLL BACK encroaching police statism in other areas. Far from creating a new federal police force to check on women's menstrual cycles, that majority/administration would more likely rein in existing infringements of the 4th Amendment. Believe it or not, it IS possible to outlaw an activity without engaging in random block-by-block, house-by-house searches to ensure that said activity does not occur. Murder is against the law. So is bank robbery. But I've never had the police come to my door demanding to search my house on the off chance that I have a corpse hidden in the closet or a ski mask and pistol stashed under my mattress. Nor do I generally expect that they would do so unless they knew, or had probable cause to believe, that a crime had been committed. In the case of a putatively libertarian administration or majority implementing the kind of policy Brian is talking about, it wouldn't likely be: Every woman report to the police station monthly in order to prove she hasn't become pregnant or if she was pregnant either still is pregnant or has given birth. It would much more likely be: Hello, this is Officer Bob. You called? What's up? You're reporting a violation of the abortion law? OK, tell us what evidence you have to support your allegation that the crime happened -- when and how you knew the woman got pregnant, when and how you knew that she no longer was pregnant, and what makes you think that that's the result of an illegal abortion rather than, say, a miscarriage, an abortion for health reasons, or a live birth. And you'd better make it good -- the judge gets irritable when we ask for a warrant and have nothing to offer as probable cause except some busybody's bullshit speculation, and I have better things to do than listen to you gossip. That's not to say that I necessarily agree with Brian on the issue -- but the it will bring on the nanny/police state argument doesn't hold water if one believes that it would take a Libertarian majority/administration to implement his position. My main disagreement with Brian is on the premise that the change he recommends would likely bring about any great shift in voter sentiment toward the LP. The 10% of Americans who even MIGHT be single-issue 100% pro-choice voters aren't going to support the LP if it makes this change (most of them don't now, either, even with the LP ball entirely on their side of the court).* The 29% of Americans who even MIGHT be single-issue 100% pro-life voters aren't going to support the LP unless it adopts their positions entirely, not just half-way.** And the massive middle is composed almost entirely of NOT SINGLE ISSUE ON ABORTION voters who are going to have to see more from the LP than an abortion position they agree with to get them here, and who would not likely be especially driven away by an abortion position they weren't fully on board with IF they saw enough in the LP to cause them to support the LP otherwise. Regards, Tom Knapp * In 1997, when I was still pro-choice, I ran for city council in a medium-sized city (polled 20% in a three-way race, too, and that city elected an LP councilman, who was one of my key 1997 volunteers, last year). When I was canvassing door-to-door one day, I ran into a voter who took my fliers, looked me up and down, and said I only care about one thing
[marketliberal] Re: [Knowing Humans] The Undefended Popular High Ground On Abortion
Quoth Brian Holtz: This opportunity is so unique that I'll pay that $200 bounty for a position that ANY of these five parties could take (but hasn't yet) where both 60% of their members and 60% of Americans support it and it is not already staked out by any of the other four parties.I don't think any other such position exists in American politics. You get my $200 if you can give a counter-example. That's a pretty loose set of definitions so I'm not really sure what to make of it. At least two parties (the LP and the Green Party) support medical marijuana, as do somewhere upwards of 60% of Americans (see http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=3392 for a list of polls -- 60% is the BOTTOM of the positive response). The Green Party specifically mentions medical marijuana in its platform (http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/socjustice.html#999378), the LP does not. On the other hand, it can't really be said that the Green Party has staked out a position in favor of medical marijuana in the sense that one stakes a claim and is identified with it. I've never heard anyone include medical marijuana when asked to describe what the Green Party stands for, where the LP is highly identified with the issue, in part due to the LP affiliations of prominent medical marijuana activists like (the late) Peter McWilliams and Steve Kubby and in part because the LP has always been identified as heavily ideologically invested in drug policy. So, probably not good for $200 ... but an interesting proposition. As for abortion, you make an interesting case philosophically and naturally I think the LP should determine what the right position is and take it BECAUSE it's the right position ... but politically it's a dead end. The 60% of voters who aren't pro-life, period or pro-choice, period aren't either of those, for the most part, because they just don't care that much about the issue, and certainly not enough to abandon major parties they're otherwise happy with over it. People abandon major parties and go to third parties over a single issue because they are king-hell obsessed with that issue, and obsession is a feature of the polar opposite minority positions. Regards, Tom Knapp
[R] Problem with a global variable
From: Thomas Jones I have several user-defined functions. As is standard practice, I am defining a logical vector named idebug in order to control debugging printouts. For example, if idebug [1] has the value TRUE, such-and-such debugging printouts are enabled. After the function works, some or all of the debugging printouts can be inhibited. idebug is a global variable; otherwise, it would have to be moved around with function arguments in a way which is clunky and hard to get right. However, I am getting an error message. This message was emitted during the loading of the program and is NOT inside any function. Or perhaps idebug wants a special slot on the search path. --- debug_l - 5 # length of debug vector idebug - logical (5) idebug [1] - TRUE Error in idebug[1] - TRUE : object idebug not found [snip] --- Your advice? Tom Jones __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[Libertarian] Candor, compromise and consistency -- an open letter from Steve Kubby
Below my signature, please find an open letter from Steve Kubby to his fellow Libertarians, dated 12/01/07. Best regards, Tom Knapp Communications Director Kubby for President Dear friends, As decision time for the Libertarian Party's 2008 presidential nomination draws closer, the gloves are beginning to come off. At the beginning of my candidacy, I committed myself to running a high road campaign and engaging my opponents on issues and experience, not on personality. I intend to stick to that commitment ... but I also want to ensure that my fellow Libertarians have the FACTS at their disposal when considering their options. Over the last few months, several of my fellow Libertarians -- Libertarians who backed and supported my campaign early on -- have decided that another candidate, Christine Smith, better represents them. The main reason cited for this change of heart has been my endorsement of US Representative Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. It is not my intention to attack Ms.Smith here. So far as I can tell, she's a fine individual who represents the Libertarian Party well in her public communications and whose decision to seek our party's presidential nomination has made the race more interesting and more issues-centered. We are, however, opponents in the sense that we're both seeking the same position and that only one of us can be hired to fill that position. As it becomes more and more clear that Ms.Smith and I both appeal to the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party, I think that it's time to talk about our differences -- and our similarities. The place to start is, I think, with the issues. Ms. Smith's campaign platform is thoroughgoingly libertarian, as is mine. The main difference between us in that respect is that while her issues positions have evolved in a libertarian direction over several months, I have a record of taking libertarian policy positions and sticking to them over the course of more than a decade of Party activism. By way of example, I offer the issue of immigration. I am, and always have been, a pro-immigration libertarian who opposes the use of imaginary lines, drawn on the ground by politicians, to limit the freedom of peaceful individuals. Don't take my word for it -- do a little Googling. You'll find that my position has remained the same, and that I've argued publicly and forcefully on its behalf for many years. The position paper on my campaign web site was posted nearly a year ago and has remained unchanged since. Ms. Smith's web site also offers a stirring, thoroughly libertarian take on immigration ... today. Only a few months ago, however, her position on the issue was very different. Under a hypothetical President Christine Smith of March 2007, [t]he American citizens of states and cities will have jurisdiction over non-citizens inhabiting their communities based on a sovereign right to control the influences and development of their society and its culture. Once again, don't take my word for it. Ms. Smith's positions, now and then, are easily accessible to anyone who cares to look for them. I'm more than happy to see that Ms. Smith has gone from states' rights conservative to radical libertarian on the immigration issue over the course of only a few months. I'm not inclined to question the sincerity of that conversion -- but contra her implicit claim to constancy of view in a recent manifesto on compromise (... advocating freedom always on all issues. This is what I devote myself to in my writing, public speaking, and now in this campaign), it's obvious that her ideas on what freedom is and how it should be defended have undergone drastic revisions even within the timeframe of her presidential campaign. I'm glad that Ms. Smith is discovering the consistency and applicability of libertarian ideas. That discovery is a fascinating and enlightening journey, and one which never ends. However, I submit that the first steps on such a journey are best taken in smaller shoes than those we expect our presidential candidate to be wearing now, or 11 months from now. I believe that my long-time advocacy of plumb line libertarian positions on the issues, compared to Ms. Smith's recent and ongoing conversion, differentiates us as candidates. If I may be so immodest as to say so, I believe that it casts me in better light as your prospective nominee. I'm advocating the same positions now that I advocated a year ago and ten years ago, and I will be advocating those positions a year from now and a decade from now. And I've established a track record for turning those positions into public policy that none of my opponents can match. Now that I've covered a difference, I'd like to cover a similarity WITH a difference: My endorsement of Ron Paul's Republican presidential candidacy. Yes, I have endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. I've stated that if he seems set to gain that nomination, I
[marketliberal] Candor, compromise and consistency -- an open letter from Steve Kubby
Below my signature, please find an open letter from Steve Kubby to his fellow Libertarians, dated 12/01/07. Best regards, Tom Knapp Communications Director Kubby for President Dear friends, As decision time for the Libertarian Party's 2008 presidential nomination draws closer, the gloves are beginning to come off. At the beginning of my candidacy, I committed myself to running a high road campaign and engaging my opponents on issues and experience, not on personality. I intend to stick to that commitment ... but I also want to ensure that my fellow Libertarians have the FACTS at their disposal when considering their options. Over the last few months, several of my fellow Libertarians -- Libertarians who backed and supported my campaign early on -- have decided that another candidate, Christine Smith, better represents them. The main reason cited for this change of heart has been my endorsement of US Representative Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. It is not my intention to attack Ms.Smith here. So far as I can tell, she's a fine individual who represents the Libertarian Party well in her public communications and whose decision to seek our party's presidential nomination has made the race more interesting and more issues-centered. We are, however, opponents in the sense that we're both seeking the same position and that only one of us can be hired to fill that position. As it becomes more and more clear that Ms.Smith and I both appeal to the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party, I think that it's time to talk about our differences -- and our similarities. The place to start is, I think, with the issues. Ms. Smith's campaign platform is thoroughgoingly libertarian, as is mine. The main difference between us in that respect is that while her issues positions have evolved in a libertarian direction over several months, I have a record of taking libertarian policy positions and sticking to them over the course of more than a decade of Party activism. By way of example, I offer the issue of immigration. I am, and always have been, a pro-immigration libertarian who opposes the use of imaginary lines, drawn on the ground by politicians, to limit the freedom of peaceful individuals. Don't take my word for it -- do a little Googling. You'll find that my position has remained the same, and that I've argued publicly and forcefully on its behalf for many years. The position paper on my campaign web site was posted nearly a year ago and has remained unchanged since. Ms. Smith's web site also offers a stirring, thoroughly libertarian take on immigration ... today. Only a few months ago, however, her position on the issue was very different. Under a hypothetical President Christine Smith of March 2007, [t]he American citizens of states and cities will have jurisdiction over non-citizens inhabiting their communities based on a sovereign right to control the influences and development of their society and its culture. Once again, don't take my word for it. Ms. Smith's positions, now and then, are easily accessible to anyone who cares to look for them. I'm more than happy to see that Ms. Smith has gone from states' rights conservative to radical libertarian on the immigration issue over the course of only a few months. I'm not inclined to question the sincerity of that conversion -- but contra her implicit claim to constancy of view in a recent manifesto on compromise (... advocating freedom always on all issues. This is what I devote myself to in my writing, public speaking, and now in this campaign), it's obvious that her ideas on what freedom is and how it should be defended have undergone drastic revisions even within the timeframe of her presidential campaign. I'm glad that Ms. Smith is discovering the consistency and applicability of libertarian ideas. That discovery is a fascinating and enlightening journey, and one which never ends. However, I submit that the first steps on such a journey are best taken in smaller shoes than those we expect our presidential candidate to be wearing now, or 11 months from now. I believe that my long-time advocacy of plumb line libertarian positions on the issues, compared to Ms. Smith's recent and ongoing conversion, differentiates us as candidates. If I may be so immodest as to say so, I believe that it casts me in better light as your prospective nominee. I'm advocating the same positions now that I advocated a year ago and ten years ago, and I will be advocating those positions a year from now and a decade from now. And I've established a track record for turning those positions into public policy that none of my opponents can match. Now that I've covered a difference, I'd like to cover a similarity WITH a difference: My endorsement of Ron Paul's Republican presidential candidacy. Yes, I have endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. I've stated that if he seems set to gain that nomination, I
[R] Communicating from one function to another
My question is a seemingly simple one. I have a bunch of user-defined
functions which compute such-and-such objects. I want to be able to define a
variable in a particular function, then make use of it later, perhaps in a
different function, without necessarily having to move it around in argument
lists. In the C community, it would be called a global variable.
Question 1: Is this practical at all in the R language?
Suppose the variable is called x23. I want to assign a value to it, then use
it later. Seemingly, there are two cases:
Case I is if the variable is given its value at the top level.
Case II is if it is given its value inside a user-defined function. That I
do not know how to do.
Example:
func1 - function (){
x23 - 2.6
return ()
}
driver_func - function (){
func1 ()
print (x23)
return ()
}
However, when I call driver_func, it won't work. Beginning with the load
operation, I get:
Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.
func1 - function (){
+
+ x23 - 2.6
+
+ return ()
+
+ }
driver_func - function (){
+
+ func1 ()
+
+ print (x23)
+
+ return ()
+
+ }
driver_func ()
Error in print(x23) : object x23 not found
---
From Tom:
Clearly, the two functions cannot communicate. I am aware of the existence
of environments, but don't know much about them. Also, the attach function
and the get and set functions. Also, .GlobalEnv It might or might not make
sense to create a list of all of the variables, with two functions which
get all of them and set all of them. The function calls may be thought of as
an upside down tree. I want to be able to communicate from any node to any
other node.
Your advice?
Tom
Thomas L. Jones, PhD, Computer Science
__
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[R] Naming elements of a list
I have a numeric vector of lenth 1. I am trying to use it inside
a function just by giving its name, rather than specifying it as
an argument to the function. I am aware that there is an attach
function which you need to call. The attach function will accept a
list. However, I don't seem to be able to create the list properly. (Or
should I use a frame instead?)
free_driver - function (){
i - numeric (1)
attach (as.list (i))
i - 25
free_test ()
}
free_test - function (){
print (i =)
print (i)
return ()
}
Anyway, here is the output, starting with the load operation:
--
free_driver - function (){
+ i - numeric (1)
+ attach (as.list (i))
+ i - 25
+
+ free_test ()
+
+ }
free_test - function (){
+ print (i =)
+ print (i)
+ return ()
+
+ }
free_driver ()
Error in attach(as.list(i)) : all elements of a list must be named
--
Is there an easy way to name all elements of a list?
Your advice?
Tom Jones
__
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[R] Problem with environments
I have a numeric vector of length 1. I am trying to use it inside
a function just by giving its name, rather than specifying it as
an argument to the function. I am aware that there is an attach
function which you need to call. The attach function will accept a
list. However, I don't seem to be able to create the list properly. (Or
should I use a frame instead?)
Anyway, here is the output, starting with the load operation;
# function bar_driver
free_driver - function (){
+ i - 25
+ attach_list - list (i = i)
+ print1 (attach_list = , attach_list)
+ attach (attach_list)
+ free_test ()
+
+ }
free_test - function (){
+ print (entering free_test)
+ print1 (i)
+ return ()
+
+ }
[1] attach_list =
$i
[1] 25
The following object(s) are masked _by_ .GlobalEnv :
i
[1] entering free_test
[1] i
Error in print(value) : argument value is missing, with no default
-
From Tom:
Question 1: Is the idea of using such a variable viable at all? In some
communities, it would be called a free variable.
Question 2: Is the list correct? If not, how does one build it correctly?
Question 3: How do you tell it NOT to mask the variable i by .GlobalEnv,
whatever that is?
Your advice?
Tom Jones
Thomas L. Jones, PhD, Computer Science
__
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[marketliberal] Re: Ron Paul neither a typical Republican nor a homophobic bigot
Quoth Brian Holtz: - LOL. There's no political power up for grabs here. If anything, we LP leaders who support Paul are running the risk of weakening the LP in the short term, and thus reducing our own power (such as it is). It's much more accurate to say that some people are to a certain extent selling out the broader libertarian movement in order not to leak any sand from the little LP sandbox on which they want to keep their grip. And since unlike you I don't deal in coy elliptical allegations, I'll say I'm talking primarily about George Phillies (my current favorite LP contender) and Tom Knapp (my favorite LP radical). - I guess the first point to hit on there is the idea that either Mr. Phillies or myself have some kind of grip on the LP. Between the two of us, Mr. Phillies and I have held a state chairmanship (his, Massachusetts), an alternate LNC position (me, for a few months in 2001), one term on the (not at any time called into service) national Judicial Committee (me), and some state and local party positions. Neither of us has been an LP presidential or vice-presidential nominee. Neither of us has held an officership, at-large, or voting regional position on the LNC. The idea that the two of us together, let alone either of us separately, constitutes some kind of power bloc which has reason to be jealous of its prerogatives is preposterous. I decline to speak to Mr. Phillies' reasons for unhappiness with widespread support for Paul in LP ranks. His reasons are his own and any overlap between his reasons and mine are purely coincidental. My reasons for unhappiness with widespread support for Paul in LP ranks are several, none of which have to do with any attempt to preserve my non-existent Machiavellian grip on the LP apparatus: 1) It is my considered opinion that the Republican Party is a dead stick, in terms of both its general political future and its fitness as a vehicle for libertarian political use. Therefore, I consider any investment in the GOP to be a mal-investment. I certainly recognize the right of each individual to make his own investments of effort and wealth as he sees fit, and maintain my friendships with many Paul supporters notwithstanding what I consider their poor judgment in that respect ... but I'm not going to pretend that I think they're making a wise decision in helping identify libertarianism with the Republican Party by supporting a Republican candidate for president. 2) It is my considered opinion that identification of Ron Paul in particular as the standard-bearer of the libertarian movement in this election cycle, under any party banner, is a bad idea, for two reasons: a) I agree with his foreign policy positions, and I agree that the war on Iraq is the central issue of the election, but not being a Rothbardian I do not agree that foreign policy is the be-all and end-all. There are other front-burner issues (notably gay rights and immigration) for which I consider Paul to be a poor representative of the libertarian movement. As it happens, I also believe that those two issues are at their far point in public opinion from the libertarian plumb-line at this time, and are beginning, or will soon begin, to swing back in our direction. I prefer to see the libertarian movement representing itself on these issues in such a way that as public opinion begins to move back toward the libertarian plumb-line on them, the public identifies its opinions WITH the libertarian movement, and tailors its voting patterns and other political actions accordingly. b) While I do not wish it to happen, I still am fairly confident in my prediction that to the extent that Paul does well in the Republican primaries (I predict 10-15% in New Hampshire), the mainstream media will increasingly focus on his past statements and past and present associations which carry unsavory race-related connotations. The better he does at the polls, the harder they will hit him ... and I believe that there is enough there there to create a libertarian-movement-sized crater with his candidacy in the political earth. 3) It is my considered opinion that, while the LP's 2008 candidates have no chance of winning the presidency/vice-presidency and almost no chance of winning any US Senate or US House seats, 2008 represents a reasonably good chance for the Libertarian Party to pick up more lower-level elected positions than usual and to position itself as a spoiler with enhanced vote totals in a number of US Senate/US House/statewide races, and perhaps even to affect the outcomes in some states in the presidential race ... but that requires that libertarians recognize the opportunity and invest in the LP rather than in the Republican Party. Paul's candidacy is not, at the moment, conducive to that recognition or investment. 4) It is my considered opinion that political parties are competitive organizations and that it is both improper per se and an inherent conflict of interest for an individual
[marketliberal] Re: Empirical arguments against anarcholibertarianism
Quoth Brian Holtz: - Almost all of political ethics is in effect defined by edge cases. - It does not follow from the fact that almost all political ethicists define their proposed systems on the basis of edge cases that edge cases are the proper tools for defining a correct political ethos. - There aren't really any interesting ethical dilemmas on the playground at my four-year-old's daycare center. - Your four-year-old must attend one king-hell boring daycare center, then. - The central mistake of anarcholibertarianism is believing that sandbox morality completely generalizes to the grown-up world of how humans behave in groups - The central mistake of _any_ political philosophy _may_ be believing that a large set of moral lessons which can be drawn from the interactions of _any_ particular group will easily generalize to _all_ groups. Even if that's the case, however, I reject the notion that settling an edge case necessarily supports a similar approach to routine problems. Or, to put it a different way, I reject the notion that trolley problem necessarily deterministically decompresses into to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net of sustenance and shelter for fellow community members facing death due to indigence or misfortune, then the state should finance such a safety net through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Empirical arguments against anarcholibertarianism
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) The central mistake of _any_ political philosophy _may_ be believing that a large set of moral lessons which can be drawn from the interactions of _any_ particular group will easily generalize to _all_ groups. (TK Indeed, that's why I'm extremely suspicious of any absolutist interpretation of an ethical principle. Where you may see a little wiggle room in a principle as a vice, I see it as sometimes a virtue. - I don't see a little wiggle room in a principle as a vice. Since a principle, by definition, is a reduction of a rule to a level of complexity at which it is universally applicable to that which it is being applied to, wiggle room means that I'm either looking at something which is not a principle, or at a principle which is not applicable to the problem I'm trying to apply it to. Rand's approach to non-initiation-of-force as a a principle is that it is not applicable to a situation in which force already HAS been initiated. Probably the classic example is Evil Gunman A is shooting at you, and holding Random Innocent Victim B in front of him as a human shield. Rand, as I understand it, would say that the non-aggression principle is not applicable to you shooting through the human shield to keep your attacker from killing you; even though that human shield has not initiated force against you, force HAS been initiated against you and you are morally free to defend your life even at the cost of the lives of innocent others. I'm not sure that I agree with Rand. While I would probably do exactly what she says I'm morally free to do, I'd still regard myself as in violation of the principle, because I consider it applicable ... the fact that I value my life more highly than I value the life of Random Innocent Victim B and more highly than I value adherence to the principle doesn't invalidate the principle, it just makes me a violator of that principle. I'd consider myself reasonably liable for having sacrificed the life of an innocent unwilling other to my own desire to live and obliged, in some sort of split with Evil Gunman A, to make that innocent unwilling other's contractual or reasonably defined creditors/dependents whole for their loss insofar as possible. - TK) I reject the notion that trolley problem necessarily deterministically decompresses into to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net [...] (TK I didn't imply that it did. I just implied that it rebuts the idea that having clean hands should be of absolute (or arbitrarily high) importance in one's ethics. - The more I read on the trolley problem, the less I'm convinced that it rebuts anything. The stench of false dilemma hangs heavy over it. Few situations are binary-optional (throw the switch, don't throw the switch, no other possibilities) situations. The trolley problem does not account for the possibility of driving a car onto the track, or cutting the trolley's power supply, or bending the rails to derail the damn thing, etc. Given realistic options, I suspect that most people would choose a lower chance of saving BOTH sets of tied to the tracks victims over a higher chance of saving ONE such set. They might fail ... but the fuse might have blown when the switch was thrown, too. Clean hands does not necessarily imply total inefficacy. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Empirical arguments against anarcholibertarianism
Quoth Brian Holtz: - [America's constitutional republican framework] has been increasing personal and civil liberties almost monotonically for two centuries - Do you care to provide any actual evidence for that mantra -- at least for the almost monotonically part? - we are among the most economically free nations in the world - The inmates of a minimum-security prison camp are among the most free inmates in the US justice system, especially as compared to the inmates of supermax facilities or maximum-security penitentaries, too. It does not follow from that that either described population is free. - I dare you to stand next to me in front of ANY Libertarian audience and say: to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net of sustenance and shelter for fellow community members facing death due to indigence or misfortune, then the state nevertheless should NOT finance such a safety net through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic. Sure, I can do that. But I'll do it in English: To the extent that you and I decline to act as good Samaritans, then the state should nevertheless not steal from us on the pretense of making good our alleged deficit of good Samaritanism. Barbarism is not a solution to callousness. - If your tortured prose criticism had any substance at all, you could pick a sentence or paragraph of mine, and show how it could say the same thing(s) without being tortured. Can you? - I just did. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Ron Paul says he is not a libertarian - lie
Quoth Allen Rice: This analysis is much too blithe, Tom, much too black and white. Does the following originate from a libertarian or a conservative? Unless my memory fails me, the quote is from 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Goldwater authored a book on his political beliefs. Do you remember the title of that book? It answers your question. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Gun control
Quoth Brian Holtz: - it's quite inaccurate to say I believe in gun control. What I believe in is A-bomb control, mustard gas control, grenade control, Stinger missile control, smallpox bullet control, and yes, machine gun control. - Rather than approaching this from an ideological pissing match perspective, I'm going to hit it from the pragmatic angle: - A-bomb, mustard gas and Stinger missile production/procurement require a high level of technology/organization/finance which, if undertaken with the intent of initiating force, would comprise a criminal conspiracy preceding and de facto independent of the actual production/possession of A-bombs, mustard gas and Stinger missiles. Therefore, there's no particular need for A-bomb and mustard gas control -- you've already got criminal counts in hand before you reach that issue. It's a dead end unless your political target is the hysterically paranoid set. - Grenades, poisoned (with organic or inorganic toxins) bullets and machine guns simply aren't susceptible to control. Given a normal household, common tools and, in the case of machine guns a collection of common semi-automatic rifles, a competent individual can produce grenades, poisoned bullets and machine guns (or simulacra thereof, e.g. the Hellfire switch) to his heart's content (simple chemical weapons, too, btw). There's no practical ability to control that, and no practical reason to want to, since malicious use of said tools would themselves constitute prosecutable offenses. - As a matter of practical politics, I'm unaware of any significant constituency for the position you stake out. Gun control advocates aren't going to accept unregulated possession of handguns or semi-automatics (indeed they go out of their way to confuse people into thinking that semi-automatics are automatics), and gun rights supporters aren't going to buy into the idea that Brian Holtz should get to decide what guns they can and can't have. On this matter, you are a starry-eyed ideologue. Your beliefs are in the same league as others' beliefs in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and of little or no application to the real world or to political advantage. Tom Knapp
[R] Fw: Creating a barplot--advice needed
Subject: Creating a barplot--advice needed Advice needed: I am preparing a computer program to do a barchart. Advice needed: Should I learn the lattice package, or try to? As a non-statistician, much of the terminology is unfamiliar to me. grouping variable, object of class trellis, etc. Or, is there a more easily learned way to do it? It is a simple, vanilla-flavored barplot. Each of the bars has the same width. I knos how to create the barplot using a speadsheet program (MS Excel or equivalent), but I do not know how to put the barplot on top of a R graphics windows. I have a PhD in Computer Science, but am no statistician. Your advice? Tom Jones __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[marketliberal] Re: 2001-10-14 LP press release on Afghanistan
Quoth Brian Holtz: - It's pretty bizarre that LP radicals would object to this press release. - Not really. - It seems that as anarchists they cannot allow themselves to endorse any action of the tax-financed U.S. military, no matter how laudable. - Not all LP radicals are anarchists -- but even as an anarchist, I would have been able to endorse a proper course of military action in Afghanistan, and in fact gave the rough outline of such an endorsable course in numerous discussions of the improper course which was followed. From the press release: - On Sunday, October 7, the United States launched military action against Osama bin Laden, the terrorist believed to be responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The U.S. military also struck military bases controlled by the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, which has sheltered and reportedly assisted bin Laden. - This was not a tenable or credible statement at the time, and events proved it to be wholly unfounded. The US did not launch military action against Osama bin Laden and also [strike] military bases controlled by the Taliban. The US launched military action against the Taliban, beginning with immediate direct aid to the Northern Alliance and proceeding to seizure of Kabul and other key cities, with the declared aim of regime change. This went on for about six weeks before the US deigned to turn its attention toward al Qaeda, and it then did so in an ineffectual and lackadaisical manner. The results speak for themselves -- even with international assistance, the US project in Afghanistan remains an abject failure. The US is in its sixth year of occupation of Afghanistan, and the grand total of its achievements is that it can claim to control of a few military bases and, on behalf of the new regime it installed, a few city blocks in downtown Kabul. The press release was issued toward the beginning of the farce, but the farce's character was plainly visible at the time of the release. It was, and remains, a severe embarrassment to the LP. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: 2001-10-14 LP press release on Afghanistan
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) even as an anarchist, I would have been able to endorse a proper course of military action in Afghanistan, and in fact gave the rough outline of such an endorsable course (TK I thought you oppose increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose. - I do. Note the difference in tenses, though. What I believe now and stated in 2006 is not necessarily what I believed and stated in 2001. - Expanding the allegedly theft-financed budget of the Pentagon to go fight in a nation 12 time zones away seems like an increase in the size and scope of the federal government. - The assumption that the operation I recommended would necessarily have entailed an increase in the Pentagon's budget is not necessarly a safe assumption. - If you can advocate new spending for a new kind of military action in a new venue (while reducing the overall amount of military spending and kinds of military action and places where it acts), then why can't I advocate school vouchers (while reducing the overall amount of education spending and kinds of education spending and eliminating all government schools)? - I don't recall ever saying that you can't advocate school vouchers, whether or not I advocate new spending. In point of fact, however, I did not advocate new spending for a new kind of military action in a new venue. Both the type of action and the venue were old, and the increased spending was minimal and debatable. - Are you saying that OBL has to be in a gun sight for the first sentence to be true? Are you saying that no Taliban military bases came under attack from Oct 7 to Oct 14? - I am saying that the entire focus of US operations in Afghanistan for the first six weeks was the destruction of the Taliban regime, and that only after that did al Qaeda become a significant objective -- when in fact the US could have gone directly and effectively for al Qaeda and for all practical purposes ignored the Taliban had it chosen to do so. - It's absurd to suggest that al Qaeda's ability to use Afghanistan as a base for global terrorism training and logistics hasn't been substantially impaired by U.S. action in Afghanistan. - It's absurd to suggest that the point of the invasion of Afghanistan was, or should have been, to substantially impair al Qaeda's ability to use Afghanistan as a base for global terrorism training and logistics. The point of the operation should have been to liquidate al Qaeda's facilities and command and control structures or, failing that, to substantially damage those facilities and structures, not just get them to move those facilities and structures elsewhere on six weeks' notice. Thus far there's no evidence that the invasion of Afghanistan in any way substantially negatively impacted al Qaeda's ability to conduct operations. They've conducted operations on a larger scale, at a higher tempo, and with more success since 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan than they did before 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. They've conducted numerous operations in Indonesia. They've bombed London, Madrid and Ankara. They're going toe to toe with Musharraf's forces in Afghanistan. And they've killed hundreds or thousands of US military personnel who were gift-wrapped and shipped to them courtesy of the DoD, to the slaughterhouse we built for them in Iraq.
[marketliberal] Re: Ron Paul a homophobic bigot?
Only Ron Paul knows whether or not Ron Paul is a homophobic bigot. His positions and policy proposals, however, are a matter of public record, and there is absolutely no doubt that those positions and policy proposals are homophobic and bigoted ... and therefore the distinction between Ron Paul as possibly homophobic/bigoted and his positions and policy proposals as obviously so is a distinction that doesn't make a difference when considering him as a political candidate. Maybe David Duke secretly doesn't really hate Jews and African-Americans deep in his heart of hearts, either. The policies he advocates remain anti-Semitic and racist whether he does or not. - The fact remains that you cannot produce a single quote from Paul saying that he believes that government -- not individuals -- should be the final arbiters of your sex life and the sexual activities of consenting adults. - Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states' rights -- rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards. Paul does not object to this -- to the contrary, he proclaims it. From that, it cannot be construed in any other way than that he believes that yes, the government (at the state, rather than federal, level) should be the final arbiter of your sex life and the sexual activities of consenting adults. At the level where even Ron Paul believes that the federal government has a role -- policy within the armed forces, e.g. don't ask don't tell -- Paul tried to dodge the question in debate with bromides about disorderly conduct and individual vs. group rights, but in fact affirmed his support of that policy, a policy of direct discrimination, by the federal government, solely on the basis of an individual's sexual orientation. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: $100 booth contrib if Radicals take the No 1st Force pledge
Quoth Brian Holtz: - (We can negotiate over the details of the pledge if necessary, but each element of it follows straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force.) - I'll be hitting each point of your proposed pledge from my own perspective, but I'll also point out which points do not, in fact, follow straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force. - I do not -- and will never -- advocate, practice or abet the initiation of force -- by any person, group, or institution, through any law, regulation, or practice -- for political or social goals. - I'm trying to figure out here why you throw in the and will never bit, and the best I can come up with is that you think it in some way differentiates your pledge from the LP's membership certification. It doesn't. The party trusts each member to police him or her self, but the obvious corollary to the certification is that if at any time it ceases to describe one's views, one should withdraw one'[s endorsement of it and leave the party. - If I am ever a candidate for political office: * I will publicly advocate immediate repeal of all laws that in any way authorize or tolerate the initiation of force. - This does not follow straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force. Not advocating immediate repeal of Law X is not an endorsement of Law X or a call for its perpetuation. - * I will never commit to any particular order of destatization, for that would be construed as endorsing the continuation of statism and the violation of rights. - This one's a bit slippery. I have no problem with committing to a particular order of destatization by proposing some kind of sequential program. I would not, however, stand in the way of some part of that program being implemented ahead of my schedule. I don't think the difference between we can ONLY reach freedom in the following order: A, B, C -- and if anyone tries to do C before A, I will oppose them and hey, let's try to reach freedom by doing A, then B, then C is especially subtle. Furthermore, the above does not follow straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force. The fact that someone might construe a particular proposed sequence as, at any given point, an endorsement of perpetuating the non-liberty status quo obtaining in areas that sequence has not yet reached, is irrelevant to whether or not it is, in fact, such an endorsement. - * I will refuse to accept any salary financed by coercive taxation. - Once again, this not only does not follow straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force, it doesn't even follow non-straightforwardly. Unless you have information that I don't have pertaining to how the salaries paid to public officials, government employees and contractors, etc. are refunded to the taxpayers if uncollected by those officials, employees, contractors, etc., then there's no initiation of force involved in accepting such a salary. The force was initiated when the money was stolen, not when it is disbursed. - * I will refuse any funding of my campaign financed by coercive taxation. - See above. - * I will refuse any media access granted by coercive equal-time or fairness laws. - I can endorse that. If the Fairness Doctrine or some other legal requirement to provide me as a candidate with media existed, I would: a) Ask the media outlet for the time/space and make clear that if they expressed a preference not to give it to me, I would not invoke said legal requirement. b) Offer to pay the going rate even if they were required to offer the time/space gratis, or to contribute an equal amount to a charity of their choice in lieu of said payment at their option. - * I will publicly declare my mental reservation to any oath or affirmation to preserve, protect, or defend any Constitution insofar as it authorizes the initiation of force. - I am unaware of any situation in which preserving, protecting or defending any Constitution would require the initiation of force. - If I ever hold executive office: * I will use whatever authority I can to grant full amnesty and pardons to anyone and everyone ever accused or convicted of tax evasion, any other victimless crime, or self-defense against an agent of the State or any other aggressor. - Once again, I can agree to that, even though it does not follow straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force. Failure to correct all past initiation of force by others in no way constitutes a breach of an agreement not to endorse the initiation of force. - * I will use whatever authority I can to veto, nullify, or cancel any law that in any way authorizes or tolerates the initiation of force. -
[marketliberal] Re: $100 booth contrib if Radicals take the No 1st Force pledge
Quoth Brian Holtz: - I agree with Tom Knapp that the delegates in Denver should have all the information they need to evaluate the agendas of the Radical and Reform caucuses. I'll contribute the remaining $100 to the Radical Caucus booth if the Caucus endorses the following pledge and makes a copy prominently available to every delegate who visits the booth. - Interesting proposition. Are you the author of this pledge, or is it a pre-existing document from some other source? - (We can negotiate over the details of the pledge if necessary, but each element of it follows straightforwardly from an absolute commitment to never endorse the initiation of force.) - I'm not particularly interested in negotiating the details (I don't represent the caucus, and so far as I know the caucus has no formal mechanism for adopting resolutions and such). If you need help correcting it (some of it does not, in fact, follow straightforwardly from, etc.), let me know, though. I AM interested in the disposition of the piece as intellectual property. All rights reserved? Committed to the public domain? Licensed under one of the Creative Commons term sets? I may be interested in distributing it as a pamphlet/brochure at the national convention under auspices other than those of the Radical Caucus. I'm thinking of titling it HOLTZ SPEAKS OUT: Reform Leader Reveals Sordid Implications of LP Membership Pledge. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] [lpradicals] Re: New Member Seeking Ideas Feedback
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) The statement is not still in effect because it never was in effect (TK Sounds like your dispute is with the LNC, not me. - I'm unaware of any dispute at all. It would not surprise me if Barbara Boxer frequently muttered Al Gore is REALLY the president while sitting in her office in Washington, DC. She's perfectly free to do so ... but the Electoral College disagrees with her, and it is the Electoral College, not Congress (except under specifically delineated circumstances which do not pertain in this instance) which elects the president. Similarly, if some LNC members want to have a bull session in which they mutter the mission of the LP is (something other, or only a partial subset of, what the bylaws say), that's fine ... but the bylaws said at that time and 15 years later the bylaws still say, otherwise and it is the bylaws, not LNC bull sessions, which are the authoritative source. Any dispute pertaining to the matter would have to center on some LNC action taken pursuant to the bull session mutterings that brings the LNC into violation of the bylaws. If you're aware of any such action, feel free to elaborate. Otherwise, I'll concern myself with more substantive matters than bull session mutterings. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] [lpradicals] Re: New Member Seeking Ideas Feedback
Quoth Brian Holtz: - Sounds like your dispute has expanded to include whoever at LP News decided that such LNC resolutions -- I mean, mutterings -- and their retractions are worthy of front-page treatment over multiple issues. - Well, before I didn't _have_ a dispute. Now you're pointing to something that may constitute a dispute. If the LNC has misappropriated party funds, staff time and equipment to fraudulently portray its resolutions as trumping the bylaws, then it's gone beyond bull session mutterings and into the realm of official misconduct. Hell, I may stir myself to look into the matter! - Since you've been a member of LNC and I haven't, I'll defer to your expertise in divining which LNC resolutions are mere mutterings from bull sessions. :-) - Sorry, not an LNC expert here -- I was briefly a regional alternate, but I ran out of Maalox. However, the organizational principle involved is probably most easily described as similar to the legal/political equivalent in Madison v. Marbury: If the LNC does something it has no legitimate authority to do, then that action is not legitimate or authoritative. And, as courts subsequently held in the realm of government/politics, that illegitimacy/non-authoritativeness applies from the time of the action, not from the later time that some jurisprudence _finds_ it to be illegitimate/non-authoritative. In summary, the LNC has no legitimate authority to modify the bylaws, and any attempt to do so is on its face null and void, whether or not the matter has been taken up by the Judicial Committee, the national convention, etc. But in point of fact, every convention subsequent to the LNC's illegitimate/non-authoritative proclamation has affirmed the bylaws rather than the LNC's ad hoc alteration thereof, so we're in pretty good shape de jure as well as de facto. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] [lpradicals] Re: New Member Seeking Ideas Feedback
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) in point of fact, every convention subsequent to the LNC's illegitimate/non-authoritative proclamation has affirmed the bylaws rather than the LNC's ad hoc alteration thereof (TK I'm not aware that each NatCon formally affirms the Bylaws (e.g. like Platform retention), but Susan made the same claim, so maybe I'm missing something. - At every national convention, it is possible to modify the bylaws, either through an agendaed process for considering amendments, or from the floor via a suspension of the rules for consideration of amendments. If a convention passes without the bylaws, or any particular part thereof, being modified, then the bylaws, and all particular parts thereof, have presumptively been affirmed. - At any rate, the LNC's language was adopted nearly verbatim in 1998 as a Bylaw purpose, so I don't understand your suggestion that the 1998 and subsequent NatCons have somehow disagreed with the LNC's mission statement. - The key there is NEARLY verbatim. The LNC bull session outcome was _the_ mission. The convention bylaws outcome was _a_ purpose. I suppose we could argue word meanings. Is there any reason why mission and purpose should be interpreted to have different meanings from each other in this context? A mission statement is a brief statement of the purpose of a company or religious or other organization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Statement The LNC is bound by, not in a position of plenary authority to modify or supersede, the bylaws. An attempt to impose a constraint on the party to other purposes than, or to a limited subset of, the purposes laid out in the bylaws would by definition be void, since the LNC simply has no authority to do it. - I'm curious what you think of my purpose proposal: The Party's purpose is to implement and give voice to the Statement of Principles by uniting voters who want more liberty behind the electoral choices that will most move public policy in a libertarian direction. - Actually, I'm fairly agnostic on the whole question of what kind of organization the LP should be. I'd just like it to decide what kind of organization it is. If that's not a kind of organization I'm comfortable in, I know where the door is. Regards, Tom Knapp
[R] Format of a data frame
The goal is to smooth a scatterplot using the LOESS locally weighted regression program and a gam. There are 156 points. Thus x can have the value 1, or 2, etc., up to a maximum of x = 156. The y values are random, with a Poisson distribution, or the next thing to it. After reading in the data, I was able to generate a model, named mod, as follows: mod - gam(y~lo(x), family=poisson, x = TRUE) Next, I want to look at some values of the fitted curve: Specifically x =1, x = 2, and x = 3. Upon looking up predict.gam, I see the following: Usage predict.gam (object, newdata, type, dispension, se.fit = FALSE, na.action, terms ...) One of the arguments of the function is named newdata. I see: newdata A data frame containing the values at which predictions are requested. [snip] Only those predictors, referred to in the right side of the formula, need be present by name in newdata. I am having difficulty figuring out the format of the data frame. For example, how many columns should it have? Should it have a column for the three values of x? Probably there is a rather standard format for data frames, but I am having trouble looking it up. Perhaps some one would point me to the place in the documentation where this is discussed. Tom Jones __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[Libertarian] Video Premiere: The Kubby Chronicles, Episode One
In 1998, the producers of the South Park satire television commercial for Steve Kubby's California gubernatorial campaign won a Pollie -- the political advertising equivalent of the Oscar. We've come a long way since then, especially in the ability to pump video through the Internet and direct to its audience -- and Steve Kubby's presidential campaign is stretching the potential of that medium as well with the debut of Kubby's first campaign video. It's not a commercial (although one may be excerpted/edited from it). It's a short film, and the first in what's expected to be a continuing series of animated political reality TV satires. Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-PWwN0tvW8
[marketliberal] Video Premiere: The Kubby Chronicles, Episode One
In 1998, the producers of the South Park satire television commercial for Steve Kubby's California gubernatorial campaign won a Pollie -- the political advertising equivalent of the Oscar. We've come a long way since then, especially in the ability to pump video through the Internet and direct to its audience -- and Steve Kubby's presidential campaign is stretching the potential of that medium as well with the debut of Kubby's first campaign video. It's not a commercial (although one may be excerpted/edited from it). It's a short film, and the first in what's expected to be a continuing series of animated political reality TV satires. Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-PWwN0tvW8 Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[marketliberal] Re: LibertarianReformCaucus archives are now public
Quoth Brian Holtz: - TK) You detect an apparent variation of list purpose/policy. The moderator of the LPRadicals list treats that list as an organization/project tool for LP radicals, to the exclusion of the list's use as a venue for radical v. reformer debate. (TK That's their story and they're sticking to it. - No, it's MY story and I'M sticking to it -- because it seems to be the truth. - The two organizations - ... are at this point so different in degree along some axes as to be operationally different in kind. It might even be a bit of a stretch to call the Radical Caucus an organization at all -- it's more of an informal collaboration nexus. While I'd prefer to see the Radical Caucus more formally organize itself (and have suggested that the LRC's organizational model isn't a bad one to look to for inspiration), I haven't seen a lot of enthusiasm for the notion. Tom Knapp Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: Fwd: Re: [html-formfu] DBIC-FormFu extension - Carl?
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:34:56 +0200
From: Mario Minati [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[snip]
BTW2:
I would like to introduce a parameter in the form stash (or in form) for
catalyst to prevent the automatic call to 'process', so that I still can add
a callback to an element.
Is there yet a way to populate the stash from yml?
Greets,
Mario
When I just had
stash: howdy
HTML::FormFu::ObjectUtil::stash() blew up on non-hashref, so I think
we're in the right area, and the below ought to work?
---
id: form
stash:
hello: howdy
elements:
- type: Fieldset
: : : :
Later, using Data::Dumper
$HTML_FormFu_form = bless( {
'_elements' = [
bless( {
'_elements' = [
bless( {
: : : :
'stash' = {
'hello' = 'howdy'
},
'submitted' = 2
}, 'HTML::FormFu' );
___
HTML-FormFu mailing list
HTML-FormFu@lists.scsys.co.uk
http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/html-formfu
[marketliberal] Re: Taxation is theft, ad nauseum
- Pennsylvania Consolidated Statute § 3923, Theft by extortion -- (a) Offense defined.--A person is guilty of theft if he intentionally obtains or withholds property of another by threatening to: 1. commit another criminal offense; 2. accuse anyone of a criminal offense; 3. expose any secret tending to subject any person to hatred, contempt or ridicule; 4. take or withhold action as an official, or cause an official to take or withhold action; 5. bring about or continue a strike, boycott or other collective unofficial action, if the property is not demanded or received for the benefit of the group in whose interest the actor purports to act; 6. testify or provide information or withhold testimony or information with respect to the legal claim or defense of another; or 7. inflict any other harm which would not benefit the actor. - Of course, the state gives itself an exemption: - (b) Defenses.--It is a defense to prosecution based on paragraphs (a)(2), (a)(3) or (a)(4) of this section that the property obtained by threat of accusation, exposure, lawsuit or other invocation of official action was honestly claimed as restitution or indemnification for harm done in the circumstances to which such accusation, exposure, lawsuit or other official action relates, or as compensation for property or lawful services. - But if even the state defines extortion as a form of theft (Pennsylvania is not the only state which so defines it, and the definition also offered in the Model Penal Code), and includes the threat of government action as a form thereof, why should radical libertarians accept your argument that such a definition is some kind of extremist rhetoric without foundation in common usage and understanding? The difference between the radical libertarian definition of theft, including theft by extortion, and the prevailing definitions of same, is that state-approved instances are excluded in the latter. It seems to me that given the agreement of overall definition, it is the anomalous exclusion, rather than the common sense inclusion, which requires justification. Tom Knapp Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[marketliberal] [LibertarianReformCaucus] RE: Re: Is direction not destination just a code ph
QUoth Bob Capozzi: - What is perhaps more interesting to me, Brian, is that we Reformers provide and encourage dialog with our Radical brothers and sisters, and allow them to share their thoughts on our discussion listserv. Apparently things are more controlled and exclusive on the Radical listserv. The same courtesies are not extended to Reformers there. Do I detect a generalized pattern of behavior? - No, you detect an apparent variation of list purpose/policy. The moderator of the LPRadicals list treats that list as an organization/project tool for LP radicals, to the exclusion of the list's use as a venue for radical v. reformer debate. Apparently the moderator of the LRC list treats that list as a venue for radical v. reformer debate, in addition to any other purposes he or she may allow it to be used for. I'd be the last one to suggest that the LRC moderator should tighten up his or her ship so that debate does not overshadow organization/project matters, but I'm quite comfortable suggesting that if he or she did so, there would still remain plenty of accessible debate venues ... just as there are now, the fact that LPRadicals is not one of those venues notwithstanding. Tom Knapp Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[html-formfu] Standalone testing with FormFu
Still playing with the vertically-aligned example and trying out
various features, including the validation constraints and error
messages. But how to test the input error checking without lots of
code or embedding into another program?
It is possible to feed sample input values into FormFu using the YAML
config file. At the end of my FormFu .yml I added
query:
contact_phone: testing
contact_email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
to set the form's 'input' values.
I had tried to use the process: key as documented, but because the
config loading is still going on process() really can't, uh, process
yet. So to force 'input' processing to test constraints and all, I
simply added a process() call to the short demo program.
my $form = HTML::FormFu-new;
$form-load_config_file('uw1.yml');
$form-process;
my $tt = Template-new;
$tt-process(
'uw1.tt',
{ form = $form },
'uw1.html',
) || die $tt-error;
I can feed bad values in, or leave some required values missing, and
generally try out lots of combinations of errors, all without much
coding. Just being lazy...
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[html-formfu] Patch for assorted small pod nits, FormFu.pm and Element/Date.pm
Attached is a semi-useless patch for a few very small documentation nits in FormFu.pm. Strange characters, bad pod entities, heading levels, English quirks, etc. The only interesting part is replacing the synopsis example in Element::Date with one I found while reading the past months' archives. I think it shows more of the possibilities: --- lib/HTML/FormFu/Element/Date.pm (revision 419) +++ lib/HTML/FormFu/Element/Date.pm (working copy) @@ -355,9 +355,19 @@ --- elements: - type: Date -name: foo +name: birthdate +label: 'Birthdate:' +day: + prefix: - Day - +month: + prefix: - Month - +year: + prefix: - Year - + less: 70 + plus: 0 auto_inflate: 1 diffs_to_419_minor_nits.patch Description: Binary data ___ HTML-FormFu mailing list HTML-FormFu@lists.scsys.co.uk http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/html-formfu
[marketliberal] Published LTE: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 09/23/07
Although I'm a radical libertarian, I suspect that this LTE will not raise serious objections from market liberals. Comments/critiques welcome. TinyURL (the Post-Dispatch site produces monster 100+ character URLs): http://tinyurl.com/38roww Text: - Is the St. Louis County Council fresh out of problems? Lately it seems to have changed its focus from solving problems to creating them. Case in point: The pending move to eliminate competition in trash hauling by creating special districts in the county's unincorporated areas and awarding area monopolies. None of the justifications for the scheme square with reality. Competition improves service and lowers rates; monopolization degrades service and raises rates. If recycling is a priority, it's far more easily addressed by setting higher landfill tipping fees for companies that don't separate and recycle. And road wear doesn't wash at all like everyone else, trash truck operators pay for their road use every time they fill their gas tanks. The proposal is equal parts corporate welfare scheme, potential graft nightmare and bad deal for county residents. It takes a public servant of special quality to tell his constituents with a straight face, at least that eliminating choice, raising rates and drastically reducing the imperative to provide good service are desirable outcomes. The only beneficiaries of this plan are the area's larger trash-hauling companies and the politicians whose campaigns they finance. Thomas L. Knapp Greendale, MO - Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[marketliberal] Tom Paine University: Beta Testing/Pilot Course
Y'all, Tom Paine University is supposed to be a radical project to facilitate delivery of a more radically oriented program of internal education in the LP, but its motto is the Paine-ism it is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. So: - I'm beta-testing the facility (an installation of Moodle on my own server) and running a pilot course of a nuts and bolts rather than ideological variety, and am looking for up to 10 course participants. - The pilot course is Letters to the Editor 101.* To get the full benefit of the course, I estimate a time commitment of ~2 hours a week for 5 weeks, and I think students will find it a good investment of time ... but it's a non-graded course with no actual minimum commitment. MY goal with this iteration of the course is to acquaint myself with operating the facility. - It's free -- just register at the site and enroll in the course using the enrolment code LTE101PILOT. The site is located at: http://tpu.rationalreview.com Once the pilot course has allowed me to work out any operational kinks, I'll be looking for teachers of both nuts and bolts (writing, campaign techniques, fundraising, etc.) and ideological (Survey of Rothbard, Basics of Public Choice theory, whatever) courses. Regards, Tom Knapp * It may occur to someone to ask whether or not I'm qualified to teach a course on writing letters to the editor, so: I stopped counting after my 100th published LTE/op-ed in a mainstream newspaper under my own name (including but not limited to the Springfield, Missouri News-Leader, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Times). I think I'm somewhere around 150 at the moment. I started writing community notices for my small-town local daily at age 12; moved on to become a staff writer for my high school and college newspapers, as well as for a high school magazine; and sat as a community representative on the editorial borad of a 60k+ circulation city daily (the Springfield News-Leader -- which remains libertarian-friendly to this day and serves a city which recently finally elected its first Libertarian city councilman). A few years ago, I wrote an e-booklet (Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed), and received positive feedback from several of its 100 or so purchasers, including at least two who had never successfully submitted LTEs before, but who had had LTEs published after applying the rules. That e-booklet is the course text, and may be freely downloaded and distributed (without enrolling in the course) at: http://www.rationalreview.com/pdf/writingthelibertarianoped.pdf So, yes, I think I'm reasonably qualified. I have no doubt there are libertarians who have published more, and better, LTEs and op-eds than myself, but I suspect I'm well to the right side of the bell curve's center in both quantity and quality. Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[marketliberal] Re: From Lpradicals: drop a scented hankie to maximize tax cuts
Quoth Brian Holtz: - I've only recently recognized this bizarre taboo held by radicals: that there are policy compromises we might recognize as the most liberty-maximizing ones available, but we must be demure and coquettish and never be so forward as to ask for said compromises. - It's interesting to see how standard major party political practice suddenly becomes bizarre taboo when its radical libertarians instead of Nancy Pelosi or Trent Lott advocating it. On any issue, both parties routinely put forward relatively pure to platform legislative proposals, then fight like cats and dogs to keep those proposals from being amended by their opponents and by moderates within their own parties. They accept amendments, conference committee compromises, etc., only if they have no alternative. Essentially you're positing a willingness to roll over and expose one's throat to the enemy at the beginning of the duel as a criterion of political realism, when in fact it's political suicide, and at least as absurd as anarchy next week. Tom Knapp Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[marketliberal] Re: LP anti-statists defend Leviathan from the best strategy for reducing it
Quoth Brian Holtz, quoting Wikipedia on Tiebout sorting: - W) Tiebout describes municipalities within a region as offering varying baskets of goods (government services) at a variety of prices (tax rates). Given that individuals have differing personal valuations on these services and varying ability to pay the attendant taxes, individuals will move from one local community to another until they find the one which maximizes their personal utility. The model states that through the choice process of individuals, jurisdictions and residents will determine an equilibrium provision of local public goods in accord with the tastes of residents, thereby sorting the population into optimum communities. The model has the benefit of solving two major problems with government provision of public goods: preference revelation and preference aggregation. (W - All of which is very nice, but there's a certain sense in which it resembles a theory of physics that, for the sake of convenience, leaves out friction, inertia and momentum (which is why Tiebout labeled it a pure theory). The simplest example of friction within Tiebout Sorting as a way of describing population movement toward areas with preferable governance schemes is probably the home mortgage. Chances are good that a family in Tiebout Non-Preferable Community A are at some point between making a down payment on, and paying off the mortgage of, the house they live in. In order to move, they need to get that mortgage paid off and come out with enough cash to make a down payment on their new home in Tiebout Preferable Community B. But if the two communities really are non-preferable/preferable as described, then chances are also that homes are getting harder to sell, and going for less, where they are -- and getting harder to find, and going for more, where they want to be. Similarly, inertia: The family which has paid off a home in Tiebout Non-Preferable Community A may find that the economic advantages of hanging on to a home they own and would have problems getting a good price for outweigh the political advantages in taking a loss on their home and moving to another community to start over. The only analog I can think of for momentum is that insofar as an enterprise has invested heavily in doing business in Tiebout Non-Preferable Community A, they're more likely to further invest in trying to attract shoppers from Tiebout Preferable Community B than they are to liquidate their holdings at a loss and move their store. That doesn't stop Tiebout Sorting from happening, of course (if I had to guess, I'd guess that the St. Louis metro area has been cited in recent decades as a premier example of it). But there are countervailing forces. - And yet it is the LP's radicals and anarchists who throw their bodies in front of any effort to endorse the use of a divide-and-conquer strategy against Leviathan. - I'd be interested in seeing you support that assertion. So far, that part of your argument has been 100% heat, 0% light. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: LP anti-statists defend Leviathan from the best strategy for reducing it
Quoth Brian Holtz: BH) And yet it is the LP's radicals and anarchists who throw their bodies in front of any effort to endorse the use of a divide-and-conquer strategy against Leviathan. (BH TK) I'd be interested in seeing you support that assertion. So far, that part of your argument has been 100% heat, 0% light. (TK Are you kidding me? You're the guy who wants to engrave that opposition into any Platform you can get your hands on: The [insert name] Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose. My understanding is that you would bitterly oppose replacing the federal nanny state with 50 more-local nanny states, even if the sum of their sizes were significantly less than that of the central nanny state. OK, I thought you were advocating radical federalism or radical decentralization. Apparently that's not the case. If federal nanny-state functions were decentralized, there's no particular reason why 50 smaller nanny states would necessarily eventuate from that decentralization. When you decentralize, you leave the decisions to those smaller units. I'd be more than happy to see nanny-state functions defederalized/decentralized. I'd then fight to keep the state I live in from duplicating those federal nanny-state functions, or move if it did ... and let those living in the other 49 states decide what they wanted to do where they lived, and move if they didn't get their way. Your argument above indicates that what you favor is not decentralization, but devolution -- mandating the same functions, just moving management of those functions a few rungs down the ladder. That was Newt Gingrich's idea, too, and my experience with my local government says it was, and continues to be, an utter failure. You can't swing a cat at one of my little town's council meetings without hitting some yahoo who wants to apply for/accept free federal money, and all we have to do to get it is (insert some stupid thing that government shouldn't be doing) here. Decentralization: The federal government will no longer be involved in education. States, do it however you like. Devolution: The federal government will no longer manage education. States, let us know as soon as you've recreated your education system exactly the way we want it recreated, and we'll cut you a check. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: LP anti-statists defend Leviathan from the best strategy for reducing it
Quoth Brian Holtz: - Again: is it not the case that you oppose any program of decentralization whatsoever unless it rules out any increase in the size, scope, or power of every level of government? - No, that's not the case. I oppose any program of decentralization whatsoever that _requires/includes_ an increas in the size, scope or power of any level of government. Or, more particularly, I oppose a libertarian political entity proposing such a program. To give the above more detail, I'll offer a future hypothetical: A future Libertarian congressional majority would likely draft and attempt to pass legislation to de-federalize/de-centralize education. Such legislation might mandate elimination of the Department of Education, repeal of No Child Left Behind, etc. I assume that if such legislation passed and was signed into law, some states would increase their education budgets, and create new programs and bureaucracies to replicate the federal functions which would shortly be disappearing. I would not support language in the federal legislation intended to EITHER require OR prohibit those states from doing so. I favor decentralization of decision-making, not devolution of tasking. Yes, I would oppose growth of government in my own state to replicate those disappearing federal functions (and expect my own state party to oppose it as well) -- but I'd still say that it was at that level (or lower) that the decision should be made either way. I wouldn't oppose the decentralization just because it came with no guarantee that my state, or any other, would respond to that decentralization in the way I would prefer it to. - You oppose increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose. Accepting an increase in the size, scope, and power of the several state governments may very well be the tactically smartest first step toward reducing the overall size, scope and power of all government. - I never said I wouldn't accept such an increase. I said I oppose, and would not support, such an increase, and I say that I don't want my political party to be the party proposing such an increase. BIG difference. Unless you're calling for a one-party government, it's a reasonable prediction that there will always be at least one party calling for increases in the size, scope and power of government at any given level. Division of labor is good, and the LP should concentrate on doing its job rather than trying to do the job of its opponents as well. Decentralization allows for just such a division of labor insofar as voters could elect a Libertarian congressional majority to get the federal government out of Issue X, and then elect state or local government officials who would brake the dreaded slide toward anarchy on Issue X at whatever point those voters in a given locale deem appropriate. - If you're going to claim that rent-seeking is equally easy and equally insidious in local government as it is under centralized government, then I'm just going to call timeout and decline to proceed unless you can cite even a single writer in public-choice theory who agrees with you. - On the one hand, if Public Choice theory doesn't recognize that the bulk of government rent-seeking takes place at the lower levels of government, then Public Choice theorists live in a fantasy world. On the other hand, I don't know why in the world you would think me constrained to argue on the basis of a theory to which you, rather than I, subscribe. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: FW: Individual rights are not a lifestyle
Quoth Brian Holtz: ) Why is it so hard to focus our *National* platform only upon topics that have very broad appeal ( 53% and 78% sound pretty broad to me. With only 16% to 20% of Americans being libertarian-leaning, it would be folly for our Platform to be silent on this topic. Gay rights should be a meat and potatoes issue for the LP. There's a large constituency (much larger than the typical partisan LP vote) for protection of the rights which we as a party are on record as standing for protecting, and that constituency is not well represented by either major party. If we can't successfully appeal to voters who agree with us and whom the major parties don't represent, we can't successfully appeal to anyone. Granted, even a successful appeal won't necessarily garner the support of that entire constituency (most voters aren't single issue voters, and many members of that constituency may disagree with us on other issues), but it's the kind of constituency we should be appealing to. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: God Bless America
Quoth Brian Holtz: - We now return to your regularly scheduled fog of disinformation, already in progress. - There are two sides to disinformation. Like him or not (and I'm no fan of Infowars, the site he works for), Lepacek technically _was_ a journalist, properly credentialed as such by the host facility/organization for the event he was covering, standing in a designated press area and doing what journalists do: Asking questions of a public figure who had chosen to enter an area where he knew, or should have known, to _expect_ questions to be asked of him. That's hardly trespass, criminal or otherwise. If Giuliani or Giuliani's staff find the kind of questions asked by Infowars types annoying or unwelcome, well ... tough shit. They're free to ignore those questions. It isn't the job of the New Hampshire State Police to shield politicians from annoying or unwelcome questions. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: GH acceptable to 2 out of 2 radicals who've read it?
Quoth Brian Holtz, quoting Starchild: SC) I'm just not convinced that watering down our platform will accomplish this goal. [...] than by changing the ideas of the party. (SC I've been meaning to address this particular argument for some time -- none like the present, I guess. The GH approach (and most other shorter platform approaches) can hardly be described as a watering down approach. To water something down is to add a bunch of weaker material to it to dilute the stronger material. GH/WSPP et al do exactly the opposite. They prune away lots of material. And if that pruning is done correctly, it turns the LP's platform into something that stakes LP claims to larger pieces of political territory for which those claims are legitimate, without sacrificing any principles at all. Tom, what do you think of the GH draft sans abortion and secession? Looks nice. I still have suggestions, and since you're still soliciting them, I'll keep making them: In section 1.2, I would delete the phrase such as the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes. In section 1.4, I would replace at significant risk with in clear and present danger. In section 2.2, I would replace riparian with something that a reasonably high-IQ representative reader (me) doesn't have to look up in a dictionary. Section 2.5 is problematic insofar as a proper libertarian position on corporations is that they should not exist (corporations are chartered creations of the state imbued with government-mandated privileges including artificial personhood, alienation of owner liability, etc.). A short platform isn't the place to go into that in detail, but I'd recommend replacing corporations with enterprises in the title, and with joint stock companies in the body of that section. I continue to desire the elimination of tax credits from section 2.6. Finally (there are some other minor quibbles, but they're purely purist stuff), I don't know how I missed the endorsement of Instant Runoff Voting in section 3.5 Um ... why? If we're going to advocate a particular alternative voting method, why not one that's GOOD, like Approval Voting? None of the above, nor any of the above in combination, break my time to let the perfect be the enemy of the not good at all barrier. I'd support this version of GH over the 2006 platform. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] For the record
Conditions and policies on opposite sides of a border could NEVER vary so widely as to make unrestricted economic immigration infeasible in terms of detrimental effect on labor markets, public goods, natural monopolies, and natural resources.
[marketliberal] Re: More Iraq Cassandras: they didn't tell us so either
Quoth Brian Holtz: BH) What percent of America's 3100 combat fatalities have involved either Iranians or Kurds and Turks? I've never heard of any, and I bet it's well under 1% if it's not zero. (BH You also haven't heard of any of America's combat fatalities involving Sunnis or Shia. You might be able to infer that they did because of location (a US death in Anbar was likely at the hands of Sunni insurgents; in Sadr City, the killers were more likely Shia), but I've seen no breakdown from DoD of the ethnic composition of opposing forces linked to each combat death. There's no reason to believe prima facie that US deaths in Nineveh province/Mosul area aren't related to the Kurd/Turk conflict, or that US deaths along the Kirkuk/Arbil axis (the Eden your brother mentions) aren't related to the Kurd/Iranian conflict. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence -- or, if it is, then it is in all cases, and therefore we don't know if the US troop fatalities in Anbar are caused by Sunni insurgents or by purple space aliens who happen to be conducting experiments in the area.
[marketliberal] Re: Welcoming moderates while staying true to our radical mission
Quoth Brian Holtz: - I was in the LRC and on PlatCom, and didn't miss a PlatCom email or meeting. I don't remember any Platform proposals that were identifiably from the LRC. In fact, I'm sad to say I know of no separate communication or planning among the LRC PlatCom members (McLendon, Aitken, West, me) either before or during the Portland PlatCom meeting. - I brought out the let the platform committee do the re-writing thing because that was how the plan was described after the fact. BEFORE the fact, Kris Overstreet's proposed LRC manifesto for the 2006 convention (which, to my recollection, enjoyed overwhelming support at the time that I left LRC) included the plan that I left LRC over, since I couldn't support it and believe in caucus solidarity. The manifesto, located at: http://reformthelp.org/caucus/build/manifesto.php ... includes 15 specific plank deletion proposals, each of which the manifesto claims enjoyed a minimum of 60% LRC member support; 17 specific plank rewrite/replace proposals, each of which the manifesto claims enjoyed a minimum of 70% LRC support; and two new plank proposals, each of which the manifesto likewise claims enjoyed at least 70% LRC support. If that's not a plan for rewriting the platform, what is? - TK) Don't sell yourself short. The LRC didn't immediately after the fact: [LRC press release] (TK The LNC also issued a press release after Portland trying to put such a spin on the Platform retention vote. You're way too smart to think that either press release means that the Portland Platform was designed by either group. - On the contrary. I full understand that most LRC members did not expect what eventuated to eventuate, and that a number of them viewed the outcome negatively rather than positively. That doesn't mean there wasn't a plan, nor does it mean that LRC's presence and activities were not decisive in many, probably most, of the outcomes. TK) several prominent LRC members persistently construed opening the party to non-anarchist libertarians as something different: Closing the party to anarchists. (TK How so? I seriously doubt that. One need only look at a list of Carl Milsted's published articles in the runup to the Portland convention for evidence that Mr. Milsted was saying big enough tent for everyone, anarchists included from one side of his mouth and not big enough to accomodate anarchists -- or even those who reject GROWING government out of hand if my ultra-top-secret uber-super-calculational apparatus whispers in my ear that doing so would result in a 'net reduction in the overall initiation of force -- from the other side. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: More Iraq Cassandras: they didn't tell us so either
Quoth Brian Holtz: And thanks for not defending the claim that in the context of the Iraq civil war there is significant crossfire between Kurds and Turks. Why should I defend it when I don't have to? The Center for Strategic and International Studies already has, in Iraq's Insurgency and Civil Violence: Developments Through Late August 2007, noting cross-border shelling of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan by Turkish forces, the massing of Turkish forces on the Turkey/Iraq border, and the trend of insurgent operations (i.e. civil war battles) away from Anbar/Baghdad and toward Mosul, Kirkuk and other Kurdish areas. It's likely that the Turks are at least as involved in aiding Iraqi insurgent groups as Iran is, likely that that has resulted in US casualties, and unlikely that we'll get a very clear picture or accounting of the crossfire impact any time soon -- Turkey is a NATO member and putatively a US ally and the US wants to keep it that way; Iran is neither, and the Bush administration seems to be seeking a reason to expand the war in Iran's direction. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Anarchy, history, and exceptionalism
Quoth Terry: - Tom... If the back yard is full of pie thieves, it's nice to have a cop in the neighborhood. - OK, I'll bite: If the back yard is full of pie thieves, why is it nice to give one of those pie thieves a badge, a gun and a uniform and then invite him to blow about how he's stealing my pies for his own good? Adding insult to injury does not strike me as a sound way of dealing with injury. Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Blaming America for WW II
Quoth Brian Holtz: - This thesis about 20th century history suffers from misunderstandings about path dependence and the difference between necessary and - If France hadn't demanded ruinous reparations from Germany in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic would almost certainly not have been replaced by Nazi totalitarianism. - And if the US had not intervened in WWI, France would almost certainly have not been in any position to demand such ruinous reparations. France and England were not on the ropes -- they had shut down the first major breakout of Ludendorff's spring 1918 offensive at Amiens on or about March 25th, a few days before significant numbers of US troops began to arrive -- but the US intervention ended up putting France in a position to dictate much harsher armistice terms than it would otherwise have likely been able to successfully demand. Whether a more congenial set of armistice terms would have immunized Germany from the fascist virus is another question, of course. If it had, WWII might have been avoided, or at least differently composed. Similarly, it is my opinion that US intervention, at least above and beyond Lend-Lease, in the European theatre in WWII did not change the outcome vis a vis the survival or non-survical of Hitler's Third Reich. Operation Sea Lion had failed in 1940. The Russians had turned the Wehrmacht back from Moscow in November of 1941 (without even Lend-Lease -- their first shipments didn't arrive until the following month). Hitler was going to go down whether the US intervened or not. The difference that the US military intervention made -- once again, in my opinion -- was that it allowed the Soviet Union to dominate eastern Europe for 45 years of Cold War instead of exhausting itself defeating Hitler. Regards, Tom Knapp
[marketliberal] Re: Anarchy, history, and exceptionalism
Quoth Brian Holtz: To be a minarchist is to be an optimist about the institutional design of states, and to be an anarchist is to be an optimist about human nature. I'm an anarchist because I'm a realist about both human nature and the institutional design of states. To wit, I note a human capacity for evil, observe the attractions of power for those in which said capacity is most manifest, and therefore think it a really, really bad idea to centralize/institutionalize power (i.e. compose a state). It's like putting a pie on a window sill, knowing that the back yard is full of pie thieves. Tom Knapp
