Under Penalty of Catapult

Longtime Pixar director Andrew Stanton provided an interesting glimpse into Hollywood thinking in this interview with /film about his transition to live-action directing with Disney’s John Carter:

It’s interesting to see the system and how the live-action system works. It’s based on a lot of things that maybe made sense in the day or decades ago or are holdovers from the studio system. It’s unionized and there’s a lot of rules that don’t make a lot of sense logically. Pixar has none of that. I realize that one of the reasons it’s Nirvana is that we didn’t realize how a movie was made and just used — god forbid — logic. We figured that if we made a movie the way it should be made, that was the way they were being made. Our system is very logical and we keep improving upon it. We criticize ourselves and we have post-mortems every movie to improve the system. Out here, nobody questions the system. It’s just the way it is with all its faults and everything. We don’t have unions. Steve [Jobs] was very smart. He said, “Let’s give them why there was unions. Let’s give them great healthcare. Let’s treat them extra special and there’s no reason to have that.” There aren’t these weird byproduct rules that actually cause problems in one area when they think they’re helping another. We have a very clean system, Pixar. After you’ve worked in that, it becomes very obvious how things should work and very obvious how things don’t work the right way here. I get a little frustrated at the haphazardness of it.

The world of moviemaking, since the studio system broke down — and this is my guess — lives and breathes off of triage. It lives off disaster planning. People feel comfortable in the disaster. “Oh! I know how to deal with this. This is chaos. Somebody’s on fire. Let’s run and get an extinguisher.” That is not Pixar. Pixar is planning to avoid every disaster possible. It’s a very opposite experience to the extreme and that took my awhile to get used to, the embracing of the chaos. There’s a certain level of it that I feel is necessary. I feel like a parent having their first kid and I can’t wait to have to the second one because I’m going to do the parenting a bit differently. I’m somewhat half observer and half participant in watching how this whole things happens.

I think this helps explain the ongoing copyright wars between the studios and, well, everyone else. It’s not about some Randian ideological commitment to copyright or a genuine belief that “piracy” is a menace on par with terrorism. It’s about the studios not wanting to take a hard look at how they do business from top to bottom.

The “anti-piracy” crusade is rooted in the Hollywood union-guild system where, as Stanton observed, “there’s a lot of rules that don’t make a lot of sense logically.” It’s a defensive, inward-looking system. Any new technology, be it VHS in the 1980s or Internet streaming today, is a crisis that has to be managed. That’s why every political debate over copyright resorts to panic over “lost jobs.” No studio wants to plan ahead and look at how technology might help them. They’d rather just stand up and say “no!” to change.

Monday is the 60th anniversary of Elizabeth II’s accession to the thrones of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and a bunch of other countries. If nothing else, the Queen’s “Diamond Jubilee” reminds us that monarchy does in fact still exist. It’s not especially powerful anymore, but it remains useful. In particular, the patchwork British Constitution is held together merely by the existence of the Queen’s office. It is a theoretical backstop against total paralysis of the state.

The real question is how long can the monarchy survive Elizabeth herself. Charles, the Prince of Wales and 63-year-old heir apparent, will likely be the oldest monarch at the time of his accession, eclipsing King William IV, who took the throne at 64. Charles follows in the steps of his great-great grandfather, King Edward VII, who succeeded Queen Victoria after living his entire life, 59 years, as heir apparent.

It’s hard to foresee a celebratory tone at the coronation of the future King Charles III. He may well be into his 70s or 80s. Virtually all of his “subjects” will have lived during the reign of his mother. More to the point, Charles has lived his own life as a tabloid figure devoid of much substance. That’s true of all Royal family members, but it’s easier for the public to digest a new monarch who is at the beginning of his or her days than one who is at the end. Elizabeth II and Victoria took the throne 25 and 18, respectively, so they were able to define their respective cultural eras. Charles will be perceived as a stopgap until his own son assumes the throne as King William V.

Constitutionally, the monarchy isn’t relevant to the non-British countries like Canada and Australia. They maintain pro forma links to the monarchy, but if there were no more kings and queens, none of these countries would witness an interruption in their respective affairs. The only remaining link is the office of the governor-general, which in all Commonwealth countries has been a local citizen for decades. Queen Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, appointed the first Canadian to the governor-generalship of that country, and all his successors have been Canadians. The same is true of Australia and every other Commonwealth realm. (In the old days, the governor-general was often some British peer, maybe even a son of the monarch.)

There has been no serious anti-monarchist push in these outlying realms because of respect for the present Queen and her longevity. That will change when Charles becomes king. Maybe not enough to end the monarchy in these countries right away, but Elizabeth really is the last personal link the monarchy has with any of these realms. It’s difficult to imagine her passing won’t at least start the process of dissolving the monarchy outside Britain.

As for Britain itself, the country itself may break apart while the Queen is still alive. Scotland’s local government plans a push for full independence. The European Union continues to chip away at the traditional concept of national sovereignty. The United States continues to impose its anti-individual authoritarian values on its British “allies.” None of these trends bode well for the maintenance of a thousand-yer-old monarchy predicated on hereditary succession.

Some might point to last year’s wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton as a sign of Royal resuscitation. I’m skeptical for one major reason. It’s not that the Duke of Cambridge isn’t an attractive potential King. It’s his military background. Like most men of the House of Windsor, William has occupied his time in the armed forces. But the military isn’t held in the same esteem it was during World War II. The Iraq and Afghan campaigns are just as divisive in the United Kingdom as the United States. The British government participated in the American lies and deception necessary to initiate those wars. While the monarchy likes to act politically neutral, its physical and symbolic presence in support of the military will, I predict, prove fatal in the long run.

There’s also the inherent blowback of egalitarianism. The monarchy survives largely by its own inertia. The rest of society no longer accepts its basic foundation — that goes for libertarians, socialists and even many conservatives. The succession laws, which date back in their present form to the 18th century, discriminate against women. In America, you can’t have unequal numbers of male and female athletes on college sports teams. Yet the British — and by extension the Canadians, Australians, etc. — maintain that a son has an automatic right of succession to the throne over an older sister.

There has been recent movement to change that and abolish the gender-preference rule. But that exposes the other problem of monarchy. The British government can’t simply decree a change to the rules of succession. It needs the cooperation of Canada, Australia and the other realms that maintain Elizabeth as Queen. And once you open up the rules of monarchy to one major change, any of these countries might be tempted to seek other changes — or reconsider their participation in the whole project altogether.

What if, for example, King Charles III doesn’t go over so well with the Canadian or Australian public? Charles can’t just resign and let William take over. When his great-uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated, it took a political act of all the Commonwealth parliaments to grant him leave to do so. And that was a case where everyone wanted the guy gone. If some countries resist worshiping at the feet of Charles, they are likely to simply abolish the monarchy in their country. And once one country goes, especially one like Australia, the others may take advantage of the opportunity to follow.

One can never predict the future, but probability strongly suggests the monarchy won’t exist in 100 years or even 50. It may be down to its last decade or two. Britain will face the most difficult transition. Ending the monarchy may end up being the final step towards full integration of Europe into a superstate (either voluntarily or by force). So I’m not suggesting that abolition will necessary be a good thing for the cause of individual rights. But all institutions eventually adapt or perish.

Jeffrey Tucker’s excellent 2011 book, It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, is now available as free audiobook read by libertarian philosopher and broadcaster Stefan Molyneux:

Rabbits are an interesting animal, economically speaking. Humans tend to strictly segregate “companion” animals from “livestock,” yet rabbits straddle the line. Farmers raise meat rabbits. Industrial farms breed rabbits for meat and fur. Some folks keep domesticated rabbits in backyard hutches. Others keep “house” rabbits the same as dogs and cats. Regardless of one’s views on animal rights, the economic truth is that humans domesticate animals to fulfill their needs, whether it’s for food or because they want a cute, furry repository for their unmet emotional needs.

There’s an understandable tension between different factions of rabbit-keepers. If you keep house rabbits, the idea of adorable bunnies raised and slaughtered in massive factories no doubt sickens you. Conversely, many folks view rabbits as a form of vermin no different than rats; rabbits may be cute but they also pose an ecological threat if not properly controlled.

In Canada, there’s recently been problems with feral rabbit colonies. These exist when domesticated rabbits are abandoned by their human owners. These rabbits then reproduce like Tribbles and overrun public spaces. Animal rights groups have organized to save the rabbits from being culled — hunted down — by local government officials seeking to gain control of the situation. I read a plea from one such group recently who wanted to relocate a feral rabbit colony to a special “rabbit sanctuary” — at the cost of about $130 per rabbit.

Some folks would say that’s a waste of money. I spoke to one person, a veterinarian, who suggested it would be better to trap and kill the bunnies and use the meat to feed carnivorous animals in local zoos. He noted that if this were a group of squirrels, instead of rabbits, nobody would talk about setting up an expensive “sanctuary.” But, of course, bunnies are cute.

On some of the Canadian news reports I read, commenters were similarly outraged that a source of cheap meat for people who might be hungry would be so cavalierly disregarded. Rabbit is a lean protein, after all, and given the reproductive rate of the species, you can theoretically produce a lot of it quickly.

But then we have our animal-rights friends who just can’t fathom the idea. Surely, we would never consider eating cats or dogs! Which raises an interesting point. Most companion animals kept by humans are predators. Even though we’ve selectively bred cats and dogs, for the most part, to be cute and adorable, these animals are descended from predatory species like wolves. They are meat-eaters, after all. Rabbits are herbivores and, by natural evolution, prey animals. They live to reproduce quickly because they have a short lifespan and high mortality rate.

Humans keep other small prey as pets, such as gerbils. But those tend to be animals you can easily keep in a small vivarium or cage. As any rabbit lover will tell you, a pet rabbit needs quite a bit more space. Keeping a rabbit in an outdoor hutch is basically torture. You’re confining a prey animal without providing any means of sanctuary or escape. Many outdoor “pet” rabbits die of fright at the mere sight of a predator.

So ideally, you keep a pet rabbit indoors where he has as much space as is practical. Rabbits also have special dietary requirements. They’re social creatures — it’s commonly suggested a person own at least two rabbits to ensure constant companionship — yet they generally don’t like to be handled as aggressively as a dog or even a cat. Again, that’s a function of their nature as prey animals.

The problem is that because house rabbits require so much in terms of resources from humans, they’re more prone to being abandoned than dogs or cats. Most pets, especially when children are involved, are impulse acquisitions. And since rabbits fall between the line separating companions from livestock, people seem to have less inhibitions about simply abandoning rabbits in a public park than a dog or a cat.

In the Canadian cases I reviewed, the problem seems to be that these rabbits are abandoned on public (government-owned) land, so there’s no property owner who can take charge of the situation. When a feral rabbit colony emerges, it becomes a political question pitting animal groups against other residents who view the rabbits as a pest. If I own a piece of land and someone dumps rabbits on it without my consent, that’s a form of trespassing, and I should have the right to compensation from the owner if the rabbits multiply and cause damage to my property. And, yes, I certainly have the right to kill the rabbits to prevent them from causing more damage or, even worse, attracting predators like coyotes to my property.

Likewise, if animal groups want to privately finance and organize “rescues” for these animals, more power to them. Let the market sort things out. I don’t think the pro-rabbit folks should feel bad if they prefer to put their money into saving rabbits over other social causes. I would just note, as my veterinarian friend pointed out, that other animals have a need to survive as well, and they would benefit from the rabbit meat. What larger purpose is really served by saving rabbits from fulfilling their natural function as prey? I recognize that feral rabbits are the offspring of animals expressly domesticated by humans. But if there’s clearly excess supply, isn’t it better that the excess support other wildlife populations as opposed to consuming scarce human veterinary resources?

Thomas Mulcair is a Canadian Member of Parliament and deputy leader of the opposition New Democratic Party. He’s married to a French citizen and, in accordance with French law, applied for and received a French passport for himself, making him a dual citizen. According to a Canadian Press report,

Mulcair said he did so 20 years ago after an unsettling incident at Spain’s Madrid airport, where he was separated for 30 minutes from his wife and two then-young children because he was travelling on a Canadian passport while they had both Canadian and French passports.

Seems innocent enough. However, Mulcair is now seeking the leadership of the NDP following the death of former leader Jack Layton last year. If Mulcair wins, he would not only be leader of the official opposition in Parliament, but potentially the next prime minister of Canada if the NDP wins the next election, which will likely take place in 2015.

The Canadian punditry is divided. Some think it’s unacceptable for a potential prime minister to have “divided loyalties” between Canada and France. Others think it’s no big deal. It’s worth noting there is precedent here. Former Liberal Party of Canada leader Stephane Dion also held French citizenship — but, Mulcair’s critics note, Dion’s citizenship was automatic though his mother, whereas Mulcair sought his out. The late Jack Layton also publicly criticized Dion’s dual citizenship, though Mulcair claims Layton privately repudiated those remarks later.

Lorne Gunter, writing in the National Post, tries to explain why Mulcair’s dual citizenship should make Canadians uncomfortable:

Just as no person may serve two masters, it seems wrong that someone who wants to lead our country should also want to be a citizen of another at the same time. It’s almost like being married, but thinking it is okay to fool around on the side. And what does it say about a leader’s commitment to stay here and fight to make the country better when he has an escape card in his back pocket? That’s probably making too much of the situation. Neither Mr. Mulcair nor Mr. Dion before him have given any indication of divided loyalties or part-time commitment, still there is a nagging doubt I cannot get past.

The marriage analogy is interesting given what’s gone on this week in the U.S. Republican Party’s leadership contest. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has angrily denied his ex-wife’s allegations that he divorced her after she rejected his demand for an “open marriage,” where he could stay married to her while continuing to fool around with his mistress (now his third wife). But as Gunter himself acknowledges, that doesn’t seem analogous to Mulcair’s situation. It’s not like he’s also running for office in France while seeking the NDP leadership. Muclair said his dual citizenship was made entirely for the convenience of his family, which seems like a pretty decent motive. And it’s not like France and Canada are mortal enemies.

I’d also point out that in politics, “loyalty” has always been a flexible concept. Take Mulcair’s history of shifting political allegiances. Before he was an NDP leader, he held office in the Quebec legislature under that province’s Liberal Party. He was even a provincial cabinet member under Liberal Premier Jean Charest, the former leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. Nobody seems to question Mulcair’s character or fitness to lead the federal NDP based on these shifts, which are fairly commonplace in Canada’s complicated federal system.

Then there’s the irony of criticizing Mulcair’s dual citizenship when Canada itself shares a head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, with 15 other independent nations. And she’s a British citizen descended from inbred Germans to boot!

Instead of questioning Mulcair’s “loyalty” to Canada over his French passport, perhaps we need to look at why he felt the need to apply for dual citizenship in the first place. Citizenship and passports are political creations of the state, designed to main control of its resident population. It’s nothing more than a restriction on the free movement of people. Mulcair wanted dual citizenship so he could have the same right to travel through Europe as the rest of his family, who were already dual citizens. The right of travel should not be tied to one’s declaration of “allegiance” to a mob calling itself the government. Then again, given Mulcair’s socialist politics, I doubt he’d appreciate this argument.

In 1998, the British government under then-Prime Minister Tony Blair passed a series of “devolution” measures, reviving local legislatures for Scotland and Wales that had ceased to exist centuries ago. The current devolved Scottish government is controlled by the Scottish National Party, which as the name implies, stands for Scottish nationalism. The SNP plans to conduct a referendum in 2014 on declaring full independence from the United Kingdom’s parliament and government.

Of course “independence” isn’t what it was in 1776 when America broke away from the UK by force. An independent Scotland would likely retain Queen Elizabeth II as sovereign, just as Canada and Australia have. It would almost certainly remain part of the European Union super-state, which infringes just as much, if not more, on the individual liberties of Scottish citizens as the Westminster parliament. And Scotland would not enjoy monetary independence. It would either continue to use the British pound — meaning monetary policy would still be made in London — or join the fast-collapsing Euro.

The original devolution law has a laundry list of subjects that are “reserved” to the British parliament. Obviously the Scottish parliament wants control of those subjects. And therein lies the fraud behind independence. I doubt many of the specific policies now reserved would change much under a Scottish-only government. This is less about independence for the Scottish people and more a competition for political control between the UK and Scottish parliaments.

Secession generally ends badly for individual rights. American secession led to the establishment of a centralized state that now terrorizes its population on a daily basis. Confederate secession from the United States led to a nearly identical central government, and following a bloody invasion by the American state, led to an even stronger “united” government. (Mind you, I’m not totally down on American secession. If nothing else, it helped keep the U.S. out of European in-fighting for over a century.)

To the north, Canada has constantly dealt with secession threats from Francophone Quebec. This has produced the worst of all worlds: A central government desperate to prevent secession by constantly making concessions to Quebecois rent-seekers. Letting Quebec go would be bad for locals but probably good for the rest of Canada.

This isn’t to say more consolidation, a la the EU, is the answer. The goal should be to reduce the overall scope of government, not rearrange monopoly power into smaller boxes where “nationalist” mobs make decisions.

Dr. Rajendra Kale, writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, wants the government to forbid physicians from revealing the gender of a fetus under the age of 30 weeks. Kale says this is necessary to protect female fetuses from abortion by Indian and Chinese immigrants who simply prefer male children. Although abortion is legal in Canada — and Kale doesn’t suggest it should not be — the targeting of female fetuses for abortion is somehow unethical and must be stopped:

A pregnant woman being told the sex of the fetus at ultrasonography at a time when an unquestioned abortion is possible is the starting point of female feticide from a health care perspective. A woman has the right to medical information about herself that is available to a health care professional to provide advice and treatment. The sex of the fetus is medically irrelevant information (except when managing rare sex-linked illnesses) and does not affect care. Moreover, such information could in some instances facilitate female feticide. Therefore, doctors should be allowed to disclose this information only after about 30 weeks of pregnancy — in other words, when an unquestioned abortion is all but impossible.

So because a handful of pregnant women may be using information to exercise their legal right to an abortion, the government must prohibit all women from receiving information about the sex of their babies? Kale can’t even establish a widespread “femicide” problem in Canada. The editorial only cited a “small, qualitative study” done in the United States involving 65 Indian women.

Government censorship won’t prevent women from certain cultures from selectively aborting female children. Even if the government passed the ban proposed by Kale, many doctors would likely ignore it, especially if they share a culture identity with the patient. The notion that a physician should ever withhold information from a patient negates any valid concept of “medical ethics.” Kale’s position that gender is not “medically relevant” is bull. If it’s relevant to the patient, it’s relevant. What Kale proposes is a precedent for the government to decide what information people should or should not have about their own bodies. That’s a lot more damaging to society as a whole than the prospect of a small group of women engaging in selective abortion.

Kale also seems to want it both ways on abortion. If it’s legal, it’s legal. A woman can abort an early-term fetus for any reason she deems appropriate, be it medical, financial or cultural. Doctors do not get to decide what reasons are valid or invalid. If that’s the case, Kale should support banning physicians from telling a woman she is pregnant at all before 30 weeks — and while we’re at it, ban women from purchasing or using home pregnancy tests.

Finally, I wonder if Kale has thought through the long-term ramifications of using the state to coerce women into having girls they don’t want. If these mothers have such a strong cultural predisposition towards having boys, won’t that translate into lifelong resentment and neglect of an unwanted girl thrust upon her by the likes of Kale and the Canadian medical establishment?

Public schooling is based on the same organizational principles as factory farming. They are both modern procedures designed to replace ancient methods of child-rearing and rural farming, respectively. Both rely on a core principle of confinement. In factory farming, animals are generally kept indoors in confined pens for duration of their lives. If we’re talking about male cattle raised for veal, they are literally confined to a small box and denied any exercise whatsoever. With public schooling, children are confined indoors for the majority of daylight hours and, in lower grades, generally restricted to a single classroom. They are expected to sit quietly at desks — analogous to a factory animal cage — with only limited exercise approved for limited, scheduled intervals. Animals and children alike are deprived of the ability to fulfill their natural desire to exercise and explore their outdoor environments.

Factory animals are force-fed an unnatural diet of processed foods often based on corn and other grains. In nature, these animals eat mostly grasses supplemented by fresh vegetables and fruits. In schools, children generally eat a school-provided lunch of grain-based processed foods. Children, unlike most farm animals, are natural carnivores and should be eating a meat-based diet.

Now, factory animals are fed grains so they’ll rapidly gain weight, increasing their value as a food product. Factory animals are also selectively bred to this end. Chickens, for example, are usually bred to produce larger breasts. Schools do not actually “breed” children, but they do control the environment to encourage or discourage certain traits. Controlling mealtimes — and feeding them a carbohydrate-rich diet — ensures children are lethargic in the middle of the day, a time when they would naturally be at the peak of their physical activity. This is reminiscent of denying veal cattle iron or natural milk to ensure they remain weak and unable to exercise their muscles.

There is also the issue of socialization. Many farmed animals, including cows, pigs and rabbits, are naturally sociable and psychologically require healthy contact with other members of their species, particularly with their mothers during adolescence. Factory farming largely ignores those relationships. Young cattle are often denied any maternal contact, in order to preserve the mother’s milk for human consumption. Animals are often caged or together in inadequate indoor facilities, which promotes the spread of disease, aggressive fighting and even cannibalism. Similarly, when children are confined in large classrooms, they are more exposed to communicable diseases and subject to anti-social behaviors such as bullying.

Of course, proponents of schooling claim socialization is a primary benefit, especially compared with continued instruction from a parent (aka “homeschooling”). Yet as is true with most high-order mammals, human children require an extended period of exclusive access to a parent, ideally the mother, who serves as a model for proper social behavior. Children of the same age are inadequate substitutes. They cannot model behaviors that they themselves have not learned. Nor is a teacher in a position to do so, as one person is incapable of developing the necessary relationship of trust with several dozen children during normal “business” hours.

In the case of factory animals, socialization is deemed irrelevant, since the animals are destined to be slaughtered anyways. There’s no risk an isolated, depressed cow will grow up to be a criminal or a politician. With children, improper socialization often manifests itself as a host of neuroses and negative behaviors that will continue through their lifetimes. As adults, “farmed” children are akin to domesticated animals released into the wild. If you take a rabbit that’s been raised in a cage and drop him off in the woods, he’s likely to be killed within a day or so, as he’s never learned to act as a rabbit. Children, of course, simply go go to college and try to drink themselves into a stupor for four years.

(Just an aside here. In talking about factory farming, I’m not making a case against eating meat or advocating a vegetarian diet. Far from it. I would remind the audience that factory farming includes all forms of agriculture, including grains that many vegetarians build their diets on. It’s just harder to compare children to stalks of genetically engineered corn.)

Speaking of college, there’s also the principle that all children/animals must be strictly categorized based on estimated contribution to overall productivity. Experienced schoolmasters know how to separate the college-track children from the future food stamp recipients (although that line is a lot fuzzier these days). All children are rigorously tested so that schools can demonstrate their productivity or lack thereof. Think of them as laying hens expected to maximize egg production, even if it means burdening them with additional work and further restricting their ability to exercise. In factory egg production, male chicks of egg-laying breeds are simply discarded — in some cases they’re piled up and ground alive. Luckily, we don’t do that to the children who don’t end up in college. Most of them will be ground up by entry-level wage labor.

Finally, there’s the problem of sustainability. Neither public schooling nor factory farming can survive without government subsidies. That’s self-evident with schools. With factory farms, there are the subsidies for corn and grain production that displace grazing pastures; the USDA, which uses regulation to encourage large-scale production over local farms; and, most tellingly, the government’s role as a major purchaser of factory farm products. Public schools, after all, are a major purchaser of pasteurized cow’s milk.

The collapse of factory farming and public schools has been underway for some time. We’ve seen localized disruptions in the forms of “locavore” movements towards non-factory farms and a dramatic increase in homeschooling. There has been substantial government pushback, especially with respect to farms, but the die has been cast. Within 20 years at the most, the U.S. government will be forced to acknowledge it’s broke, which will bring a seemingly sudden end to the subsidies that underlie both factory farming and schooling. That will hasten the consumer exodus from both to the point where neither can exist in its present-day form.

Karen DeCoster posted a link to this video of a child (she looks about four) complaining that “marketing tricks us” into thinking girls want to be princesses and boys want to be superheroes.  I won’t disagree. What gets me is the entire “girls want to be princesses” concept. Last year, I was talking to a woman — a mother to multiple girls — who said her kids got up early to watch the Royal wedding because “they just love princesses.”

Being the inconsiderate jackass that I am, I noted that Kate Middleton was not a princess by account of her marriage. In the British system, a princess is the daughter of a sovereign. If and when Prince William — a prince by virtue of being a male-line descendant of the Queen — becomes Prince of Wales, then Middleton would take the courtesy title of princess, as Princess Diana did. Indeed, the custom of extending the title “prince” and “princess” to anyone other than the Prince of Wales only dates back to the rise of the House of Hanover in the 18th century, who essentially followed German custom in assigning those titles to other members of the Royal family. Even in modern Britain, “princess” is not a peerage. Prince William’s peerage is the Duchy of Cambridge; therefore, Middleton holds the courtesy title Duchess of Cambridge. But I guess no little girl grows up wanting to be a duchess.

More to the point, I don’t get the fantasy appeal of being a princess/duchess. Historically European monarchs used their daughters as diplomatic currency, arranging their marriages to other European monarchs, who oftentimes were there own cousins. Even princesses who became monarchs in their own right, like Queen Victoria, were abused and mistreated in their youth by cruel relatives. For that matter, even the fictional princesses of Disney movies — presumably the reason so many young girls have princess fantasies — are portrayed as helpless captives who have to be liberated by some heroic figure, oftentimes a complete stranger. I’m not sure that’s the healthiest role model for a four-year-old girl.

Of course, I don’t want to overstate things. Most girls emulate princesses simply because they like dressing up in pretty gowns and tiaras. They’re not longing for a restoration of the monarchy in America or aspiring to a life of social isolation. They abandon the princess fantasies well before adolescence, although, in most cases, not the love of pretty dresses and jewelry.

One of the few television shows I watch regularly is a program on the Food Network called “Chopped.” If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a competition where four chefs prepare a three-course dinner using a basket of mystery ingredients (one chef is “chopped” after each course). A November 2011 episode marked the first time I didn’t watch until the end, because the show was hijacked for White House propaganda purposes.

I guess for the Thanksgiving holiday, the competition decided to feature four women who work as cooks in school cafeterias (for some reason they were all from Connecticut). During the introductions there were sob stories about how what they do is essential and that many kids wouldn’t eat a hot meal except for government-subsidized school lunches. OK, this is manipulative, but I decided to continue watching.

But then it got much, much worse. Normally the competition is judged by three New York City restaurant chefs. But for this special event, one of the judges was Sam Kass, a chef and “senior advisor” to Michelle Obama. Normally the contestants are simply judged on the taste and presentation of their food. Kass was there to make sure whatever the chefs prepared was consistent with the new food pyramid and other government mandates regarding child nutrition.

The moment I turned off the show came during the presentation of the entrees. Kass looked at one of the chefs and said, in about as condescending a manner as possible, that her entree portion size was too big and that “we have an obesity crisis in this country.” And he’s saying this to the very same people he praised earlier for their “service to the country” in helping to prevent childhood hunger.

What Kass really did was emphasize how much the state manufactures “crises” to suit its short-term political needs. Are there a lot of dangerously overweight children? Probably, but that’s not  proof of of an “obesity crisis,” but rather a sign that children are being raised in unhealthy environments. And by “unhealthy environments,” I mean government schools.

Children are essentially pets. A classroom is a terrarium for small humans. They’re kept in a confined, artificial environment for most of the day, given limited opportunities to exercise or explore the larger world, and strictly told when and what to eat. You might as well be feeding them pellets and teaching them to use a litter box.

This isn’t just a function of the school system. It starts at birth when infants are placed in cages — er, cribs — and forcibly separated from their mothers for long periods of time. I won’t repeat what I wrote the other day, but suffice to say the roots of childhood obesity lay in training infants to associate food with packaging and artificial sources.

More importantly, food tends to be a continuous sources of conflict. Animals fight over scarce food to survive. Humans use food as a weapon of psychological destruction. Again, this starts in infancy. You can read any number of “parenting” books that tell parents to force babies onto strict feeding schedules, withhold food as punishment or, conversely, use food to reward desired behaviors (again, a case of treating a child like a pet). Obviously, schools use the artificial concept of “lunchtime” to dominate and control students. And even among adults, food produces conflict, such as the FDA crackdown on Amish farmers selling raw milk.

Kass and his “obesity crisis” managers would like to scapegoat private industry, notably fast food and junk food producers. One common argument is, “These companies target advertising to children.” Which is true. Yet nobody asks why these ads work. Sure, children may see a McDonald’s ad and plead with mom to take them there for dinner. But why does the mom agree? Maybe it’s to stop the children from nagging her. Maybe it’s to reward them for behaving in school. It’s certainly not because the food is high-quality nutrition. The reason is generally psychological — reiterating the idea that food is primarily a means of punishment and reward.

Karen DeCoster and I have a running dialogue about the “cupcake bubble” that started a couple years ago. When I lived in Washington, DC, I witnessed the growth of the specialty cupcake stores. Even living now in central Virginia, I see storefronts built around the (unsustainable) business model of selling $3 and $4 cupcakes. This especially offends Karen as she’s a “paleo” eater who prefers locally sourced organic meats and vegetables to sugars and processed foods.

Last month Karen went on a well-justified diatribe against the Golden Corral buffet chain for advertising its new “chocolate waterfall” dessert bar:

Americans are so sugar-addicted and are therefore resistant to real, whole, healthy foods. Additionally, modern culture embraces the lifelong adolescent while praising the ageless infant in an adult body. So to get Americans to eat, the food has to be a visual toy in order to engage the perpetually adolescent mind. Food must be a game and a play thing. If the masses are amused by their food, they might just eat it. Therefore, we take fruits and veggies and things and stick them in … the chocolate waterfall.

The only thing I take exception to here is Karen attributing this to “the ageless infant in an adult body.” I maintain it’s the other way around. The infant has been forced to adopt the unhealthy lifestyle of the adult. The poor eating habits we ascribe to children are, in fact, learned behaviors that are not innate to the infant.

The other day I talked about the threat breastfeeding poses to central planners who want to dictate every aspect of childhood development. The state, through the FDA and affiliated companies, spend billions marketing artificial milks (i.e., “formula”) to parents as a perfect substitute for human milk. The infant doesn’t choose to purchase or consume these products. The parent chooses to introduce processed food to the infant, often from the moment of birth. “Formula” isn’t even a standardized product. The same marketing brand may include several variations of formula.

When you introduce formula, you also introduce the bottle. The bottle is an object infants can play with. Many bottles contain colorful marketing logos — which, again, appeal to the parent buying the bottle, not the illiterate child who has yet to discover his own nose. Simply by shifting the child from breast to bottle, the not-yet-toddler learns that food is associated with objects rather than people. He learns that food is something to be entertained by.

By itself, this isn’t a big deal. So what if kids play with their food? Kids “play” with every object they are exposed to at a young age. It’s how they explore and learn about the world. The problem is that they’re not learning to be curious about food as food. They don’t learn where it comes from. A nursing toddler learns food comes from a person. A bottle-fed toddler learns it comes from a colorful, inanimate object. The more that kids associate food with packaging, the more disconnected they become from the nutritional and life-sustaining aspects of food.

Awhile back I saw an article in one of the Canadian papers about some group calling for three-year-olds to be placed in government schools. The funny thing was the group’s argument was less about what was in the best interests of the kids and more about promoting job growth. In other words, if we make all three-year-olds go to school, then we have to go out and hire a bunch of “qualified” teachers to watch them. This means not just a bunch of new teaching jobs, but jobs teaching the teachers (to become “qualified”) and, of course, parents can now go out and get jobs instead of staying home with their kids. It’s the Broken Window Fallacy, but with live humans instead of windows!

The period between birth and roughly the age of five is troublesome for central planners. As long as children remain dependent on their parents — and not “society,” as controlled by the state — there’s a risk of them developing habits that will become impossible to break once they enter a state-sanctioned institution, i.e. Kindergarten. The state has made several inroads to separate children from parents, such as the demonization of “co-sleeping,” the practice of a mother and child sleeping together. Periodically you’ll see hysterical local news reports warning about the dangers of co-sleeping, which of course has been safely practiced by humans for thousands of years. To the extent there are problems with co-sleeping, it’s because of inappropriate bedding material or the parent’s general unfitness (i.e., they’re alcoholics). Co-sleeping itself is a necessary product of human evolution. Few mammalian species leave their children alone at night to fend for themselves.

The real problem is that co-sleeping, like many aspects of early childhood, is a relationship that exists outside of the state. There’s no government regulation of co-sleeping. A parent who foregoes a crib (a product regulated by federal authorities) and a separate bedroom for her child is not spending money — and thus, not paying sales taxes to the local government. More alarmingly, the child isn’t being taught to substitute material desire for human contact. In the eyes of central planners, a peaceful co-sleeping child is an abomination. An isolated child “comforted” by a $100 Teddy bear is a future consumer-and-taxpayer-in-training.

Then there’s the single biggest threat to state control of childhood — breastfeeding. Officially, governments claim to support breastfeeding, and there are any number of propaganda sites where you’ll see such messages. But that’s just a facade. The planners go out of their way to encourage rejection of breastfeeding as anything more than a short-term option. Consider the widespread demonization of the female breast, as exemplified by the FCC’s long crusade to punish a brief appearance by Janet Jackson’s nipples on national television. I’m not suggesting there was some hidden FCC agenda to discourage breastfeeding; I’m saying that the government gladly promotes the cultural taboo that breasts are sexual objects first and a source of infant nutrition second.

More recently, the FDA has crusaded against raw animal milks sold by farmers. The FDA insists, without evidence, that such milks are always unsafe to consumer. Which begs the question: If raw animal milks are always unsafe, how can raw human milk ever be safe? Remember, the FDA regulates the content of infant formula (even though the term “formula” falsely implies there’s a uniform composition to these artificial milks). It can’t regulate the content of human milk. Government agencies generally don’t like anyone competing with them, and this case, every nursing mother is little more than a potential terrorist.

“Extended” nursing — breastfeeding past one year — poses a major challenge for central planners. As with co-sleeping, which promotes frequent nursing, the longer a child depends on his mother for nutrition, the longer he’s kept away from the state-managed food system. Human milk does not follow USDA dietary guidelines. A nursing toddler is “untrained.” In a school environment, he can be forced to delay eating until an arbitrary “lunchtime.” He can be kept immobile at his desk until an arbitrary “recess,” assuming one is even allowed, so he can’t work off the calories he just consumed. He can learn to be sedentary and passive.

Ideally, if you extend the “let’s put three-year-olds in school” argument to its logical conclusion, human children would be separated from their mothers soon after birth, much like dairy farmers do with goats. This way, their diet can be strictly monitored for compliance with federal guidelines, mothers could re-enter the workforce sooner (driving down employers’ labor costs), and children would learn from the age of three months or so that they can’t exist outside the central planners’ view of “society.” And hopefully, they’ll finally do well on those  standardized tests!

There are two broad arguments for copyright. The first is rights-based: Copyright constitutes a form of “intellectual property” that must be protected like tangible property. The second argument is utilitarian: Copyright generates a net benefit for society.

In reviewing the copyright debate, I find the utilitarian argument can be reduced thusly: Copyright benefits society because it protects jobs and cultural identity. Copyright advocates almost always point to short-term economic impact as justification for restricting the public domain. In their minds, copyright is first and foremost about protecting existing jobs in copyright-dependent industries, notably large entertainment companies. This goes hand-in-hand with “protecting cultural identity,” which is the belief that inadequate copyright protection will ultimately lead to a reduction in future cultural “output,” reducing the morale of society as a whole.

There is a related, non-copyright example of this argument — and its fallacy — in the form of taxpayer-subsidized sports stadiums. Whenever a local government is called on to “invest” in such a facility, the argument almost perfectly mirrors the utilitarian case for copyright noted above. First, it’s about jobs. A stadium creates hundreds of short-term construction jobs, advocates say, while supporting thousands of low-wage service jobs during the lifespan of the facility. Second, stadiums are about a city’s cultural identity. I remember years ago when the mayor of the District of Columbia successfully fleeced his city council into spending several hundred million dollars on a stadium to lure a Major League Baseball team. Many analysts noted the mayor’s claims of expected financial benefits form the stadium were exaggerated if not downright false. But that didn’t matter. One prominent newspaper columnist openly derided any attempt at fiscal analysis and said this was about protecting the “soul” of DC and resolving its “identity crisis.”

When you make that type of argument, it’s not about constructing a useful building, but erecting a monument. And when one city has such a monument, other cities want their own. This devolves into a business model that ignores customers and long-term growth completely in favor of maximizing present-day consumption.

Which is exactly what has happened with copyright. Instead of building stadiums, however, legislatures erect monuments in the form of further restrictions on free speech and the public domain. It’s not enough to maintain the existing scope of copyright, just as no respectable sports team would play in a small, outdated facility. The government must show its devotion to preserving these business models by thwarting the market’s efforts to dictate otherwise. It doesn’t matter that the beneficiaries are wealthy franchise owners and multinational entertainment conglomerates. When it comes to protecting a city or society’s “cultural identity,” government intervention isn’t just desirable but mandatory.

All this is fallacy. Taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, like copyright, diminishes rather than protects culture. Copyright diminishes culture by restricting the public domain — which is the culture — and subsidizing a non-productive enterprise in the form of intellectual property law. Similarly, stadium funding schemes don’t generate wealth; they simply redistribute capital that a free market would otherwise allocate to potentially thousands of different uses, including other cultural products. Rather than the government spending $400 million to build one cultural product, millions of individual consumers would spend those funds on other sports, concerts, books, etc. All subsidies do is guarantee more of the subsidized product than would otherwise exist in the marketplace.

I second Robert Wenzel’s support for using sex scandals to bring down politicians like Anthony Weiner:

Political leaders are not private individuals, they are power hungry bastards trying to control my life in a multitude of ways, mostly to expand their own power.

I certainly would object to the treatment given Weiner, if it was done to a private individual who was not attempting to interfere in my life, but this treatment for a  political leader is a completely different situation.

If a man is putting a gun at me and I can throw him off for just a minute by creating a sex scandal to distract him, I am going to do it. In Chicago once, in the wee small hours of the morning, a punk tried to mug me, I fought back and I think that dude is still running.

Weiner and his gang, the Congress of the United States, are harassing me with rules and regulations everyday, trying to control my life. They have guns, more guns and, if needed nuclear weapons. I can’t make then run like I can a punk mugger.

No one who might have seen me take down the mugger would have ever thought, “Oh my, how terrible. Why can’t Wenzel debate this guy over the merits of mugging. Fighting is so crude, you should never do it. At Harvard, they simply debate the ethics of theft.”

This has been a pet gripe of mine for as long as I’ve hung around the fringes of the libertarian movement. Many of the self-styled leaders of said movement love nothing more than to talk about liberty and freedom — but they’re not terribly eager to get their hands dirty in actually doing something to stop the “power hungry bastards,” as Wenzel calls them. There’s a certain sense of detached elitism among certain libertarians who insist on a 100% “ideas” approach to advancing liberty. These folks are condescending, if not outright hostile, towards any form of direct action that might compromise their self-image as intellectual leaders.

It’s not that I’m anti-ideas. I simply think one should employ any available tool to advance the cause. I have no problem, in many cases, with using the exact same techniques the state uses against us. Now there are limits. You can’t go around blowing up buildings and murdering innocent people — as the US and many other states do on a daily basis. But digging through a guy’s personal life and using the information to blackmail or humiliate him? Sign me up!

Listen, I’ve written hundreds of articles detailing the problems of antitrust aggression in the US. And I’ll keep writing about the subject. But if, hypothetically speaking, someone sends me a legitimate video of FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz having sex with farm animals, then yeah, I’m uploading that sucker to YouTube and promoting the shit out of it. I’m not going to think twice about the impact on him or his family. He’s an evil man who spends every waking moment trying to destroy the lives and liberties of me and every other American.

There are no style points here. If you can find a way to bring down any government official, you take it, especially if it doesn’t involve the use of weapons or physical force.

I’d also note that we shouldn’t limit our pursuits to just the elected or high-ranking officials. Most of the actual abuses of individual rights come from low-level employees. I’ve long advocated going after these folks with the same vigor that we pursue the Anthony Weiners. Wenzel talks about getting politicians “walking on egg shells,” afraid to impose new mandates out of fear of retaliation-via-scandal. I would respectfully suggest, however, that the better objective is to demoralize state officials rather then making them afraid. Fear can often lead to an even nastier backlash. But if you demoralize a person, they won’t even want to get out of the bed in the morning and go to their nice little government office.

Remember, most of these mid- and low-level minions thrive on the self-esteem generated by hurting other people. There’s quite a rush in destroying a person’s livelihood as part of your own “job.” The only way to effectively turn the tables on these folks is to take that emotional reward away from them. This doesn’t necessarily require a scandal. It can be as simple as, to put it nicely, treating them like crap. A little emotional abuse and scorn can go a long way. It need not devolve into anything remotely illegal — and it should never involve threats — but it does involve a vocal absence of civility.

George Washington University — which I may have once attended, though I’ll deny it under oath — has adopted a gender-neutral housing policy for all students, including freshmen. In other words, guys can choose to room with girls and vice versa. The Washington Post is positively giddy with anticipation:

The change marks a retreat in the parental authority college officials at many schools once routinely wielded over their undergraduates dating to the days when dorm mothers stopped opposite-gender guests at the front doors of residence halls.

But the policy also signals the rising clout of gay, lesbian and transgendered students, who successfully argued that assigning students by gender was inherently unfair when many of them might be more comfortable with a roommate of the opposite sex. University officials considered opening the gender-neutral option to only some students before deciding to lift the restriction for all.

[ . . . ]

The proposal, first aired last winter, prompted concerns from some conservative students who argued it could create additional housing costs, especially if many couples became roommates, then later requested room transfers. Some also suggested that the new housing policy might erode morality and trouble some parents.

“This is the liberal administration at the university imposing something on students,” said Travis Korson, a senior international affairs major and president of the campus chapter of Young America’s Foundation. “None of these systems have been around for more than five years. There’s no way to prove they will be successful.”

The Post really had to stretch here to manufacture the “other side” of the story. Exactly what “morality” is there to “erode”? We’re talking here about a social custom — or taboo, if you will — rather than a moral question. And morality is a function of the individuals involved. If GW admits students with strong ethical foundations, then it need not worry about its housing policies; if, on the other hand, the students are a bunch of degenerate assholes — and that’s a strong possibility given that it’s GW — then you’re fucked whether or not you allow opposite-sex roommates.

Now as for the Young America’s Foundation guy and his token opposition quote — if he’s such a moral conservative, what’s he doing at a school with a “liberal administration” in the first place? It’s silly to voluntarily attend a “liberal” school and then complain it’s too liberal. And it’s not as if the administration “imposed” anything on students. The policy is that students can voluntarily choose an opposite-sex roommate. Students who ask for a randomly-assigned roommate will get someone of the same sex. An “imposition” would be if the administration forced liberal and conservative students to share rooms.

Now all that said, this story leads me to ask a practical question: Why are universities still in the business of student housing? If these were mere private apartment buildings instead of “dormitories,” there wouldn’t be a story here. GW was historically a commuter school that only recently expanded its presence in the housing business. As the Post noted, schools in general are moving away from the “parental authority” model — as well they should — and if that’s the case, then they should also move out of the dormitory business. Housing is really nothing more than a cog — albeit a large cog — in the bureaucratic machinery of the modern university. It helps inflate overall demand for university services and keeps the “retail” prices higher than they need be. It can also exacerbate tensions between universities and the “permanent” residents — which has long been an issue for GW.