Ray Harvey

A reader writes:

Dear Ray: Awhile ago you answered a reader’s question about side-stitches that was equally informative and made me laugh so hard I spit coffee all over my computer screen!! I was looking for it to show my Girlfriend (whom has been battling side-stiches since she started running) and could not find it! Did you delete it!?

– dodgybiker9

Dear dodgybiker9:

Yes, I did delete it, just recently. But here it is again:

Dear Ray Harvey: I’m a fellow who exercises regularly. As a result, I often find myself the victim of a multitude of aches and pains, including these peculiar shooting pains in my balls. Without a doubt, though, the pain that plagues me most are side aches. What ARE these things?

Doubled Over

Dear Doubled Over: The side stitch is a mysterious thing. One theory, by far the most commonly accepted these days, is that side aches are the result of the diaphragm going into a state of what some call tetanic contraction, which is basically another of these generic terms that means next to nothing. When we inhale, our lungs fill with air. This in turn presses downward upon the diaphragm. Exhaling brings the diaphragm back up, so that if there’s any trapped air below the diaphragm, the diaphragm will cramp on the right-hand side. This same sort of cramping can also come about if food is consumed just before exercising.

There are a number of ideas about how best to prevent the side stitch — among them: take deep, deep belly breaths; eat more calcium; warm up gradually; strengthen the lower back and the midsection; avoid running downhill; avoid eating before exercise. But this is mostly just talky-talky, with probably not a hell of a lot of truth to it. Plenty of people, for instance, get side aches on their left-hand side, or even on both sides simultaneously. I know because I happen to be one of these people, as you can see. Additionally, plenty of people eat and drink immediately before exercising, or even during exercise, and yet never get side stitches. Also, many people run downhill and do not get them. In short, sir, I’m afraid you’re on your own.

Best of luck with your balls.

Thirty-one years after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, Giorgio Vasari wrote Leonardo’s biography, from which the famous painting got its name: The Mona Lisa — or, as it’s known in Italian, La Gioconda, and in French La Joconde.

Before Vasari, the painting had been referred to as “a certain Florentine lady.” Later, in the collection at Fontainebleau, “a courtesan in a gauze veil.”

Leonardo’s panel is undated and unsigned, and although most portraits of that time included something to indicate the sitter’s family name or social status, no such emblem can be found in the Mona Lisa…. Some speculate that the Mona Lisa is not a portrait of one woman, but an artful composite of many, Leonardo’s idealization of all womanhood. Others suggest it may have been one of Da Vinci’s young male models in drag. Some even believe that the Mona Lisa is not a portrait at all, but instead what is known as a “finzione,” an invention of Leonardo’s extraordinary imagination (source).

According to Vasari, Leonardo devoted four full years to painting the Mona Lisa — which, however, covers only a fraction more than five-and-a-half square feet of surface.

Worthy of the painting itself is Walter Pater’s unforgettable description of the Mona Lisa:

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.”

It’s not nuclear. Quoting Annalee Newitz, at i09:

“[W]hen accidents happen, the deadliest and costliest source of energy is water — especially when it’s held back by poorly-designed dams. The Chernobyl disaster doesn’t come close to the damage done when a dam at a hydroelectric plant bursts.”

Here’s her rundown:

1975: Shimantan/Banqiao Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 171,000
Cost: $8,700,000,000
What happened: Shimantan Dam in China’s Henan province fails and releases 15.738 billion tons of water, causing widespread flooding that destroys 18 villages and 1500 homes and induces disease epidemics and famine

1979: Morvi Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 1500 (estimated)
Cost: $1,024,000,000
What happened: Torrential rain and unprecidented flooding caused the Machchu-2 dam, situated on the Machhu river, to burst. This sent a wall of water through the town of Morvi in the Indian State of Gujarat.

1998: Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Jess Oil Pipeline Explosion
Type of power: Oil
Human lives lost: 1,078
Cost: $54,000,000
What happened:Petroleum pipeline ruptures and explodes, destroying two villages and hundreds of villagers scavenging gasoline.

1944: East Ohio Gas Company
Type of power: Liquified natural gas (LNG)
Human lives lost: 130
Cost: $890,000,000
What happened: Explosion at LNG facility destroys one square mile of Cleveland, OH.

1907: Monongah Coal Mine
Type of power: Coal
Human lives lost: 362
Cost: $162,000,000
What happened: Underground explosion traps workers and destroys railroad bridges leading into the mine.

Compare these to:

1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Type of power: Nuclear
Human lives lost: 4,056 (Source for this number: United Nations Scientific Subcommittee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation)
Cost: $6,700,000,000
What happened: Mishandled reactor safety test at Chernobyl nuclear reactor causes steam explosion and meltdown, necessitating the evacuation of 300,000 people from Kiev, Ukraine and dispersing radioactive materials across Europe.

A lot of this research was based on public policy professor Andrew Sovacool’s extremely informative monograph “The Accidental Century,” which looks at power plant disasters in the twentieth century in great detail.

(Link)

In 2006, a movie director named Davis Guggenheim made a documentary about former Vice President Albert Gore and his global warming propaganda campaign. That movie is entitled An Inconvenient Truth, and since its release, the term “global warming” has, as you may have heard, fallen completely out of fashion — ostensibly because the earth has not warmed as predicted. “Climate change” and “climate chaos” have thus become the preferred nomenclature.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore — who, incidentally, told Grist Magazine that “Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are” — spat out a pile of doomsday scenarios, which his millions of minions indiscriminately swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Among those scenarios, none, perhaps, was more frequently regurgitated than Gore’s claim that “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Of course, the (inconvenient) truth about Kilimanjaro has been known for some time: as George Kaser (et al) published in the International Journal of Climatology, the snows of Kilimanjaro began receding around 1890 — which is to say, long before the advent of mass CO2 output. But we’ve written about that before, as have many others, like Dutch scientist Jaap Sinninghe Damste, winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize, and please see also the following recent article in New Scientist: Kilimanjaro’s Vanishing Ice Due To Tree-Felling.

Now, however, there’s this:

And this:

If there is a poster child for global warming, it may be the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro, which were predicted to disappear as early as 2015 in a widely-publicized report a decade ago.

However, the famed snowcap is stubbornly persisting on the African peak and may not fully vanish for another 50 years, according to a University of Massachusetts scientist who had a hand in the prediction.

The 2001 forecast was indirectly part of key evidence for global warming offered during the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which warned of the threats of rising global temperatures. In it, former vice president Al Gore stated, “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro” due to warming temperatures.

“Unfortunately, we made the prediction. I wish we hadn’t,” says Douglas R. Hardy, a UMass geoscientist who was among 11 co-authors of the paper in the journal Science that sparked the pessimistic Kilimanjaro forecast. “None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now” (source).

And this:

Physicist loses civility over Gore’s Kilimanjaro claims: ‘That dishonest a##hole can no longer surprise anyone’

Al Gore and his representatives have declined to comment.

(Hat tip Climate Depot)

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.

In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable.” Doctor Braithwaite’s unequivocal conclusion:

“There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

“By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite” (“It Would Be Nice to Know More about Ice,” Jay Lehr).

On the basis of that logical fallacy known as the fallacy of insufficient evidence, all glacier fears are stopped cold right there.

But in fact that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keith Echelmeyer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, says this:

“To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do… The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response.”

Mr. Echelmeyer goes on to tell us that in Alaska there are large glaciers advancing in the very same areas where others are retreating.

Quoting Doctor Martin Beniston of the Institute of Geography at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

Numerous climatological details of mountains are overlooked by the climate models, which thus makes it difficult to estimate the exact response of glaciers to global warming, because glacier dynamics are influenced by numerous factors other than climate, even though temperature and cloudiness may be the dominant controlling factors. According to the size, exposure and altitude of glaciers, different response times can be expected for the same climatic forcing.

Of course, as Doctor Beniston intimates, the paramount thing to consider in any discussion of glacial melt is the sheer size of these suckers, which because of their size do not respond to heat and cold like the snow in your backyard. According to the excellent glacier program at Rice University, those response times run something like this:

Ice sheet: 100,000 to 10,000 years

Large valley glacier: 10,000 to 1,000 years

Small valley glacier: 1,000 to 100 years

Glaciers are influenced by a variety of local and regional natural phenomena that scientists do not fully comprehend. Besides temperature changes, glaciers also respond to changes in the amount and type of precipitation, changes in sea level and changes in ocean circulation patterns. As a result, glaciers do not necessarily advance during colder weather and retreat during warmer weather (John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy).

Glaciers Are In World-Wide Retreat — read one New York Times headline recently.

Well, they were anyway, starting decades before industrialization (i.e. increased CO2 output). As IPCC AR4 reports:

Most mountain glaciers and ice caps have been shrinking, with the retreat probably having started about 1850 [NB: the end of the 'little ice age']. Although many Northern Hemisphere glaciers had a few years of near balance around 1970, this was followed by increased shrinkage.

Research published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the much-touted Peruvian glacier (on p. 53-53) disappeared a few thousand years ago.

There are, moreover, glaciers forming across the globe, in both hemispheres. Here’s a very partial list:

In Norway: Alfotbreen Glacier, Briksdalsbreen Glacier, Nigardsbreen Glacier, Hardangerjøkulen Glacier, Hansebreen Glacier, Jostefonn Glacier, Engabreen Glacier, Helm Glacier, Place Glacier. Indeed, a great number of Scandinavia’s glaciers are exploding.

In France, the Mount Blanc Glacier.

In Ecuador, Antizana 15 Alpha Glacier.

In Argentine, Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest in all of Patagonia, was recently observed to be advancing at about 6 feet per day.

Chile’s Pio XI Glacier, the largest in the southern hemisphere, is also growing.

In Switzerland, Silvretta Glacier.

In Kirghiztan, Abramov Glacier.

In Russian, Malli Glacier is growing and surging.

In New Zealand, as of 2003, all 48 glaciers in the Southern Alps were observed to have grown.

In the United States: Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Shuksan, Mount Shasta, Mount McKinley, Mount Hubbard, and Rocky Mountain National Park have all shown recent glacier growth.

“There is evidence that the McGinnis Glacier, a little-known tongue of ice in the central Alaska Range, has surged,” said assistant Professor of Physics Martin Truffer. He recently noticed the lower portion of the glacier was covered in cracks, crevasses, and pinnacles of ice – all telltale signs that the glacier has recently slid forward at higher than normal rates.

There’s also this article from the Associated Press, which I quote only in part:

Geologists exploring Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Park say that they discovered more than 100 additional glaciers here in a single summer, said Mark Verrengia.

Officials previously believed the park, which is 60 miles northwest of Denver, included 20 permanent ice and snow features, including six named glaciers. The new survey, conducted by geologist Jonathan Achuff, shows there are as many as 120 features.

“Comparisons with historical photos suggest that at least some of the glaciers are expanding,” say park officials. “Subtle climate changes may be helping the formation of glaciers or at least reducing their retreat.”

“We’re not running quite in sync with global warming here,” park spokeswoman Judy Visty said.

Not, of course, that it really matters much either way, since the entire climate change issue is predicated upon a stupendously fraudulent premise: a corrupt epistemology.

To say nothing of the fact that, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, the free market is far better equipped to deal with environmental issues than proposed socialist policies — for the simple reason that free markets generate astronomically more capital with which to deal with such issues.

The wealthier the country, the healthier the country.

A reader reminded me that spring has just begun, and that in turn reminded me of a peculiar poem I’ve always liked, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), whose poetry is wildly erratic. This is Edna St. Vincent Millay at her best:

Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

(Link)

Ophelia: Woe is me
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see.

– Hamlet Act III, scene i

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
– Hamlet Act III, scene ii

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, in Stratford — a tiny village with at that time a population of approximately 1,500. In the summer of 1579, when Shakespeare was 15-years-old, a young woman named Katherine Hamlet fell into the river Avon and drowned, an incident the young William Shakespeare would surely have known about.

Is Shakespeare all that?

[UPDATE: The sudden interest in this subject and the subsequent glut of traffic that that interest has generated has also, not quite coincidentally, generated a number of requests for my "nuclear credentials" and "my scientific qualifications." As a bartender, I am of course eminently qualified to discuss these and similar issues, and I refer all curious readers to the following: Interview]

In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, one article I wrote just over a year ago entitled “Nuclear Waste Does Not Exist” has generated, in the past two days, an astonishing amount traffic. It is no secret that I’m a proponent of nuclear energy — for reasons I outline in a different article called Wind Or Nuclear? — and so I’ve watched with great interest and dismay as misinformation about nuclear energy spreads faster than the Code Red virus infected the world’s computers.

Fortunately, people like Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, among others, are working very hard to dispel the mass hysteria building around the Japanese nuclear facilities.

Dr. Oehmen is a PhD scientist whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. Dr. Oehmen writes:

I am writing this text (Mar 12, [2011]) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.

There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.

By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By “not free of errors” I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism – that is quite normal these days. By “not free of errors” I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.

I urge you to read Dr. Oehmen’s full article here.

Also edifying is William Tucker’s excellent explanation, which reads, in part:

Even while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.

Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a longtime opponent of nuclear power, has warned of “another Chernobyl” and predicted “the same thing could happen here.” In response, he has called for an immediate suspension of licensing procedures for the Westinghouse AP1000, a “Generation III” reactor that has been laboring through design review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for seven years.

Before we respond with such panic, though, it would be useful to review exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it.

The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can’t have a “runaway reactor,” nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.

Once the reactor has shut down, there remains “decay heat” from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.

On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified “passive” cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.

If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate.

If the coolant continues to evaporate, the water level can fall below the level of the fuel rods, exposing them. This will cause a meltdown, meaning the fuel rods melt to the bottom of the steel pressure vessel.

Early speculation was that in a case like this the fuel might continue melting right through the steel and perhaps even through the concrete containment structure—the so-called China syndrome, where the fuel would melt all the way to China. But Three Mile Island proved this doesn’t happen. The melted fuel rods simply aren’t hot enough to melt steel or concrete.

The decay heat must still be absorbed, however, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.

None of this amounts to “another Chernobyl.” The Chernobyl reactor had two crucial design flaws. First, it used graphite (carbon) instead of water to “moderate” the neutrons, which makes possible the nuclear reaction. The graphite caught fire in April 1986 and burned for four days. Water does not catch fire.

Second, Chernobyl had no containment structure. When the graphite caught fire, it spouted a plume of radioactive smoke that spread across the globe. A containment structure would have both smothered the fire and contained the radioactivity.

If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact.

(Link)

William Tucker, incidentally, is the fellow I quoted at length in my initial article, along with Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility.

Pandemonium erupts in Madison, Wisconsin, as pro-union protesters converge upon the Capitol to protest the passage of Governor Scott Walker’s so-called union-bargaining bill.

The following is an unedited email, presumably written by a union thug — judging, at least, by the lingo — and published on the website of 620 WTMJ radio, Madison. The letter is relatively short, and if you can stomach it, read every word, typos and all:

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the
message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t
tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives
of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!

Reply Reply to all Forward

You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star.

Another nobody kid raised in a half-broken home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly care.

Yet you were inherently happy. Your smile burst across your face like a star shell. Happiness was in your bones, your blood, your ectomorphic body, not tall, but a natural-born athlete from head to toe.

The college coaches all went crazy for you, but your test scores were poor. You never quite made the grade. You served instead as a gunnery sergeant in the war: a gunner, a dead-eye.

But when you shook the high school rafters that late-autumn night, scoring seventy-eight points, shooting twenty-for-twenty in the second half, both sides of the bleachers erupting for your grace, the purity of your touch, your form, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing – you were beautiful.

When you won the 100 yard dash and the 220 against all the big-city boys, edging out by fractions two future Olympians – you were beautiful.

When, at thirty-two, you lied about your age and won a tryout with the Denver Nuggets and made it down to the final cut, still going strong, still a gunner, a sniper from the three-point line, then busted your ankle in a fall – you were beautiful.

And are you beautiful still in your oil-stained clothes, turning wrenches at the garage, your thin black fingers spiderlike among the parts? Do you still have that delicate touch?

Are you beautiful with your scuffed-up knuckles and your immutable smile, your snaggly teeth and skeletal face?

Are you beautiful in those filthy hightop sneakers and that jumpsuit mechanic uniform, your chocolate slab of forelock hanging lank across your cheek?

Are you beautiful in your small hometown, moving into middle-age, still so thin, so graceful-looking, filling in part-time at the cowboy hat store? Is your uncanny coordination fading with disuse? Your infallible sense of direction and time?

I saw you once when you were drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup on the fire escape of your tenement building. It was the middle of August. You wore a white tanktop and pleated gray slacks. You looked very elegant. The day was dying. The trees beyond stood iron-black against the sky. The staircases along the outer buildings were duplicated in isometric shadows across the orange brick walls. I was visiting a woman who lived across the street, and I could see you from her kitchen window. You sat on those metal steps for a long time. The sky flared and then emptied out into a draining reef – a reef of green. Darkness came. The first stars appeared. Still, you sat. You sat and sat, and after a while, the stars began to shoot and fall.

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Justice — also known as equity — is nothing more or less than the legal recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and her own property.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term rights as, in part, “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.”

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

The primary thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Compulsory taxation, for instance, means that you are not free to do whatever you wish with your own money, because the government may at any time legally compel you to give to government any amount it specifies.

Voluntary action hinges upon the principle of individual rights:
Are we each free to live as we choose, provided we do not infringe upon the equal rights of others? Or not?

The most fundamental political question is this: Do we rightfully own ourselves, or do others rightfully have jurisdiction over us?

To ask that question is to answer it.

America is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly and principally upon the concept of individual rights.

At root, there’s really only one way to infringe upon another’s rights, and that is through the instigation of force. Quoting the 19th century political thinker Auberon Herbert:

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it – so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership – force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

As Auberon Herbert notes, force can be direct, as in assault and rape, or indirect, as in fraud or extortion. There’s no other way to breach rights than through the (direct or indirect) instigation of force.

Laws that restrict freedom of production and trade (such as cap-and-trade laws) are an indirect use of force.

Trade tariffs are an indirect use of force.

Military conscription is a direct use of force.

Rights, I repeat, are a formal codification of human freedom.
This includes the freedom to trade.

Rights are ethical principles, and they are political principles. As such, rights delimit human freedom in large groups.

This latter thing is emphasized because rights would not need to be discovered if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society.

Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights; for if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

In the final analysis, there’s only the right to your own life: all others – from liberty, to property, to the pursuit of happiness – are an extension of that one.

Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible (Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, 1884).

The crux of freedom is rights.

The crux of rights is human individuation and moral agency.

A deep connection exists between the right to life and the right to property. The importance of this connection cannot be overstated, yet it is precisely this connection that the leftwing and rightwing are both equally ignorant of.

Quoting Claude Frédéric Bastiat:

Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is property (Claude Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1848).

Property is “not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases” (Lectric Law Library).

That is precisely why the crux of freedom and free markets is private property.

It is also why environmentalism, as all other forms of socialism, is inherently anti-freedom.

The reason that laissez faire is the proper social system is not because it “works best,” as many nominal defenders of free markets never tire of telling us. Laissez faire is proper, rather, because it is just. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only economic system that respects and protects the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and free exchange.

One must never forget: money is property. Money is the symbol of your labor.

The root of real wealth is production.

Compulsory (as opposed to voluntary) taxation is a breach of property rights. It is also, again in the words of Bastiat, “legalized plunder.”

Individual rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light. And yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason they’ve remained resilient is that they are in a certain sense self-evident: we each, as John Locke said, “have a property in our own person.”

That is the fundamental principle behind rights, and property is an extension of person, nothing more and nothing less.

If you believe in human freedom, you perforce believe in the freedom to trade – fully. For if humans are not allowed to trade freely, humans are not truly free.

No freedom or justice can exist if rights, including property rights, do not exist.

Indeed, the very word rights has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus, as in justice. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.”

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms – specifically, the freedom to act in a certain way. Notice the phrase “freedom to act”; it is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

What, though, fundamentally, is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made of?

To begin with, rights are not primaries: they are second-order principles that derive from something deeper. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition. It is the faculty of choice.

If human behavior were automatic, as it is with animals, there would be no question of rights because any action we undertook would not be chosen. Human action would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, and rights would therefore not exist.

The grizzly bear who mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

Thus rights are the link between ethics and politics.

Which is why Herbert Spencer and other freethinkers regarded rights as “ethical-political precepts.”

Quoting Samuel Adams:

Among the natural rights are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are another of these things that everyone thinks he understands, but which in fact almost nobody does.

To get some idea of how poorly understood the nature of rights is, one need only look at the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and observe the sheer number of times one would have to breach the rights (usually in the form of property expropriation – i.e.: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”) of some individual somewhere to achieve even a fraction of that Declaration’s stated goals. The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights is a tour-de-force of postmodern, multicultural, neo-Marxist non-thought.

Leftwingers tell us we have the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a smoke-free work environment, and so on.

Rightwingers, on the other hand, say we do not have the right to open our liquor stores on Sunday, we do not have the right to consensual sex with prostitutes, we do not have the right to gamble, et cetera.

Despite what you’ve been told, these views are not opposites; they are a variation on an identical theme, and their common denominator is this: Humans do not possess the inalienable right to life and property, and government bureaucrats are better suited than we ourselves to tell us how we must live. Yet the fact is, there is nothing in nature, neither human nature nor nature apart from humans, that gives government bureaucrats legitimate authority over the person or property of any other human being.

To say that we have the “right to healthcare,” or the “right to a job,” or the “right to a smoke-free work environment” is the same as saying we have the right to the life, labor, and property of another, which we do not and cannot – by virtue of what rights are.

Rights by definition preclude any claim to the person and property of another, even if that person is a doctor.

To say that humans do not have the right to open their liquor stores on Sunday if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to have consensual sex with prostitutes if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to gamble and use drugs if they choose, is the same as saying your life is not yours by right but belongs in some measure to bureaucrats, and that humans to that extent exist only by those bureaucrats’ permission — this in spite of the fact that no government and no governmental bureaucracy in the history of the world has ever proved itself more capable of running the individual’s life better than the individual herself.

Government compulsion, rightwing or left, is the antithesis of individual rights.

There is no such thing as a “collective right,” not in any variation.

Rights, by definition, can only belong to the individuals who make up any “collective.”

That is why the very term individual rights is pleonastic in the ultimate purport, albeit necessarily so: the very definition of the word presupposes individual, since it is only individuals who can properly possess rights.

Quoting George Reisman, who is echoing his friend and mentor Ludwig von Mises:

Only individuals exist; collectives consist of nothing but individuals. Only the individual thinks; only the individual acts; only the life of the individual has value and is important. All rights are rights of individuals.

As it happens, there’s an absolutely foolproof method that exists for determining if something is a right or not:

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you follow that simple principle, and if you remember that property is nothing more than an extension of person, and that money is also property, you’ll never confuse the issue of rights.


[This article appeared, in a slightly altered form, in Chapter 30 of my book].

The mob captured in the following video calls to mind Massachusetts Congressman Michael Capuano’s recent instructions to unions: “Time to get a little bloody.”

Watch:

If you don’t have the time or the stomach to watch, here are some of the highpoints:

“Shame! Shame! Shame!”

“Fuck you! Fuck you!”

All the while clubbing that cheesy tribal drum, backing Grothman up to the side of a building, harassing him across the lawn, cornering him.

Grothman was eventually rescued by Democratic Senator Brett Hulsey.

Barack Obama, whose Organizing For America helped organize this protest, has yet to comment, despite his recent platitudinous appeals to “make all our children proud and improve the national tone.” AFL-CIO union boss Richard Trumka has been likewise silent.

It all just depends upon whose ox is being gored, I guess.