OK, I’m a bit late, but I finally noticed Zombyboy’s post about which Heinlein novel is the best and all the comments that elicited. Friday? Job? Time Enough for Love? You must be kidding.

Other suggestions are more respectable. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is an obvious choice, as is Stranger in a Strange Land. I think both are too obvious. Starship Troopers is worthy of mention. The Door Into Summer is a more perceptive choice. IMHO, it’s the best time travel novel ever.

Many people have noted that Heinlein’s juvenile science fiction represents some of his best writing, so Tunnel in the Sky is a worthy mention, although Red Planet is a better choice.

Personally, I’ve always thought that Heinlein’s short stories were, on average, much better than his novels. The Green Hills of Earth, The Menace from Earth, and Assignment in Eternity are just wonderful collections. And, mixing short and long items, there’s the "future history series" compilation, The Past Through Tomorrow. Heinlein’s future history series is just awesome in its scope, vision, and realization. There’s nothing else like it.

But his best novel? There’s simply no question, and I can’t believe no one at Resurrection Song even mentioned it. Heinlein’s best novel is absolutely Glory Road.

Although, I must admit I liked Farnham’s Freehold a lot, too.

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Great helpings of fresh bloggy goodness await you at this week’s Carnival of Liberty. Host Stephen Littau at Fearless Philosophy has done a terrific job of introducing the posts, and it looks like there are many must-reads. So, go read!

And don’t forget to check out this week’s winning entries at Watcher of Weasels. Members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions,  I’m submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process. This is my shameless attempt to curry favor with the Watcher.

Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

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Peter Robinson, author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, is one of the guest hosts on the Hugh Hewitt radio show this week. Today, he told a nice Reagan story. It seems there was this little old lady (in Michigan, I believe) who occasionally contributed a few dollars to the Republican Party, so she of course got various direct mail solicitations from the party, trying to shake loose more money.

One of these mailings was made to look like an invitation of sorts, and the little old lady misunderstood. Thinking she’d been invited to the White House, she packed up, flew to Washington, and presented herself and her invitation at the White House.

The staff didn’t know what to do about her. Reagan was in the Oval Office, so someone asked him. Reagan had her brought in to meet him, and he spent some time with her. According to Robinson, Reagan treated this woman with exactly the same courtesy and respect that he would have shown Queen Elizabeth II.

Robinson quoted Ron Reagan, Jr., who is ideologically quite far removed from his father, as saying that in his entire life, he never once saw his father being condescending to anyone. That’s character. 

From Edmund Morris’ biography, Dutch:

Many years later, I asked Gorbachev the question that tantalized me that morning: what he saw when he looked up into Ronald Reagan’s eyes. “Sunshine and clear sky. We shook hands like friends. He said something, I don’t know what. But at once I felt him to be a very authentic human being.”… “Authentic? What word is that in Russian?” I asked the interpreter. He was startled to be addressed directly, and shot Gorbachev a nervous look. “Lichnost. It is a very difficult word to translate because it means ‘personality’ in English. Or ‘figure,’ but in the dignified Italian sense, figura. But in Russian its meaning is much bigger than in these languages: a lichnost man is someone of great strength of character who rings true, all the way through to his body and soul. He is authentic, he has”… “Kalibr,” said Gorbachev, who had been listening intently. He is so intuitive that he can follow dialogue without vocabulary. “I know what kalibr is, Mr. President, “ I said. “We have the same word in our language.”

Da.

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Stephen Littau blogs at Fearless Philosophy for Free Minds, which he describes as "dedicated to challenging conventional political Left/Right wisdom through reason with a focus on individual liberty, personal responsibility, free markets, accountable & limited government, and critical thinking." He has some good, thought-provoking material. I’m still trying to find the time to finish his four-part series on the rights of children. A provocative and under-explored topic, for sure.

Every month, Stephen selects the top three Blogposts of the Month. I’m quite pleased that my July 8 post, Why the left blames us, received second place for the month. Thank you, Stephen!

Don’t forget to drop by Fearless Philosophy for Free Minds on Tuesday — Stephen is hosting Carnival of Liberty #6, which is sure to be full of fresh bloggy goodness!

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Saturday, I spent about six hours shooting with Jed and Nick. That was the first time I’d thrown any lead at paper in about a year, and I had a great time, despite the case head separation that rendered my Daewoo DH40 inoperable (any recommendations for gunsmithing in the metro Denver area?).

Jed and Nick persuaded me to join them at a gunbloggers’ meet-up Sunday at the Tanner Gun Show, and that was fun, too. Lots of lively discussion on a wide range of topics.

One of the topics of conversation is the topic of this post. Human beings have an inherent right of self-defense and a right to acquire and own property, and thus they have a right to be armed. But is there a limit to what kinds of weapons a person may properly own, and if so, where do you draw the line?

One point of view is that the 2nd Amendment was intended to cover the kinds of weapons that a single person could carry and deploy in service to the militia. I find this argument unpersuasive for three reasons:

• The 2nd doesn’t grant the right to be armed, it merely recognizes it; it’s possible that the language of the 2nd ought to be broader to fully cover our inherent right.
   
• It’s doubtful that the founders intended to cover only rifles, muskets, and pistols, since the patriots who fought at Concord Bridge and Lexington did so to protect an arsenal that included small cannon. Furthermore, the Constitution authorized Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal, which commissioned privately-owned warships ("privateers") to take action against a hostile foreign party. Privateers played a significant role in the War of 1812, and were used by the Confederacy during the War Between the States.
   
• If you have an inherent right to deploy arms in self-defense and I have the same right, then don’t we have the right to cooperate in order to deploy squad-based weapons (M2 machine gun, SMAW, field artillery, etc.)?

Someone suggested that explosives should be off-limits because they’re too indiscriminate. I think that gets us closer, because it considers the risk to innocent bystanders, but it’s too broad a restriction. I’m comfortable with you owning some kinds of explosives in some circumstances. For instance, if you live on a farm or ranch, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to have explosives for non-defense purposes such as breaking up rock and removing stumps. And I’d have no objection to you having a means of delivering an explosive charge against attackers — a mortar or grenade launcher, for instance. I may judge you overly cautious — even paranoid — but you’re not endangering me by merely possessing them.

On the other hand,  I live in the city. My house sits less than 10 feet from the houses on either side. I’d really rather not have one of my neighbors storing hundreds of pounds of high explosives in the basement and assembling bombs. I think that would present an unreasonable risk to me, making my neighbor guilty of reckless endangerment. Therefore, some restrictions are justified.

What restrictions, exactly? I’m not sure. I don’t mind my neighbor doing hand-loading or working with model rockets — up to a point. I suspect this is kind of like choosing the age at which we presume adulthood (for contracts, marriage, etc.) — setting a limit is reasonable, but the precise one chosen is necessarily rather arbitrary. So, perhaps up to X pounds of black powder is OK, Y pounds of smokeless powder, etc. The limits would be stricter for more dangerous substances.

In trying to formulate a principle, it helps to ask why limits on explosives have a broad appeal: I think it’s because it’s harder to avoid "collateral damage" with explosives than with rifles or swords. You have a right to defend yourself, even if doing so exposes innocent bystanders to some risk. If that weren’t true, you’d essentially have no right to use a weapon beyond your bare hands. But you don’t have an unlimited right to put innocents at risk.

So, how much risk to innocents is appropriate and how much force may you use?  I think it depends on the scale of the aggression you’re facing. If someone picks your pocket on a city sidewalk, you wouldn’t be justified in pulling out a machine pistol and firing away. On the other hand, if a band of twenty outlaws is laying siege to your cabin in the mountains, and you have some mortars or RPGs, more power to you. Could you be endangering an innocent hiker or fisherman? Perhaps, but given the attack you face, the response seems appropriate and the risk justifiable.

Do you ever have a right to drop a 1000-pound bomb or launch a tactical nuke that will kill everyone within a mile? Well, if your adversary is an entire nation, with a vast army, tanks, airplanes, etc., perhaps. But nations don’t normally attack individuals or small groups (except when Janet Reno is Attorney General). They go after an entire nation, so now we’re talking about a war.

Nevertheless, rights belong to individuals. The leadership of a group, such as a government, can’t have any rights beyond those delegated to it by the individuals in the group. That means either there must be an individual right to possess and use nuclear weapons, or no government may rightfully have them, even for purely defensive purposes.

I’m inclined to resolve this quandary by acknowledging an individual right to nukes, but insisting that you may only exercise that right in a way that reasonably limits the risk to innocents: 

• They must be stored with an extremely high degree of security, such as in a highly-secure facility controlled at all times by a highly-trained military unit with a functioning command structure that’s accountable to the people being put at risk.
   
• They must be used only against an aggressor army/nation in such a way that it’s reasonable to conclude that their use will lead to a better outcome in terms of casualties and consequences. "Better outcome" may include "prevent us from being conquered and oppressed."

I realize that I’ve defined an individual right in such a way that no individual can exercise it alone (except maybe Superman), but I think such severe restrictions are appropriate, given the principle that you don’t have an unlimited right to put innocents at risk and the fact that nukes (or 1000-pound HE bombs, for that matter) represent one hell of a risk to those around them!

In other words, the consequences of mishandling, misusing, or losing control over a nuke are so grave that it’s just not possible for you to possess one all by yourself without recklessly endangering others. IMHO, of course.

But is there such a thing as an individual right that you can only exercise in cooperation with others? Or is this all sophistry on my part?

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Thanks to Hold The Mayo for pointing to the Kyoto Count-up at JunkScience.com. It keeps track of the Kyoto Protocol’s cost (since going into effect on Feb. 16, 2005) and its potential temperature saving by the year 2050. At this time, the cost counter is spinning fast and approaching $70 billion. The temperature counter is at 0.000725775 °C and holding. The site notes parenthetically that "to get activity on the clock we had to go to billionths part of one degree, which obviously cannot be measured as a global mean."

… and yes, that really does represent about $100K per billionth of one degree allegedly "saved." Guess that means for the bargain price of just $100 trillion we could theoretically lower global mean temperature by about 1 °C.

JunkScience.com also has The Malaria Clock, which counts up the number of cases of and deaths from malaria since William Ruckelshaus declared DDT a "potential human carcinogen" and banned it. The death rate is one every 12 seconds, and WHO estimates that 90% of the deaths are pregnant women and children under the age of five.

How is it that Gaia can be painted an Earthmother nurture-figure whilst demanding an annual sacrifice of roughly two million, four hundred and thirty thousand infants, pending mothers and their untallied unborn? This is not ecology. This is not conservation. This is genocide.

Let’s be unequivocal, spraying DDT inside dwellings presents no discernable human or environmental hazard. "Resistance" is not an issue since this mostly takes the form of avoidance and keeping mosquitoes away from human prey is the intended object anyway. DDT presents no patent issues to upset anti-globalists/anti-capitalists and, at pennies a pound, DDT is affordable and cost-effective health care for developing nations.

In short, anti-malarial use of DDT allows more healthy populations to work, generate wealth and climb out of the poverty/subsistence hole in which "caring greens" apparently wish to keep them trapped. DDT bans are not pro-environment – they’re anti-human. Worse, they attack impoverished, developing societies least able to protect themselves.

JunkScience.com is published by Steven J. Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, among other places, and the author of several Cato books, including Junk Science Judo, and hundreds of papers, columns, and articles. It looks like a great resource with a plethora of interesting links. I’m going to add it to my Miscellaneous Links list, which I’ve been neglecting lately.

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Democrats are jubilant over the close special election in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District. Republican Jean Schmidt beat Democrat Paul Hackett, but only by 52-48%. Rob Portman (whose appointment as U.S. trade representative triggered the election) got 72% in the last election, and Bush got 64%. Predictably, Dems are seeing signs and portents:

"This very red district became a lot bluer," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The result shows "there is no safe Republican district," he said.

… 

"The Ohio race sends a much larger signal," said Washington-based Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.

Republicans are mumbling "special election, low turnout, unusual factors" — the latter appears to be code for the scandals surrounding Gov. Taft’s administration and Schmidt’s own ethical problems.

Here’s my take, based on an admittedly cursory look at the two campaigns. Hackett is a major in the Marine Corps Reserve who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. He was highly critical of Bush and the decision to invade Iraq, but he took a "finish the job" stance, and his service gave him more cred than the average lefty anti-war Dem.

Although the Deaniacs, Kos, etc., all worked hard for Hackett, he didn’t come across to Ohioans as a lefty, but as more of a centrist. He’s an NRA member and hunter, has a concealed carry permit, and opposed renewal of the "assault weapons" ban.

Schmidt, meanwhile, won a nasty 11-way primary battle largely because conservatives abandoned frontrunner Pat DeWine — partly over his marital problems and partly to punish his father, Sen. Mike DeWine, for selling out on the judicial filibuster issue. The RINO tag transferred from father to son. Schmidt is pro-life and pro-gun-rights, so lots of conservatives felt comfortable supporting her.

But Schmidt has a tax-and-spend, big government RINO history in the legislature. She made ethanol subsidies one of her major issues. The Club for Growth actively opposed her, and Ohio’s taxpayer watchdog group, Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes, ran ads urging voters to boycott the general election.

The COAST ads seem to have worked spectacularly well among Republicans, judging from the comparative turnout numbers cited by Michael Barone:

… turnout is the key to winning elections. Turnout in 2004 was up 16 percent over 2000—a historic rise. John Kerry got 16 percent more votes than Al Gore, but George W. Bush got 23 percent more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. …

The results in the Ohio 2nd go the other way. According to the latest results I have before me, 112,375 people voted in the special election. That’s just 34 percent of the 331,104 who voted in the district in 2004. Republican Jean Schmidt’s vote total was only 27 percent of Bush’s. Democrat Paul Hackett’s vote total was 46 percent of Kerry’s. Democrats did a better job of turning out their vote.

… 

In this week’s election, Democrats apparently were able to motivate their Bush-hating core to go to the polls. Republicans, who demonstrated such prowess at turning out their voters in November 2004, did not do nearly as well in motivating their base. … if I were Karl Rove or Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman, I would be thinking hard about how to motivate the Republican base.

There are a number of reasons having nothing to do with policy issues for the drop in Republican turnout. Sleaziness and scandals are always a big turnoff.

Nevertheless, I think this is the critical lesson to be learned from Ohio’s 2nd district:

• When a Democrat is pro-gun, looks good in uniform, is at least credible on defense, and moves toward the middle, he gains more votes from the center than he loses from the left. 
   
• When a Republican favors tax increases and big government, runs a lackluster, visionless campaign, and portrays herself as a "moderate centrist," she loses far more votes from the right than she gains from the center.

Rove and Mehlman had better pay attention to that lesson. You can bet Hillary will.

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Unbelievable. This is what "all the news that’s fit to print" means today:

The NEW YORK TIMES is looking into the adoption records of the children of Supreme Court Nominee John G. Roberts, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The TIMES has investigative reporter Glen Justice hot on the case to investigate the status of adoption records of Judge Roberts’ two young children, Josie age 5 and Jack age 4, a top source reveals.

Judge Roberts and his wife Jane adopted the children when they each were infants.

Both children were adopted from Latin America.

A TIMES insider claims the look into the adoption papers are part of the paper’s "standard background check."

I still don’t know what to think of Judge Roberts. But I know what I think of his enemies (and, yes, the mainstream media have most certainly chosen to be his enemies). They’re slimeballs. Beneath contempt.

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I don’t see ABC’s Late Late Show very often, but the few times I’ve watched, I’ve really enjoyed host Craig Ferguson and his odd sense of humor. Here are a couple of recent lines that stuck with me:  

"The only people attracted to anorexic super-models are gay fashion designers, and they’ve got nothing for you, ladies!"

Email question: "What could a woman do to really impress you?"

Craig’s answer: "Not talk about her feelings." 

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It’s getting harder and harder to tell the parody websites from the ones covering real news about Democrats. For instance, Outside the Beltway pointed out this Yahoo! News story about an apparently genuine Democratic National Committee "fact sheet":

… Doctors pronounced the President to be in "superior" physical condition, which media reports attributed to his rigorous, six day a week exercise routine. While President Bush has made physical fitness a personal priority, his cuts to education funding have forced schools to roll back physical education classes and his Administration’s efforts to undermine Title IX sports programs have threatened thousands of women’s college sports programs.

"President Bush’s has dropped the ball when it comes to fully funding physical education in public schools and women’s athletic programs at the college level," said Democratic National Committee spokesman Josh Earnest. "His personal habits indicate that physical fitness is not just fun and games for him. Don’t our kids deserve the same opportunities to be physically fit? President Bush should stop running from his responsibility and make sure that all American children have access to physical fitness programs."

OK, the first thing I did is look closely at the page again — "Is this a real Yahoo! News page or a clever parody?" I mean, come on — Josh Earnest? Cuts to education funding? Dropped the ball? Scrappleface couldn’t have done better!

But, no, it’s apparently real. And in earnest. … I’m sorry, that was just so wrong.

Back at Outside the Beltway, James Joyner asks the obvious question and offers an appropriate rejoinder to this nonsense:

First they put Howard Dean in charge and now this. Are the Democrats trying to make themselves look foolish?

Let’s leave aside, for now, the question of whether the federal government has any business subsidizing gym classes for tykes or mandating intercollegiate athletic programs for women.

President Bush is fit because he is blessed with good genetics and spends a lot of time doing vigorous exercise, not because of government programs. Our kids are fat because they eat a lot of junk food and spend their after school hours watching television and playing video games, not because we’re cutting funding for P.E.

Meanwhile, over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein offers a somewhat more snarky response (as is his wont), starting with his priceless title, "The Far Side (or, ‘The Impotence of Being Earnest’)":

Well now.  A serious person might respond that the President, while he has no Constitutional responsibility to “make sure that all American children have access to physical fitness”, has nevertheless done so by keeping America free under his extended stewardship, allowing each and every citizen who wishes to do so the opportunity to pick up, say, a Frisbee or baseball mitt.  A serious person might further respond that by NOT forcing women who don’t wish to do so to play sport anyway as part of some symbolic and socially-engineered proportional contrivance designed to appease a largely cosmetic brand of feminism, the President is indeed acting in the best interest of the liberty of the individual—which is something we have every right to expect from our elected leaders.

But then, I’m not a serious person, so I’ll simply respond by expanding on Lorie Byrd’s remarks about Democratic desperation and divisiveness, and add that, were George Bush to pull a child out of burning library, the DNC would issue a release saying, “BUSH ALLOWS MASSIVE BOOK BURNING; FORCES TRANSIENTS OUT ON THE STREET.”

And of course, this wouldn’t be a classic Protein Wisdom post if Jeff didn’t add an update like this:

In an email circulated to its activist base, the DNC offerred this conveniently pre-written protest slogan as an example of what dedicated progressives might publicize in an effort to help fight the scourge of Republican control of our bodies:  “ONE TWO THREE FOUR, WE DON’T WANT YOUR UNBLEACHED FLOUR – LADEN TREATS THAT FILL US WITH EMPTY CALORIES AND MAKE US SLOW AND FAT SO THAT YOU CAN GIVE TAX BREAKS TO THE RICH!”

Okay, not really.

The problem with this sort of nonsense is that not enough people will laugh appropriately at it. In particular, not enough Republican Senators, Representatives, and party spokespeople. Instead, some Republican "leader" — probably McCain — will explain to a sympathetic, all-ears press corps that federal P.E. spending isn’t set in stone yet, that he and other "concerned" Republicans in Congress are working to find additional funding, and that he sure hopes the Democrats don’t think Republicans are big old meanies who favor childhood obesity, yada, yada, yada…

I mean, come on — under Bush, federal education spending has gone up 82.5% in real dollars, far more than under Clinton. In response, the Democrats and the NEA have screamed ever more shrilly that Bush is "short-changing" the precious chilllldrennn.

And far too many Republicans respond to that with defensiveness, waffling, backpedaling, and inside-the-beltway arcana about process and priorities. We need some Congressional Republicans who’ll stand up and ridicule this idiotic "fact sheet," for starters — and then announce that it’s time for their party to stop pandering to these special interests that will never be satisfied anyway.

Maybe stem cell research will lead to a badly needed medical breakthrough: the ability to grow spines in Republican officeholders.

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If you’re looking for a big list of juicy, liberty-related posts to read, hurry on over to the fifth Carnival of Liberty at Owlish Mutterings.

Owlish has organized the long list of entries into several broad categories: Decreasing Freedom, Increasing Freedom, Philosophy of Freedom, War, and the ever-popular Miscellaneous. Grab a great big cup of coffee and dive into your favorite category. Mmm… Miscellaneous! I love big helpings of Miscellaneous.

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While you’re waiting for tomorrow’s Carnival of Liberty at Owlish Mutterings, why not check out this week’s winning entries at Watcher of Weasels? Members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I’m submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process. This is my shameless attempt to curry favor with the Watcher.

Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

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For some time now, I’ve been arguing with libertarian friends about the Bush Doctrine. It’s been my contention that libertarians should at least respect, if not embrace, the Bush Doctrine. Libertarians, of all people, should welcome the rejection of the preceding 50-odd years of "realpolitik" and applaud a foreign policy explicitly committed to promoting liberty. 

A typical riposte involved some cynical remarks coupled with the words "Uzbekistan" and "unprincipled." Even before the May slaughter of pro-democracy demonstrators, some of my friends said U.S. policy toward Uzbekistan proved that the Bush Doctrine was long on rhetoric and short on consistency.

I replied, somewhat lamely at times, that a principled foreign policy didn’t require foregoing all other considerations, that our strategic needs could legitimately influence when and how we pushed for more freedom and democracy in places like Uzbekistan and Pakistan, and that, for all we knew, the Bush administration was actually pushing Uzbeki President Karimov hard behind the scenes.

Apparently, the U.S. has been pushing hard. So hard that Karimov is throwing us out of the country. TigerHawk summed up the story:

The United States has a strategically significant base in Uzbekistan, which borders on Afghanistan. In May, Uzbekistan’s hideous government opened fire on demonstrators and killed hundreds of innocent people, raising the ire of the civilized countries of the world. The United States, among others, threw a fit. Uzbekistan has now expelled the United States, ordering it out of the base within six months. Russia and China, neither offended by the thugs running Uzbekistan but both sorely annoyed by the U.S. presence in central Asia, are happy today.

The next time somebody tells you that the United States operates without principle, remind them that the Bush Administration walked away from an important base in central Asia because it stood up for political liberty in one of the most isolated places on the planet.

Austin Bay has more, including the impact on Bagram Air Field near Kabul, which he visited not long ago.

The loss of the K2 air base is bad news, as is the failure to positively influence the Karimov government. But at least I get to say "I told you so."

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