Freedom to die - 2

In An Unquiet Mind- A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist and authority on manic-depressive illness, describes her own struggle with the disease. She has suffered from it nearly all her life and the book is fairly engaging even if you, like me, don't like autobiographies.

Jamison once unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by overdosing herself on prescription pills, and she neatly describes how she went about rather clinically with her suicide attempt. Here are some of her thoughts about her preferred method:

...for many months I went to the eight floor of the stairwell of the UCLA hospital and, repeatedly, only just resisted throwing myself off the ledge. Suicidal depression does not tend to be a considerate, but somehow the thought that my family would have to identify the fallen and fractured me made that ultimately not an acceptable method.

Isn't the rationale fascinating? I strongly believe in having the political freedom to choose one's own time and place of death before it chooses you, and have fretted over the fact that thousands of families have to identify their fallen, fractured, dismembered, burnt, and drowned loved ones because society does not allow them to choose a peaceful and dignified end.

Political opposition to suicide seems to be rooted either in religious sensibilities or plain dogmas. Lacking the religious convictions that would instill an overrated notion of life in my head, I see completely no value to it if its owner does not want it. In that situation, life is as virtual and redundant as the Orkut account that you created five years ago but haven't logged on since, and don't intend to log on ever.

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In another part of the book, Jamison describes her struggles with another symptom of mania - the tendency for making wild and impulsive purchases. Says she:

Spending a lot of money that you don't have - or, as the formal diagnostic criteria so quaintly put it, "engaging in unrestrained buying sprees" - is a classic part of mania.

Hmm, now what does that remind me of? Housing boom, refinancing, consumer spending boom, credit-fuelled spending...do you see where I am going?It is a chilling analogy; Jamison does not leave a doubt in your mind that euphoric manic periods are almost always followed by terribly damaging and dark periods of depression.

"Manic depression is a frustrating mess", sang Jimi Hendrix, but obviously not if you can maintain a perpetual state of mania. At least, that's the state they seem to be trying to achieve.

A bend in this blog

After living in England for a few years and becoming completely disillusioned by what he described as a paternalistic and cloistered society, Bend is finally back in India for good. Good for me; I had to bear the brunt of a number of bitter monologues about how public life in England sucks.

But nothing from that time stuck in my mind more than Bend's unthinking but sublimely political characterization of the state of affairs: at one point, he stopped calling ordinary English as people, instead choosing to use the term "subjects".

He is not alone. I just ran into this post, Born a citizen, living in subjection, on Samizdata (via Instapundit). Here is the executive summary:

ID cards, databases, surveillance, and dependency.

If I hadn't been armed with the perspective, I would surely have missed the point.

On the subject of Bend, check out his song A cup of tea in Madhepura. It has been described as having "mattfinis simplicity"....what else do you expect from the house of Guthrie, Seeger, and Zimmerman?

Not worth its weight

In spite of being a big fan of libertarian thought and greedily lapping up everything dished out by Paul and Co., I have always been deeply uncomfortable with libertarians' fixation on the gold standard. While gold seems like a good proxy for value of any economic activity because of its rare and limited presence, it seems pretty arbitrary, like having a month being defined by 30 gusts of wind rather than that many appearances of the sun.

In a pretty well-written piece called Putting the Toothpaste Back into the Tube, Andy Kessler argues:

"...(for many centuries), gold and silver were the money supply. It's the only thing people would trust. They are rare earth elements, which means there is only so much of them. Hence stable money supply. Gold, even today, increases by about 1 percent every year from new discoveries. With a gold standard, money supply would grow 1 percent, which everyone used to think was just right.

But there are a couple of problems with that whole 1 percent business. The new wealth from more gold goes to the miner who found it, and then it starts circulating in the economy so others can use it. Doesn't seem quite fair. Plus, the 1 percent yearly increase in gold and therefore money supply basically covers population growth and completely ignores productivity and innovation, which get stifled because there's not enough money to increase output, even with new tools and inventions.

So a gold standard implies a static world.

Not that I agree with any of Kessler's Keynesian presumptuousness in the rest of the article, but the part about the gold standard is nicely put.

The case against marriage

Like I have argued before, I am against the state recognizing gay marriages. Not because homosexuals should not marry, but because the state has no business recognizing any marriages.

Marriages are social contracts between individuals that have historically been blessed by religious institutions. While religious institutions are private entities and have the freedom to decide which marriages they would and would not rubber-stamp, that does not stop individuals from entering into private contracts on their own and the state has no right to bar them or hold these contracts any lesser than others.

The state "granting" marriage rights to gays is not fairness; it is a second wrong to cover up the first one. What would be fair is for the state to de-recognize all "marriages" and recognize them as civil unions.

To further the fairness, the state has to stop providing incentives for people getting into civil unions (i.e., tax benefits) like it presently does. Like any other subsidy under the sun, it is illegal and unjust.

Anyhow, here is a cartoon (click for bigger image) by Jeff Danziger, who seems to agree that gay marriage is as rotten an idea as a heterosexual one:
















LOL.

Enough Already # 3

Obama's pet

Trust me, I dont care what Bo's pedigree is. Enough already!

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More Enough Already!s are here.

Not a matter of luck

Last week, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates proposed drastic changes in the nation's military budget that would cut away millions of dollars from a bunch of military programs like the F-22.

Within hours of his announcement, a gaggle of Congressmen representing the interests of the armament industry lined up to rip apart Gates' proposal. And these war-whores (as a certain wise friend of mine would call them) were united across party lines for a change; for instance, a group of senators dashed off a letter to the president complaining about Gates's cuts and this group included Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), and Mark Begich (D-Alaska). Sarah Palin chimed in from Anchorage about how her state will be threatened if a certain missile program is shut down.

Presumably the defence industry, which spent about $148 million on influencing lawmakers in 2008, will be airdropping lobbyists on Washington DC over the next few days.

I am not articulate enough to write commentary that would exactly reflect my feelings about this particularly shameful aspect of an otherwise decent nation, so I shall resort to plagiarism. Following is a reproduction of a short but poignant exchange that takes place between Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie, in the movie Schindler's List.

(Schindler, who opened a successful business manufacturing supplies for Germany's war effort, is explaining to his wife how his fortune changed)

Oskar:
There is no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I see now it wasn't me that was failing, it was this thing, this missing thing. Even if I had known what it was, there is nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this sort of thing. And it makes all the different in the world between success and failure.

Emilie:
Luck?

Oskar:
War.

You can't create this sort of thing, he says. How wrong.

Videos for thought - 2

Check out this interview with Peter Schiff on Yahoo's tech ticker:



Pay attention around 3:34 where he equates the American economy to a Ponzi scheme. Don't you wish Schiff's word was the law? The Internal Revenue Service revised their rules recently to enable taxpayers to get a deduction on money lost in Ponzi-type investment schemes....one could possibly argue that every dollar spent in the American economy was tax deductible; unless, of course, you took Schiff's advice in 2007 and sent all your money abroad....