Unscientific American

I did not renew my subscription to Scientific American because it has devolved into a platform for collectivism. It is not merely the political agenda. Politics rests on epistemology and Scientific American has abandoned the scientific method and replaced it with authority opinion. 

In fact, science was presented that way 100 years ago. A scientist (professional or amateur) submitted their paper and if the journal found merit in it, they published it. Footnotes and references are the modern style. It can get excessive. In my review of The Invention of Enterprise for the now defunct Libertarian Papers (reprinted here), I took issue with an avalanche of citations to validate an obvious fact. Erring in the other direction, authors in Scientific American assert the hypothesis rather than offering evidence and Scientific American now publishes empassioned pleas for an intellectually bankrupt political agenda.

I have been thinking this through for over a year. I subscribed in 2020 because Covid closed the University of Texas and I (among very many other independent scholars) lost my library privileges. Subscribing to Scientific American (as well as Sky & Telescope) bought access to their archives. For Scientific American that was highly important. 

Today's left wing slant was obvious and I just ignored it. The science articles were still respectable. Evidence of that was in the January 2022 issue, which carried an article about the Antikythera Mechanism by Tony Freeth. However, the same  issue carried “Inside America’s Militias” by Amy Cooter. The first was a technical report for the general reader who is interested in science but uninformed on this topic. The second was one person's self-validation of beliefs she formed before she began her university education. 

 

From Dr. Amy Cooter's curriculum vitae.

Both were personal narratives. Freeth has devoted decades to studying, writing, and lecturing about the ancient computer. His article in this issue included many references, citations, and pointers to the works of others. Freeth has puzzled over the Antikythera and invested careful, questioning thought to the many problems it presents.

 

Cooter cites two people who agree with her, or with whom she agrees. Unlike Freeth, she did not come to this research with an open mind. She is not necessarily wrong in her basic facts, only in how she weaves them into a scripted oratorio.

 

It is an easy claim that the militias, being traditionalist are also masculine. The affinity of men for weapons is obvious by inspection. Benign sexism is a consequence of that. As a guy who has served in uniform, I assure you that protecting women and children is not open to question. At that same time, I served with, alongside, and under the command of women. I never had a problem, though I did report up the chain to inform the leadership about other men who did need some corrective counseling on the subject.[1] It is a known situation.

 

Dr. Amy Cooter does admit that the right wing militias do have women in command. In her January 2022 Scientific American essay, she wrote: “There are a few women who fully participate in militias, and because of their activity they tend to be well respected and rise to leadership roles. (Jessica Watkins, leader of an Ohio militia who was arrested for her participation in the Capitol riot, is one example.) Still, most militia units have a culture suffused with casual misogyny.” Personally, with my master’s in social science, if I were considering a doctorate, I would find the subject of women in command of traditionalist militias more compelling research than the observable truth that boys like to camp out and play with guns.

 

Like Cooter, I grew up Republican. My introduction to libertarian versus traditional conservative ideology came at the 1965 convention of Young Americans for Freedom. There, I met conservatives who were opposed to the draft and to the war in Vietnam. I also had to come to grips with the fact that many of my comrades on the right were racists who believed that Negroes are substantially different from and inferior to us white folk. I found that attitude repugnant and distanced myself from the people who asserted it. 

 

So, when in college, I turned hard to the left, I also found it easy to parse the many, many varieties of socialist theory, including the distinctions among British Labour and Social Democrats, Lenin, Trotsky, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the American Marxist, Daniel de Leon and his Socialist Labor Party. Much later in life, I came to understand how left wing syndicalists became the anarchists of the Spanish civil war and right wing syndicalism became fascism. 

 

Understanding those nuances led me to ask why the same people who decry the insurrection of 6 January 2021 were silent during Occupy Wall Street. I admit that it is a rhetorical question. 

 

The final failure came in a special supplement for March 2022. Under the rubric “How COVID Changed the World” by senior editor Jen Schwartz, the lead article was “A Microbe Proved That Individualism Is a Myth: Humans evolved to be interdependent, not self-sufficient” by Robin G. Nelson (biological anthropologist at Arizona State University). Nelson builds her hypothesis from an inventory of complaints: 

 

“For countless Americans, there was a dull but persistent pain to prepandemic life: high-priced housing, nearly inaccessible health care, underresourced schools, wage stagnation and systemic inequality. It was a familiar ache, a kind of chronic hurt that people learned to live with simply because they had no other choice. Faced with threadbare safety nets and a cultural ethos championing nationalist myths of self-sufficiency, many people did what human have always done in times of need: they sought emotional comfort and material aid from their family and friends. But when COVID-19 hit, relying on our immediate networks was not sufficient. Americans were gaslit into thinking that that are immeasurably strong, impervious to the challenges people in other countries face. In reality, our social and economic support systems are weak, and many people are made vulnerable by nearly any change in the capacity to earn a living. The fallout from the pandemic is an urgent call to strengthen our aid systems.”

 

The thesis fails from unnamed collectives: “countless Americans … people… many people… Americans… people in other countries… many people...” It offers not a single measure, no statistical survey, no validated polling. 

 

I point out that nationalism is not individualist. I might accept that the myth of personal self-sufficiency may be found nationwide. I must insist that nationalism denies personal self-sufficiency and insists on the integration (or total absorption) of the individual into the nation (as defined by its self-identified leaders). 

And individualism is not a myth; it is fact of life. 

"In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable." On my blog here.

People who receive intense family care and people who benefit from the highest levels of professional medical care in a hospital still die. They give up. The time comes when you decide. You make the choice that no one else has the right to make for you. And every moment of every living day, you decide to make the best of your life, regardless of your circumstances.[2] 

 

Moreover, during the pandemic, hobbyist markets have flourished. In amateur astronomy, we found sales exploding. Millions of other people returned to reading, walking, and other pastimes. These are personal pursuits, edifying and enjoyable. Millions of parents learned to get along with their own children and to appreciate the teachers on whom they previously had inflicted their brats. There was no shortage of the very family life which the collectivists had long complained that work outside the home was destroying. 

 

I confess that I had to read the introduction to Nelson's phillipic several times over several days before I understood “gaslit.” Then just to be sure, I googled it. It is a neologism, a trope from a 1944 movie that only became vernacular in popular writing from about 2016. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting.) That being the assertion, who then is the villain? Who is robbing the unnamed collectives and what is being taken from them? 

Ultimately, you can only steal from individuals. That speaks to a deeper fallacy: the stolen concept. You cannot have theft without property: even a landlord is debarred from transgressing the renter’s “quiet enjoyment.” Quiet enjoyment is an economic value that can be stolen. So, what is missing here? And while it is theoretically possible that lacking any other motivation except your pain your landlord could set up loudspeakers and blast Wagner into your home, it would be bizarre. Most landlords only do things that make them money or prevent losses. So, who is getting the money from gaslighting Americans into believing that we can make decisions that result in our happiness? Are the perpetrators Runner's World, Sky & Telescope, and Papercraft Essentials? 

 

Speaking to the deeper point, if engaging in new hobbies makes us happier and perhaps morally better, is it gaslighting? I think that we are being gaslit into believing that we are unhappy in order to rob us of money to pay college professors at public universities who tell us that we really are unhappy despite all evidence to the contrary. (For some point-counterpoint on the subject, put "happiness conservatives liberals" into your search engine.) 

 

Social facts being complicated, it is also true that many people did and do suffer from the strain on the healthcare system: the providers themselves. Their plight does not appear in Robin G. Nelson’s article. (See "The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine" by Ayn Rand.)

In a second illogical attack on personal freedom, Dr. Robin Gair Nelson strikes at the root of American exceptionalism by conflating our chosen virtues with our inherited sins. “Since this country’s inception, the dominant ideologies here have encouraged not only individualism but also the dehumanization of certain groups, as evidenced by the enslavement of Black people and the displacement of Indigenous communities from their ancestral lands. This dehumanization continues today in the form of the bootstrap narrative—the myth that anyone can prosper if only they work hard enough—and in efforts to weaken relief programs for people who need help.”

 

She does not parse those dominant ideologies. One of them was collectivist. Way back then, correctly stated individualism would have ended slavery and recognized the property rights of the people who were here first. Collectivist thinking based on incorrect epistemology caused those evils and many others. In point of fact Article I Section Nine of the Constitution contemplated the end of slavery after 1808 and allowed the imposition of a tax on the importation of slaves until then. As the Supreme Court ruled in a different case: The power to tax is the power to destroy. Apparently, since this nation’s inception we were intent on destroying slavery, and that is why we eventually fought a civil war over it. 

As for the Native Americans, as long as the trespassers were only individuals who chose the harsh frontier over the comforts of village and city life, the Natives usually won any battles. They struck hard and terribly. The theft of their lands was possible only because of the collectivized action of a central government that had no intention of keeping its promises. That is quite different from the bourgeois ethics of individualism.

 

One way or another, we all have bootstraps. It is true that some inherit their very nice boots including four generations of wealthy African-Americans. (See Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham. In an episode of The West Wing, the staff writers are in a quandary over Republican resistance to escalating the estate tax because it also would penalize the first  generation of African-American millionaires.) Envying them and being jealous of their status will not provide you with the intellectual tools required to make your own or to pull yourself up by whatever you do have. Some of the answers are hidden in books like Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Rich Dad Poor Dad and Benjamin Franklin’s collected aphorisms published as “The Way to Wealth.” You can read about Madam C. J. Walker, Maggie Lena Walker, Steve Jobs, or Steve Forbes. 

 

From reading the theories of the arch-capitalist economists of the Austrian School, I am willing to believe (provisionally) that financial success is ineffable: it must be learned and cannot be taught. Working hard is absolutely required and yet alone is not enough. Knowing the principles of accounting may be necessary but insufficient. Finding a thriving market or a floundering one that will reward nurturing may both be exploitable alternatives or failure modes. 

 

Nelson closes her complaint with a demand: “Committing ourselves to upholding our evolutionary mandate to help one another—not just the people we see every day but everyone everywhere—is the only thing that will save us.” 

 

If helping one another is our evolutionary mandate, then it must be beyond our choice. If it is not, then by what standard is it required by evolution? Evolution required that people who have diabetes live long enough to have children and we have people with family names like Drinkwater and Passwater. Yet we are investing billions of dollars to overthrow that evolutionary mandate. 

• https://professional.diabetes.org/research-grants
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26798117/

 And that is just Type 1. It may well be the case that the other types are remediable and preventable with common sense diet and exercise. Or would Professor Nelson prefer that we follow our evolutionary mandate to let the infirm die off lest they degrade the gene pool? In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski tells of the Bakhtiari tribe who even in modern times  leave behind any individual who cannot by their own power cross a swollen stream. The right answer to that question begins with the assumption of individualism: each individual is important to the survival of the tribe, including (and especially) the one who does not want to belong to any tribe.

 

Tribalism also underlays Amy Cooter’s essay. The militias are clearly tribal and define themselves in those terms of “we versus they.” Yet within that is a strong strain of individualism, self-dependence and self-sufficiency. Dowsing the militias with the individualism they recognize would defuse their desire for collective action. Instead of storming the Capitol, they would “go Galt” and just leave the society that has rejected their values. I suspect that Amy Cooter, Robin Nelson, and the editors at Scientific American would not be happy with that and would prefer that everyone just go along with their plans. 

 

Notes

[1] Reflexes speak. There was one time working security, we made regular bank deposits, pretty much the same time, same place, unarmed and unarmored. I was in the bank with my partner, being vigilant and the left side of my brain said, “If guys with guns came in right now, I would knock her to the ground and cover her with my body.” And the right side of my brain said, “Marotta, she would knock you down and cover you because is the better officer.”

[2] It is fully consistent and epistemologically integrative that Dr. Robin Gair Nelson extols the tribal values of the Navajo Nation for their immunization campaign. Apparently, those individuals were unable to make the right choices. Unlike the WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rational, Democratic), the Navajo Nation has no tradition of individualism.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Scientific Method 

The Science of Liberty 

Michael Schermer’s Moral Arc 

The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 

Modes of Survival

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

 

Reflections on Sex and Gender

I foresee a future in which males are a minority, perhaps a rarity, and females reproduce by cloning and gene splicing. I foresee a future in which you can change your gender as easily and often as we now change our cosmetic styles in clothing, hair, and skin. I find it difficult to trace the multifarious consequences of those assumptions. Would there be a parallel development in “humanism” that discriminates against cetaceans or cetacean-human hybrids? Such creatures might make excellent spaceship pilots. Some years back, I read a science fiction story (perhaps 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson) in which the spaceship was a biologic creature who invited you to have sex with your choice of configurations. 

Spinning off from astronomy, I have a new interest in microscopy. Hopefully having learned from my mistakes with telescopes, I am still shopping for an instrument for viewing the microcosmos. Part of that process was acquiring some textbooks. I could not help but be

amused by illustrations in Microbiology: Principles and Applications, 2^nd edition, Instructor’s edition, by Jacquelyn G. Black (Prentice Hall, 1990, 1993). The woman has no genitals.* The man does. And he is circumcised. This is not uncommon. It is difficult to find an ordinary illustration of an anatomically correct female. 

Consider ancient Greek ceramics and statuary. The womanity in women is conspicuous by its absence. I blame the Semites. 

9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

The Indo-European languages date to about 4000 BCE and they all share the Semitic root word for “seven.” So, some contact must have occurred. On the other hand, I have read that in archaic times, perhaps 700-550 BCE, in hot weather, it was not uncommon for Greeks to go without any clothing. Only when looms made textiles common did covering become more common, especially for women. In Allan Drury's novel, A God Against the Gods, about Pharaoh Akhenaten (circa 1350 BCE), people often went about unclothed. Another fact is that temples in India perhaps less than a thousand years old do have anatomically correct female deities. So, the historical development of enforced modesty is not clear to me. The fact remains. And we live surrounded by and living within the consequences no less than fish live in the waters. 

 

Plaque sent into outer space aboard Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11

Fish, however, are probably not as confused and conflicted about water as we are about sex and gender.

It has become common in academics for people to insert their preferred gender appellations in their signatures. For those circles, one of my signature blocks is 

Michael E. Marotta, BS MA

Editor, History of Astronomy Division

American Astronomical Society

That would now become 

Michael E. Marotta, BS MA (he/him/his)

Editor, History of Astronomy Division

American Astronomical Society

 

I was amused by a sigline like this:

Mary Smith (she/they)

College & School 

Project & Thesis

 

So, Ms. Smith would be “she” in the nominative case, but “they” in the objective. She did not say what the possessive is. I suspect that she had not considered what she wanted to be called in German with four cases or Russian with six or Hungarian with at least 12 cases and arguably another six: inessive, adessive, ablative, sublative…  

 

Fashion trends in sexual identity quickly grew as homosexuals, bisexuals, and transvestites inclusively embraced the persons of intersexual and non-sexual orientations. As easy as it was to accept all of that, I needed a moment to get my head around “queer” as a good thing. 

PRICHEP: Margolis, who's been studying pandemic Yiddish learning, says secular Yiddish has always been a chosen space, and people make that choice for a lot of reasons.

MARGOLIS: Descendants of Holocaust survivors, for whom the language was deeply meaningful.

PRICHEP: People who are drawn to the music and literature.

MARGOLIS: And then that youth vanguard of people who gravitate towards Yiddish because it's a queer space, it's a lefty space, it's a progressive space.

“For some secular Jews, their pandemic hobby has been learning Yiddish,” by Deena Prichep, December 25, 2021, 7:58 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday. -- https://www.npr.org/2021/12/25/1067966088/for-some-secular-jews-their-pandemic-hobby-has-been-learning-yiddish

Well, yes, they would have to be secular Jews because religious Jews would find queer spaces problematic.

So, we now have LGBTQIA+. Somewhere in that string is the space for non-binary. Because the string has eight characters, not being included there would allow me to claim that I am non-octary, the modern way to say “straight”--at least here and now because there's no telling what opportunities the future may offer. It might be interesting to advocate for time functions among the alphabetists. LG(x)T(y)B(dy/dx)QI(d^2y/dx^2)A+/-.

Note:

* Her wounds are also disturbing. It would have been possible to illustrate "Sites of Skin Infection" without personalization. Just show the sites. I believe that this illustration presents  woman-as-victim, continuing and reinforcing the problem.

Previously on Necessary Facts

The Madame Curie Complex

Females and Women 

She's Such a Geek!

Turing Never Said That 

Cursing the Moon

Astronomers seem universally aligned against SpaceX Starlink. In point of fact, except for the selenologists who actually study the Moon, most astronomers, professional and amateur alike, consider the Moon to be light pollution. Some observational astronomers also find the planet Jupiter to be an inconvenience. 

 

The Moon is interesting. It is complex, rich, and textured. It is not a dead world. However, neither is it accepted as a living world. The existence of Transient Lunar Phenomena is both acknowledged (provisionally) and debated, even denied. (See Columbia University here and NASA here.) And note that direct views of meteor strikes are even less well attested. (See NASA here.) Nevertheless, if it were absolutely changeless (a metaphysical impossibility), the Moon would be all the more compelling. 

 

But it gets in the way. As the Moon waxes, it washes out the night sky. 

 

Amateurs call galaxies and nebulae “faint fuzzies.” The average entry-level telescope of 100 mm (4 inches), whether a reflector or a refractor, will reveal some of them easily, but they will appear small and indistinct. Unless you know what you are looking for and looking at you will miss them as you scan the sky. You can find them by star-hopping or by relying on a computerized “go to” mount with a database of coordinates. However you seek them out, galaxies, globular clusters, and nebulae are best viewed when the Moon is not up. And to observe them at all well, amateurs mostly rely on larger instruments, Dobsonian reflectors of 8 or 10 inches (200 to 250 mm) or more. 

Professional astronomers are no less inconvenienced, but are also more accustomed to planning and scheduling, and direct observations (usually photographic, seldom visual) are automatic. So, they work around the Moon. But it is a problem for them, as well.

 

At our Austin Astronomical Society December 2020 Winter Party (virtual), one of our members delivered a slide show about his trip to a deep woods star party at a national park in Wyoming. Many of the telescopes arrived on trailers or in mobile homes or domes of their own. He said that when Jupiter rose, people complained about the light pollution.

 

Even though the Moon gets in the way of most observing, astronomers have found special programs for it. As the Moon passes in front of other bodies, the occultation can be used to derive measurements of Lunar features or of the occulted body. The International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA at occultations dot org here) is an amateur organization founded in 1983. The Society for Popular Astronomy (UK, founded 1953; PopAstro dot com here) also has an Occultation section. The section director will prepare a spreadsheet of local observation events for SPA members. 

 

Previously on Necessary Facts

 

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe 

Viewing Mars 

Testing the Stellarvue Correcting Diagonal Prism 

Measuring Your Universe: Alan Hirshfeld’s Astronomy Activity Manual 

 

Massive Constellations of Artificial Satellites: What if they were natural?

Many of my colleagues in astronomy, both professional and amateur, are vocal in their opposition to Starlink, the SpaceX project that is placing thousands of satellites in orbit. They complain that imaging and other data gathering has been harmed or ruined by the tracks of these devices.  

What if Earth had a ring and these tracks were a consequence of our natural situation? Would the astronomers curse the ring and demand its destruction?

 

They want it stopped. They want the UN to do something. They vilify Elon Musk. They call the satellites junk and pollution. This is not merely a matter of a difficult technical problem like the construction of the Panama Canal or going to the Moon. It is an emotionally motivated attack on material progress, capitalism, and one audacious entrepreneur. 

 

If no one wanted these things, they would not be launched. The project cost is estimated at $30 billion (Reuters here.) It could fail, ultimately. Enterprise entails is risk. In fact, absent risk, there would be no enterprise. (Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein reviewed here.) However, the basic fact of a perceived market still exists. 

 

One of my first university classes in sociology studied the workplace in America. The professor was a nice enough guy but accepted the usual complaint that corporations advertise to motivate to buy and do things that we do not really want. I understand. I certainly was never motivated to buy and drink Mountain Dew though millions of people have been. So, I went out online and found some easy examples of famously failed products. When vitamin-enhanced bottled water was first introduced, it failed, and was mocked in the advertising trade magazines. Starlink could fail. 

But it is not the first communication satellite. That honor goes to OSCAR-1 launched for the Amateur Radio Relay League six months before AT&T’s Telstar. So, these satellites have been “polluting” astronomical images for sixty years. No one seemed to care.

 

I believe that the detractors of progress are privileged and satisfied, enjoying their own comforts, and now wanting to deny those benefits to others. Back in the 1960s, one mock on British Labour was “Sod you, Jack. I’ve got mine.” Ludwig von Mises sketched out well the anti-capitalist mentality (Mises Institute here) as being motivated by envy and jealousy.

 

What if Earth had a natural ring? Other planets do. The four giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have rings. Smaller planets do, also. The minor planet of Chariklo, Centaur 2006 Chiron, and trans-Neptunian minor planet Haumea all have rings. (See Caltech News here.)  Ontologically, Earth could as well. If we did and if views of the other planets, the stars, nebulae, etc., etc. were occasionally blocked or photographic plates captured their tracks what would be the response? 

 

Would astronomers wish for (or demand) a massive anti-satellite program? No one seems to be calling for weather modification to clear the sky of clouds on nights that astronomers want to work from their visual observatories. (Radio astronomy is not affected by clouds and rain.) 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Entrepreneurship 

Elon Musk and the Audacity of Entrepreneurship 

Supplies and Demands 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy 

The Invention of Enterprise

The Invention Of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship 

from Ancient Mesopotamia To Modern Times. 

David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, William J. Baumol,. 

eds. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 

2010. 

THIS ANTHOLOGY DELIVERS 17 authoritative essays by accomplished scholars, surveying the sweep of history as seen from the vantage point of trade and commerce. The presentations on ten cultures from 20 different researchers are necessarily varied in perspective. Uniting them are their answers to the question, “What is entrepreneurship?” 

This review originally appeared in 

Libertarian Papers Vol. 3, Art. No. 15 (2011).

In the Preface by William J. Baumol, three hypotheses are presented. First, entrepreneurs find practical application for new inventions. However, in addition to those obviously creative actions, corrosive enterprises enrich their operatives without apparent net benefit to others. That, too, is enterprise because (third) “the direction taken by entrepreneurial activity depends heavily, at any particular time and in any particular society, on the prevailing institutional arrangements and the relative payoffs they offer…” Of course, other definitions have been offered. Peter Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner, Frank Knight, and even John Keynes are referenced across the essays. But these three hypotheses frame those other views.

Little here will be challenging, except, perhaps by omission. The Babylonians are here, but their long distance trade with the Hittites is not. Michael Hudson (“Entrepreneurs: from the Near Eastern Takeoff to the Roman Collapse”) validates our belief that Plato and Aristotle, among other sources, show that merchants and craftsmen were held in lower esteem than farmers and soldiers. That does not explain the invention of coinage, nor the contemporary rise of the tyrants as self-made men, nor the vibrant commerce in goods such as wines and ceramics that were nominally available both at home and from abroad. It may be that our assumptions are defined only by the surviving works of a few writers whose opinions are too easily accepted by the would-be philosopher-kings of later academies and lyceums.

Similarly, Louis P. Cain (“Entrepreneurship in the Antebellum United States”) chronicles Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston without mentioning their competitor, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Senator Douglas Stevens and the Illinois Central are here, but James J. Hill and the Great Northern are absent from “Entrepreneurship in the United States, 1865–1920,” by Naomi R. Lamoreaux. The history of the computer revolution covered by Margaret B. W. Graham, feels the same as Cornella Wunsch’s telling of the Neo- Babylonians: as if the author researched it professionally, without actually living through it. If Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution were condensed to a dozen pages, it would identify the salient moments and crucial decisions of the significant entrepreneurs, which this chapter did not.

The economic histories of the Islamic/Arabic matrix, China and India, are each covered in single chapters. They are like a view of the Earth from the International Space Station: admiring the geography is easier than finding the people. Nonetheless, from orbit, a telescopic lens on a commercial television camera reveals water wells in the desert, each no more than two meters across. And here, too, within the panoramic sweep are individuals.

In “The Scale of Entrepreneurship in Middle Eastern History: Inhibitive Roles of Islamic Institutions,” by Timur Kuran we meet Ismail Abu Taqiyya, a coffee merchant who was active 1580 to 1620. (His story is told fully in Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant by Nelly Hanna, Syracuse University Press, 1998.) Like many innovators, Abu Taqiyya met social and religious resistance: coffee was considered an intoxicant; and so “black water” was opposed by clerics. Mobs attacked and burned coffeehouses. Finally, in a courtroom, it was demonstrated that people who drink coffee exhibit no signs of slurred speech, dull wit, or lethargy.

In fact, we know Abu Taqiyya only from court proceedings. Few merchants of the Middle East left any personal financial records. Certainly, as a class, they were literate. They must have kept track of their sales and expenses. However, unlike their counterparts in Florence and Flanders, they had no strong tradition of record-keeping.

That fact reflects the fundamental barrier everywhere outside Western Europe—and there as well, until modern times: the family and the partnership were the only available modes of collective action.

It was difficult to create an enterprise that outlived its founders. That was true not only for the Middle East, but also for India, and China. By contrast, both the Babylonians and the Neo-Babylonians, whose temples were economic actors, did leave evidence of contracts extending across years and lifetimes.

Yet those family partnerships enabled trust, which is essential for transactions across space and time. Louis P. Cain (“Entrepreneurship in the Antebellum United States”) outlines the extension and expansion of the post office and the telegraph, both of which empowered communication that carried business news. Cain explicitly cites the invention of specialized commercial newspapers transported by U.S. Mail at favorable tariffs. Unfortunately, he says nothing about the competitors to the federal postal service. He also leaves out the U.S. Mint which in this era adopted steam engines to produce millions of uniform objects to close tolerance on a tight budget. However, he does support his claim that entrepreneurs of the time brought fundamental innovations to three key infrastructures: law, transportation and communication, and finance.

It is easy to quibble with details and to criticize the book they did not write. Only when we take an “orbital view” of the history of enterprise do those large features stand out in patterns. The editors and authors of this anthology show that enterprise is a complex phenomenon. Entrepreneurs find uses for new inventions. They seek out inefficiencies and [they] profit by reducing or removing them. They create novelties that destroy the patterns of existing goods and services. And they seek and gain special favors from political authorities. Entrepreneurs profit from war; but they do so only when and to the extent that their culture denigrates the merchant. When, as in Rome, the richest men claim poverty while using slaves to run their affairs, what we call “rent seeking” becomes the highest expression of enterprise.

Within that big picture, this anthology provides a wealth of facts, often as contrasts. Although Islamic law did not generally allow the existence of a non-corporeal entity, the waqf was adapted to that need. Originally intended to allow social service based on real estate—a well, for example—the waqf was extended to the caravansarai and eventually to pure cash holdings. Despite the anti-capitalist ethics that dominated Germany and France, non-state enterprises succeeded there, as well. Across the essays, the authors provide specific narratives of common themes such as the the varieties of business organizations, including partnerships, joint-stock corporations, and cartels, the use (and abuse) of patents, innovations in accounting, the nature of debt, and the contradictory impacts of religions.

Societies that hold merchants in high esteem enjoy material benefits. Evidence for that in this book comes from “The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic,” by Oscar Gelderblom, as well as the chapters covering England, and the United States. The status of the merchant in ancient India and China and in modern Japan validates that assumption. The best the merchant could hope for was benign neglect. Japan eclipsed India and China when merchants were elevated in the culture, granted not merely political power (though therewas that), but status and respect.

Allowing for some problematic distractions, this book can serve as an excellent primary text for a university class in economic history or as a supplemental assignment for a business school survey course in entrepreneurship. Aside from the content itself, each of these articles suggests topics for further study. Anyone who has already invested serious research in the development of trade and commerce will have questions— perhaps challenges—of their own to illuminate the work here. Thus, this anthology provides a reliable foundation for understanding how modern entrepreneurship came to be; and it also delivers a provocative engagement for new research and further discoveries.

Readers of this journal may not immediately recall the content of Ayn Rand’s essay, “The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age” but they will not be surprised that Rand wrote a tract with that title. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer warned that followers of mass movements often feel that they have access to special, even arcane, knowledge unavailable to, or unrecognized by, the mainstream culture. With that caveat as an anchor, it remains that several of the otherwise fine works here are tarnished by a kind of academic decadence, “death by citation.”

In the chapter “Entrepreneurship in France,” Michel Hau writes: “The persecutions of Protestants by Louis XIV (Lüthy 1955–1961) and then the troubles under the Revolution (Perrot 1982; Bonin 1985; Crouzet 1989; Aerts and Crouzet 1990) had more or less weakened entrepreneurship in many parts of France.” The facts are known to all; and Hau speaks to the expected, not the unusual. Moreover, Hau’s sentence contains modifiers (weasel words) “more or less” and “in many parts.” Of course, each chapter has its own bibliography, lest we suspect these professors of invention. Michel Hau provides 178 references for his 26 pages, including Weber’s Protestant Ethic in the original German.

In the chapter “Entrepreneurship in the United States, 1865–1920,” Naomi R. Lamoreaux conjurs five citations to bolster this claim: “There was no higher goal for a young American male to pursue during this period than to be a ‘self-made man’—to make a great deal of money through dint of his own hard work and ‘pluck.’” Anyone who wishes to tout the Gilded Age as an Era of Altruism will need to see her five and raise her one.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Genius of Design

Venture Capital: a Zeitgeist Film

A Man's Home is His Market 

The Heller Coins of Medieval Hall in Swabia 

Money as Living History 

Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics 
Numismatics Informs Economics

Censorship in Cyberspace 1991-2021

I placed myself outside the accepted norms on two discussion boards for amateur astronomers, The Sky Searchers and Cloudy Nights. I withdrew from TSS though I still participate with CN. 

 

To me there is no doubt that the owners of the discussion boards can have any rules they want: it’s their property. My problem—and it is entirely my own—is that the privately-own spaces are marketed as forums for discussion and in those discussions I found myself marginalized for not sharing common though unstated assumptions.

 

On The Sky Searchers, I posted a negative review of The Science and Art of Using Telescopes by Philip Pugh (Springer 2009). I placed similar though somewhat different versions on Cloudy Nights and Stargazers Lounge. You can read another here on Necessary Facts. On TSS, I received a nastygram from a moderator demanding to know how I could “launch an unprovoked attack on one of our special authors.” (The quote is inexact. I no longer have access. My IP address is blocked.) I said that they would not have a problem in the future and deleted the review. When I went back to find the exact exchange, I found the block. 

 

Cloudy Nights LLC is a discussion forum for amateur astronomers. It is hosted by Astronomics, a second-generation family-owned retailer of telescopes and related instruments and accessories. The discussion board is now over 30 years old and has more than 115,000 unique usernames. Their policies and processes are time-tested and mature. However, they do include contradictory applications. 

 

They say that they do not allow discussions of religion and politics. And that’s fine with me, except that several people do quote the Bible in their signature fields. Psalm 19:1 is perhaps the most common: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork.” In fact, my Austinite neighbor, Ed LaBelle has an outreach called “Psalm 19 Astronomy” and he writes under that label for the local astronomy club newsletter as well as Cloudy Nights. They do work hard at urban sidewalk outreach taking their telescopes to the public and I applaud their successes.

 

On The Sky Searchers, when birthdays come around, one of the frequent contributors places her good wishes in an off-topic chat area. As it was November, I followed suit by quoting astrological forecasts for the day as a nod to other Scorpios. Those were pulled down by the moderator because astrology is not allowed on TSS. If that stricture is in the published rules, I missed it. In a wider context, however, astrology is a religious practice and I wonder if the moderator would have pulled down a Christian benediction. 

On Cloudy Nights, in the off-topic forum, I placed a version of my Christmas star essay, which in the past I placed in the Austin Astronomical Society newsletter. (Two versions are 2015 here and 2017 here on NecessaryFacts.)

The article was only a historical view of a popular problem. The International Planetarium Society website (www.ips-planetarium.org) lists over 100 citations to the Star of Bethlehem. Writing in Archaeology Vol. 51, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 1998), Anthony F. Aveni cited 250 “major scholarly articles” about the Star of Bethlehem. 

The moderator, csa/montana, pulled it because it discusses religion, which is not allowed on Cloudy Nights. And that would be fine, if people did not have Scriptural quotes in their  signatures. 

Cloudy Nights hosts a forum for discussing Light Pollution. The guidelines are very clear. They do not allow people to advocate shooting out lights with BB guns. 

LP Forum Guidelines - Please Read

Started by Glassthrower, Jan 21 2008 10:23 PM

Cloudy Nights wishes to foster a positive environment where the science of light pollution can be discussed. People seeking to learn more about light pollution should be able to come here, peruse the information available, discuss the issue, and walk away with something positive gained - and hopefully a new appreciation (or at least a curiosity) for starry dark skies the way nature originally intended them. 

We want to provide useful information that will help people take civic action on their own, or with local/national networks (like the IDA) - to implement dark-sky friendly regulations in their area. Working with local and state governments, zoning commissions, lighting boards, and utility departments can be an intimidating experience for the uninitiated - we'd like to offer a place for others to share their experiences and resources in this respect. But the politics of the day should always take a back seat to the academic and the science. Stick to the facts and leave the feelings out of it. 

Full statement here:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/150672-lp-forum-guidelines-please-read/

Personally, I believe that concerns about light pollution and the associated problem of new constellations of artificial satellites are mostly Luddite rants against progress. The recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope dramatically caps 64 years of progress in placing sensors and recorders away from the Earth, its atmosphere, and lights. That said, I am not insensitive to the frustrations of ground-based astronomers. In fact, I share them. But I tally the convenience of electricity and night-time lighting as a diminutive cost to myself. (Against Dark Skies on NecessaryFacts here. and I Like Satellite Constellations here.) 

In response to a post, I quoted from those two essays. The moderator csa/montana closed the discussion saying that it had become political. So, it is appropriate to call for the United Nations to regulate the launching of satellites and further for your local government and the UN to debate whether and how to address light pollution. However, it is not allowed to question the need for those interventions.

 

http://www.phrack.org/archives/issues/38/2.txt

                                ==Phrack Inc.==

                 Volume Four, Issue Thirty-Eight, File 2 of 15

                          [-=:< Phrack Loopback >:=-]

                                By Phrack Staff

 

     Phrack Loopback is a forum for you, the reader, to ask questions, air problems, and talk about what ever topic you would like to discuss.  This is also the place Phrack Staff will make suggestions to you by reviewing various items of note; magazines, software, catalogs, hardware, etc.

 

Date: March 22, 1992

From: "Michael E. Marotta" <MERCURY@lcc.edu>

Subject: Censorship in Cyberspace

To: Phrack Staff

 

I have been hired to write an article about the control of information in

cyberspace.  We all know that Fidonet moderators and sysops devote their OWN resources for us to use.  There is no question about the "right" of the sysop or moderator to delete messages and users.  The practice of censorship is nonetheless newsworthy.

 

If YOU have experienced censorship on Fidonet or Usenet, Prodigy or CompuServe,or another BBS or network, I am interested in learning about your story.  If you can supply downloads of actual encounters, so much the better.

 

If you have ever been censored, send me physical world mail about the event.

 

               Michael E. Marotta

               5751 Richwood  #34

               Lansing, Mich. 48911

 

http://www.phrack.org/archives/issues/38/2.txt

 

http://cu-digest.org/CUDS5/cud514.txt

Computer underground Digest    Wed Feb 17, 1993   Volume 5 : Issue 14

                           ISSN  1004-042X

 

       Editors: Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer (TK0JUT2@NIU.BITNET)

       Archivist: Brendan Kehoe

       Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth

                          Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala

       Copy Editor: Etaion Shrdlu, Seniur

 

Date: Thu, 11 Feb 93 20:17 EST

From: "Michael E. Marotta" <MERCURY@LCC.EDU>

Subject: File 5--Censorship in Cyberspace

 

Excerpts from "Censorship in Cyberspace" (c) 1993 by Michael E. Marotta the complete text (2000 words) appears in the ($5) 1993 Retail Catalog of Loompanics, P. O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368. Founded in 1974, Loompanics, publishers of unusual books, features about 300 titles on privacy, underground income, self-defense, etc.

+++++

As Ayn Rand noted, when people abandon money, their only alternative when dealing with each other is to use guns.   Yet, the anti-capitalist mentality permeates cyberspace.  Most public systems and networks actually forbid commercial messages.  So, computer sysops and network moderators are reduced to cavalier enforcement of their personal quirks.

 

When Tom Jennings created Fidonet, Omni magazine called him an "online anarchist."  Since then, Fidonet has developed a governing council and lost Jennings.  Over the last two years, I have been banished from

these Fidonet echoes: 

         * Stock Market for saying that Ivan Boesky is a political

           prisoner

         * Virus for saying that viruses could be useful

         * Communications for saying that telephone service

           should not be regulated by the government

         * International Chat for asking "How are you" in Hebrew

           and Japanese.

 

Kennita Watson, whom I met on Libernet, told me this story:

 

         When I was at Pyramid, I came in one day and

         "fortune" had been disabled.  I complained to

         Operations, and ended up in a personal meeting with

         the manager.  He showed me a letter from the NAACP

         written to Pyramid threatening to sue if they

         didn't stop selling racist material on their

         machines.  They cited a black woman who had found

         the "...there were those whose skins were black...

         and their portion was niggardly.... 'Let my people

         go to the front of the bus'..." fortune, and

         complained to the NAACP.  I suspect that she (and

         the NAACP) were clueless as to the meaning of the

         term "niggardly".  I (as a black woman) was

         embarrassed and outraged. Because of the stupidity

         of a bunch of paranoid people, I couldn't read my

         fortune when I logged out any more. "

 

It is important to bear in mind that to the censor, censorship, like all evils, is always an unpleasant but necessary means to achieve a good result.  Robert Warren is a sysop who replied to an article of mine on Computer Underground Digest.  He said: ... People have a right to say what they want in public, but some don't care about the responsibility that comes with it. So you zap 'em."  Now, there is no argument with his basic premise: Since he owns the equipment, he has the final say in its use.  This is his right.  Likewise, the administrators of publicly-funded university computers also engage in censorship under a mandate to serve the people who pay taxes.  "All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely," the historian John E. E. Acton said.  It is no surprise that this applies in cyberspace.

 

   Political and social freedom have little to do with constitutions or elections. Congress could choose a new prime minister every day or the people could elect the secretary of state to a three year term. The details are unimportant.  Some places are free and some places are controlled because the people in those places need freedom or accept oppression.  It always comes back to the individual.

 

   Dehnbase Emerald BBS is home to libertarian and objectivist discussions and is a vital link in Libernet.  The number is (303) 972-6575.  Joseph Dehn is not interested in enforcing rules.

 

   Albert Gore and George Bush agreed on the need for a "data superhighway."  The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recommended that this national network be open to commercial enterprises.  This is good.  An open market is the best protection against power and corruption.

 

------------------------------

Previously on Necessary Facts

 

The Science of Liberty 

The Sociology of Freedom 

Why Evidence is not Enough 

Jerry Emanuelson's Algebraic Proof of Ricardo's Law of Association. 

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments