"In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better."--Michael Crichton

It all started with the cavemen.

Wait, let me back up: it all began with men.

From the very beginning, we've been runners. Those biologists and anthropologists who don't argue that we're aquatic apes will tell you that we're running apes. It's unlikely that anyone had to invent running; the brisk joggers were simply weeded out. This much, at least, is genetic. Nature, not nurture.

The running subsided somewhat with the discovery of shelter, also unlikely to have been invented (hell, maybe shelter even came first). Our ancestors found holes in the ground, dirt-eroded tree root structures, crude canopies, and occasionally even caves, and set up base camp for the next few years -- make that 200,000 years, for those families lucky enough to find caves. There, our ancestors developed a taste for the sedentary life. Sure, they still hunted and gathered, but they left the wandering to the nomads.

That's where evolution and circumstance end and invention begins. That's where the most significant changes to the human condition stopped being chromosomal and started being societal, occurring inside a generation at a time. Someone came up with the sharpened rock, music, money, campfires, the scorch-tipped wooden spear, the arrow, the plow, language, storytelling, jokes, and religion.

Someone also invented not killing, and not injuring, and not stealing. Or someones, rather; it didn't happen quite how the libertarians like to imagine. We didn't draw up agreements not to kill each other; even something that seemingly basic is still having the kinks worked out. Slavery was still practiced explicitly in Niger in 2003. For much of history, "no killing" enjoyed unilateral enforcement; that is, no one had to bother inventing the idea of "don't kill me." That idea occurs naturally to each of us. The union of "don't kill me" and "I won't kill you" has been almost geologically slow going. In fact, we can still witness the evolution of this seemingly commonsense tit-for-tat concept today in philosophy lecture halls, on the morning news of the world, and on C-SPAN. People still do not get it.

Every few centuries, someone makes an improvement. But as philosophy and its subset political theory are neither exact sciences nor formal systems, the best one can do is type up a treatise, get it published, and leave the rest to fate.

In this way, every improvement to the original invention of rights has not been a start from scratch, as is frequently the explanation. Rather, each spasm in the human condition has been an upgrade to the configuration of rights. It's all open source. Wiki-rights. We've come a long way from the early "Usenet" world of warring city states and Hobbesian pharaohs. Hammurabi's code, Greece's democracy, Plato's Republic , the Magna Carta, Locke's Second Treatise, the US Constitution, even Marx's Communist Manifesto -- each with varying success and arguable merit, some mere flights of fancy, others the very stuff of the global polity.

The greatest conceit, to me, is the belief that nothing will come next. Humans have a need to be part of a climax, of the End of Days, the conclusion of civilization. Maybe to give their own lives closure, maybe to witness firsthand what it is that gives humanity its purpose, but whatever the case, people want to believe there's nothing new under the sun and everything worth saying or doing or making has been all of those things and too often. Nobody wants to be obsolete, so here's to hoping nothing gets better.

This, of course, goes beyond cynicism and into the realm of willful ignorance. We'll get better. When this is said about science, technology, medicine, wealth, economics, and the human standard of living, we accept it as obvious to the point of redundancy.

And yet, for some reason, when we broaden the scope of our definition to include merely one more facet of the human condition (indeed, a vital facet if we are to assess the whole of human experience), argument and denial endure. The facet of the human condition to which I refer -- freedom -- depends just as much on the ingenuity, innovation, and capacity for reason of our brightest minds as all the other facets mentioned above. Freedom, just like the other facets, has an intimate relationship with both science and philosophy. The collection of inventions called human rights have not been fine-tuned quite to perfection, just as other sciences have not been. We still have kinks to work out, not only in its execution but in its very conceptualization. Of all people, anarchists and libertarians should recognize this.

Humankind's demand for freedom only becomes stronger the greater our potential for happiness. Every innovation that adds a day to our life expectancy, makes us safer, less likely to suffer, or improves our strength, stamina, or health, gives us a greater incentive to refuse the state's services. Any creation that subtracts a minute from the labor necessary to survive, or cuts the daily commute, or other wastes of time, ups the stakes. Any invention that provides me with something else to do with my time increases the value of a day of my life , just as surely as an increase in the supply of alternatives for how to spend a dollar increases the value of that dollar.

Relative to its position 1000 years ago, the state has almost no power. It's grown, to be sure. It has developed new technology, like the rest of us have. It can do things it couldn't do before. But I ask: what would the state need, today, to carry out what it has done in the past? What state is currently capable of conquering the entire known civilized world, like Macedon did (under Alexander) and Rome did (it's important to "curve for inflation" by making a relative comparison rather than speaking in absolute terms on matters of government vs. humanity; obviously, for example, modern states can kill MORE people now, but even 60 years ago, the Nazis couldn't even accomplish something as historically routine as genocide, while they still managed to kill 12 million people, 6 million of them Jews, in the Holocaust)? What would the state need in order to tie people to their land and have them working as serfs? Will the state ever have the control it once had over the mass media? International trade? Domestic affairs? Sex? Religion? The Taliban wasn't a sign of things to come, it was a spasm of nostalgia.

And what of tomorrow? We're at the cusp of the information age, already having experienced unprecedented accessibility of knowledge. We have the genome cornered; it must soon come out with its hands up. On the brink of nanotech, we have nowhere to go but forward into immortality.

And man's liberty index will react to these developments as it always has: it will rocket into the sky, ever upward, on its current path, its steadiness broken only by an occasional acceleration. We'll continue to get older, healthier, wealthier, wiser, stronger, faster, and prettier. With it, we'll only get more stubborn with our rights and more precise in our demands.

Let me finish where we started, with cavemen. All of humanity descends from a single ancestor -- called Eve by geneticists -- who lived in Africa 2 million years ago. Oh, there were other hominids all across the globe, to be sure. Our ancestors merely spread rapidly over the planet and "displaced" them, with virtually no intermarriage. Human history, you see, began with a global, and 100% successful, genocide. And all of us are descended from the perpetrators. Violence, it would seem, was at one time the rule rather than the exception. Aggression, the spirit of statism, in those days included all of us. I think that fact best illustrates how far we've come.

What will our descendants say about us?

A mere two months after taking a courageous stand in favor of a minimum wage hike for other people's workers along with their own, Wal-Mart workers have taken a courageous stand in favor of irony: an Oakland, California jury yesterday found Wal-Mart liable for $172 million in compensatory and punitive damages for not providing their workers with state-mandated lunch breaks.

The issue is multi-layered for the private sector proponent: on the surface, it looks like yet another case of a state regulation clashing with market efficiency. Complicating the matter: Wal-mart, even as corporations go, are perfect bastards, from their estimated $1.5 billion in subsidies and property tax abatements to their preference for factories in union-prohibitive countries and notorious eminent domain abuse. Wal-Mart's libertarian apologists have their hands full defending their precious corporation as a business proper when the company behaves as though they'd prefer hefty regulation over light. The rest of us are left to ponder whether to just throw up our hands and write off the whole matter as a case of roundabout just desserts.

The only reason I go to the Washington Times is for work, I wouldn't touch that moonie rag otherwise. The mark of a good right-wing nutball crackpot website is the slightly fuzzy, poorly-designed ads for sites about using your own body weight to get in shape, sites that teach you unconventional self-defense techniques even weirder than Krav Maga, and sites that sell all kind of coins as long as they're gold. One of these ads recently was for Stand Up For Steel, a coalition of various steel unions pushing for the government to subsidize their vocations by forcing the rest of us to buy the ridiculously expensive product they produce when we can get it dirt cheap from China and elsewhere.

What is it about unions that make them so untouchable? Why are they allowed to constantly threaten and impoverish us with violence and protectionism? This supposedly capitalist country is held in thrall by these dirtbags who are too lazy to educate themselves in something useful, a service people actually want them to perform instead of one people are forced to pay them to perform. Why don't they abandon America's Butthole and move to more vibrant places like China or India? After all, their ancestors moved to the US from Europe. I know a lot of people want to believe it but the United States is not the end of history. If toiling in filth is their raison d'être, let the comfy workers ship their F-350s to Asia and get a job there. They can bang on all the steel they want for $1.50 a day.

Something tells me that if the US cast off that filthy frozen pit called Michigan, all our problems would be solved. Send the rest of the Rust Belt with it into economic oblivion. Fuck it, flush the Flyover down the toilet altogether. The coasts are the regions that run this show. Let the middle of the country join Angola in an economic union, they have just about the same GDP.

In my youth there were these things called LPs, big, ugly and made of vinyl. They (normally) included the song lyrics so that we'd be able to figure out what the hell Bob Dylan was singing. In the digital age more and more of us buy our music via download, whether from Apple, Rhapsody, Napster, or any other internet based content distribution system, those lyric sheets are no longer available. A young software developer saw a need, and tried to meet it. He created a software plug-in for iTunes, called PearLyrics, that would search available internet lyrics databases to bring users the lyrics for their downloaded songs. Simple, no? Indeed, he was not unique, Apple's latest OS has a plug-in architecture called Dashboard, a way of launching applets (called Widgets) quickly, and many developers had created Widgets that served the same purpose. PearLyrics, however, was the most popular.

However, the Music Publishers Association has decided that buying a song doesn't entitle you to know what the hell the singers are saying. Because they've been issuing cease & desist orders to one and all. Now, as these plug-in applications do nothing more than search websites for available data, they could indeed win in court. However, because the people that wrote these mini-applications are all small fries, their resources are not equal to the sort of fight that they would face to defy the MPA. This is the official statement of Pearworks concerning the end of their program, and why. More disturbing still is the hard-on that the MPA seems to have for websites that serve up lyrics, for reference this quote from Lauren Keiser of the MPA sums up the attitude of the armed banditi, ""throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective". Really? Jail time for guessing what singers are singing?

So, next up for the MPA is the closing of internet lyrics sites, and jailing their owners. And the US government will be complicit in jailing its citizens to protect the corporate profits of music publishers. Just as it already jails people to ensure the corporate profits of large software developers, record companies and movie distributors. There isn't even any debate by the denizens of state whether or not lyrics websites actually do impact the corporate profits of music publishers. Have any of you that aren't musicians ever bought a lyrics book for an album? Professional musicians may need accurate lyrics and tablature, but does anyone else? In fact, this whole enterprise looks more like an attempt by corporate America to use government to create new customers by fiat.

An English academic (whose abstract I do not have handy, and if anyone knows his name, please email me) observed that people tolerated copyright because it was not overly oppressive, but that once it became oppressive they would turn against it. Unfortunately that has not been the case, while protest has risen on the anarchist fringe, the progressive fringe, and the academic fringe, there has been no united opposition to the ruthless extension and criminalization of intellectual property laws in the U.S. Like a slow boiled frog Americans simply accept the Sovietization of their society. America, ain't it great to live in the land of the free?

I don't know if this guy is a libertarian or just a civil libertarian, but this article gets an eye-roll score of at least 6. Much of what he's doing I agree with, such as not wanting to give his SSN to the DMV to get a license to drive (the article doesn't mention whether he thinks needing a license to drive on streets he ostensibly owns is also ridiculous). Not that I refuse to do this out of protest, how ridiculous, but I certainly would like to not have to.

The part that gets me is that he won't fly because he objects to having to identify himself to airlines. One airline even offered to let him fly without showing ID if he would submit to more stringent searches. He rejected that offer. He's complaining that the government is requiring airlines to check passenger IDs. But, how in the hell is a service provider supposed to know who you are without some sort of proof of identity? You could smack some dude over the head outside the airport and take his tickets to Paris. Whether this guy is a libertarian or not, surely he should realize that even without any state at all -- hell, maybe even more so -- you'd still need to prove your identity, whether with a photo ID or some sort of PIN (or both), to be able to use certain services like banks and airlines.

Also, the objection to being at least lightly screened for things such as guns and bombs before getting on a plane is pretty goofy. I certainly think the search procedures at the airport are pretty ridiculous, but it's the procedures that are stupid, not the searches themselves. I'm not the kind that likes to take any decent risks of being blown up in mid-air. Wild, huh?

He should stick to blowing his fortune on more worthwhile things like licensing requirements, not proving who you are to be able to use a ticket with your name on it.

PS: Sweet quote:

"I'm a millionaire," Gilmore said. "I can do whatever the fuck I want, right? Why should I run around without an ID? Because no one else was paying attention to that and letting our liberties slip down the drain. I figured it was worth some amount of money and some amount of personal sacrifice to keep a free society."