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“These are my questions to news reports that US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made a surprise trip to Baghdad in a desperate effort to jumpstart stalled efforts to form an Iraqi government…It may help Rice, discredited neocons, and the GOP to have such a coalition in place so that they can claim progress and accommodate the growing demand for withdrawal as gas prices rise and the November elections draw near. But like New Englanders in 1776 – or even South Carolinians in 1861 – Iraqis resent centralized governments imposed on them by foreigners…

“This second view of government is more recognized than government partisans wish to admit. It explains why small government is always to be preferred to large government – because small government is relatively less threatening to the private relations and private institutions that characterize civilization itself – and why no government is always to be preferred to both. In Iraq, an artificial state encompassing at least three nations, it explains why new coalition governments are so difficult to form..

“What Iraq needs is what its US and British overseers oppose: at least three separate states representing the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite nations. Political devolution into smaller states has much to recommend it, as University of Nevada-Las Vegas economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe tells us. A primary benefit is that small states are generally easier to keep in check by those who live within their jurisdiction.

“Another important effect is the increased role of free trade because small states cannot be autarchic. This means that they must trade with other countries in order to provide goods and services and the stuff of life. The resulting interdependency among nations is crucial to the creation of a political economy of peace, because countries that trade with each other tend not to war with each other…”

To read the complete article, click on http://www.mises.org/story/2109

“GETTING THERE
by Nick Paumgarten”

Our title and quotes are from an article posted in the 04/24/06 print edition of THE NEW YORKER:

“It is a testament both to the early allure of the automobile and to the difficulty of traveling very far in one that, in 1907, Andrew McNally II, the grandson of the founder of Rand McNally & Company, chose to spend his honeymoon in Milwaukee. He and his bride drove there, from their home in Chicago. The way was mostly unpaved and unmarked. In those days, there were no route numbers or state roads; in Wisconsin, there were merely old cart and carriage thoroughfares, whose primary purpose was the conveyance of food from farm to market…

“Rand McNally started out printing railway tickets and flyers, and then, in the eighteen-seventies, branched out into the business of publishing wax-engraved maps for gold prospectors and other hardy tourists. These were maps more of terrain than of roads through it. Still, Andrew McNally II had a sense that the automobile might enhance the way-finding side of the business, and so, on this honeymoon trip, he strapped a camera onto the front fender of his car and at every junction – every right or left turn – stopped and snapped a photograph. He and his bride did the same on the return trip. Back in Chicago, McNally compiled the photographs into a booklet, with a little arrow in each photograph indicating the proper direction to take. The booklet was called a Photo-Auto Guide and was essentially a driver’s-eye view of the way to Milwaukee, at least as it looked that spring…

“In the fifteenth century, Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince, presided over a court in Sagres that became a center for cartographers, instrument-makers, and explorers, whose expeditions he sponsored. Seafarers returning to Sagres from the west coast of Africa reported their discoveries, and new maps were produced, extending the reaches of the known world, which in those days did not go much beyond Cape Verde. These maps became very valuable, owing to their utility in trade, war, and soul-saving, and were jealously guarded as state secrets.

“The latter-day equivalent is a company called Navteq. It is the leading provider of geographic data to the Internet mapping sites and the personal-navigation industry – the boiler room of the where-you-are-and-what-to-do business…

“Despite the digitization of maps and the satellites circling the earth, the cartographic revolution still relies heavily on fresh observations made by people. Navteq, like Prince Henry, produces updates periodically (usually four times a year) for its corporate clients. Its explorers are geographic analysts, whose job is to go onto the roads to make sure everything that it says about those roads is true – to check old routes and record the new ones. The practice is called ground-truthing. They drive around and take note of that they call ‘attributes,’ anything of significance to a traveler seeking his way. A road segment can have a hundred and sixty attributes, everything from a speed limit to a drawbridge, an on-ramp, or a prohibition against U-turns. New signs, new roads, new exits, new rules: if such alterations go uncollected by Navteq, the traveler, relying on a device or a map produced by one of Navteq’s clients, might well get lost or confused enough to be ‘fit for Muldoon’s Asylum,’ as the Jones Live-Map brochure put it, in an early acknowledgment of the anguish of being lost in an automobile. (‘It’s his for the violent ward, straight and sure.’) A driver making a simple left turn – say, from Broadway onto Forty-second Street, - encounters a blizzard of attributes: one-way, speed limit, crosswalk, traffic light, street sign, turn restriction, two-way, hydrant.

“Navteq has about six hundred field researchers and offices in twenty-three countries. There are nine field researchers in the New York metropolitan area…

“A map is a piece of art. It is also a form of language – a rendering of information. A good map can occupy the eye and the mind longer than almost any other single page of data, including Scripture, poetry, sheet music, and baseball box scores. A map contains multitudes…

“The purpose and emphasis of a map are usually determined by who is paying for or benefiting from it. Web sites like MapQuest make money in much the same way that road-map publishers always have. They feature banner ads that direct users to fast-food restaurants, hotels, and services. Their maps become tourist-promotion documents. Personal navigation devices have their favored stops and ‘points of interest,’ too. As they become more sophisticated, they will come to know your preferences and needs and make suggestions – the nearest Jiffy Lube or Starbucks – turning G.P.S. into a sort of customized, localized Yellow Pages. Harley and Woodward would have been intrigued, though hardly surprised.

“The American road map tends to be treated more like folk art. Its leading expert is probably Jim Akerman, the director of the Smith Center for the History of Cartography, at the Newberry Library, in Chicago. ‘Scratch someone who’s interested in the history of cartography and you’ll most often find someone who was into road maps as a kid,’ he told me when I went to visit him at the library recently. He likes to point out that he was born in the same year as the interstate system, 1956. The Newberry has a peerless road-map collection, in a climate-controlled vault – a kind of giant, fantasy glove compartment…

“Eventually, in 1916, the federal government passed the first of several road-improvement acts. State highway departments were established, and in due time roads were standardized. In 1926, the government established a system of road numbers – odd for those running north-south, even for those running east-west. Soon, gas companies and tire manufacturers began commissioning highway maps, from Rand McNally and others, which they distributed free at service stations…

“Navteq (the name is a contraction of Navigation Technologies) started life in 1985, in Silicon Valley, and moved to Chicago in 1997. Its revenues have tripled since 2002, amid the digital mapping boom. It occupies an ever-expanding suite of offices on an immense floor of the Merchandise Mart, one of the largest commercial buildings in the world. It would be wise, when visiting Navteq, to bring bread crumbs or a handheld G.P.S. to keep from getting lost…Navteq is as much a collator of information as a collector of it. The raw information comes from a variety of sources, including the government – for example, from what are known as TIGER files, prepared by the Census Bureau. This information is in the public domain. A lot of it is out of date, idiosyncratic, incompatible, and, at the very least, requires cleaning up. Digital aerial photography is used as well.

“The existing data, from the government and other sources, had not been collected with way-finding in mind, so it was necessary to look at the world again through the eyes of a driver, instead of those of a tax collector or a land surveyor – ‘to add all the attributes no one ever thought to add because they weren’t thinking of navigation in the first place,’ Kahn said. ‘Guidance, one-way systems, no left turns. Does something go under or over when you have two lines that cross on a map?’”

“NOT A BLACK AND WHITE QUESTION”

Our title and quotes are from an article posted on The Economist print edition of 04/12/06:

“…Perhaps the last word should go to Francis Collins, who led America’s contribution to the Human Genome Project, and thus helped to open the debate. ‘The downside of using race, whether in research or in the practice of medicine,’ he says, ‘is that we are reifying it as if it has more biological significance than it deserves. Race is an imperfect surrogate for the causative information we seek. To the extent that we continue to use it, we are suggesting to the rest of the world that it is very reliable and that racial categories have more biological meaning than they do. We may even appear to suggest something that I know is not true: that there are bright lines between populations and that races are biologically distinct…”

USED BOOK SALES

We offer for sale all used books listed at http://www.vardaman.com/booksale.php.

OUR SYSTEM FOR BUYING OR SELLING LAND OR TIMBER

For details, click on http://www.vardaman.com and then on the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” You can offer to buy or sell timber or land. You must post the general area of your interest; be sure to include the state. You must also post your E-MAIL ADDRESS and the URL of your Internet site. Our tracking report will not report the number of visitors UNLESS you enter your URL. If you are selling, you should post the name of the tract. When you have entered all details, click on “Submit,” and what you just entered will appear on our Internet site at the bottom of the page under the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” Be sure to check for and correct errors.

For each tract posted and whose owner posted his URL, we charge $0.50 for each visit his ad receives. On each Friday at 0900 Central Time, we will e-mail him a bill for $0.50 for each visit his ad received during the week just ended. You can pay us by e-mailing the money to “Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company” at PayPal or mailing it to P.O. Box 12293, Jackson, MS 39236. We will delete your ad when your payments cease.

SELL LAND

For tract in AL, send e-mail to landsale@larsonmcgowin.com

BUY LAND

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BUY TIMBER

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