Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 07/14/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“THE POLITICS OF SKY-HIGH HOUSE PRICES
How Government Jacks Up The Price of Owning Your Home
By Joel Miller”
If you own your home or may sell or buy one, be sure to click on this article in REASON at http://www.reason.com/0607/millerchartb.shtml. There are four pages of text plus charts of U.S. home ownership rates by regions in 1965-2005, cost per square foot, and median metropolitan home prices in 14 cities and 10-year intervals beginning in 1985. You’ll be surprised.
“MUST THE GOVERNMENT DECIDE IF KFC IS GOOD FOR YOU?
by S. M. OLIVA”
Our title and quotes below are from an article posted by Mises.Org:
“Free speech is perhaps the single greatest threat to central governments, because speech is the ultimate form of decentralized social cooperation – people conveying information to one another. It is no surprise, then, that politicians and regulators, people whose livelihoods depend on the existence of social conflict, target free speech as a threat to various ‘national interests.’ These interests are always expressed in collectivist terms that often employ the façade of rights – i.e., ‘consumer rights.’…
“Today, the most prominent regulator of commercial speech in the Federal Trade Commission, which identifies, prosecutes, and punishes ‘unfair methods of competition.’ This broad phrase applies to both violations of the antitrust laws (i.e., monopolization) and ‘false or misleading’ speech in connection with commercial interests.
“It may seem unobjectionable for the government to outlaw ‘false’ speech, but the broader term ‘false or misleading’ opens a Pandora’s box. Any communication, no matter how grounded in fact, can ‘mislead’ someone who lacks proper context or has different experiences to draw upon than the speaker. Speech can mislead simply because the listener must consider arguments that contradict his own biases and prejudices. As a legal standard, ‘misleading’ confers enormous power on the government censor charged with identifying and punishing such speech.
“In 2004, the FTC punished as ‘misleading’ a series of television advertisements produced the previous year by KFC Corporation, the operator of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. One ad compared the nutritional value KFC’s ‘Original Recipe’ fried chicken breasts to the Whopper sandwich sold by Burger King. The ad stated that two Original Recipe breasts contained 38 grams of fat compared [to] the Whopper’s 43. A second ad claimed that an Original Recipe serving had 11 grams of carbohydrates and 40 grams of protein, which was compatible with a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet. Both advertisements argued that Original Recipe chicken could be incorporated into a healthy and balanced diet…
“FTC member Pamela Jones Harbour, a former deputy attorney general of New York, said in a separate stement on the KFC case that the company should have been forced to forfeit the profits it earned while airing the challenged advertisements: ‘KFCC is fullt aware of our nation’s struggle with obesity, yet has cynically attempted to exploit a massive health problem through deceptive advertising. Companies should not be allowed to benefit monetarily from this kind of deception, especially where the health and safety of consumers are compromised.’
“Harbour’s position is curious. Political groups and elected officials often benefit from deceiving the public, and they certainly ‘exploit’ social concerns to justify all sorts of state interventions. (Indeed, Harbour’s statement exploited the obesity issue to justify stricter punishment of KFC and other restaurant companies.) Far from benefiting consumers, political intervention usually deprives consumers of choice, as in the case of restaurant smoking bans…
“Ultimately, consumers were more than competent to assess KFC’s advertising claims and act accordingly. The FTC did not actually accuse KFC of fraud – that is, taking customers’ money without providing an agreed-upon product in return. And to that point, the FTC’s complaint never cited a single example of a consumer who was ‘injured’ by KFC’s advertising. The only publicized complaint was from a political group that wanted the government to censor a company that it disliked. This same group recently sued KFC over the content of its fried chicken, asking a federal judge to tell the company to use a different type of cooking oil.
“The traditional justification for government is that it protects individual rights by settling disputes between citizens. But when there is no actual dispute, and the government itself goes looking for problems to ‘fix,’ what you have is a monopolist who seeks to control all speech, thereby eliminating political competition…”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.mises.org and then on the title. The author’s e-mail address is smoliva@voluntarytrade.org
“WHY DO WE DREAM?”
“Ernest Hartman, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., explains.
“The questions, ‘Why do we dream?’ or ‘What is the function of dreaming?’ are easy to ask but difficult to answer. The most honest answer is that we do not yet know the function or functions of dreaming. This ignorance should not be surprising because despite many theories we still do not fully understand the purpose of sleep, nor do we know the functions of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is when most dreaming occurs. And these two biological states are much easier to study scientifically than the somewhat elusive phenomenon of dreaming…
“Therefore, I will try to explain a current view of dreaming and its possible functions, developed by myself and many collaborators, which we call the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming. The basic idea is as follows: activation patterns are shifting and connections are being made and unmade constantly in our brains, forming the physical basis for our minds. There is a whole continuum in the making of connections that we subsequently experience as mental functioning. At one end of the continuum is focused waking activity, such as when we are doing an arithmetic problem or chasing down a fly ball in the outfield. Here our mental functioning is focused, linear and well-bounded. When we move from focused waking to looser waking thought – reverie, daydreaming and finally dreaming – mental activity becomes less focused, looser, more global and more imagistic. Dreaming is the far end of this continuum: the state in which we make connections most loosely…
“Some consider this loose making of connections to be a random process, in which case dreams would be basically meaningless. The Contemporary Theory of Dreaming holds that the process is not random, however, and that it is instead guided by the emotions of the dream. When one clear-cut emotion is present, dreams are often very simple. Thus people who experience trauma – such as escape from a burning building, an attack or a rape – often have a dream something like ‘I was on the beach and was swept away by a tidal wave.’ This case is paradigmatic. It is obvious that the dreamer is not dreaming about the actual traumatic event, but is instead picturing the emotion, ‘I am terrified. I am overwhelmed’...
“Therefore, overall the contemporary theory considers dreaming to be a broad making of connections guided by emotion. But is this simply something that occurs in the brain or does it have a purpose as well? Function is always very hard to prove, but the contemporary theory suggests a function based on studies of a great many people after traumatic or stressful new events. Someone who has just escaped from a fire may dream about the actual fire a few times, then may dream about being swept away by a tidal wave. Then over the next weeks the dreams gradually connect the fire and tidal wave image with other traumatic or difficult experiences the person may have had in the past. The dreams then gradually return to their more ordinary state. The dream appears to be somehow ‘connecting up’ or weaving in’ the new material in the mind, which suggests a possible function. In the immediate sense, making these connections and tying things down diminishes the emotional disturbance or arousal. In the longer term, the traumatic material is connected with other parts of the memory systems so that it is no longer unique or extreme – the idea being that the next time something similar or vaguely similar occurs, the connections will already be present and the event will not be quite so traumatic…
“Thus we consider a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us to cope with further trauma or stressful events.”
To read the complete article, click on
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ and then on “ASK THE EXPERTS: BIOLOGY” and then on the title.
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