Gus Van Horn blog

Unsurprisingly, a bunch of documents pertinent to the question of whether the White House used the IRS to target conservative groups weren't really lost after all: After saying over and over -- in press statements, in court filings, in congressional hearings -- that the emails that went missing when Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed were gone forever, up to 30,000 Lerner emails have now turned up and are on their way to Congress. [link dropped] Or, at least they were said to have been... Now Treasury has clammed up again, trying to keep its contacts with the White House secret and reiterating that it is exempt from disclosure. The administration has offered a bizarre rationale: It would be illegal to turn over documents the IRS shared illegally since it is illegal for the IRS to share the files with anyone, including the court. [bold edded] As the rest of story indicates, the onus (and opportunity) of prising open the IRS will go to Congress, which can thereby (1) stop a dangerous precedent from being set, an (2) nail the President for an offense even greater than one which was drawn up as an article of impeachment for Richard Nixon. We can be sure that Obama's media apparatchiks will ignore the urgency of the task and pretend that it's just ugly politics. Republicans should understand that this line will appeal primarily to people who didn't and will never vote for them anyway, not that winning elections is an end in itself. We shall soon know what our new GOP majority is made of. -- CAV Link to Original

Over at Forbes is a column about a Supreme Court case dealing with the increasingly arbitrary way regulatory agencies exercise their authority. At one point, the article outlines the problem the case may help address in terms that remind me of the explanation for bureaucratic expansion offered by Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy: ... Government officials administering regulatory programs, particularly by bureaucratic staff without electoral constraints, will tend to aggrandize their own authority as each year passes, even with the most benign motives. Broad delegations of power to regulatory agencies are a continuing invitation to churn out more regulations, which almost always impinge personal freedom. Thus, regulatory officials tend to regularly expand their own power at the expense of individual liberty, regardless of the President's ideology. Not only are lots of things that shouldn't be crimes already illegal, but our current political milieu presents a temptationirresistible to most of our current politicians in the legislative branch to expand regulation. These problems are bad enough, but at least they don't put us so nearly at the mercy of a bureaucrat's whim. This piece indicates that administrative law attempts to impose some restraints on the regulators, but that it remains necessary for the Supreme Court to rule on the matter. This is because such informal communications as FAQs and internal emails have been treated like these agencies as if they are regulatory rulings. "By Interior's logic, agency tweets also could be 'regulations'", the authors point out. That's the last thing we need. Until political momentum builds for truly reigning in government to its proper, limited role as protector of individual rights, we should at least ensure that the regulatory process is intelligible and predictable. -- CAV Link to Original

Delegation on Steroids At Harvard Business Review is an interesting piece about how Google attacks problems. The piece breaks the approach down into four parts: People want to do a good job. Given enough eyeballs, every bug is shallow. People perform best at tasks that interest them. Great leaders provide a sense of mission and purpose. Based on the concluding paragraph of the third point, I would essentialize this by saying that Larry Page is a master of delegation: [T]he "best people" weren't chosen by Page, they chose themselves and proved so adept at the task that the AdWords problem was solved over a weekend. Far faster than most CEO's can organize a meeting among "top people." We see Larry Page using his grasp of the better, value-oriented side of human nature so well that his urgent tasks seem to delegate themselves! It is astounding how much time and effort that harnessing the interest of others can save. Weekend Reading "Human knowledge is neither automatic nor infallible, and it's not a moral failure to not know everything." -- Michael Hurd, in "What Makes a Person a Perfectionist" at The Delaware Coast Press "For two decades I've been questioning the concept of the alleged disease of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder." -- Michael Hurd, in "ADHD: The Party's Over" at The Delaware Wave My Two Cents I'll remember the Hurd piece on ADHD when my son reaches grade school age: I have seen ADHD used to "explain" typical boyhood behavior so many times that I regard having to contest such a diagnosis as almost inevitable. I have never been on the ADHD bandwagon, but I would have to challenge professional authority if someone decides to apply that label. Word to the Wise: Dump Sitemeter The "third-party script" that was causing people to have trouble visiting my blog stopped causing the problem as soon as I removed it. Ashas beenthecasefornumerousotherbloggers with the same or similar problems, this was the script that enabled the (former?) site statistics-tracking service, Sitemeter. My site being replaced, without my knowledge or consent, by a full-page ad for something I've never even heard of is completely unacceptable, and I don't care if it happened through incompetence or sleaziness. I don't run ads here, and if I ever decide to, they will be unobtrusive. I hate being made to redirect my attention by visually-distracting, noisy ads, and I have a general policy of not subjecting others to things I that find annoying. Sitemeter has lost my trust and I can't think of anything that outfit can do to gain it back. My thanks go to reader C. August for bringing my attention to this problem. --CAV Link to Original

1. I took Little Man to the pediatrician for his eighteen-month checkup this week and played the part of amused interpreter when the physician opened a conversation with me about my concerns. Immediately, his three-year-old sister started repeatedly interjecting something. On noticing this, I got Pumpkin to slow down and repeat herself again. "He's allergic to strawberries," was the message, and delivered at the appropriate time, too. As I suspected about the rash he got at daycare one day, it could be due to any number of things, and we won't really know what it is for some time. In the meantime, I nevertheless have a cute memory of Pumpkin being proud of contributing, and being a good Big Sister. And I got a chance to begin helping her understand the limits and basis of knowledge. 2. Heh! Electric cars are a Bad Idea, part 5,000: After 15 or 20 minutes, a woman shows up, unplugs her Nissan Leaf and pulls away. I've finished my burger, so I speed-walk to my Leaf and speed-drive through the garage to snag her spot. I plug in, and wait. I've got work to do, anyway. An hour later, I've got enough juice to get back to San Francisco, where I park, exhausted. A trip that would have taken an hour in a regular car -- Bay Area traffic is a hassle, after all -- took me almost three. This tempts me to make something like "range anxiety update" into a recurring feature of this blog. 3. Thomas Sowell, among a few other random thoughts, quips: You know you are old when waitresses call you "dear." This reminds me of something I noticed when I was around thirty-five or so. Starbucks baristas, young waitresses, and the like started calling me, "sir". I called it the s-bomb back then. It's good to know I have something to look forward to! 4. I enjoyed seeing the below interview of Bosch Fawstin, creator of the anti-Jihadist super-hero, Pigman: This just about makes me want to adopt an all-pigskin wardrobe. -- CAV Link to Original

Heather Wilhelm explains why she left feminism at the Federalist. Wilhelm does not attempt an analysis, but I think the article is a fine snapshot of what this movement means for women in practice. Here's an example: In a recent Slate article, writer Emily Yoffe tried to gently suggest that college girls drinking to the point of incapacitation might not be the best idea, safety-wise. Feminists, of course, blew a gasket. "Real equality is when women have the right to be as drunk and stupid as men," Jessica Valenti wrote at The Guardian, in a column that is not satire. "This false idea, that women's behavior is the real reason they are victimized," wrote Katie McDonough at Salon, "is regularly used to blame sexual violence on the 'problem' of young women today." Well, no. We all know where the blame lies: with the perpetrator. The goal is to encourage women to protect themselves, with reality being what it is. It almost leads one to wonder: Do feminists really care about women's safety at all? Or do they care more about their dream world, where there's an abortion clinic on every corner and a Vagina Monologues in every theater? [links in original, minor format edits] I have, over the years, observed a couple of things about feminists: (1) A flattery-by-imitation of some of the worst male behaviors (and stereotypes thereof), and (2) a willful blindness to actual differences between the sexes (e.g., upper body strength) and their consequences. In that light, the admonition that liberation somehow entails drinking oneself into a stupor is hardly surprising. Regarding explanations for why this is so, I refer the reader to the writings of feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin, and to Ayn Rand's comments on feminism in her 1971 essay, "The Age of Envy" (republished in The Return of the Primitive). Among them: (I regard myself as surpassed by Women's Lib in one respect: I did not know that it was possible to blow up the character of Comrade Sonia to such gigantic proportions.) ... Every other pressure group has some semi-plausible complaint or pretense at a complaint, as an excuse for existing. Women's Lib has none. But it has a common denominator with the others, the indispensable element of a modern pressure group: a claim based on weakness. It is because men are metaphysically the dominant sex and are regarded (though for the wrong reasons) as the stronger that a thing such as Women's Lib could gain plausibility and sympathy among today's intellectuals. It represents a rebellion against masculine strength, against strength as such, by those who neither attempt nor intend to develop it -- and thus it is the clearest giveaway of what all the other rebellions are after. [link added] Fascinatingly, nothing in Wilhelm's article would have been a surprise to Rand, as her other comments on "Women's Lib" indicate. I also have to confess amusement here, given a third thing I have observed over the years: professed feminists mouthing admiration for Ayn Rand. In that vein, I would recommend that any "feminist" who is actually simply interested in being respected as an individual, become more familiar with Ayn Rand. Although the feminist movement may want to co-opt her, she is actually worthy of admiration for the right reasons, and provides an antidote to both subservience and self-righteous stupidity: individualism. -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel, after interviewing Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress, treats us to an eviscerationof many of the anthropogenic global warming-based arguments used to justify the state crippling our economy: Let's agree for the sake of argument that this recent warming was partly caused by humanity. Let's also agree that there are some negative effects, including more frequent coastal flooding or longer droughts. If we agree that those are costs, shouldn't we also look at the benefits? Much of modern civilization owes its existence to our use of the fossil fuels that produce the greenhouse gasses. I don't see that civilization as misfortune. I wish climate alarmists would weigh its accomplishments against the relatively small downsides of climate change. One of industry's biggest accomplishments is creating a world where far fewer of us are likely to die because of weather. Alex Epstein's book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels documents the rapidly shrinking number of human beings killed by storms, floods and other climate events thanks largely to ever-growing industry, fueled mainly by oil, natural gas and coal. [minor format edits, bold and link added] I have noted beforethat cost-benefit analyses of improper governmental actions almost always fail to account for the cost of lost freedom, but what an example! Epstein has not just called the AGW alarmists on this omission, but has shown us how big an error this really is, in the form of what free men have succeeded in doing. As the title of Epstein's book indicates, cost-benefit analysis is not enough to fight global warming hysteria. That said, it is clear that what these scare-mongers have been misusing is, in fact, an important part of making the case against them. -- CAV Link to Original

Some time ago, I ran into a video about how to load a dishwasher, as well as advice on "How to Load and Run a Dishwasher for Efficiency and Ultimate Cleanliness". Both offer decent, but not incontestible, advice on how to use my favorite kitchen labor-saver. I'll toss in a couple of my own tips in a moment, but first things first... Both posts have -- by reminding me of observations and past experience -- caused me to want to raise a question: "Efficiency? For whom, and by what measure?" When I visit other families, I almost invariably see an error that I myself used to make, and that the second LifeHacker post expicitly advocates: Run only when full. First of all, your dishwasher, like many appliances in your home, is most efficient when it's full. Make sure to only run the dishwasher when you have enough dishes inside to make it worth the energy and the water that it'll use to clean them. Plus, you're not going to get your dishes cleaner by running the dishwasher empty, so don't bother... [bold in original] So what happens when you host a gathering and you find, for example, that you have almost no clean glasses (but plenty of everything else), and a half-empty dishwasher? Most people seem to throw in the towel and hand-wash the glasses. This is fine if you need them right away, but what if you don't? You can easily waste ten or fifteen unreplaceable minutes of your time hand-washing them -- or you can waste a few cents' worth of detergent* and electricity by running the washer partially full. This may not be efficient from the point of view of the dishwasher, but whose life is it, anyway? You can buy more detergent and more electricity, but you'll never get that quarter-hour back. (That said, I do know a few people who actually enjoy washing dishes. If the activity doesn't preclude doing something else, like chatting -- or the relaxation/enjoyment overrides anything else you could be doing at the time -- go for it.) The Lifehacker article does leave open running a partially-empty washer, but it reads like it over-values water and detergent. But while we're on the subject of efficiency -- for the owner of the machine -- let me explain a thing I do and a thing I don't do. First, I disagree with both the common practice of having the business end of utensils up (unless it is unavoidable) and with the video advice of having some pointing up and some pointing down. Experience shows me that most modern washers can clean them quite well even when all are pointing down. The benefit of doing this (and training everyone else in your house to do so) is that you can just grab the contents of each bin with one hand, and simply sort them into the containers in your drawer. That speeds up unloading quite a bit. (Ditto for having plates of one size next to each other, contrary to the video.) Second, although we have an infant in the house, I don't use racks for dish-washing baby bottles. Why? Loading and unloading these, at least for our brand of bottles, would take a comparable amount of time to just washing them by hand. On top of that, the bottles end up needing washing a couple of times a day versus the one time a day it is usually necessary to run the dishwasher -- which also takes a long time to finish a load. So I'd gain nothing in terms of time by using one -- and I'd have to use the washer more often or probably still end up hand-washing bottles anyway. Efficiency is meaningless unless one asks "At what?", and "At what price?" Too often, with loading the dishwasher, people focus too much on a minor improvement for the machine at the expense of time, the ultimate non-renewable resource. -- CAV * As of this writing, 155 oz. of Cascade retails for $7.67. At 1.5 oz./load, this washes 103 loads, even if you fill the whole reservoir, which isn't always necessary. Minus electricity, the cost per load is about 7.5 cents. The electricity is pricier: you'll have to cough up a quarter! (But remember, you're only "wasting" part of this since, unless you write for LifeHacker, running an empty washer will never cross your mind.) By spending 15 minutes to save less than thirty-two cents, you are "earning" less than a buck-thirty per hour. Link to Original

Karl "The 'Genius' Who Can't Stop Hillary" Rove has written a column about whom he calls the winners of the GOP's "invisible primaries", leading to the 2016 presidential race. Among those winners is Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon of whom I have had a vaguely positive impression: Dr. Carson may have the most impressive list of new small donors. The Draft Carson Committee (with which he legally could not be involved) used his name to raise $11.1 million, spent $10.2 million (92%) on overhead and devoted $531,788 (5%) to supporting midterm candidates. American Legacy PAC (Dr. Carson heads its anti-ObamaCare project) used his signature to help raise $6.5 million, and spent $5.9 million (91%) on overhead and gave $140,090 (2%) to candidates. If Dr. Carson runs, his campaign presumably can use those donor names. In addition to already having strong grassroots support, Carson recently polled second only to Mitt Romney, showing that he already starts with good name recognition. This is impressive, but I have become highly suspicious of GOP candidates in recent years. Accordingly, I decided to take a closer look at Carson, aided by the fact that he has a published a fair amount of commentary, making it easy to learn his actual positions on a host of relevant issues. Hardly scratching the surface, I found the following whopper in a piece about a successful effort by a secular watchdog group to have the Navy remove Bibles from the rooms of its military hotels. After wrongly likening atheism to religion, Carson makes the following interesting analogy: This is like saying there shouldn't be certain brands of bottled water in hotel rooms because there may be guests who prefer a different type of water or are offended by bottled water and think everybody should be drinking tap water. The logical answer to such absurdity would, of course, be that the offended individual could bring his own water or simply ignore the brand of water he does not care for. I have a small quibble to make with Dr. Carson here: These hotels are run by the government, which not only should not be taking a stand on what we should be thinking, but is also legally barred from doing so in the case of religion by the Establishment Clause. Carson's analogy is fine for a private business, whose owner can choose to provide (or allow others to provide) Bibles to his customers, but it fails here. This is because, at the very least, those Americans who are not Christian are being made to finance, however indirectly, the spread of ideas they do not support. Christians have freedom of speech, but that freedom does not include being provided a forum at the expense of non-Christians. Dr. Carson cuts a very appealing figure to many, but intelligence and impressive credentials are not enough to make a defender of liberty. In that vein, let me offer a couple of analogies of my own: First, as is most obvious in economics, small breaches in freedom lead to larger ones. Letting the Navy off the hook here would be like leaving a small piece of a tumor behind during a cancer surgery, and pronouncing it cured. Second, if someone cannot be trusted in small matters, he should not be trusted in large ones. As Carson's condescending language about "'big boy' pants" indicates, this may be a relatively minor affront to individual rights in today's context, but it is a violation nonetheless. A true defender of freedom tolerates no breach, and would have the courage to say so. Carson may well emerge, in today's horrendous culture, as the lesser of two evils in the 2016 election, but that is the best I can say for him. Next! -- CAV Link to Original

You Don't Need to Touch Me, "Brother" This section of my Saturday posts seems to have become ... occupied ... by Ferguson "activists" lately. This week, I shall raise a small point about the moral high ground they are pretending to hold, if they aren't simply too oblivious to realize they haven't reached it: A smaller crowd confronted police with taunts. Chesray Dolpha, 31, yelled at the officers: "We are not violent. We are not touching you. What are you doing with that baton, brother?" The police made eye contact but did not reply. As Ayn Rand once pointed out, it is wrong to initiate physical force against others, including threatening to do so. This is why fraud, perjury, looting, vandalism, and -- yes -- even trespassing are crimes deserving of a police response. None of these acts involve direct physical contact between the criminal and the victim, but they are all criminal and wrong just the same. This is because the criminal in each case interferes with the ability of his victim to go about his life in some form or fashion. The protesters don't know or don't care about any of this. That they haven't been laughed out of existence already after mass arrests (particularly when they block highways and important intersections) tells me that too many others are dangerously foggy about initiation of force vs. "violence" (which can include just and retaliatory responses to crime). Weekend Reading "Why should you own your mistakes, but not your successes?" -- Michael Hurd, in "Pride and Arrogance: Not the Same Thing" at The Delaware Coast Press "Knowing what you're getting out of your seemingly irrational behavior helps you to take responsibility in a way that's supportive and understanding." -- Michael Hurd, in "'Why Did I Do That?' The Psychology of Secondary Gain" at The Delaware Wave "Cryptography is just a tool that can be used for good or evil ends -- like a knife or a gun." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Should You Have to Speak with Others in a Way the Government Can Understand?" at PJ Media "The average American uses machine energy of 186,000 calories per day, equal to that produced by 93 physical laborers, and the vast majority of this is produced by fossil fuels." --Philip Delves Broughton, in a review of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein at The Wall Street Journal In More Detail Just as I once expressed amazement that someone had to explain that the power for electric cars has to come from somewhere, Alex Epstein's reviewer expresses a similar surprise that a book like his was necessary: When you consider that most of us live what we would consider decent, moral lives, it seems extraordinary that anyone feels it necessary to write a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. We use fossil fuels and their by-products in everything we do and rarely consider it a vice. A pang of conscience may strike us when we read of oil spills or melting icebergs. But not when we are sitting on a plastic chair, visiting a power-guzzling hospital or turning on our computers. To call fossil fuels "immoral" is to tarnish our entire civilization and should plunge us all into a permanent state of guilt, which seems a bit strong. Yet, as Mr. Epstein notes, this is precisely what so many vocal environmentalists do... [minor format edits] For the same reason that we need such a book out there, I am glad to see it get the kind of exposure that a review in a publication like the Wall Street Journal provides Fun With Math Just for fun, someone has come up with a mathematical formula for how many days there are in a month -- unless it's a leap year. --CAV Link to Original

1. Lately, I've been playing with Emacs for fifteen or twenty minutes at the end of my morning writing time. The learning curve is steep and, yes, I'm having to use a cheat sheet as I compose my first blog post, this one, in Emacs. But here is just a part of what some slow, steady effort can buy for me, in the form of access to "Org Mode": One of the big deficiencies I have noticed in simply having a to-do list is that the items there are devoid of context and that keeping tabs on them as part of a project involves duplication of effort and a greater possibility for human error. Being able to get around such problems while simplifying my own system is the long-term reward for learning this somewhat arcane text editor. So, as I learn the basics, I am keeping interested/making sure the effort is worthwhile by making a first pass through the org-mode documentation. On top of this, Org Mode may obviate much of the effort I anticipated having to expend in order to create a personal knowledge base. 2. Paul Graham writes about why mean people fail: Other people are a fact of reality, but the emotions caused by fights can cause one to lose perspective, paying much more attention to an opponent than is warranted. That is a big part of the merit of some advice I got a long time ago about I fight I was contemplating. A friendly acquaintance advised me to "let the anger go", and an old friend advised me to ask myself what I could accomplish by engaging. Between those things, I realized that the fight would have been a big waste of my time. Retrospectively, I think Paul Graham's words also explain why the potential for a confrontation felt so burdensome. I dreaded the prospect of preparing myself for the fight at the expense of so many other things. The moral isn't so much, "Never fight," as it is, "Pick your fights wisely." 3. If I weren't married to a physician, I'm not so sure we'd bother having a land line, and the daily barrage of robo-calls that comes with it despite our listing in the National Do Not Call Registry. On days that I'm home alone with the kids, I have taken to unplugging the line from the phone to prevent calls during nap times. Of course, I'd rather just not get robo-calls. To that end, I may try two things I encountered recently: some advice from a telemarketer on how to get rid of such calls, and a free service (that won an FCC award) called Nomorobo. If anyone here has tried the latter, I'd be interested in hearing about your experience. 4. An NPR article asks, "Is the Food Babe a fearmonger?". The answer, according to quite a few people who should know is, "Yes," as some of her claims are ridiculous upon even cursory examination: This would be a lot funnier if Hari didn't command a wide audience. -- CAV Link to Original

Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal about the latest academic fad, "microaggression": In November 2013, two dozen graduate students at the University of California at Los Angeles marched into an education class and announced a protest against its "hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color." The students had been victimized, they claimed, by racial "microaggression"--the hottest concept on campuses today, used to call out racism otherwise invisible to the naked eye. UCLA's response to the sit-in was a travesty of justice. The education school sacrificed the reputation of a beloved and respected professor in order to placate a group of ignorant students making a specious charge of racism. The pattern would repeat itself twice more at UCLA that fall: students would allege that they were victimized by racism, and the administration, rather than correcting the students' misapprehension, penitently acceded to it. Colleges across the country behave no differently. As student claims of racial and gender mistreatment grow ever more unmoored from reality, campus grown-ups have abdicated their responsibility to cultivate an adult sense of perspective and common sense in their students. Instead, they are creating what tort law calls "eggshell plaintiffs"--preternaturally fragile individuals injured by the slightest collisions with life. The consequences will affect us for years to come. Think of this as "polarization" on steroids. For example, MacDonald reports of a kindly professor, who often hugged his students, finding himself charged with battery basically for being his usual diplomatic self: After the meeting, [Professor Emeritus Val] Rust approached the student who had berated him for not seeking forgiveness and tried to engage him in conversation. Ever naive, Rust again reached out to touch his interlocutor. The student, a large and robust young man, erupted in anger and eventually filed a criminal charge of battery against the 79-year-old professor. Rust's employers presented him with a choice: if he agreed to stay off the education-school premises for the remainder of the academic year, they would not pursue disciplinary charges against him. The administration then sent around a letter to students, alerting them that the school would be less dangerous--for a while, at least--with Rust out of the picture. This reminds me of Ayn Rand's writings about the student "protests" of the 1960's -- except that now, instead of even pretending to take a stand, only to capitulate, it seems as if universities are now bending over backwards not to take any kind of stand at all. If you don't believe me, perhaps other examples in the article will sway you, such as students taking grammatical corrections to their dissertations as racist attacks -- and being taken seriously. -- CAV P.S. A commenter recently left a link that may be of interest, which gives us a sample of what kind of students our universities are turning out. If anything, its story is even more incredible. Link to Original

Among Thomas Sowell's latest "random thoughts" is the following profound observation, in the form of a couple of questions: No, and I seriously doubt it. It is interesting to consider, along the lines of an introspection technique designed to detect "secondary gain", what such advocates have to gain when they push such measures. (Note that it will be impossible to determine, merely from performing such an exercise, whether there is a moral or a psychological flaw -- an ulterior motive or some subconscious reason -- at play for any individual here.) But to do that, one must first consider the astounding lack of thinking at play here, which Sowell's questions help along quite well. I could go on about the many other things that aren't being thought about here, such as: whether our murder rates are historically high; if so, why they are high; whether some other weapon will simply replace the guns that have been banned; whether other means of reducing murder rates might be more effective; whether the high murder rates are uniformly so; and so forth, but there really is no need. In many cases, what one has to ignore to advocate such a position are of a variety and kind that they seem symptomatic to me of a general mental laziness, or at least poor training or practice. (This would not include, for example, a very busy person who defaults to such a position or accepts it due to some intellectual he finds credible,) For a mind so unaccustomed to careful deliberation, big problems requiring careful thought will often look more insoluable (and thus, frightening) than they really are. A quick fix, particularly if it sounds logical at first glance, will appeal to someone with a fear of thinking. "If they didn't have guns, they couldn't shoot people," will sound great to someone who isn't in the habit of asking questions or integrating knowledge. The question just about answers itself: What is being gained here is a safety from having to think too much about something that may well be terrifying if thought about just a little. The inquiry doesn't end here for at least a couple of reasons, though. Some anti-gun activists clearly attempt to argue around objections such as Sowell's, and, more to the point, these laws limit what other people can do. My short, off the cuff answer to the next obvious question is that the "freedom from thought" sought includes the thoughts of others. The logic might run, "Cut off their options and they can't frighten or harm me." That most people will obey a proposed law that is passed seems to offer a feeling of control, which is what most eludes those who refuse to think. In the meantime, advocating such a law helps perpetuate the illusion that one is "doing something" and, perhaps better yet, occupies time that an otherwise idle mind has to frighten itself. -- CAV P.S. This post is not actually about the psychological condition of the same name. Link to Original

I recall hearing it said, from where I no longer recall, that the term "wage" is unfortunate in discussions about economics because it makes it easy to forget or gloss over the fact that a wage is a price is a cost -- the cost of labor. If I correctly recall the general vein of the argument, this obscurity, in turn, makes it easy to treat wages as some sort of entitlement since they aren't being thought of in a similar manner as other expenses. I see some merit to that idea, but that merit is limited, as the thinking of many employers demonstrates: It can be hard to swallow the reality that a company just isn't going to make a prudent decision when it makes a ridiculously low job offer. I can't tell you how many times I've advised clients to raise offers -- after I've shown them what it's going to cost to leave work undone. Crummy job offers also cost employers their reputation -- in their own professional community when word gets out that their offers are too low. Many just don't get it. Employers incorrectly view hiring as an expense rather than an investment with [a return]. The great irony is, the actual extra dollars spent on higher offers are almost irrelevant when compared to the value the new employee will create. The more subtle lesson that some companies -- but not most -- learn is that enhancing an offer can make a new hire happy, more loyal, and more productive. Money doesn't buy love, but it can buy better work. [bold added] So while, yes, pointedly calling wages something like "labor prices" might help novices to economics realize that employers are people with bills to pay, too, a terminology shift can't fix the kind of un-integrated thinking discussed above. I see no similar quick fix to that problem: The best one can do when attempting to teach or persuade others is to encourage them to make connections, such as by asking the question, "What for?" Even then, the best one can do is indicate what other mental effort is required. At some point, people have to be left to think for themselves. The above example is also instructive in the sense that even high stakes can't "make" someone think. -- CAV Link to Original

As out-of-state communists and other "activists" continue using a Michael Brown's death as an excuse to frighten children, trespass, and loot, a very encouraging story (HT: Dollars and Crosses) comes from Ferguson. There, amidst the hooliganism, a white businessman's black neighbors have been helping him defend his business from vandals and looters: "We would have been burned to the ground many times over if it weren't for them," said gas station owner Doug Merello, whose father first bought it in 1984. Merello said he feels deep ties to Ferguson, and if the loyalty of some of his regular customers is any indication, the feeling is mutual. At times, [Derrick] Jordan and his friends were joined on Tuesday night by other men from the neighborhood, also armed. None of the men was getting paid to be there. They said they felt they owed it to Merello, who has employed many of them over the years and treats them with respect. "He's a nice dude, he's helped us a lot," said a 29-year-old who identified himself as R.J. He said he, like the other volunteers, had lived a short distance away from the store for most of his life. He carried a Taurus 9mm pistol in his sweatpants and drew it out to show another customer, an older man at a pump who was brandishing a MAC-10 machine pistol. Missouri allows the open carrying of firearms. State lawmakers recently passed a law overriding any local ordinance that banned the open carry of firearms by people who have concealed-weapons permits. R.J. said on Monday they chased away several groups of teenagers rampaging through the area. But they have also had a close brush with soldiers from the Missouri National Guard, who mistook them for looters, he said. The guardsmen, rifles raised, had handcuffed one man before Merello came outside the store to explain that the residents were trying to help, not hurt. Memo to communists: The fact that someone owns a business does not strip him of his humanity, nor does it make him an "oppressor". Doug Merello is proof of that. And Merello's friends-in-need are proof -- contrary to the violent rabble who have dominated news coverage ever since this sad incident -- that there are lots of good people out there who don't buy the race-baiting and the other dehumanizing leftist rhetoric that have surrounded this sad incident. I applaud Merello and his friends for standing up to the marauding barbarians in their neighborhood. I also thank them on a personal level: Their courage and commitment to real justice is both an inspiration and a much-needed respite from over a hundred days' bombardment with examples of depravity and moral bankruptcy. -- CAV Link to Original

My Children May Learn a Profanity for Christmas Unsurprisingly, communist flags are cropping up in the "protests" being conducted in the name of Michael Brown. That might explain why trespassing loudmouths have been showing up in large-enough numbers to disrupt shopping in local Walmarts, Targets, and the St. Louis Galleria. Similar "protests" have occurred throughout the country, including encirclement and hectoring of a children's choir in Seattle. This all reminds me of the following words, from a perspicacious column I encountered fairly recently: [T]his idea that ... any person should not enjoy life while others languish in misery proves as immoral as any have-not claim upon the lives of haves. Notice the many Christmases these bullies -- these are not activists -- are ruining while asking, "Who cares? Mike Brown doesn't get a Christmas." They have already lost sight of why any life could matter, or to whom: Their equality is one of misery. They are also treating Michael Brown like a symbol, rather than the (criminal) individual he was, trivializing and discrediting whatever legitimate goals they might claim to support (e.g., police reform). Secular conservative Robert Tracinski made this point recently regarding the equally off-base journalists who covered this story: If you make Michael Brown into a symbol of all young black men, you cannot let yourselves admit to or report on any negative facts you discover about him, because then those negative things become facts about all young black men. So if you find out that Michael Brown was a thug who roughed up store clerks so he could steal from them--if you actually have video of him doing it--you can't report that, because then you are saying that all young black men are thugs, which is clearly racist. So you've painted yourself into a corner where reporting the facts makes you racist. [link in original] There is a good case for police reform, but these "protests" are wildly off-track, to say the very least. If my children have the misfortune of seeing any of this themselves, I will make sure they learn the word, "communist", as soon as I have gotten them out of harm's way. A sufficient definition for someone their age is, "a kind of very badperson". If they remember this when they are old enough to understand more, I will be more than happy to elaborate. Weekend Reading "When people mob the malls and the stores to enjoy the fruits of the very capitalism they vilify, it just seems like a contradiction." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Self-Fulfilling Madness of Black Friday" at The Delaware Coast Press "[M]any problems in relationships arise from the false beliefs that one is entitled to something to which he or she is not." -- Michael Hurd, in "Mean People Suck…So Why Put Up With Them?" at The Delaware Wave "[T]he laws may have a perverse effect of driving consumers towards less-healthy foods!" -- Paul Hsieh, in "How Mandatory Calorie Labeling Hurts Consumers" at Forbes In More Detail Michael Hurd, in his column about abusive relationships, as well as in a recent blog posting about handling dysfunctional co-workers, offers some excellent advice about how to diminish the pseudo-power of various types of abusive people. It is one thing to know that psychological boundaries are important, but it can be another to see how to enforce them, or realize they are being tested. Heh! Speaking of Marxism and dysfunctional relationships, we have this, the "Marxism" entry from "Why You Should Not Have Broken Up With Me, According to Various Critical Theories": Marx believed that the arc of history bends inevitably towards a more equitable distribution of the means of production, but that the battle for socialism would be a long one. I'm confident he would agree that my current financial straits are an inevitable result of the current socioeconomic moment, rather than "a permanent shitstorm born out of sheer laziness," as you described it in your letter. In spite of your attending that Occupy rally last year, which I missed because I was hung over from drinking too much at your work party (you're welcome for supporting you, BTW), you seem to have forgotten the socialist credo: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." If you were ever incapable of making rent on your own, I certainly would have been willing to get a job in order to help out. But you always insisted on focusing on the negative; you had no trouble criticizing me when I couldn't pay for dinner, but you never thanked me for going to the trouble of ordering it in the first place. I am pretty sure the above is facetious. Really. -- CAV Link to Original

1. Have you ever wondered for a moment, upon zipping a coat or a jacket, something like, "YKK? What does thatstand for?" Wonder no more: Founded by Tadao Yoshida in Tokyo in 1934, YKK stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha (which roughly translates as Yoshida Company Limited). The young Yoshida was a tinkerer who designed his own customized zipper machines when he wasn't satisfied with existing production methods. One by one, Yoshida brought basically every stage of the zipper making process in house: A 1998 Los Angeles Times story reported that YKK "smelts its own brass, concocts its own polyester, spins and twists its own thread, weaves and color-dyes cloth for its zipper tapes, forges and molds its scooped zipper teeth …" and on and on. YKK even makes the boxes it ships its zippers in. And of course it still manufactures its own zipper-manufacturing machines--which it carefully hides from the eyes of competitors. With every tiny detail handled under YKK's roof, outside variables get eliminated and the company can assure consistent quality and speed of production. (When the Japanese earthquake hit last year many supply chains were shredded, but YKK kept rolling along.) The elimination of outside variables is huge for a zipper manufacturer, given that the failure of a zipper effectively ruins a garment for many people. This company manufactures about half of all the zippers in the world. 2. What's not to like about fracking to a fan of industrial civilization? It lowers gas prices, brings prosperity, and gives OPEC headaches: Whatever action Opec [ sic] agrees to take next week to halt the sharp decline in the value of crude, experts agree that one thing is clear: the world is entering into an era of lower oil prices that the group is almost powerless to change. The article does point out a what may look to many, at first glance, like a cloud behind the silver lining: Less oil money will make the Middle East less stable. However, given that the likes of Saudia Arabia and Iran are state sponsors of terrorism, that will be good in the long term, assuming American foreign policy eventually improves. 3. I have seen a small handful of articles debating the merits of the NFL expanding to London, but this article, about Britain's skin-deep love affair with American football may provide the best case against its doing so: These kilted gentlemen are Euan Cartney, a Titans fan because it's the first team he ever saw play, and Graham Henderson, a Texans fan since his fiancee's family moved to the Houston area. Both are from Aberdeen, Scotland, and they plan on attending the Titans-Texans game at NRG Stadium in Houston on Nov. 30. Both started watching the NFL on Scotland's Channel 5 as kids and never stopped. Eventually they decided to pick teams. They had the kilts professionally made; leather with embroidered team logos, as well as the logos of each team they've seen play down the seam. They've been to all three games at Wembley this season. Vignettes like these show interest, but the article also delves into relevant aspects of this fandom, like how Britons decide which soccer team to root for. Those details make expanding to London seem very dubious to me. Some time ago, someone at Monday Morning Quarterback outlined what I think would be a far better way for the NFL to capitalize on this unusual fandom. 4. Two articles have me once again thinking about learning to use the Emacs text editor: Getting Organized with Org Mode and Why Browse the Web in Emacs?. (A third, on Emacs resources, will be worth remembering if I do.) The learning curve has been steep enough to deter me for quite some time. However, I have been casting about lately for a non-proprietary way to track projects, and Org mode is tempting me. (While I'm geeking out, I guess I'll toss a couple of bones to fans of the other big Unix text editor, vi: Emacs Evil Mode and Vigor. The former allows you to edit with Emacs as if using vi and the latter allows editing with vi, but with the "aid" of a "Clippy"-like "assistant".) -- CAV Link to Original

In the wake of the grand jury decision on whether to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown comes (via Instapundit) an interesting and timely review of what a grand jury is and why we have them: The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution gave its name to the protection against self-incrimination, and it also contains three other famous (and these days somewhat battered) guarantees--against double jeopardy; against deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and of just compensation when private property is taken for public use. But before any of these, in pride of place in the very first words of the amendment, comes perhaps the least thought-of protection in the whole Bill of Rights: the assurance that no one will be "held to answer" for a serious crime unless indicted by a grand jury. [bold added] Elsewhere, I learned that the identities and deliberations were kept secret to prevent pressuring the grand jury into making any particular decision. At the risk of sounding callous, this is something that keeps our government from behaving like a lynch mob directed by whoever is in charge. It's too bad that so many people think that any kind of deliberation is necessary at all to render justice. As relieved as I was to hear that the forgotten man in the Micheal Brown case was no-billed, that relief has been nearly cancelled out by my disappointment in the rioting -- the worst yet -- that has followed. Thanks to rampant arson, there is "nothing left" along a stretch of road I happened to travel earlier in the day of the initial confrontation. Smiling looters raided a toy store last night. Others carelessly fired guns, of all things. That's just a sample of what happened last night. My only question: Why did anyone bother to wait until 8:00 p.m. last night to get started? As a St. Louisan, I now have to keep tabs on this barbarism since it is close enough to my doorstep to represent a threat to my personal safety and that of my family. Most disappointing of all are those who chant that "Black lives matter," from one side of their mouths while condoning and abetting behavior like the above. Committing crimes is not the way to protest what one is claiming to be a crime. Refusing to consider evidence is not the way to show a concern for justice. Making one's immediate vicinity a living hell is not the way show that one's desire for respect comes from self-respect and a regard for the lives of others. This is pathetic, and I must say that pity is one of the most unpleasant emotions one can feel. I take solace in the fact that there are still legitimate aspects of our government that function properly, such as grand juries, and that most people are not as mindless as the self-lynching mob that is incinerating Ferguson, or the other mobs like it that have been cropping up across the area lately. -- CAV P.S. I will take tomorrow off from blogging for the holiday. I wish you a safe and happy Thanksgiving. I will not allow the necessity for vigilance to cause myself to forget that life is precious, and worth living. Link to Original

There is an interesting article out on possible "Rust Belt Republican" candidates for President in 2016, which offers sketches of four Republican governors of Midwestern states who could figure as Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidates. It is clear to me, as an advocate of laissez-faire, that I could offer only highly qualified support, if that much, of any of them. As an example of what I mean, Take Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who has racked up some impressive wins against public sector unions: Walker, 47, won national attention after beating back a labor-led 2012 recall attempt. He has pushed through a series of big-ticket bills, including requiring women to get ultrasounds before they have abortions and paving the way for more mining in the state. He's now preparing a legislative agenda that includes mandating drug tests for welfare beneficiaries, repealing the Common Core education standards and cutting property taxes. [bold added] On the one hand, one could conceivably make a case for drug-testing recipients of government benefits as part of a sunsetting program. On the other hand, there is no such case to be made for forcing someone to undergo a medical procedure, as required by the abortion bill. Indeed, that requirement is a fresh intrusion of improper government into the lives of individuals, and is, as such, the exact opposite of restraining government to its proper role of protecting individual rights. Like those conservatives who regard us as having, not so much a right to our lives as a duty to live, Walker holds positions that are inconsistent -- with each other or with advocacy of limited government. Our culture is presently too saturated with the idea that the government should be running our lives in some form or fashion for a truly acceptable candidate to emerge. That said, advocates of limited government must approach any candidate with a high degree of skepticism. We might wish that a Scott Walker were also secular and pro-choice, but wishing doesn't make it so. No matter who wins in 2016, we will probably find ourselves fighting him at least part of the time. -- CAV Link to Original

No Friend to Law and Order Attorney General Eric Holder has issued a stern warning ahead of the grand jury decision in the shooting of Michael Brown: ... Attorney General Eric Holder urged law enforcement authorities Friday to minimize the potential for confrontations during possible demonstrations. "It is vital to engage in planning and preparation, from evaluating protocols and training to choosing the appropriate equipment and uniforms,'' Holder said in a video message posted on the Justice Department website. "This is the hard work that is necessary to preserve the peace and maintain the public trust at all times-- particularly in moments of heightened community tension." Reading further, one will fail to unearth one jot about the protestersremaining calm or working with authorities to stop vandalism, theft, or violence. One will find no, "Harm to persons or property will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," there. This is amazing since, were there no protests, there would be no possibility of an escalation to violence, vandalism, or looting. I don't particularly object, under these circumstances, to reminding law enforcement to behave professionally, but standards for civilized behavior apply to everyone. Given that such violent anti-capitalist reactionaries as Lisa Fithian are on hand to incite rioting, this omission is beyond derelict on Holder's part. Weekend Reading "[N]ot feeling good every moment of the day doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong." -- Michael Hurd, in "Is 'Feeling Good' Really the Purpose of Life?" at The Delaware Coast Press "True closure involves not only accepting the facts and getting out of denial, but also understanding why and how the relationship ended." -- Michael Hurd, in "'Closure' After Breaking Up -- What's It Mean?" at The Delaware Wave My Two Cents A neuroscientist has recently made a case that high altitude might contribute to depression, but Michael Hurd's first column still speaks to the so-called "Utah paradox": The state with the suicide epidemic also happens to rank as "America's happiest state". Given how commonly "feeling good" is mistaken for happiness, any survey attempting to create such a ranking will probably be polluted by that premise, particularly if any form of self-reporting factors into the results. Hurd's column even describes how acting on that mistaken premise can lead to depression. Earworm Infection I don't know how it is that I am immune to the latest earworm, from the movie Frozen, but the author has my sympathy: Wikipedia tells me that you have kids, too. As I live and breathe, I swear that one day I will write something that will get in your kids' brains and move into your house. My words will haunt the echo chamber of your minds, day in and day out. And you, too, will fall down sobbing. You'll understand. And I'll laugh from afar, letting the storm rage on. Then, once the dust settles, maybe we can meet for coffee or something. Maybe a playdate? We can work around nap schedules. On a related note, isn't it incredible how much adulation for royalty there is in Disney's entertainment? I think some of this stems from much of its early work being derived from fairy tales, but I can't help but wonder if, as in many comics, part of the phenomenon lies in a foreign-ness of the heroic to our culture. (This is not to saythat comics shouldn't exist, or can't portray heroism accurately.) --CAV Link to Original

1. Interesting medical news concerns a possible role for marijuana in treating an aggressive form of brain cancer: Fortunately, legalization of marijuana as a recreational drug might, in some jurisdictions, keep the FDA out of the way for anyone who wishes to try this in the meantime. 2. A news story about a girl who joined "Santa" for a meal to keep him company sounds a little like something my daughter might do: File under "too cute to pass up". 3. Not that I condone theft, but I can't think of a more deserving victim of car theft than Elizabeth "Fuck the Police" Vega: Perhaps this incident will spur reflection on the legitimate role of the police by Vega, but I doubt it. In any event, she got the poetic variety of what she and so many other hooligans are claiming to want: justice. 4. Do you Shazam? Then you may enjoy this story on how the ubiquitous music identification app is affecting the industry: Also interesting is how the algorithm works, which is among the first things in the article. -- CAV Link to Original

Jean Moroney of Thinking Directions writes about a common and vexing problem: How can one do in-depth thinking when one hasn't long blocks of time to work with? Her advice concerns stitching together the smaller blocks of time one does have. Here is part of her advice on how to handle the end of a session. Within the article, Moroney mentions a course she offers that features techniques that can solve this problem completely. I recommend it and will point out that there is a free course at her site that one can try to get an idea of what to expect. -- CAV Link to Original

If you're having trouble buying, selling, or -- like former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently did -- refinancing a home, you might have our paternalistic, "helicopter-parent-from-hell" government to thank. Bruce Bialosky writes about some of the "unintended consequences" of Dodd-Frank including significant impediments to buying and selling houses: ... It used to be that a mortgage broker or real estate agent would contact their reliable appraiser to get a timely and hopefully accurate evaluation of a property. The lawyers behind Dodd-Frank saw that as a means of manipulation and no doubt on some occasions that would occur. The new system requires a third party service to be contacted that, of course, charges a fee to obtain an appraisal that is added on top of the appraiser's fee. That means out of the box the cost of appraisals have been driven up. Koevary says it is worse than that. He and his fellow professionals used to be able to contact their friendly appraiser and get an idea whether the property will appraise at either the sell price or refinance price. That is no longer possible because of the requirement of using a third party service. Koevary states that often people will incur appraisal fees under the new system and find out the deal will not fly. Thus, his client gets stuck with significant appraisal costs which have done nothing but kill the deal. The law has also resulted in lots of third-party appraisers falling under the control of "big' lenders; difficulties in obtaining financing for people with unusual sources of income, and an end to discounted fees by mortgage brokers. I am an advocate of laissez-faire, and I oppose laws like Dodd-Frank on moral and practical grounds. Regulars know this already, and that I consequently never supported this law. That said, on my reading of this column, I am beginning to feel ill at ease with Bialosky's term, "unintended consequences". I am not singling him out for criticism: Many conservatives use the term, and I probably have used it myself in the past. However, my uneasiness lies with the idea that the phrase may be letting proponents of such laws off the hook too easily for meaning well. I am not an economist, but at least two economists I know of have pointed out that central planning is doomed to fail for removing rational thought from the economy. History is also littered with failed attempts at central planning. Perhaps we could use a term like "unforeseen consequences", or "side effects", or even "further ramifications" instead. (Or maybe "unplanned consequences of central planning" would be the ticket.) In any event, I have no patience with the idea that, any time something goes wrong, we should reach to the cabinet for even more government interference, as if that worked the first thousand times. (And I haven't even touched on the question of whether it is the right thing to do with government...) My question for advocates of government regulation of everything is this: How many "unintended consequences" does it take before I should begin to wonder what it is you intend to do? -- CAV Link to Original

Although he is not explicitly calling for an American foreign policy based on national self-interest, Brett Stephens of The Wall Street Journalmakes some recommendations that I think might apply to pursuing such a policy. Stephens proposes that we apply a criminological insight to bad international behavior in order to make it easier to maintain the peace: "Disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence," Drs. [George] Kelling and [James Q.] Wilson argued. It had long been known that if one broken window wasn't replaced, it wouldn't be long before all the other windows were broken too. Why? Because, they wrote, "one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing." The idea that the mere appearance of disorder encourages a deeper form of disorder cuts against the conventional wisdom that crime is a function of "root causes." Yet municipalities that adopted policing techniques based on the broken-windows theory--techniques that emphasized policing by foot patrols and the strict enforcement of laws against petty crimes and "social incivilities"--tended to register sharp drops in crime and improvements in the overall quality of life. Stephens cites encouraging evidence from our nation's recent long-term decline in crime in support of his view. I think his idea has merit, but that it will ultimately succeed only if coupled with a significant change for the better in what we treat as our objectives in foreign policy. To look at this merely as a way of striking some sort of a happy medium between Barack Obama's fecklessness and George W. Bush's nation-building export of the welfare state is to miss an opportunity to reconsider our fundamental strategy. As we have seen in many recent wars, great weapons, personnel, and tactics can still lose if deployed for the wrong end. -- CAV Link to Original

With the grand jury in the Michael Brown case expected to announce a decision this week, Ron Christie of The Daily Beast asks, "Is Ferguson on the Brink of War?" Christie's skepticism of "civil rights" "activists" -- which I share -- is hardly assuaged by the actions (or lack thereof) of a few prominent members of officialdom: While our first African American Attorney General was quick to condemn America for being a "nation of cowards" on matters of race, I find it cowardly that he has not consistently spoken out to respect the work of the grand jury and the rule of law. He was too busy, apparently, seeking to bring federal civil rights charges against the charged officer whose fate has not yet been determined by the grand jury. So much for his impartiality. And where is the President--one so quick to interject himself where race is involved (the Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer acted "stupidly") but absent when a violent confrontation appears likely if a grand jury does not indict a white officer for the death of a black teenager. He should be speaking out forcefully and frequently about the need for calm as the jurors conclude their work. His silence is both deafening and disheartening. I find it a sad commentary that the beginning of the Obama era encouraged millions of Americans to think that we had entered a post-racial phase in our evolution as a country from the dark stain that slavery has placed upon our collective history and heritage. As we enter the waning years of the Obama Administration, America remains as divided as ever on matters of race. Apparently, many of us had moved past racial bigotry, but a few of us hadn't. In the meantime, the cultural and political rot at least isn't complete: Local officials have been preparing for the worst and passing out notices in the lead-in, in some cases advising residents to treat the possibility of civil unrest like a storm -- to stock up on food and medicine in case leaving home for a few days is not feasible. Perhaps this is what President Obama meant when he told "protest" leaders recently to stay "on course". Whatever the case, don't expect any help from the Republicans. They're too busy hiding behind Joe Biden, whom they jokingly call "impeachment insurance". The new Congress has yet to take office, and it seems that they're already preparing to file a "spinelessness insurance" claim! No wonder violent bigots feel like they can act with impunity. -- CAV Link to Original

Look Who's In Town The Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, who recently made national headlines by using a racial slur to refer to Palestinians, is here in town to keep things "peaceful" whether or not the grand jury investigating the Michael Brown shooting returns a verdict he likes. Pardon my skepticism, but: Sure, he is. "We are in a rebellion at the moment," said Reverend Osagyego [ sic] Sekou, an activist from Boston. "That means breaking police lines, non-compliance with police orders. It is confrontational but not violent." He urged the group of potential protesters to try to focus their minds on "deep, abiding love" to remain calm during demonstrations. These are the words of someone who likens the police in New York to the defense forces of a regime he apparently equates with the Jim Crow South at best -- and don't forget that he is saying it for public consumption. I guess we'll find out soon enough if he really means it. Weekend Reading "Obnoxious people can't get validation from themselves, so they seek reactions from others by being blowhards." -- Michael Hurd, in "How to Handle an Obnoxious Person" at The Delaware Wave "So how do you deal with tradespeople? Simple: Treat them the way you want to be treated." -- Michael Hurd, in "Amazing How a Little Respect Gets Things Done" at The Delaware Coast Press "Here's a radical thought for conservatives: Brittany Maynard has a right to life -- to her life. " -- Peter Schwartz, in "A Real Right to Life" at The Huffington Post In Further Detail As Peter Schwartz so economically demonstrates, the outcry over Brittany Maynard's decision to end her life on her own terms exposes many conservatives as opponents to individual freedom. Read the whole thing, and keep this piece in mind the next time you encounter a so-called right-to-lifer -- or even a conservative complaining about paternalism. Too Bad the Taboo Doesn't Extend to Reading the Word "Pig" The American Thinker recently wrote of the work of comic book writer and Pigman creator Bosch Fawstin: Fawstin seems to be on a mission to educate others about the threat that Islam poses to all of civilization. His primary tool of communication is through the creation of a comic-book superhero - Pigman - who battles jihadists. Fawstin talks about how Muslims dread contact with anything related to pigs, noting that if he had an airline he would have all the seats covered with pigskin leather, making it the safest airline flying. Most interesting to me is Fawstin's description of what his "moderate" Moslem upbringing included: anti-Semitism, admiration of Adolf Hitler, domestic violence, and sadness on the occasion of the birth of a girl. --CAV Link to Original