Gus Van Horn blog

John Stossel gives an informative update on how things are going in Argentina, which elected as its president Javier Milei, a professed capitalist who campaigned on a promise to reduce the size of the government. One of the things I wondered about when I'd heard he was elected was how much he'd actually be able to accomplish. The short answer is more alone than an American president could:The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him. But already, "He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls," says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already "eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen." "He can just do that without Congress?" I ask. "The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States." Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly. "Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!" says Di Martino. [bold added]This is quite interesting and, given Milei's apparent popularity with Trumpists, I hope they notice the huge chasm between Trump and Milei on imports (for starters). The article is a very interesting read, but has a major drawback: Although I think both the author and Milei are well-meaning, they are under the false impression that big-L Libertarianism is a friend to capitalism, and regard Murray Rothbard favorably. This is interesting to consider in light of a recent hour-long interview (also embedded below) titled, "Libertarianism: Big Tent or Big Mess?," between Ben Bayer of the Ayn Rand Institute and Nikos Sotirakopoulos of the Ayn Rand Center UK. Within, Sotirakopoulos delves into "[t]he connection between libertarianism and the progressive left," which was largely initiated by Rothbard. Stossel, Milei, and other better Libertarians correctly blame the left for Argentina's current mess: They and their fans would do well to consider how and why this alliance during the foundation of their political movement might undercut and ultimately defeat the battle to achieve capitalism. This engaging interview, which I listened to about two months ago, would be a great place to start. -- CAVLink to Original

For years, I've heard complaints from the less-liberty-friendly parts of the conservative movement that the news aggregator Drudge Report, lost its mojo when Donald Trump won in 2016. Today, I see that one of the few conservative sites I still respected, Issues and Insights has joined that bandwagon en route to providing a sort of short, annotated bibliography of alternatives. Before I get to that, let's consider the following complaint about a recent set of headlines at the the site started by Matt Drudge:This Monday, for example, the top of the fold featured a long list of links to stories about Trump's alleged mental lapse (while completely ignoring Biden's more egregious one the day before), plus links to stories pumping up the left's current favorite Republican, Nikki Haley. The stories listed that day were almost entirely from a handful of (mostly) liberal-leaning news outlets -- AP, Politico, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, SFGate, the Guardian.Does anyone in the conservative movement know how to play Devil's advocate anymore? Might the reason so many of these stories come from leftist partisan media be that right-wing partisan media have become largely a pro-Trump echo chamber? Have conservatives memory-holed the idea that a true friend is one who is willing to talk about bad news? If I were a Trump supporter, I'd be concerned about signs of mental decline. Might the case be not so much Matt Drudge leaving the conservatives so much as they left him? (Here's a Trump toady who incidentally notes the post-Trump change in the conservative movement.) And finally, is it really news to Biden's opponents that he is quite the senile "embalmed Soviet corpse of an incumbent," as Dan Hannon recently put it so aptly? Sorry, Issues and Insights, but Our guy isn't as senile as their guy is weak sauce as a defense and the fight song for a ship of fools. I&E even stoops to Trump's rhetorical style, dismissing Nikki Haley as a "neoCon" and "the left's current favorite Republican." This pro-capitalist reader of I&E wonders: Will that site start kowtowing to Trump's economically illiterate protectionism? His anti-American xenophobia? His threats to misuse government to punish political opponents? With those questions in mind, here is their list of recommended sites that are "better than the Old Drudge:"It may remind you of it, but this is not your father's Drudge Report. (Screen shot by the author. I believe my use of this image is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.)The Liberty Daily is the most Drudge-like in appearance -- same font, same general layout, same use of red to flag hot stories -- but has a tendency to add lots of zing and nicknames, such as Crybaby RINO NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger or Bribery Biden, NeoCon Nikki Haley. Discern Report and Off the Press sport more modern front pages. Whatfinger, which describes itself as "The Conservative answer to the Drudge Report" and aspires to be "The Greatest Aggregate Link News Site On Earth" has a huge mélange of stories from conservative news and blogs. But we find ourselves increasingly drawn to Citizen Free Press, which has taken Drudge to the next level and is almost entirely a long list of links.I will admit that these sites can be useful in the same way as Drudge -- which was never perfect and has always tended to sensationalize things. Indeed, they might be more useful than the original now in the sense that, just as one should slum around in the likes of the Huffington Post or Mother Jones to get news the right ignores and get the pulse of the left, one should do so with sites on the right -- whatever "the right" means now. I'll close with a link from each site: Don't Listen to Woke "Pastors", Christians Can't Just "Agree-to-Disagree" on Degeneracy -- The Liberty Daily (The story should -- but won't -- bother anyone who says America is a "Christian" country. The aggregator is my pick of the litter for "looniest Drudge alternative." Also: I am not cherry-picking. This one is from The Federalist.) Healthcare Students Still Forced to Inject Vaccines -- The Discern Report (Nobody's being forced to do anything, here. I am old enough to remember when being anti-vax was "for hippies" and when a conservative would acknowledge that an institution can require such things as proof of vaccination as a condition for membership or patronage.) Supreme Court To Hear Abortion Pill Case -- Off the Press (This site seems the most substantive of the lot.) 89% of 'American Elites' Back WEF's Plan to Ration Meat, Gas, Electricity for General Public -- Whatfinger (Mostly substantive, but seems comfortable with that brain-dead, populist term of blind rebellion, "elites." This site has layout options.) Inside America's Covid Lab ... Deadly viruses manipulated in Wuhan-style experiments. -- Citizen Free Press (Like most of these other alternatives, there is pandering to populist nuttiness about covid.)Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand and historian Brad Thompson declared conservatism dead long ago. They were correct to do so. Whatever the right has become, it isn't even conservative in the sense of pretending to be pro-capitalist or pro-individualist. It pains me to see people who call themselves conservatives turning off their minds and descending into mere populism, which might win elections -- so theocrats and nationalists who have very anti-American agendas can carry them out in the name of patriotism. I do appreciate I&E bringing some new news aggregation sites to my attention, including helping me more quickly learn what the other other side is saying about any given issue. -- CAVLink to Original

In a thought-provoking analysis, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times observes of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade:Interestingly, this image of a quasi-military "policeman" was also tagged with such terms as "Pandemic, "Covid," and "Omicron." (Image by Alec Favale, via Unsplash, license.)One thing to recognize about the scope of states' power from the founding to the Civil War is that it was broader and more expansive than we tend to recognize under modern conceptions of constitutional law. States, as most Americans understood them at the time, were governments of general jurisdiction with far-reaching police powers that gave them almost total discretion to regulate internal affairs. The federal government, by contrast, was a limited government of enumerated powers -- a government that could take only such action as allowed by the Constitution. The police power, the historian Kate Masur notes in Until Justice Be Done, "was grounded not in the idea that a government's duty was to protect individual rights but, rather, in the conviction that government's most important obligation was to secure the health, safety and general well-being of a community." [link omitted, format edits, bold added]Re-read that last sentence. I can't count the number of times I have read news articles or opinion pieces that pertain to individual rights, suspected that the term rights appears nowhere in the piece, and confirmed my suspicion with a negative result by searching for the term. Here, we not only have that near-forgotten word, but the whole phrase. There is promise! Bouie comes tantalizingly close to saying what I wish someone would say -- or would have said when the "police power" was used to excuse the wholesale violation of individual rights during the pandemic: The police power of the state, to the degree that it violates individual rights, is as contradictory to proper government as slavery was. That connection is not lost on Bouie, who brings it up, but he does not note the contradiction explicitly. I am no legal scholar, but I did some reading about the police power during the pandemic. Back then, I noted:... I am very uncomfortable with the vagueness that the legal idea of police power has had from its inception and the fact that (predictably for that reason) it gets abused. Indeed the FDA, which the authors cite as an anodyne example of government regulation (which I gather is one sense of "police power" as it is used today), would appear to be a disastrous abuse of late. Surely, there are or should be limits on the police power, if it is at all a legitimate concept...That said, Bouie comes to a conclusion I largely agree with:For as much as it is important to defend reproductive rights -- and other key rights -- on a state-by-state basis, this is why it is also important to defend and protect them at the level of the federal government. The goal is not just to secure rights but also to restrain the states.If the Constitution does not restrain the governments of the individual states as much as it does the federal government, it is useless as a protection of our individual rights. As more states start criminalizing interstate travel (e.g., for the purpose of helping a minor get an abortion), we are starting to see exactly what that means. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. We're enjoying our larger, much less-cluttered house, and -- since we have a dining ROOM instead of just a dining area, that table stays clear -- which has lent itself to nightly dining there and, in turn to one of my favorite pastimes, cards. The kids are finally old enough to be interested in card games, and able to play them well enough that we now sometimes play spades after dinner. Image by Kowloonese, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.2. Citrus grows here on the Gulf Coast, and a tree of a pomelo-citron hybrid called the "ponderosa lemon" grows in our yard. It produces fruit year-round and makes an interesting lemonade. Most who have sampled it say it tastes ... like lemonade. But I get a hint of grapefruit. One day after we juiced a bunch of these and made the lemonade, my daughter decided it should be named "ponderade". 3. With us being in New Orleans, it was only a matter of time -- in this case, on my first trip to the nearest grocery store -- before I'd find a good hole-in-the-wall place that makes great food. A seafood and sandwich shop, only a few blocks away, makes a great muffuletta, and we're going to have one -- yes, a single one of these is huge -- and some shrimp for dinner tonight. 4. Silver lining first: I now know where the nearest urgent care clinic is. It's oddly-situated, and I'm glad I was only having to put pressure on a wound with one hand while I drove. (And I'll be glad to know exactly where it is if I ever need it again.) Glass doors and I don't get along, and I am relieved that the one I walked into was tempered glass, and that my eyeglasses cut me where they did. I went in because the bleeding hadn't stopped after 15 minutes of constant pressure. I am also glad the nurse practicioner on duty used glue rather than stitches to close and protect the wound. I won't have to go back to have stiches removed, and I shouldn't have a bad scar. (On reviewing this, I think I'll add Find and drive to nearest urgent care clinic to my list of things to do the next time I have to relocate.) -- CAVLink to Original

I often look at advice columns on Thursday morning. Doing so today, I came across an "ask the readers" reply at Carolyn Hax's Washington Post column. While I'd never want to see my favorite columnists completely quit, I am glad that several of them toss one up for their readers to tackle from time to time. In this column, the questioner is having to deal with the emotions evoked by once again having a long-past, unrequited romantic interest back in her social circle. The reader replies run the gamut from You know the best way to ensure you won't jump? Stop walking toward the edge through calls to introspect to [P]ut a college crush where it belongs: in the past. All were thoughtful, and touched on different aspects of the problem as the readers saw it. Some of these concerns might not have applied precisely to that reader's particular situation, but they plausibly could, and they did for that kind of situation, at least for the people speaking from experience. My favorite reply was the first, which I'll quote below:Image by Greysen Johnson, via Unsplash, license.I recently had this exact situation happen to me. I hadn't seen my what-could-have-been friend for a number of years. During this time I got married and had kids while he was unhappily married and eventually divorced. When I saw him again a month ago, I started having fantasies, mostly about him realizing I was the one who got away. However, all those fantasies weren't about me wanting him. They were about my wanting to feel wanted. I wanted to be the object of that initial obsessive, head over heels, fiery part of an early relationship. I wanted to feel like a mystery to be discovered again. I wanted to be pursued. I love my husband and we have a great relationship, but we've been married a long time and that kind of spark is hard to come by after almost two decades together. Identifying my feelings and what these weird intrusive fantasies were actually about helped me re-approach my relationship in a new way. I asked for things -- emotional, sexual -- from my husband that filled that need for me and those fantasies went away. I don't mean to for this to sound pat and easy, it required me to be very vulnerable (although I didn't say what brought these requests on). However, I knew my husband was who I really wanted, and I found away to feel wanted by him in a better way. [bold added]This is gold: She admitted her feelings to herself, introspected, got to the bottom of what caused her emotions, and greatly improved her life with what she discovered. As someone who has had to deal with the X that got away and resurfaced at an awkward time in multiple areas of my life, I am extremely impressed with what this respondent did, and will admit wishing I'd read or done something like this myself a couple of times when I was much younger. That said, it's never too late to learn from or move on from the past. These kinds of columns combine the advantages of "crowdsourced" advice with the those of curation by someone who has spent lots of time thinking about how to help people with personal problems. If you're inclined to skip these, as I used to be, you might reconsider that policy. -- CAVLink to Original

Donald Trump managed to eke out a win over Nikki Haley yesterday in New Hampshire. Haley is not dropping out of the GOP primary yet, but her battle is more uphill than I was hoping to learn from yesterday's vote. The outcome likely means that too many Republicans are part of Donald Trump's personality cult for that party to nominate a serious candidate for President and that not enough independents appreciated the need to have a better choice than Trump or Biden in November. That is awful. The war for freedom is hardly over, but this particular battle appears to be lost, and we will almost certainly have one of Joe Biden or Donald Trump and -- if either drops dead while in office -- one of their Vice Presidents continuing to damage our country for another four years. This is both a bigger deal and a lesser concern than Oh well, I'll leave President blank again in the next election. Two articles do an excellent job of explaining why. On the bigger deal side is the first, which I learned about from the excellent Yaron Brook's Twitter feed. It's by Briton Dan Hannon, and its title is, "This Isn't About Trump Anymore -- It's About Whether America Is the Country It Always Was." The whole thing is worth a read, and ends as follows:The country that was founded as an antidote to arbitrary power has fallen for a personality cult. The city on the hill is set, this time knowingly, to make a liar and petty crook its first citizen. The things that elevated and ennobled America -- optimism, political pluralism, the ability to disagree with civility, respect for the law, respect for the ballot box -- are scorned by those who claim to be patriots. God help them. God help the rest of us. [bold added]In the short term, things look bleak. This election cycle and no matter who wins, we could be moving from a discussion of breathing room, of how much time we have to turn the ship around -- to wondering if we can politically further the cause of liberty at all, any time soon, in America. On the not as big a deal side of the ledger we have Ayn Rand's 1972 essay, "What Can One Do?", which I first encountered in Philosophy: Who Needs It:To gain perspective, one must focus on the right things. (Image by topntp26, via Freepik, license.)Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them? Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? Are you immune from the fallout of the constant barrage aimed at the destruction of reason -- and can you provide others with antimissile missiles? A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability. This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles, Objectivist or otherwise: knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action. This does not require omniscience or omnipotence; it is the subconscious expectation of automatic omniscience in oneself and in others that defeats many would-be crusaders (and serves as an excuse for doing nothing). What is required is honesty -- intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one's knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute. When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. This does not mean that you must make philosophical speeches when unnecessary and inappropriate. You need philosophy to back you up and give you a consistent case when you deal with or discuss specific issues. [bold added]The essay was written with people concerned about the state of the world in mind, but it has a deeper meaning than is apparent, as is frequently the case with Rand's writings. The passage above is a reminder, frequently needed anyway, about the nature of current trends, particularly for people interested in improving the world around them: Politics is the end product of a long conceptual and causal chain. Philosophically, it arises from ethics, and the dominant form of politics (increasingly, collectivism today) derives from the dominant ethics in the culture, which is altruism. Until enough voices in the culture challenge altruism and its philosophical underpinnings (of mysticism and primacy-of-consciousness), our society will remain dominantly altruistic and political movements appealing to it -- be they leftist crusades to redistribute wealth or save "the planet" or right-wing crusades for nationalism or theocracy -- will always threaten to gain ground. Change the dominant philosophy and the politics will take care of itself. That's the easier part to see of a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. On a deeper level, one should ask, Why do I want to improve the world? My answer is because I live in it, and I would hope any fellow travelers are at least equally selfish in that regard. That is the only good reason to want to participate in an intellectual movement. One cannot improve anything without knowing how, and one cannot know how without knowing why, and having a solid grasp of facts. In the process of getting one's house in order and developing an active mind, one will consequently improve the quality of one's daily life by applying what one has learned. Rand shows that the battle to improve the culture is long-range, and -- barring a true cataclysm -- much bigger than any single election. But she also shows that it is a personal battle for self-betterment that is always within the grasp of anyone who seeks it. Speaking for myself: Short-term, while I might be unfortunate enough to be witness to the start of a dark time in American history, I'm glad I am doing so with open eyes, and am not deluded enough to see either of Donald Trump or Joe Biden as America's savior. I know that the constant media blare about Trump isn't worth too much of my time, and I can spend it on better things. Politics can help or hinder one's life, but it isn't the whole of one's life. Thank God for that, so to speak. -- CAVLink to Original

New Hampshire holds its presidential primaries today. Ron DeSantis has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. (I'd wager, given his earlier pledge to save the GOP from Trump and his over-the-top pandering to the Trump base, he's hoping Trump's legal problems represent a reentry path later.) We thus have an early primary in a state that allows independent voters to participate in party primaries, and a two-person contest between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. This represents as good a chance as there is for a sane candidate to begin to break the stranglehold of Trump's personality cult on the Republican Party, and give Americans a real choice in the next election. According to a headline from the Boston Globe, it is unlikely that Haley will win, but buried at the end of the story is what I think will be the decisive factor:Most Americans are tired of this... (Morph via FaceShape from pubic domain official portraits of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.)[T]here is one wild card that is hard to figure out: turnout. Despite the primary week being low energy overall, the New Hampshire Secretary of State is predicting there could be a record turnout. Traditionally, there is higher turnout when voters are motivated to send a message against the status quo, in which case that could be against Trump. Given that the contest in New Hampshire is largely a binary one between Trump and Haley, Haley could be the biggest beneficiary of a higher turnout. Then again, she isn't turning out people in big numbers to her own events in the final weekend. [bold added]Haley isn't drawing big crowds -- and doesn't have me raving about her here -- because she keeps committing unforced errors. So she doesn't have people excited about her candidacy so far. (I think the excitement -- or at least noticeable support -- might come if she does well, and offers real hope of keeping Trump out of office.) The real question then, is How sick are independent voters of Donald Trump and Joe Biden? If they're annoyed enough, they don't have to like Haley to want to vote for her, and they will. I'd show up and vote for Haley if I lived there, but I don't know the answer to that question. Today, we will find out. -- CAVLink to Original

I often wince from afar at the anti-freedom political and legal climate in California, but even I was shocked to read the litany of its sins against freedom penned by Joel Kotkin and published recently by Sp!ked. The whole thing is worth a read, as an update and as a warning for what the far left has in mind if it achieves dominance elsewhere. Three things stood out to me: (1) the number of ways the "climate crisis" has been used to excuse improper government, (2) how intrusive, on the level of interfering with normal daily business the government has gotten there, and (3) how blatant the government is at redistributing wealth. On its anti-fossil fuel energy policy, Kotkin writes in part:The sun is setting on California -- and the rest of America -- in more ways than one. (Image by TravelScape, via Freepik, license.)Nothing has accelerated California's decline quite like the state's climate-change fetish. Under Newsom, California has passed a series of laws that make it almost impossible to build affordable housing. The state has essentially banned single-family zoning as a part of its 'war against suburbia', which is precisely where most Californians reside. Instead, in a bid to slash CO2 emissions, it seeks to increase housing density and restrict development to places where public transport is widely used. Outside of San Francisco and inner-city LA, this is essentially nowhere. Local control of zoning has been all but eliminated in favour of the state's climate-oriented policies. Ultimately, California's climate policies erode the lives of middle- and particularly working-class Californians. Environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls such policies 'the green Jim Crow'. The industries that have traditionally helped nurture upward mobility -- manufacturing, construction and energy -- are all being systematically undermined by climate regulation, not least as they have led to some of the highest energy prices in the US... [links omitted, bold added]That's just a sample of the impact of just one far-left "fetish" destroying freedom in California. It comes after any pro-freedom reader will already be reeling, and the punches don't stop there: This is only about half-way through the piece! I highly recommend reading this a few times, perhaps in installments so it all sinks in. That said, my main reservation is that, as with almost any American political commentary one encounters these days, it has ideological blind spots. Kotkin, for example -- while correct to call out California for violating freedom of speech on the internet -- lets red states off the hook too easily:While supposedly 'repressive' Republican states like Texas and Florida work to prevent online censorship, Newsom's California attempts to control social-media content from Sacramento. [links omitted]The GOP, from the rash of red states requiring government ID to view porn all the way to Florida's proposal to make bloggers register with the state and Nikki Haley's proposal to abolish online anonymity, doesn't strike me as a good alternative -- and boy do we need one! So my full recommendation: Read this as a small sample of what today's electorate takes for granted, but which its politicians want to take away from you, and keep in mind that while partisans from each side will point to the other, they aren't giving the full picture of just how much trouble we're in. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Over the years, I have taken to task various installments of National Review's war on Ayn Rand. (Here's a good one I'd forgotten about.) Scratch war on Ayn Rand in the name of accuracy: It's really a war against anyone learning what Ayn Rand had to say, and it began in earnest with an infamous non-review of Atlas Shrugged by professed ex-communist Whittaker Chambers. I recently learned via New Ideal that Leonard Peikoff penned a rebuttal, in the form of a letter-to-the-editor. National Review, true to form, elected to memory hole it, but now it appears as a chapter of the collection, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged -- and as the blog post linked above. It reads in part:Mr. Chambers is an ex-Communist. He has attacked Atlas Shrugged in the best tradition of the Communists -- by lies, smears, and cowardly misrepresentations. Mr. Chambers may have changed a few of his political views; he has not changed the method of intellectual analysis and evaluation of the Party to which he belonged. And the National Review, an ostensibly [pro-capitalist] publication, permitted these tactics to be used on the first book which has ever provided a philosophic, rational basis for capitalism.I am glad to see not only that this thorough rebuttal is now available for anyone to read, but also that it is now easy for anyone to ascertain the true character of the National Review, as exemplified by its treatment of Ayn Rand. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn asks, in the form of her title, a question she clearly hopes to make non-controversial one again. "Instead of ESG and DEI, how about value creation, justice, and independence?" Here is an excerpt regarding justice:Not all companies follow these principles, to their detriment. Destroying value instead of creating it, through deception, fraud, or exploitation is unsustainable because not only is it immoral but illegal. Companies that engage in fraud or coercion will be prosecuted and punished. Not trading value for value, even when not illegal, is unjust and leads to a loss of customers, employees, suppliers, and profits. Giving up first-handed adherence to reality is similarly unsustainable, resulting in copy-cat investment in such value-depleting programs as ESG and DEI that violate the principle of justice.This essay is a much-needed corrective for both ESG/DEI and the alleged rationale for them, the latter of which is part and parcel of widespread ignorance about the nature of capitalism and suspicion of self-interest that permeate our culture. Image by wirestock, via Freepik, license.3. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger economically addresses a couple of favorite conservative myths behind the ridiculous idea that there is a "border crisis." Regarding terrorism, Binswanger reminds us of what really needs to be done:One site breathlessly reports that 169 people on terrorist watch lists were spotted and/or apprehended. The same site reports 3.1 million "encounters." But the two facts are not put together: 169 of the "encounters" is 1 in 20,000. So, conservatives want to stifle the lives of 19,999 people to block entry to 1 person on a terrorist watch list. The answer to terrorism is not retreating to a bunker. It is moral certainty in the rightness of America combined with decisive, overwhelming military action against the states that sponsor terrorism.I completely agree with his contention that, "The only crisis on our border is the outrageous refusal to recognize that 'All men are created equal, endowed ... with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" 4. Brian Phillips of the Texas Institute for Property Rights alerts us to a proposal in New York that is as obscene as his post title ("The Right to Eat Fried Chicken") is ridiculous:The New York legislature is considering a bill that would require Chick-fil-A to be open on Sundays. The bill would essentially establish an alleged right to eat fried chicken. The bill's author said, "Look, if you want to eat fried chicken while traveling over the holidays, then Chick-fil-A should be open on Sundays." In other words, it is the responsibility a business to satisfy every consumer desire, regardless of the business' own desires. [link omitted]As annoyed as this atheist is that Chick-fil-A closes on Sunday, I recognize and support the right of its owners to set their own schedule, and I am outraged that this little dictator in New York wants to set their hours for them. -- CAVLink to Original

Back when I lived in Maryland, I noticed that large numbers of people backed into parking spaces, rather than simply driving into them. I tried to learn why then, and the answers I could find basically consisted of vague assertions that it was "safer," sometimes festooned with statistics that may or may not have been inaccurate, incorrectly applied to the question, or irrelevant. Such drivers stand out to me, and have had me scratching my head since. Sometimes, they waste my time in parking lots with their antics, and have even -- because of unintuitively switching to reverse as I was getting ready to park -- nearly caused me to have an accident. (!) (To be fair, it can sometimes make sense to park this way. For example, my next-door neighbor in Florida owned a very large pickup truck that he'd back into his driveway. It's relatively easy to do, and the prospect of a toddler wandering into his driveway when he needs to drive is much greater than that of a parent allowing a toddler to wander in a parking lot.) Enter one Matthew Dicks, who is not content to stew in mild bewilderment or frustration. He decided to try to understand this odd practice, and decided to try it for a week. His conclusions after doing so pretty well confirm what I concluded after some time observing this phenomenon and occasionally having to interact with the drivers. I especially like his sixth item, which comes after his consideration of other aspects of this practice and its alleged benefits:The biggest drawback to backing into a parking spot, and the reason I will not be backing into parking spots in the future, is time. Not only do I sacrifice my own time by backing into a spot (which always takes longer), but I discovered that if there is a vehicle following you in a parking lot, backing into a parking spot delays that vehicle considerably from moving forward and finding their own parking spot. Rather than pulling forward into a spot, I must instead drive past the desired parking spot, stop the car, turn my body so it's in position to drive in reverse, shift into reverse, and then begin the slow process of backing into the spot. If I'm backing out of a parking spot, I can do all these things without delaying anyone. I can take my time because I am safely tucked away into my own spot. When I'm in the middle of the lane with other vehicles waiting to find a spot, this process becomes a serious delay for others. In two instances, the driver behind me pulled close enough to me that part of their vehicle was blocking the spot that I planned on backing into, and in both cases, I didn't blame them. They had no idea that I was preparing to engage in this ridiculous maneuver and simply continued moving forward until I could no longer access the desired spot. In both cases, I instead drove forward to a new spot, feeling foolish while doing so. [I have been that driver more than a few times. --ed] If everyone backed into their parking spots, I am convinced that parking lots would become nightmares to drive through. Vehicles would constantly be delayed as drivers executed the required steps to back into a parking spot. [bold added]Let me say I fully agree with the following alternate recommendation:In fact, if you want to be safer in a parking lot, experts advise that you park farther away from the entrance, where pedestrian and vehicular traffic is less congested. This is the single best way to avoid an accident in a parking lot. This is true and, on really busy days, it is a great way to save time. In fact, I sometimes do this specifically to save time, and have walked past cars that I saw hunting or waiting for spaces close to the store as I drove up. A big bonus to this is that for the one undeniable benefit of parking front-out, one can often drive forward through an empty space to be in position to do this near the fringes of the lot. Then you get to park quickly and have fast egress. -- CAVLink to Original

Snatches of two bits of political commentary pretty well encapsulate my assessment of the "landslide" outcome in the GOP's Iowa caucuses the other day. First, Iowa hasn't exactly been predictive lately:In 2008, holy roller Mike Huckabee won the caucuses in the red-shaded Iowan counties shown above. (Image by Kroisaurus, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)[Nikki] Haley caught some flak from DeSantis when she told a group of New Hampshire voters that they "correct" Iowa's results, but her statement is supported by recent history. Remember Presidents Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz, the last three winners of the Iowa caucuses? Neither do the history books. One must travel back nearly a quarter-century to the year 2000 to find the last winner of the GOP Iowa caucuses who went on to secure the nomination. [bold added]Caucuses aren't polls of the general public, and whoever it is -- strong partisans, I presume -- who participate in the Iowa caucuses have been out of touch in the theocratic/social conservative direction lately. Trump is the man for that anti-freedom lot in this election. Second: 51%. That's all? I agree with Phil Boas, who argues in USA Today that this result is a weak showing, because Trump is, for all practical purposes, running as an incumbent. (And that would be true despite polling showing that 65% (!) of the caucus participants there are brain-dead enough to believe Trump actually won the 2020 election.) Taken together, the "not Trump" coalition of candidates won nearly half the vote in a state that ABC News calls "overwhelmingly white and rural." In other words, these were ideal conditions for a Trump landslide. But Iowa is not the national electorate. And Trump's Iowa triumph can hardly serve as a bellwether for the fall. [bold added]Boas notes a big incentive for independents who want a choice other than Trump or Biden to vote in New Hampshire's Republican primary at a time when polling shows Haley smoking Biden by 17% in a head-to-head matchup. Overall, while it was disappointing to see Trump run away with Iowa, his winning there was predictable. But his margin there -- under ideal conditions for him -- wasn't the catastrophe Democrats and Trump supporters were hoping for, albeit for different, co-dependent reasons. New Hampshire will give a better picture of whether Nikki Haley can topple Donald Trump. -- CAV P.S. One bit of good news out of the caucuses: DeSantis, who has come to represent a more competent (and therefore dangerous) version of everything bad about Donald Trump, may have fatally wounded his future political aspirations:The DeSantis campaign was fundamentally a product of a certain class of the GOP's elite: people who admired Donald Trump's willingness to break the traditional norms of American politics but saw him as basically déclassé or ineffectual. These are the sorts of conservatives who look admiringly at Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, seeing his use of legalistic arcana to crush liberal opposition as a model for how to fight a culture war and win. [links omitted]This is the direction a significant part of the conservative movement has been headed for some time, and unless we get a "more competent DeSantis" in the near future, the Iowa caucuses may well have bought some time to fight for freedom.Link to Original

At RealClear Markets is a shocking story about the IRS coming after someone over a debt incurred by a relative:The IRS once again spits in our faces and tells us it's raining. (Image by United States Department of the Treasury, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)Two years later, and twelve years after her last interaction with the trust, the IRS tried to make up the difference by holding Pickens personally liable for the entire $10 million tax bill, as the trustees were out of cash for the IRS to seize. Never mind that by that point the IRS had had nearly fifteen years to protect its interest in the trustees' tax debt with all the tools at its disposal, or that the tax bill exceeded what Pickens had received from the trust in the first place -- the IRS still simply chose to target the next closest relative.It is bad enough that the IRS exists at all, but so long as it does, it should at least confine its looting to the money of whatever individual taxpayer violates a given matter of tax law. This is a new low. Curious about the case, I briefly searched the news for the victim, and learned that, on top of the sin of possessing more money than another person, she will probably be relatively easy for the media to kick around. This does not matter: It is an outrage that someone is being subjected to this kind of treatment, and the article rightly warns us of the principle at stake:[T]he IRS tends to apply its most aggressive tax enforcement tactics against rich and poor alike. If the IRS is saying that it thinks taxpayers should be held liable for their relatives' tax debt, taxpayers of all income levels should believe it.Pickens may not be the most likable person around, but she is hardly in a league with the Nazis and Klansmen often held up as examples of what we must tolerate in the name of protecting freedom of speech. Nor is she the guilty criminal who escapes jail in the name of due process -- which, by the way, she is entitled to. Madeleine Pickens does not deserve this, nor does anyone else unfortunate enough to be related to a deadbeat. -- CAVLink to Original

A few years ago, I came across a Marginal Revolution post by Tyler Cowen, who was re-reading the collection of essays first published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and then later in an expanded edition known as The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Regarding its chapter on racism, Cowen cites a quote and expresses an admiration that I share:"Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned." Ouch, it would be good to resuscitate this entire essay (on racism).That would indeed be a wonderful thing, especially considering how far our culture has fallen short of Martin Luther King's dream of Americans living "in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." We instead have a culture obsessed with race and seemingly determined to keep it that way, with hypocritical virtue signalers adding a new "anti" variety of racism to the mix with plain old-fashioned bigotry -- the former helping revive the latter by giving it an appearance of credibility it does not and never has deserved. Cowen's quote deserves a fuller context, so I shall oblige:Image by That's Her Business, via Unplash, license.Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge -- for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment -- and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem). To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a "tribal self-esteem" by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.I love this quote, because it shows how easily racism can die, and yet how hard at the same time. While one cannot end racism in society today, in part because one cannot make others think, one can start today, by purging it from one's own soul as a happy by-product of pledging to put in the work to judge everyone's character objectively, and first-hand, starting with one's own. This is a sacred obligation to oneself, for the simple reason that one's life is best served by having the most accurate, true-to-reality appraisal of everyone -- good or bad -- that one deals with. It was shocking to me when I realized that the second blog post I linked above was written over twenty years ago. Things were bad then, and have gotten much worse since. But just as individualism is the cure for racism, it is also the basis for hope. One can continue the noble and life-improving fight for equality by starting today, with oneself, and continue by helping the best people one knows understand how they can join the cause and why they should. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At Ask a Manager is a post titled "Scolding Strangers, Kids Using Corporate Lingo, and Other Ways Our Jobs Follow Us Home," which you may find amusing. Within, Alison Green shares reader contributions, such as:I teach English as a second language in Toronto, the most multi-cultural city in the world. I have to stop myself from saying "Speak English!" when I hear other languages outside of school.I originally read this with some mild puzzlement and memories of irritation with others for doing things like this in the past. You're not at work, I recall once saying to a friend using work lingo on an unsuspecting layman. Intending to ... circle back ... to this because I was curious as to whether the multilingual or others used to code-switching were better at avoiding such lapses, the above example is the first I laid eyes on. I guess I learned some patience instead... 2. While I do recognize Steve Jobs as a great innovator, I am not a great fan of Apple's software, and someone has supplied the ideal quote for me to explain part of why:If Apple products were so intuitive, I would intuit them.The other part is my general gripe with closed-source, proprietary software, at least in the way it gets produced (read: changed unnecessarily and often for the worse) in our modern culture: Any work flow or store of knowledge you might develop is at risk of being decimated by some unforeseen change you may or may not find helpful. I like learning new things and building on them; I hate learning basically the same thing over and over again. 3. A bit related to my rare desire for changes in software to be confined to improvements is an interesting blog post praising the "beauty of finished software." Among other things, you will learn that George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, which was the basis for the television series, A Game of Thrones, using Wordstar 4.0. Says Martin of his 40+-year-old word processor:George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire with this word processor. (Image by Posi66, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.The blogger discusses his concept further and rightly points out that Unix-like software has many commands that exemplify it. 4. On a walk before our big move, I enjoyed reading a PBS story on "the lucrative world of undead brands." The piece explains how it is that you keep bumping into brands and wondering things like Didn't they go bankrupt a year or so ago. Good News: You're not out of touch or misinformed:In simplest terms, the business model works because "not everybody knows the store is closed," says James Cook, director of retail research at the commercial real estate firm JLL. "People are Googling that brand all the time." Right now, online home-goods retailer Overstock.com is trying this with the intellectual property of bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond, shedding its old Overstock self and relaunching under the newly purchased Bed Bath & Beyond name. Buyers of the Toys R Us brand have tried to keep it alive through several iterations.One company in this business, Authentic Brands, reported nearly half a billion in revenues in 2020, of which about half was profit. -- CAV Link to Original

The thrust of John Stossel's recent piece on driverless cars was to marvel at the relative restraint Californian regulators showed after problems surfaced with the GM Cruise. I share his relief, especially after reading the following:Image by Dllu, via Wikimedia Commons, license.[M]ost people who try them like them. "It's one of the few things you can do today that makes you feel like people must have felt 100 years ago," says [former Argo AI executive Alex] Roy. "First time they saw a light bulb, first time they saw a plane." Fully driverless cars are here, and they're a very good thing. [bold added]Stossel is correct to note that this new technology is life-saving and that regulation is its main threat. But, despite his clearly good intent, I think Stossel understates both the threat and the benefits, as good as lives spared from accidental deaths may be. Overregulation? This marvelous new technology exists as the mercy of the reasonability government officials. This would not be a problem in a world where independent agencies like the Consumers Union competed to provide us with the information we need to strike the best balance between innovation and safety. And as for the spiritual lift Roy describes, it is arguably an even greater crime that our nation's sense-of-life is in danger of being slowly snuffed out by such a circumstance. I have no doubt that a vicious cycle of cultural risk-averseness and omnipresent regulation is a major part of why it is now so rare to enjoy the thrill of a new technology. Americans need to see the evidence of -- and experience the feeling of -- human efficacy that new technology affords much more often than we have in recent times. -- CAV Link to Original

Over at FEE is a piece by Lawrence Reed whose headline reads, "Indians, Property Rights, and Ayn Rand," and whose blurb elaborates: Ayn Rand got many things right, but on the issue of Native Americans she made a big error. Interesting I thought. I don't recall Rand specifically positing or critiquing a general Amerindian stand on that issue. As a labor of love (which my respect for intellectual property rights will otherwise keep obscure and thus financially unrewarding), I have been gradually creating a searchable database of the works of Ayn Rand and some of her students. (It is, albeit incomplete, a superset of this one.) Although I like to imagine myself a good researcher, I found nothing directly or indirectly addressing this issue by Ayn Rand herself. (Anyone knowing otherwise should feel free to point to a source in the comments to this post, or by emailing me directly. But read the rest of this before you do.) This is odd by itself, but it was hardly the only swipe at a position allegedly held by Ayn Rand, but unsubstantiated. The piece actually, and bizarrely, starts its out-of-the-blue swipe at Rand with the following:Philosopher Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) got many things right, but she also got two very big things wrong. One was that life is the result not of intelligent design but of pure chance, an observation that science is increasingly debunking (see Science Is Affirming Creation, Not Accident). [link to creationist web site omitted]This attack is quite easy to refute:I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. ("The Missing Link" in The Ayn Rand Letter, vol. II, no. 17, May 1973)Since, as of now, I have heard Rand accused of both dismissing and espousing evolution, I think it's worth also quoting Leonard Peikoff, her most important student, on this matter:Darwin's theory, Ayn Rand held, pertains to a special science, not to philosophy. Philosophy as such, therefore, takes no position in regard to it. (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Chapter 11, footnote 19)So on at least one count, FEE's piece is demonstrably wrong, which is the best that can be said for it. (To be clear, this is not to say that Rand espoused creationism.) As far as I can tell, its assertions about Rand's opinion on what "the Indians" thought about property rights is, as Wolfgang Pauli might put it, "not even wrong," as far as any casual reader of the article is concerned. That said, in a comment on the article, Reed cites an off-the-cuff answer Rand gave to a question on the matter after her West Point address as the source of his allegation about Rand's views. Nevertheless, it is clear that this matter was not a prominent theme she developed in her commentary, and one wonders if she might have said the same thing had she known more about some Amerind cultures. (It is instructive to consider what she says about so-called "collective rights.") Conversely, if we take Reed's assessment of the Nez Perce at face value, it is likely incorrect to apply it to all Amerind tribes. All in all, it behooves anyone looking to FEE for help defending capitalism to consider how slipshod this piece is, as well as why it goes out of its way to attack Ayn Rand, whose defense of capitalism is so sorely needed today. I don't have a good answer to that question, but Ayn Rand, who wrote the following in 1946 to FEE's founder, Leonard Read, would doubtless have been unsurprised by something like this coming:Image by Ritam Baishya, via Unsplash, license.The mistake is in the very name of the organization. You call it The Foundation for Economic Education. You state that economic education is to be your sole purpose. You imply that the cause of the world's troubles lies solely in people's ignorance of economics and that the way to cure the world is to teach it the proper economic knowledge. This is not true -- therefore your program will not work. You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis. The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral. People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism. You cannot reverse cause and effect. And you cannot destroy the cause by fighting the effect. That is as futile as trying to eliminate the symptoms of a disease without attacking its germs. (Letters of Ayn Rand, pp. 256-257)As we see, Read ignored Rand's advice about the name and purpose of his organization. And now, nearly eighty years later, we see it not just ignoring the need for the right premises to promote capitalism, but actively undermining Rand in part for not espousing Creationism -- in an article supposedly making a case that at least some Amerindian cultures upheld a theory of property rights in some form. In light of the above, I would urge any reader to consider for themselves Rand's commentary on the ethical origins of collectivism and how they relate to mysticism, i.e., religion. -- CAV Link to Original

If you've ever heard of bike shedding, you might get a whiff of déjà vu from a piece by Alex Papadimoulis at The Daily WTF. To begin with, his example discussion arises from a cyclist's desire to keep his hands warm in the winter. Image by Axel Brunst, via Unsplash, license.That coincidence aside, if we take bike shedding to mean have a lengthy, unproductive discussion over a minor issue, then we see that Papadimoulis describes a kind of bike shed discussion. Usually, bike shedding occurs when people out of their depth focus on some minor issue they know something about (e.g., "it is easier for a committee to approve a nuclear power plant than a bicycle shed"). But here, we have knowledge domain experts beating a solved problem to death, apparently oblivious to said solution, which a quick reminder causes them to realize they do know of and understand. In the example, a bunch of engineers got going with an idea for heated handlebar grips for bicycles until someone who wasn't zeroed in on the discussion casually popped the whole thing like a balloon:The reason that this "hand warming system" does not exist is because most people have found a pair of gloves to be a perfectly suitable way for keeping one's hands warm.Most of us have seen or participated in discussions like this, and Papadimoulis proposes that the word gloves, with his full example in mind, might be a good, quick way to help oneself step back and gain perspective long enough to identify such discussions or, better yet, avoid them altogether. I think that's great advice, and I appreciate that a single, memorable word tied at once to a common object and a good example of failing to keep the big picture in mind can help one implement that advice. -- CAV P.S. The kind of discussion Papadimoulis describes is common and has been around enough to give rise to such unflattering stereotypes as the proverbial professor who lacks common sense. It is interesting to consider how much of this phenomenon comes down to fascination with interesting problems vs. a kind of dis-integrated thinking, in which a person is prone not to relate knowledge he has across domains. I have often seen intelligent people failing to make connections I deem near-obvious en route to mini-versions of the discussion at The Daily WTF. Unfortunately, in those cases, there isn't a well-developed thread one can puncture with a single word, or time to help make an immediate correction. Still, it can be helpful to know that this might be going on. I have found that time can help, at least in cases where ethusiasm for a given subject overwhelms thoughts about other concerns. Revisiting a topic after some time has passed often helps when that is possible.Link to Original

We're finally here! Image by Ketut Subiyanto, via Pexels, license.Actually, between my in-laws taking care of the kids for over a week and holiday travel, all of us have been here only about a week, now, but the house already feels like home. Chalk that up to a combination of Home is where your stuff is and our current house being roomier -- in more than one sense of the word -- than the one we left in Florida. And that's even though we left a relatively inexpensive part of that state. This was my first move to involve both buying a house on one end and selling one on the other: Even if government meddling every step of the way didn't make that more annoying/difficult than it would be anyway, I think it's fair to say that those transactions made the move an order of magnitude more stressful than the ones before. Logistically, the worst is over, but it will probably be another month or so before we're operating on what I would call a normal routine. In the meantime, the kids love having an upstairs and an area more their own, and, fogies that my wife and I are, we're enjoying the fact that this house, being older than our last, has an interior feature called "walls" that divide our living space into distinct areas -- called "rooms," I believe. Among other things, we can hang more of our art and photos! Despite the fact that we'll still have to drive everywhere, the place our particular suburb reminds me most of so far is Boston. We'd lived in a new development in Florida, and in a sparsely-populated area. I did expect to be able to drive less, and for there to be more amenities in our immediate vicinity, simply because it is better-established. But all kinds of things I used to have to drive 20-30 minutes to reach are within five minutes or so of us, now. These kinds of things might sound banal, but I am amazed at how they've summed up to greatly improve our daily quality of life already. -- CAV Link to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Each year, I take two or three weeks off from blogging around this time. This year, it will be at least three, but I may require four since this is when we finally move to Louisiana. Expect me back here as early as January 1, but possibly on January 8. I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. *** The pelican, which is the state bird of Louisiana, sometimes makes an appearance at the pond behind our house. (Image by Pete McGowan, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)1. If I could take one thing from our home in Florida with me to Louisiana, it would be the pond behind our house, which is home to about a dozen beautiful ducks and serves as a fishing hole or migratory stopping point for all manner of fascinating birds. This house has a huge sliding glass door with an unobstructed view of the pond, and spotting strange birds in the pond or in our back yard has been a near-daily occurrence. I may be a bit odd in this regard, but birds often amuse me. There is something about the juxtaposition of beauty with they way they move while they walk or hunt for fish that makes me chuckle. (My daughter may share my fond amusement at birds: She came up with a very funny imitation of the walk of a huge, ungainly bird that pranced across our back yard once.) I like the new house, but it doesn't have a pond. I will miss the birds! 2. Ditto for alligators. While I suspect that Florida is more of a bird-watcher's paradise than Louisiana, both have plenty of alligators. Again, though, there is no pond behind the new house, so I won't as often get to see if there's an alligator lounging around outside. People who are unfamiliar with gators are often a little bit alarmed to learn that basically any pond in the warmer parts of the South has them. But gators -- unlike crocodiles -- are not aggressive, and will leave people alone unless they approach too closely and provoke them, or swim around them, or have a yipping, small, natural-prey-like dog in tow. 3. If I loved the view from our living room, I hated our kitchen sink, not-so-affectionately nicknamed "The Time Sink." I never want to deal with a "farmhouse" sink again. Clean, they look good, and are especially tempting to people like me who cook partly as a hobby. And, yes, it is easy to clean pots and pans in them. But if you are busy and use your kitchen a lot, know that every time you are dumb enough to actually use that sink, you'll have to hose any and every food particle down a foot or so over to the disposal since the bottom doesn't slope. If you don't do this, the sink will become gross even quicker than if you do. Oh, and there's a grate over the bottom since it's stainless steel and will get ruined if anything scratches it. So that little chasing task either requires lifting the grate (which has to be cleared first) or spraying through it, which often deflects the water enough to send the food the wrong way. And the flat surface gets filthy very quickly anyway in large part because things like milk don't drain completely unless you waste time chasing those, too. The sink requires daily cleaning to shine, only a couple of days to look dirty, and only a couple more to look disgusting. After one really busy week, I realized that cleaning a toilet compared favorably because it is an easier chore with longer-lasting results. We have a traditional sink at the new place. Hallelujah! 4. I will not miss Florida's ... challenging ... hurricane evacuation decision matrix and logistics. Hurricanes are something to be aware of anywhere in the South, but it was ahead of sheltering in place across the state from Hurricane Ian that I realized how much worse evacuation logistics are in Florida than anywhere else. Louisiana famously gets its share of hurricanes, too, but we will have friends or relatives only a few hours away in several directions if we need to evacuate, and while evacuations are never easy, deciding whether to do so won't be as complicated: There aren't as many people there, and they aren't all having to stampede through a narrow freaking peninsula. -- CAV P.S./Bonus: Just ahead of posting, I recalled us seeing a bird at an intersection which looked like a ball of white yarn supported on two toothpicks, and with a stray piece of yarn -- its (tiny!) head and neck -- swaying, snake-like above the ball of its body. My daughter laughed and then said Awwwww! So I guess she does share my amusement with/love of weird birds. Link to Original

Someone asked advice columnist Carolyn Hax if a recent decision to turn down the offer of a "high voltage" job was a sign of depression. Hax's reply wasn't bad, and amounted to this was a difficult, multifactorial decision and coming to such a conclusion about one's mental health requires weighing many things, including why you made that decision about the job offer. Hax will sometimes also promote intelligent comments from people who follow her column, and one of those seemed particularly astute:It's okay to have other priorities than living up to fevered steorotypes. (Image by Alejandro Ortiz, via Unsplash, license.)What would you do with the extra life the FINE job frees up? Valuing that could reframe defeat into an accomplishment. Rewarding work for more money can be a good life, too, so I'm not pulling for either side. Just honesty about what we value, and the true costs and benefits of each path. Some decisions are wrenching not because one path is wrong, but because both meet different standards of "right." That could ease the pressure a bit.That comment, valuable as it is for hindsight, reminded me of a decision-making tactic I learned from Jean Moroney's Thinking Directions called decision cards. I think the technique bears mention because it can be hard even to know what the "true costs and benefits" are, or how to weigh them no matter how dilligent one is trying to be. That technique might have made the choice easier for the writer, and given her peace of mind with her choice. That technique is designed specifically to tackle such difficult, consequential decisions. Indeed, the example Moroney used in a course to teach the technique was ... evaluating competing job offers. Here is a brief description:Roughly speaking, you create a card for each option, putting positives on one side, negatives on the other. Then you systematically examine all of the negatives to translate them into equivalent positives for the other options. There's a bit more to it than that, but the effect is that you reconceive the decision entirely in terms of values, and then you can choose your direction while "holding all of the values with care."This technique takes into account our two basic motivational systems -- motivation by love and motivation by fear -- and provides a way to resolve any conflicts between them, while also framing the choice in a way that lends itself to maximizing long-term values -- which may or may not be financial, depending on an individual's priorities. -- CAV Link to Original

According to the Wall Street Journal, the NCAA is considering the "radical" idea of permitting colleges to pay actual money to the grown men and women who play spectator sports under their brands. Do note that the term radical is not my sarcastic description, but the newspaper's, and is used unironically in its headline. Here's what they're calling "radical":The proposed changes would create a new top tier, or subdivision, for the richest programs. Those schools would be required to set aside at least $30,000 per year for at least half of their eligible athletes in an educational trust fund designed to serve as a launching pad fund. The subdivision would also require schools to work together to make their own rules for things like scholarship limits, recruiting windows and transfer requirements. This neither challenges the altruistic premise that amateurism is morally superior to professionalism in athletics, nor grants professionalism a (long-overdue) moral sanction: It's just a new flavor of hypocrisy. And it is a sad joke compared to what athletes of similar ages abroad and in other sports are making. I argued years ago that football of the American gridiron variety should adopt the more capitalist (and thus more truly American) multi-tiered league systems of association football (aka soccer) already found in Europe: An expectant mother roots for Ajax FC, renowned for its youth development program. (Image via Pixabay.) The good news is that we are now speaking openly of compensating college-aged athletes. The bad is that we continue doing so on the unimaginative premise that they must play for college teams. Fortunately, we have the [counterexample] of European soccer abroad ... to help people see that there are far better ways -- morally and practically -- to foster young athletes...Interestingly, the article discusses several compensation-centered legal actions pending against the NCAA, including a unionization attempt by a baseball team. While that is occurring within America's hyperregulated and litigious legal environment, and unions are hardly friendly to capitalism, I would bet that has a higher chance of freeing college athletes to turn pro (even if accidentally) than the NCAA's "radical" proposal to continue not really paying college(-aged) athletes. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at Jewish World Review, Carl Leubsdorf handicaps the early Republican primaries, and concludes that Nikki Haley is in a strong position to emerge as the main alternative to Donald Trump after Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. I mostly agree with his analysis, but I think New Hampshire might be more interesting for Democrat voters and political junkies than Leubsdorf realizes. His take on New Hampshire:Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, license. A second-place finish for Haley in Iowa would likely create momentum for a two-person Trump-Haley race in New Hampshire and South Carolina, less than would a DeSantis second-place finish. That's because Haley already has the stronger campaign in New Hampshire, a state that loves outsiders, and in South Carolina. Her New Hampshire success may hinge on whether most of the large number of unaffiliated voters flock to the Republican primary, since the Democrats won't recognize the winner of their Biden-less contest. [bold added]Important here is why the Democrats won't recognize that winner, and the name of that why is Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who is challenging Biden in large part because of the President's age. Phillips is in that "Biden-less contest" and stands to get headlines as the winner, regardless of what his party does. Absent Phillips, what Democrats ought to do in New Hampshire is a no-brainer: Vote for Trump in the Republican primary since running against Trump again is Biden's best shot at getting reelected. But with Phillips? Any Democrat who shares Phillips's concern about Biden's age and wants to send a message to the DNC should seriously consider voting for Phillips, even if only to show other younger possible candidates -- like Gavin Newsom -- that Biden is vulnerable. Yes, this might narrow or outright derail a Trump victory, but that might not be a bad thing: After all, running against Biden is Trump's best shot at getting back into office, so maybe sticking with Slow Joe isn't a great idea... On top of that, and especially if Haley (or DeSantis) actually wins or does well in Iowa, Trump will have been shown to be vulnerable, and the Democrats will be looking at Biden running against a younger and less-disliked candidate than Trump. In that case, telling the DNC to dump Biden while there's still a chance to do so might be a compelling reason to vote for Phillips, who has other strong points, as I wrote earlier at the link above. And the fun doesn't stop there. With RFK, Jr. in the general, there is high protest vote potential that can go any number of ways. If Biden is in the general, RFK, Jr. is leftist-enough to attract dissatisfied Democrats. (I hear that he's a hit with younger voters.) If Haley (or, less likely, DeSantis) is in the general, RFK, Jr. -- as an anti-vax conspiracy nut -- is kooky enough to draw support from a significant number of disgruntled hard-core Trump supporters. Either prospect could motivate Democrats in New Hampshire to vote for Phillips in their own (unofficial) primary or for the best non-Trump alternative in the Republican primary. -- CAVLink to Original

I have never been a fan of Donald Trump. I voted none of the above in '16 via blank, and only very reluctantly held my nose and cast a ballot for him in '20 -- and only then because I was worried that the Green New Deal had a serious chance of passing. The fact that an authoritarian-styled person like Trump can ride a personality cult to power in the United States is an alarming development to say the least. And it is hard to say what he has done -- spending worse than a Democrat while in office, backing kooky blind-loyalists in (often losing) efforts to control Congress, end federal protection for abortion via court appointments, among many other things -- has most damaged the GOP as a viable opponent to the Democrats. Republicans keep losing winnable races thanks to Trump. But maybe that's a good thing, given what he plans to do should voters return him to office:He has said he would establish a government-backed anti-"woke" university, create a national credentialing body to certify teachers "who embrace patriotic values" and erect "freedom cities" on federal land. He has pledged to marshal the power of the government to investigate and punish his critics. It is a governing platform barely recognizable to prior generations of Republican politicians...Barely recognizable as Republican?! I am old enough to remember when Republicans would, correctly, say that such a platform isn't recognizable as American. Indeed, a few with a spine might even call it what it is, Anti-American. Central planning may or may not now be a Republican value, but it is not and never will be an American value, in the original sense of that term. Our federal government has no business pushing people to build cities in the middle of nowhere -- like the Chinese government has -- for any purpose, and calling them "freedom cities" is another move from the same playbook. It is disturbing to say the least that Trump, who is happy to go out of his way to make off-color jokes about the Chinese, gets away with imitating their ruler -- who, unlike the Chinese people, deserves ridicule -- when he thinks it suits his purposes. The government has even less business running educational institutions. Assuming Trump actually brings his "anti-'woke'" university into being -- by stealing our money to do so, whether or not we agree with his conception of a proper education -- what next? Does the next Democrat President change it into a far-left indoctrination camp? Or do we just not hold elections? It will be hard enough to separate government from education as it is. But that difficulty pales compared to those that can easily be caused by threatening the Republic in the way such obvious questions suggest. In her essays, "The Establishing of an Establishment" and "Fairness Doctrine for Education," Ayn Rand respectively (1) explains how government support for education and research leads to entrenched orthodoxy (like the far-left ones strangling our universities now), and (2) presents a measure that could put the brakes on such orthodoxies while we find a way to back the government out of education, so academics will once again have to compete on merit. Since Republicans have forgotten this, let me say it: Freedom and other meritorious ideas win in any free marketplace of ideas. (We do not have one today, and the only way to establish one is to have less government meddling in education, not more.) It is a serious indictment of Trump's conception of freedom that he thinks he has to (or even can) ram it down our throats with the full force of the Federal Government. Trump's -- and many modern conservatives' -- solutions to America's problems no longer represent opposition to the central planning/welfare state foisted on Americans over generations by the left. Instead, the right has decided to take over the welfare state. This is all bad enough, but just in case you don't believe Republicans have no idea what freedom means, get a load of the following quote from a former Trump appointee:Brooke Rollins -- a Trump White House official who now leads the America First Policy Institute, a think tank run by former Trump aides -- argued that the majority of the public thinks that "the federal government [should] ensure that it is working on behalf of the people." "When local or state government drifts away from that, either unintentionally or intentionally, then I think that the vision is with an America First approach that the federal government will lean in and pull freedom back to where it should be," Rollins said. [bold added]Contrast this with the following quotes from Ayn Rand:"Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion." [1] "The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights..." [2]Now, you tell me what the hell it could possibly mean for the government to "pull freedom" anywhere (but down) when such things as building entire cities and indoctrination centers -- rather than protecting our individual rights -- are being touted by a party that has gone from at opposing the left (even if inneffectively) to aping it on apparently every level. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Image by Petr Meissner, via Wikimedia Commons, license.1. Visiting one of my brothers and his family over Thanksgiving, I got to re-visit a card game I learned in college and taught him, but had forgotten about. "Dahimian" was what we called it in college, but I have never found anything called that, much less a card game. Some internet sleuthing based on the rules of play indicates that dahimian is likely a corruption of Dai Hinmin, a Japanese game that gained currency in the U.S. some decades before I learned the very similar game we played. It had been a long time since I played cards in person and we had a blast, surprising ourselves when we realized we spent something like five hours playing this. 2. Fellow foodies may be surprised to see me list remembering cocktail franks here as a win, and fellow parents might wonder how I could have forgotten about them for so long: Kids love these. My son asked me to make macaroni and cheese some time back, and I was puzzled over what meat I'd serve with this and a vegetable side to be able to serve a well-rounded meal. Andouille went over well enough, but didn't seem quite right. Then one day, like a bolt from the blue, I recalled liking cocktail franks as a child and realized that this was the solution I was looking for. The kids loved it and I now have an easy combination I can keep on hand for a meal that feeds the family and takes only 20 minutes to make: mac and cheese, cocktail franks, and a frozen vegetable. (I alternate between green beans, which my daughter prefers, and the green peas favored by my son. 3. For the next few weeks, the kids and I are still in Florida finishing up the semester and preparing to move, while my wife, whose career has led her to New Orleans, is there starting her new position. On road trips, we enjoy listening to audio books, often by Brandon Sanderson. During the Thanksgiving drive, we listened to Defiant, the last of his Skyward series. 4. Hooray for backups! One morning, while I was preparing for another trip, I was running my backup script as I do each week, when a dialog box suddenly and unexpetedly informed me that my computer was no longer connected to Dropbox. I lost no data there, fortunately, but my postmortem caused me to realize that (a) either or both of an outdated BIOS and a defective USB port and (b) a old (and badly-written) backup script joined forces to wipe out about two thirds of my home subdirectories. The previous backup meant I'd lost only about three hours' worth of work, and the postmortem helped me see an obvious fix to the backup script that would make it impossible for it to wipe any data from a home directory in the future. (It also now periodically verifies that the computer can see the backup media and fails safely if it doesn't.) I have isolated the computer's part(s) of problem enough to work around it/them for the time being, and fix them outright later. -- CAVLink to Original

Science writer Faye Flam argues that "It's Past Time Scientists Admitted Their COVID Mistakes." Trained in science myself, I have to agree and disagree. Yes: Anyone worthy of that occupation will seek truth at all times and will need no urging to correct an error. But no: While some scientists -- and people really only posing as such -- promoted bad policies during the pandemic, scientists as such have zero power to violate individual rights on the massive scale we suffered during the pandemic. Flam all but admits as much in the following paragraph, which is the crux of her piece:Even as early as January and February of 2020, the US public health community was making unforced errors. Evidence mounted week after week that this disease was wreaking havoc in China and spreading around the world. Health authorities should have been scrambling to prepare hospitals and nursing homes, to create tests that worked, and to develop a strategy for contact tracing and virus monitoring. They should have warned people of possible business and school closures ahead. [bold added]Later on, she goes further:Even at the time, scientists should have been clearer when they were basing policies on educated guesses.Insofar as Flam is commenting on the scientific issues behind the policies being imposed by the government (aka the "public health community"), she is absolutely correct: To the extent that science can affect a government policy, scientists the government consults must go out of the way to be sure they are correct, including admitting mistakes and recommending course changes when necessary. And part of changing course emphatically includes owning any past mistake and explaining why there will (or should) be a course change. But we aren't governed by scientists, and the blame doesn't lie entirely with them. And one should never take a scientist to task for admitting We didn't know, at least when that is the truth and that scientist is discussing a scientific question. As for policy, why would we expect great answers from scientists, given that political philosophy is an entirely different discipline than the one they chose to specialize in? The most disastrous aspects of the pandemic response were due to massive violations of individual rights by the government, whose job it is to protect those rights, not to cure or protect us from disease. Insofar as government might sometimes appear to to protect us disease, it is (or should) actually be protecting us from having our rights violated by other people, namely by others intentionally or negligently getting us sick. The real lesson from the pandemic is that governments the world over were ill-prepared for this foreseeable circumstance, both in terms of how they understood their basic remit and in terms of applying that remit to a pandemic. Fortunately, the good people at the Ayn Rand Institute foresaw the need for the conversation that actually needs to take place before the next pandemic, when there is ample time to think about policy. In that vein, I once again recommend the white paper "A Pro-Freedom Approach to Infectious Disease," by Onkar Ghate:We need laws that focus government with laser-like precision on its proper goal: to remove the active threat posed by carriers of severe infectious diseases.I highly recommend the whole thing, which is available at the link (also in PDF or podcast form). To give an idea of the wide-ranging and well-considered nature of the document, I have reproduced the table of contents below:Executive Summary I. WE MUST DEMAND BETTER FROM GOVERNMENT.Our response to SARS-CoV-2 was un-American.The alternative to coercive, statewide lockdowns was not two million dead.A truly American response requires new laws. II. THE LAW SHOULD FOCUS GOVERNMENT ON STOPPING THE THREAT POSED BY CARRIERS OF INFECTIOUS DISEASE.We need to legally specify a threshold for when infectious diseases qualify as active threats.We need to legally delimit appropriate coercive interventions.Proper laws would focus government on one task: to test, isolate and track carriers of infectious disease. III. IN PRACTICE, PROPER LAWS WOULD HAVE ENSURED GOVERNMENT WAS PREPARED TO TEST AND ISOLATE CARRIERS OF SARS-CoV-2.With better laws we would have had Taiwan's level of readiness.With better laws we would have had South Korea's widespread, strategic ability to test. IV. WHEN GOVERNMENT IS UNABLE TO ISOLATE MOST CARRIERS OF AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE, THE LAW MUST LEAVE US FREE TO ACT.If government is unable to isolate most of the infected, the law should grant it few additional powers.An improper public health goal led to coercive statewide lockdowns.The proper public health goal is for government to protect our right to the pursuit of health.This means government's public health goal is not to coercively "flatten the curve."But during a pandemic, government must be transparent and explain how government-controlled healthcare will be rationed.The law should prohibit statewide lockdowns and require governmental transparency. V. IN PRACTICE, IF GOVERNMENT HAD NOT POSSESSED THE POWER OF STATEWIDE LOCKDOWNS, THE RESPONSE TO THE UNCONTAINED SPREAD OF SARS-CoV-2 WOULD HAVE BEEN FAR BETTER.Governmental action would have been more strategic, targeted and effective.Private action would have been more strategic, targeted and effective. VI. WHAT YOU CAN DOWrite your representatives in government.Do you have a comment or question?A version of the above (with links to relevant parts of the paper) exists at the ARI site. -- CAVLink to Original