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Gus Van Horn blog

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Everything posted by Gus Van Horn blog

  1. Image by Arthur Rackham, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.As of this morning the poll at Drudge Report shows four double-digit performers in the second Republican debate. Currently, they clock in at Haley (35%), Ramaswamy (20%), DeSantis (19%), and Christie (16%). (Pence, whom I said didn't have a base and called "Trump-limited," finished dead last at 2%.) I called the race after the first (in which Ramaswamy and Haley's numbers were reversed) a sprint for Ramaswamy and a marathon for Haley. One headline characterized the debate as "trading insults," and partisan media, left and right, have hastily written it off as irrelevant, charging that, with Trump leading Biden in the latest polling, that the "electability argument" has evaporated, and that with Trump leading among Republicans that his coronation -- like Hilary Clinton's in 2016? -- is inevitable. Balderdash! I submit that, since Haley polls best against Biden, there might be some wishful thinking behind any leftist outlet proclaiming that Haley can't hang her hat on electability, and double for any Trumpist saying this. Anyone else is likely being lazy or giving up too soon. As for Trump's supposedly insurmountable primary lead, that's rich after the way polling largely missed Trump's win way back in 2016 -- and probably also wishful thinking. Leftists know that Trump is Biden's best bet to get reelected. And Trumpists? The fact that they're frontloading winner-take-all primaries shows that they fear an electorate taking any time to think through its options. Seriously. Where's the fire? If Trump is so ace, why hurry? And why not show up for the debates? If Trump is the Only Man Who Can Save America, what has he to fear from some piker being "unfair" to him at a debate? Continuing with what's actually going on: The first state primary/caucus isn't until January. In the meantime, polling in early states shows that while, yes, majorities give Trump as the answer to the "if the election were held today" question, most of these people aren't political junkies or Trump cultists. More to the point, over three quarters of Republicans are considering someone other than Trump:In both states, most voters are still considering multiple candidates. In fact, just a fifth in Iowa and about a quarter in New Hampshire are considering Trump and nobody else, making his support "floor" a bit lower in these early states than it looks nationwide. Most of Trump's backers are considering at least one other candidate, and these voters are more likely to say they're supporting him "with some reservations" than Trump-and-only-Trump voters are. And in both states, only-Trump voters are outnumbered by the third of the electorate who aren't considering him at all.It's not quite early days, but there is ample time for Haley to continue building momentum and for Trump to make an ass of himself, even without showing up for the debates. I remain cautiously optimistic that Haley can win. -- CAVLink to Original
  2. Over at Hot Air is speculation about a possible third-party run for the Presidency by RFK, Jr. Naturally, it is difficult to read without being splashed due to the resident Trumpites drooling at the prospect. Early polling indicates that the kooky Kennedy will draw more votes from the Democrats than he will from the Republicans:Image by Maxlovestoswim, via Wikimedia Commons, license.If the Democrats and Republicans nominate Biden and Trump respectively, and Kennedy runs as an independent, 33 percent of Democratic voters would "likely" vote for him according to the poll, including 14 percent who would be "very likely" to back him. Among likely voters as a whole, 25 percent said they would likely vote for Kennedy if he runs against Biden and Trump, including 14 percent of Republicans, with 10 percent saying they are "very likely" to cast their ballots this way.It's early days, and I can see those numbers going either way. RFK, Jr.'s numbers may be as high as they are simply because (a) he has name recognition that is favorable, deservedly or not; and (b) he looks at first like a ready solution to anyone concerned about the age of the next President. Either party could instantly fix that problem by nominating a younger candidate. (I have seen speculation that the Democrats could well throw Biden under the bus at the last minute, much as they did Robert Torricelli ahead of New Jersey's 2002 Senate election.) But if we do end up with Trump-Biden, I can't imagine partisans not panicking and closing ranks behind their respective albatrosses. Democrats viscerally hate Trump, and which Republicans does Kennedy appeal to, anyway? I can think of two sets: (1) anti-vax kooks, who are all basically Trumpists, anyway; and (2) anti-Trump Republicans looking to cast a protest vote, some of whom might have second thoughts. How much of the independent vote he'd get really depends on how off-putting most people find his views on vaccines after those become more well-known to more people. I am afraid to even try guessing an answer to that. The ultimate outcome of a Trump-Biden-Kennedy race is anyone's guess, in my opinion: Trump and Biden are both so awful that almost anyone would look good by comparison: I can imagine Kennedy winning. More interesting to me are the ramifications of two scenarios, only one of which is mentioned (and only in passing at that): how he would affect a race that included a No Labels candidate; and how he would affect a race that included a non-Trump Republican. I think No Labels would effectively eliminate RFK Jr. as a viable candidate because there would then be a young and sane alternative who could win. Indeed, by draining kooks from each of the major parties, RFK Jr. could perhaps improve the chance of No Labels winning. (Earth to No Labels!) What I worry about is his effect on, say, a Biden-Haley race. I could see disgruntled Trumpists/anti-vax Republicans voting for RFK Jr. instead of the Republican, handing the Presidency back to the Democrats, whether Biden or a last-minute substitute is running. As it stands, I am inclined to hope the Democrats placate RFK, Jr. enough in some way that he doesn't do his third-party end-run at all. -- CAVLink to Original
  3. Over at Ask a Manager, a reader with a vicious coworker ("Cassandra") writes in. Since she's in a small town, it is impossible to avoid the coworker socially, and she is tired of forgoing certain activities simply so she doesn't have to deal with Cassandra. The situation reminded me a little of one I faced shortly after college, so the answer interested me. Here's the main point:Image by Artur Solarz, via Unsplash, license.[T]here are professionally appropriate ways to indicate you don't want to engage socially with someone. You can be chilly to Cassandra as long as you're not rude, and you can excuse yourself from conversations with her right away. I recommend Miss Manners' map of the varying degrees of chilliness to employ with someone you loathe -- which goes from Slightly Cool ("your mouth turns up when you have to say hello to her, but your eyes do not participate in the smile") to Cold ("all the formalities, but no smile -- you do not have a personal grievance against him; you are merely treating him as the sort of person you do not want to know") to Freeze ("you do not greet him, you do not acknowledge his presence, and if he approaches you, you turn away"). Freeze is too much for a coworker; I recommend Slightly Cool. (If you prefer Cold, I'd only caution you to factor in how it will look to those around you, which matters more than what Cassandra thinks.) Frankly, there's real power in being meticulously professional, and it's more likely to throw her off whatever game she's playing than getting down in the mud with her will do. [bold added]The power here lies precisely in the fact that Cassandra is functioning in an entirely second-handed way: All the normal ways of being chilly are to communicate moral disapproval for an audience, which includes the recipient. Here, the recipient's past actions indicate that she does not care about the moral disapproval, beyond its potential to provoke a response she can use to play the victim to others -- potentially preempting or overwhelming whatever message of disapproval one would want to convey to the others. The power in the "professional" response is that it provides no buttons to push, and it is perfectly appropriate since Cassandra is a coworker. She would be frustrated (if not defeated) by the very boundary she started out violating. Would that advice have helped a younger "me?" I am not so sure: I was quite socially awkward then, and I had not been exposed to professional norms very much. Perhaps with more of an explanation about those (which can be found by searching the site, or absorbed by following it for a time), it might have sunk in. This is hardly the first time I have wished Ask a Manager had been around quite some time earlier! I'll happily risk sounding like a broken record and recommend her site to anyone who might be nonplussed by a workplace issue, or simply wants to become more effective on the job. -- CAVLink to Original
  4. Last week, I wrote:[Nikki] Haley does best against Biden in polling of any Republican in the field now, and there is no doubt that if Trump ends up in jail, or is declared to be disqualified from office, she would have a decent chance of winning the GOP primary. She is ready, if things break her way, and more people paying attention might constitute breaking her way in this election. [bold added]This scenario, which I already viewed as unlikely to occur, but the best shot of the Republicans nominating a decent alternative to Joe Biden, appears to be even less likely than I thought. This is because Trump's disciples within the GOP have been pushing for earlier, winner-takes-all primaries:Used car salesmen like to rush things, too. (Image by Parker Gibbs, via Unsplash, license.)The former president's aides have sculpted rules in dozens of states, starting even before his 2020 reelection bid. Their work is ongoing: In addition to California, state Republican parties in Nevada and Michigan have recently overhauled their rules in ways clearly designed to favor Trump. ... The Trump campaign succeeded in changing the rules "in part because they knew what they were doing and in part because everyone else is asleep at the switch," Ginsberg added. ... The Trump campaign's rule changes have focused on ensuring he benefits from how all-important delegates are awarded after each state caucus or primary. ... [T]he work started in earnest years ago -- changes were made in 30 states and territories in 2019, according to Josh Putnam, a political scientist who focuses on the presidential nomination process and runs FrontloadingHQ. Among the rules changes were switching from proportional delegate allocation, where multiple candidates can win delegates in a state, to winner-take-all. In some states, delegates are also being awarded based on the outcome of party-run caucuses among GOP activists, many of whom remain loyal to Trump, rather than official state primary elections.Perhaps because the rules are obscure and vary from state to state, the article is unclear about how much this tilts the scales in favor of Trump, but it does note that the strategy could backfire if Trump falters enough early in the race. It would appear, then, that in addition to a smaller field of competitors to Trump, narrowing it down quickly will be necessary. It is a shame that the Republicans have allowed a power-hungry liability like Trump to cause it to have to choose a candidate quickly, rather than deliberately. -- CAVLink to Original
  5. A Friday Hodgepodge Our latest move, from northeastern Florida to the New Orleans area, has been our most hectic. This morning, I'm taking some time out to focus on a few of the things I look forward to when it's done. 1. There is an active Arsenal supporter's club there called -- what else? -- the Krewe of Arsenal. (Interestingly, this will be three cities in a row where meeting up for the games will be in an Irish pub.) I stopped going to the local club in Jacksonville during the pandemic and look forward to doing this from time to time again, especially with the magic head coach Mikel Arteta has been working over the last couple of years. 2. During my time here in Florida, I discovered a new favorite beer, Abita's Andygator. We will soon live a short drive away from Abita Springs: Might there be a brewery tour in the not-so-distant future? The answer would appear to be yes. Oh, and I just noticed there's a link titled, "Join the Brew Krewe." 3. Since we'll be suburbanites, you might shake your head at the thought that the Van Horns, foodies that we are, will have to make do with chain restaurants. That is largely true, but (a) we like the local cuisine and (b) some of the chains are New Orleans-based. A couple are already familiar since we lived in Houston, where there are also locations. (I drove by a Copeland's last week.) Verdict: We should be fine. As a bonus, both places I've gone to with limited beer selections had Andygator as the "beer snob" option. Not a bad local default, if that is indeed the case... 4. It will be very easy to be in touch with our families here. My wife's folks have a place on the beach near Pensacola, which is only a three or four hour drive away, and they still have lots of friends in the area. My family is about that far away in various parts of Mississippi. Rumor has it that even my mother, who doesn't travel much these days, might be tempted to drive down and see the place once we're situated. She'll have to: We plan on having a couple of grandcats to go along with her grandchildren. -- CAVLink to Original
  6. The Semafor, David Weigel opines that Nikki Haley is "riding a charming, focused, and consistent campaign to third place." With polls all over the place, I presume Weigel is placing the former South Carolina governor behind Trump and one of DeSantis or Ramaswamy. I think it is premature to consign Haley to third place: Aside from political junkies and Trump-worshipers, not that many people are paying much attention. This means that, while part of Trump's overwhelming-looking support is never going away, a significant amount remains persuadable. In this context, Weigel's description of how Haley has been running her campaign sounds more like strategic patience than futility:Image by Rachel Leppert, via Wikimedia Commons, public doman.... Haley has built her own lane in the Republican primary. A relentless commitment to her message -- and even the anecdotes she tells on the trail -- has helped. Reporters are invited to watch her dazzle crowds, but they don't get to pepper her with questions after. Instead, Haley gets to talk about her own electability, in sync with the voters showing up to see her. She pledges to "veto any spending bill that doesn't take us back to pre-COVID levels," a $1.8 trillion spending cut, without much detail. She leans into her support for funding the war in Ukraine, and commits to an amorphous abortion stance -- finding "consensus," to "save as many lives as possible" -- even as social conservatives protest it. ... No other candidate in this race has executed an underdog strategy so effectively, with so little deviation from her original plan. Haley has managed to nail her core message -- that she's a fresher, more electable, less erratic alternative to Trump.Yeah, Gus, but this depends on Trump imploding, you might say. I say that with all his legal troubles, he may have already imploded, and closer to election time, it's going to look uglier to the persuadable part of the GOP electorate. And with Trump's volatility, there's always the chance he'll scare away a few voters on top of that. Haley is building her case now, and has neither alienated nor pandered to the Trump base. She has been running a frugal campaign, but stands to benefit when big anti-Trump GOP donors -- who have been backing away from DeSantis since he began his stupid war on Disney -- decide where their best chances lie. Haley does best against Biden in polling of any Republican in the field now, and there is no doubt that if Trump ends up in jail, or is declared to be disqualified from office, she would have a decent chance of winning the GOP primary. She is ready, if things break her way, and more people paying attention might constitute breaking her way in this election. I wouldn't write her off just yet. -- CAVLink to Original
  7. There's a good article at Vox about a Florida intuition I will miss when we move out of state: Publix, the state's ubiquitous and well-liked grocery chain. I especially like the account of its founding at the start of the article:These pans, sold at Publix, are the best frying pans I have ever had. I own two myself and bought one for my father-in-law, who has thanked me more than once for it. (Image by Publix, via Publix. The author believes this use to be protected under U.S. Copyright Law as Fair Use.)George Jenkins was working as a store manager at a Piggly Wiggly in Winter Haven, Florida, when he tried to meet with the grocery chain's new owner to talk business and introduce himself. The guy blew him off -- his secretary said he was in important meetings, but Jenkins overheard him talking golf. So he quit and opened his own store, which he called Publix, right next to the Pig in 1930. He built the business gradually, its growth mirroring Florida's, and finally took the company outside of the state in 1991, starting with Savannah, Georgia. Today, Publix employs some 250,000 people across 1,350 stores concentrated across the Southeast. It is the largest employee-owned company in the United States. Its workers -- it prefers the term "associates" -- get shares of stock in the company after working 1,000 hours in a year... [bold added]I had not been aware of any of this -- except that a few other states in the South also have locations. Sadly, Louisiana isn't one of them: I checked soon after we decided to move there. (I don't shop there for everything, but it has been my go-to for grilling night and gourmet items the whole time we've been here.) As one might expect of a large, leftist media outlet, the piece is ultimately about politics, and seems at times to try really, really hard to slam the chain for such transgressions as not permitting workers to wear BLM garb on the job; a baker leaving a space on a cake for the word trans due to erring on the side of caution for leaving politics out of work; and an heiress (who has zero active role in the company) donating money to Donald Trump. The piece comes up empty. To Emily Stewart's credit, she does acknowledge the chain for also not kowtowing to the right, such as with this quote:"Publix wants you to have an ideal civic experience in its store. It doesn't cut corners, it's not the cheapest, you go into its stores and it feels like you're in a really nice neighborhood," says Billy Townsend, a Lakeland-based writer and former member of the Polk County School Board. "They are going for a specific kind of feel, and January 6th ain't it."The piece ends almost wistfully:Publix seeks to remain uncomplicated in a complicated world because life is complicated enough. Keeping things simple may not be possible, but isn't simple a little bit what we want our grocery stores to be?I appreciate Publix both for being an outstanding grocery chain and for showing a new generation by example that it is both possible and desirable to live life in the pursuit of excellence. Politics isn't everything: It's only a means, and we should be highly suspicious of anyone "left" or "right" who seems to think we should live our lives for a cause -- rather than supporting a cause because it will improve our lives. -- CAVLink to Original
  8. Although his piece mischaracterizes the demographic as "conservative," Mark Penn correctly describes how Trump won the 2016 nomination with suburban voters as an apparent moderate -- and how a non-Trump nominee can target such voters to win the nomination:Image by Nikola Knezevic, via Unsplash, license.[Trump's] weakness is with the very voters who once were his most enthusiastic supporters. But his opponents have failed to understand this and, so far, have tried to outflank him on the right, which has failed. This is why DeSantis, once the anticipated Trump-slayer, lost out as he failed to get the very-conservative voters and lost the more moderate support that was ready to back him. A review of the recent Wall Street Journal poll of Republican primary voters shows they are a majority of suburban voters and, while more working-class voters have joined them, they still are a more highly educated group than the electorate as a whole, with 54% who are college graduates or more. They are definitely an older party, with 68% of the GOP voters over 50, but 49% are women and 75% of them are married. How plausible is it that this group of older, highly educated suburban family voters are going to return Trump to office if presented with a more compelling alternative? [bold added]The path to victory is narrow, but Penn argues that it might be viable once what he calls the "rally-around-the-indictments effect" wears off. I'm not sure how strong such an effect is with educated voters, nor that it will wear off at all for his core constituency, given Trump's ... prowess ... at playing the victim and that group's blind loyalty. So, I guess if he means some of these voters might be momentarily reacting to the politicizing of the trial by left-wing partisans, I could agree with him: The ideal target voters will know that both of Trump is probably guilty and It's a shame the Democrats are gilding that lily by politicizing are true. -- CAVLink to Original
  9. Some sleep-deprived thoughts about a farcical news story... *** "Hugh Akston?" she stammered. "The philosopher? ... The last of the advocates of reason?" "Why, yes," he answered pleasantly. "Or the first of their return." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 308. *** NBC's recent story is borderline hilarious when one momentarily suspends the context of severe cultural rot and political danger it represents. It even has its punchline as its title: "Trump criticizes Republicans pushing abortion bans with no exceptions: 'You're not going to win'." That's right: The man who angered or annoyed so many Americans that he lost the presidency despite toting up history's second-highest popular vote total is advising his party to moderate its stance on that losing issue -- while refusing to step aside in favor of a more electable candidate. To be fair, though, Biden could well be the one person running who could get Trump elected again... And with in-kind media campaign donations like this story, I wouldn't bet against it. Here's Trump, playing the media like a fiddle, on Meet the Press:Trump said members of his own party "speak very inarticulately about [abortion]." "I watch some of them without the exceptions, etc., etc.," he said, referring to conservatives who don't support abortion exceptions in cases including abortion and rape. "I said: 'Other than certain parts of the country, you can't -- you're not going to win on this issue. But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks.Aside from the already-noted irony of Trump coaching his party on how not to lose elections, Trump is to blame for overturning Roe vs. Wade. The piece goes on about this at some length:President Joe Biden's campaign fired back at his remarks shortly after the interview, painting him as "the reason" the issue has taken center stage in the past year. "In Donald Trump's own words: he is the reason states across the country are able to ban abortion and are putting women's lives in danger," Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. "He's repeatedly bragged that 'nobody has ever done more' for abortion bans, and it was 'an honor' to have appointed the justices who eliminated Roe v. Wade. "Now, facing an election where he has to defend his deeply unpopular actions, he refuses to give Kristen Welker the honest answer on his support for banning abortion nationwide...Good response, but this came only after Trump -- with the free platform given to him by the media -- got to pretend to be the voice of reason in a debate that he got to pretend he didn't reignite, and that he got to pretend just needs someone to broker a good deal. Trump's base will eat this up and everyone knows this, including the interviewer, who should know by now not to expect a straight answer from Trump about anything. It is hard here to apply the maxim of not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity: This will only solidify his support in the primary and make it hard for any alternative to develop enough of a following to cause the others to drop out. The resulting large field persists and splinters Trump's opposition, which could defeat him behind one candidate. Politically, this is terrible news for the Republican Party and for America, because it makes the Trump-Biden match-up 70% of Americans don't want all but inevitable. It is also bad culturally: Most people don't have the understanding of how philosophy drives history that Ayn Rand teaches. Cultural change happens one mind at a time, and has to reach a critical mass before the politics follows. In this analysis, politicians are the end result, not the drivers of a debate. But that doesn't mean politicians can't impede cultural change. Obviously, dictators can, but so can candidates in a declining republic. Trump's dismissal of both facts (in the form of not admitting his role in the abortion debate) and principles (in the form of treating this debate as if it's as mundane as a group choosing where to go to lunch) -- and the knowledge that his personality cult will buy it hook, line, and sinker -- will demoralize many lower-level intellectuals on the right. This demoralization can manifest as some giving up altogether, because they think that there is no audience for serious debate. It can give others either the excuse to join in because they are cynical or self-censor themselves, "going along to get along" just to keep an audience in the hopes of having some influence on some issue. Bastiat (Image by unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)All of these are understandable, but mistaken reactions. News media, particularly television, is a poster-child for applying Frederic Bastiat's "broken window" parable more widely than economics. We see the crowds who show up to worship Donald Trump -- but not vastly larger number of people who hate/are tired of/never liked him. We also don't see the large numbers of people who want abortion to be legal, at least early in a pregnancy. We do get to hear Trump rightly name abortion as a losing issue and wrongly tout himself as a solution. I didn't see the interview, but I bet it was a softball and the interviewer didn't really challenge any of that in the moment. Even if I'm wrong, television does not lend itself to deep discussion, such as what the abortion debate demands, or to developing a full historical context, such as what Trump's slick answers deserved: That's why so many people dismiss it, often rightly, as sound bites coming from talking heads. Television, at least as it is usually produced, is a poor medium for serious discussion, so you rarely see serious discussion if that's where you get your news. (This situation cannot last forever: Best case, the culture improves enough that television itself improves or people become much less reliant on perceptual-level media for news. We should work to realize that best case scenario!) The conservative movement wasn't exactly a bastion of good, revolutionary ideas before Trump, and it is obviously less so after Trump cowed it into submission. We see this with the legions of mindlessly loyal Trumpists and with the cowing or pandering of such figures as Ben Shapiro or the late Rush Limbaugh to Trump's base. Such intellectuals at best fail to appreciate the unseen but influential demographic of thoughtful people who would be receptive to a good alternative, if only someone would present one. There are people who can change their minds over time, and who will, in turn provide a basis for a better political climate in America. The process takes a long time, on both the retail level (of persuading individuals) and the wholesale level (of holding elections about substantial issues again). This is the context that real, positive change requires, and persuasion about ideas important to liberty is the opportunity anyone blindly panicking about "the seen" forfeits. -- CAVLink to Original
  10. A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At New Ideal, Ben Bayer explains "Why Champions of Science and Reason Need Free Will." Taking the recent "emergence of thinkers who celebrate reason and critique forms of irrationality on both the cultural 'right' and the 'left'" as his point of departure, Bayer charges that for all their virtues, they are not revolutionary enough, and will fail unless they take the time to understand and embrace the concept of free will. He states in part:Even though it is demonstrable that science requires free will, the allegation that there is something mysterious and unscientific about free will is widespread, and it warrants a response. It is an allegation with a long history and many facets, but addressing a few of the representative allegations should suffice for our purpose. (In the concluding section, I will also try to explain why this worry about free will has been so enduring, in spite of its shortcomings.) One concern is that the idea of free will is in tension with a principle that is central to the scientific worldview, the principle of cause and effect...Aided by Ayn Rand's understanding of what free will is, Bayer goes on to address this concern at length. 2. At the blog of the Texas Institute for Property rights, Brian Phillips considers the question, "Is a Lack of Supply Causing the Housing Crisis?" While his full answer took a book (linked below), the following part is food for more careful thought than most people are giving:Image by "I Do Nothing But Love," via Unsplash, license.As I demonstrate in my book, The Affordable Housing Crisis: Causes and Cures (available on Amazon), the cost of regulations can add 40 percent to the price of new housing. As one example, regulations in Austin can inflate the price of a new house by more than $110,000! When compliance costs are combined with land costs, which are inflated by zoning laws, a new house is virtually unaffordable, even before the foundation is poured. If greedy housing producers could profitably build housing for low- and moderate-income households, they'd do so in a New York minute. But they can't, so they don't. If we want to solve the housing crisis, we need to free greedy housing producers. [link in original, bold added]As I write this post, we're house-hunting in the New Orleans area. If there has been one unpleasant constant throughout our relocation process, it has been the insane cost of housing everywhere we have looked, including the area we ultimately chose. Something is clearly wrong, and I am glad that when I have some more time, I can at least get a more satisfying explanation than my current hunches. And I am confident that I will find one in Phillips's book, based on having read two of his earlier works. 3. Speaking of confidence, Jean Moroney has posted a great piece on the subject, particularly on how confidence differs from optimism and what that can mean on a daily basis:[O]ptimism simply predicts a result; it doesn't concern itself with what you can do to ensure that result. In contrast, confidence is about you and your skill, not whether you succeed per se. Confidence is the emotion that proceeds from the conclusion that you have sufficient skill that your current or proposed effort will result in success.It is worth reading the whole thing to see this fleshed out with an example -- an employee optimistic about getting a pay raise after asking for it -- and how confidence can place that request in a richer context that will both increase the chance of that conversation going well and provide emotional resilience even if it doesn't. This isn't a bunch of fake it till you make it type hokum: This is about the value of a more rational and mature perspective one can take regarding anything, and how to work towards making that one's normal approach. 4. In How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn challenges the conventional Labor Day "wisdom" about exploitative corporations and valiant unions:While labor unions were originally founded for the legitimate purpose of improving working conditions and helping negotiate wages, they have long since substituted that purpose for entrenching the power of their leaders and the entitlements for their senior members. Today's labor unions in industrialized countries that operate on the principle of collectivism (e.g., forced membership, benefits regardless of performance) as opposed to justice, do not help workers flourish -- to perform at their best for their own economic wellbeing, purpose, and enjoyment of life. [bold added]Woiceshyn then considers how the alternative of free markets and the protection of individual rights can begin to undo the damage that unions have caused, and lead to the betterment of workers' lives, as one might expect from evidence she also presents. -- CAVLink to Original
  11. Over at the Atlantic, Yascha Mounk asks and observes: Why is it so difficult to get a new pair of glasses or contacts in [the United States]? It's easier pretty much everywhere else. The short answer is, unsurprisingly, the same as for why Americans used to be unable to buy hearing aids over the counter: regulation. Mounk goes through the gory details of that in his piece, but what really interested me, apart from his noting that it's easy and painless to buy glasses almost everywhere else, was the following case he pitches to end the farce:Image by Ovidiu Creanga, via Unsplash, license.Even in times of extreme polarization and a deeply broken Congress, this is one piece of sensible legislation that should be able to command bipartisan support. Republicans who believe in the free market should look on this red tape as an unnecessary intrusion on free enterprise. Democrats who care about the well-being of the socioeconomically disadvantaged -- and are worried about the health disparities between different ethnic groups -- should be outraged by the unreasonable burden the situation places on underprivileged Americans. Put Americans in charge of their own vision care, and abolish mandatory eye exams. [bold added]I will admit some pessimism here: On the evidence, I doubt partisans on either side actually care about what they say they care about. But then again, I laughed for a similar reason when I first learned of efforts to make OTC hearing aids a reality. Sometimes, small changes for the better can happen despite general momentum away from freedom, and we can always hope the right people learn the right lessons from their success: So here's hoping I'm wrong again! -- CAVLink to Original
  12. Scrolling through Instapundit for the first time in quite a while this morning, I happened upon the following Glenn Reynolds post, which I quote in its entirety:THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOW-TO MANUAL: We Are Re-Paganizing. "A world that embraced infanticide would not necessarily look anything like Nazi Germany. It would probably look like ancient Rome. Or, indeed, twenty-first-century Canada." [formatting and link in original]Reynolds and other bloggers there occasionally mention Rand's works, including Return of the Primitive, and that often using the stock phrase we see above. In fact, the book clocks in at 68 hits according to Google. My memory serves me correctly that such references are used to pillory "the left," e.g., Ayn Rand's Return of the Primitive: a warning for the rest of us, a how-to guide for the left. This apparently includes even when the left manages to get an issue right, like abortion. While one can hope such references cause a few readers to pick up the book, the one above is both amusing and frustrating: Anyone aware that Ayn Rand supports a woman's right to an abortion will see the irony of using one of her works to imply that abortion is "primitive." But the irony hardly ends there: Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- the perspective from which she wrote that book and which enabled her to make so many of the "prophecies" conservatives tout when it suits them -- also leads to the conclusion that America's founding principles are secular and that religion is actually antithetical to our country's ideals and well-being. Her student, Leonard Peikoff argues this at length in "Religion vs. America," where he notes in part:Religion means orienting one's existence around faith, God, and a life of service -- and correspondingly of downgrading or condemning four key elements: reason, nature, the self, and man. Religion cannot be equated with values or morality or even philosophy as such; it represents a specific approach to philosophic issues, including a specific code of morality. What effect does this approach have on human life? We do not have to answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of the United States.Regulars here know where this is heading. I recommend curious passers-by read -- or listen to -- the whole thing. The West has been shaped by two competing influences, Greco-Roman culture (which gave us the philosophy behind America's founding) and Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is the antithetical religious influence. "Re-paganizing" is a smear of abortion akin to smearing atheists as leftists, like Dennis Prager does both wrongly and as if it's a bodily function. Most conservatives know that Rand -- an atheist -- wasn't a leftist. Likewise, infanticide (as the linked article notes was practiced by the Romans en route to equating it to abortion) is wrong (and opposed by Ayn Rand for the same reason she supports abortion. But none of that stops the antiabortionists from using infanticide to tar abortion advocates or anyone else who doesn't take the Christian religion on faith, as "primitive" by citing Ayn Rand -- of all people! -- in cargo-cult fashion. If antiabortionists are happy to spout such ignorance or play it so loose with facts, why should we listen to them at all? -- CAVLink to Original
  13. Within a Hot Air blog post about a couple of cash reparations proposals in California comes the following good news, in the form of excerpts from a report on polling by the Los Angeles Times:The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 59% of voters oppose cash payments compared with 28% who support the idea. The lack of support for cash reparations was resounding, with more than 4 in 10 voters "strongly" opposed. ... In the Berkeley poll, when voters who oppose reparations were asked why, the two main reasons cited most often were that "it's unfair to ask today's taxpayers to pay for wrongs committed in the past," picked by 60% of voters, and "it's not fair to single out one group for reparations when other racial and religious groups have been wronged in the past," chosen by 53%. Only 19% said their reason was that the proposal would cost the state too much, suggesting that money alone is not the main objection. [bold added]I grant that neither moral objection is exactly individualistic, but I would bet that that would be because of bad polling questions -- with the top two answers simply being as close as there was to a "right" answer for many participants. Curious about what Ayn Rand might have said about the subject, I found quite the rebuttal within her 1974 essay, "Moral Inflation," which includes the following:There is no such thing as a collective guilt. A country may be held responsible for the actions of its government and it may be guilty of an evil (such as starting a war) -- but then it is a public, not a private, matter and the entire country has to bear the burden of paying reparations for it. The notion of random individuals paying for the sins of an entire country, is an unspeakable modern atrocity. Image by Thure de Thulstrup , via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.This country has no guilt to atone for in regard to its black citizens. Certainly, slavery was an enormous evil. But a country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery, has atoned for it on such a scale that to talk about racial quotas in addition, is grotesque However, it is not for injustices committed by the government that the modern racists are demanding reparations, but for racial prejudice -- i.e., for the personal views of private citizens. How can an individual be held responsible for the views of others, whom he has no power to control, who may be his intellectual enemies, whose views may be the opposite of his own? What can make him responsible for them? The answer we hear is: The fact that his skin is of the same color as theirs. If this is not an obliteration of morality, of intellectual integrity, of individual rights, of the freedom of man's mind (and, incidentally, of the First Amendment), you take it from here; I can't -- it turns my stomach.It is easy to see how Rand's argument applies, despite (1) the different forms of the reparations -- violating the right to contract via quotas vs. violating property rights via wealth transfers; and (2) the current fashion of pleading "systemic" racism since individual racists are rare and (at least until recently) closeted. The first paragraph probably would not come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Ayn Rand, whom even many opponents would acknowledge as an individualist. But the second paragraph deserves wide circulation, starting with its acknowledgment of the Civil War as reparation enough, in the only meaning of the term that it can be proper to discuss. -- CAVLink to Original
  14. NBC News reports that the party that spent the last presidential term swooning over Trump as supposedly some kind of natural Alinskyite has decided to borrow yet another page from the left's playbook: relabeling. Never mind that conservatives routinely make fun of the left for doing exactly this: They seem to think that they can go from making fun of, say, the "alphabet brigade" every time a new letter or symbol gets added to LGBT one moment -- to changing "pro-life" to some term-to-be-named-later for their anti-abortion crusade -- the next. And without anybody noticing:Image cropped from screenshot of the Center for Reproductive Rights, I believe this use to be protected under U.S. Copyright Law as Fair Use.Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the polling made it clear to him that more specificity is needed in talking about abortion. [(!) --ed] "Many voters think ['pro-life'] means you're for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and 'pro-choice' now can mean any number of things. So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they've shifted. So if you're going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific," Hawley said Thursday.Has Hawley seen a map of where abortions remain legal lately? (Blue, above.) The piece is mute on whether Hawley, who helped confirm anti-abortionist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, offered any more specifics as to what his own position on reproductive freedom might be, or which specific legal stand on abortion his party should stake out and clarify. Let me help. Either a fetus is a human being, and all abortion should be outlawed as murder, or it is not, and abortion should be treated under the law like any other medical procedure. I support the second position, but I could at least muster some respect for an opponent who would openly state and offer a rational justification for even the former position. But that is not the kind of "specificity" that surfaced in the Republicans' closed-door meeting:Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., summarized Wednesday's meeting as being focused on "pro-baby policies." Asked whether senators were encouraged to use a term other than "pro-life," Young said his "pro-baby" descriptor "was just a term of my creation to demonstrate my concern for babies."How insulting and infantilizing is that? At least leftists occasionally appear to have semi-plausible reasons for changing their sleazy terms. This, to use a term even Hawley might understand, is as subtle as a fart in church. The reason voters react differently to the term pro-life these days is because, with Roe overturned, there is now a real danger -- as seen in the numerous Republican states that have banned abortion since -- that a "pro-life" "pro-baby" (i.e., anti-abortion) politician will be able to do the same if elected. In other words, previously Republican-leaning voters, who used to feel safe ignoring the term "pro-life" now know they can't. Voters know this, and they'll still know it if and when anti-abortion Republicans -- too cowardly to state their actual aims openly and too sneaky to give up on them -- relabel themselves in the same way leftists relabeled "corporate responsibility" to ESG, or "global warming" to "climate crisis" not too long ago. -- CAVLink to Original
  15. A Friday Hodgepodge 1. A startup writes up its experiment with running a phone check at a convention. The description of the process made me smile. (Each step is elaborated upon within the post.):Image by Diana Polekhina, via Unsplash, license.You give us your phone, and we give you a claim ticket like any coat check.You get a "Replacement Phone" which is a notepad and pen.You get a "Phone Free" badge to wear around the party.When I first saw mention of this, I thought something like Pfft! I'm not on my phone all the time like some people. But then I realized that at things like conventions, I am, due to my very strong tendency towards introversion. The experiment seemed to go well for the participants: Based on that, I think I might try going phone-free with or without help the next time I attend something like that event. The phone, as a multipurpose device, has many uses and so, many misuses. There can be more than one good reason to do without one from time to time. 2. I sometimes have to run legacy software, and use virtual machines running decades-old operating systems to do so. I recently had to do enough on Windows 2000 that I realized I would want a decent text editor for it. I appreciated the ease of finding a version of Notepad++ that would run on Windows 2000 at OldVersion.com. The site's motto is "Because newer is not always better." That was certainly the case for me that day, when newer would have meant inoperable. 3. Having lived in Texas for as long as I did, I developed a taste for Shiner Bock beer, brewed west of Houston at the Spoetzl Brewery. Since we'll soon live in New Orleans and will occasionally visit Houston, I should finally be able to tour that brewery pretty easily. An interesting wrinkle will be that the brewers there are branching out into distilled spirits, according to a very recent piece at Inside Hook. While distilling operations are getting off the ground, the products will be confined to the tasting room at the brewery. 4. At Futurity is a piece describing a new tool which harnesses AI in the fight against robocalls. I love the approach, which sidesteps the potential to violate privacy that would come from monitoring private phone lines, and takes advantage of the fact that many scammers provide a callback number:Perhaps most importantly, the researchers were able to extract the phone numbers used in these scams. Robocallers often "spoof" the number they are calling from, making it impossible to tell where the call actually originated. However, scammers increasingly encourage the people receiving robocalls to call a specific phone number. This may be to resolve a (fictional) tech support issue, resolve a (fictional) tax problem, resolve a (fictional) issue with Social Security, and so on. "Scammers can fake where a robocall is coming from, but they can't fake the number they want their victims to call," Reaves says. "And about 45% of the robocalls we analyzed did include this 'call-back number' strategy. By extracting those call-back numbers, SnorCall gives regulators or law enforcement something to work with. They can determine which phone service providers issued those numbers and then identify who opened those accounts."The data is collected from thousands of phone lines dedicated to the purpose. -- CAVLink to Original
  16. Starting with an amusing story about a sixty-year-old slacker who discovered the hard way that she was not untouchable, Suzanne Lucas provides a handy guide for "How to Fire Anyone Without Legal Repercussions." We've all heard of cases in which incompetent or lazy employees were kept on for far too long because management believed doing so would land them in legal trouble. Lucas clarifies what protected class actually means for those purposes and how to work within the law to remove deadwood:Image by ernestoeslava, via Pixabay, license.This term means that you can't terminate or punish someone because of their gender, race, gender identity, pregnancy status, disability status, or other protected characteristics... ... You can't terminate someone because they are White any more than you can terminate someone because they are Black. And even when people say, "But I'm in an at-will state!" that doesn't make much difference. First, every state but Montana is at-will. Second, at-will means you can terminate for any reason or no reason as long as that reason isn't illegal. Read that again. As long as that reason isn't illegal.It is good to know that, although the government is violating the freedom to contract through employment laws, the law is predictable and nowhere near as restrictive as one might believe. Lucas's advice boils down to the following steps: Don't be a racist/sexist/whateverist Document everything Use performance improvement plans and progressive discipline Be consistent Conduct neutral investigationsIt would seem that on balance, such laws make it harder, but not impossible to fire bad employees. While this is still not a point in their favor, it is good to know that they are less onerous than commonly believed. -- CAVLink to Original
  17. Yesterday, Patrick Brown, a climate scientist whose work recently appeared in Nature, published a bombshell article in The Free Press about what he had to stoop to to get it published there, despite its scientific merit:I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn't close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus. So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world's most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.A bit later, we learn that Brown had, earlier in his career, tried to get more complete accounts of some of his other work published, only to find himself relegated to less-prestigious journals. The rest of the piece is a good description of how perverse incentives help distort reporting of climate science, thereby making it of less practical use and more suited to the anti-fossil fuel narrative. For example:Unlike your foot, information can get lost entirely or grossly mangled when one forces it to fit a narrative. (Image by Clément Bucco-Lechat, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change -- which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore -- or at least downplay -- practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn't we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public -- or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions. [italics and links in original, bold added]We thus have a scandalous, blow-by-blow account of how an important part of what energy expert Alex Epstein calls the knowledge system systematically distorts scientific information even at the earliest stages of transmission. All that is missing is a deeper explanation -- which Epstein indicates elsewhere, "Experts who are on the standard of 'lack of human impact' are unconcerned with the benefits of fossil fuels, including the climate mastery benefits." The powers that be at Nature and similar publications hold the wrong standard when evaluating what climate science results to publish. This last point indirectly comes up several times in Brown's piece, although it remains obvious that the kind of narrative scientists are having to shoehorn their work into is compromising how well it is understood and used. In addition to having made so many aware of what is going on, Brown deserves credit for the following call for culture change:The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what's been left out. The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish. I am glad for Brown's sake he has already left academia. His uphill battle will not be easy, but there is some hope he can carry it on and that it will be a bearable burden. -- CAVLink to Original
  18. Writing at The Hlll, Mark Mix warns of a bureaucratic rule change by Joe Biden's National Labor Relations Board that would have union goons making recruitment calls at the homes of American workers:[T]he NLRB, at the end of August, effectively mandated the "card check" unionization process by bureaucratic fiat. Never mind that numerous union-backed measures in Congress to require this abuse-prone unionization process have failed to pass into law. Card-check drives occur when employers, usually in the face of union-applied political and economic pressure, waive workers' right to a secret ballot election. During these drives, union officials are allowed to demand union authorization cards directly from workers using coercive tactics that would be unlawful during a secret ballot vote. [bold added]This is being done in part because nearly 60 percent of workers are not at all interested in joining the unions the President would foist on us. For good measure, Mix provides examples of what unions have stooped to in the past to avoid the secret votes that incessant propaganda would have you believe are slam dunks:It's for our own good, according to this guy. (Image by John Simmons, via Unsplash, license.)Union organizers can show up at workers' homes over and over again demanding signatures, in some instances requiring workers to call the police to get organizers to leave. Workers report being misled about the true implications of signing the cards, and some have been told they would be fired if they didn't sign just before the union successfully took over. Some workers even face threats of violence. In one SEIU organizing drive, a worker reported being told that the union would "come and get her children" and "slash her tires" if she didn't sign a union card. [bold added]The NLRB is the same agency Biden hopes to weaponize against contract work and the franchise business model. Aside from enforcing legal contracts and providing the legal infrastructure to adjudicate disputes, the government has no legitimate say in the daily operation of business. The NLRB shouldn't exist in the first place, but these blatant uses of it to directly violate our right to work on our own terms underscore the need to abolish it as soon as possible. -- CAVLink to Original
  19. In the wake of Hurricane Idalia, there are reports of electric vehicles bursting into flames as a result of being flooded or otherwise exposed to salt water:Some electric vehicles in Florida are bursting into flames after coming into contact with saltwater. Residual saltwater particles left behind on flooded batteries and battery components can conduct electricity, resulting in short circuits and eventual fires. Safety officials are urging EV owners with vehicles that flooded to take action now as fires can ignite weeks after flooding.Among the actions-to-take? "[M]ove their EVs at least fifty feet away from any structure." (!) We didn't have much to worry about in our part of Florida this time, but I recall my EV-owning neighbor across the street having enough sense to evacuate for Ian last year -- by piling his family into a conventional SUV. (I stayed home, but evacuating was hardly a silly choice.) We're safe from most storm surges here, but imagine evacuating to safety -- only to drive home to the burnt-out hulk of your former home because your garage flooded a little bit with an EV inside. Conservative blog Hot Air asks:An EV, parked safely away from other flammable objects. (Image by George Sargiannidis, via Unsplash, license.)When Tesla, Ford, and everyone else were designing these vehicles, how did nobody anticipate this? Did it never occur to them that sometimes cars get wet? And if people live near the ocean, did anyone point out that they might be exposed to salt water, occasionally deep enough to come up to the wheel wells? ...This is an understandable question, but may or may not be a fair one. Why do I say this? Recall that conventional automobiles have been in widespread use and under development for over a century. Granted, some of the first were electric, but they lost in the marketplace early on. So conventional "ICE" (internal combustion engine) cars have had a century to develop and for everyone to become familiar with their merits and drawbacks. By contrast, electric vehicles are a new thing, and one cannot expect all the kinks to have been worked out in the same way as for regular cars, or for ordinary people to know how to react when things go wrong. It is commonplace for climate catastrophists to claim that they are following "the science" -- while also pretending that the wholesale transformation of our energy sector is all but trivial. After all, "Just Stop Oil" is the name of one catastrophist organization. But these actual (if small-scale) EV catastrophes demonstrate that it is anything but trivial to make such a change. Countless things that no one person can know or anticipate have to be factored in before a technology can become safe enough that we can use it without having to worry too much about it. Electric cars are clearly not ready for this kind of use, and it is wrong to attempt to force mass adoption ahead of (or contrary to) demand and the natural timing of the marketplace. And don't forget, it's not just cars that we're supposed to be able to just swap out overnight... -- CAVLink to Original
  20. A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At the blog of the Texas Institute for Property Rights, Brian Philips comments on the post-fire moratorium on property sales imposed by Hawaii's state governor:Undoubtedly, the moratorium will prevent some individuals from making rash decisions that they later regret. But that doesn't justify the governor's rights-violating proposal. Preventing some individuals from making bad decisions also prevents individuals from making good decisions. The governor's proposed moratorium prevents all individuals from acting as they deem best for their lives. The governor implies that individuals are too stupid to know what is best for themselves. [bold added]This is, as far as I know, the only answer to that awful policy. As such, it is illustrative of the power of thinking in terms of principles: When one remembers that the proper purpose of a government is to protect rights -- that is, the freedom of individuals to act on their own judgement -- the injury this moratorium does becomes obvious in a way it can't to people hyperfocused on preventing misfortunes on behalf of other people. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn argues that businesses should embrace a moral defense of capitalism because "governments tend to ignore logical and economic arguments because they are ideologically committed to" their various anti-freedom measures. Interestingly, her argument soon nicely shows why this is such a good idea:Calling out the government on these rights violations would be more powerful than trying to argue on logic and economics. [The moral argument could also be a basis for a legal case and merit support from Canadian Constitution Foundation to challenge the government in court]. Appealing to individual rights to defend the freedom of business to operate also makes a case for capitalism, a social system where the government's only role is to protect -- not to violate -- individual rights. As first recognized by Ayn Rand, individual rights are the central moral principle of capitalism, the only system where physical coercion, including fraud, is banned. [link omitted, bold added]In other words, taking up the moral cause moves one from defense to offense, and that is what we ultimately need to win against today's all-out, multidirectional assault on freedom. 3. The third post of this roundup continues our emerging theme of seeking the positive. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney answers the question, "What is defensiveness?" As usual, the answer is comprehensive and merits a couple of readings, but the below is what really hit me:Image by Mick Haupt, via Unsplash, license.Defensive reactions are emotional responses that have been intensified by an unrelated threat-oriented emotional reaction. The key concept here is "unrelated." This is why defensive reactions are a bit more difficult to understand. Every emotion draws your attention to its object, i.e., the value (if it's a value-oriented emotion such as joy or love or grief) or the threat (if it's a threat-oriented emotion such as fear or anger or relief). Normal (non-defensive) emotions draw your attention directly to the object that seems to need attention; defensive emotions pull your attention away from it. [bold added]Anyone familiar with Moroney's work will see the problem: Defensiveness can make it hard to maintain an orientation around one's values -- and this makes it vital to detect it and do something about it. Anyone not familiar with her work can better understand how this is a problem by referring to the brilliant golf course analogy linked within the beginning of the post. 4. As he does periodically, Amesh Adalja commemorates his esteemed mentor, epidemiologist D. A. Henderson at Tracking Zebra. I always enjoy these posts, because they include questions Adalja would ask if he could, but I also appreciate this vignette of his mentor:... D.A., often wearing a sweater vest, would turn in his chair and indulge me while regaling me with some story of some thing that happened to him or related to whatever the subject of my question was. In the end, I often had the answer -- sometimes DA would affirm my own thinking and other times he would point out a connection that I was not aware of and lead me to dive into the medical literature. I was recently looking through some old papers and spotted DA's handwriting in the margins of a medical journal article alerting me to something he noted and wanted me to notice as well. It is his benevolence and his interest in cultivating my limitless quest to learn all I could about infectious disease that is what I miss most about him. Individuals infrequently get to sit in the presence of extreme competence and genius that it is hard to describe to those who have not experienced it themselves. [bold added]Whether or not Adalja has accurately captured what it is like to be in the presence of a giant, he very well portrays someone who was both an excellent teacher and a friend. I couldn't help but fondly recall several of the people who made a big difference for me after I read that, including my father and my favorite science teacher from way back in high school. -- CAVLink to Original
  21. Since every year, each hurricane I have to pay attention to comes along with climate catastrophists hectoring us about their pet (non-)crisis, it is nice to see a rebuttal at Issues and Insights. It reads in part:Going back more than a 100 years, we can see from the data that today's hurricane activity, defined as a hurricane making landfall in the continental U.S., is roughly the same as it was at the turn of the previous century. As author Michael Shellenberger says, the media have "lied about hurricanes," "lied about heat waves," "lied about floods," and of course "all they do is lie about fires." The climate mob has also lied about snowfall, polar ice, polar bears, the temperature record, and the reliability of their warming models. [links in original]Note the copious supply of links I left in. The article is a handy quick reference that way. My only quarrel with the piece comes from the paragraph immediately preceding the excerpt, which debunks the claim that climate-related fatalities are on the rise. I don't dispute that at all, but that is a missed opportunity to bring the concept of climate mastery into the public's awareness. Fortunately, the economist Bryan Caplan explores the idea at his Substack blog, and quotes Epstein freely. (I have supplied the page numbers for these within Fossil Future below for your convenience.)[T]he history of climate safety shows that fossil-fueled machine labor makes us far safer from climate -- a phenomenon I call "climate mastery." (Fossil Future, p. 49)Epstein, again quoted by Caplan, elaborates:Climate Mastery: Ever-improving models allow millions to decide whether or not to evacuate. Neither prediction nor speedy escape -- both made possible with fossil fuels -- were options a century ago. (Image by The National Hurricane Center, via site archives, public domain.)[O]ver the last century, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly increased, the climate disaster death rate fell by an incredible 98 percent. That means the average person is fifty times less likely to die of a climate-related cause than they were in the 1920s. The first time I read this statistic, I didn't think it was possible. But rechecking the data repeatedly, I found that was indeed the case: the rate of climate-related disaster deaths has fallen by 98 percent over the last century. This means that not only does our knowledge system ignore the massive, life-or-death benefits of fossil fuels, but it has a track record of being 180 degrees wrong about the supposedly catastrophic side-effect of climate danger -- which has dramatically decreased. (47-48)Epstein's concept backs the climate catastrophists who deny climate mastery into a corner: Even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that climate is causing more disasters, they would still have to explain why relatively fewer people are dying from them, despite there being more of us. Indeed, as if the lower death rate weren't impressive enough, do note that the absolute numbers also fell for the items discussed by Issues and Insights. -- CAVLink to Original
  22. Miss Manners takes up a question from a reader who was "huffily informed" how to pronounce a baby's name -- by a parent either too clueless to bother to learn how to spell it or too enamored of conflict to legally change it while the child is still very young. The name is spelled like another name, but is supposed (by the parent) to be pronounced like the name of an ancient civilization for which the spelling is both commonly known -- and often used as a first name anyway. Miss Manners -- who duly notes that there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to give unusual names -- rightly indicates that the huffy parent is guilty of courtesy lapses to two parties:Image by Arina Krasnikova, via Pexels, license.Your annoyance is nothing compared to what those children will have to go through. Having an unusual name means a lifetime of spelling and pronouncing it for other people. ... [Miss Manners] requires an equal good-faith effort from the bestowers and holders of these names when patiently explaining those preferences to others -- and ignoring mistakes that are not likely to be repeated.My wife and I both grew up with the opposite problem: Our names were en vogue when we were born, so we frequently got to be one of several people with our first names in school. But we both knew people who had to go through a whole rigmarole regarding their names every single time they met other people. Their routine put our relatively minor annoyance in perspective. My wife's wise solution to both problems is her "keychain rule:" A name should be common enough to find in a key chain display, and yet not so common as to be sold out. Back in Boston, while waiting on a subway platform with my daughter in a stroller, an admiring stranger struck up a conversation. Upon my mentioning her name, she smiled and laughed: I can pronounce that one and spell it! While I admit it will tempt me in such situations to note the inconvenience of the unfortunate child, something more constructive occurs to me: Upon hearing that a friend or friendly acquaintance might confer such a name, it might be a kindness to gently bring up the lifelong inconvenience the name will cause the future child. Depending on the reaction, mentioning the easily-remembered keychain rule might even be in order. -- CAVLink to Original
  23. Over at The Daily Beast, David Rothkopf speculates on "11 Wild Things" that could happen in the 2024 election. His list:Trump is disqualified. There is a candidate health scare. Trump is convicted of one or more crimes. Trump could melt down and make his legal peril even greater. A new candidate could enter the GOP race and catch fire. Trump flees the country. An extremist act of violence. Intensified foreign election interference. A sudden major turn in the war in Ukraine or in Russia's leadership. A natural disaster. The usual disruptive suspects.As might one expect from someone who says, "Americans will continue not to fully appreciate all the good Biden has done," (!) the piece reads a little like a left wing fantasy in places, but I think it gets most of the possibilities. Three, one of them not even on the list, bear comment. Regarding Trump being disqualified, about which I have already commented, we are now seeing leftists argue, for all practical purposes, that there isn't even a legal need to establish that Trump aided or abetted an insurrection:So far, I'm answering none of the above. (Image by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu, via Unsplash, license.)The new twist is the idea that none of that is necessary. Trump is already disqualified, and all state election officials have to do is remove him from ballots on their own initiative. And then he is gone. Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment], in this way of thinking, is "self-enacting." It is "constitutionally automatic," in the words of law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, writing in a new law review article that is making the rounds. "Section 3 requires no legislation or adjudication to be legally effective. It is enacted by the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment [in 1868]. Its disqualification, where triggered, just is." All a state election official has to do is pick it up and use it. That's nuts, and as much as I would love to see Trump disqualified, doing so without legally establishing why would set a legal precedent dangerous in the same way that reelecting a Chief Executive who has no respect for the law would be. What would happen next election? Some climate catastrophist polling official decides that anyone who won't "leave it in the ground" is abetting an "insurrection?" Anyone who won't protect a fertilized egg as if it's a human life is an insurrectionist? It's a non-starter, if anyone at all still has his marbles. The other item on the list deserving of comment is the one regarding a candidate catching fire. That's the best normal possibility. I read a few leftist reviews of the Republican debate and found them worthless -- as one might expect from quarters where even lip-service to capitalism gets equated with Trumpist populism. Leftists are almost uniformly unable to tell the difference -- or admit that there is one -- between, say, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. While even the "good" candidates leave lots to be desired, any would be better than Trump, and a few in the race now could attract enough reasonable voters to win over Trump. I'd even go so far as to say I could see casting a vote for Haley with a clear conscience. As I said earlier, much of this piece is heavily slanted left and reads like a protracted wish/projection of non-leftists as bomb-toting nuts. Perhaps that explains the following blind spot or deliberate omission:12. No Labels gets ballot access in enough states for a run to become feasible.As far as I can tell, each party fears No Labels because they imagine it will tip the election over to the other's candidate. Let them worry: If we do end up with Trump vs. Biden, it's the least they deserve for presenting us with such a dire "choice." That organization will be holding a nominating convention in April:"Our plan is to only run if we think we have a chance to win realistically," he said. "And look, we just finished a poll of 10,000 voters in the eight battleground states. And we give them a choice of Trump, Biden and a moderate independent third choice, and 63 percent say that they're open to a moderate Independent third choice."This independent voter would have been among that 63 percent. -- CAVLink to Original
  24. Editor's Note: We are likely to feel some impact from Tropical Storm Idalia, which is currently tipped to hit the other side of Florida as a major hurricane and be at or near hurricane strength as it goes through or near our area the day after. Posting may be interrupted for some time afterwards.*** Despite arguably winning the GOP presidential debate last week, Vivek Ramaswamy has not, according to the Wall Street Journal, lived up to whatever elevated expectations that might have led to:[M]uch of [Ramaswamy's] usual sunniness disappeared on Wednesday, replaced by snarky interjections. For all his complaints about "professional politicians," he rivaled the best of them with an evening of canned sound bites -- contrasting his "bought and paid for" "Super PAC puppet" opponents with his "patriot" self.This came after the Journal panned him for what it deemed unserious remarks during the debate itself. Nikki Haley comes off best in the column, and we can add her position on Ukraine to her "least bad" one on abortion and her lambasting of Trump's economic policy to the list of reasons to consider her:Image by Nikki Haley, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.While the press is predictably highlighting Ms. Haley's smackdown of Vivek Ramaswamy's foreign-policy confusion, her more consequential moment was her persuasive argument that supporting Ukraine is entirely in America's self-interest. She noted that only a small fraction of the U.S. defense budget has gone to Ukraine and that the country has become a "first line of defense" against both Russia and its partner China. This is the speech Joe Biden should have given more than a year ago. [bold added, link omitted]Nikki Haley is far from my dream candidate for President, but it beggars belief that we are wasting our time instead discussing losers like Donald Trump and Joe Biden at all, and may well end up with one of them as President again. -- CAV Link to Original
  25. A Friday Hodgepodge Note to Myself My wife's career is taking us to New Orleans, and we move during the next few months. I like New Orleans, but really, really hate moving. Today's post is as much about giving myself a way to stay motivated for all the drudgery this will entail as it is this blogger's "feeding of the beast." *** Image by Onur Bahçıvancılar, via Unsplash, license.1. This move is my big chance blast away a big accumulation of junk we don't need. Up until about five years ago, we had to move frequently with babies or toddlers in tow. In addition to my wife and her parents being ... overexuberant ... with toy purchases during that time, the combination of frequent moves and the time demands of child care meant that lots of things ended up in boxes that there simply wasn't time to go through. (This situation is in part due to us having used professional packers twice in a row. They are fast, but they have no clue about what you may want to keep or throw out, so it all goes, and it will be boxed by room, with no other thought as to organization.) I have some time to go through those things now. More importantly, with the kids having outgrown most of those things, I also have a free hand to discard or donate most of it. 2. This move will allow me to consolidate and organize what's left. The ditching-out is huge. I made some progress organizing the garage shortly after we moved here, but without a clear mandate to get rid of things, the effort stalled and left me with no overflow space. Things like art supplies ended up being stored in multiple odd places, depending on where we could find space or who put them away. Predictably, this sometimes led to things being lost and bought again. I am finally about to round up all of this stuff (and a couple of other categories of things), thin the herd, and pack it. On the other end, I'll know what we have and how much, and can have a designated place for it. This will save time, money, and hassle on the other end. 3. We can have pets on the other end. We will have a bigger (and less cluttered) house after we move. We've all wanted cats for about the past year, but I didn't see a way to do so here without the massive clearout sparked by the move: It was already too easy for the house to get very messy very fast, and cleaning up required an inordinate amount of decluttering. I did not want to add pets to the mix. 4. We can entertain more often on the other end. In a small, cluttered house, the prospect of hours of straightening and cleaning always came with that of guests. I have for some time wished we could ... just have people over. The big clearout will make it easier to maintain a regular cleaning schedule and enlist the kids's help (in the form of picking up after themselves or taking over chores they're interested in). We're looking to augment this with a professional coming in once or twice a month, since we won't have to worry about things we actually want or need being misplaced by a third party anymore. -- CAVLink to Original
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