Gus Van Horn blog

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

The article is poorly titled -- "People With 'Poor Speech Etiquette' Always Use These 7 'Rude' Phrases, Says Public Speaking Expert" (always? really?) -- but it has merit. The piece is a list of what I long ago mentally filed as verbal tics. These are phrases and forms of expression (including intonations like fry register and verbal question marks) that somehow become popular and that drive me crazy, especially when I have to deal with people who are prone to them. In any event, the popular press occasionally notices these and ticks them off, with the article under discussion being the latest I've encountered. First on the list is something that seems to be on the decline already, but I'd love to see disappear altogether:Image by Jon Tyson, via Unsplash, license.1. "Do you want to ...?" This phrase is great when you're offering someone a choice ("Do you want to go to lunch with me?"). But as a way of delivering orders ("Do you want to take out the trash?"), its indirect fake-politeness comes across as belittling. What to say instead: State your request directly. It's courteous to broach a request by asking, "Will you do me a favor?" After all, people generally like to pitch in. But they don't like to feel manipulated. [bold in original]Every time someone does this, I have to fight the temptation to make a witty or sarcastic reply: And I have yielded on several occasions when I thought it might help the other person become aware of how badly this lands when they do it. I am glad to see articles like this appear from time to time: Popular culture has a way of normalizing things like this that many people are susceptible to (or simply don't notice since "everyone's doing it") and then adopt as habits, causing them to stick out like sore thumbs once the fad has died down. But this habit? Yes. It comes across as very rude, and I think it would be a kindness to tip off anyone still doing it. -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel reports that an entrepreneur is being prevented from informing potential customers that he is offering a dietary solution for "FODMAP" intolerance. (FODMAPs -- fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols -- are a class of sugars and sugar alcohols that can cause intestinal distress in susceptible people.) Hard-to-find rules by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture are keeping Ketan Vakil from employing the simple expedient of labeling his wares Low-FODMAP:Sorbitol, a FODMAP. (Image by Kemikungen, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)"Everyone agrees that Ketan is telling the truth," [Justin] Pearson[, senior attorney at public interest law firm the Institute for Justice] points out. "The government just bans it because it's not on the outdated, pre-approved list." Some of the approved terms don't seem very scientific, or even specific. Ambiguous labels like "home style" and "deli fresh" are approved. But "Low-FODMAP," a more useful term, isn't allowed. The "approved" list isn't even easy to find. It's scattered throughout several government websites. It took [Stossel TV fellow Trevor] Kraus hours just to compile a partial list of what's approved. "How do you get on that list?" Kraus asks Pearson. "With a giant pile of money," Pearson replies...These are, of course, the same people who are happy to permit a pseudoscientific, scare-mongering term like "non-GMO" to appear on food labels everywhere, putting to the lie their alleged mission of protecting consumers from being misled. I am glad to see the Institute for Justice on this case, and hope that the lawsuit at least brings up the issue of freedom of speech, along with the freedom of individuals to ingest whatever they want, both of which are routinely violated by the FDA, and apparently also the Department of Agriculture. (Companies should be free to label their wares however they wish, so long as such labeling isn't fraudulent, which the court system already exists to adjudicate.) I recently noted the following from a great broadside against the FDA:[T]he FDA is wrong to withhold drugs from the market and wrong to put the government's imprimatur on them."It is likewise wrong to do the same thing regarding food labels: As we can easily see here, anti-GMO hysteria has the government's blessing, while people with a kind of sugar intolerance are being kept in the dark about a way they can attempt to deal with their problem. And that's just the tip of the iceberg when the government wrongly gets into the business of violating freedom of speech. -- CAVLink to Original

Years ago, possibly through Alex Epstein's How to Talk to Anyone About Energy course or Don Watkins's Persuasion Mastery course, I recall one of the later steps of the process of persuasion being to point the other person to a book which will present whatever argument or viewpoint you are promoting in a comprehensive way. This makes perfect sense and mirrors my own experience. Way back in grad school, a big-L Libertarian contacted me after reading a few of my student newspaper columns, saying among other things that he thought I'd "make a good Libertarian." I disagreed, and began arguing that the Libertarian movement would actually harm the cause of liberty. We emailed back and forth for quite some time. (This was a surprise, as I'd expected a short correspondence, ended by him insulting me for bringing Ayn Rand into the conversation: That's basically what had always happened in my semi-captive audiences with my Libertarian ex-father-in-law...) I finally reached the conclusion that (a) this guy was actually interested in what I was saying, although he did not always agree with it, and (b) he needed (and was ready) to see a better case than I was making because his questions and objections were intelligent. So I lent him my well-worn copy of Peter Schwartz's booklet, Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty. A week or so passed, and I, probably a decade older than the Libertarian, began to think something like, This kid's ghosting me. Time to ask for my booklet back. Within about another day, and before I'd done anything else, I heard back from him. He'd changed his mind! "Chalk one up for pamphleteering," his email began. Some time later, at his suggestion I would join him in starting a campus Objectivist club, which did very well. That is, in microcosm, how the kind of ideas we need to spread, to improve our culture happens: One mind at a time, and, crucially, with each new fellow traveler deciding on his own to join the cause in whatever capacity makes sense to him. I've been re-reading Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It lately, and this episode came to my mind as I read the essay "An Untitled Letter," where she commented on John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Within is her brief description of the funhouse mirror image of how good ideas spread: how bad works gain currency. It is instructive to consider the differences between the two processes:A Portrait of Evil (Image by Unknown Artist, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)If you wonder how so grotesquely irrational a philosophy as [Immanuel] Kant's came to dominate Western culture, you are now witnessing an attempt to repeat that process. Mr. Rawls is a disciple of Kant -- philosophically and psycho-epistemologically. Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader's critical faculty -- a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable -- all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the Critique of Pure Reason. ... Like any overt school of mysticism, a movement seeking to achieve a vicious goal has to invoke the higher mysteries of an incomprehensible authority. An unread and unreadable book serves this purpose. It does not count on men's intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions and fears. It is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation. It is not aimed at the reader's understanding, but at his inferiority complex. ... Within a few years of the book's publication, commentators will begin to fill libraries with works analyzing, "clarifying" and interpreting its mysteries. Their notions will spread all over the academic map, ranging from the appeasers, who will try to soften the book's meaning -- to the glamorizers, who will ascribe to it nothing worse than their own pet inanities -- to the compromisers, who will try to reconcile its theory with its exact opposite -- to the avant-garde, who will spell out and demand the acceptance of its logical consequences. The contradictory, antithetical nature of such interpretations will be ascribed to the book's profundity -- particularly by those who function on the motto: "If I don't understand it, it's deep." The students will believe that the professors know the proof of the book's theory, the professors will believe that the commentators know it, the commentators will believe that the author knows it -- and the author will be alone to know that no proof exists and that none was offered.When one considers the need to change the overall direction of a culture, this sounds intimidating. But omitted from the above are important elements of context, supplied in part by Rand's description of how more active-minded readers will react to such garbage (within that essay); as well as how intellectuals can influence a culture, and in this way, affect the course of history (elsewhere). In short, merely looking at numbers is the wrong way to view cultural trends. The people who glom on to an impenetrable work they keep hearing is profound do not count in that regard. They can't or won't bother to grasp anything truly original. They're the ones who skip editorials and run away from serious conversations of any kind. There are tons of them and, aside from perhaps being amenable to persuasion at a very superficial level, on a very specific issue, and for a very short time, they are not the best targets for meaningful, long-range attempts to persuade them of something that will challenge major philosophical premises most people in their society -- likely including themselves -- hold. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Happy Thanksgiving! Due to travel and family obligations, I'm taking all of next week off. See you on the 27th! *** Image by Suzy Brooks, via Unsplash, license.1. I remember using the Sumatra PDF reader on Windows some time back, but it was (or has since become) much more versatile than that, according to the blurb on its site:PDF, eBook (epub, mobi), comic book (cbz/cbr), DjVu, XPS, CHM, image viewer for Windows. Fast, small, packed with features, customizable, free.The bulk of my Windows usage is on machines other than my own, so I looked for (and found) a portable version that runs from a pen drive under PortableApps. 2. My usual method for consuming podcasts is to download them at home and transfer them to my phone using Synchthing. I do this primarily so I don't have connectivity issues on the road, but I have found the experience superior to using YouTube directly. I get to skip ads, and while its easy to return to or reopen my local mp3 player and pick up where I left off, doing the same thing with YouTube is annoying at best. (If you have to close YouTube or it crashes, good luck finding what you were listening to. Wierdly, if you DO find the episode, it knows EXACTLY where you were WITHIN that episode. Nuts.) YouTube is okay for those times I forget to download, or run out of material while out and about, but I recently found some Android alternatives to YouTube in this thread about one of them (NewPipe) at Hacker News. I like the fact that NewPipe allows downloading from URLs since that's the way I keep track of things I want to listen to (and possibly blog later), anyway. 3. By chance, I found an amazing cooking site for people who are blind or visually-impaired. The Blind Kitchen catalogs and sells an impressive array of cookware, too. Although my vision is fine, some of these, like a rattling boil alert disk or the double spatula sound like great things to have in any kitchen. This is one site I will revisit when my wife asks me for Christmas gift ideas, or I need to come up with some of my own. 4. With our end-of-year move to New Orleans fast approaching, I was glad to learn that the Internet Archive now hosts a collection of product manuals. I doubt I'll need one for a pet rock, but I might need this for appliance manuals on the other end of our move. -- CAV Link to Original

A story in the South China Morning Post that would be pilloried as an advertisement if it appeared in a reputable Western outlet title-gushes China Launches World's Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit Per Second Link, Years Ahead of Forecasts. The first thing that came to my mind was:So what? They censor it.But I went ahead and read the "news" anyway and remembered a few other things about this story that would be fishy, even if the claims are 100% true. Let's take a look at some of these:The achievement -- a collaboration between Tsinghua University, China Mobile, Huawei Technologies, and Cernet Corporation -- smashes expert forecasts that 1 terabit per second ultra-high-speed networks would not emerge until around 2025.Cool, if true, but this is only about a year early -- by whatever unclear or arbitrary standard they're using.Most of the world's internet backbone networks operate at just 100 gigabits per second. Even the United States only recently completed the transition to its fifth-generation Internet2 at 400 gigabits per second.There's lots of context missing here, but it's revealing that this "news" agency felt the need to compare this alleged "collaboration" with "the United States," as if this were a race between planned economies. As woefully imperfect as the United States is at practicing capitalism, the fact that there isn't a truly comparable "backbone" here could mean anything from There isn't yet a need for one that would justify its cost to Regulation or other aspects of central planning have interfered with such a goal being accomplished. Conversely, perhaps if either country were freer, something like this (or better) would have been built long ago, and without the government stiff-arming -- I mean "collaboration." (Companies collaborate all the time for profit without making a big deal out of it, so that aspect of the brag smells funny to me.) This comparison means nothing in and of itself, but it only becomes more interesting to contemplate as we continue...Huawei Technologies vice-president Wang Lei told the same press conference at Tsinghua University on Monday that the network was "capable of transferring the data equivalent of 150 high-definition films in just one second".I think they might have added, as long as none of those films is about Winnie the Pooh to that last sentence. But even that would be too generous. Moving along...If they won't even allow this, what difference does it make how much their "backbone" can carry? (Image by the Guardian. The author believes his use of this exemplary image to be protected as Fair Use under U.S. Copyright law.)The new backbone network marks another advance for China, which has been concerned about its reliance on the US and Japan for routers and other components of internet technology. All of the system's software and hardware has been domestically produced, with the technical research team making advancements in everything from routers and switches to optical fibre connections. [bold added]I'd be much more impressed by this claim absent China's tendency to steal Western intellectual property. The whole thing reminds me of a book I heard about years ago titled East Minus West = Zero: Russia's Debt to the Western World, which outlined how dependent Russia was on the West for its economic development. While China was never as backward as Russia, its failure to respect intellectual property and violations of individual freedom make a complete mockery of this milestone on many levels as it is. But the fact that the information will be filtered means that whatever the government over there does with its new toy, it will be less useful to the individuals there than it could have been, even if we assume that (a) it is economically justified and (b) wouldn't have been built much sooner (and with actual Chinese innovation) in a free China. East minus West isn't even zero. -- CAV Link to Original

Within an analysis of the last election, the following sentence caught my eye:[T]he liberal positions won big in Ohio's two ballot measures to enshrine the right to an abortion and to legalize marijuana. [links omitted]Liberal positions? I support both of these, but I am not a "liberal" -- at least in today's twisted sense of the term that implies leftist. Liberals might, however imperfectly, support reproductive rights and the freedom to ingest whatever one wants, but these are pro-liberty positions, and they contradict other "liberal" positions, such as decriminalizing petty theft or surgically mutilating children below the age of consent and without their own parents' consent. Nevertheless, many people lump such disparate positions together, based loosely on which party campaigns on them at the moment, much to the detriment of their own understanding of politics and the advancement of any genuinely good positions they might hold, such as the "liberal" right to abortion or the "conservative" right for parents to raise their own children. Two cases in point are evident from the very article under discussion, and they manifest in Democrats and Republicans seeing lessons for each other -- while getting the wrong message for themselves -- after each election. Since this piece is by a leftist, we'll start with it. As I noted the day after the last elections:When abortion becomes the major issue on the ballot, and there is a clear choice, being anti-abortion will lose any election not dominated by religious voters.This article focuses on the educated, affluent voters found in suburbs and other similar areas. These voters are not particularly religious, but they also aren't particularly leftist, as attested by the fact that they delivered wins to Glenn Youngkin in the previous election cycle, and used to trend more Republican before Roe was overturned and Republicans were safe to preen about abortion (i.e., pander to religious voters) without having to face the consequences (i.e., voters suddenly having to worry about their daughters being forced to bring unwanted pregnancies to term). The GOP is screwed with these voters unless it changes its position on abortion. The writer at Vox rightly sees this -- but then starts hallucinating as soon as the whole smorgasbord of other liberal positions comes to his mind:School choice as bait for abortion restrictions? Reproductive freedom as bait for in-school grooming? Both parties are guilty of baiting and switching. (Image by Anne Nygård, via Unsplash, license.)Abortion politics have played a huge role in this since 2022, but the shift in the suburbs and with more affluent college graduates predates the Dobbs decision ending the federal right to an abortion. In Virginia and Pennsylvania, politics around schools and education, gender identity, and crime all joined abortion as issues that voters kept top of mind. "In conjunction with abortion is the other layered-in kind of Republican social agenda that is just so repellent to the country," a Democratic campaigner in suburban Bucks County told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Voters in the largest swing county in the most important swing state uniformly rejected that." [bold added]Read the bold and ask yourself how the author -- who discusses Glenn Youngkin earlier in the same piece -- is now coupling woke nuttiness about "gender" and academic egalitarianism, with abortion. It was the woke nuttiness that got Youngkin into office on the backs of the same voters who just took him down a peg over abortion. (For the sake of showing that my point is subtler than just "economic" vs. "law and order" vs. "social" issues: If I might take the liberty of speaking on behalf of such voters, I will note here that I support the right of consenting adults to marry, period, for which "gay marriage" might be shorthand. This is not the same thing as supporting the woke "gender" agenda in elementary school. I find religious opposition to "gay marriage" repugnant and I am repulsed by efforts to "educate" children about "gender" that amount to grooming them. I am an atheist, by the way.) When Democrats manage to frame getting borderline pornography removed from school libraries as "book banning," they can sometimes smuggle in a victory for that kind of nonsense, but it's a losing issue for them in isolation (among voters who aren't overwhelmingly "blue"), just like abortion is for the GOP. And speaking of woke nuttiness and Glenn Youngkin, he provides the corresponding example of the other political tribe overplaying its hand after a win. Youngkin was elected because the bloc of voters under discussion were upset about unnecessary school closures during the pandemic and did not appreciate "gender" propaganda being directed at their young children or their children being kept in the dark about academic awards for woke/DEI (i.e., egalitarian reasons). That was his mandate, so what did he try to glom onto that in the last election? An abortion limit:Virginia Democrats' success will spell doom for Youngkin's proposed 15-week "limit" on abortion, which would ban the procedure after 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies. Democratic legislators in Virginia have previously used their senate majority to block bills restricting abortion access and they had promised to do so again if they maintained control of the chamber.As one of these voters, I have come to dread every election because the Democrats are happy to construe my support for, say, reproductive freedom, as also support for, say mutilating underage children -- and Republicans take my concerns about, say crime and government looting (i.e., property rights), as license to ram their religious strictures down my throat. Partisans on both sides seem oblivious to the idea of personal liberty, and quite eager to read overarching mandates for their own particular takes on tyranny into any vote I make. Anyone accusing this bloc of voters of moving into either party is delusional or attempting to be manipulative. Conformative fealty to a laundry list isn't clear thinking, if it's thinking at all. -- CAVLink to Original

In which a light going out signifies a wake-up call. I am glad to see that I was hardly the only one disappointed to learn that Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- who had traveled so far intellectually from her religious upbringing -- has chosen to profess religion. Yaron Brook does an outstanding job in his podcast (also embedded below) considering and addressing the points she made in her essay to that effect. The strength of Brook's presentation is that it is even-handed. He shows due respect for Hirsi Ali's past strength of character, intellect, and accomplishments. Doing so sets the context necessary to show several things about this move, including: why it is surprising, why it is nevertheless understandable on a couple of levels, and why it is so disappointing. If I recall correctly, Brook said at one point, A light has gone out. That is absolutely true. I have only begun reading Watkins's analysis, but Brook mentioned it towards the end of his, and per Brook, and my reading so far, he argues in a similar vein. His opening is strong, and is a call to arms to those of us who see the issue at stake for the West better than those who are mistakenly or otherwise relying on Christianity to bolster her during these challenging times:... Ayaan's account has nothing to say about why she thinks Christianity is true. There are no arguments offered for the existence of God and no arguments offered for the reliability of the New Testament. But there is an argument. Not for the conclusion that Christianity is true, but for the conclusion that Christianity is necessary. It is necessary, Ayaan believes, to uphold the value of western civilization and it is necessary for the individual seeking meaning and purpose. This is not a new argument. Christians have been making it forever, but it was Jordan Peterson who most effectively injected it into the current debate. Peterson used it to win over Dave Rubin. Now, with Ayaan, he's claimed another scalp. All of this was avoidable. Peterson's argument is a bad argument. But no atheist has stepped up to convincingly answer it because there is no moral leadership among today's secular thinkers. Instead of offering the world an inspiring rational moral ideal, atheists have evaded the issue, or, worse, embraced a secular form of Christian ethics. We can do better. [bold in original]Fellow travelers will know where this is going, in the sense that we know of a rational alternative to the faith, renunciation, and sacrifice that Christianity upholds over reason, love of life, and the rational pursuit of values. But both go further: It is up to those of us who do know better to find a way to get that knowledge out there more effectively. Brook quite thoroughly demolishes Hirsi Ali's worse-than-baseless assertion that Christianity alone can uphold dignity and rights. Whether Hirsi Ali's profession of faith is sincere on some level or driven by panic does not matter: Joining forces with the same people who brought us the Dark Ages (and were only dragged into the Renaissance and Enlightenment kicking and screaming) will prove the final nail in the coffin for the West, and not its salvation. Watkins is right that we can do better, but after listening to Brook, it becomes clear that we must do better. Fortunately, we know what the Christians can only profess to take on faith: the truth is on our side. In a war that has us outnumbered and off the initiative, we do at least have the most important advantage. -- CAV Link to Original

Image by Alexandre Saraiva Carniato, via Pexels, license.As valuable as email and other electronic communications are, they can sometimes cause unnecessary delays. Josh Thompson gives the common example of someone seeking a green light from his boss:Let me know if my criteria are sound, or if you have any concerns. I'd like to get started as soon as possible.Thompson then invites his readers to try a different turn of phrase the next time that situation arises:Unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to start reaching out to the clients that meet my criteria for this research.The second choice can obviously save several days. I've done things like this before, in situations that fall into the following two categories: (1) Getting permission when I'm emailing would really be redundant, based on previous discussion, or -- more rarely -- (2) I felt safe operating under the premise that it would be, as they say, easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. I don't necessarily recommend following my example in that second type of situation. But I am also hesitant to recommend the second kind of email, at least as the default, despite the fact that Thompson claims "nothing but positive feedback." It does bear consideration much of the time, and especially when asking for approval would be redundant and only slow things down: This phrasing is a diplomatic way to say, I'm getting started now en route to getting to work. If there is any doubt you'd get your boss's blessing on getting started, though, I'd use a more immediate form of communication if there is a time constraint of some kind, or maybe just use the original type of phrasing.. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Since the Islamist atrocities of October 7 started the war in Israel, the Ayn Rand Institute has been producing excellent content at an astounding pace, to the point that even those of us who pay attention are having trouble keeping up. Recognizing that problem and the need for more clarity on that issue, ARI has produced a landing page of ARI's Resources on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. By coincidence, the first one listed, a podcast (embedded below) on "Why Iran Fuels the Mideast War" happens to be the latest of their offerings I've listened to. I am glad Nikos Sotirakopoulos, a relative newcomer to Objectivism, participated in the discussion, because I am sure many thoughtful people are as perplexed as he was (at first) by ARI's longstanding contention that Iran is the main driver of the problems in the Middle East. His raising of the issue sets up the explanation very well. 2. It's only one of three posts Brian Phillps took to address everything that was wrong with an editorial, but "A False Premise not Supported by Law" takes to task a very common misconception:The author cites zoning, density restrictions, road standards, height limits, and more as examples to support his position. He wants us to believe that such laws are proper and just. Why? Because they are the law and the courts have upheld them. The fact that a law exists does not make it proper, just, or moral. Slavery was once legal, but that did not make that vile institution proper, just, or moral. The Nazis exterminated Jews and other "undesirables" in accordance with the law, but that did not render mass murder proper, just, or moral.The example of slavery reminds me of a favorite strawman that anti-capitalists like to bandy about: slave markets. The fact that that an institution or practice -- like selling people on a market -- has some of the trappings of capitalism does not mean it is, in fact, capitalism. Indeed, Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism blows the whole slavery-as-capitalism narrative out of the water for anyone who gives it a moment's thought: Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. Laws permitting slavery are not capitalistic because they violate the rights of the enslaved, and slave markets are no more capitalistic than markets in, say, stolen goods for the same reason. 3. Jaana Woiceshyn argues that "If we want peace, we need capitalism," drawing on Ayn Rand's definition of capitalism as stated above:Hamas and the Palestinian Authority don't want a Palestinian nation that is capitalistic: free, enterprising, and prosperous. Because their goal is to destroy Israel, they don't want to give up their dictatorial powers to condemn their people to poverty and to sacrifice them while channeling the international aid for the elimination of Israel (and pocketing part of it).Woiceshyn recognizes, but is not deterred by the near-universal opposition capitalism faces in the cultures of the West and the Middle East today. 4. Having to move this December and drawing a blank on what to do next one day, I found a post at Thinking Directions in which Jean Moroney advises mitigating stressful events by alleviating something she calls "crow overload.". Not to take anything away from the stressors she lists, but I was recently told that moving tops them all. I don't know if that's true, but I can see it... In any event, that short post led to another about her efforts to make the term crow -- from early attempts to gauge the metal capacity of those relatively intelligent birds -- part of the vernacular:Here's how the slang term works: When you are overloaded, you can say, "you're overloading my crow," or "my crow hurts," or "I can't fit another thing in my crow," or "I don't have enough crow space to deal with this." When you hear or read something that is easy to take in, you say, it's "crow-friendly." If it's mind-busting, it's "crow-unfriendly." This simple word not only helps us name the situation easily, it also subtly reminds us that unlike crows, we have a remedy when we are overloaded.I find crow space the most natural of these, myself. I agree that a one-syllable term is needed for what she's discussing. Read the whole thing both for that longer term and a brief description of those early crow experiments. -- CAV Link to Original

Image by Gayatri Malhotra, via Unsplash, license.After what sounds to me like a uniformly underwhelming debate, it appears, at least according to Matt Drudge's numbers as of this morning that Nikki Haley decisively won. As of writing, we have: 43% Nikki Haley, 25% Vivek Ramaswamy, 15% Ron DeSantis (!), 13% Chris Christie, and 4% Tim Scott. Haley's total is more than the second- and third-place finishers put together. Since Haley has momentum and is the main non-Trump candidate aside from Ron DeSantis, this would suggest that the smart money is on her as the best chance for the GOP to rid itself of Donald Trump in this election cycle, rather than continuing to lose elections and alienate independent voters (for starters) for another four years (also, for starters). But if Donald Trump is the most immediate threat to the GOP (and to liberty, via the two-party system), its stand on abortion is a much more potent and longer-term threat, as yesterday's results once again indicated. Two of those things we used to call Tweets should show the depth of the problem -- which, big picture, shows that the Republican Party is at best a temporary check on the Democrats, rather than a long-term home for those of us who value liberty. The first tweet, by the execrable Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, shows that the anti-abortionists in no way are wondering whether their goal should be reconsidered. The money quotes from the long-form post are, "Giving up on the unborn is not an option. It's politically dumb and morally repugnant." and, "So let's keep fighting for our country's children, and let's find a way to win." This appeal to a deeply wrong view of morality amounts to We lost on messaging, since the goal -- enslaving women to fetuses -- is immoral and there is no earthly argument to do so, or way to motivate about half the electorate to accept it. There is a saying that goes something like, "You can't reason a person out of an opinion that person did not reach by reason." Vance demonstrates this in spades: He doesn't stop and think Hmmmm. Maybe "the unborn" don't have rights because they aren't individuals, yet, or Lots of people don't seem to accept my idea of what constitutes a human life. Perhaps I should rethink that. This doesn't mean that Vance and other pro-lifers can't consider this question rationally; but the fact is, they aren't. The anti-abortionists overwhelmingly hold their position on faith, and based on religious teachings they exempt from the kinds of questions they would (or should) correctly ask of any other knowledge claim -- such as that morality lies outside the province of reason. (It doesn't.) There is much more to say about this, but time does not permit, so I shall close with the second tweet, by historian C. Bradley Thompson, author of America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It:The most potent force in American politics today is young women between the ages of 18 & 35. And the Republican message to them is ________?Religious Republicans often call themselves "values voters," but the above quote is much more in line with a rational (but too often, vaguely, inconsistently, and implicitly-held) grasp of values. What Republicans seem uniformly oblivious to, is what is obvious to many young women: Outlawing abortion threatens their lives (because pregnancy is always medically risky) and futures (as any halfway conscientious parent or prospective parent will know), and for what? Satisfaction of the alleged demands of an alleged being that noone has proved exists in thousands of years of time to do so. Women are correct to rebuff the Republicans as long as they continue to champion the alleged rights of "the unborn" at the expense of the living. -- CAVLink to Original

When the populists who infest the GOP (and enable the theocrats) are feeling cocky, they are fond of using the abbreviation FOFA, meaning f--- around and find out. It is too bad that neither a sense of irony, nor introspection, nor a willingness to learn from reality are parts of their tool chest, because the GOP could use all three: There was a clear lesson from yesterday's election for the Republican Party, which has once again failed to thrive under the orange thumb of Donald Trump. That lesson is When abortion becomes the major issue on the ballot, and there is a clear choice, being anti-abortion will lose any election not dominated by religious voters. The connection is so obvious, even today's news media noticed:Abortion rights advocates won major victories Tuesday as voters in conservative-leaning Ohio decisively passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, while those in ruby-red Kentucky reelected a Democratic governor who aggressively attacked his opponent for supporting the state's near-total ban on the procedure. In Virginia, a battleground state where Republicans pushed a proposal to outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Democrats were projected to take control of the state legislature after campaigning heavily on preserving access.(Good: The Virginia result should keep stealth holy roller Glenn Youngkin out of the GOP presidential race, which is already too crowded.) Two governor's races were instructive here. In Kentucky, polls had tightened between the Democrat incumbent and his Trump-endorsed rival ahead of the election. The not-exactly popular governor aired a pro-choice commercial (embedded here) that went viral and was able to beat back his anti-abortionist challenger. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, incumbent Republican Tate Reeves eked out a victory against his Democrat opponent, who had received lots of out-of-state funding. I see him as the (illusory) exception that proves the rule. Although roughly 40% of that state's voters are black and bloc-vote for Democrats, that constituency is not quite as on board with abortion as I think the Democrats hoped. Mississippians, black Democrats included, are generally more religious than voters in other parts of the country. Black turnout is often low, too. Brandon Presley's focus on Reeve's corruption and on the issue of whether the state should collect information about residents getting abortions elsewhere simply wasn't motivating enough to drive black Democrat turnout. (And the heavy out-of-state funding Presley received probably drove turnout for Reeves.) Mississippi, by the way, is a lesson for Democrats, too: Long experience tells me that, had Presley won, we'd never hear the end of crowing about Mississippi "turning blue," along the way to the "progressive" element of that party overplaying its hand and giving pause to voters who might otherwise support a sane Democrat because of abortion. Sane Democrats and other proponents of reproductive freedom can breathe a sigh of relief after yesterday. -- CAVLink to Original

For about the umpteen millionth time, I ran across an editorial -- this time by one Monica Crowley, a former Trump appointee -- to the effect of Trump is the inevitable GOP nominee, so it's time for his challengers to quit. I have already opined that the GOP primaries, front-loaded by Trump's party stooges, are designed to ensure a Trump victory by ensuring there is no time to narrow the field of challengers down before his delegate lead becomes insurmountable. This tactic hardly reflects confidence on the part of the Trump camp that Republican voters will, given enough time to think about their choices, choose Trump a second time. This kind of editorial, resembling a dishonest, high-pressure sales pitch as it does, reeks of a lack of confidence in the product on offer:In 2024, any candidate running a quixotic campaign against Trump is bound to meet a grisly political end. As president, Trump earned an approval rating of roughly 90 percent from Republican voters, the vast majority of whom remain fiercely loyal to him, particularly given the endless political persecution he's enduring at the hands of Democrats. No other GOP candidate can overcome that deep emotional bond. [bold added]Many of the same people who wear tee shirts like this are following Trump for emotional, rather than rational reasons. (Image by TeePublic, via TeePublic, I believe my use of this image to be protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.)The above comes after quickly discounting the top three challengers to Trump -- plus Tim Scott, perhaps so the charge of quixotic doesn't look too ridiculous? -- and pretending that Trump's 55-60% share of a mostly still tuned-out GOP electorate is a "vast majority" of "fiercely loyal" army. If that's true, why waste time and ink on an editorial? The army will take care of things. Those of us who are and have been paying attention know that (a) the 25-35% of voters in the GOP who are, in fact, loyal to Trump, plus (b) name recognition among people with lives outside of politics, together are the whole reason he seems to be inevitable right now. Furthermore, the kid-gloved barely-mentioning of Nikki Haley's candidacy indicates to me that people like Crowley know that Haley will be a real threat to Trump if she has time to consolidate opposition to Trump: Ignore simple arithmetic and focus on the relatively small size of her current share (which can grow) next to Trump's current share (part of which is soft and poised to collapse if he gets convicted), and speak of her in the same breath as Scott, who really doesn't have a chance. Oh, and speak of Trump's competitors as if they are doomed if they stay in. If this is a threat, it speaks ill of Trump and is actually a reason to try harder to bury him while we have a chance. If not, it makes no sense, since politicians frequently go on to fight another day after losing primaries. This is still America, and not a banana republic, ... I think. The charge that these candidates are "weakening" Trump is ridiculous. The opponent is Biden, and (contrary to Crowley's assertion) it is often Haley, and not Trump, who polls best against Biden in a head-to-head. If the GOP wants to defeat Biden, shouldn't it make sure his strongest opponent makes it to the general? And, if the GOP wins the Presidency, shouldn't it take its time figuring out which candidate is best for that job? If Trump is so great, he and his toadies should welcome more time to explain why he is to potential voters within their party and for the benefit of the general electorate. If not, why the hurry to don that albatross -- who angered enough voters to elect a non-entity like Biden in the first place! -- again? All this, and I haven't even gotten around to the "myriad legal challenges" that could saddle such a hastily-chosen standard-bearer (cough!) with a conviction by his peers. This independent voter who wishes not to reelect Biden despairs when he sees the opposition party blinded to the unfitness of its main candidate by an irrational "emotional bond" felt by the sort of people who wear "fuck your feelings" tee shirts, of all things. -- CAVLink to Original

This morning, I followed a link from a story (Part I and Part II) at Issues and Insights about the latest scientific paper to question climate catastrophism and be ignored. Said link, also at Issues and Insights likens climate catastrophism to a doomsday cult, a comparison I have only ever heard in a podcast by Alex Epstein, author of Fossil Future, and via the title of Patrick Moore's Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. (I've read the former, but not the latter.)Different is not a synonym of wrong. (Image by Sam Field, via Unsplash, license.)[David] Viner is of course only one of many climate doomsday prophets who have made forecasts that seemed more like the rantings of a mental hospital patient. Their miserable record has been covered by esteemed columnists, reputable think tanks, and occasionally the media. There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to climate change predictions. At this point it’s fair to ask: What is the difference, if any, between the climate alarmists and the religious cults that predict the end of the world, and rather than humbly rethink their premises after their predictions fail, claim that they just got the day wrong and double down on the loco? Our answer: The only real difference is that while the doomsday cults have no political power and are routinely skewered by the media, the climate alarmists have nearly unchallenged political clout, deep and wide institutional patronage, and the uncritical support of a press that is not merely sympathetic but actively promotes a deception agenda. [links omitted]This is a fair point, but it can be bewildering to a thoughtful person (and useful to an catastrophist) to note, as one headline puts it, that it sure looks like, "For Epstein to be right, everyone else has to be wrong." One of the best aspects of Fossil Future was its discussion of our society's "knowledge system," which explains the many sources of error, distortion, and misinterpretation that exist from lab bench, through publication, to policy agenda when it comes to energy (and anything else). In other words, it is less mysterious and intimidating, after reading Epstein's work, that so many people are so wrong (or not even wrong) on this issue. Anyone who has seriously engaged with Epstein's book will know what is wrong with such assertions and how the answer supports his main argument. One of the most common mistakes is to allow a consensus, real or imagined, to cause oneself to assume that one's own thinking is incorrect or fruitless. Just because a movement is large and powerful does not mean it is correct or that its size and power are a testimony to objectivity or virtue of any kind. Or that it is not, in fact, a cult. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Anyone who regrets a tattoo might be glad to hear that tattoo removal has become easier and more effective in recent years. The article purports to be more about "the culture of ink," and includes statistics and snapshots of trends that might also be of interest to anyone who -- like me -- never even considered jumping onto that bandwagon. In any event, ease of removal is reducing the significance of this practice:That said, laser tattoo removal is not magic. It requires multiple treatments, sometimes as many as 10 or 12, spaced weeks or months apart. It hurts, much more than getting a tattoo in the first place -- like sizzling oil on the skin. You can sometimes still see smudges and shadows after the removal process is done. But it works well enough that hundreds of businesses now offer the procedure to thousands of customers. (It is more lucrative to remove tattoos than to ink them.) This is changing the practice and culture of tattooing itself. Perhaps the most tangible and immediate result, tattoo artists said, is that cover-ups -- turning an ex's name into a flower, or a flower into an all-black sleeve, for instance -- have become less common. Now people are much more likely to get a tattoo lasered off.I will freely admit that I am not a fan of tattoos. Indeed, as soon as I see one, I usually wonder why on earth the bearer got it, given the pain involved in getting (and removing) them, coupled with the frequency of people regretting the often ill-considered decision to get one in the first place. Yes, I usually wonder about the judgement of any new acquaintance I know to have a tattoo. (The ones designed to convey what second-handers take to be "toughness" don't help.) (Obligatory disclaimer: Tattoos, like any other piece of information, exist within the context of everything else one knows about a person. There are people I repect who, nevertheless, sport tattoos. Okay, then. Back to ragging on tattoos...) That said, these new treatment options pose a dilemma for fans and detractors of tattoos alike: The lack of permanence will cause tattoos to lose the ability to convey membership in a collective at the perceptual level, and so they will converge in significance to the water-transferable designs we all played with as kids. Perhaps soon, anyone who wants random others to tell -- just by looking at them -- that they want to be considered tough -- might have to resort to actual branding. In the meantime, inked skin will continue its slow decline in usefulness as a convenient warning sign that someone might have a screw loose somewhere. 2. I pass along a rant about the sad state of the modern automobile in the hopes that reading "My Rude-Ass Car" might prove somewhat cathartic to someone else out there. His executive summary?I knew car software was bad, but I only realized how bad it truly was once I got some first-hand experience.Government "safety" and energy regulations, along with short-range pragmatism about costs on the part of too many businessmen have come together in the past couple of decades to suck the fun out of driving and make driving anything new low-level annoying at best without active countermeasures. I feel for this guy, whose list is long despite his omission of that silly switch you have to push to keep your engine from cutting off at every stop. Perhaps he was too distracted by everything else about stopping to notice. 3. A lengthy blog post by Ed Driscoll points to a Mark Judge recommendation of a couple of new movies that (gasp!) don't involve superheroes.I recently went to the movies, where I was confronted on the screen by minor miracles: two well-crafted films that are smart, brave, and aimed at adults. And they have nothing to do with superheroes. The films are The Holdovers and American Fiction. The Holdovers is about the relationship that develops between three people who are left stranded at an expensive private school for Christmas. The second film, American Fiction, didn't play, but the trailer did. That was enough to leave the jaws of those seated around me on the floor. With what looks like brutal satire, American Fiction tackles the phenomenon of white elites in the media, academia, and publishing world who satisfy their own egos by making black authors sound more "street" and "authentic" at the expense of more gifted black writers. It's a savage takedown of the condescension liberalism holds toward black people. [links omitted]I haven't bothered going out to see a new movie that wasn't for kids in years. This was at Instapundit, whose recent decline into religious right/crackpot mediocrity resembles that of Hollywood into left-wing/remake hell, so I'll corroborate with other reviews first. I don't expect cinematic excellence (video embedded below), but I am cautiously optimistic, though. I am glad that today's blogging reminded me of this video, listing ten classic films Harry Binswwanger rates as among the greatest, along with his reasons why. 4. The title purports to answer a question I and many of my countrymen have doubtless asked themselves for at least a decade: "Why Every Microwave Sucks These Days." I don't agree that Capitalism will destroy everything it touches is the answer, otherwise there wouldn't be so many very good products, new and old, we could all get. On top of that, comments at Hacker News indicate that, if the analysis applies anywhere, it is probably just the United States market. With those qualifications in mind, I think there is a germ of an explanation:[A]s the 2000s rolled along, a problem occurred. You see, everyone had a microwave, and there was no way to make one that was actually better than their old one. This meant that nobody had a reason to buy a microwave anymore. If everyone suddenly no longer needs to buy your product, your company has a big problem. Of course, very few companies would sell only a microwave and nothing else. Most companies just focused on other hot new electronic gadgets. Still, having a microwave on offer was nice, so they just contracted out to someone else to make those microwaves, and slapped their name on the box at the end. After a decade of this, there was only one company left making microwaves. This company, Midea, doesn't really sell microwaves under their own name, because all of them suck. They only slap their name onto actually good products, because they don't want to be tied to how absolutely dogshit their microwaves are. They work fine at first, but break after a year or so of normal usage, and are designed to be completely unrepairable to stop idiots from electrocuting themselves on the high voltage transformers inside. Somewhere along the line of all this margin squeezing, someone had the idea to get rid of the moisture sensor from the cheap models. But instead of removing the now-useless popcorn and potato buttons, they just left the buttons on there, and made them kinda half work. Of course, they don't work very well. You can usually find if a microwave has a sensor because it will brag about it on the box. This is the only feature that defines the cheapest Midea microwaves from the slightly less cheap ones. but they're all cheap and they all suck. [edited for standard capitalization, footnote markers omitted]Again, the cynical author is quick to blame capitalism for everything when ample evidence from other products in the U.S. and microwaves from other parts of the world points to some other cause. But I do think he may be onto something in that there would appear to be low incentives or high barriers to entry in the U.S. market for someone to offer a better-enough product to make money here doing it. Some candidates I can think of, off the top of my head? Some possibilities: Labor costs make manufacturing decent microwaves here prohibitive. Safety regulations make microwaves expensive enough already that truly better ones get priced out of the market. Safety testing regulations could make it harder or more expensive to bring a new product to market than anyone is willing to bear. Tariffs could keep otherwise compliant/viable competitors out of the American market. I am sure I am missing a few others. -- CAVLink to Original

Job recruiting has apparently become the latest field requiring the reintroduction of a once widely-known principle in the wake of the artificial intelligence revolution. We are all fortunate that Suzanne Lucas took it upon herself to do so gracefully, but forcefully:It's a tool requiring thoughtful application, not an excuse to slack off. (Image by Hitesh Choudhary, via Unsplash, license.)...This is a problem with the recruiter's supervisor. If you tell the AI (or the standard Boolean search) that you need skill Y, which is transferable, then you'll find people. More than a decade ago, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli shared a story about a company that had 29,000 applicants for a single position, and yet the applicant tracking system rejected all of them. Again, this is a problem with the recruiter and not the system. AI is like any computer program: When you put garbage in, you get garbage out... Is AI Rejecting Candidates? Almost surely, as [applicant tracking systems] have jumped on the AI bandwagon. But, when they do, they don't explain exactly how they select candidates. James Zuo, a computer science professor at Stanford, explained that with AI and specifically ChatGPT, "These are black-box models. So we don't actually know how the model itself, the neural architectures, or the training data have changed." This should be a concern for talent acquisition professionals and hiring managers because they remain legally responsible for their decisions -- except they don't know precisely how AI decides. [bold added]This is, of course, true in the typically modern sense that AI is poised to cause companies all kinds of legal grief for running afoul of assorted paternalistic anti-discrimination laws. More importantly, it can cost companies talent when they attempt to use the mis-named technology as a substitute for the real thing. A refreshing counter-example of an innovative recruiter who works with ex-military job candidates occurs within the piece. That company uses AI to enhance the abilities of its recruiters, rather than as a substitute for their thinking. -- CAVLink to Original

Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips has thrown his hat into the Democrat presidential primary ring. He thus offers voters in his party a younger alternative to the President, whose age and mental acuity would be big enough handicaps even if he weren't polling so poorly. A profile of the new candidate at CNN sees the move as providing the Democrats an emergency option in addition to a way for Phillips to build name recognition ahead of the 2028 race. I am no fan of the Democrats, but I think this is a much more wiley and viable move than Phillips is being credited with. On paper, he sounds almost like an even-keeled, younger Democrat version of Donald Trump, in that he is a former businessman who grabbed a political opportunity by the horns:Democrats should celebrate, and Republicans should be jealous. (Image by Eric Connolly, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)Yet it was only after achieving all this success in the business world that, in 2018, he decided to jump into the political fray. Sensing an opening in Minnesota's purplish and suburban third congressional district, which has been in moderate Republican hands for around 60 years, Phillips took the leap. Given how many voters in the district had been turned off by the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency, Phillips sensed it was a vulnerable seat. It was a big bet for someone with no prior political experience, but it paid off. And it's maybe some of that same thinking about political risk-taking which prompted Phillips' move to challenge Biden as well. [links omitted]The piece makes much of how this move has angered the Democrat establishment, which, incidentally has unintentionally paved the way for Phillips to establish credibility with an early win in New Hampshire. This anger puzzles me. The guy voted with Biden 100% of the time as a congressman and flipped a seat in a purplish district. Many commentators -- left, right, and otherwise -- have said that Trump and Biden need each other in the race to win. Unlike the kooky RFK, Jr., here is a reliable lefty who passes for sane enough to win the kind of suburban district that will be part of a path to victory in 2024. If the Democrats were halfway sane, they'd heave a quiet sigh of relief, persuade Biden to stand down, and back this guy yesterday. Phillips puts the Democrats in a position the GOP can only dream it was in: a primary with a single challenger to an old, problematic, and deeply unpopular front-runner, with said challenger being viable in the general and, all other things being equal, getting to face the other party's ancient albatross. Oh, and I almost forgot: Unlike the case with Trump, Biden doesn't have a core of blindly loyal personality cultists who would vote for him even if he personally shot their own mothers: Phillips thus would have an easier path to victory than a similar challenger to Trump, who would have to work hard to consolidate lots of support very quickly in order to make it to the general. This isn't a no-chance loon like Marianne Williams or an obvious kook like RFK, Jr. -- who will hurt Trump more than Biden with his now-independent run. This guy is the real deal and, if his own party should support him, the GOP should be jealous and very concerned about its chances in 2024. -- CAV Link to Original

Phillip Wegman of RealClear Politics, who notes that anti-corporate rhetoric usually comes from Democrats, reports that Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is about to introduce a bill to overturn the Citizens United decision that protects corporate free speech in elections. His closest ally in the effort? None other than socialist Bernie Sanders. Notably, Hawley uses ESG as his excuse, but his solution is 180 degrees wrong:Image by Michael Maasen, via Unsplash, license.The Hawley project then can perhaps be best described as an effort to export traditional conservative skepticism of big government to the realm of big corporations. “What we find, and what lawsuits like the Missouri v. Biden case exposed, is that big corporations and big government work hand in hand,” he said referencing the federal case that found the White House lobbied social media companies to remove content critical of the administration.For starters, this ignores the fundamental difference between the government and all other social institutions, namely that only the government can legally wield the retaliatory force of the citizens. If this force is being misused -- as it clearly was when Biden jawboned the social media companies -- the the solution is to get the government to stop doing so, not to blame the companies or start pretending that they are arms of the government. On top of that, Ayn Rand debunked this kind of rhetoric decades ago when she discussed the then- (and apparently also now-) common confusion between economic and political power:A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.Hawley knows he can get away with this misconception, but even he knows -- since there are still a few remnants of respect for businessmen within his party -- he has to dehumanize "big business" to get away with attacking corporate property and speech rights. This is what he is doing with his disingenuous appeal to whatever mistaken apprehension the Founders might have had about what he calls "the corporate form." Ayn Rand's student, Leonard Peikoff, addressed this directly:A corporation is a union of human beings in a voluntary, cooperative endeavor. It exemplifies the principle of free association, which is an expression of the right to freedom. Any attributes which corporations have are attributes (or rights) which the individuals have—including the right to combine in a certain way, offer products under certain terms, and deal with others according to certain rules, for instance, limited liability. [bold added]It should be clear from the above that any attempt to "limit" corporate speech, such as by prohibiting financing of political campaigns, is a violation of the property rights, speech rights, and the right to free association of every single person involved in any corporation. This attack is wrong on so many levels, and is a massive attack on the individual rights of millions of Americans all at once. Return government once again to its proper scope. Make it unable to loot people, to order us around, and to pick winners and losers. Then, the need to bribe politicians in every election cycle will disappear. It is a revealing shame that Josh Hawley's response to America's plight is to even further aggrandize the improper powers her government has assumed over the past century and a half. -- CAVLink to Original

It is a shame that the Republican Party -- never exactly a consistent or reliable advocate for freedom to begin with -- remains under the spell of Donald Trump and his personality cult. The latest manifestation of the rot is the election of the inexperienced and relatively unknown Mike Johnson of Louisiana as Speaker of the House. A Mild-Mannered Opponent of Personal Liberty (Image by United States Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)I dare say that this is not a choice that a party that is even remotely in touch with normal Americans and wants to win a general, national-level election would make. (To be clear: The Democrats haven't been guilty of that lately, either.) The following, from a news report, just about sums up the brain-dead selection process. Not to put too fine a point on it, but said process resembles a failure to flush a malfunctioning toilet enough times much more than it does the deliberation of a major political faction of the world's most powerful country. Here's a quick look at what rose to the top:Johnson's rise comes after a tumultuous month, capped by a head-spinning Tuesday that within a span of a few hours saw one candidate, Rep. Tom Emmer, the GOP Whip, nominated and then quickly withdraw when it became clear he would be the third candidate unable to secure enough support from GOP colleagues after Trump bashed his nomination. "He wasn't MAGA," said Trump, referring to his Make America Great Again campaign slogan. [bold added]This whole circling-the-drain fiasco started because Kevin McCarthy wasn't a Trump puppet, and so was set up to fail from the start by other Trump loyalists. So he's "MAGA." Aside from loyal to Trump, what might that mean? Nothing this independent voter wants, anyway. If we look at Johnson's public record, it is clear that it quite likely means being anti-liberty while paying lip-service to the same. A quick look at the issue of marriage is instructive. According to Wikipedia, Johnson worked to have something called "covenant marriage" -- which is much harder to end in divorce -- recognized by law in Louisiana. It is interesting to note a couple of things: (1) A couple wishing such an arrangement for itself already has recourse to prenuptial agreements, so this law is superfluous at best; and (2) Fewer than one percent of couples in the three states that have such laws on the books avail themselves of them. Absent a reason that makes sense, let's consider the below:According to proponents of covenant marriage, the movement sets out to promote and strengthen marriages, reduce the rate of divorce, decrease the number of children born out of wedlock, discourage cohabitation, and frame marriage as an honorable and desirable institution.Notice that every single item above is an altruistic, busy-body excuse to make it harder for a couple to get divorced. The whole thing reeks of the idea of people not owning their own lives, and reads as if getting married permanently vetoes the rights of the spouses. What about marriage supersedes, say, one or both spouses recognizing having made a mistake; growing apart and leaving as friends; or discovering that, however much they might love each other, the best thing they can do for themselves and each other is to set themselves free? To an individualist, the answer is nothing. It is astounding how inimical people who regard marriage as intrinsically good can be to the welfare of the two individuals in a marriage. Or, for that matter, the purpose of a marriage, which would be to promote that welfare through a freely-entered legal agreement tailored as necessary or desired to that couple's needs. And while we're still wondering why Johnson is busying himself writing laws that make it harder for couples to correct their past mistakes, we are confronted with the fact that he opposes gay marriage:... Johnson called homosexuality "inherently unnatural" and a "dangerous lifestyle"; he argued that if same-sex marriage was allowed, "then we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection", including people who want to marry their pets. Johnson further concluded that allowing same-sex marriage would put the country's "entire democratic system in jeopardy". In another article, he wrote that unnamed experts "project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic". [footnotes omitted, bold added]To whom is homosexuality dangerous, so long as it is between consenting adults? In what way is it dangerous? And speaking of the need for consent as a prerequisite for needing legal protection, said need obviates the whole idea of someone marrying a pet, however frightening to religious nuts like Johnson that prospect is. Ditto for pedophilia, which would remain illegal if only lawmakers -- among whom, alas, Johnson can count himself -- remembered the proper purpose of government, which is the protection of individual rights. Since children can't give meaningful consent, sexual activities with them would and should be illegal. All this "culture wars" caterwauling occurs, by the way, against the backdrop of the GOP's bovine failure to question the meaning (much less propriety) of "equal protection," which is often the violation of the free speech and property rights of business owners. But to permit bigots to be bigots -- the bug Johnson wants based on some of his past activist legal work -- would require consistency, such as also getting the government to butt out of the institution of marriage altogether except to enforce freely crafted (and entered) marriage contracts of all kinds -- the feature he apparently fears. What a treasure the GOP has ... surfaced ... with its rigorous and well-thought out criterion of Must Be MAGA... If they -- led by Johnson, of course -- end up wondering why Trump's 2024 coattails are so short or why he lost (again) -- Oh, never mind. The kind of mentality that places loyalty to a mere person above a commitment to the truth and to liberty can't be bothered with a way back. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Having encountered a list of words that deserve wider use, I was amused to see George Will use one of them, blatherskite, in a recent column. I got about a third of the way through that list the first time and plan to return... Image by y6y6y6, via Wikimedia Commons, license.2. In honor of our impending move and in deference to my wife, who dislikes my old gumbo recipe, I plan to experiment with gumbo when we settle in the New Orleans area. From Hacker News of all places comes inspiration in the form of a short gumbo primer by the Southern Foodways Alliance. As always, I peruse the comments first at Hacker News, where I learned of egg and shrimp gumbo. Mrs. Van Horn shot that one down instantly, so I'll play with that some time when she's out of town, or perhaps foist it on the kids for lunch when she's on call some weekend. 3. This once and perhaps future home brewer was intrigued to learn that a group of intrepid meadmakers are attempting to revive bochet, a style of mead requiring the "terrifying" process of caramelizing the honey:The recipe called for water and honey, plus "brewer's yeast" and an assortment of spices, including ginger and cloves. That's standard fare for medieval mead, as were the steps describing fermentation. But the very first few steps were unique: "Put it in a cauldron on the fire to boil" and stir until the honey blisters and bursts, "giving off a little blackish steam..."The author describes a safer-sounding way to do this, not that I'm thinking about branching out into mead. I've tried mead a few times but, until our trip to Ireland early this summer, I hadn't liked it. I'd like to try this style of it and will keep an eye out for it, though. 4. My favorite science writer, Derek Lowe, comments on an entertaining tribute to TNT that recently appeared in Nature Chemistry and references a famous Roadrunner cartoon:But while it's safe to say that the compounds described by the links in that first paragraph surely have higher detonation velocities than TNT, it's also for sure that none of those are going to replace it for any purpose whatsoever. That's because TNT has a number of other qualities that (taken together) make it still a useful substance even now. A big one is its melting point: it can be melted, poured, and cast without getting anywhere near its decomposition temperature, and that's a highly useful property. It also has low sensitivity to impact, to friction, and to electrostatic discharge, and all of those are keys to making sure that stuff only blows up exactly when and where you want it to. Which is the first thing we ask of any useful explosive. Remember, TNT is classed as a secondary explosive -- something else (a primary explosive in a detonator) generally has to blow up first in order to get TNT to go off at all.I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never let a love for the new and shiny cause you to lose sight of the wonders of proven, reliable technology. -- CAVLink to Original

Every once in a while, Miss Manners makes me smile with a short, sweet reminder that etiquette is contextual and has a legitimate purpose. This is far from the common stereotype of etiquette being a collection of arbitrary rules that some second-handers can use to herd around others -- whom they presume to be/hope are also second-handers. Ever since a falling-out with his parents, the letter-writer has occasionally been on the receiving end of scathing, uninformed letters from strangers and distant relatives -- and is in a quandary about whether to respond and, if so, how. The concern arises in part because the senders are "members of an older generation, who may care more about etiquette." The following sentence, from the reply just about stands on its own:Image by Insung Yoon, via Unsplash, license.Members of a generation who care more about etiquette would not write rude, impertinent letters in the first place.As I suspected, not replying at all is well within the bounds of proper etiquette in that situation, but there was an amusing pro forma option I wouldn't have considered, and probably would ordinarily not use myself. -- CAVLink to Original

In a discussion about how to defend oneself from scammers using AI, the good folks at Fisher Investments lead by claiming that "patience, skepticism, and caution" are "timeless tools" we can marshal in our defense. Few would argue with that, but I see a missed opportunity, particularly after reading the following subtitle: "The more you know, the better your defenses can be." That sentence, by the way, had been lifted into the link I followed to the story. Everybody knows knowledge is power, Gus, you might be thinking. And that's exactly the problem. Lots of people know lots of things, but fail to use what they know, when they need it. We all know people who, for example, are veritable storehouses of "useless information" who do well at trivia games, but lack common sense. To play on a common turn of phrase: It's not just what you know, but how you use it that matters. To be fair, I think patience, skepticism, and caution are a stab at saying this, as we can see from the below:Image by Sammy Sander, via Pixabay, license.... The new tricks mainly involve so-called deepfakes, where bad apples use generative AI to clone people's voices and images. One is an evolution of a widespread scheme where criminals send a text or email purporting to be from a loved one in trouble and in need of money in a pinch. Now, scammers can plug an audio clip into a program that can synthesize the voice to create an entirely new message -- audio they can easily rip from social media or hacked voicemails. You could get a call that sounds like a child, grandchild or other loved one in distress, making it vital to keep your cool, ask questions only that individual could know the answer to, and not let the purported urgency override your skepticism and defenses. [bold added]The part in could be summed up as Always keep a full context when evaluating a knowledge claim, and those tips are only part of what that entails. Knowing that such scams exist, or having some alternate means of verifying someone's whereabouts would also qualify. It is interesting to compare the panicked, context-free thought process the con man is hoping to provoke with the fallacy of context-dropping identified by Ayn Rand, specifically in the realm of time range:A rational man sees his interests in terms of a lifetime and selects his goals accordingly. This does not mean that he has to be omniscient, infallible or clairvoyant. It means that he does not live his life short-range and does not drift like a bum pushed by the spur of the moment. It means that he does not regard any moment as cut off from the context of the rest of his life, and that he allows no conflicts or contradictions between his short-range and long-range interests. He does not become his own destroyer by pursuing a desire today which wipes out all his values tomorrow. [bold added]Falling for such a con is not the same thing as willfully pursuing a short-range goal that conflicts with one's long-range interest, but the effects are similar: In the case of the con, one is tricked into giving away money needed for such goals. While it might be easy for most to see why one should be aware of the latest scams, it is profitable to consider that they are, more broadly speaking, attempts to cause people to drop context, actually or effectively. Thanks to Ayn Rand, we have the vocabulary to describe what is being done and, more important, we have an ethical explanation for why context is always important, and not just when someone is trying to pull a fast one. -- CAVLink to Original

I am glad to see that I'm not the only one to notice that the Trump machine has made time of the essence in defeating its champion. Recently, George Will urged Republican candidates to withdraw from the primary to give breathing room for a viable challenger, and at least one newspaper editorial has followed suit. Both pieces are worth reading in full, but George Will captures the problem well:Image modified from work of Jon Tyson, via Unsplash, license.By catalyzing a coalescence around Haley, Scott could transform the nation's political mood. As long as the Republican race pits Donald Trump against a cluster of lagging pursuers, the nominating electorate cannot ponder a binary choice. When, however, it is Trump against one experienced, polished, steely and unintimidated adversary, voters can internalize this exhilarating reality: There is a choice suitable for a great nation. [bold added, link omitted]Interestingly, Will appeals to Tim Scott to take the lead on this, which I think is wise: Scott is far enough behind that he might be reconsidering his run anyway. This is despite his long career as a successful politician (unlike newcomer Doug Burgum) and his being well-regarded in most quarters (unlike Mike Pence, who will get no support from Trump supporters and will have trouble with more secular voters). Scott would have the most to gain, both for his long-term political career and for the good of the country he seems to love, of all the other candidates. One would hope that his example would lead to other concessions and a narrow-enough field -- Haley alone or with only one or two non-Trump challengers, whom she could manage -- that the prospect of a real choice could rally non-Trump Republicans before it is too late to avert the rematch nobody really wants. -- CAVLink to Original

During a recent podcast about the war in Israel, I heard mention of a misconception that guided Middle Eastern foreign policy during the Bush Administration. That idea was derisively (and rightly so) called the "pothole theory" of democracy. It was used to justify permitting the Palestinians electing Hamas into power at a time when we or Israel should have begun the process of civilizing the Palestinians much as the United States did in Japan after World War II. Curious about this patently ridiculous idea, I turned up a 2006 piece in Slate whose subtitle pretty well sums up that theory: "How to Civilize Hamas: Will Wednesday's Winners Be Too Busy Fixing Potholes to Wage Jihad?" One need quote only a couple of paragraphs from the article to see how outlandish the idea is:Hamas not only doesn't really give a damn about potholes, it has provoked Israel to defend itself. Hamas and its supporters alone are responsible for damage like the above, and anything and everything else Israel does in order to defend itself. (Image by Al Araby, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)f you allow radical Islamists into the political fold and get them competing for votes -- and dealing with mundane civic issues like fixing potholes and collecting garbage -- they will, by necessity, turn moderate and palatable. At the very least, so the theory goes, such inclusion will force a split between the "hard men" and those willing to pursue Islamist goals through peaceful means. ... The more immediate issue is how Hamas will adapt to the reality of the existence of Israel, whose citizens now play the role of lab rats in Bush's grand experiment with potholes and democracy. Never a strictly nationalist movement, Hamas' ultimate goal is the establishment of a theocratic state; the elimination of the Jewish state is a means to that end. Olivier Roy writes of a shift in Islamist movements away from fights over territory toward the Islamicization of individuals (a "de-territorialized ummah," as he calls the new body of globalized Muslims). Would Hamas compromise on its claim to every inch of ancient Palestine if it felt that doing so would further its fundamentalist agenda? Perhaps, but given the supposed sanctity of the territory in question, it's difficult to imagine Hamas backing down from its stated goal: an Islamic state "from the river to the sea." [link omitted]Not long after, the piece discusses some of the "evidence" this idea's backers marshaled in its support, noting that "Critics dismiss Islamists' talk of democracy as mere window dressing that would be discarded if they ever came to power." It would seem that the "critics" were right: When a genocidal terrorist organization seemingly adopts the norms of civilized political behavior, it is doing so to further its goals, which are anything but the semicivilized ones (like fixing potholes) the likes of Bush hoped they were. Democratic norms -- not religiously-motivated genocide -- were the window dressing to these people. We will not begin to turn the tide in this civilizational war -- in which the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel are only a battle -- until we admit that we are fighting barbarians and begin to act accordingly. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge "Thinking through this policy's logic and implications reveals that giving the government power to screen immigrants' ideologies means handing government the expansive power to police everyone's ideas." -- Agustina Vergara Cid, in "Trump's Proposal to Ideologically Screen Immigrants Would Be Unjustified and Immoral" (Orange County Register) "[The immigration] system doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be rethought entirely." -- Agustina Vergara Cid, in "The Immigration System vs. Legal Workers" (Orange County Register) Image by Matthew Schwartz, via Unsplash, license."How are engineers to do experiments and calculations without any concept of the experimental method, and without anything close to the mathematical tools that are available today to any fifth-grader?" -- Jason Crawford, in "Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?" (Less Wrong) "The world is experiencing unprecedented safety from extreme weather thanks to fossil fuels -- because fossil fuels' climate mastery benefits overwhelm any negative climate side-effects." -- Alex Epstein, in "25 Myths About Extreme Weather, Refuted" (2022, EnergyNow) "Leftists ... feel the need to condemn people for not liking a movie that was used to push an agenda, instead of entertaining audiences by giving them a live-action version of the animated movie in which Ariel looks like Ariel." -- Bosch Fawstin, in "Giving Low Ratings to Disney's Black Little Mermaid Movie is 'Ratings Terrorism'" (FrontPage Magazine) "[Noah] Berlatsky is the poster boy for leftists who hate the very idea of a movie taking on the kidnapping and rape of children, a movie which their attempt to bury has helped make it the great success that it is." -- Bosch Fawstin, in "'Stigmatized Group' Trashes Sound of Freedom" (FrontPage Magazine) "The artificial lung pushes fresh oxygen into the blood (and pulls carbon dioxide out of the blood), then returns the oxygen-replenished blood to the patient's body." -- Paul Hsieh, in "A Celebration of Dr. Robert Bartlett, the 'Father of ECMO'" (Forbes) "[T]he mere existence of a financial relationship between a doctor and a pharmaceutical/medical device company does not automatically imply unethical behavior." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Some Physicians Receive Thousands of Dollars a Year From Drug Companies; Should You Be Concerned?" (Forbes) "[P]hysicians are also finding tools like ChatGPT helpful in the more "human" aspects of medical care -- specifically helping to communicate with patients with greater empathy and compassion." -- Paul Hsieh, in "When the AI Is More Compassionate Than the Doctor" (Forbes) "[T]the track record of such deals makes me concerned that they are too often bad for patients and physicians alike." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Why Private Equity in Healthcare Is Receiving Closer Scrutiny by Journalists and Government" (Forbes) "... Israel's leaders themselves lack the moral confidence to act resolutely to protect the individual rights of their citizens." -- Elan Journo, in "After Israel's 'Pearl Harbor,' Nothing Less Than Victory Against Hamas Is Demanded" (Orange County Register) "If we allow patent-infringing products to be imported, we undermine the legal engine that has driven the U.S. innovation economy for over two centuries: the patent system." -- Adam Mossoff, in "Big Tech's 'Patent Troll' Attacks Are a Smokescreen -- Don't Let Them Fool You" (The Hill) -- CAVLink to Original