Gus Van Horn blog

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

At RealClear Politics, Benjamin Reilly and Rachel Hutchinson note that ranked choice voting (RCV) could have averted the ongoing dumpster fire that is the GOP House Speaker contest. This is an interesting point that will surely be lost on the Trumpists in the GOP caucus who architected this problem long ago with a rule change as a condition of voting for former speaker Kevin McCarthy: One of its selling points -- at least for any voter disenchanted with each party's hard line -- is that it favors candidates who appeal to the broadest swath of voters:Image by Tomruen, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Here's the problem: After decades of laser-focused partisan gerrymandering and increased "sorting" of Americans into politically uniform communities (think rural red areas or liberal blue ones), over 90% of seats in the House of Representatives are so one-sided that the election is effectively decided in party primaries. And in most states, candidates don't even need to win a majority in their own party primary. Candidates routinely win crowded primaries with way less than 50% of the vote by attacking their opponents and revving up a narrow (and often extreme) base. Matt Gaetz, who nearly caused a government shutdown just two weeks ago before re-focusing his efforts on removing then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, first won his deep-red seat with just 36% of the vote in a crowded, low-turnout summer GOP primary. Almost two-thirds of Republican voters wanted someone else. A shift to RCV primaries would flip the incentives for politicians like Gaetz. With RCV, candidates need the support of a majority of voters to win, something that's difficult to do by just pandering (and governing) to the extremes. Gov. Glenn Youngkin -- a conservative able to appeal to moderate voters -- won this way when Virginia's Republican primaries switched to RCV in 2021. [bold added]As I have stated before, I have a generally positive view of RCV, but have not considered it enough to give a definite opinion for or against it. But let me hand it to the authors for using the antics of the kind of idiots it would get rid of in the short term to make a case for it. The biggest reservation about RCV that comes to my mind is that, like term limits, it strikes me as a kind of band-aid solution for a deeper problem that could even backfire: Namely, too many American voters do not truly appreciate limited government. Indeed, most voters are not just ignorant, but have been dulled by decades of welfare statism and pressure group warfare to the point that they basically sell their votes at election time. The end result might be that, yes, the Matt Gaetzes and Rashida Tlaibs get eliminated from Congress, but eventually get replaced by smoother operators who can nonconfrontationally pass very bad legislation that "everybody" likes. Consider this thought experiment: Imagine George Washington winning a modern election -- or Glenn Youngkin winning one during revolutionary times -- even with RCV. I can't, because the electorate has changed so much. Gridlock is not necessarily a bad thing, and the ease of achieving it, such as by Checks and Balances, was built into our system of government by the Founders for good reason. As much as I detest most politicians these days, they do at least get in each other's way. That alone tempers any enthusiasm I currently feel for RCV. -- CAVLink to Original

Ever since I stumbled across Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch a couple of decades ago, I've been a fan of Mike Rowe, whose narration career runs strong even as he has branched out. Rowe now runs a foundation to promote education in skilled trades that don't typically require a college education, and he founded a whiskey distillery named after his grandfather, among other things. The last fact I learned from Salena Zito's piece on Rowe that appears in the Washington Examiner. It was interesting to learn that the man who has done more than anyone else I can think of to help us gain an appreciation -- if not outright affection -- for ordinary work experienced aimlessness himself at one point:Image by Reason TV, via Wikimedia Commons, license.Rowe's foray into our living rooms began when his mother called him one day and said only what a mother can say to a grown son when they know there is more purpose to him other than freelancing his way through life. She said, "Gee wouldn't it be great if before your grandfather died, he turned on the TV and saw you doing something that looked like work." Within 24 hours, he was trying to fix a sewer in San Francisco, covered in human feces, and after a lot of hard selling, few people at the time were looking for a show that was a love letter to hard work. Nonetheless, it soon became the basis of his hit show Dirty Jobs, which spent nine years filling a void no one knew was missing in American culture: a love and respect for honest hard work. It was a project Discovery wasn't really married to, sort of a one-off. They had only ordered three episodes, and Rowe had no expectation they would take it any further, and then something remarkable happened: The pilot episode attracted thousands of letters from viewers who loved it.Zito calls Rowe the unofficial working man's evangelist after telling his story so far, and while that is apt, it doesn't quite go far enough. I would describe Rowe as an adventurer. There is something about Rowe's start that makes perfect sense to me: Perhaps his mother's nudge helped him realize he had stagnated or was missing something. Whatever the case, he explored the world a bit before he really got going, with those Dirty Job pilots reminding me of a vastly accelerated and wider-ranging, yet condensed, "wrong job" experiment. It is impossible to spend any time around Mike Rowe, even at a distance, without ending up an adventure of one kind or another. Perhaps this is the greatest lesson he teaches -- to become able to see the wonders all around us at the small price of taking the time to appreciate them as such. -- CAVLink to Original

Answering a series of questions from a thoughtful student, criminologist Stanford Samenow considers the question of whether solitary confinement should exist within the prison system. I found his discussion enlightening both for its explanation of what such a measure should accomplish and for his acknowledgment of past abuses and popular stereotypes about it:Image by Édouard Hue, via Wikimedia Commons, license.Security is the first consideration in running a humane prison. As many have said, people are sentenced to prison as punishment for their crimes; they are not sent to prison to be "punished" by other inmates who bully, psychologically torture them, rape them, and assault them. If there is an effective method to protect inmates doing their time from being injured or killed, then solitary confinement would not be needed. If one looks at the reality of who the criminal is and the formidable task of what it takes to operate a secure correctional facility, solitary confinement or something close to it is likely to be needed as one method of prisoner management for security. Solitary confinement has had an ugly history. In the past, inmates who incurred the wrath of prison employees for disobeying a direct order could be arbitrarily remanded to the "hole." Clearly, such a capricious use of isolation is not only an overreaction but also a violation of individual rights. In many institutions, inmates in solitary confinement are provided a clear path by which they can earn their way out and rejoin the general population. [bold added]Ultimately, it would seem that prisons need solitary for the same reason general society needs prisons, which Ayn Rand once well explained:All actions defined as criminal in a free society are actions involving force -- and only such actions are answered by force. Do not be misled by sloppy expressions such as "A murderer commits a crime against society." It is not society that a murderer murders, but an individual man. It is not a social right that he breaks, but an individual right. He is not punished for hurting a collective -- he has not hurt a whole collective -- he has hurt one man. If a criminal robs ten men -- it is still not "society" that he has robbed, but ten individuals. There are no "crimes against society" -- all crimes are committed against specific men, against individuals. And it is precisely the duty of a proper social system and of a proper government to protect an individual against criminal attack -- against force. [bold added]Considered in this way, it is easy to realize that ill-informed crusades against solitary in the name of treating criminals humanely can easily end up accomplishing the opposite of their alleged goals: making prison "cruel and unusual" for anyone having to cross paths with a prisoner who poses a threat to anyone around him. -- CAVLink to Original

If there has been a silver lining to the Covid-19 @#$%-storm, it has been the opportunity to test-run work-from-home presented by entire offices adopting stay-at-home measures, be it because employers saw actual merit to them or were wrongly forced to adopt them. To be fair, the audition for work-from-home was flawed, given that so many who had children were conscripted to provide child care at the same time. Nevertheless, the fact that so many balk at blindly returning to the way things were shows that the advantages -- at least to office workers -- were evident anyway. With many offices calling their workers back in, the popular press has produced articles about some of the benefits people are losing when they return. One such article appeared recently in USA Today, which proposes that office work costs employees more money than working from home:The report found that employees working at the office pay about $51 a day on the following expenses: $14 (Commute), $8 (Parking), $13 (Breakfast/coffee), [and] $16 (Lunch) [format changed from bulleted list]Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images, via Pixabay, license.This fan of work-from-home calls shenanigans on this assertion. First of all, over half of the added dollar cost is for food, which most of us can easily reduce by, say, eating an early breakfast at home or on the way, and brown-bagging lunch on most days. (If you protest But Gus, it takes time and planning to do that! Isn't that a cost?, I applaud you, but also note that I am not done.) Second, let me point out a common mistake: yielding to the temptation to be lazy by considering only dollar costs. You would have eaten breakfast and lunch anyway, so regarding these as "added" expenses inherent in office work is silly. This doesn't mean it's wrong to point out that commuting makes meals more expensive: It does, but relying on the fact that lots of people will order food and forget that they would have eaten meals anyway isn't the way to begin to understand the costs. It is far more accurate to say that commuting incurs an additional dollar cost for anyone who orders out and an additional time cost for anyone who doesn't. So this dollar cost analysis, although thought-provoking, is almost too easy to demolish. It furthermore lends itself to another common fallacy: context-dropping. The first clue comes from the article itself, which notes a few other non-monetary expenses:From getting stuck in traffic and the extra effort put into getting dressed, many employees would much rather clock in from home. ... The report also states that 49% of workers feel it's easier to maintain a work-life balance with a remote job while 31% believe it's easier with a hybrid and only 20% at the office. ... ...46% of employees find it easier to build colleague relationships when working from home...So the article does acknowledge in passing that non-monetary costs are also an issue. It even offers a comeback on behalf of worker bees for a common managerial rationale for going back in. So... good, right? We're acknowledging that money isn't the only thing we forgo to work in the office and we acknowledge that our bosses have a stake. Not really. The piece reminded me of a post I read at The Endeavour years ago, in which John D. Cook noted of some two-income couples that sometimes, one of them was basically working ... so he or she could work:Some people need to work because they work. A family may find that their second income is going entirely to expenses that would go away if one person stayed home.If you think that sounds bad, consider the fact that somebody is wasting entire days to achieve zero financial gain. Got you again! Cook's point is completely valid if the entire reason for the second income is financial: That would be an obscene waste. But what if it isn't? What if the spouse is a former career woman who took out time to raise kids and needs to get back up to speed or develop skills she missed out on during that time in order to pick back up again? Or suppose this is the best way to start making contacts in a new city? A zero net gain or a loss might simply be the necessary price of admission to better things down the road. Every individual owes it to himself to know why he is working in order to make a rational calculation of the benefits or harms of taking or staying in a particular work situation. Focusing on monetary costs might seem like due diligence, but it can easily miss the whole picture, as can looking too much at disembodied statistics. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Arthur C. Clarke is known for having once said that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A case in point might be an unmaintained home automation system simulating a haunted house:I was called to an elderly lady's home to "un-haunt" the building. See, her husband had recently passed away; he done "all of the cool things" to make the home smart. Unfortunately too smart. The wife could not operate the devices in her own home. She had the tenacity to handle living in a dark house. All the time; she just gave up on the lights -- she couldn't figure it out and lived like this for an entire year. She finally called for help when lights started randomly turning on and off. She believed it was the spirit of her late husband, but after some diagnostics, we found some cross-channel noise from a home further down the block. Whenever this neighbor would come home, he would turn on his lights via his home automation. About 75% of the time, it would turn on our lady's lights too. In her bedroom. And the neighbor worked 3rd shift. I spend the next two days removing all home automation devices and, as she put it, putting in "turn the light on and off again" switches.Of course, from the standpoint of people being used to technology doing things like this, few people really think this is magic: Even the widow from the story above eventually called someone in to help, and was probably not worried about her lights coming on randomly after lower-tech light switches had been reinstalled. 2. In keeping with my "lag and leap" approach to new technology, I have steered clear of home automation so far, but that doesn't mean I am oblivious to it -- which is how I encountered the above anecdote. That said, it is easy to see how one can throw one's hands up from the whole idea and run away pretty early into the entertaining and thought-provoking essay on the subject titled, "The Midwit Home: Less Automation and Less Agony." I love this essay and can't wait to use some of the advice once we're in our new place. Why? Because the author clearly understands the big problems and annoyances that exist in the current state of the market in home automation and suggests things one can do NOW -- with well-tested technology that is easy to use and won't turn into a piece of expensive trash if a business goes under, its manufacturer deems it "obsolete," or a subscription lapses. His example is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the following is a good sample of what you'll get:Say you have Clapper-activated lights in your bedroom, but you do a lot of sleep-clapping. Well, you can plug the lights into a Clapper, and the Clapper into an outlet timer. That's basically an AND gate.I like the way the author thinks: There can be a happy medium between the hassle (when it really is one) of using the light switch or going with trendy ephemeral tech that spies on you, makes you pay to do simple things, and doesn't work with other things you own. 3. When accounting for how long something takes, it can be helpful to have a set of ready analogies. That's what you get from a post at Technical on the "soft orders of magnitude" that computer tasks can take: The task completes instantly. There is a short pause, maybe 1-2 seconds, but then it's done. There is a long pause, maybe 3-20 seconds, that you have to wait. Time to check your email / messages / notifications while you wait. Time to refill your water. Time to work on something else for a bit. Long enough to go to lunch. Long enough to go home for the day. Long enough to go home for the weekend. (I've never worked on anything with a task this long, thankfully.) The last one reminds me of such a task back in grad school. For part of the data analysis for my thesis project, we relied on code from a collaborator. Naturally, right as I was in the thick of writing my thesis -- and getting married! -- we learned that there was a bug, and I'd have to re-do that analysis for every single experiment I'd done. Fortunately, I'd automated such tasks so that it was a simple matter of replacing the call to his old code with a call to his new code and writing a script to do this for all the data. I figured this would take about two weeks, so I started the ball rolling, got married and went on our honeymoon, and then came back and picked up where I left off, but with my data correctly analyzed. 4. I haven't thought through this obligations-as-different-kinds-of-balls analogy, but it strikes me as clever:Image by Yi Liu, via Unsplash, license.My life has glass balls, plastic balls, and bouncy balls. Glass balls can't be dropped or they'll shatter -- but there aren't very many of them, it turns out. Plastic balls can be dropped, but once you miss them, they are dropped -- you have to bend over and put in effort to pick them up again. Bouncy balls, on the other hand ... not only will they survive being dropped, but they'll pop right back up for me to handle tomorrow. The friend texting to see if I want coffee? The museum exhibit I had plans to visit today, but that's still in town for another month? The laundry sitting in my hamper? If I ignore them too long they might stop bouncing and become a dropped ball. But I'll get several chances at them before we hit that point. A lot of things in life are bouncy balls, it turns out.I am inclined to think it can be useful for short- to medium-term planning. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing about the old internet quiz he recently retired, Justin Searls of "Searls-Briggs Type Indicator®" fame analyzed the statistics that years of leaving his "workplace horoscope" questionnaire online yielded. Aside from being an amusing read, his "16 Things You Believe About Software" is also a distillation of the conventional wisdom of a more thoughtful than average cohort. My favorite points to ponder were the second and eighth points, which are Don't hold back details, show us the big picture and Aggressive deadlines won't get it done faster, respectively. I'll admit feeling vindicated by seeing my own opinion being held by a group of professionals I respect, but these points are worth thinking about. And they're related, as can best be seen in Searls's comments on deadlines:Great for goading animals, poor for inspiring humans. (Image by the U.S. National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)Before we founded Test Double, I read Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt. It's a brisk read, but -- and I mean this as high praise -- by 2023 most of its points have become well-trodden, familiar territory. One phrase Andy used when summarizing how creative thinking is blunted by the human stress response wedged itself permanently in my brain: "pressure kills cognition." I empathize with the project managers tasked with completing software projects within a given time constraint. First, Fred Brooks quipped in the 70s that, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Now, a growing body of research shows the most surefire way to doom a project is to put undue pressure on the people you already do have. Once things start going sideways, there are only so many knobs to turn and, try as you might, you can't push on a rope. [links omitted, emphasis in original]My only quibble here is that Searls could have stood to add undue to pressure kills cognition: If something really does need to be done by a given time, it really needs to be done by then, and one can think of that as part of its specification. Having to work quickly will always be a challenge, but having a solid reason for being in a hurry is a whole different animal than being put on a short timeline for no apparent reason at all. I'm not just in the programmers' amen corner here: A couple of recent experiences with ridiculous deadlines have really made me think about how I can push back the next time I find someone jerking me around this way. Just off the top of my head, the deadlines: caused the quality of my work to suffer, set priorities I didn't agree with (for what turned out to be very good reasons), caused me unnecessary stress about the work and annoyance with the person's arbitrary or unexplained constraints on my time, and ended up costing me time compared with how I would have proceeded left to my own devices. What would I do differently in the future? In essence, it would be to push back against the deadline, or at least get the person setting it to explain what the big hurry is. If there is a good reason, I can bake it in to my thinking. If not, that problem is out in the open, and less likely to reflect badly on me. In fact, in the latter case, there might be space to say I told you so, should the arbitrary hit the fan. -- CAVLink to Original

Self-described "progressive Democrat" Lanny Davis notes a curious refusal to face facts on the part of his compatriots concerning the war in Israel:I spent the weekend and most of Monday engaging in back-and-forth with fellow progressive Democrats who were trying to change the subject on the clear black-and-white facts about Hamas' terrorist war against Israel. I kept reminding them of four indisputable facts. [italics in original]These facts are as follows, and will likely sound familiar to many of those of us who do not call ourselves "progressive." (Note that while each fact listed is directly quoted from Davis, I don't lead with his first sentence on Fact 2, because the idea of a "two-state solution" obscures the essential problem.)This picture -- of the same kind of atrocity by the same butchers -- is over a decade old. Hamas already deserved more then than it's about to get now. (Image by Edi Israel, via Wikimedia Commons, license.) Hamas openly declares it hates Jews. Hamas denies Israel's right to exist. Hamas doesn't care about ... the well-being ... of Gazans. Hamas is and continues to be a terrorist organization -- which meets the universal definition as dedicated to intentionally murdering civilians for political purposes. Davis does a good job support each point with historical data. All of these facts fly in the face of very common excuses for allowing these barbaric theocrats to govern Gaza, and, while I wish it did not take recent events to cause more people to face these facts, I am glad to see that some have learned them and are calling out anyone trying to pretend otherwise. -- CAVLink to Original

As expected, conspiracy nut RFK, Jr. declared himself an independent candidate yesterday. Naturally, the leftist media are fretting about whether the Democrat scion will harm Biden more than he will Trump:When Kennedy announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination in April, he immediately put up surprisingly strong polling numbers. In early summer some surveys showed that he had the support of 20% of Democratic voters, and recently he's been averaging around 15% support. He's never gotten close to President Joe Biden, who has averaged over 60% support in polls throughout the year, but Kennedy's numbers have been high enough to raise questions of whether the president has some vulnerability among the Democratic electorate. [bold added]This report and several like it reach a similar conclusion to mine: RFK, Jr. will also siphon off nutters and other less intellectually fastidious types who vote Republican. It is interesting to compare this with media coverage, left and right, of Biden's non-incumbent counterpart in the GOP, who still has to win his party's nomination. Granted, this is a little different than the normally two-man race for the Presidency, but even with Trump basically owning much of his party's apparatus, he's under multiple indictments and has soft support outside his personality cult. And yet you constantly see headlines touting his huge (current and very early) lead in polling -- in outlets that arguably want Trump to be the GOP candidate because (a) they're partisan left and see him as Biden's best hope or (b) are Trumpists hoping to ramrod his candidacy through before anyone has a chance to think very much. But even people on the right not wedded to Trump do this. A couple of examples: Hot Air recently put out a post titled "Next GOP Debate Moving Forward for Some Reason." And then, with Nikki Haley winning both GOP debates and polling around 20% in New Hampshire, we get this, from a column crediting Haley with doing all the right things to position herself as a Trump alternative:Most voters as of today. (Image by Shane, via Unsplash, license.)The bad news for Haley is that the anyone-but-Trump voters are not the majority for the GOP right now. The former president is clearly the runaway favorite for base voters and not just in the polls. When I talk to the Georgia Republicans most likely to vote in the 2024 primary, the energy and the issues and the sheer momentum are pure MAGA. They're with Trump. But the good news for Haley is that if Republicans ever do need a Plan B, she's doing everything right to be the ripcord GOP voters can pull if Trump's campaign ever seems headed for a free fall. And with Trump, the bottom of the barrel never seems far away. [bold added]"Anyone but Trump" voters don't have to be the majority, and in early stages, ignorance of alternatives is any alternative's biggest obstacle. Many voters receptive to Trump, but wary of his poor electoral record and weary of his pugilism, would be very easy for someone like Haley to win over. It's early days, yes, but if Biden is weak because someone out of left field draws 20% of the vote away from him, what does that say about Trump? -- CAVLink to Original

It was by glancing at a blog feed in the wee hours of Sunday morning that I first learned of the barbaric -- but utterly predictable -- terrorist onslaught going on in Israel. By now, I have no need to catalog the sheer brutality. Perhaps, to aid the American imagination, it is worth noting that our population is thirty five times that of Israel: To get a numerical feel for the severity of the attack, multiply any figure by 100, then divide by three, for an approximation, as our population is about 35 times that of Israel. I highly recommend Yaron Brook's comments on the breaking news, which I linked above and embed below. Brook follows up with a lengthier podcast, which I plan to listen to today while on errands. Daniel Pipes correctly calls the crisis "Israel's Opportunity to Destroy Hamas" in an editorial so titled in the Wall Street Journal in which he notes that many (if not most) Palestinians in Gaza might be receptive to renewed Israeli occupation:[M]ost Gazans loathe Hamas, but they dare not rise up against their power-hungry oppressors, who enjoy support from Iran. What about Israel? It has the motive and the means to end Hamas rule, but its security establishment has preferred that Hamas, for all its horrors and threats, stay in power rather than have the Israel Defense Forces move back into Gaza (from which they withdrew in 2005) and run the territory again. For one sign of Israel's acquiescence to Hamas rule, note that it permits and even encourages the government of Qatar to send Hamas $30 million a month. ... Once Gaza has been secured, Israel would find a great number of its inhabitants ready to start over and build productive lives rather than focus endlessly and hopelessly on the destruction of Israel. Gaza could aspire to become the "Singapore of the Middle East" of which optimists dreamed decades ago. None of this can happen as long as Iran's medieval-minded agents run the enclave.Israel can and -- for reasons Brook lays out that I fully agree with -- should take over Gaza, root out the entire terrorist infrastructure, and in the same manner the United States did in Japan after World War II, pacify it. The fact that Israel has not only tolerated Hamas being in power and receiving foreign aid, but also supplies electricity and water to Gaza (!) makes me pessimistic about the country taking this course of action. And listening to Brook -- who is from Israel and knows far more about the situation and the context leading up to it than I -- has unfortunately led me to become even more pessimistic about it doing so. -- CAV Link to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Image by the United States Department of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Editor's Note: I have long had 'Consider taking Columbus Day off' in my calendar ahead of October, both in homage to my father and as an option for celebrating my birthday, with which it sometimes coincides. Often Most years Practically every year, though, something comes up and causes me to scuttle the plan, so much so that the whole idea has become something of a running joke to me, and I chuckle when it shows up on my calendar. Well, this year is ... different: Between moving preparations and a minor surgical procedure whose recovery is going to lay me out for a couple of days, I find that I am all but compelled to use the entire week before Columbus Day for recovery and catching up -- on anything not involving heavy lifting. (What a time for that!) So: Between a period of enforced, unwanted idleness and having to catch up on a crap-ton of unusual obligations, I'm going to disappear from here for about a week. I expect to return by the eleventh (the Monday after next), but I might need another day or two. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy today's post and, of course, I wish you a happy Columbus Day! *** 1. After we move, we will be using the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway quite a bit. Naturally, I wondered if there might be an easy way to get alerted to traffic problems. There is, thanks to a web page dedicated to the bridge, whose about section drew me like a moth to a flame -- although the fact sheets are more important, especially during the October to March "fog season" on the lake. Missing from my quick scan of all this is the status of the bridge as the longest continuous span over water in the world. 2. Some time back, I learned that coffee lovers in Japan have an option we don't have in America: canned coffee that is warm and actually tastes good:The year was 1969. Tadao Ueshima was at the train station. In the sweltering heat of the Japanese summer he got himself a bottle of cold "coffee milk" (コーヒー牛乳) from the station's convenience store, figuring he had a few minutes till the train left. In those days you would buy your drink, drink it on the spot, and return the bottle. As luck would have it, he mistimed his coffee and his train started to pull out of the station. He hurriedly returned his half-finished bottle and ran to his train. Now, Tadao had somewhat of a reputation as a frugal man. He hated seeing things go to waste. And he couldn't shake off the frustration of the coffee. "If only there was a way I could buy and carry my coffee with me ... " he reasoned. Fate couldn't have chosen a better person for this encounter. Tadao Ueshima was the CEO of UCC Coffee, which sold coffee and tea in bulk to restaurants. He assembled a team at UCC and gave them an impossible mission: to create a coffee he could buy and walk away with.It is fascinating to read about the innovations -- among them: stopping milk separating from coffee in the cans, heated vending machines, heating the coffee without ruining it -- but the story has additional funky bonuses, like Tommy Lee Jones playing an alien in commercials for Coca Cola's brand. 3. In the New Yorker is a fascinating and inspiring story of an engineer who blew the whistle on himself when he realized that the prestigious new skyscraper he had designed could blow over under certain storm conditions:On the island, [William J.] LeMessurier considered his options. Silence was one of them; only Davenport knew the full implications of what he had found, and he would not disclose them on his own. Suicide was another; if LeMessurier drove along the Maine Turnpike at a hundred miles an hour and steered into a bridge abutment, that would be that. But keeping silent required betting other people's lives against the odds, while suicide struck him as a coward's way out and -- although he was passionate about nineteenth-century classical music -- unconvincingly melodramatic. What seized him an instant later was entirely convincing, because it was so unexpected -- an almost giddy sense of power. "I had information that nobody else in the world had," LeMessurier recalls. "I had power in my hands to effect extraordinary events that only I could initiate. I mean, sixteen years to failure -- that was very simple, very clear-cut. I almost said, 'Thank you, dear Lord, for making this problem so sharply defined that there's no choice to make.'"From such a low point, LeMessurier reacts heroically, and the story of how he and the team he assembled prevented catastrophe makes a gripping read. 4. Regulars here will know that I keep an eye out for news in the effort to deal with multiple sclerosis. Not long ago a study offered long-range hope for eradication when it appeared that researchers had found its leading cause. But what about now? And what if those results are wrong, or a practical vaccine can't be developed? There may be hope for treatment in the form of an "inverse vaccine:"The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with "do not attack" flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen -- a molecule being attacked by the immune system -- with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease. "In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity," said Jeffrey Hubbell, the Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the new paper. "But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context." [link omitted]This is exciting news, and not just for those suffering from MS. -- CAVLink to Original

Image by Arthur Rackham, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.As of this morning the poll at Drudge Report shows four double-digit performers in the second Republican debate. Currently, they clock in at Haley (35%), Ramaswamy (20%), DeSantis (19%), and Christie (16%). (Pence, whom I said didn't have a base and called "Trump-limited," finished dead last at 2%.) I called the race after the first (in which Ramaswamy and Haley's numbers were reversed) a sprint for Ramaswamy and a marathon for Haley. One headline characterized the debate as "trading insults," and partisan media, left and right, have hastily written it off as irrelevant, charging that, with Trump leading Biden in the latest polling, that the "electability argument" has evaporated, and that with Trump leading among Republicans that his coronation -- like Hilary Clinton's in 2016? -- is inevitable. Balderdash! I submit that, since Haley polls best against Biden, there might be some wishful thinking behind any leftist outlet proclaiming that Haley can't hang her hat on electability, and double for any Trumpist saying this. Anyone else is likely being lazy or giving up too soon. As for Trump's supposedly insurmountable primary lead, that's rich after the way polling largely missed Trump's win way back in 2016 -- and probably also wishful thinking. Leftists know that Trump is Biden's best bet to get reelected. And Trumpists? The fact that they're frontloading winner-take-all primaries shows that they fear an electorate taking any time to think through its options. Seriously. Where's the fire? If Trump is so ace, why hurry? And why not show up for the debates? If Trump is the Only Man Who Can Save America, what has he to fear from some piker being "unfair" to him at a debate? Continuing with what's actually going on: The first state primary/caucus isn't until January. In the meantime, polling in early states shows that while, yes, majorities give Trump as the answer to the "if the election were held today" question, most of these people aren't political junkies or Trump cultists. More to the point, over three quarters of Republicans are considering someone other than Trump:In both states, most voters are still considering multiple candidates. In fact, just a fifth in Iowa and about a quarter in New Hampshire are considering Trump and nobody else, making his support "floor" a bit lower in these early states than it looks nationwide. Most of Trump's backers are considering at least one other candidate, and these voters are more likely to say they're supporting him "with some reservations" than Trump-and-only-Trump voters are. And in both states, only-Trump voters are outnumbered by the third of the electorate who aren't considering him at all.It's not quite early days, but there is ample time for Haley to continue building momentum and for Trump to make an ass of himself, even without showing up for the debates. I remain cautiously optimistic that Haley can win. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at Hot Air is speculation about a possible third-party run for the Presidency by RFK, Jr. Naturally, it is difficult to read without being splashed due to the resident Trumpites drooling at the prospect. Early polling indicates that the kooky Kennedy will draw more votes from the Democrats than he will from the Republicans:Image by Maxlovestoswim, via Wikimedia Commons, license.If the Democrats and Republicans nominate Biden and Trump respectively, and Kennedy runs as an independent, 33 percent of Democratic voters would "likely" vote for him according to the poll, including 14 percent who would be "very likely" to back him. Among likely voters as a whole, 25 percent said they would likely vote for Kennedy if he runs against Biden and Trump, including 14 percent of Republicans, with 10 percent saying they are "very likely" to cast their ballots this way.It's early days, and I can see those numbers going either way. RFK, Jr.'s numbers may be as high as they are simply because (a) he has name recognition that is favorable, deservedly or not; and (b) he looks at first like a ready solution to anyone concerned about the age of the next President. Either party could instantly fix that problem by nominating a younger candidate. (I have seen speculation that the Democrats could well throw Biden under the bus at the last minute, much as they did Robert Torricelli ahead of New Jersey's 2002 Senate election.) But if we do end up with Trump-Biden, I can't imagine partisans not panicking and closing ranks behind their respective albatrosses. Democrats viscerally hate Trump, and which Republicans does Kennedy appeal to, anyway? I can think of two sets: (1) anti-vax kooks, who are all basically Trumpists, anyway; and (2) anti-Trump Republicans looking to cast a protest vote, some of whom might have second thoughts. How much of the independent vote he'd get really depends on how off-putting most people find his views on vaccines after those become more well-known to more people. I am afraid to even try guessing an answer to that. The ultimate outcome of a Trump-Biden-Kennedy race is anyone's guess, in my opinion: Trump and Biden are both so awful that almost anyone would look good by comparison: I can imagine Kennedy winning. More interesting to me are the ramifications of two scenarios, only one of which is mentioned (and only in passing at that): how he would affect a race that included a No Labels candidate; and how he would affect a race that included a non-Trump Republican. I think No Labels would effectively eliminate RFK Jr. as a viable candidate because there would then be a young and sane alternative who could win. Indeed, by draining kooks from each of the major parties, RFK Jr. could perhaps improve the chance of No Labels winning. (Earth to No Labels!) What I worry about is his effect on, say, a Biden-Haley race. I could see disgruntled Trumpists/anti-vax Republicans voting for RFK Jr. instead of the Republican, handing the Presidency back to the Democrats, whether Biden or a last-minute substitute is running. As it stands, I am inclined to hope the Democrats placate RFK, Jr. enough in some way that he doesn't do his third-party end-run at all. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at Ask a Manager, a reader with a vicious coworker ("Cassandra") writes in. Since she's in a small town, it is impossible to avoid the coworker socially, and she is tired of forgoing certain activities simply so she doesn't have to deal with Cassandra. The situation reminded me a little of one I faced shortly after college, so the answer interested me. Here's the main point:Image by Artur Solarz, via Unsplash, license.[T]here are professionally appropriate ways to indicate you don't want to engage socially with someone. You can be chilly to Cassandra as long as you're not rude, and you can excuse yourself from conversations with her right away. I recommend Miss Manners' map of the varying degrees of chilliness to employ with someone you loathe -- which goes from Slightly Cool ("your mouth turns up when you have to say hello to her, but your eyes do not participate in the smile") to Cold ("all the formalities, but no smile -- you do not have a personal grievance against him; you are merely treating him as the sort of person you do not want to know") to Freeze ("you do not greet him, you do not acknowledge his presence, and if he approaches you, you turn away"). Freeze is too much for a coworker; I recommend Slightly Cool. (If you prefer Cold, I'd only caution you to factor in how it will look to those around you, which matters more than what Cassandra thinks.) Frankly, there's real power in being meticulously professional, and it's more likely to throw her off whatever game she's playing than getting down in the mud with her will do. [bold added]The power here lies precisely in the fact that Cassandra is functioning in an entirely second-handed way: All the normal ways of being chilly are to communicate moral disapproval for an audience, which includes the recipient. Here, the recipient's past actions indicate that she does not care about the moral disapproval, beyond its potential to provoke a response she can use to play the victim to others -- potentially preempting or overwhelming whatever message of disapproval one would want to convey to the others. The power in the "professional" response is that it provides no buttons to push, and it is perfectly appropriate since Cassandra is a coworker. She would be frustrated (if not defeated) by the very boundary she started out violating. Would that advice have helped a younger "me?" I am not so sure: I was quite socially awkward then, and I had not been exposed to professional norms very much. Perhaps with more of an explanation about those (which can be found by searching the site, or absorbed by following it for a time), it might have sunk in. This is hardly the first time I have wished Ask a Manager had been around quite some time earlier! I'll happily risk sounding like a broken record and recommend her site to anyone who might be nonplussed by a workplace issue, or simply wants to become more effective on the job. -- CAVLink to Original

Last week, I wrote:[Nikki] Haley does best against Biden in polling of any Republican in the field now, and there is no doubt that if Trump ends up in jail, or is declared to be disqualified from office, she would have a decent chance of winning the GOP primary. She is ready, if things break her way, and more people paying attention might constitute breaking her way in this election. [bold added]This scenario, which I already viewed as unlikely to occur, but the best shot of the Republicans nominating a decent alternative to Joe Biden, appears to be even less likely than I thought. This is because Trump's disciples within the GOP have been pushing for earlier, winner-takes-all primaries:Used car salesmen like to rush things, too. (Image by Parker Gibbs, via Unsplash, license.)The former president's aides have sculpted rules in dozens of states, starting even before his 2020 reelection bid. Their work is ongoing: In addition to California, state Republican parties in Nevada and Michigan have recently overhauled their rules in ways clearly designed to favor Trump. ... The Trump campaign succeeded in changing the rules "in part because they knew what they were doing and in part because everyone else is asleep at the switch," Ginsberg added. ... The Trump campaign's rule changes have focused on ensuring he benefits from how all-important delegates are awarded after each state caucus or primary. ... [T]he work started in earnest years ago -- changes were made in 30 states and territories in 2019, according to Josh Putnam, a political scientist who focuses on the presidential nomination process and runs FrontloadingHQ. Among the rules changes were switching from proportional delegate allocation, where multiple candidates can win delegates in a state, to winner-take-all. In some states, delegates are also being awarded based on the outcome of party-run caucuses among GOP activists, many of whom remain loyal to Trump, rather than official state primary elections.Perhaps because the rules are obscure and vary from state to state, the article is unclear about how much this tilts the scales in favor of Trump, but it does note that the strategy could backfire if Trump falters enough early in the race. It would appear, then, that in addition to a smaller field of competitors to Trump, narrowing it down quickly will be necessary. It is a shame that the Republicans have allowed a power-hungry liability like Trump to cause it to have to choose a candidate quickly, rather than deliberately. -- CAVLink to Original