Gus Van Horn blog

Over at the Atlantic, Yascha Mounk asks and observes: Why is it so difficult to get a new pair of glasses or contacts in [the United States]? It's easier pretty much everywhere else. The short answer is, unsurprisingly, the same as for why Americans used to be unable to buy hearing aids over the counter: regulation. Mounk goes through the gory details of that in his piece, but what really interested me, apart from his noting that it's easy and painless to buy glasses almost everywhere else, was the following case he pitches to end the farce:Image by Ovidiu Creanga, via Unsplash, license.Even in times of extreme polarization and a deeply broken Congress, this is one piece of sensible legislation that should be able to command bipartisan support. Republicans who believe in the free market should look on this red tape as an unnecessary intrusion on free enterprise. Democrats who care about the well-being of the socioeconomically disadvantaged -- and are worried about the health disparities between different ethnic groups -- should be outraged by the unreasonable burden the situation places on underprivileged Americans. Put Americans in charge of their own vision care, and abolish mandatory eye exams. [bold added]I will admit some pessimism here: On the evidence, I doubt partisans on either side actually care about what they say they care about. But then again, I laughed for a similar reason when I first learned of efforts to make OTC hearing aids a reality. Sometimes, small changes for the better can happen despite general momentum away from freedom, and we can always hope the right people learn the right lessons from their success: So here's hoping I'm wrong again! -- CAVLink to Original

Scrolling through Instapundit for the first time in quite a while this morning, I happened upon the following Glenn Reynolds post, which I quote in its entirety:THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A HOW-TO MANUAL: We Are Re-Paganizing. "A world that embraced infanticide would not necessarily look anything like Nazi Germany. It would probably look like ancient Rome. Or, indeed, twenty-first-century Canada." [formatting and link in original]Reynolds and other bloggers there occasionally mention Rand's works, including Return of the Primitive, and that often using the stock phrase we see above. In fact, the book clocks in at 68 hits according to Google. My memory serves me correctly that such references are used to pillory "the left," e.g., Ayn Rand's Return of the Primitive: a warning for the rest of us, a how-to guide for the left. This apparently includes even when the left manages to get an issue right, like abortion. While one can hope such references cause a few readers to pick up the book, the one above is both amusing and frustrating: Anyone aware that Ayn Rand supports a woman's right to an abortion will see the irony of using one of her works to imply that abortion is "primitive." But the irony hardly ends there: Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- the perspective from which she wrote that book and which enabled her to make so many of the "prophecies" conservatives tout when it suits them -- also leads to the conclusion that America's founding principles are secular and that religion is actually antithetical to our country's ideals and well-being. Her student, Leonard Peikoff argues this at length in "Religion vs. America," where he notes in part:Religion means orienting one's existence around faith, God, and a life of service -- and correspondingly of downgrading or condemning four key elements: reason, nature, the self, and man. Religion cannot be equated with values or morality or even philosophy as such; it represents a specific approach to philosophic issues, including a specific code of morality. What effect does this approach have on human life? We do not have to answer by theoretical deduction, because Western history has been a succession of religious and unreligious periods. The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of the United States.Regulars here know where this is heading. I recommend curious passers-by read -- or listen to -- the whole thing. The West has been shaped by two competing influences, Greco-Roman culture (which gave us the philosophy behind America's founding) and Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is the antithetical religious influence. "Re-paganizing" is a smear of abortion akin to smearing atheists as leftists, like Dennis Prager does both wrongly and as if it's a bodily function. Most conservatives know that Rand -- an atheist -- wasn't a leftist. Likewise, infanticide (as the linked article notes was practiced by the Romans en route to equating it to abortion) is wrong (and opposed by Ayn Rand for the same reason she supports abortion. But none of that stops the antiabortionists from using infanticide to tar abortion advocates or anyone else who doesn't take the Christian religion on faith, as "primitive" by citing Ayn Rand -- of all people! -- in cargo-cult fashion. If antiabortionists are happy to spout such ignorance or play it so loose with facts, why should we listen to them at all? -- CAVLink to Original

Within a Hot Air blog post about a couple of cash reparations proposals in California comes the following good news, in the form of excerpts from a report on polling by the Los Angeles Times:The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 59% of voters oppose cash payments compared with 28% who support the idea. The lack of support for cash reparations was resounding, with more than 4 in 10 voters "strongly" opposed. ... In the Berkeley poll, when voters who oppose reparations were asked why, the two main reasons cited most often were that "it's unfair to ask today's taxpayers to pay for wrongs committed in the past," picked by 60% of voters, and "it's not fair to single out one group for reparations when other racial and religious groups have been wronged in the past," chosen by 53%. Only 19% said their reason was that the proposal would cost the state too much, suggesting that money alone is not the main objection. [bold added]I grant that neither moral objection is exactly individualistic, but I would bet that that would be because of bad polling questions -- with the top two answers simply being as close as there was to a "right" answer for many participants. Curious about what Ayn Rand might have said about the subject, I found quite the rebuttal within her 1974 essay, "Moral Inflation," which includes the following:There is no such thing as a collective guilt. A country may be held responsible for the actions of its government and it may be guilty of an evil (such as starting a war) -- but then it is a public, not a private, matter and the entire country has to bear the burden of paying reparations for it. The notion of random individuals paying for the sins of an entire country, is an unspeakable modern atrocity. Image by Thure de Thulstrup , via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.This country has no guilt to atone for in regard to its black citizens. Certainly, slavery was an enormous evil. But a country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery, has atoned for it on such a scale that to talk about racial quotas in addition, is grotesque However, it is not for injustices committed by the government that the modern racists are demanding reparations, but for racial prejudice -- i.e., for the personal views of private citizens. How can an individual be held responsible for the views of others, whom he has no power to control, who may be his intellectual enemies, whose views may be the opposite of his own? What can make him responsible for them? The answer we hear is: The fact that his skin is of the same color as theirs. If this is not an obliteration of morality, of intellectual integrity, of individual rights, of the freedom of man's mind (and, incidentally, of the First Amendment), you take it from here; I can't -- it turns my stomach.It is easy to see how Rand's argument applies, despite (1) the different forms of the reparations -- violating the right to contract via quotas vs. violating property rights via wealth transfers; and (2) the current fashion of pleading "systemic" racism since individual racists are rare and (at least until recently) closeted. The first paragraph probably would not come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Ayn Rand, whom even many opponents would acknowledge as an individualist. But the second paragraph deserves wide circulation, starting with its acknowledgment of the Civil War as reparation enough, in the only meaning of the term that it can be proper to discuss. -- CAVLink to Original

NBC News reports that the party that spent the last presidential term swooning over Trump as supposedly some kind of natural Alinskyite has decided to borrow yet another page from the left's playbook: relabeling. Never mind that conservatives routinely make fun of the left for doing exactly this: They seem to think that they can go from making fun of, say, the "alphabet brigade" every time a new letter or symbol gets added to LGBT one moment -- to changing "pro-life" to some term-to-be-named-later for their anti-abortion crusade -- the next. And without anybody noticing:Image cropped from screenshot of the Center for Reproductive Rights, I believe this use to be protected under U.S. Copyright Law as Fair Use.Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the polling made it clear to him that more specificity is needed in talking about abortion. [(!) --ed] "Many voters think ['pro-life'] means you're for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and 'pro-choice' now can mean any number of things. So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they've shifted. So if you're going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific," Hawley said Thursday.Has Hawley seen a map of where abortions remain legal lately? (Blue, above.) The piece is mute on whether Hawley, who helped confirm anti-abortionist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, offered any more specifics as to what his own position on reproductive freedom might be, or which specific legal stand on abortion his party should stake out and clarify. Let me help. Either a fetus is a human being, and all abortion should be outlawed as murder, or it is not, and abortion should be treated under the law like any other medical procedure. I support the second position, but I could at least muster some respect for an opponent who would openly state and offer a rational justification for even the former position. But that is not the kind of "specificity" that surfaced in the Republicans' closed-door meeting:Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., summarized Wednesday's meeting as being focused on "pro-baby policies." Asked whether senators were encouraged to use a term other than "pro-life," Young said his "pro-baby" descriptor "was just a term of my creation to demonstrate my concern for babies."How insulting and infantilizing is that? At least leftists occasionally appear to have semi-plausible reasons for changing their sleazy terms. This, to use a term even Hawley might understand, is as subtle as a fart in church. The reason voters react differently to the term pro-life these days is because, with Roe overturned, there is now a real danger -- as seen in the numerous Republican states that have banned abortion since -- that a "pro-life" "pro-baby" (i.e., anti-abortion) politician will be able to do the same if elected. In other words, previously Republican-leaning voters, who used to feel safe ignoring the term "pro-life" now know they can't. Voters know this, and they'll still know it if and when anti-abortion Republicans -- too cowardly to state their actual aims openly and too sneaky to give up on them -- relabel themselves in the same way leftists relabeled "corporate responsibility" to ESG, or "global warming" to "climate crisis" not too long ago. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. A startup writes up its experiment with running a phone check at a convention. The description of the process made me smile. (Each step is elaborated upon within the post.):Image by Diana Polekhina, via Unsplash, license.You give us your phone, and we give you a claim ticket like any coat check.You get a "Replacement Phone" which is a notepad and pen.You get a "Phone Free" badge to wear around the party.When I first saw mention of this, I thought something like Pfft! I'm not on my phone all the time like some people. But then I realized that at things like conventions, I am, due to my very strong tendency towards introversion. The experiment seemed to go well for the participants: Based on that, I think I might try going phone-free with or without help the next time I attend something like that event. The phone, as a multipurpose device, has many uses and so, many misuses. There can be more than one good reason to do without one from time to time. 2. I sometimes have to run legacy software, and use virtual machines running decades-old operating systems to do so. I recently had to do enough on Windows 2000 that I realized I would want a decent text editor for it. I appreciated the ease of finding a version of Notepad++ that would run on Windows 2000 at OldVersion.com. The site's motto is "Because newer is not always better." That was certainly the case for me that day, when newer would have meant inoperable. 3. Having lived in Texas for as long as I did, I developed a taste for Shiner Bock beer, brewed west of Houston at the Spoetzl Brewery. Since we'll soon live in New Orleans and will occasionally visit Houston, I should finally be able to tour that brewery pretty easily. An interesting wrinkle will be that the brewers there are branching out into distilled spirits, according to a very recent piece at Inside Hook. While distilling operations are getting off the ground, the products will be confined to the tasting room at the brewery. 4. At Futurity is a piece describing a new tool which harnesses AI in the fight against robocalls. I love the approach, which sidesteps the potential to violate privacy that would come from monitoring private phone lines, and takes advantage of the fact that many scammers provide a callback number:Perhaps most importantly, the researchers were able to extract the phone numbers used in these scams. Robocallers often "spoof" the number they are calling from, making it impossible to tell where the call actually originated. However, scammers increasingly encourage the people receiving robocalls to call a specific phone number. This may be to resolve a (fictional) tech support issue, resolve a (fictional) tax problem, resolve a (fictional) issue with Social Security, and so on. "Scammers can fake where a robocall is coming from, but they can't fake the number they want their victims to call," Reaves says. "And about 45% of the robocalls we analyzed did include this 'call-back number' strategy. By extracting those call-back numbers, SnorCall gives regulators or law enforcement something to work with. They can determine which phone service providers issued those numbers and then identify who opened those accounts."The data is collected from thousands of phone lines dedicated to the purpose. -- CAVLink to Original

Starting with an amusing story about a sixty-year-old slacker who discovered the hard way that she was not untouchable, Suzanne Lucas provides a handy guide for "How to Fire Anyone Without Legal Repercussions." We've all heard of cases in which incompetent or lazy employees were kept on for far too long because management believed doing so would land them in legal trouble. Lucas clarifies what protected class actually means for those purposes and how to work within the law to remove deadwood:Image by ernestoeslava, via Pixabay, license.This term means that you can't terminate or punish someone because of their gender, race, gender identity, pregnancy status, disability status, or other protected characteristics... ... You can't terminate someone because they are White any more than you can terminate someone because they are Black. And even when people say, "But I'm in an at-will state!" that doesn't make much difference. First, every state but Montana is at-will. Second, at-will means you can terminate for any reason or no reason as long as that reason isn't illegal. Read that again. As long as that reason isn't illegal.It is good to know that, although the government is violating the freedom to contract through employment laws, the law is predictable and nowhere near as restrictive as one might believe. Lucas's advice boils down to the following steps: Don't be a racist/sexist/whateverist Document everything Use performance improvement plans and progressive discipline Be consistent Conduct neutral investigationsIt would seem that on balance, such laws make it harder, but not impossible to fire bad employees. While this is still not a point in their favor, it is good to know that they are less onerous than commonly believed. -- CAVLink to Original

Yesterday, Patrick Brown, a climate scientist whose work recently appeared in Nature, published a bombshell article in The Free Press about what he had to stoop to to get it published there, despite its scientific merit:I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn't close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus. So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world's most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.A bit later, we learn that Brown had, earlier in his career, tried to get more complete accounts of some of his other work published, only to find himself relegated to less-prestigious journals. The rest of the piece is a good description of how perverse incentives help distort reporting of climate science, thereby making it of less practical use and more suited to the anti-fossil fuel narrative. For example:Unlike your foot, information can get lost entirely or grossly mangled when one forces it to fit a narrative. (Image by Clément Bucco-Lechat, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers. For example, in another recent influential Nature paper, scientists calculated that the two largest climate change impacts on society are deaths related to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. However, the authors never mention that climate change is not the dominant driver for either one of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining, and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change. To acknowledge this would imply that the world has succeeded in some areas despite climate change -- which, the thinking goes, would undermine the motivation for emissions reductions. This leads to a second unspoken rule in writing a successful climate paper. The authors should ignore -- or at least downplay -- practical actions that can counter the impact of climate change. If deaths due to extreme heat are decreasing and crop yields are increasing, then it stands to reason that we can overcome some major negative effects of climate change. Shouldn't we then study how we have been able to achieve success so that we can facilitate more of it? Of course we should. But studying solutions rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public -- or the press. Besides, many mainstream climate scientists tend to view the whole prospect of, say, using technology to adapt to climate change as wrongheaded; addressing emissions is the right approach. So the savvy researcher knows to stay away from practical solutions. [italics and links in original, bold added]We thus have a scandalous, blow-by-blow account of how an important part of what energy expert Alex Epstein calls the knowledge system systematically distorts scientific information even at the earliest stages of transmission. All that is missing is a deeper explanation -- which Epstein indicates elsewhere, "Experts who are on the standard of 'lack of human impact' are unconcerned with the benefits of fossil fuels, including the climate mastery benefits." The powers that be at Nature and similar publications hold the wrong standard when evaluating what climate science results to publish. This last point indirectly comes up several times in Brown's piece, although it remains obvious that the kind of narrative scientists are having to shoehorn their work into is compromising how well it is understood and used. In addition to having made so many aware of what is going on, Brown deserves credit for the following call for culture change:The media, for instance, should stop accepting these papers at face value and do some digging on what's been left out. The editors of the prominent journals need to expand beyond a narrow focus that pushes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And the researchers themselves need to start standing up to editors, or find other places to publish. I am glad for Brown's sake he has already left academia. His uphill battle will not be easy, but there is some hope he can carry it on and that it will be a bearable burden. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing at The Hlll, Mark Mix warns of a bureaucratic rule change by Joe Biden's National Labor Relations Board that would have union goons making recruitment calls at the homes of American workers:[T]he NLRB, at the end of August, effectively mandated the "card check" unionization process by bureaucratic fiat. Never mind that numerous union-backed measures in Congress to require this abuse-prone unionization process have failed to pass into law. Card-check drives occur when employers, usually in the face of union-applied political and economic pressure, waive workers' right to a secret ballot election. During these drives, union officials are allowed to demand union authorization cards directly from workers using coercive tactics that would be unlawful during a secret ballot vote. [bold added]This is being done in part because nearly 60 percent of workers are not at all interested in joining the unions the President would foist on us. For good measure, Mix provides examples of what unions have stooped to in the past to avoid the secret votes that incessant propaganda would have you believe are slam dunks:It's for our own good, according to this guy. (Image by John Simmons, via Unsplash, license.)Union organizers can show up at workers' homes over and over again demanding signatures, in some instances requiring workers to call the police to get organizers to leave. Workers report being misled about the true implications of signing the cards, and some have been told they would be fired if they didn't sign just before the union successfully took over. Some workers even face threats of violence. In one SEIU organizing drive, a worker reported being told that the union would "come and get her children" and "slash her tires" if she didn't sign a union card. [bold added]The NLRB is the same agency Biden hopes to weaponize against contract work and the franchise business model. Aside from enforcing legal contracts and providing the legal infrastructure to adjudicate disputes, the government has no legitimate say in the daily operation of business. The NLRB shouldn't exist in the first place, but these blatant uses of it to directly violate our right to work on our own terms underscore the need to abolish it as soon as possible. -- CAVLink to Original

In the wake of Hurricane Idalia, there are reports of electric vehicles bursting into flames as a result of being flooded or otherwise exposed to salt water:Some electric vehicles in Florida are bursting into flames after coming into contact with saltwater. Residual saltwater particles left behind on flooded batteries and battery components can conduct electricity, resulting in short circuits and eventual fires. Safety officials are urging EV owners with vehicles that flooded to take action now as fires can ignite weeks after flooding.Among the actions-to-take? "[M]ove their EVs at least fifty feet away from any structure." (!) We didn't have much to worry about in our part of Florida this time, but I recall my EV-owning neighbor across the street having enough sense to evacuate for Ian last year -- by piling his family into a conventional SUV. (I stayed home, but evacuating was hardly a silly choice.) We're safe from most storm surges here, but imagine evacuating to safety -- only to drive home to the burnt-out hulk of your former home because your garage flooded a little bit with an EV inside. Conservative blog Hot Air asks:An EV, parked safely away from other flammable objects. (Image by George Sargiannidis, via Unsplash, license.)When Tesla, Ford, and everyone else were designing these vehicles, how did nobody anticipate this? Did it never occur to them that sometimes cars get wet? And if people live near the ocean, did anyone point out that they might be exposed to salt water, occasionally deep enough to come up to the wheel wells? ...This is an understandable question, but may or may not be a fair one. Why do I say this? Recall that conventional automobiles have been in widespread use and under development for over a century. Granted, some of the first were electric, but they lost in the marketplace early on. So conventional "ICE" (internal combustion engine) cars have had a century to develop and for everyone to become familiar with their merits and drawbacks. By contrast, electric vehicles are a new thing, and one cannot expect all the kinks to have been worked out in the same way as for regular cars, or for ordinary people to know how to react when things go wrong. It is commonplace for climate catastrophists to claim that they are following "the science" -- while also pretending that the wholesale transformation of our energy sector is all but trivial. After all, "Just Stop Oil" is the name of one catastrophist organization. But these actual (if small-scale) EV catastrophes demonstrate that it is anything but trivial to make such a change. Countless things that no one person can know or anticipate have to be factored in before a technology can become safe enough that we can use it without having to worry too much about it. Electric cars are clearly not ready for this kind of use, and it is wrong to attempt to force mass adoption ahead of (or contrary to) demand and the natural timing of the marketplace. And don't forget, it's not just cars that we're supposed to be able to just swap out overnight... -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At the blog of the Texas Institute for Property Rights, Brian Philips comments on the post-fire moratorium on property sales imposed by Hawaii's state governor:Undoubtedly, the moratorium will prevent some individuals from making rash decisions that they later regret. But that doesn't justify the governor's rights-violating proposal. Preventing some individuals from making bad decisions also prevents individuals from making good decisions. The governor's proposed moratorium prevents all individuals from acting as they deem best for their lives. The governor implies that individuals are too stupid to know what is best for themselves. [bold added]This is, as far as I know, the only answer to that awful policy. As such, it is illustrative of the power of thinking in terms of principles: When one remembers that the proper purpose of a government is to protect rights -- that is, the freedom of individuals to act on their own judgement -- the injury this moratorium does becomes obvious in a way it can't to people hyperfocused on preventing misfortunes on behalf of other people. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn argues that businesses should embrace a moral defense of capitalism because "governments tend to ignore logical and economic arguments because they are ideologically committed to" their various anti-freedom measures. Interestingly, her argument soon nicely shows why this is such a good idea:Calling out the government on these rights violations would be more powerful than trying to argue on logic and economics. [The moral argument could also be a basis for a legal case and merit support from Canadian Constitution Foundation to challenge the government in court]. Appealing to individual rights to defend the freedom of business to operate also makes a case for capitalism, a social system where the government's only role is to protect -- not to violate -- individual rights. As first recognized by Ayn Rand, individual rights are the central moral principle of capitalism, the only system where physical coercion, including fraud, is banned. [link omitted, bold added]In other words, taking up the moral cause moves one from defense to offense, and that is what we ultimately need to win against today's all-out, multidirectional assault on freedom. 3. The third post of this roundup continues our emerging theme of seeking the positive. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney answers the question, "What is defensiveness?" As usual, the answer is comprehensive and merits a couple of readings, but the below is what really hit me:Image by Mick Haupt, via Unsplash, license.Defensive reactions are emotional responses that have been intensified by an unrelated threat-oriented emotional reaction. The key concept here is "unrelated." This is why defensive reactions are a bit more difficult to understand. Every emotion draws your attention to its object, i.e., the value (if it's a value-oriented emotion such as joy or love or grief) or the threat (if it's a threat-oriented emotion such as fear or anger or relief). Normal (non-defensive) emotions draw your attention directly to the object that seems to need attention; defensive emotions pull your attention away from it. [bold added]Anyone familiar with Moroney's work will see the problem: Defensiveness can make it hard to maintain an orientation around one's values -- and this makes it vital to detect it and do something about it. Anyone not familiar with her work can better understand how this is a problem by referring to the brilliant golf course analogy linked within the beginning of the post. 4. As he does periodically, Amesh Adalja commemorates his esteemed mentor, epidemiologist D. A. Henderson at Tracking Zebra. I always enjoy these posts, because they include questions Adalja would ask if he could, but I also appreciate this vignette of his mentor:... D.A., often wearing a sweater vest, would turn in his chair and indulge me while regaling me with some story of some thing that happened to him or related to whatever the subject of my question was. In the end, I often had the answer -- sometimes DA would affirm my own thinking and other times he would point out a connection that I was not aware of and lead me to dive into the medical literature. I was recently looking through some old papers and spotted DA's handwriting in the margins of a medical journal article alerting me to something he noted and wanted me to notice as well. It is his benevolence and his interest in cultivating my limitless quest to learn all I could about infectious disease that is what I miss most about him. Individuals infrequently get to sit in the presence of extreme competence and genius that it is hard to describe to those who have not experienced it themselves. [bold added]Whether or not Adalja has accurately captured what it is like to be in the presence of a giant, he very well portrays someone who was both an excellent teacher and a friend. I couldn't help but fondly recall several of the people who made a big difference for me after I read that, including my father and my favorite science teacher from way back in high school. -- CAVLink to Original

Since every year, each hurricane I have to pay attention to comes along with climate catastrophists hectoring us about their pet (non-)crisis, it is nice to see a rebuttal at Issues and Insights. It reads in part:Going back more than a 100 years, we can see from the data that today's hurricane activity, defined as a hurricane making landfall in the continental U.S., is roughly the same as it was at the turn of the previous century. As author Michael Shellenberger says, the media have "lied about hurricanes," "lied about heat waves," "lied about floods," and of course "all they do is lie about fires." The climate mob has also lied about snowfall, polar ice, polar bears, the temperature record, and the reliability of their warming models. [links in original]Note the copious supply of links I left in. The article is a handy quick reference that way. My only quarrel with the piece comes from the paragraph immediately preceding the excerpt, which debunks the claim that climate-related fatalities are on the rise. I don't dispute that at all, but that is a missed opportunity to bring the concept of climate mastery into the public's awareness. Fortunately, the economist Bryan Caplan explores the idea at his Substack blog, and quotes Epstein freely. (I have supplied the page numbers for these within Fossil Future below for your convenience.)[T]he history of climate safety shows that fossil-fueled machine labor makes us far safer from climate -- a phenomenon I call "climate mastery." (Fossil Future, p. 49)Epstein, again quoted by Caplan, elaborates:Climate Mastery: Ever-improving models allow millions to decide whether or not to evacuate. Neither prediction nor speedy escape -- both made possible with fossil fuels -- were options a century ago. (Image by The National Hurricane Center, via site archives, public domain.)[O]ver the last century, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly increased, the climate disaster death rate fell by an incredible 98 percent. That means the average person is fifty times less likely to die of a climate-related cause than they were in the 1920s. The first time I read this statistic, I didn't think it was possible. But rechecking the data repeatedly, I found that was indeed the case: the rate of climate-related disaster deaths has fallen by 98 percent over the last century. This means that not only does our knowledge system ignore the massive, life-or-death benefits of fossil fuels, but it has a track record of being 180 degrees wrong about the supposedly catastrophic side-effect of climate danger -- which has dramatically decreased. (47-48)Epstein's concept backs the climate catastrophists who deny climate mastery into a corner: Even if, for the sake of argument, we allow that climate is causing more disasters, they would still have to explain why relatively fewer people are dying from them, despite there being more of us. Indeed, as if the lower death rate weren't impressive enough, do note that the absolute numbers also fell for the items discussed by Issues and Insights. -- CAVLink to Original

Miss Manners takes up a question from a reader who was "huffily informed" how to pronounce a baby's name -- by a parent either too clueless to bother to learn how to spell it or too enamored of conflict to legally change it while the child is still very young. The name is spelled like another name, but is supposed (by the parent) to be pronounced like the name of an ancient civilization for which the spelling is both commonly known -- and often used as a first name anyway. Miss Manners -- who duly notes that there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to give unusual names -- rightly indicates that the huffy parent is guilty of courtesy lapses to two parties:Image by Arina Krasnikova, via Pexels, license.Your annoyance is nothing compared to what those children will have to go through. Having an unusual name means a lifetime of spelling and pronouncing it for other people. ... [Miss Manners] requires an equal good-faith effort from the bestowers and holders of these names when patiently explaining those preferences to others -- and ignoring mistakes that are not likely to be repeated.My wife and I both grew up with the opposite problem: Our names were en vogue when we were born, so we frequently got to be one of several people with our first names in school. But we both knew people who had to go through a whole rigmarole regarding their names every single time they met other people. Their routine put our relatively minor annoyance in perspective. My wife's wise solution to both problems is her "keychain rule:" A name should be common enough to find in a key chain display, and yet not so common as to be sold out. Back in Boston, while waiting on a subway platform with my daughter in a stroller, an admiring stranger struck up a conversation. Upon my mentioning her name, she smiled and laughed: I can pronounce that one and spell it! While I admit it will tempt me in such situations to note the inconvenience of the unfortunate child, something more constructive occurs to me: Upon hearing that a friend or friendly acquaintance might confer such a name, it might be a kindness to gently bring up the lifelong inconvenience the name will cause the future child. Depending on the reaction, mentioning the easily-remembered keychain rule might even be in order. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at The Daily Beast, David Rothkopf speculates on "11 Wild Things" that could happen in the 2024 election. His list:Trump is disqualified. There is a candidate health scare. Trump is convicted of one or more crimes. Trump could melt down and make his legal peril even greater. A new candidate could enter the GOP race and catch fire. Trump flees the country. An extremist act of violence. Intensified foreign election interference. A sudden major turn in the war in Ukraine or in Russia's leadership. A natural disaster. The usual disruptive suspects.As might one expect from someone who says, "Americans will continue not to fully appreciate all the good Biden has done," (!) the piece reads a little like a left wing fantasy in places, but I think it gets most of the possibilities. Three, one of them not even on the list, bear comment. Regarding Trump being disqualified, about which I have already commented, we are now seeing leftists argue, for all practical purposes, that there isn't even a legal need to establish that Trump aided or abetted an insurrection:So far, I'm answering none of the above. (Image by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu, via Unsplash, license.)The new twist is the idea that none of that is necessary. Trump is already disqualified, and all state election officials have to do is remove him from ballots on their own initiative. And then he is gone. Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment], in this way of thinking, is "self-enacting." It is "constitutionally automatic," in the words of law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, writing in a new law review article that is making the rounds. "Section 3 requires no legislation or adjudication to be legally effective. It is enacted by the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment [in 1868]. Its disqualification, where triggered, just is." All a state election official has to do is pick it up and use it. That's nuts, and as much as I would love to see Trump disqualified, doing so without legally establishing why would set a legal precedent dangerous in the same way that reelecting a Chief Executive who has no respect for the law would be. What would happen next election? Some climate catastrophist polling official decides that anyone who won't "leave it in the ground" is abetting an "insurrection?" Anyone who won't protect a fertilized egg as if it's a human life is an insurrectionist? It's a non-starter, if anyone at all still has his marbles. The other item on the list deserving of comment is the one regarding a candidate catching fire. That's the best normal possibility. I read a few leftist reviews of the Republican debate and found them worthless -- as one might expect from quarters where even lip-service to capitalism gets equated with Trumpist populism. Leftists are almost uniformly unable to tell the difference -- or admit that there is one -- between, say, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. While even the "good" candidates leave lots to be desired, any would be better than Trump, and a few in the race now could attract enough reasonable voters to win over Trump. I'd even go so far as to say I could see casting a vote for Haley with a clear conscience. As I said earlier, much of this piece is heavily slanted left and reads like a protracted wish/projection of non-leftists as bomb-toting nuts. Perhaps that explains the following blind spot or deliberate omission:12. No Labels gets ballot access in enough states for a run to become feasible.As far as I can tell, each party fears No Labels because they imagine it will tip the election over to the other's candidate. Let them worry: If we do end up with Trump vs. Biden, it's the least they deserve for presenting us with such a dire "choice." That organization will be holding a nominating convention in April:"Our plan is to only run if we think we have a chance to win realistically," he said. "And look, we just finished a poll of 10,000 voters in the eight battleground states. And we give them a choice of Trump, Biden and a moderate independent third choice, and 63 percent say that they're open to a moderate Independent third choice."This independent voter would have been among that 63 percent. -- CAVLink to Original

Editor's Note: We are likely to feel some impact from Tropical Storm Idalia, which is currently tipped to hit the other side of Florida as a major hurricane and be at or near hurricane strength as it goes through or near our area the day after. Posting may be interrupted for some time afterwards.*** Despite arguably winning the GOP presidential debate last week, Vivek Ramaswamy has not, according to the Wall Street Journal, lived up to whatever elevated expectations that might have led to:[M]uch of [Ramaswamy's] usual sunniness disappeared on Wednesday, replaced by snarky interjections. For all his complaints about "professional politicians," he rivaled the best of them with an evening of canned sound bites -- contrasting his "bought and paid for" "Super PAC puppet" opponents with his "patriot" self.This came after the Journal panned him for what it deemed unserious remarks during the debate itself. Nikki Haley comes off best in the column, and we can add her position on Ukraine to her "least bad" one on abortion and her lambasting of Trump's economic policy to the list of reasons to consider her:Image by Nikki Haley, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.While the press is predictably highlighting Ms. Haley's smackdown of Vivek Ramaswamy's foreign-policy confusion, her more consequential moment was her persuasive argument that supporting Ukraine is entirely in America's self-interest. She noted that only a small fraction of the U.S. defense budget has gone to Ukraine and that the country has become a "first line of defense" against both Russia and its partner China. This is the speech Joe Biden should have given more than a year ago. [bold added, link omitted]Nikki Haley is far from my dream candidate for President, but it beggars belief that we are wasting our time instead discussing losers like Donald Trump and Joe Biden at all, and may well end up with one of them as President again. -- CAV Link to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Note to Myself My wife's career is taking us to New Orleans, and we move during the next few months. I like New Orleans, but really, really hate moving. Today's post is as much about giving myself a way to stay motivated for all the drudgery this will entail as it is this blogger's "feeding of the beast." *** Image by Onur Bahçıvancılar, via Unsplash, license.1. This move is my big chance blast away a big accumulation of junk we don't need. Up until about five years ago, we had to move frequently with babies or toddlers in tow. In addition to my wife and her parents being ... overexuberant ... with toy purchases during that time, the combination of frequent moves and the time demands of child care meant that lots of things ended up in boxes that there simply wasn't time to go through. (This situation is in part due to us having used professional packers twice in a row. They are fast, but they have no clue about what you may want to keep or throw out, so it all goes, and it will be boxed by room, with no other thought as to organization.) I have some time to go through those things now. More importantly, with the kids having outgrown most of those things, I also have a free hand to discard or donate most of it. 2. This move will allow me to consolidate and organize what's left. The ditching-out is huge. I made some progress organizing the garage shortly after we moved here, but without a clear mandate to get rid of things, the effort stalled and left me with no overflow space. Things like art supplies ended up being stored in multiple odd places, depending on where we could find space or who put them away. Predictably, this sometimes led to things being lost and bought again. I am finally about to round up all of this stuff (and a couple of other categories of things), thin the herd, and pack it. On the other end, I'll know what we have and how much, and can have a designated place for it. This will save time, money, and hassle on the other end. 3. We can have pets on the other end. We will have a bigger (and less cluttered) house after we move. We've all wanted cats for about the past year, but I didn't see a way to do so here without the massive clearout sparked by the move: It was already too easy for the house to get very messy very fast, and cleaning up required an inordinate amount of decluttering. I did not want to add pets to the mix. 4. We can entertain more often on the other end. In a small, cluttered house, the prospect of hours of straightening and cleaning always came with that of guests. I have for some time wished we could ... just have people over. The big clearout will make it easier to maintain a regular cleaning schedule and enlist the kids's help (in the form of picking up after themselves or taking over chores they're interested in). We're looking to augment this with a professional coming in once or twice a month, since we won't have to worry about things we actually want or need being misplaced by a third party anymore. -- CAVLink to Original

At least, that's what Matt Drudge's poll showed this morning, after the first Republican debate. I did not watch, having pretty low expectations, but was curious to see whether anyone would make a strong impression. Judging by an admittedly early lack of spectacular headlines, it looks like novelty won the day, in the form of Vivek Ramaswamy, who was perhaps aided by being the target of the likes of Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence. As of this morning, Ramaswamy had won just under a third of the votes in the Drudge poll. Haley's second was just over one-fifth, about three percentage points ahead of Christie and Ron DeSantis, who didn't exactly revive his flagging status as top alternative to Trump, but might perhaps be content to lie in wait in the hopes that Trump gets sunk. It's hard to draw a definitive conclusion from the debate, but I'm cautiously optimistic for Haley, assuming other polls show similar results. I take my lead from a good description of the contenders, in both leaning towards Ramaswamy's current strength reflecting his novelty and Haley's current weakness her relative lack of exposure. Regarding Ramaswamy, Philip Wegmann of RealClear Politics has this to say of the "surging enigma:"He is fast-talking and unapologetically optimistic about the future of the country, so long as the nation embraces his prescription for a second revolution, what he calls "our 1776 moment." Everyone is paying attention now, including DeSantis, whose allies are urging him to take the fight to Ramaswamy. The fear? Ramaswamy could easily steal the spotlight. His campaign argues the primary is already a two-man race between him and the other Florida man. In a leaked memo obtained by RCP, they told their donors Ramaswamy is set to "eclipse DeSantis." He has a chance to prove it in Milwaukee. "Campaigns like his, which come out of nowhere and get early momentum, tend to flame out," [Republican strategist Alex] Conant said, pointing to stars that burned bright right before crashing, like Herman Cain. A big part of avoiding that fate could be demonstrating policy expertise, particularly in foreign affairs. [bold added]I'm not writing him off, but I will hardly be the last potential supporter to start out intrigued only to find myself having a major problem with him. His stated positions, being the hodgepodge they are, are practically guaranteed to make up for his charisma down the line. So we have Ramaswamy, who was polling among the top three non-Trumps heading in finishing first. Compare this to Nikki Haley, who was in single digits coming in. Wegmann's preview of Haley ("experienced, but overlooked") reads in part:She has attacked Trump for his skepticism of the war in Ukraine, DeSantis for his metaphorical war with Disney, and Ramaswamy over his plan to cut aid to Israel. It hasn't worked. But Haley has a unique advantage as the only woman on stage at a moment when her party desperately needs to win back that constituency, and she has succeeded where her competitors struggled. For instance, Haley was the rare candidate to handle populist firebrand Tucker Carlson with ease. And if her competition looks past her, they may open themselves up to a broadside. "She is someone who could easily be declared the winner of the debate if she delivers some punches and doesn't take any," Conant said.If the below is any indication, Haley certainly did land some punches:Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, license.The truth is that Biden didn't do this to us. Our Republicans did this to us too. When they passed that $2.2 trillion Covid stimulus bill, they left us with 90 million people on Medicaid, 42 million people on food stamps. No one had told you how to fix it. I'll tell you how to fix it. They need to stop the spending, they need to stop the borrowing, they need to eliminate the earmarks that Republicans brought back in, and they need to make sure they understand these are taxpayer dollars, it's not their dollars. And while they're all saying this, you have Ron DeSantis, you've got Tim Scott, you've got Mike Pence, they all voted to raise the debt and Donald Trump added 8 trillion to our debt and our kids are never gonna forgive us for this. And so at the end of the day, you look at the 2024 budget, Republicans asked for 7.4 billion in earmarks, Democrats asked for 2.8 billion. So you tell me who are the big spenders. [my emphasis]Again, assuming other polls are consistent with Drudge, Haley might have really helped her cause with her performance, as one might hope it did. Regarding DeSantis, Christie, and Pence, I see all of these as "Trump-limited." The former apes Trump too much, the second is too focused on attacking Trump, and the last is too religious. Pence is the kind of candidate holy rollers would have backed before their orange savior showed up in 2016. His natural constituency won't return, either, ironically because he did his job by certifying the election of Trump's opponent. Pence's ceiling is Trump's ceiling minus anyone who feels aggrieved by that fact. And, while I thank Pence for upholding his oath of office in that moment, I can't overlook his theocratic tendencies, and I doubt others will, either. -- CAVLink to Original

The first Republican debate of the presidential primaries is tonight and Nick Reynolds of Newsweek weighs in with his list of things to look out for. These are:DeSantis vs. Ramaswamy,"Pile on Ron,"Splintering on Ukraine,Nuance on Abortion, andWho Takes on Trump?Of these, only the third and fourth interest me and the fourth is -- I think -- already settled. Except for Nikki Haley, all the candidates who will be present will, to my knowledge, sign whatever abortion ban a GOP-controlled Congress sends to their desk. Haley thinks abortion should be left to the states, so Haley, as the status quo candidate, is the "best" of the bunch in the short term on that issue. The fact that aiding Ukraine is an issue at all reflects the regrettable fact that Donald Trump is at least setting the agenda despite his absence. That said, at least he won't be there to prevent anything serious being said by turning the debate into a circus. It's too bad everyone there is so fixated on Trump and his cultish followers that they will walk on eggshells rather than take full advantage of that fact. Much has been made of Trump's decision to skip the debates, including a pro-and-con piece in The Hill, but what I dislike the most about that decision is that it was an open invitation to the media to make the debate all about him, which it has stupidly and predictably accepted. Image by Amy Reed, via Unsplash, license.There are major issues we could and should be discussing instead of paying all our attention to Donald Trump: Here are just three: What can we do about global warming hysteria? How will we deal with the looming Social Security funding crisis? What should we do about China's increasing hostility? What would I like to see in a debate? I'd like each candidate to pretend Trump doesn't exist and tell us why he or she would be a good President. We already know what Trump thinks. That's old news, and his most loyal voters are (a) unreachable, (b) won't be paying attention, and (c) will stay home (or write him in) if Trump isn't the nominee, anyway. (A remedy -- in the form of a vast pool of politically homeless independent voters -- exists and is there for the taking.) Impress those of us you can reach, and remember that independents make up much more of the electorate than Democrats or Republicans. An impressive-enough performance need only galvanize the significant number of Republicans who want to move on from Trump. Consolidate these voters and get the attention of enough people who support Trump, but more by default than slavish loyalty. Another Republican can defeat Trump, and he has just left an opening to start doing so. Will anyone there have the wits to get that ball rolling? There is no need to hope that Donald Trump drops dead or gets disqualified from office: Luck is there to be made. -- CAVLink to Original

Populist. Everyone uses the term and, unfortunately, politicians fitting the description are seeing success the world over. The term gets sprinkled around news reports like croutons on a salad all the time. But I can't remember anyone giving a definition of "populism." From my view, it's one of those terms everyone seems to understand, but which raises questions as soon as one tries to pin it down: It cuts across left and right, so it doesn't seem to be an "ism" in the sense of being a specific set of beliefs and arguments one can wrap one's head around. But you can know a populist when you see one. The dictionary isn't much help. Here's what Google belched forth:a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.A political approach ... to achieve what, exactly? And what counts as an "establishment" or an "elite?" For what reasons -- good or bad -- would "ordinary people" feel that their concerns are ignored? Do they have a point, and would 'populism' actually help them? Why or why not? Believe it or not, it only occurred to me this morning to see what, if anything, Ayn Rand might have said about populism. I was not disappointed:It is no accident that the state that elected Huey Long during the Depression is Trump Country today. (Image by U. S. Senate Historical Office, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)The commentators regard [George McGovern and George Wallace] as opposites -- as the extremes of left and right -- and are shocked by the extent of Mr. Wallace's popularity. Mr. McGovern is the consistent representative of the New Left. But can one call Mr. Wallace a representative of the right? Yes -- symbolically and journalistically. No -- in fact, if by "right" one means capitalism. Mr. Wallace is a "conservative," which means a statist; and a "populist," which means an old-fashioned, anti-intellectual, non-ideological collectivist. He can match any liberal in attacks on the rich and in appeals to the "little fellows." He is behind the times: he sounds like a New Dealer of the 1930s. But he has the courage to attack some of the modern outrages which the Establishment protects by uncritical silence: welfare, busing, foreign aid, the U.N., the appeasement of Soviet Russia. People are relieved to hear these attacks, which are long overdue. ("The Dead End," in The Ayn Rand Letter, vol. 1, no. 20, July 3, 1972)Freshen up the above by swapping out Bernie Sanders for George McGovern and Donald Trump for George Wallace (as I did some time back in a different context). Oh, and keep reading past the bold for what could be a preemptive review/account for the popularity of "Rich Men North of Richmond." In terms of a coherent belief system, there is no "there" there in populism, at least beyond what is already "out there" in the culture (and is likely at the root of the frustrations felt by those permitting themselves to fall under the spell of a populist). There is just a willingness on the part of a populist to channel anger and frustration -- without challenging any basic premises -- in the quest for political power. The people so upset at the "establishment" (as they put it in the sixties) or the "elites" (as they put in now) that they would blindly revolt this way will pay for such blindness if they ever get their way. Their payment will be to get what they want "good and hard" -- when they learn that the primary goal of their supposed champion is political power and its trappings. -- CAVLink to Original

John Stossel recently provided a short, sweet synposis of the past and present of the college cost crisis brought on by the federal student loan program. Regulars here will likely already understand why that program has caused college costs to skyrocket, but Stossel has a good, simple explanation for anyone who hasn't thought much about the issue before. Spolier: The same perverse incentives that are making college expensive are also causing many to spend five or more years there without graduating, or to leave with degrees that are worthless to employers. Most interesting to me is Stossel's report on conditions on the ground in today's job market, in light of this:College not required! (Image by Elvert Barnes, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)College students take on loans and spend decades in debt because they believe they must get a degree to be hired. But that's no longer true. IBM, Accenture, Dell, Bank of America, Google and other big companies, recognizing the uselessness of many undergraduate degrees, recently dropped college-degree requirements. So have state governments in Maryland, Utah, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Alaska, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia. Good jobs in the trades, like welding and plumbing, don't require a college degree. Trade school programs often take less than two years and cost much less than college.Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame, started a foundation to support students interested in vocational education, and has said similar things in the past. It is interesting to see some of the companies whose actions are speaking louder than words in agreement. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge I wasn't actively looking to learn any of these short tidbits, but I did... On a lark, I put "one-liner" into an image search engine and got this. I like flamingos, so here it is. (Image by Kelly Sikkema, via Unsplash, license.)1. Within the debunking of a job-hunting fallacy I blogged yesterday: "f you ever see me walking to my car during a downpour, it’s because the MythBusters proved you get wetter by running. Almost twice as much, actually." 2. This bit of reading advice comes from Harry Binswanger's commentary on some bad reporting on housing costs in Miami: "For propaganda pieces, I always look to the last paragraph because savvy propagandists put there the thought, or feeling, they want you to take away." 3. Alison Green comes through with the following answer to What can you say when your hand hurts too much for a handshake? "'I have an injury so I'm not going to shake your hand, but it's great to see you/meet you!' Say it warmly and you should be fine." 4. As in the title of a post at Irreal, I am often "Writing Prose in Emacs, I visited, expecting to get an idea of whether there would be useful advice I might eventually want to tinker with. I wasn't disappointed, but it was nice to get something I could use immediately. "You need merely toggle variable-pitch-mode to try this out for yourself." Yes. Proportional fonts are much easier on the eye. I look forward to playing with hiding markup, too. I'd love to be able to toggle between, say, raw HTML and how it renders within one window, although my longstanding solution is fine. -- CAVLink to Original

I just encountered a thorough debunking of a common myth I myself used to believe. Job hunters just about can't avoid being told to ferret out unadvertised positions, often in the form of the maxim in the title of the post I just linked: 80% of All Jobs are Hidden. An important reason I like the post is that, before he dives into how this myth might have originated or why it might seem plausible, Jonathan Blaine gives a good executive summary right out of the gate:Let's examine the question from the point of view of an employer. Why would a company keep a job opening secret? Short answer: in most cases it wouldn't because it wants to be able to find the cream of the crop. Successful businesses do not restrict options. Also, the longer the role remains unfilled, the less money the company will make, or the more stretched and ineffective existing staff will become. [emphasis in original]Image by Jan Canty, via Unsplash, license.The rest is interesting reading, but that question is easy to remember and very nicely boils the problem with that myth down to its essence. (Blaine has also, by this point mentioned two general cultural factors behind the ubiquity of the myth.) As with any good advice, it is not too hard to generalize: Never assume that something "everyone knows" is the truth, particularly if it starts sounding implausible as soon as you begin asking yourself why it would be true. -- CAVLink to Original

To accommodate typical work schedules, many elementary schools provide on-site after-school child care. We used the one at ours last year, but are picking the kids up at dismissal this year. Image by note thanun, via Unsplash, license.I normally pick the kids up, so naturally, I wondered what time I should show up that would minimize the amount of time the kids and I would have to wait. At first, I didn't realize I already had crucial data and assumed I might try various increments of time ahead of dismissal: Through experimentation, I would find some sweet spot whereby I'd be reasonably close to the head of the line, and so neither waste my own time waiting for school to let out nor stick the kids with a ridiculous wait every day. On Day 1, I tried showing up 15 minutes early and was stunned to see myself quite far back in line. It was about 10 minutes after dismissal before I picked up the kids. 30 minutes ahead was similar: I wasn't that close to the head of the line and pick-up followed about 10 minutes after school was out. I wondered: What are those people ahead of me doing? Getting here an hour early? That jogged a couple of memories from last year, when we were using the after-school care option. The first memory was from a time I had to pick my son up early for a trip to the dentist, about an hour ahead of regular dismissal. I recall seeing a couple of cars already in the pick-up line and thinking that was nuts. So... Yes, indeed: At least some of them were showing up an hour early! The second memory told me that was, in fact, nuts. Last year, although I had the option of using the after school time, I'd normally pick the kids up early on Thursdays, and the earliest I could do so, for logistics reasons, was half an hour after dismissal: I realized that I never saw cars in the pick-up line then. Clearly, although the line took time to get moving, it took less than half an hour to clear, and that meant to me that I could probably just show up at dismissal time, with everyone -- the kids and me -- waiting less than half an hour. It has rained every day since I realized I should try this, meaning that the rain and all the extra kids (who would otherwise walk, bike, or ride in golf carts, but are now being driven in cars) are making the line longer, but I am confident that I have my answer, and will sail through efficiently on the next sunny day. Only on rainy days do the people showing up more than half an hour early stand a chance of coming out ahead with the way this line is set up. The rest of the time, they're just wasting gas and time. Sometimes it pays more to be just on time, rather than early. -- CAV P.S. On further thought, I realize that anyone who has to chauffeur a kid around to an activity scheduled too soon after school is pretty much stuck having to show up an hour early, so it is useful to know how far in advance one would need to show up to be able to do something like that.Link to Original

The New York Times recently reported that two Federalist Society law professors have concluded that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution bars former President Donald Trump from returning to office:The professors -- William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas -- studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review. ... He summarized the article's conclusion: "Donald Trump cannot be president -- cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office -- unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6." [links omitted, format edits]The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is clear enough:The transmittal letter for the 14th Amendment (Image by Edward McPherson, LL.D., Clerk of the House of Representatives of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.I am no lawyer, but the only legal question would seem to be whether Trump has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion." The article reportedly argues that he has:There is, the article said, "abundant evidence" that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself. "It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump 'engaged in' the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction," the article said.This is still a country of laws and not men. May the legal machinery operate correctly, and rapidly-enough to settle this question once and for all, and ahead of the election. -- CAVLink to Original

An anti-abortionist conducts a post-mortem on his party's recent failed attempt to prevent abortion from becoming enshrined in Ohio's state constitution:Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly called the special election earlier this year after a well-funded group of pro-abortion organizations succeeded in getting an amendment on the ballot this November that protects a virtually unlimited right to abortion in the state. If Issue 1 had passed, the abortion amendment would have needed 60 percent of the vote to become law.At least Shane Harris starts off being honest about why there was a move to raise the bar to amending the state's constitution. What is more interesting is where he goes next in his 1300-word-plus editorial:Image by Element5 Digital, via Unsplash, license.Convincing voters to make a change to a seemingly less democratic process was always going to be a difficult task. Moreover, GOP leaders in the state initially denied that Issue 1 had anything to do with abortion -- a line even the most credulous voter could see right through. This gave off the unavoidable impression (one encouraged by well-funded liberal groups) that Ohio Republicans were trying to unfairly change the rules at the last minute in order to thwart the democratic will of the people. That notion undoubtedly motivated "No" votes from large numbers of Democrat and Independent voters and likely some Republicans as well who saw the question as more a matter of preserving the principle of "majority rules" rather than a pro-life issue. To be sure, there is a valid and compelling argument to be made about why writing and amending state constitutions via a simple majority vote is a bad idea. For starters, it allows deep-pocketed special interests to mobilize a relatively small number of voters in low-turnout elections and effectively bypass the legislative process to enact laws that are often far out of sync with where the state is politically -- which is exactly what is happening in Ohio right now. [bold added]While I was glad in the short term to see that this move didn't kill the attempt to protect abortion via amendment, I am under no illusions about how flimsy that "protection" will be. As Brian Phillips recently argued in the case of California -- and our Founders understood when they created a republic rather than a democracy -- a democracy affords no protection for individual rights against the will of a mob. That is the "compelling argument" to be made for raising the threshold to amend a state constitution, and it could have made Issue 1 into a winner. That the Republicans seem not to understand that and are furthemore so bothered by such a small obstacle to their cause, speaks volumes. Unfortunately Republicans weren't motivated by that better argument. If they were, they wouldn't have waited until an abortion measure looked likely to pass by about the same margin as defeated Issue 1. Indeed, if they cared about individual rights and had a rational case that a fetus is an individual, they could have sought to pass a personhood amendment, then worked to make it harder to amend the state constitution. That is exactly the opposite of what they did. The rest of the article is a muddle because: (a) the author never contests the idea of "preserving the people's power" as being synonymous with democracy; and (b) his protestations that the GOP "dance[d] around the abortion issue" while emphasizing other (more rational) stands by the Republicans leading up to the vote ring hollow. Frankly, given that a majority in Ohio think abortion should be legal and the GOP has only religious dogma behind its assertion that abortion is murder, "dancing around" that issue was about the only hope it had. Leave it to Republicans to make a genuinely good idea look like a fool's bargain. When Harris concludes that his side needs to "creat[e] a culture of life," he sounds like he realizes on some level that political change requires cultural change. But cultural change requires individuals to change their minds, one at a time, and "abortion is wrong because god says so" is not an appeal to reason. Perhaps, deep down, many Republicans, Harris included, understand this, and know that shady tactics are their best hope of political success. In the meantime, a reasonable proposal to make Ohio's state constitution has been a casualty of the crusade against reproductive freedom, and -- as Harris himself notes -- taxpayers will soon be wrongly forced to fund abortions. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At the blog of the Texas Institute for Property Rights, Brian Phillips considers the multitude of things that come up for referenda in California:The fact that this is even up for a vote illustrates that rights are only temporary permissions in California. The proposals to impose new regulations on dialysis clinics and tax millionaires to subsidize electric cars are further evidence. For now, clinics and millionaires enjoy some property rights. But as the initiatives on the 2022 ballot show, those rights can be revoked if the majority chooses. Mob rule rules in California. [bold added]This reminds me of a something I read a long time ago about that state's gutting-by-referendum of its AB-5 anti-contract-work law. The commentator concluded that voters there were of a libertarian bent. That may well be the case, but moods can change, and mob rule, capricious to begin with, can very quickly become even more obviously as bad as Phillips has just argued it is. 2. Although I do not see it posted so far at the OCON 2023 YouTube playlist, I heard that Harry Binswanger's talk, "Saving Math From Plato," was very well-received. In what I hope turns out to be a teaser, he has posted revised slides for the talk at his blog. They are thought-provoking on their own, and apply the lesson from an Ayn Rand quote I encountered a few days ago, but in the form of what he calls Ayn Rand's special question: "What facts of reality give rise to the need of such a thing as mathematics?" 3. Jason Crawford, who has gotten lots of attention for his excellent essay on why Rome never had its own Industrial Revolution, examined another interesting question at The Roots of Progress some time back. In the form of his notes on Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, we learn much, including about that early champion of AC, George Westinghouse. On this, Crawford quotes Jonnes:Image by unknown photographer, via Wikipedia Commons, public domain. the War of the Electric Currents grew uglier and fiercer, George Westinghouse decided in the fall of 1889 to hire a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter named Ernest H. Heinrichs to promote his companies and their achievements. On Heinrichs's first day, Westinghouse came by to wish him success and explain his purpose. "All I want to see is that the papers print [things] accurately. The truth hurts nobody. ... "As to the attacks made against me personally, of course they hurt, but my self respect and conscience do not allow me to fight with such weapons. Besides, I feel that my moral reputation and my business reputation are too well established to be hurt by such attacks. However, I am preparing an article for the North American Review in answer to Mr. Edison's charges against the Alternating Current system, but beyond that I shall have nothing to give you for publication ... . By letting the others do all the talking, we shall make more friends in the end than if we lower ourselves to the level of our assailants."Ahead of this, Crawford notes that a popular narrative about the War of the Currents is unjust to both Edison and Westinghouse, the latter by way of omission. In addition to being an enjoyable and informative read about the early history of electricity, you may be pleased to meet a new hero of the industrial era, even if you had heard of Westinghouse before. 4. At New Ideal, Keith Lockitch writes a long, but thorough and absorbing comparison of four recent works challenging the climate catastrophism narrative: False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg, Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger, Unsettled by Steven Koonin, and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. A good preview comes in the form of Lockitch's wrap-up of how the last of these goes beyond what the others discuss in terms of how badly scientific findings about the greenhouse effect are being distorted at every step of the way from analysis to headline:Examining each of these functions in detail -- including some of the key people and prominent institutions that perform them on issues related to climate and energy -- Epstein clarifies just what are (in Koonin's phrasing) some of the "filters" that give rise to the "abundant opportunities to get things wrong." In my view, this is a deeply insightful analysis that helps us avoid the false alternative offered by our increasingly tribalistic culture: the "climate denier's" outright dismissal of expert knowledge versus the blind parroting of the alarmist narrative in the name of supposedly "following the science." Instead, what Epstein provides is a nuanced framework for how to think about expert knowledge, and how to identify when "the system we rely on to tell us what experts think is significantly distorting what actual experts think." [bold added]Lockitch turns from here to the question of why things are so bad and again finds Epstein's book to be "in a category of its own" among these four books, all of which he highly recommends. -- CAVLink to Original