Gus Van Horn blog

Lately, I have been seeing lots of advocacy for the idea of the GOP reaching out to blacks, who have historically bloc-voted for Democrats. One thing that has been glaringly absent from these calls has been any consideration of how best to do this. Thomas Sowell addresses this deficiency by offering lots of good advice on this score, in terms of both general principles and specifics. Sowell's general advice probably sounds a lot like mine, regarding how the GOP attempts to appeal to any voter: Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to "reach out" is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black "leaders" like Jesse Jackson -- that is, people tied irrevocably to the Democrats. Voters who want what the Democrats offer can get it from the Democrats . Why should they vote for Republicans who act like make-believe Democrats? [bold added] No surprise there and, as Sowell said about such calls, it's about time someone said this. What should interest the Republicans are the advantages Sowell maintains that they have over the Democrats on some issues that concern at least enough black voters to reduce the huge advantage the Democrats currently hold. School choice is one example: The issue on which Democrats are most vulnerable, and have the least room to maneuver, is school choice. Democrats are heavily in hock to the teachers' unions, who see public schools as places to guarantee jobs for teachers, regardless of what that means for the education of students. There are some charter schools and private schools that have low-income minority youngsters equaling or exceeding national norms, despite the many ghetto public schools where most students are nowhere close to meeting those norms. Because teachers' unions oppose charter schools, most Democrats oppose them, including black Democrats up to and including President Barack Obama. Another issue the Republicans could see an advantage in is the minimum wage, but this would take work: The Republicans would have to explain why these laws result in more unemployment. Sowell admits that this form of outreach will not instantly win over a large percentage of the black vote, but he does note that, "f Republicans aim a one-size-fits-all message at all blacks they will fail to connect with the particular people they have some chance of reaching." This would be a great start, but I would go further. The Republicans need to become a real alternative to the Democrats, meaning that school choice can't be the only challenge laid down to the government monopoly on education, for example. Such Republican stands as school choice, tax holidays, and even not being quick to raise the minimum wage may seem better (or, more likely, less bad) than the Democrat alternative, but they all beg the question of why we do not get permanent and universal relief from these government intrusions. Until the Republicans take up that gauntlet, they will neither be, nor look for long like, a real alternative. -- CAV Link to Original

Jack Kelly offers an interesting analysis of the recent special congressional election in Florida, won by Republican lobbyist David Sink. He sets the stage for his analysis by acknowledging and dismissing how the respective major parties will slant that news. And then he shows just how bad the news for the Democrats really is: This just sets the stage for what is to come. The news would appear to be all very, very bad for the Democrats: After reading Kelly's analysis, one is left with the strong impression that, if a Democrat who hadn't even voted for ObamaCare could win anywhere, this was a district in which it could easily have happened. If Kelly is right, and the Republicans have a field day in November, they will have lots of explaining to do if ObamaCare has not been mortally wounded and plans aren't in place to finish it off after the next election. Yes, the President will make it impossible to repeal ObamaCare, but that does not excuse doing nothing or, far worse, "fixing" it. If anyone has the ability to make ObamaCare a non-issue after this election, it is the Republicans. How? By being sent to Washington en masse to get rid of ObamaCare and utterly failing to do so. In the last election, the Republicans failed to give voters a clear choice. That lost them one election. This time, they can do themselves and America more and longer-lasting harm by only appearing to offer an alternative. -- CAV Link to Original

Here's a sign of the times: The man who once published a paper titled, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", and others have formed a new institute to police bad science. In addition to bogus results, the institute (METRICS, for "Meta-Research Innovation Centre at Stanford") will also consider the problem of wasted effort: ... A recent series of articles in the Lancet noted that, in 2010, about $200 billion (an astonishing 85% of the world's spending on medical research) was squandered on studies that were flawed in their design, redundant, never published or poorly reported. METRICS will support efforts to tackle this extraordinary inefficiency, and will itself update research about the extent to which randomised-controlled trials acknowledge the existence of previous investigations of the same subject. If the situation has not improved, METRICS and its collaborators will try to design new publishing practices that discourage bad behaviour among scientists. [bold added] While this effort is laudable, I think it will fail, because I think many of these problems are ultimately due to government funding of science. Indeed, it reminds me a little of recent efforts to address the problem of the government training too many new scientists in certain fields -- such as by adding a whole new training program to their terminal degrees. Set aside, for the sake of argument, the whole question of whether the government should be taking money forcibly from some citizens for any reason. What we are seeing in science, as with many other areas of the economy, is a vast amount of money being poured in to an industry by a political class whose primary motivation isn't the discovery of truth (rather than flowing there due to market forces) and creating a whole slew of artificial, perverse incentives. When these perverse incentives guide individuals, it should come as no surprise that it is common to see examples of money being wasted, be it in the form of sloppy studies, redundant work, or over-training. It may be possible to mask or slightly alleviate the symptoms for a time, but the disease goes merrily on. -- CAV Link to Original

Rich Lowry writes a good, short overview of the anti-vaccination movement, quickly shooting down two of its most plausible-sounding rationales, (1) a discredited link between the measles, mump, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism; and (2) a purported link between a vaccine preservative (long since discontinued in several countries) and autism: ... One theory was that a preservative in children's vaccines called thimerosal was causing autism. But the U.S. removed thimerosal from most childhood vaccines in 2001. If the theory had been sound, this should have reduced cases of autism. It didn't. Cases have continued to rise, and the same held true in Canada and Denmark after eliminating thimerosal in the 1990s. Lowry does parents who may have heard half-way plausible reasons to not vaccinate their children a great service, but he started the excerpted paragraph with, "No amount of discrediting makes a difference." Why? He may sound unduly pessimistic, but the fact is that, no matter how ill-supported a given "theory" might be, it will have followers, and often rabid ones. The very parents he is trying to help are at risk of being swayed by the fervor or apparent moral certainty of the "anti-vaxxers". (They will also be bombarded ad nauseam with anecdotal claims of dubious value, as I have noted before.) Lowry is reminding them to consider the facts, regardless of their feelings: Intransigence can be a sign that someone is on solid ground, but that isn't always the case. There is no better guide to taking action than actual evidence. We can't all be experts on everything, so one must consider how well the advocate of any given position actually understands what he is talking about. Imperviousness to evidence and a willingness to believe conspiracies speak ill of someone who wants your attention. So it is that, in addition to showing that their cause is baseless, Lowry shows the anti-vaxxers to be less-than-fastidious epistemologists. They will relentlessly hound anyone who will listen, regardless of the overwhelming evidence in favor of vaccines. The life you save by ignoring them may well be that of your own child, and the time you save by ignoring them will be better spent on other things. Perhaps, if more people who are open to reason hear about his column, new outbreaks of old diseases will become less common. -- CAV Link to Original

Given that all kinds of innocuous actions violate federal law and that our President openly (and without political challenge) flouts his duties, many are right to be concerned about the ability of ordinary people to live their lives without government meddling. Unfortunately, some of the proposed remedies are worse than inaction, to wit a slew of proposals in the "Show Me" state to enshrine such activities as parenting, hunting, and farming, as constitutionally enumerated "rights". An advocate of the parenting initiative, which may appear on ballots soon, has this to say: As you might suspect, this law will have no immediate, practical legal effect. Furthermore, given the increasing the tendency of elected officials to ignore the law and an enormous amount of judicial precedent favoring laws that ought to have been rejected as unconstitutional, I fail to see what extra weight Richardson imagines such "rights" will have. Certainly, one thing is being given greater weight: The idea that particular spheres of action are permitted us by the government, as opposed to inherent rights, the protection of which is the proper job of the government. Sadly, this seems to be the one concern not on the minds of opponents: Translation: We do not understand that the proper job of the government is to protect (not violate, while pretending to "grant" or "balance") individual rights for all persons. If we did, we would realize that certain kinds of criminals would lose access to their own children, who have rights. Furthermore, we -- like the advocates of this initiative -- fail to see that so long as parents do not actually harm or severely neglect their children, they would (and should) be free to raise their children as they see fit. The idea of a constitutional guarantee would be laughable were it not so tragic on so many levels. To name a couple: First, a constitution without a government that enforces it (or a populace that even wants it to) is merely a piece of paper. The idea of "locking in" things before they get further eroded is also absurd, given how this erosion occurs: through the public continually demanding government meddling and favors, and a pliant judiciary twisting the law into pretzels to justify each new encroachment on liberty. Oh, and the constitution can be amended anyway: So what if something is listed as a "right" today? Do I need to go on? A constitutional amendment is not a magical spell that will end the consequences of over a century of publicly-demanded (but improper) meddling and theft by the government. And a plebiscite isn't a cleansing ritual that will make American Revolutionaries out of us all. The law will remain toothless -- at least as a guardian of liberty -- so long as its supporters resort to it as a substitute for moral suasion. There is no way to "lock in" liberty. And there is no way to keep it for a people who do not understand or want it. That's what "a republic -- if you can keep it" means. The left attempts to use the law to create outcomes it desires at the expense of individual freedom, but at least it works to persuade (by rational means or not) people that this is the right thing to do. Conservatives are worse if this is any indication: They pretend that the law works like a computer program -- and that our agreement with it is unnecessary and that it is not open to interpretation. The only way to gain and keep liberty is to understand for oneself its basis and why it is a necessity, and to help others do so. Only then can one even begin to think clearly about how to make our country free again, let alone cause that to happen. -- CAV Link to Original

Editor's Note: For reasons that will quickly become apparent, today's post is late and I will not be getting to my comment queue today. I have been having a frustrating week playing "Super Dad" while my wife is away for a prep course for her boards. I can thank her mother's being here for preventing the above description from being somewhere between "hellish" and "impossible". I am not sure how I could negotiate bedtime with an infant and a two-and-a-half year-old who keep each other awake if they're in the same room. Oh, and the older child fights sleep as it is. At least, I am not sure I could put both down and still get any sleep myself. Interestingly enough, all the problems have been from Pumpkin; the baby has only bothered me once or twice a night. (No: Until tonight, I have not had to wake my mother-in-law for help.) I suspect -- and this is as close to an atheist gets to praying -- that the problems are due to her missing Momma and some circadian-rhythm-disrupting combination of me getting her to sleep earlier and daylight savings time. (Parents of very young children lose no matter which way the clock shifts, because children can't be expected to understand, let alone make such a change.) I get lots done on top of blogging by getting up at three each day. This week, though, Pumpkin, who normally sleeps through the night, has woken at least once a night. Today, I hadn't even turned on the coffee maker when I had to check in on her -- for the first of five times in less than an hour. Ultimately, I had to take her downstairs and put my mother-in-law on baby duty. I couldn't just wake her when the baby woke (or take the baby myself) because our nanny cam apparently requires a full-blown Internet connection (and not just a working home network) to function. (How hard would it be for Dropcam to make some sort of time/feature-limited provision for such an event?) I was ready to devote a post to how easy Dropcam was making my life until this cute (and technologically unnecessary) hiccup. I still love it, but I am kicking myself right now for not having a backup monitor. And the Internet connection? Apparently, there is some sort of outage affecting Charter customers in my area. All it took to find out after checking things on my end was a few calls to a badly-executed voicemail that tried to route me to billing when I said, "I want to report a service outage." As far as that goes, I think the below tweets say it all: Rev. Nick : Do you not have a System Status web page for people to check? Why do I have to search Twitter looking for network status? Charter : orry for the downtime of services.Pls call 888-438-2427 to check for outages in your area.We want to help. Rev. Nick: I already called. They confirmed there was an outage, but said they did not have ANY details or specifics. Okay. That's enough venting for one day. In fact, it's quite a bit of a luxury to be able to complain about things like this, and that's the big lesson for me today: I think I owe more than "a moment's silent thanks" to quite a few people as a character in an Ayn Rand novel once put it. That, and maybe get a few emergency posts together ahead of time for the next time I have "one of those days". And buy a second old-fashioned baby monitor. -- CAV Link to Original

Correctly noting that, "the political left's avowed concern for minorities [is being] definitively exposed as a fraud", Thomas Sowell details its war on charter schools. The autonomy of charter schools is also a threat to the powers that be, who want to impose their own vision on the schools, regardless of what the parents want. Attorney General Eric Holder wants to impose his own notion of racial balance in the schools, while many black parents want their children to learn, regardless of whether they are seated next to a white child or a black child. There have been all-black schools whose students met or exceeded national norms in education, whether in Louisiana, California or other places around the country. But Eric Holder, like Bill de Blasio, put his ideology above the education -- and the future life -- of minority students. Sowell also observes that, "public schools are often run as if their main function is to provide jobs to teachers". Consider this an in-depth example of how leftists judge any of their initiatives. George Will recently hit the nail on the head with regard to their criteria: Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives -- making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates. Perhaps one strategy for stopping the left in its tracks might be to expose more of its accomplishments as being at odds with its stated goals. But for this to work, most voters would have to have a sincere interest in achieving the goals their candidates say they are going to achieve. (I think ths would ultimately involve them electing candidates who would get government out of the way.) This would include not being in on the game, and disdaining the "free" goodies they are being bribed with long enough to see where their true, long-term interests lie. Above all it would entail recognizing that no favor comes without strings attached. If your kid gets educated as a "favor", the Eric Holders of the world will educate them on their terms. If you pay for it yourself, it will be on your terms. Which is the better deal? Until conservatives see that and appeal to the better nature of voters, rather than competing to pander to them, the various schemes the left has in place are quite likely to keep on "succeeding". -- CAV Link to Original

The bureaucracy, that unaccountable de facto "fourth branch" of the government, is up to no good, as George Will points out. Regarding the recent IRS scandal, Will observes: So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501©(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define " candidate-related political activity" and to narrow the permissible amount of this. [links in original, my bold] Had the GOP made good on its Clinton-era promise to dismantle the welfare state "brick by brick", the IRS, if it still existed by now, would hardly be in its current powerful position. As it is, it has been left in place to continue its violations of our property rights even as it starts dictating who will get to exercise freedom of speech. Do note that it is the whole idea of "tax-exempt status" -- which is a concession to the legitimacy of governmental looting of income -- that is driving this power grab. I don't know how this particular pressure-group goodie first arose, but it sounds suspiciously like something the cowardly GOP could get behind. Since when was an inalienable right something we had to beg for from a gang of thieves? The last time the GOP held power, it failed to even reduce the size of government, let alone take steps to return it to its proper scope. Will it have learned its lesson upon returning to power by the grace of ObamaCare? I am not optimistic, and our ominously shrinking lack of government protection for freedom of speech bodes ill for it having many more chances to do so. -- CAV Link to Original

Walter Williams draws an apt analogy between disruptive students and drunk drivers: No one argues that yesteryear's students were angels. In Philadelphia, where I grew up, students who posed severe disciplinary problems were removed. Daniel Boone School was for unruly boys, and Carmen was for girls. Some people might respond: But what are we going to do with the students kicked out? Whether or not there are resources to help them is not the issue. The critical issue is whether they should be permitted to make education impossible for students who are capable of learning. It's a policy question similar to: What do you do when you have both drunken drivers and sober drivers on the road? The first order of business is to get the drunken drivers off the road. Whether there are resources available to help the drunks is, at best, a secondary issue. [bold added] Williams is right to remind us that schools are intended to teach kids who are able and willing -- at least without an inordinate amount of adult supervision -- to learn. What interests me is that I found his analogy refreshing and why. Education, like medical care, is something that statists will go on and on about being necessary (which is correct), and therefore something the government ought to guarantee everyone (which is wrong, since this inevitably requires the government to steal money). What is interesting is how this presumption that it is okay to steal to help someone who doesn't have something leads to a race to the bottom. Johnny is poor, and the easiest way (they lazily imagine) to educate him is to make someone else pay for it. If he underperforms for any reason, he gets more help, be it in the form of more loot stolen from adults or of a shift of time or resources away from the other children and towards him. The focus is entirely on any observable, negative outcome -- if it entails an alleged lack of whatever it is that is deemed necessary and regardless of what must be done to be able to say that need was met. (Just look at the rest of the column for examples! The fact that Williams has to reach to the world of driving to make his readers see the problem with that approach tells us just how ingrained this kind of thinking is regarding children and education. Altruism is so ingrained, in fact, that people routinely are failing to see that it is causing more and more children to be deprived of an actual education even as more and more loot is thrown at the problem. Regarding altruism, Ayn Rand says the following: Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist withoutgiving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: "No." Altruism says: " Yes." Does your child have a right to study a level he is capable of reaching? Without constantly being distracted? Without fear of assault? So long as you have or can find a way to pay for this that doesn't involve theft, absolutely. Public educators may mouth agreement with you, but their actions resoundingly say otherwise. By focusing on those who are needy, these "educators" ignore the able and the good, consigning them to ignorance and stunting their development. -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel fact checks some recent remarks on the budget by President Obama and, along the way, captures some of the uncertainty businessmen are facing during our economic "recovery": This post-recession economic recovery is the slowest ever. Usually, after a recession, the cost of labor drops, and companies rush to hire so they can profit as the economy improves. This time, employers looked at a thousand new regulations, unknowable new rules and taxes coming from Obamacare, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Labor Department and so on. They decided: "I better not try." May I hire interns to see if I like them before offering them long-term jobs? No. It may not be legal to employ interns anymore. May I build a pipeline? Maybe. But the Environmental Protection Agency must approve. And state utilities. And state environmental officials. And the State Department. And the White House. And ... who knows whom else? Already-existing taxes and regulations are bad enough, but at least they are known quantities. The uncertainty that comes with the prospect of new taxes and regulations -- and with having to justify one's decisions to the satisfaction of some third party -- makes long-range planning nearly impossible. -- CAV Link to Original

A couple of years ago, upon encountering the notion of "risk intelligence", I noted the following: Based on past experience, I think it is possible for people with this kind of self-awareness [i.e., of what they do and do not know] to appear to be less confident than they actually are. This can happen when one communicates his level of uncertainty poorly (or too conservatively) or when one is dealing with someone who lacks this form of self-awareness (and hence equates certainty with confidence or views admitted uncertainty with suspicion). I can even recall doing the former while in the latter situation quite a few times when I was younger. (This ultimately culminated in me being ignored after correcting someone I absolutely knew to be wrong! Fortunately, the stakes were low.) And so it is that I found refreshing one entrepreneur's tale of how he made a crucial hire, as well as the lessons he learned from it: ... While there are lots of tactics, there is no one true silver bullet. I had lots of ideas I wanted to try. One of the reasons I was so excited to have Kiran on board was that he would be the one who would actually get to try them, as well as come up with tons of new ideas. But at this moment, the most truthful answer I could give him was, I don't know. And he smiled and responded back, "I was waiting for that. I like it when people say I don't know." I burst out laughing. Kiran explained that he likes it when people say I don't know because it lends credibility to everything else that they've said. He was already pretty close to making up his mind that he was coming to 42Floors, he just wanted an honest accounting of what we had answers to and what remained as questions. [italics in original] Far from being an admission of defeat, a sign of low confidence, or a confession of unwarranted skepticism, "I don't know," can actually help us see who knows his stuff. Nobody is omniscient, but those who know something understand best of all where the limits of their knowledge lie. -- CAV Link to Original

Karen Cheng reports that the question, "What do you mean?" can stop someone who is being rude in his tracks. She gives a couple of examples, including this: I stopped him and said: "So you said that your employees are behaving like a bunch of women. What do you mean?" Immediately he apologized, said it was the wrong choice of words, and said he meant to say "stop behaving like a bunch of children." This example is actually better than the earlier one she gives, which inspired her to try it herself. In that example, an investor admits he might not have funded a startup whose founder then became pregnant. As a parent of two young children, I know how their arrival can radically alter one's time landscape and priorities. As I see it, the investor's worst sin was being too blunt. (At least he tries to be careful with his money.) Indeed, one could even make the case that he did the pregnant founder a favor by helping her see why she has lately had/might have future trouble raising money. Absent further context, I think implying that this investor is an "asshole" is inappropriate. This is not to deny that Cheng's question is valueless: There are many times that putting someone on notice that his attitudes are out of line is warranted. But one must weigh whether his evaluation of that person as immoral is correct and further consider what raising the issue might accomplish. Simply getting an apology over the phone may feel good -- but if someone really is a jerk, the chances are that he knows he can make himself look good to most people by apologizing. The question is better in a few other situations I can think of off the top of my head: The "asshole" is an employee of yours, in which case he now knows you will not tolerate him acting this way on your watch. There are others around who might need to hear that they now have an ally against such a person. He is a friendly acquaintance who you know probably didn't mean what he said, and whom you'd like to gently help realize how badly he is coming across. On the other hand, firing this question first and asking questions later can be worse than saying nothing in several situations I can think of off the top of my head: You seem offended (and not merely confused), giving the impression that you are prejudiced. You put on notice and antagonize a powerful opponent -- and also immediately cede any advantage that might be gained by patience or camouflage. The frequent and careless use of this one-liner can make you look like you will use any random utterance to blackmail any random acquaintance. Neither list is exhaustive. I like the one-liner, but it can't and shouldn't be used in every situation. The real lesson is to think before one speaks in all situations. -- CAV Link to Original

But Would They Govern Like a Different Party? This Time? John Podhoretz offers a rosy forecast for the GOP regarding control of the Senate after this year's elections: ... Republicans are coming on strong in other races no one expected. In Michigan, where another Democratic incumbent is retiring, Republican Terri Lynn Land has shown strength for months, leading her likely Democratic rival, Gary Peters, by a few points in a state Obama carried by eight points in 2012. In New Hampshire, the one-term ex-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen seems to have a formidable foe in Scott Brown, who won the surprising January 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts that portended the huge GOP wave later that year. Ugh. Scott Brown? If he's any indicator, my warnings about the GOP failing to make a difference once in power again will look more like accurate predictions. Weekend Reading "It isn't often that a doctor is mistaken about how many feet his patient has." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Can You Trust What's in Your Electronic Medical Record?" at Forbes "I see the aftermath of a lot of breakups, and one thing that stands out is the denial people exhibit about the flaws in their relationships before the end." -- Michael Hurd, in "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" at The Delaware Wave "nstead of Jim Crow laws, they use public education mandates and taxation, environmental regulation, government health care edicts, and a plethora of other legalized individual rights offences to sacrifice you and your loved ones to their own interests." -- Anders Ingemarson, in "Freeing the Individual from the Conceits of the Collective" at RealClear Markets In More Detail I'll briefly throw something out there for each column today: (1) Hsieh offers concrete advice to readers who want to protect their health from government-incentivized errors-carried-forward in their medical records; (2) Hurd brings up a fallacy ("Heaven's Reward") I'd never heard of; and (3) Ingemarson makes lots of good points, despite, as a newletter I follow pointed out, the fact that the column does not mention that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually violated individual rights with its provisions against non-government racial discrimination. Many Apps Cost Way too Much A widely-circulated Internet joke lampoons people who complain about the noiminal dollar cost of some smart phone or tablet app, but drop a fiver on coffee without batting an eye. The point about the value of a good app is well-taken, but developer Jeff Atwood notices that the argument doesn't apply to all paid apps: Imagine you bought your coffee, only to open the lid and find it was only half full, or that it wasn't coffee at all but lemonade. If only 1 in 5 cups of coffee you bought actually contained coffee, a $3.99 price for that coffee starts to seem unreasonably high. When you buy an app, you don't really know what you're going to get. [link and bold in original] You may have wasted your money, but you will have also paid in time, which is, being irreplaceable, is worse. Mobile phone apps that could be replaced with a decent web site (or mobile version of one) are worse than pointless, as the rest of Atwood's piece shows. --CAV Link to Original

Editor's Note: I have a backlog of "proud father" stuff today... 1. Three cheers for the web, this time for saving me from my own carelessness. One evening, Pumpkin wanted to "work" (i.e., play with my desktop "becuter" in my office area), and I let her. Of course, in the span of a half-second of my being distracted, she managed (I think) to invoke a settings selector a couple of levels down in a right-click menu, thereby accidentally removing the borders and controls from all windows. This "stacked" all my open applications and x-terminals uselessly on top of each other. Persistently, too: Neither logging out nor rebooting changed anything. Luckily, I was able to search the problem on my laptop and find a solutionalmost immediately. Time to create my little girl's first user account... 2. Little Man, my eight-month-old son, impressed me a couple of days ago, just before his bedtime. Rather than start crying, he looked at me and reached for me with both arms -- and got slightly fussy only when I incorrectly guessed he wanted to practice standing. (He pulls himself up now, by the way.) No: He was trying to ask for bedtime. He quickly went to sleep after I figured that one out. 3. Our recent vacation was part of a surprise party for my wife's sister's birthday. It was fun seeing Pumpkin and her cousin -- about the same age, but a head taller -- interact over the course of the trip. My wife has an amusing series of pictures of them fighting over who could dance with Mickey Mouse. Unintimidated by being pushed away, my daughter pushed right back -- not that we encourage fighting as the go-to means of dispute resolution! 4. My favorite moments from the vacation, in no particular order, were as follows: (1) my son buying me a rest on the beach by wanting a nap; (2) visiting an aquarium with my daughter, like we frequently did in Boston; (3) the massage my wife and I got for ourselves as a belated anniversary present; (4) a morning walk alone; and (5) the whole set of three families actually making it to a show on time (hard to do with two toddlers and an infant involved!). It was especially fun to see how Pumpkin lit up whenever it was time to clap. -- CAV Link to Original

Andrew Napolitano describes a federal assault on attorney-client privilege borne of domestic surveillance and some convenient twisting of the "rules", either of which is bad enough on its own: Can the NSA lawfully tell lawyers for the government who are negotiating with Mayer Brown lawyers what it overheard between the Mayer Brown lawyers and their client? The answer, incredibly, is: Yes. Federal rules prohibit the NSA from sharing knowledge with lawyers for the federal government only about persons who have been indicted. In this case, Mayer Brown is attempting to negotiate favorable trade relations between Indonesia and the U.S., and the lawyers for the U.S. have the unfair advantage of knowing in advance the needs, negotiating positions and strategy of their adversaries. In the Obama years, this is how the feds work: secretly, unfairly and in utter derogation of the attorney-client privilege. [bold added, link in original omited] With the government running practically everything these days, does Napolitano even need to ask, "What will they do next?" -- CAV Link to Original

Christopher Groskopf, a software developer and project manager who has been "a 100% remote worker" for over two years, offers his insights and advice for making that sort of arrangement successful. There is lots of practical advice, such as on using technology, but I think the following psychological insight is crucial: It goes without saying that if you're going to be apart from your team, you need to take responsibility for your own organization. What may be less obvious is that you're going to need to take that organization to much greater lengths than would probably otherwise be necessary. Why? The lack of tangible reminders. It's amazing how much we rely on subtle environmental and social cues for how and when things get done. If you never lock eyes with a homepage producer, you might forget to tell them about an impending launch. [bold added] Groskopf soon after uses the term "context" in passing, but it is clear that the idea of there being a psychological context to work is crucial to his thinking. And here's an example of Groskopf implementing this idea in another way: The single best advice I got when I went remote was from Matt Waite, who said, "Put on pants," by which I'm pretty sure he meant, "Act like you're going to work." Get up, put on clothes you'd leave the house in, take a look in the mirror, and go to your work space. It is essential that you have a room (or nook) in your house that you use only for work. You need a place to go to at the start of the day and leave at the end. I even put an office nameplate over mine. Do the same things you would if you were going to the office. This might sound silly, but it will help keep you sane. Think of your home workspace like an exclave of your company's offices. Act like you might run into your editor or the CEO at any moment! It'll make you feel normal. [link in orignal] Do note that his work day doesn't just start at his office: itends there. Implicit in Groskopf's advice to act like one is at work is the idea that one should have clear-cut boundaries between work and leisure. That said, while it may seem counterintuitive to include non-work items -- like picking kids up from school -- in a work calendar, this actually helps one maintain such boundaries by avoiding conflict. (Parent and former Qwest CEO Teresa Taylor even goes so far as to keep one calendar for similar reasons.) I highly recommend this piece, which is explicitly written to be useful for people in any line of work. Link to Original

There are many things I disagree with about his column, but Michael Schulson (or the editor) of The Daily Beast asks a pregnant question in the opening blurb to "Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience" (HT: Snedcat): Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers [ sic], but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It's all pseudoscience--so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others? Schulson comes to the following interesting and relevant conclusion about the predominantly leftist clientele of Whole Foods: ... By the total lack of outrage over Whole Foods' existence, and by the total saturation of outrage over the Creation Museum, it's clear that strict scientific accuracy in the public sphere isn't quite as important to many of us as we might believe. Just ask all those scientists in the aisles of my local Whole Foods. [link added] Schulson also does a good job cataloging the scientfic nonsense peddled at Whole Foods and likening it to religious dogma and practice. That said (and again), there are many things I disagree with about Schulson's analysis. For example, I don't agree with parts of his conclusion, which is that: Bringing sound data into political conversations and consumer decisions is a huge, ongoing challenge. It’s not limited to one side of the public debate. The moral is ... that whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites. I think Schulson is right to look at the questionable "science" tolerated or accepted on both sides of this cultural divide and conclude that neither side is ultimately rational. His exhortation to bring "sound data into political conversations and consumer decisions" is also laudable. But good data isn't enough. What is also needed -- whether we are discussing how to achieve good health, the origins of life, or the proper scope of government -- isn't just good data, but the proper method of evaluating such data. Without it -- as we see time and time again in politics -- all the data in the world won't amount to a hill of beans. We should not just insist on good data, but rational justifications that actually follow from it from each other when conversing. In fact, we should start off by insisting on this from ourselves, because the conclusions we form have life-promoting or -impairing consequences. If enough people start doing this, the political conversations would start improving as a result. It is this last context -- rational self-interest -- that I think is missing from Schulson's analysis, and I think it causes him to miss why leftists get so irritated by the Creation Museum, yet don't bat an eye at Whole Foods. When someone adopts an ideology or a practice that has no rational justification, that person has, somewhere along the line, accepted an arbitrary statement or evaded a falsehood. No matter how much that person distracts himself by performing rituals or making long-winded justifications or getting others to join his folly, he knows what he has done, and the best way to anger him to to hold a mirror up to his face. The Creation Museum is just such a mirror. Add to that a dollop of jealousy of the political powertheocrats have regrettably amassed in recent decades, and you have the perfect trigger for an angry leftist to explode. -- CAV P.S. More than once in the past, I have offered my support here to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his stand against ObamaCare, with which I agree. Considering some of the products he sells and the campaigns his stores support, I regard him as at least intellectually inconsistent, like many too many other businessmen. Link to Original

Vacation time for the Van Horn family is over and a couple of difficult projects, each with its own share of tedious steps, await me. Fortunately, I happened upon a couple of good blog postings that will help me work more effectively. The first I encountered this weekend as I caught up with my favorite email list. In "Keep It Interesting", Jean Moroney offers advice on how to maintain focus by overcoming boredom. For example: One idea is to take a quick timeout to pick favorites. If you're in a meeting, what do you like best about the person speaking? Or the meeting setup? If it's a project, what is your favorite task? What do you think is most important about the project? You can stop to pick favorites anytime, anywhere. It takes only a moment, but it gives you an important mental refresh. [emphasis in original] Moroney, whose Thinking Directions course and site I have mentioned here from time to time, has long offered advice like this through a newsletter, but now also does so through a blog. Links to new installments will show up automatically on my blogrollfrom now on. (Click "View All" to see the link if it is not on the short list of most recent posts from other blogs.) Second, and of longer-range use than tackling an immediate problem with boredom, is an entry from the blog of the Harvard Business Review by Heidi Grant Halvorson, titled, "How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To". This post offers advice on tackling procrastination. One strategy I find particularly intriguing is the following: There are two ways to look at any task. You can do something because you see it as a way to end up better off than you are now- as an achievement or accomplishment. As in, if I complete this project successfully I will impress my boss, or if I work out regularly I will look amazing. Psychologists call this a promotion focus - and research shows that when you have one, you are motivated by the thought of making gains, and work best when you feel eager and optimistic. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, if you are afraid you will screw up on the task in question, this is not the focus for you. Anxiety and doubt undermine promotion motivation, leaving you less likely to take any action at all. What you need is a way of looking at what you need to do that isn't undermined by doubt - ideally, one that thrives on it. When you have a prevention focus, instead of thinking about how you can end up better off, you see the task as a way to hang on to what you've already got- to avoid loss... [emphasis in original] This reminds me of Ayn Rand's definition of value as, "that which one acts to gain and/or keep" [my emphasis]. Note with the "prevention focus" the crucial, but not necessarily obvious difference between avoiding loss and avoiding punishment (which is a poor motivator): The focus is firmly on how one can act to defend values one has already obtained. That is, both kinds of focus are value-based, and therefore positive, but if a prospective gain seems too difficult or abstract, the prospect of losing something tangible can provide better motivation. That said, I would have to think more about Halvorson's other advice before saying which aspects I agree or disagree with. (For example. I wouldn't leave negative emotions unexamined for too long, not that Halvorson necessarily advises that.) Nevertheless, she has lots of interesting things to say. -- CAV Link to Original

Answering a "progressive" who (correctly) sees cronyism as an inevitable consequence of central planning, but is untroubled by it; John Stossel makes the following observations regarding its enormous visible and invisible cultural and economic costs: Politicians doling out favors quietly shift where society's resources flow, who gets employed, what ideas are pursued. It distorts the economy and the culture -- and it turns us into a nation of favor-seekers instead of creators and producers. What about all the new businesses that would have gotten investment money but didn't have Gore on their boards? What new ideas might have thrived if old industries weren't coddled? We don't know. We will never know the greatness of what might have existed had the state not sucked the oxygen out of the incubator. Stossel calls this an argument for "smaller" government, but that is akin to a physician advising his patient to remove only part of a cancerous tumor. This analogy is inexact, as we shall see: What we really need is a propergovernment, which protects our individual rights, and isn't in the business of looting from -- or doling out favors to -- anyone. Without anygovernment, we would have anarchy; but if we merely cut back, we would have the same problems on a smaller scale and would eventually see them get much bigger again with a vengeance. The progressive Stossel mentions knows this on some level, which is why he included the military and prisons (which the government and only the government should control) in his list of things he thinks we should get from the government. (Most people wouldn't have a problem with roads, either, but they are mistaken.) Until opponents of the "progresives" start discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate uses of government, the "progressives" will own the debate -- which will look like a choice between advocating anarchy and merely quibbling over who gets what favors, and whose resources will be raided to pay for it. -- CAV Link to Original

Spotting in this morning's news feeds (1) a post on productivity tips for academics and (2) a link to a blog premised on the idea of parenting as an experimental endeavor; I was reminded of a realization I had some time ago that others might find useful. It may not really merit a special name, but I call it "acceptable incompletion". It's all about finding more stopping points than might be obvious for a task, so that it can be completed more easily, or at a more opportune time, or in a more efficient way than simply performing it all at once. To take a simple example, suppose I notice that the downstairs bathroom needs, say, a new spare roll of toilet paper, but restocking it would require a trip upstairs. There's no hurry to do this immediately and I have no other reason to go upstairs at the moment. Rather than devote a couple of minutes to this task, I spend a few seconds placing the empty roll or some other reminder where I will see it at the foot of the stairs so that the next time I do need to go there, I know to retrieve the new spare. I have saved some time and increased the value of that later trip. Have I replaced the spare? No, but I know I will. (Likewise, I no longer waste twenty minutes every evening getting bottles, pacifiers, and whatnot upstairs for bedtime, thanks to this approach. Generally, these things get spirited up (and counterparts down for washing) over the course of other morning or evening activities.) I have blogged other examples before (specifically, laundry and multiple tool stashes), but hadn't noticed the unifying characteristic of recognizing "new" steps in a process. Considering Matt Might's advice, to which I refer in the latter link, this method falls within his broader theme of lowering transaction costs -- by becoming better at recognizing transactions. Might, by the way, makes a good point along these lines about starting a new project. Call it "Unseen Step One: Devote a blank document to it", if you will. I frequently hear productivity advice -- especially that influenced by David Allen -- warning about "projects in disguise". Depending on your context, what might be a task for most people might well be a project, however simple, for you. Why not take advantage of that fact? -- CAV Link to Original

I always enjoy Thomas Sowell's occasional "Random Thoughts" columns. Their short paragraphs invariably are thought-provoking, humorous, or both. For example, in his most recent edition, Sowell has this to say about history: Not to put words into Sowell's mouth, but it is too easy to observe the many disgraceful and horrific episodes history has to offer and come to the wrong conclusion about man's nature and, consequently, underestimate the power of rational men to change history's course for the better. Time doesn't permit me to elaborate on why Rand has such an encouraging message, but she does a far better job arguing her point than I could, anyway. Suffice it to say for now that, while one cannot assume that men are always rational, one can still understand much of what they do and fight them effectively as a result. I point this out because, as far as I know, Rand's view of history is novel and underappreciated by many of her fans and sympathizers. It is also something her opponents would probably wish never saw the light of day. -- CAV Link to Original

"Why Speed Reading Is for Fools": A speed reader is sure to notice the title. I hope the many good lines sprinkled throughout act as speed bumps, helping would-be passers-by slow down and sit for a spell, as it were. You could drive by the Grand Canyon at 100mph. "I saw 20 landmarks today." "Oh, really, I saw 45". But did they see anything? Did they experience anything? They'd have felt and learned far more if they had tried to do far less. You can race through a foreign nation checking items off a list of "must-sees" or you can dig in deeper and actually experience something of the culture you've taken so much trouble to go and visit. Books, art, movies and meals are no different. Two people can see the same exact thing in the same moment and have entirely opposite experiences simply because of how quickly or slowly they pay attention. I am no speed reader, but I did, at first, think, "But you do sometimes need to skim something or read it quickly." Berkun doesn't deny this, but he does raise the following possibility: If you are rushing through everything, maybe you should consider doing fewer things better. "Haste makes waste" applies to mental activities just as much as it does to physical ones. Man, the rational animal, can neither go through life properly without thought nor can he really think without taking in relevant data. Unwarranted haste deprives us of both, because both take time. -- CAV Link to Original

An article with some interesting polling data about the regulatory state indirectly reminded me of the approach taken by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute in a recent piece in USA Today. In the former piece, we have the following question-and-answer: Americans from fishermen to insurance agents are getting tired of being victimized by their own government, said the report's poll section: "68 percent believe regulations are created by 'out-of-touch people trying to push a political agenda' rather than by 'well-intentioned people trying to address real challenges' (26 percent)." Left unasked, and demonstrating the limitations of polls in the process, was the following question: "Should the government be in the business of telling us how to run our affairs at all?" The whole line of questioning by this "watchdog" group reminds me of the Brook and Watkins piece, where they comment on the question of whether our government is doing too little or too much by stating, "The question we need to ask, however, is not whether the government should do more or less, but what should it do." The flaw in the questioning is very deep, morally and practically. In addition to ignoring the fact that government regulation (a.k.a. prescriptive law, a.k.a. central planning) violates individual rights, the questions assume that benevolent or beneficial regulation is possible at all. Consider the polling questions in light of the following observation by economist George Reisman: The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. [bold added] It is hard to imagine how, in the words of one of the questions asked by the Center for Regulatory Solutions, a government regulatory scheme even could be -- much less end up looking like it was -- crafted by "well-intentioned people trying to address real challenges". Central planning is immoral and impractical. It should be watched, but only with an eye for personal protection and ultimate abolishment. While it can be pruned back or made less harmful in the short term, it will only metastasize again if not recognized as the threat to freedom that it is and removed accordingly. Regarding regulations and entitlement programs, what we need aren't watchdogs, but hunting dogs. -- CAV Link to Original

Today is one of those days I am surprised doesn't happen to me much more often, despite my efforts to keep the wee hours free-ish for writing: I have practically no time even to blog. So it is that writing time is on my mind and writing time is what I will write about. (I am tempted to rant about my intense and growing hatred of snow, but that would only be ironic, as profanity is already the unwanted snow clogging the arteries, driveways, and sidewalks of the Internet.) In the short term, two "unimportant, but urgent" tasks await me: shoveling snow and preparing an experimental crock pot recipe to cook all day. The former I couldn't attend to yesterday evening because my wife needed me to take the kids so she could do some work. The latter I forgot about until I looked at my to-do list this morning. Neither would normally be much of a problem but for the fact that we have an early deadline to meet this morning for my wife to get to work. So I'll risk boring you with half-formed thoughts about time or not post at all today... In the long term, there is good news/bad news for me, timewise, on the writing front. The good news is that our baby boy's sleeping pattern seems to have become somewhat predictable; the bad is that he pretty reliably wakes up between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. Ouch! That was a time I had a taste of being able to use right before he showed up. I might need to contemplate flipping my schedule around a little bit if this holds up since I am eager to have something in addition to perfunctory blog posts back in my routine. Stay tuned. In the meantime, a snow shovel and a cutting board await me. -- CAV Link to Original

Eric Raymond, his curiosity stoked by "The Incomplete Guide to Feminist Infighting", speaks of following links down a "rabbit hole". Two things stood out for me from his report, which concerns "Twitter wars" among various figures in the feminist movement. Raymond nicely sums up the first, "lack of contact with reality": The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze "privilege" from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively "oppressed" blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It's the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years - even decades - without facing a reality check. And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there's a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim. Material comfort and distance from war, anarchy, or dictatorship certainly help such people pretend to be serious and relevant, but they go nowhere near explaining the commonality of this and similar phenomena. But something else Raymond misses does: the role that our society's dominant culture plays in incubating such creatures. For starters, how else do they (could they) hold positions in, for example, academia or the press? (Some time back, the college newsletter, The Undercurrent, made a similar point about another error (i.e., blaming technology like Twitter) that people often make about phenomena like this.) In addition to not having to face real problems, these flowers live in a hothouse devoid of real ideological challenge. And that leads me to the second thing that stood out to me about Raymond's report. He colorfully refers to "Kafka trapping" as how these feminists (a) avoid having to think about criticism and ( how they persuade others of their cause. In his earlier blog post, Raymond even includes a small taxonomy of Kafka traps, but I think it is also helpful to note that his traps fall under a broader logical fallacy, the Argument from Intimidation, long ago identified by Ayn Rand: There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent's agreement with one's undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure . . . [it] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent's character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: "Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X's argument is false." . . . The falsehood of his argument is asserted arbitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality. There is much more at that link, including the following: The Argument from Intimidation dominates today's discussions in two forms. In public speeches and print, it flourishes in the form of long, involved, elaborate structures of unintelligible verbiage, which convey nothing clearly except a moral threat. ("Only the primitive-minded can fail to realize that clarity is oversimplification.") But in private, day-by-day experience, it comes up wordlessly, between the lines, in the form of inarticulate sounds conveying unstated implications. It relies, not on what is said, but on how it is said--not on content, but on tone of voice. It is astonishing to think that this was written in 1964, half a century ago. The Internet is replete with such rabbit holes, and speaking with their inhabitants (or even spending time in them as an observer) is useless unless one attempts to understand what is going on. This one does in order to defend one's own mind and, perhaps, help others understand how to defend themselves against poisonous notions and the unearned guilt that go with them. -- CAV Link to Original