Gus Van Horn blog

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. The German word of the week is Deppenapostroph, as explained below:Establishments that feature their owners' names, with signs like "Rosi's Bar" or "Kati's Kiosk" are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be "Rosis Bar", "Katis Kiosk", or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar. However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph ("idiot's apostrophe") has become so widespread that it is permissible -- as long as it separates the genitive 's' within a proper name.And yes, dear reader, I shall save you the trouble of visiting Google Translate: Depp does indeed mean idiot. Poor Johnny... I'll never complain about my own name again! 2. If you're old enough to remember Atari, you may have wondered how games like Pong were implemented without computers:They were made by mostly avoiding 'computing' concepts altogether, and treating it more like a mechanical thing. For example with Pong a major component is usually timers - every xth of a second the timer will emit a signal. You have timers calibrated to match the horizontal refresh of the screen, so they'll 'ring' at the same point on each scanline. Then you have timers calibrated to the vertical refresh, so they'll ring on the same scanline each frame. The ball is then just two discrete timers for vertical and horizontal position, and their rings are sent through an AND gate that will raise the voltage going to the display when both are ringing causing a white dot to appear. The paddles build on this concept with a medium length timer that can be started and stopped to define the length...The above is from the top-rated Stack Exchange answer, but another points to an online emulation of Pong that demonstrates how the schematics work. 3. If you were as impressed as I was with last month's pager attacks against Hezbollah, you might find this 2021 account of the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist interesting. "The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine" reads like a science fiction/spy novel hybrid:[T]he machine gun, the robot, its components and accessories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran. The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup, a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to bits after the kill, destroying all evidence. ... The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray. The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the [target] car's speed.The detailed account was unfortunately made possible by the fact that the device was not successfully destroyed as planned by the post-kill explosion. 4. Good news! The subtitle says just about all you need: "Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touch screens. Buttons are back!" The author has many of the usual misconceptions about capitalism, but he is a bearer of good news in what I would call the stupid smart car front. -- CAV Link to Original

I have always disliked the phrase brutally honest despite its positive connotation to many people as something akin to forthright, even when the truth might be unpleasant. Too often, there seems to be an additional connotation/cultural baggage in the vein that truth is somehow more often unpleasant than not. Said baggage is most often evident in the boastful use of the phrase as a self-descriptor. Most of the time, rude or (at best) blunt would be more accurate, and I take it as a red flag accordingly. In fact, truth can be pleasant or not, and can be processed rationally or not -- the latter up to and including outright evasion. That said, at the end of the day, the truth, even if it's unpleasant, is your friend. If a hurricane is coming, you can't run from it if you don't know about it or fail to take it seriously. Today, I learned of a new phrase that strikes me as about as trendy at brutally honest was at one point when I was young: radical honesty. Courtesy of a column by Suzanne Lucas, we have the following example making the rounds from the LinkedIn profile of a famous actor:Was aggressively mediocre at job. Skipped work to be an extra on a Guillermo del Toro movie called Pacific Rim; subsequently let go. Suffered an existential crisis that led to enlightenment regarding the definition of success on one’s own terms. Became an actor instead.Lucas herself sums this up as outlining [one's] flaws. As with bluntness, there can be a place for "radical honesty," (or, as it is more commonly known, self-deprecation. A LinkedIn profile (which is a marketing tool) is not that place for the vast majority -- and Lucas shows us exactly what she means by indicating another viral and "radically honest" LinkedIn post whose many compliments failed to translate into a rapid end to a job hunt. "Well, you're as pretty as any of them, you just need a nose job." -- Cosmo Kramer It is true that it sometimes takes a real friend to break an unpleasant truth to someone else, and humor about past failures has its place. But communicating those things doesn't take place in a vacuum. One's purpose and one's audience govern which facts are relevant to bring up and in what way. Whether you think an acquaintance could use a nose job or you know you weren't the best at a past position, telling others about those things isn't inherently necessary or even a good idea. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at Capitalism Magazine is a thorough debunking of the latest hokum Donald Trump is throwing around to gin up anti-immigration hysteria. The number comes from a letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding how many noncitizen criminals are facing deportation. Everything else apparently comes from misunderstanding of the data or downright fabrication. Cato's Alex Nowrasteh debunks the following untrue claims:The 13,099 non-detained migrants convicted of homicide are free to roam the United States.The small number of migrant murderers who are not in prison were released willy-nilly.These 13,099 migrants convicted of homicide committed their crimes recently.All these migrants were convicted for homicides committed in the United States.Nowrasteh makes short work of the first claim:Cropped from image by Nitish Meena, via Unsplash, license.... Migrants incarcerated for homicide are considered "non-detained" by ICE when they are in state or federal prisons. When ICE uses the term "non-detained," they mean not currently detained by ICE. In other words, the migrant murderers included in the letter are overwhelmingly in prison serving their sentences. After they serve their sentences, the government transfers them onto ICE's docket for removal from the United States.This alone should cause almost anyone to wonder how stupid or dishonest Donald Trump is, and question Harris's competence, given how easy it would be to answer his claims. But, alas, Harris has "struggl[ed] to respond." -- CAVLink to Original

This fall, quite a few states will have electoral reforms on the ballot, mostly one or more of ranked-choice voting (RCV), open primaries, and explicitly making it illegal for non-citizens to vote. The third strikes me as so commonsensical that I'm wondering Isn't that already against the law? The first two are more interesting, and attempt to address a blatant problem caused by the way the two-party system operates, namely that closed primaries make certain party factions disproportionately strong, leading to elections in which one or both parties fields a candidate with very narrow appeal to the general electorate. While the overall current state of our politics is a direct result of our cultural deterioration, I am inclined to believe that the entrenched two-party system worsens the problem by putting each party under the thumb of its worst elements, by making it too easy to ignore centrist or pro-liberty voters. But inclined is the key here: As I have said of ranked-choice voting in the past, I can see these measures being band-aids, too:Image by Elliott Stallion, via Unsplash, license.[M]ost voters are not just ignorant, but have been dulled by decades of welfare statism and pressure group warfare to the point that they basically sell their votes at election time. The end result might be that, yes, the Matt Gaetzes and Rashida Tlaibs get eliminated from Congress, but eventually get replaced by smoother operators who can nonconfrontationally pass very bad legislation that "everybody" likes. Consider this thought experiment: Imagine George Washington winning a modern election -- or Glenn Youngkin winning one during revolutionary times -- even with RCV. I can't, because the electorate has changed so much.My apprehension about the "smooth operator" stems in part from how similar the two parties look to me today. Neither challenges the welfare state. Neither has a coherent (let alone pro-America) foreign policy. Neither speaks of individual rights. They look different only on exactly how they'll violate our rights. Sooner or later, someone will find a way to do so in a way that is popular across the board. No election protocol can be well-designed enough to protect a diseased body politic from itself. Another concern shows up courtesy of Alaska, which already has RCV and open primaries -- and will consider returning to the old system. That state elected a Democrat as representative due to pathological behavior in its particular RCV system when Nick Begich III, whom a majority preferred to his two opponents, lost anyway. I don't know enough about RCV to know whether such results can be avoided in the future, but if they can, they need to be, given that the whole point would seem to be that the majority can elect its preferred candidate. -- CAVLink to Original

John Stossel includes the following gem near the start of his latest column:Reich does almost exactly what I do, except Reich is repeatedly wrong. It's understandable. Despite being frequently introduced as "economist Robert Reich," Reich has no economics degree. [bold added]Having never particularly looked into Reich's background myself, I am among the many who have been and will be surprised to learn this. The rest of the piece is as fun to read as it is informative. Here's a sample:One of countless examples of Reich being referred to, incorrectly, as an "economist." (The author believes that this screen shot is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.)Progressives and liberal lawyers like Reich believe rich people take most of America's wealth and leave little for the poor. Like the Hollywood writers for the movie Wall Street, they call our economy "a zero-sum game -- somebody wins, somebody loses." But that's just dumb. Capitalists create new wealth. They don't take a big slice of the pie and leave us a sliver. If they get rich, it's because they find ways to bake lots of new pies. That's what's happened in America. Its why today, even poor Americans have access to things European kings only dreamed about. Capitalists can get rich only by making all of us better off. Actual economist Dan Mitchell explains, "Billionaires only kept 2.2 percent of the additional wealth they generated ... The rest of us captured almost 98 percent of the benefits."This is not just a good refutation of a ridiculous trope, it calls to mind Ayn Rand's comprehensive demolition from Atlas Shrugged, where she says in part:In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of "exploitation" for which you have damned the strong. [bold added]As Stossel indicates in his piece, Reich is hoodwinking millions with his zero-sum, envy-mongering nonsense. This piece and Atlas Shrugged are good things to keep in mind any time one might encounter a thoughtful person who might be receptive to a more truthful narrative. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner. *** 1. I'll start with a win for today. By leveraging a log review for blogging purposes, I caught myself letting a tax matter fall through the cracks. We could have already been done, but getting it done today is great, too. Chalk another one up for regular log reviews. And blogging. And multi-purposing things. 2. This one's good for the awwwwww! factor alone: Our new kitten sometimes sleeps on my pillow next to my head. Image by Yunus Tuğ, via Unsplash, license.3. The kids are no longer toddlers and I needed a new grill after the move. That was only ever going to mean one thing: I'm back to grilling with charcoal! As I've said before, gas is more convenient in a lot of respects, but the taste with charcoal is superior, and I enjoy using charcoal more. 4. I enjoyed seeing Arsenal dig in and win 4-2 after Leicester City scored two goals out of thin air during a short span of the second half. My favorite commentator on Arsenal, Peter Wood, does well to describe the overall performance and impressive reaction to the setback:The team didn't play the victim. There was no panic in the system. They just accepted the job was to score, and they pummelled that task hardcore. It was a destruction zone out there -- but the Leicester keeper Hermansen was putting on a worldie, and it really did start to feel like they weren't going to find a way. Then it arrived in the 94th minute. From a corner, the ball found Trossard at the back post, he put it back into the danger zone, and it was turned in by Leicester. Three minutes later, Kai Havertz capitalised on a poor clearance and made it 4. 36 shots. 16 on target. 4.62 xG. This was a battering of exceptional proportions...I remember talking with another fan before halftime about how solidly the Gunners were in control of the game, and then how they just kept on with it. If anything has struck me more than the impressive record the team has amassed over the last couple of years under Mikel Arteta, it has been the mentality behind it. -- CAVLink to Original

Image by DuffDudeX1, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.PETER Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you would do if we had a million dollars and didn't have to work. And invariably, whatever we would say, that was supposed to be our careers. If you wanted to build cars, then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic. SAMIR So what did you say? PETER I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech. MICHAEL No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. -- Office Space (1999) *** In an essay he titles "When To Do What You Love," venture capitalist Paul Graham considers a dilemma just about every thoughtful person faces regarding work in the long term. He begins:There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give a general answer is to trace it. When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work on what interests you the most? So even raising the question implies that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else, like what pays the best. [bold added]Note the careful consideration of this advice, which is so common as to be effectively devoid of meaning and subject to the kind of ridicule we see in the movie quote above. Whether you're young or simply someone who has struggled with finding the right career, I highly recommend reading the whole piece. I'm from the latter camp, so I recognize lots of the pitfalls Graham discusses, and I am in awe of the creative ways he offers around some of them:One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people? Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring. The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math. [footnote removed, bold added]All I would add to this is that the advice is synergistic: Young Me nailed uncertainty-proof only to get mired with exactly the wrong set of colleagues for who he was then, by hastily choosing an ill-fitting job right after college. The time I could have saved! Oh, and yes: He does advise not waiting until you're done with college to start getting an answer to this question. -- CAVLink to Original

The transcript of energy advocate Alex Epstein's recent testimony before Congress is available at his Substack, and is well worth reading. The testimony itself is about three minutes long, but if you also read the Q&A, you'll need more like half an hour. Fortunately, Epstein embeds the video. While this is a slightly longer listen, you might find it easier to squeeze in: I plan to finish the Q&A this way the next time I run errands. This is the entire hearing, set to start when Epstein appears. The word economy is impressive and hard-hitting:The basic idea of government-dictated green energy is that the government should force us to rapidly reduce our use of fossil fuel energy and replace it with so-called "green energy," mostly solar and wind, such that we reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at the latest. There are three basic truths you need to know about the costs of government-dictated green energy. And I think these are really under-appreciated even by critics. One is they have been enormous so far. Two is they would have been catastrophic had it not been for the resistance of their opponents. This is very important when you hear the Biden administration has record production. That's in spite of them, not because of them. And three, they will be apocalyptic if not stopped in the future.Who -- friend or foe of "net zero" -- is going to read or hear this and not want more? The way I first heard about this testimony -- through a headline of a news aggregator I use -- attests to Epstein's effectiveness and offers hope that the United States might back away from the precipice that the "Inflation Reduction Act" has pushed us towards. Thanks and congratulations to Alex Epstein are in order. Please consider returning the favor he is doing all of us by further spreading the word. -- CAVLink to Original

In a world where every dictatorial thug seems emboldened by a weak-willed America, it is natural to wonder if or when China's Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan once he's done wrecking his country's own economy. Michael Fumento considers the question at some length and his answer makes the whole proposition sound borderline ridiculous even without the American assistance such an attempt would deserve. That last is my opinion, given that Fumento regards American assistance, or at least the prospect of it, as one of the challenges China found face. His full list is:Potential Combat Allies -- by which he means the United States and Japan directly and the likes of Australia and South Korea indirectly; Strait Jacket -- such an endeavor would require enormous manpower, which would have to be moved across the 100-plus mile-wide Taiwan Strait and landed on an easily-defended coast; and Mines -- which would be far easier for Taiwan to deploy than for China to remove.Air support for Taiwan looks like the weakest link here, since the presence or absence of American support makes the most difference, but the geographic constraints are impressive. For example:Image by Tom Ritson, via Unsplash, license.[M]ost of the Taiwanese beaches are very shallow. The PRC would have to anchor ships far from the coast and move equipment to the shores slowly, making the ships vulnerable to attack... ... Germany had to guard coastline from the French border with Spain all the way to entire Norwegian border... The western coast of Taiwan is only about 100 miles, but because there's so little actual beach areas needing defending would be a fraction of that. These are the so-called "red beaches," with about 12 facing the PRC or on Taiwan's northern tip. About six are on the far side of the island, requiring landing craft to swing around with every extra mile fraught with peril. Beijing would also have to assume Taiwan could destroy its major ports at a conflict's outset. The paucity of landing zones means these ships would be coming in what we nicely referred to as "kill boxes," albeit moving ones... [link omitted]Between the huge challenge of actually invading Taiwan and the fact that the strategic thinking of Sun Tzu is widely known by educated Chinese, presumably including Xi Jinping, Fumento generally argues that such a plan is a complete non-starter. Perhaps Fumento is right about Xi, but he's talking about the same leader who, seeing his country become prosperous under semi-capitalism, nevertheless chose to ignore almost equally widely-known thinking about economics. Why wouldn't someone so foolish try this, anyway? If Xi is at all a rational actor, Taiwan is safe, but his rationality is hardly a safe bet. -- CAVLink to Original

Over the weekend, the Israeli Defense Forces bombed a heavily fortified bunker deliberately situated beneath a residential high-rise, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the thoroughly evil head of Iran's strongest proxy, Hezbollah. It took 80 tons of bunker-busting bombs and culminated years of meticulous intelligence-gathering -- that picked up pace when the Islamist militia fought on the side of Syria's dictator over a decade ago:The new data allowed Israel to compile extensive profiles on Hezbollah's operatives, including the top chiefs who would attend the funerals of the slain fighters. Narrowing its targets, the Jewish state then began hacking into the terror group's communication devices, with spies able to track down the exact movements of Hezbollah's operatives -- sometimes through their wives' cell phones. Israel's spies also tracked Hezbollah leaders' movements by hacking surveillance cameras in Lebanon, and even reading their cars' odometers. As a result, Israel learned that whenever the routines of the terror group deviated, an attack was imminent, Israeli officials told the FT. That very thing occurred on Friday as Israel bombarded Beirut, with officials learning that Nasrallah was en route to his "command and control" bunker. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York for his speech at the United Nations when he green-lit the decision to drop Israel's ideal weapon to take out Nasrallah. The Jewish state had been planning the attack for months as it developed bombs outfitted with timed explosions that would dig through the earth, allowing the next bomb to reach further down, the Wall Street Journal reports. [links omitted]For the implications of this major historical development, I recommend three analyses:Jared Kushner's X post on why this castration of Hezbollah is such a welcome development. The post errs somewhat on the optimistic side, but there is no denying this immediate benefit:... Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent.For one possible immediate problem, the threat still posed by Syria, Naftali Hazony's X thread sounds plausible to me:As long as Iran controls Syria, it can continue to supply Hezbollah with rockets and drones to attack Israel's cities. It can also send troops to counter any Israeli invasion. This means that Israel's primary goal should now be to confront Iran.Finally, Yaron Brook's podcast, which I also embed below, is very good for historic and military context, as well as possible implications.I am no Middle East expert, but it seems quite clear to me that the biggest boon to this news is that there is a clear window of opportunity to end Iran's nuclear weapons program and topple its regime. If I recall correctly, Brook covers this in about the first hour, before taking questions. I didn't have time to hear many of those, which could include related analysis. This is fantastic news. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. An XKCD Comic Turns Ten:Image by Randall Munroe, via XKCD, license.... It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, or CLIP, or ResNet+ImageNet among others). The key idea still very much stands though. Understanding the difference between easy and hard challenges in software development continues to require an enormous depth of experience. I'd argue that LLMs have made this even worse. Understanding what kind of tasks LLMs can and cannot reliably solve remains incredibly difficult and unintuitive. They're computer systems that are terrible at maths and that can't reliably lookup facts! [links omitted]More at Simon Willison's Weblog. 2. Paul Child repurposed his military logistics expertise to design Julia's kitchens:It was Paul, however, who brought the design expertise to their partnership. During the war, he was part of the [Office of Strategic Services's] famed Visual Presentation branch, along with leading designers like Henry Dreyfuss and Eero Saarinen. Paul Child's particular speciality was designing war rooms, complete with situation maps, operational charts, models, and diagrams, including one for Lord Mountbatten at the South East Asian Command. In his postwar roles in the United States Information Service, Paul deployed these skills in the service of soft power and Cold War propaganda, curating exhibits showcasing American life abroad. He was also an accomplished photographer and artist. Julia gave him full share in her success, calling him "the man who was always there: porter, dishwasher, official photographer, mushroom dicer and onion chopper, editor, fish illustrator, manager, taster, idea man, resident poet, and husband." [footnotes omitted]You'll need to budget about 20 minutes for the whole read at Places Journal. 3. Fans of history and umami have a book to consider:Although both the Phoenicians and the Greeks discovered the anchovy's pleasures, it is the Romans who first put it on the food map through their fish sauces, of which garum is the best known. The sauces were probably all produced using the same method: layers of fish were alternated with layers of salt in jars or vats and left to cure, often in direct sunlight, for anything up to a year. Its potency proved ambivalent: Horace called it a 'table delicacy'; he also said 'It stinks'. No argument there: when archaeologists started excavating a garum shop in Pompeii in 1960 they uncovered amphorae that still retained its distinctive aroma after nearly 2,000 years.The full review of A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine appears at Englesberg Ideas. 4. A very rare neurological disorder is helping scientists understand facial recognition:[Neuroscientist Brad] Duchaine first heard about PMO [prosopometamorphopsia aka demon face syndrome] while studying face blindness. He was surprised when studies and surveys suggested that around two per cent of the population develops the condition. In 2021, he created a Web site that asked people who see facial distortions to get in touch, in the hope that a similar hidden population might surface. Around a hundred and fifty people have reported facial distortions to his team -- a number suggesting that, around the world, thousands of people may experience them. Given that many PMO patients don't have trouble seeing other body parts, or objects, the condition reinforces the idea that there are face-specific networks in the brain. But people with PMO can recognize faces, and this suggests that facial perception and recognition might be separate processes. (Some people with PMO see more intense distortions on strangers, whereas others see them more on loved ones; one patient said in 2012 that she saw the most extreme changes in her grandchildren.) Duchaine's findings have led him to a novel theory of how we see faces. Roughly a quarter of his patients, including Werbeloff, have hemi-PMO -- distortions that affect only half of the face. "The two halves of the face seem to be represented separately from one another, which is a surprise," Duchaine said. We may consider our lips to be one thing, but our brains seem to see them as the left side of the lip and the right side.This New Yorker piece might well remind fellow Oliver Sacks fans of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat with its skillful interweaving of the scientific and human sides of the story. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at Ask a Manager, Alison Green elaborates on a time that she relieved burnout -- from her excellent and helpful writing! -- by taking on additional, but different work:[T]hroughout all of this, I have loved my work, both here and for clients. I'm so happy to be doing it. It's rewarding on a ton of different levels. So it was hard to understand why I was so exhausted, other than the sheer volume. Then, early this year, I took on a new volunteer project that used a completely different piece of my brain. I don't know why I thought this was a reasonable decision -- I was already stretched so thin and didn't think I had time for anything additional. But something in me really wanted to do it. (I can't discuss this fully without saying that as a Jew I had been in a very, very dark place since October 7 of last year -- very close to giving up on humanity in many ways -- and this new volunteer work made me feel joy again, so I didn't apply the "do I have time for this?" screen that almost certainly would have knocked it out of consideration otherwise.) Image by the author. Copying permitted.The volunteer work is weirdly perfect for me: I do it from home so I don't have to go anywhere. It can be done at all hours of the day and night; I don't have to commit to a specific schedule and can do it at 2 am if I want. It's in many ways an F-you to big pharma, which I enjoy. It saves cats' lives. And it uses a completely different part of my brain than I've been using for years. I've had to learn a ton of new things, I have to do math, I have to think about science and medicine, I've had to learn to read bloodwork ... it's nothing like the rest of what I do. [bold added]Aside from the mistaken animosity towards "big pharma," the above makes quite a bit of sense and comports with a similar experience of mine from way back in college. Wanting to pursue a degree in literature, but also wanting to be able to earn a living after I graduated, I double majored in English and Mathematics. Over time, I noticed -- contrary to warnings I got about being overwhelmed -- that the very different kind of work each required served as a break from the other. I agree with Green that this kind of solution isn't necessarily right for everyone, but it might be good for people who have very active minds. It reminds me a little by analogy of professional athletes who enjoy other sports on the side. Do note that Green had, consonant with lots of trendy advice, tried doing less for a long time, to no avail. The good thing about trying the advice above is that if it doesn't work out, the chances are that one has already become well-practiced at saying No! and can always back out of any extra commitments. -- CAVLink to Original

Israel also deserves the justice -- including our full support -- that only full context can give regarding its acts of self-defense. *** Over at Sp!ked is what I would call a good start on a massive calling-out the Western intellectual and political establishment more than earned long ago regarding Israel. In what I would likewise call a good start, Israel has killed or incapacitated half a thousand terrorists in Lebanon, including an adult male Islamist known as Ibrahim Aqil, who was behind the murder of hundreds of American soldiers forty three years ago. (Aqil was never a man in the proper sense of the term, nor did he "mastermind" anything.) The piece is good on two counts: (1) Calling attention to the "ruthless decontextualisation of the Israel-Lebanon clash" as a "kind of war censorship," and (2) slamming our "leaders" for going along with it. Brendan O'Neill does both in the following passage:Thank you, Israel. (Image by Rewards for Justice, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)No one denies the horror of civilian casualties. But it is a flagrant lie to call Israel's actions in Lebanon a war on civilians. It's a war on terrorists, and it's been a year brewing, ever since Hezbollah chose to bombard Israel to rub salt in the wound of Hamas's pogrom. In more normal times, the French president, and the US president, would be thanking Israel for its removal of a terror commander like Aqil. After all, Aqil is widely suspected of assisting in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings that killed 241 US and 58 French military personnel. It is a testament to the moral disarray of the West's elites, if not their outright moral collapse, that they've responded to the just killing of a West-hating mass murderer by tut-tutting at those who brought him to justice. So where Macron bemoans Israeli aggression in Lebanon, Joe Biden's America is 'like a deer in the headlights', says one DC think-tanker. Way to commemorate your servicemen and women that Aqil helped to butcher, France and America. [bold added, links in original]As with Israel's long-delayed undertaking of responding on the northern front of the war that has been waged against it for decades, only to be escalated on October 7, O'Neill's piece is a good start, but it will not be enough to save the West. Let's all do whatever we can to ensure that neither is too little or too late. -- CAVLink to Original

Brad Polumbo looks at the only sane reason to consider Trump and finds him lacking. *** At the Washington Examiner, Brad Polumbo warns that voters who think Trump will return us to the relative prosperity of pre-pandemic times are badly mistaken. In fact, Trump may compare unfavorably to Kamala Harris overall:Trump is running on a platform that's utterly detached from traditional fiscal conservatism. The Wharton School of Business estimates that Trump's overall agenda would add $4.1 trillion to $5.8 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, several trillion more than Vice President Kamala Harris's plans would. [link and emphasis in original]This may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn't. Recall that Trump has already surpassed another Democrat, Joe Biden, similarly, outspending him by trillions on pandemic handouts. That's the big picture. If anything, the day-to-day picture is scarier, and the striking thing about this piece is that Polumbo builds up to the above by citing agenda items that include a couple that any dunce with a halfway rudimentary grasp of supply and demand could see are bad ideas. Take tariffs, Trump's favorite brand of snake oil:... Trump has proposed taking his somewhat narrow trade restrictions, mainly targeting China, and blowing them up into an all-out trade war with the entire world. He has proposed a 10% or even 20% flat tariff, aka tax, on all imported goods, even from allies and neighbors. Not only would this surely prompt retaliation, but it would also cost Americans thousands of dollars in increased costs every year via higher consumer prices, something most families can't afford after years of inflation under President Joe Biden.Polumbo similarly demolishes Trump's proposed credit interest rate cap, comparing it to Illinois's failed blue-state policy along the way for good measure. At this juncture, the only possible reason I can see for casting a vote for Trump would be that he might have a better energy policy overall than Harris. But would that matter in the face of policies that could (and arguably have in the past) cause an economic depression -- and the nutcases he'll surround himself with (instead of relatively sane traditional Republicans) -- this time around? RFK Jr. aside, Vice President Vance is Exhibit A in that department. Anyone who hasn't paid much attention to politics over the past couple of years is in for a rude awakening as soon as he gets past the orange skin and bad haircut of the Republican nominee. This is not your father's Republican nominee nor is this even the Donald Trump of 2016: This is someone who, unable to understand why Democrat policies cause such daily pain, will unwittingly double down on essentially the same thing, while setting the table for theocratic, nationalist nuts to take over when he's done. I have called this contest one between the Party of the Dark Ages and the Party of Blackouts. One of those outcomes is easier to come back from than the other. -- CAVLink to Original

In addition to solving a minor mystery from my childhood, John Stossel's latest column reveals something I did not know about class action lawsuits:Image by Evan Parker, via Wikipedia, license.When Google was caught sleazily collecting location data from users who turned off location history, it wouldn't have been worth any single user's time, or money, to sue. A lawsuit would cost more than anyone might win. Hence class actions. But the lawyers create their own scam. When Google paid $62 million to settle that lawsuit, the class action lawyers gave themselves $18 million and then gave $43 million to their favorite nonprofits. That included left wing advocacy groups like the ACLU (after it promised to use the money to help "people of color," "activists" and "people seeking ... transgender healthcare"). They gave victimized class members nothing. [bold added]Stossel opened with what most readers will find more typical: A couple of small checks he got as settlements for class action lawsuits here and there. I am pretty sure my general impression of this was typical: That the lawyers who won such suits made lots of money, but that members of the aggrieved class at least got something. I had no idea that these things sometimes (often? almost always?) end up simply being a way for lefties to shake down large industries while also not even awarding even nominal damages to the people who are owed compensation. Let that sink in for a moment. Small checks are understandable, and even if it weren't too easy to sue, there would be some products -- like the three-wheeled ATVs I remember from childhood -- that would vanish from the market. But simply transferring large sums of money to third parties? Even in today's cloud cuckoo land, I am amazed that this is even legal. I am grateful that John Stossel has increased the public's awareness of this abuse. Knowing about a problem is the first step towards solving it. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Editor's Note: I will be experimenting with my writing schedule next week. Blog posts may appear evenings rather than mornings. *** 1. At New Ideal, Elan Journo reviews Jennifer Burns's "worse than incompetent" Goddess of the Market, concluding:Diminished to the point of triviality is Rand's thought, her values, her distinctive idealism. Burns tries to recast Rand's original, philosophic radicalness as merely the wisdom of the old ways, tarted up. The person we encounter in this book is a cardboard character. Her extraordinary, biography-worthy life and her enduring popularity as an author become less, not more, intelligible. The book trades on Rand's name, growing fan base, and enduring cultural presence, while erasing what's essential to this inimitable novelist-philosopher. Whereas Atlas Shrugged dramatizes the role of the mind in human life, Goddess of the Market negates the role of Ayn Rand's mind in her own life.This review is long, savage, and well-justified in equal measures. I recall, at one point during my reading, encountering the phrase, But it gets worse, and thinking Good Lord! How? This essay is a much-needed corrective that I think any fellow advocate of Ayn Rand's ideas should read with the view of being able to give an informed recommendation of it to anyone who has read that travesty of a book. This will take about half an hour to read, but is worth it. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn challenges the collectivist, mindless original premise of Labor Day as she argues that we should celebrate work, and notes the high spiritual cost of the kinds of government policies favored by labor unions:In Rand's argument, elaborated by Tara Smith in The Virtuous Egoist, only productive work, and not hobbies or social relationships, qualifies as the central purpose that helps prioritize the rest of our values. Productive work must be the central purpose, because our survival and flourishing requires material values continually, and acquiring them requires a major effort, even if our needs are modest. Working productively also requires that we cultivate qualities such as initiative, responsibility, perseverance, and ability to solve problems, that are helpful in achieving values also in other areas of life. Hobbies and social relationships are important values and part of enjoying life, but they cannot substitute for productive work as providers of material values, self-esteem, and purpose. ... But productive work can be hard to find. High unemployment in Canada and elsewhere today, particularly among young people, is a sad reality, thanks to government policies, regulations, and taxes. Despite Hillary Clinton's claim, governments don't create (productive) jobs. On the contrary, government interference in the markets destroys jobs.Woiceshyn is absolutely correct that we should not only celebrate work, but act to save it from the Leviathan state. 3. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney, offers her thoughts on overthinking:After back-and-forths with some Thinking Labbers, I've got a lead to what causes some people to bog down in thinking about issues and never get into action. It's popular to say that such people are "overthinking" and need "a bias for action." But inaction is a symptom of the problem, not the problem per se. I would never recommend someone have a "bias" for action. A "bias" is like a prejudice. So, a "bias" for action implies that it is proper to jump into action as soon as you see an opening. But a moment of reflection to validate the action is always justified. That is a necessary step in the thinking process. "Overthinking" can't be solved by avoiding thinking! It needs to be solved by changing how you think so that you can spend an appropriate amount of time on thinking, given the situation at hand. Here's my conclusion: "Overthinking" is a symptom of a mistake in grasping what a logical thinking process is. So far I have spotted three basic mistakes in understanding logical thinking -- any of which could bog you down in "overthinking" and inaction.It's only a four minute read, and I found it quite helpful to learn about the three mistakes she describes. If you're an "overthinker," go! At four minutes to read, the piece may well save you time you would have otherwise wasted on making the decision! 4. At Value for Value, Peter Schwartz and Harry Binswanger discuss the seemingly peculiar hostility towards Israel on the part of many Libertarians summed up as follows by Schwartz:Image by Valentina Storti, via Wikimedia Commons, license.I have long maintained that the Libertarian movement is at root not anti-statism, but anti-state, and that it is therefore hostile toward free, or semi-free, countries because they demonstrate the rational value, and necessity, of a proper government. I chuckled when I got to Binswanger's comments on the "2% difference" Libertarians claim their professed beliefs have from Objectivism, as it resembles that often cited as the "difference" between the human and chimpanzee genomes. Maybe more people need to think about difference ... differently. -- CAVLink to Original

Today, I find myself in the rare position of taking the side of a couple of readers against Judith Martin's reply to someone concerned that a "support animal" is going to ruin an evening of dinner and the opera:Image by Mental Health America (MHA), via Pexels, license.My husband and I, along with a friend, pre-purchased hard-to-get opera tickets. We've looked forward to attending for many months. However, we just learned that our companion intends to bring her extremely unruly "comfort" poodle -- not only to the opera, but also to a lovely restaurant for dinner beforehand. This dog is hyperactive and annoying; it is not a service animal that our friend needs for seeing or hearing. Now that we know the dog is going, we want to bow out of the engagement, but would prefer to do it in the least hurtful way. Should we simply say we won't go if the dog comes along?Miss Manners offers a couple of white lie type options which would, granted, spare the feelings of the other party, but I agree with the following comments:Since you purchased the tickets together I think you should just level with her. "When we planned this event together, we did not realize that you would be bringing Rover. We're not comfortable with that and are wondering if you would consider not bringing him." If she refuses, then go to the opera and dinner on your own and let the dog be her problem as if she were any other attendee that you don't know.And:I agree that LW needs to tell her the truth. It's akin to a bait and switch - same thing as when someone "invites" you to dinner, then tells you to bring the main course. "Oh I'm sorry, that's different than what we originally agreed to; we can't do that."Thanks to a change in regulations, "support animals" are becoming very common, and even if the government protected the property rights of people affected, there would be a need for etiquette to evolve around this new aspect of social interactions. This is doubly so, given that the government and a small cottage industry are ganging up to make sure more of us are having to deal with animals in situations we might not expect. The type of remedy and reason for it suggested by the two commenters are spot-on. (In the above case, I would also consider changing my date of attendance if the other party still insisted on dragging her noisy dog into the opera.) In addition, hosts of events should take cognizance of the possibility that people may decide to bring animals along and, if they object to that, make it known in advance. In the face of petty tyranny and of thoughtlessness, the truth can set you free. -- CAVLink to Original

Yesterday, in perhaps the most enemy-focused precision mass attack in history, Israel set off the pagers of Hezbollah simultaneously, causing them to explode. The booby-trapped pagers injured thousands of terrorists (including Iran's "ambassador" to Lebanon) and killed several. While there were some injured bystanders and one death (the daughter of a terrorist), these are on Hezbollah's hands, given their year-long campaign of indiscriminate rocket fire into Israel. Predictably, many "journalists" have opted to ignore the fact that Hezbollah has been at war against Israel, and pretend instead that this sophisticated operation was an unprovoked "escalation" in the conflict. Actually, this is both long overdue and in danger of not being enough unless Israel quickly capitalizes on the chaos this will sow, by acting to defeat Iran's terrorist proxy. Unfortunately, the Biden Administration is of a similar view, having warned Israel not to "initiate" what is, in fact, an ongoing war. I am not ashamed to admit that I am still ... buzzing ... a day later. I think this is due in about equal parts to being glad to see some measure of justice meted out against this evil organization, and admiration for the sophisticated way this was done, via a supply chain attack against a foe trying to increase the security of its communications:The plot appears to have been in the making for months they said. And another security source said that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone "undetected" by Hezbollah for months. In response, the Taiwan-based company Gold Apollo said the pagers were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT based in Budapest which is licensed to use the firm's brand. Speaking outside the company's offices in New Taipei, Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe.Elsewhere, I read a description of the Hungarian company that made it sound very shady -- which it would have to be if there is any shred of decency in the world: A mainstream supplier would, I hope, be loathe to sell directly to a terorrist organization. In such a fact would lie ample opportunity for Israel to set up the kind of puppet company that would be able to pull off something like this. In the bigger picture, this is not enough. Israel risks wasting the momentum of this surprise attack unless it milks every last bit of intelligence out of it that it can, and quickly uses it to crush Iran's proxy, and as much as possible before the next U.S. administration takes office. I am sure either will pressure Israel to stop defending itself -- be it from sympathy with Islamists (Harris) or a desire to pretend that cutting a deal can somehow pacify religious fanatics (Trump). -- CAVLink to Original

Richard Hanania makes a "conservative case" for abolishing the Electoral College, which is interesting for two reasons. First, as one can see from at least ten posts here on the subject over the years, it is typically a leftist project to do this. Second, while I disagree that doing so is necessarily a good idea, the post does make some very interesting points on what I would call an emerging phenomenon of our system of electing Presidents in the context of cultural deterioration since the Founding. The gist of Hanania's argument is that, by effectively disenfranchising millions of Republican voters in deep blue states, while disproportionately amplifying the preferences of voters in the declining Midwest, the Electoral College is incentivizing the GOP to cater to older (hence, more change-resistant), less-educated, and more passive voters than it otherwise would. Two passages should suffice to get this point across. First, here is how more educated, younger, more dynamic voters from "blue states" end up getting ignored:People usually think of the senate and electoral college in terms of how much voice they give to conservatives versus liberals, or rural versus urban residents. Yet these institutions also change the balance of power within our two major political tribes. Consider that in 2020, the state that provided the most votes to Trump wasn’t Florida or Texas, but California. Trump got more votes in New York than Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska combined. ... [T]he bulk of right-wing voters in blue states aren’t WSJ writers or tech visionaries but regular Americans who don’t want to ban abortion but dislike crime and wokeness and want lower taxes. It is they who are most disenfranchised by the electoral college, and the fact that Republicans don’t feel the need to appeal to them stops their numbers from expanding. [bold added]And second, with the continued decline of the Rust Belt, the type of voters there has been changing:I think the outsized role that the Midwest now plays in our politics due to electoral college considerations has been a quite negative development. This is a region that is conservative in the worst sense. As the US deindustrialized, many people moved to areas with nicer weather and better economic opportunities. The ones who stayed in places like Michigan and Wisconsin are disproportionately passive and want to be taken care of. If there was no electoral college, then a citizen moving from Wisconsin to Texas doesn’t make his vote less valuable. But as things stand, he ceases to matter in presidential elections, and candidates continue to court his poorer and less ambitious brother who stayed home. Republicans in the Trump era have been losing ground in states that are younger and more dynamic like Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, and Virginia, which ironically grew in the first place due to a history of conservative economic policies, while gaining ground in the Midwest, turning former blue states into swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), and what were previously swing states reliably red (Ohio and Iowa). Florida is one major exception as a state that has done well while trending red instead of blue. [bold added]These are good observations, but as much as I wish the GOP (or either party, really) gave a fig about voters like me, I have serious reservations about ditching the Electoral College. Without going into a lengthy analysis, I'll just list my reservations below. Broadly, I'd say my objections fall into two categories: (1) the proposal is a band-aid for a symptom of a deeper problem, and (2) the proposal could cause other big problems we simply don't have yet. Here they are, all together. I think it's easy enough to see which category each would fall into without me having to segregate them: The Electoral College was originally intended to be something of a deliberative body, rather than a coarser-grained version of a popular vote. This change has caused it to become more "democratic" in the bad sense of the term, namely that it is not populated by the best each state can offer, but by proxies chosen based on the popular whim of the moment. Perhaps, rather than abolishing it, we should consider making it more deliberative again. Even if the Electoral College were returned to something more like it was originally intended to be, the problem would remain that politics flows from culture, which is a product of the philosophical premises most people hold (usually implicitly). This means that more benighted states are more likely to choose more benighted electors, but far from being a reason to abolish the electoral college, it's an argument that the problem lies deeper than that particular institution. Speaking of which: Hanania's whole argument assumes a two-party system. I have heard -- I don't know where -- that the parties in our system are analogous to coalitions in parliamentary systems. This seems like an imperfect analogy, as there seems much less fluidity over time. Nevertheless, might such a radical change to our system lead to more instability than we might bargain for? Related, the odds of a tie would go from minuscule to zero if we abolished the Electoral College. Considering the poor quality of the choices in our current race, I wouldn't want a tie to be impossible. I like the idea that either one of these clowns can enter office unable to pretend to have a mandate. Speaking of mandates, as imperfect as the current operation of the electoral college is, it does avert the need for runoffs and prevents us from regularly having Presidents elected by mere pluralities. Since the President is not the same thing as a Prime Minister and is our commander-in-chief, it is good to have a way to quickly and decisively choose a winner, mandate or not. At the very least, abolishment of the Electoral College would need coupling with something like ranked-choice voting. Hanania's disenfranchisement argument to the contrary, the electoral college preserves the strength of the individual voter by requiring candidates to appeal to broader sections of the country. In this election, if either party had fielded a candidate with a more centrist platform and who could be bothered to reach beyond his base, is there any doubt such a candidate could still win in a blowout? The Electoral College quarantines electoral disputes. My weakest-looking argument would be preservation of voting strength, but I think the poor quality of the Trump-Harris choice is what's making it look weak. A traditional Republican would walk all over Harris, and a Clintonesque or even center-left Democrat would do the same to Trump. That said, the problems Hanania raises demonstrate rather starkly the dependence of our form of government on a populace that can appreciate and uphold it. -- CAVLink to Original

Taking their lead from the Whiner-in-Chief, the conservative commentariat has been complaining about leftist bias ever since Trump managed to lose the debate to Kamala Harris. In one of the less ridiculous pieces, David Harsanyi correctly notes that Kamala Harris neither explained her positions to the American people, nor was pressed into doing so by the moderators:Harris' campaign contends she no longer supports policies of the Green New Deal. And that's fine. But it would probably be helpful to know what initially led her to back the elimination of fossil fuel energy production, the near-banning of meat and air travel, the retrofitting of "every building in America," and a government-guaranteed job, home and "economic security" for all who are "unable or unwilling" to work.Indeed, not only it would have been helpful for undecided voters to know the answers to such questions, they would have opened up new lines of attack for her debate opponent or opportunities for him to explain why his proposals (whatever they are) would be preferable. Instead, Trump lapped up the bait Harris laid out for him, lost his composure, and famously started ranting about immigrants eating dogs. Granted, one role many partisan pundits take up is to help their champions make cases for themselves or attack the opponents of said champions, but at some point, one begins to wonder: What would it take to cause someone to admit 'our guy/gal' is a weak candidate? It's been done in the past to great effect, such as when Louisianans rallied around the slogan, Vote for the crook: It's important as they defeated David Duke's gubernatorial bid. Trump was on that stage, with moderators he claimed later to regard as 'lightweights' and a weak opponent whose position on the last administration should have been easy to turn into a massive liability: Why didn't he ask the questions Harsanyi is asking? Why didn't he -- as Thomas Sowell recently urged -- "[address] the voting public as if they were adults who could understand an issue -- if you explained it to them in plain English"? Why has he failed to do any of these things the whole time? Conservatives such as Harsanyi have a decision to make in light of such ineptitude: Explain to voters why, despite such obvious shortcomings, we should nevertheless vote for Trump, or cut their losses. The latter might well entail campaigning against Trump and helping non-leftists prepare to thwart the worst parts of her agenda, whatever that turns out to be. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Once again, dealing with a hurricane taught me a few things... 1. Hurricane Francine was the first storm we've had to deal with since moving to New Orleans. It was also as close to a surprise as a storm has ever been to me, and I plan to keep it that way. There had been hints that something could develop in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico the week before, but I didn't appreciate how close that really is. The storm had barely organized Monday, but it was clear that we might need to prepare and leave before Wednesday. We did alright considering, but I will never again fail to top off our gas on any weekend with something brewing down there, and weather patterns that will send it in our general direction. Gas stations were closed or running out that Monday and we were lucky to be able to fill up as quickly as we still did. 2. One thing that will help me know to pay attention will be the weather. A cold front had caused the weather to be noticeably cooler in the morning the week before, and part of the southern trailing edge of that front lingered off Mexico and contributed to the development of this storm from a tropical wave that drifted into the same area. I'm no meteorologist, but... I've seen storms develop from trailing edges of cold fronts over warm water enough times over the years that I'll take cool weather at this time of the year as a cue to pay more attention. Back on the Atlantic coast of Florida, I saw this occur to our northeast, and it wasn't generally a concern. Ends of cold fronts now land in hot water southwest of us, so it's a signal to start paying closer attention. 3. The National Hurricane Center is experimenting with a new format for its famed cone graphic, which extends watch/warning shading inland from the coast. Overall, I like the idea, but there might be some work yet to do:The Experimental Cone (Image by the National Hurricane Center, public domain.)Lastly, a word about continuity. We try to refrain from making frequent changes to the watches or warnings in effect for a specific area, and that includes not discontinuing watches and warnings soon after they were issued, or changing between tropical and non-tropical watches and warnings in the middle of an event. This can mean that even when there are shifts or changes to the forecast, watches and warnings for an area may remain in effect for a while longer until we're absolutely certain the risk of strong winds has diminished. Why do we do this? Imagine if each time you go to your doctor, you're given a different diagnosis for a health problem, or prescribed a different medication to treat it. You might start to lose trust in your doctor, or at the very least not know what to believe. A consistent message from your doctor, with a gradual evolution of your treatment over time, is likely to instill more faith in his or her expertise. Our philosophy is the same. We tend to make incremental and gradual changes to our forecasts and the watches and warnings in effect, which in the long-run makes them more trustworthy. [bold added]Because Francine formed somewhat chaotically, forecasters had to adjust where they thought the center of the storm was, meaning that there was a big-enough shift in the predicted track of the storm that I went from mildly to very concerned overnight. The experimental cone pictured above confused me at first, because it looks a little like there is still a more westerly prediction of landfall due to the old inland warnings being left in place. I an now inclined to chalk that up to inexperience with the format, but I wonder if that was a common problem. 4. The Windy app/website has added a new model that will help hurricane trackers make better decisions. I noticed ICON, but didn't know what it was until I read the storm postmortem at The Eyewall:AI modeling & ICON scores a big win I went through and assessed the 15 model runs leading up to landfall from various models with Francine. Keep in mind that the landfall point is not the only variable that matters, but it's an important one. And one thing you cannot tolerate as a forecaster is a lot of whipping around within the models... While the ICON kept western Louisiana in play for a while, it too corrected east in time. This, combined with its performance during Beryl (as well as last week with Invest 90L) made it another valuable tool. Will these models fail in the future? Yes, all models do. And the ICON remains prone to spurious tropical systems that never end up happening. But at this point, I think there's a lesson to be taken from this as a meteorologist. particularly when the models show this sort of stability. The GFS and Euro operational model (and the ensemble guidance) also performed respectably, but those models showed less consistency run to run than did the ICON and AIFS.The Windy site explains what this high-performing model is. -- CAV P.S.: I would like to thank again the various readers who have told me about go-to storm tracking sites over the years, including at least Windy (brief review), the Tropical Tidbits blog (brief review), and The Eyewall, another blog. Link to Original

Editor's Note: Posting may be irregular due to impacts from Hurricane Francine, which will affect our area after making landfall this afternoon or evening. Thank you for your patience. *** "Harris 'won' the debate, and is clearly lesser evil than Trump. But still sad these are options before us. Out of 330 million people, we should be able to do better. The thought of it almost makes want to eat a cat..." -- Ilya Somin *** The Washington Examiner laid out what each candidate would need to do yesterday evening to win the presidential "debate:"If Harris is going to turn the momentum of this race in her favor, she will need to do more than dole out pablum about a "new way forward." She must explain what her positions are, how they are different from Biden's, and why they are different from those of the far more left-wing Harris who ran against Biden in 2020. ... For Trump, the plan should be simple, but that does not mean it will be easy for him to execute. All he has to do is remind voters that Harris is part of the Biden administration, which has been in government since 2021, that the Biden administration is unpopular for a reason, and that, if anything, Harris is further to the left of Biden on every issue. These are all easily established facts, but Trump will be sorely tempted to denigrate Harris personally... [bold added]This is not bad, but the bar was actually even lower for Trump. To paraphrase Yaron Brook, All Trump had to do was convince voters he's sane. Close, Examiner, but no cigar. The Examiner did nail another important bit of context: ... Tuesday's clash will be more significant than other presidential debates because Harris is intentionally unknown to most of the country. Whether they love or hate him, people know who Trump is and how he will govern. The same cannot be said of Harris. In the most recent New York Times poll showing Trump beating Harris 48% to 47%, 90% of voters said they "pretty much already know" what they need to know about Trump, but almost 30% of voters said they felt the need to "learn more" about Harris.This is as close as a paper is going to get to a joke I recently saw on X/Twitter: I can't vote for Trump because I know what I'd get, and I can't vote for Harris because I don't know what I'd get. I didn't watch the debate and probably wouldn't have, even if we didn't have a hurricane bearing down on our area, but if the video embedded below is any indication, Trump failed to pass the sanity/isn't a nut test. Allegations of cat-eating may be red meat to the Trump base, but they will put off anyone with any sense. Setting aside his unfitness for office, Trump's biggest problem is that, by choosing to pitch himself seemingly exclusively to kooks, he is repelling the sane undecideds he needs to win, and who will not necessarily know or care how far to the left Harris is. Her laughing when Trump babbles about pets being eaten is a direct parallel to his standing off to the side while a senile Biden blathered during that "debate." No. I'm not going to waste my time on that silly new anti-immigrant trope. You can go here for that. (There is no time stamp or transcript as of this writing, but if I recall correctly, that discussion is early.) -- CAVLink to Original

Editor's Note: We're keeping a sharp eye on Tropical Storm Francine in these parts. Posting may be irregular due to storm-related contingencies. Thank you for your patience. *** With the usual caveat that small-L libertarian is at best only an approximate description of my political philosophy, let me commend you to a very interesting post at Bryan Caplan's Substack, "DeAngelis Generalized." Within, Caplan analyzes how education reform advocate Corey DeAngelis has helped move the needle towards such reforms as school choice at the state level across America -- and suggests generalizing the strategy to achieve other expansions of freedom. And what strategy is that? Caplan puts it as follows:Image by Jeffrey Hamilton, via Unsplash, license.In The Parent Revolution, Corey DeAngelis argues that the key variable was a change in strategy. Stop trying to persuade your enemies. Instead, redouble your efforts on your friends. ... In Red States: Push pro-freedom policies with conservative appeal using conservative rhetoric. Stop pushing pro-freedom policies with primarily progressive appeal. In Blue States: Push pro-freedom policies with progressive appeal using progressive rhetoric. Stop pushing pro-freedom policies with primarily conservative appeal. I know "stop pushing pro-freedom policies" never sounds good to libertarians. But the logic is sound. Resources are finite. Energy is finite. Friendship is finite. So use your resources, energy, and friendship in whatever way gets you the freest bang for your buck. [links omitted]This DeAngelis did in response to the fact that, for example, in red states, appeals to Democrats weren't getting GOP holdouts to budge, while also failing to persuade Democrats to go against a major constituency (e.g., teachers unions). The good of this is that it is a brilliant application of reframing to a political strategy Ayn Rand once recommended in her 1972 essay, "What Can One Do?"The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree. In such cases, no one may attempt to ascribe his views to the entire membership, or to use the group to serve some hidden ideological purpose (and this has to be watched very, very vigilantly).The groups seeking such measures as school choice may well often fit into such criteria. Interestingly, Rand warned, in the previous paragraph of the same essay against the possible bad:... Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." By "ideological" (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the "libertarian" hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see "The Anatomy of Compromise" in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.)In the context of Caplan's post, what does all of this mean for an advocate of liberty? Be sure you judge a given measure to be pro-freedom and why, and if the opportunity presents itself, advocate a better version of it or help others see how it might fit into a larger pro-freedom picture. Rand did this in her 1972 essay, "Tax Credits for Education":I want to stress that I am not an advocate of public (i.e., government-operated) schools, that I am not an advocate of the income tax, and that I am not an advocate of the government's "right" to expropriate a citizen's money or to control his spending through tax incentives. None of these phenomena would exist in a free economy. But we are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight. And in today's context, the above proposal would be a step in the right direction, a measure to avert an immediate catastrophe.In addition, she explained at length in other work why she repudiated the Libertarian Party. The strategy Caplan outlines is brilliant, but comes with the hazard of being wasted by "pro-liberty" elements that are less than fastidious in their thinking and propose policies that might seem pro-liberty, but not be, or that are not timely. (Some drug "legalization" attempts come to mind as an example of the latter: If addicts don't get punished for real crimes (such as trespassing) or pay for their own medical expenses, such an "experiment in freedom" will backfire and lend surface credibility to the idea that drugs should be prohibited.) That said, today's left-right tribalism is a significant impediment to loosening the grip of the leviathan welfare state. This approach looks like it could alleviate the problem by leveraging the prejudices of each side to buy more time (in the form of slightly more freedom) for the cultural change that will need to occur before the politics can fundamentally improve. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing at the Foundation for Economic Education, economist Alex Tabarrok argues persuasively that, but for government regulations, lots of us would have been commuting via flying car by now. Tabarrok ably captures the technical feasibility angle with multiple examples, including the nearly century-old footage embedded in this post, and with equal adroitness shows the devastating impact of regulation on the relevant sector of the aviation industry. It is the lack of will to rid ourselves of preventative law, not technology, that stands in the way. His most interesting argument he saves for last:By far the costliest part of the FAA's regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law. The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA's signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA's failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall. This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing. [links omitted, bold added]Without going further, and contesting the propriety or need of such regulations, it is interesting to consider that such a small difference could be so consequential. On that score, I largely agree with Tabarrok, although I am not as sanguine about the positive effect of making the change he suggests, at least alone. In my admittedly uninformed opinion, I suspect that significant tort reform would also have to occur before we could unleash that torrent of innovation and industry. Although I doubt we are as tantalizingly close to flying cars as Tabarrok claims, his larger point stands: Our political and legal system stand in the way. But those arise from our culture, which, as Ayn Rand showed in her work is a consequence of the philosophical ideas championed by the dominant intellectuals and held by the majority in our culture. That change is probably decades away, if it ever occurs, but if it does, foolishness like this will fall quickly, like so many dominoes. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge I did this year's liver holiday over July (making it Dry-ly, I suppose), during which I tried a new tea that I like and rediscovered chicory coffee. My first trip to the beer emporium after that yielded a new find on the way to restocking my current go-to beer. *** 1. Looking through the tea selection at Rouses, I stumbled upon a package of Twining's rooibos tea. I'd heard of this, was in the mood for something new, and decided buying it would remind me to look up how to pronounce that odd word so I'd know once and for all: Be glad I'm weird that way, or markets in everything would be flooded with unpronounceable product names. This one was a little off the beaten path for me, being neither some flavored variant of black tea nor an obvious candidate for an herbal tea, like peppermint. This is a tea, but it's in a category of its own, with a distinct flavor that I enjoy. It lacks caffeine, but that's not a big deal to me since I don't drink tea when I want to caffeinate, anyway. A pied hoverfly visits a chicory flower. (Image by Charles Sharp, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)2. Already prompted by our move to New Orleans, I went ahead and bought some chicory coffee, which I'd tried before and knew I like. Although I like tea, I prefer coffee, and since chicory lacks caffeine, the coffee-chicory mixture is less caffeinated and is good for times I want coffee, but not necessarily at full strength, caffeine-wise. The chicory mixed with (or even substituted for) coffee is from the roasted and ground root of a plant in the daisy family, and which I think some of our neighbors have growing in the garden plots in their yards, based on my memory of spotting blue flowers on a walk. I'm thinking of planting some myself. 3. Way back in Jacksonville, some random stranger at that beer emporium struck up a conversation with me and recommended Innis and Gunn, a lager by a brewery in Scotland I'd never heard of. It was not bad, and I'd buy it from time to time. On my first trip to the beer emporium here in August, I was keeping an eye out for something new and interesting, and ran across ... Innis and Gunn. Only it wasn't what I remembered. While I normally will look up a brewery when I try one of its offerings for the first time, I did not do so with Innis and Gunn, taking them to be a venerable foreign brand that I just hadn't heard of before. This brewery is in fact only a couple of decades old, and while I like their Original lager, I prefer the Irish Whiskey Cask stout I found here:At Innis & Gunn we are never content. Ever restless to create new taste experiences, then tireless in wringing every last drop of flavour from them. Irish Whiskey Cask is testament to that endless endeavour. Smooth Scottish stout, Irish whiskey cask-matured. This delicious beer catches the eye with its jet black colour, then delights the nose with aromas of dark chocolate, espresso and vanilla. All without losing its full malt character. On the palate, a beautifully balanced bitterness gives way to a long, chocolatey finish. Nothing is missed from the combination of smooth Scottish stout and luxuriously rich Irish Whiskey barrels. First come notes of coffee, vanilla and chocolate. Then the long, smooth and seductive finish of this truly special beer. Irish Whiskey Cask is made with only the best. That means the finest rich malts; Extra Pale Ale, Amber and Chocolate. Roast barley adds even more body and character. Yet all of this richness is perfectly balanced by spicy, floral and tangy Herkules hops.The above is from the vendor's description, but I think it lives up to the description and the good folks at Beer Advocate largely agree with me. 4. Last but not least is Ghost in the Machine, a hazy double IPA brewed by Parish Brewing in the middle of Cajun Country:Welcome to the future. Our collective human consciousness, or Ghost in the Machine, has gained a tolerance for hops beyond what mankind has ever known before. This double India Pale Ale is the necessary outcome. Brewed with obscene quantities of hand-selected Citra hops from our favorite farm in Yakima Valley, WA. Expect pungent grapefruit aromas and flavors, tropical fruit, and less harsh bitterness than most IIPAs.Unsurprisingly, I see that this is rated world class at Beer Advocate. The icing on the cake for me is that the pub I go to for Arsenal games has this on tap. -- CAVLink to Original