Gus Van Horn blog

Energy advocate Alex Epstein often warns that "renewable" energy sources -- which he correctly calls unreliables -- destabilize the electric grid in addition to requiring expensive redundancy (usually in the form of fossil fuel powered generating capacity). I recalled this upon hearing about the recent blackout on the Iberian Peninsula, and wondered if Spain's reportedly heavy reliance on solar and wind power might have caused or contributed to causing the blackout. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian considers the speculation as of yesterday -- The power's back on, but the cause is still undetermined -- and considers how unreliables might have destabilized and crashed the Spanish grid. Supporting this possibility, he cites the Daily Mail:ome analysts have suggested that the Spanish grid operator's reliance on renewable energy sources to supply the majority of the nation's electricity could have led to the blackout. Traditional generators, like coal and hydroelectric plants or gas turbines, are connected directly to the grid via heavy spinning machines. When turned on, these massive machines are in constant motion and the inertia created by their weight and momentum acts like a shock absorber, helping to insulate the grid against a sudden disturbance - for example, in the event of a transmission failure. Solar and wind power do not provide the natural inertia generated by these so-called 'spinning machines', leaving the grid more vulnerable to disruptions and subsequent oscillations in the electrical frequency. [bold added]I am hardly an expert on the grid, but this sounds plausible to me, and I'd have just about bet money on it yesterday, after hearing something to the effect that Spain was running on 100% "renewable" electricity. But that seems not to have been the case. Menton quotes another source:Spain has one of Europe's highest proportions of renewable energy, providing about 56pc of the nation's electricity. More than half of its renewables comes from wind with the rest from solar and other sources. That means Spain's electricity supplies are increasingly reliant on the weather delivering enough wind to balance its grid. For much of the last 24 hours, that wind has been largely missing. The website Windy.com, for example, shows wind speeds of 2-3mph, leaving the country reliant on solar energy and old gas-fired power stations. [bold added]So Spain had more of this damping ability (from the gas-fired stations) than I thought at first. Still, was that capacity enough? It will be interesting to see what the investigation turns up. Menton goes into more detail there, and notes that much more of Europe had been on the verge of a blackout than just Spain and Portugal. -- CAVLink to Original

Within a thread at Hacker News, I encountered the following example from the wild of the bureaucracy of government schools driving out good teachers and keeping bad:... The professional development activities and courses that meet the [professional standards] requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard. When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades. ... In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads. [bold added]In a fully free educational market, parents will send their children to the school that best combines a price they can afford with the best evidence they can see that their children will learn things there, and succeed in life. This means that parents and schools would have objective ways to gauge whether their approaches to education are succeeding, and will reward/be rewarded accordingly. Government schools, isolated from this sort of feedback as they are, end up relying on bureaucratic rules instead to govern what and how they teach: Absent feedback from the real world, the rules end up being arbitrary. Is it any surprise that such a system selects for people who "don't grow out of" going with the flow, or might drive out better teachers? (The comment does not explicitly say this happens, but it is hard to imagine it not happening.) What will such schools teach, and what kind of students will they turn out? How many will be receptive to suggestions that the educational sector should be private, just like, say, grocery stores? I'd wager few, even without the handicap of everyone being accustomed to government schooling being the norm for so long. -- CAVLink to Original

At Lawfare, legal scholar Ilya Somin elaborates on "The Constitutional Case Against Trump's Trade War." The article is a good survey of the various lawsuits filed against the tariffs and is good for explaining in terms any reasonably intelligent adult can understand both the legal rationales for the challenges and what is at stake. Much of the legal rationale may be familiar to regulars here, but I am glad to see it summed up as follows:t is difficult to deny that Trump's invocation of IEEPA to impose the Liberation Day tariffs raises a major question. And if it does, courts should use the major questions doctrine to invalidate it. To understate the point, it is far from clear that IEEPA authorizes the use of tariffs, that trade deficits are an "emergency," or that there is any "unusual and extraordinary threat." If any of these three preconditions is not clearly met, then the major questions doctrine requires the courts to strike down Trump's tariffs. Trump's IEEPA tariffs also violate constitutional limits on delegation of congressional power to the executive. While there is much disagreement on where to draw the line, there must be at least some limit to Congress's ability to give away its lawmaking powers. Congress cannot just simply pass a law giving the president the power to establish any tariffs he wants, without limitation. Admittedly, the Supreme Court has long taken a permissive approach to delegations, upholding them so long as they are based on an "intelligible principle." But, in recent years, beginning with the 2019 case of Gundy v. United States, several conservative Supreme Court justices have expressed interest in tightening nondelegation rules. The enormous scale of Trump's power grab runs afoul of even the most modest nondelegation constraints. If long-standing and perfectly normal bilateral trade deficits qualify as an "emergency" and an "unusual and extraordinary threat," the same can be said of virtually anything. [bold added, link omitted]Somin's piece is also good on how fundamentally Trump's tariffs threaten the economy:Enforcing major questions and nondelegation limits on executive power is important for practical as well as legal reasons. If one man can start a massive trade war anytime he wants for any reason, that destroys the credibility of U.S. trade agreements, undermining any incentive other nations have to trust our commitments. It also undermines the predictability businesses and investors need to make decisions on production and investments. They are unlikely to build and invest in production facilities and supply chains if these arrangements can be destroyed at any time. That is especially true in industries that require long-term contracts and other commitments. [bold added]While I would have liked Somin to have also brought up the moral objection to Trump's tyrannical, rights-violating actions, I am not going to complain too loudly: His arguments clearly show that our livelihoods are under threat from the wild unpredictability the President has introduced into the planning of practically anyone in -- or with dealings in -- the United States. -- 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. My son wanted to change his hair style, but didn't do the best job explaining what he wanted to the barber. He spent the next day or so in a hoodie, which got a good laugh when I told our barber the next time I saw her. She made a great suggestion for his next visit, which I put out there for any fellow parents who might happen by: Have him find pictures of what he wants online ahead of his next haircut. He was happy after the next attempt, and I was able to say No. when I next saw the barber and she half-jokingly asked if he took to his hoodie again. 2. My wife loves getting me to take photographs and video of the kids on special occasions. This mildly annoys me as I'd rather mostly enjoy the moment and perhaps take a few shots here and there. And so it was that I found myself having to take video of the kids during their penguin encounter at the Gulfarium over Spring Break. Close to the end and deeming myself as having met my task requirements, I was about to put my phone away when I saw Mrs. Van Horn taking photos of a penguin that had waddled up to the glass wall of the viewing area. I ended up with footage of my wife taking her photos, standing up, and giving me an annoyed look when she noticed I was taping her. Instant family classic! Our other cat, Seymour, got caught hatching a stowaway scheme ahead of Spring Break.3. Apparently, I have accidentally trained one of our cats to play fetch. Lucinda sometimes climbs onto the bed when I go to sleep at night. One night, she brought a small, belled cat toy with her and played around with it enough that I picked it up and tossed it away. She showed up with it again a short time later, so I tossed it through the bedroom door. She came back with it again. I figured this was a game to her, and correctly guessed that we'd do this a few more times and she'd get tired of it. She showed up the next night with a different toy. She had to tussle around with that one a bit longer before I was disturbed enough to want to get rid of it. I tossed that toy out and she came back with it. Then it dawned on me what was going on. Luckily, it seems so far that half-a-dozen throws are enough for her have her fun and let me go to sleep. (Reading this again, it does seem plausible that it was Lucinda, and not me, who did the training here.) 4. I was never a big fan of the tuna fish sandwich until I had a couple made by my father-in-law, whose sandwiches are generally a step up from other home-made sandwiches. We were visiting my in-laws in Florida recently when Papa offered those as a lunch option. This time, I had the presence of mind to watch him make the tuna salad, and dictate notes into my phone. Don't be fooled by the simple recipe below, or by the fact that there are few ingredients. (In fact, when I tried my hand with it the other day, I was hoping to avoid a trip to the store, and found that I already had everything on hand.) Without further ado, here's what we call Papa's Tuna Salad at the Van Horn Estate:Ingredients: 7 oz. can albacore tuna in water; 3 celery hearts; salt; pepper; 1/3-1/2 cup mayonnaise1. Chop celery hearts.2. Open, drain, and rinse tuna.3. Place tuna in mixing bowl and flake it.4. Add salt, pepper, chopped celery, and 1/3+ cup of mayo to bowl.5. Mix thoroughly.This is great on toasted bread with some mayo and, optionally, a tomato slice. Sliced croissants are even better. -- CAVLink to Original

In need of something of a break from current events, I was happy about advice columnist Eric Thomas's recent decision to help a pub patron improve the quality of his favorite establishment's fries:... A simple path: Just tell the owner what your experience has been and what you'd like to see coming out of the kitchen. They'd surely appreciate a direct conversation with a customer willing to give them another chance more than a stranger leaving a scathing online review. A good way into this conversation, and others like it, is to ask, "Are you open to some feedback?" Now, sometimes the answer is "No, thank you." But the restaurant industry lives on word-of-mouth (pun partially intended)...In today's cultural climate, it can be easy to forget that one's self-interest quite often -- arguably normally -- aligns with that of others. I have no appetite for delving into the myriad reasons this is not always obvious to one or both parties, or that it is thus so easy to forget. The lesson I am taking from this is that it can be surprisingly easy to: (a) find simple examples of this, (b) improve one's immediate world in a small way, and (c) gain the relief of the resulting small affirmation of the benevolent universe premise. While it may be true that anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today, that fight can certainly bring the occasional small, but still meaningful victory today. -- CAVLink to Original

One of my favorite science bloggers, Derek Lowe, has been doing admirable work reporting on the damage that RFK Jr. is wreaking as head of Heath and Human Services, a role that places him in the position of being able to set back American medical care, research in medicine and the biosciences, and agriculture. Lowe almost certainly does not agree with me that government should be separate from the economy (including neither funding nor regulating scientific research). Lowe nevertheless rightly demands competent personnel be in charge so long as the government does do these things -- and he is well-qualified to comment on this aspect of the news, given his long career in pharmaceutical research. I began following Lowe, like many others -- laymen and fellow scientists alike -- when I first became aware of his well-written, informative, and very amusing "Things I Won't Work With" series on hazardous chemicals, but I have found his other writing highly informative as well. For example, Lowe's discussions of various aspects of the Covid pandemic were very helpful then, both for debunking such quackery as ivermectin and for comments on vaccines and more serious possible treatments. Although I left academic science long ago, I maintain an interest, and Lowe's sound reasoning and engaging, accessible writing have been a very enjoyable part of my way of doing so. That, briefly, is my short recommendation of Lowe, and why I think it ought to carry some weight: He is an expert and, as someone trained to know the limits of his own knowledge and to evaluate the work of others, I find his opinions well worth consideration. That said, I offer a quick sample of Lowe's commentary on RFK, Jr., following the latter's ridiculous recent assertions that he would somehow get to the bottom of "the autism epidemic" in only a few short months:... [L]ast week Kennedy made a bizarre statement that "By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures" That set off all kinds of uproar among those people who follow this stuff (of whom I am certainly one), and it is absolutely the sort of statement that I would expect him to make: assuming that there is an "autism epidemic" to start with, and going on to assume that it is due to "exposures". That's the sort of stuff that has made him a great deal of money over the years, and here he is, playing the hits. I have been told, though, that some believe that this was a garbled statement on his part and that what he was trying to get across is that his desired study on autism will get underway in September. Be that as it may, I think that what he actually said is what he actually thinks, because it's so consistent with years of behavior and public statements on his part. The idea that you could run a study to prove anything about the causes of autism and have it deliver definite answers to you by September is of course laughable to anyone who knows the field and the amount of research that's been done already - or, for that matter, to anyone who knows anything about clinical research at all. But even if that's not what he was trying to say (I'm agnostic on that point), the facts remain that blaming a so-called "autism epidemic" on environmental factors is not a position that is supported in any way by multiple investigations over many decades. These include gigantic natural experiments in countries where (for example) vaccination types and schedules have changed with absolutely no effect on rates of autism whatsoever. No, people have looked over and over and over for an "environmental exposure" explanation for autism, and nothing has emerged. But I believe what Peter Marks told us in his resignation letter: Kennedy has his mind made up already and is asking people to go prop up his conclusions. [bold added; italics and link in original]As if that isn't bad enough, Lowe reports that Kennedy went on a truly nutty rant in his official capacity (!) later on in the same week he made the above announcement. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who knows much about Kennedy or about science, but there might be revelations to otherwise rational people who don't know much about Kennedy or who are unfamiliar with how scientific research actually occurs. -- CAVLink to Original

Jeff Jacoby draws on the works of legal scholar Ilya Somin, "Trump-friendly" economist Stephen Moore, and Republican Senator Rand Paul among others to argue that the legal basis Trump asserts for his tariffs is nonexistent. The dubious legality begins with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) itself, which is Trump's primary excuse for unilaterally raising taxes and cutting off trade without our consent:In the nearly half-century since President Jimmy Carter signed that statute, no president ever invoked it to impose tariffs -- not against any country and not for any reason. That wasn't because seven consecutive presidents failed to make use of a powerful tool granted to them by Congress. It was because no such tool exists. Trump's assertions notwithstanding, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize presidents to singlehandedly change the tariffs charged on foreign imports. Indeed, nowhere in the 3,700-word statute does the word "tariff" appear. Neither does "duty," "excise," "impost," "levy," or any other synonym for the taxes charged by governments on imports from other countries. The IEEPA has nothing to do with tariffs. It doesn't even appear in the section of the United States Code -- Title 19 -- that deals with trade. Rather, it is codified in Title 50, which covers "War and National Defense." Congress passed the law in 1977 to enable presidents to deal quickly with a national emergency during peacetime by ordering sanctions against, or freezing the assets of, a hostile foreign power or terrorist organization. The legislative text refers to an "emergency" that gives rise to "an unusual and extraordinary threat" -- in fact, lawmakers specified that "emergencies are by their nature rare and brief, and are not to be equated with normal, ongoing problems." ... [bold added]Needless to say, Jacoby follows on with an explanation -- understood by nearly everyone but Trump -- of why "trade deficits" are neither rare, nor brief, nor even a problem. In addition to helping his readers understand why Trump imagines he has the authority to do this and why he doesn't, really, the piece surveys the legal efforts currently underway to bring the 2025 Trump Tariff Crisis to an end and points the interested reader to further reading on the matter. -- CAVLink to Original

In a fully free society, government would be drastically reduced in scope to its proper function, the protection of individual rights, and would be financed voluntarily. We are obviously a far, far cry from either goal, to the point that Ayn Rand, who advocated laissez-faire did not devote much time to the topic since it would be a final detail for hashing out at the tail end of the massive political changes that only a philosophical revolution within our culture could make possible. But she does touch on the topic:In a fully free society, taxation -- or, to be exact, payment for governmental services -- would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government -- the police, the armed forces, the law courts -- are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance. The question of how to implement the principle of voluntary government financing -- how to determine the best means of applying it in practice -- is a very complex one and belongs to the field of the philosophy of law. The task of political philosophy is only to establish the nature of the principle and to demonstrate that it is practicable. The choice of a specific method of implementation is more than premature today -- since the principle will be practicable only in a fully free society, a society whose government has been constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions.The above comes from the online Ayn Rand Lexicon. The next paragraph from its source, "Government Financing in a Free Society," reads:There are many possible methods of voluntary government financing. A government lottery, which has been used in some European countries, is one such method. There are others.It was my memory of this paragraph that piqued my interest when I saw John Stossel lay into the bizarre treatment of gambling by American politicians, who treat private betting like a scourge they should eradicate -- but turn around and set up things like government lotteries, which offer worse odds and fall prey to government cronyism. Given that Rand viewed government lotteries as a way for government to raise funds voluntarily, it is interesting to consider whether these differences are problems and, if so, why. Stossel reports:But government is so incompetent, so inefficient, that its off-track betting parlors lose money! "Government is always inefficient," says [economist Jason] Sorens. "Unions get their cut ... wages are high, benefits immense. It's another reason we shouldn't want government running gambling operations. They do it at a high cost." [Politician] don't mention that "their" games offer worse odds. This week, the price of a Mega Millions lottery ticket more than doubled. Years ago, they sneakily increased the number of white balls in the Powerball lottery, reducing your odds of winning to 1-in-292 million. "In the private sector, we're used to products improving," Sorens points out. "Only the government running a lottery would make it get worse." I tried to confront the association representing state lotteries about their scams, but they wouldn't agree to an interview. Instead, they sent a statement that says, "A state-run lottery system offers several key advantages ... strict oversight, helping to ensure fair play, responsible gaming and full transparency." Bunk. Government workers are just as crooked as private bettors. In Texas, lottery officials helped certain companies win a $95 million jackpot.At the outset, the very fact that gambling -- an activity between consenting adults -- is illegal, but shouldn't be, puts criminals in charge of it, and causes most law-abiding citizens to be more ignorant of its consequences than they might otherwise be. (For starters, only a sucker would expect to be able to make a decent amount of money, much less a living, from gambling without a big investment of time and effort.) The artificially shady nature of gambling means that people expect it to involve such deceptive practices -- like changing the odds behind the scenes -- such that the government doing exactly that doesn't raise hackles. In a free economy, this would damage the reputation of the lottery, causing players to move swiftly to another platform. And as for operations losing money: They'd go out of business in a free market (rather than presumably staying afloat with loot from taxpayers) and not be forced by improper labor laws to pay extortionate wages and benefits to their employees. We could go on, but Stossel's reporting provides enough data to conjecture that government meddling in the economy generally and in gambling in particular both damage a legitimate industry while also reducing the amount of money it could take in through this noncoercive means. Setting those problems aside, such lotteries might well still offer lower odds of winning, or lower payouts than privately-run lotteries. So long as the rules and odds of the game are known, and participation is voluntary, that's not necessarily a problem for the same reason that those aspects of charitable gambling aren't. There are good reasons for the matter of financing a proper government to belong at the back of the line! -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At New Ideal, Ben Bayer exposes the religious thinking behind a bitter controversy among atheists:[A]theists need the courage of their convictions. The latest row over transgender ideology dramatizes this for all to see. When religious-style dogmatism infiltrates atheism itself, it's a sign of religion's pervasive influence on our culture, and thus of the need for the courage to challenge widespread conventional assumptions like the alleged virtue of humility. As Jerry Coyne himself once observed, "Atheists have been 'humble' for centuries (who was more humble than Spinoza?) and it hasn't gotten us anywhere." And Coyne now says he's "proud" to be a heretic. It's time to realize he's right, drop the pose of false humility, and proudly assert the value of the scientific truth over unscrutinized feelings for faddish totems. [footnote omitted]Among the things I learned from the piece was an interesting bit of trivia: the origin of the current humility fad. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn makes "The Moral Case Against Tariffs -- and for Free Trade," in part because:The economic arguments against tariffs are valid but don't explain why tariffs are fundamentally immoral. It is true that they lead to economic misery to individuals and businesses by increasing the cost of everything, from food to fuel to construction materials and by causing job losses. But most economists today do not examine the root causes of tariffs' negative impact from a moral perspective. They take the mixed economy for granted and don't think about international trade that could be free of government intervention.As neglected as it is, this question is important because supporters of various political measures frequently do so on the basis of what they deem to be moral, often to the point that they will ignore the impractical outcomes of those very policies. (e.g., You don't really need an iPhone!) The path to winning important cultural and political battles lies in identifying and taking the moral high ground. 3. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney explains why a "twofer" doesn't work as a goal:If it seems like more than one benefit is involved in your goal, check to see if it's a "twofer." Can you name in one word what your deepest motivation is for pursuing it? Can you explain the different aspects of the goal in terms of that value? Eliminating twofers is critical to your success. The more ambitious and life-changing your goal, the more important it is to ensure your goal is unified. Otherwise, it will not fulfill its purpose, which is to guide and motivate action to the achievement of the goal. There are at least two reasons for this. For one thing, a twofer gives you no guidance in the critical moment when the two most important benefits are in conflict. It creates pressure and exacerbates conflict between the benefits. It can seem that you can't achieve one except at the expense of the other.The other problem is at least as bad as being lost at such a time of conflict. 4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger points out that in many conflicts in today's political and cultural scene, neither side deserves support. Case in point? Trump vs. Harvard:n the end, I cannot support either side. Trump wants to bully and even destroy any institution that stands up to him. (I think the campaign to end certain bad things in the universities is just a pretext, just a way to get support from his MAGA people.) But Harvard wants to destroy civilization. And it's been doing a damn good job of it, too. Some ... have rightly stressed Harvard's good work in fields other than the Humanities: medicine, physics, biochemistry. But weighing that against the further development and spreading of evil philosophy, I think Harvard, and all universities, are net destroyers not benefactors.Indeed, Trump, as Binswanger indicates, is ultimately a product of the evil ideas belched into our culture by the likes of Harvard for much of the past 200 years. -- CAVLink to Original

Via X, I got wind of an excellent piece on the Abrego Garcia case by Noah Smith, "The Authoritarian Takeover Attempt Is Here". Although it does stand on its own in terms of getting readers up to speed on the case, it is no mere rehash. Smith does well helping readers see the implications of the contempt for due process Trump and his cronies have exhibited, and offers his current forecast of where things are headed:This should scare you, for a number of reasons. First, there's the obvious: Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. Bloomberg reports that about 90% of these deportees had no criminal records in the U.S., and most have not been charged with any crime... Some were arrested simply because they had (non-gang) tattoos. Others didn't even have any tattoos, and were arrested for no apparent reason. It's not clear why the Trump administration is doing this. Perhaps it's to scare immigrants into leaving the country by making an example of a few. Perhaps it's to simply assert power, or to test the boundaries of what they can get away with. Maybe they've really convinced themselves that all of the people they arrested are gang members. Who knows. But what's clear is that this is brutal and lawless behavior -- the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that's common in authoritarian regimes. The second thing that should scare you is the lawlessness. The Trump administration insists it didn't defy the Supreme Court, arguing that simply removing any barriers to Abrego Garcia's return means that they're complying with the court order to "facilitate" that return. Trump's people have also argued that the courts have no right to interfere in the executive branch's conduct of foreign policy. And on top of that, they've declared that their deal with Bukele is classified. In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return -- ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we're on foreign soil it's the domain of foreign policy. If so, it means that due process and the rule of law in America are effectively dead; the President can simply do anything to anyone, for any reason. The third reason the Abrego Garcia case should worry you is that the Trump administration probably intends to go much further. Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn't an American citizen, but Trump has stated that he wants to start sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador too. Here are three relevant clips from his meeting with Bukele... [links omitted, bold added]In one clip, Trump shows his hand regarding the excuse of sending foreign criminals away: "Yeah that includes [Americans], you think they're a special type of people or something." This is how he speaks of you, whose rights and lives he swore to protect as President a few weeks ago. Smith correctly notes that this is exactly one of things the Founders enumerated in their reasons for rebelling against England, and goes on to offer his analysis of the political situation. He closes with his best sense of how it could play out:Trump 2.0 is still likely to struggle to get big things done, despite having a few more years to prepare. The sad spectacle of the flailing, off-again-on-again tariff announcements seems like pretty clear evidence of incompetence. Trump is more vengeful and far less constrained this time around, but he still may fail to execute the transition to authoritarianism any more effectively than he's executing the transition to autarky. He's not benign, but he's probably not invincible either. It is upon this thin thread that we must hang our hopes for democracy. [bold added]The time to begin fighting back in whatever way is available is now. -- CAVLink to Original

"Due process is what keeps good people out of jail, even though it occasionally spares people -- such as yourself, -- who deserve to be confused for an immigrant or a criminal and sent straight to an El Salvadoran prison by an incompetent, authoritarian regime." -- Me, to Stephen Miller *** Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute summarizes the status of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant illegally deported to imprisonment in El Salvador, and why you should be concerned about it. As you may know, Abrego Garcia was rounded up and deported to El Salvador without a hearing, and the Trump Administration has since admitted the deportation was in error. Somin's update:When the case was remanded back to the district court, Judge Paula Xinis issued an order instructing the defendants to "take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible." The government indefensibly interpreted this as merely requiring it to remove "domestic" obstacles to his return, making no effort to get the Salvadoran government to release him from prison. That makes no sense in a context where the Salvadorans had imprisoned Abrego Garcia at the behest of the US, and the Trump Administration could easily secure his release simply by demanding it. As conservative legal commentator Ed Whelan puts it: "The administration is clearly acting in bad faith ... The Supreme Court and the district court have properly given it the freedom to select the means by which it will undertake to ensure Abrego Garcia's return. The administration is abusing that freedom by doing basically nothing." The Administration coupled this bad-faith failure to follow the Supreme Court's and district court's orders with unsubstantiated claims that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS 13 drug gang. They have no evidence for that. And if they did, the proper course of action is to charge him with it in court, rather than deportation and imprisonment without due process. [bold added]Somin is absolutely correct to warn:I would add that this danger [of whisking people to foreign prisoners, then disavowing responsibility] isn't limited to recent immigrants. It applies to US citizens, as well. The threat to US citizens' rights is no longer just theoretical, since the president is openly considering the possibility of deporting and imprisoning US citizens in El Salvador. [bold added]As if this weren't bad enough, none other than the Vice President is pooh-poohing any concern about this serious threat to liberty as "leftist" pearl-clutching. -- CAVLink to Original

At The Edgy Optimist, Zachary Karabell presents a "potted history" of the growth of executive power over history, and argues that this excessive power may have already peaked early in this second Trump Presidency. Karabell sees Trump as having squandered this power -- which his predecessors used more sparingly -- to the point that Americans will be ready to cut it back down to size. I agree that the President is squandering his power in terms of helping his country, but not necessarily in terms of consolidating his position atop our political order -- whose Constitution he he plainly sees as a bug rather than a feature. Worse, while the bond market might well force the President to pretend to be semi-sane about tariffs, it won't slow down his attempts to acquire more power, such as by attempting to stifle dissent or relying on foreign dictators to do the dirty work of imprisoning his enemies. In the former case, he clearly plans to abuse licensing power (which he shouldn't have), and in the latter, he is being helped along in an effort to ignore a court ruling. That said, if our Republic dodges or survives the various crises Trump seems intent on inflicting, if he doesn't get away with too much, there is hope. Karabell closes:It remains, however, that the federal government -- and the executive branch in particular -- has grown too powerful relative to the balance that was attempted in the Constitution. The ascension of Trump should be a reminder of that, which even Republicans such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz appear to recognize. And the past week, with a foolish and expansive use of tariff authority having backfired (for now) spectacularly, may mark the apex of that power. In fact, the Trump presidency overall might mark the beginning of the end of the imperial presidency, which has defied earlier predictions of its imminent demise. People want change, for sure, but they don't want change that they don't want. And you would be hard-pressed to find a plurality of Americans who want a more powerful government. That reality, more than the daily reality show of contemporary politics, is what will matter most to our future -- and that is comfort indeed.The second Trump Presidency is a cartoonish but quite real exemplar of that cliche about crisis being both danger and opportunity: The Founders had recent memory of atrocities by tyrannies of all sorts to draw on as they devised a plan for their new government to be practically impossible to abuse. To the painful extent that Trump punishes a complacent nation without completely consolidating his power, perhaps there will exist a strong- and lasting-enough appetite for limited government to sustain a dismantling of the imperial presidency. -- CAVLink to Original

Trump's tariffs can't achieve any one of his stated policy goals, but they can paralyze the economy. *** If we set aside the contradictory stated policy objectives President Trump gives for starting his trade war, we quickly find that -- in addition to being unable to defy the Law of Non-Contradiction -- tariffs also can't achieve any one of the goals. We'll look at manufacturing, since I keep running into pertinent facts on that matter. First, we'll set aside a biggie: The U.S. produces nearly a fifth of the world's manufactured goods, although this part of its economy is less than an eighth of GDP, and it does so with only about one tenth of its workforce. Manufacturing is far from dead here, and had been enjoying a resurgence. But let's game out Trump's tariffs anyway. Andrew Prokop of Vox does this in a reasonably accessible way, explaining several ways that Trump's tariffs interfere with the goal of building more factories here:The supply chain problem;The workforce problem;The confidence problem; and The currency problem.For my money, the worst of these by far is the third, because if it isn't already cutting off the investment needed for our economy, it is close to doing so soon, in spades:If the US president set new high tariff levels and could guarantee that they were permanent, that could be very economically damaging, but at least businesses would be able to plan accordingly. Trump's chaotic policy rollout, and its reliance on poor-quality analysis, has only deepened uncertainty about market conditions in the US in the future. And if businesses feel uncertain -- and like Trump can and will throw their business model into chaos on a whim -- they're going to delay making big new investments in US-based manufacturing. [bold added]See also Ayn Rand on non-objective law:When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat's whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown "influence" will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the industry at all -- and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle-of-the-road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow "public policies," integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun. [bold added]Even if all of Trump's monkeying around were confined to just taxes, the damage even that has done to the ability of businessmen to plan ahead has been impressive. The crisis comes not from the fact that businessmen don't want to work under Trump's policies or with his style of governing; it's that they can't. I'll draw an interesting parallel from one last bit on manufacturing I encountered this morning. According to a poll:"America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing."80% of Americans agree20% disagree"I would be better off if I worked in a factory."25% of Americans agree73% disagree2% currently work in a factoryTo the degree anyone still imagines Trump is good on the economy, they are failing to see things the way a businessman does in the same way that they like the idea of having more factories until they are asked if they want one of those cruddy jobs. The situation Trump is creating for them might be summed up in a hypothetical poll question: Would you be more likely to make a large purchase if someone could make wild changes to your monthly expenses and seemed likely to do so often, and for little reason? -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge The good news: My daughter made the honor roll again! The bad news: It's out the door sharpish for the school's ceremony ahead of a busy day, so I need to spit something out quickly. Short and sweet are the words... 1. Via Geekpress is an annotated list of the 100 best sci-fi films of all time. 2. In an effort to foster a closer connection between the youth and adults in his community, Eri Miyahara created a trading card game based on middle-aged men there, and it took off to the point that one man, an "All-Rounder" in the game, is having to autograph his cards. 3. Ahead of a trip, my wife reminded me of the apparently broken back seatbelt in her car, which we were planning to drive. Luckily the good folks at ARC Driver saved me from having to waste even the time to visit a repair shop. Their short video on how to unlock a locked seatbelt retractor showed me how to fix it and less than a minute later, the seatbelt was back to normal. 4. This is definitely not in the category of news you can use, but it is an interesting read. A British diplomat, who volunteered for a post there, explains how to survive 3 years in North Korea as a foreigner. -- CAV Link to Original

At Ask a Manager, I encountered a simple, memorable example (Item 3) of someone -- simply by asking a question of another -- becoming aware of a good option he was blinding himself to. The writer had an unexpected business opportunity with a firm whose board included someone from his long-ago romantic past, and with whom he had parted ways acrimoniously, albeit drama-free. Out of courtesy, the writer wanted to reconnect with his ex and offer to bow out altogether, but he dreaded the prospect:I don't want to show up and ambush my ex, and it would be disingenuous for me to pretend I don't have a connection to this company. The respectful and professional thing to do is to reach out to the ex directly and ... reconnect somehow, right? The problem is the thought of even getting coffee with this person fills me with dread and anxiety. I am quite content to never see them again. At the same time, the idea that we could be on speaking terms if we run into each other again would ultimately be a relief... The beginning of Alison Green's reply was This doesn't require coffee! Wait. What? I thought. The answer, to use email, was so obvious to me that the bit about coffee hadn't registered. I was a little bit nonplussed until I reread the question. I bet this guy heaved a sigh of relief before laughing at how fixated he'd been on an awkward meeting over coffee. The lesson here is that it's often helpful to ask someone else a question, no matter how simple it might look to others, when one is stuck. The answer won't always be so simple, of course, but it can be. The good news is that people simply needing the aid of another person's perspective will often get a pleasant surprise upon hearing the answer. -- CAVLink to Original

By now you may be aware that some Trumpists are touting his brain-dead and destructive tariff regime as "manly." This is ridiculous on many levels, but it isn't surprising. There is a strain within the alt-right that pushes antiquated and wrong ideas about masculinity, and, while I am not overfly familiar with it, the below sounds par for the course:The author believes his use of this image to be protected as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law.Two Fox Network hosts have bizarrely praised Donald Trump's trade tariffs as the thing needed to bring the masculinity of America's workforce. According to the hosts, masculinity will rise due to the fact that "jobs and factories will come roaring back" to the U.S. as a result of these tariffs. Jesse Watters, one of the co-hosts of The Five, endorsed the argument during the show on Monday. "When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this," Watters, who is known for giving his unasked opinions on what it means to be a man, said. "And if you're out working, building robots like [co-host] Harold Ford Jr., you are around other guys," Watters insisted without providing any sort of data. "You're not around HR ladies and lawyers -- and that gives you estrogen." "We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class," she added. "We imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services -- jobs that used to give men access to the American dream." [bold added]I had no idea incels were mainstream now. But to the point, there is so much wrong here it is hard to know where to begin, but Aristotle's seminal identification of man as the rational animal would be a good place to start. The spectacle of people I'd hesitate to hire to clean my toilet preening like stereotypical housewives about the need to steer clear of women and their own non-manual labor type of work on air -- when they could be cleaning a sewer somewhere -- just about takes the cake. For anyone who might be curious about the actual nature of work for an animal possessing a mind, I commend a couple of quotes by Ayn Rand, a woman who immigrated from Soviet Russia and became a successful novelist in America, and who, alas, knows more about masculinity and America than the entire modern Republican Party put together. First, regarding production:Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort: of thought and of physical action to translate that thought into a material form. The proportion of these two elements varies in different types of work. At the lowest end of the scale, the mental effort required to perform unskilled manual labor is minimal. At the other end, what the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values.It is too bad that, along with the millions of grateful people around the world who are alive at all, not to mention living in clover today -- thanks to the inventiveness and thinking of intelligent men -- that ninnies like those on Fox News avoid toil long enough to spout their drivel to the effect that the only good jobs are physically taxing. Rand elaborates a bit when she discusses businessmen, whom they'd presumably admire, (although, to be fair, Donald Trump is a poor example):The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men's physical needs and expand the comfort of men's existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor's economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries -- and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.Do note that Trump's tariffs and unpredictable yanking-around of their rates are making the work of businessmen almost impossible, and take note of whom he put in charge of as many scientists as he could: If this continues for long, the idiots at Fox News may get their wish in the form of finding that what little work is left is back-breaking, menial, and very unproductive. Before I got wind of those remarks, I was inclined to pooh-pooh the idea that there is a crisis of masculinity in America. I was wrong to do so, except that crisis isn't that too many men are free of toil, or that they might get the cooties if they are in the same room as a woman for too long. The crisis is that too many men, exemplified by those at Fox News have no idea what it takes to be a mans, and never will because they scorn their own minds. -- CAVLink to Original

Even if DOGE weren't laying off government officials in the careless, haphazard way it has been, Bobby Kennedy's mandate to "go wild" with HHS would probably result in scientists losing their jobs sooner or later. Granted: The government shouldn't be regulating the economy. It also shouldn't fund science outside of a few very limited areas directly related to its proper scope, such as weapons research or medical research related to dealing with infectious disease, and even those on a very limited basis. This isn't the case now, but backing the government out of so many areas should be done carefully, so that the private sector can adjust to take up the slack in areas that would and should be funded in a free economy. Until that is done, the government should keep good people in charge. The Trump Administration has shown, starting with its appointment of Bobby Kennedy, that it is indifferent at best to basic competence. With its "go wild" mandate in particular and as shown by the haphazard, gimmicky approach of DOGE in general, it is also clear that this administration has no real goal of bringing government closer to its proper scope or strategy for doing so. Policies have consequences. If you were a scientist previously employed by the government that just appointed an anti-science kook to head your former employer, and his boss was busy destroying the private sector with tariffs, what would you do? Canadians have an idea, and they're getting ready to lap up the world-class talent that has just been told it is unwanted here:Cuts to U.S. research funding will also create gaps in evidence because there'll be less research being funded and conducted overall, says Kirsten Patrick, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). That's why it's all the more important for Canada to step up its research funding, she says. "If we have a situation where, down south, research is not being as well funded as it should be and some research isn't even being done, then we need to have a strong research system in Canada," she said.The CBC piece further elaborates on province- and university-level recruitment efforts. It is still too early to see how Trump's random cuts and Kennedy's rampage through our health and agriculture agencies play out, but if I were a scientist working in any of these affected fields, I would be paying close attention:Let's take a look at two topics that illustrate two different ways that science and public health are being damaged by the Trump administration. One of them is not subtle at all: the ax. That's what has happened to 77 scientific staffers at the CDC who (among their other duties) had been in charge of collecting samples and analyzing data on US-wide sexually transmitted diseases, specifically looking for drug-resistant gonorrhea. ... A second way that things are being undermined is at the regulatory and decision-making level. That's well-illustrated in this piece at BioCentury. Steve Usdin is looking at Mike Makary's FDA and an upcoming decision that will reveal a lot about how things are going to be run. Readers may have noticed that the current version of the Novavax coronavirus vaccine has had a sudden regulatory hold put on it at the FDA - and that was after the agency's own reviewers had recommended approval. The reason for the unexpected screeching halt have not been made public, but Makary has put his new assistant Tracy Beth Høeg in charge of reviewing the application, and this is not a good sign at all. [links omitted]Even if you don't get fired outright, you may find yourself wondering what the hell you're doing there, and for how long you'll still be there or want to be there. The ones getting fired now might well be the lucky ones. -- CAVLink to Original

Economist Alex Tabarrok recommends reading a Maurice Obstfeld piece at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, titled "Trump's Tariffs Are Designed for Maximum Damage -- to America." I found this interesting because it elaborates on the consequences of something I suspected when I heard (on the Yaron Brook show, I believe) that Trump's "reciprocal" tariff formula was based not on tariffs being levied against American imports by any given country, but in large part on the trade deficit with the particular country. I suspected correctly that the more our trade with any given country is saving us money, the more punitive the tariff. Obstfeld lays this out as follows:The tariff plan displays a basic misunderstanding of the reasons why nations trade in the first place -- reasons that imply the United States will run deficits with some trade partners (bilateral deficits) and surpluses with others (bilateral surpluses). The reasons reflect the operation of comparative advantage. For example, the US imports aluminum from countries that can produce it most efficiently, while embodying it in exports where it has the advantage, such as aircraft. This will tend to lower US trade balances with efficient aluminum producers and raise them with aircraft importers. The same is true for households and businesses. I have a surplus with my textbook publisher, Pearson, because I am relatively better at writing textbooks while they are better at publishing and distributing. But I chose to have a deficit this year with my ophthalmic surgeon rather than trying to remove my cataracts myself. Yet the USTR [US Trade Representative] report reveals up front that their "calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing." This is a fundamental misconception and suggests that Trump's administration did not even try to calculate the true heights of trade barriers. For example, Korea was hit with a tariff of 26 percent, even though it has a free trade agreement with America and its tariff rate on US imports was only 0.79 percent in 2024. The tariff's entire justification was Korea's sizable bilateral surplus in goods with the United States, much of it due to Americans' taste for Hyundai and KIA vehicles. [bold and link for comparative advantage added]The piece goes on to discuss further costs that switching suppliers to dodge high tariff rates might also incur. One part of the piece that I found not as clear pertains to the overall trade deficit: This deficit reflects that Americans spend more than they produce, obliging them to import the difference from abroad. This would seem to run counter to the fact that, as the philosopher Harry Binswanger once pointed out in "Buy American Is Un-American:The lucrative workings of free markets do not depend upon lines drawn on a map. The economic advantages of international commerce are the same as those of interstate, intercity, and crosstown commerce. And if we kept crosstown trade accounts, the "trade deficits" that would appear would be as meaningless as are our international "trade deficits." Fact confirms theory: the U.S. ran a trade "deficit" practically every year of the nineteenth century, the time of our most rapid economic progress.While perhaps in the modern era we do overall have a massive debt to other countries, I wonder if, say, foreign investment in the US isn't being accounted for, or I am simply unclear on that point. But surely it is inaccurate to look only at material goods bought and sold in international trade when such things as investment opportunities and services are also major components of any economy. Like wage (which simply means "labor price"), the term trade deficit is unfortunate for the cause of clarity in economic discussions. If we replaced the term wage with labor price, it would be easier to see the similarities between wages and other production costs. The term trade deficit, which merely describes aggregations of individual transactions across a border, bears an unfortunate and confusing resemblance to terms like the federal deficit, which reflects a shortfall of money taken in by the government relative to its expenditures. These similarly-named phenomena are fundamentally different: The first is merely a result of trade (and none of the government's business) and thus harmless; the second should be avoided or eliminated. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. A greybeard reflects on the time he reset printers systemwide to charge people a nickel a page for print jobs:Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies. One of the best was sent to me later in the day by intercampus mail, printed on their laser printer, with a nickel taped to it.If it isn't obvious that this link is strictly for entertainment purposes, its title will make it so: "The April Fools Joke That Might Have Got Me Fired" 2. Rabbit Hole of the Week: A biology professor takes a deep dive into "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters." Among many other things, you will learn why small animals do so much better in falls than we do:When any object falls, it accelerates until the drag force equals the force generated by gravity acting on its mass; from then on, the velocity is constant. This speed is known as the "terminal velocity"; for a full-sized human it's about 120 mph and is very terminal indeed. However, the drag on an object is proportional to its cross-sectional area, while the force due to gravity is proportional to its mass (and thus volume, if density is constant). As objects get smaller, gravitational pull decreases more rapidly than drag, so terminal velocity decreases. Of course, as an old gem of black humor notes, it's not the fall that hurts you, it's the sudden stop at the end... Indeed, sufficiently small animals cannot be hurt in a fall from any height: A monkey is too big, a squirrel is on the edge, but a mouse is completely safe. The mouse-sized people in Dr. Cyclops could have leapt off the tabletop with a cry of "Geronimo!" secure in the knowledge that they were too small to be hurt. The whole thing is this good, but it's a half-hour read. 3. Some time back, I noted an interesting shopping site for visually impaired people who like to cook. I followed through on sending my wife there for Christmas ideas, and my favorite two gifts have been the butter slicer and the wide-mouthed funnel. It's more satisfying than you might think to slice up an entire stick of butter all at once without making a mess. As for the wide-mouthed funnel, I like not having to worry at all about making a mess or scalding my hands when I pack a hot school lunch for my daughter. 4. At Ask a Manager, someone exposes the office plagiarist during a meeting:A colleague kept stealing my work -- copy-pasting stuff from documents I'd written, and claiming PowerPoint decks as her own. So I embedded my name in everything I made -- in the footer or the slide master, in a tiny white font. Then when she claimed the work was hers in a meeting I asked for the mouse to "point to something" and "accidentally" highlighted where it said "documents created by (my name) on date.More fun where that came from here and here. -- CAVLink to Original

Although business writer Suzanne Lucas pitches her piece to HR professionals, her post mortem of Cory Booker's record-setting filibuster has lessons for anyone interested in effective communication. Her broad points are: Focus on substance over spectacle. Tie actions to clear goals. Engage in two-way communication. Don't preach to the choir.Lucas starts off by noting that, contrary to Cory Booker's stated goal,... the focus of the headlines and reporting wasn't about the policies that Booker advocated for or the solutions he proposed. It was about the record-breaking speech, which overshadowed its purpose. For leaders of all kinds, it's a cautionary tale: Are your actions driving meaningful change, or are they just grabbing attention?I'm no fan of Booker, and I suspect our lazy and incurious news media deserve some of the blame for its focus on nonessentials. Nevertheless, it is clear that Booker could have greatly increased his odds of success by following her advice. For example, regarding her first point about the hazards of creating a spectacle:Booker's speech broke a record previously held by Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. While the delivery was historic, Booker's speech inadvertently revived discussions about Thurmond's opposition to civil rights -- an unintended consequence that distracted from Booker's intended message. Don't let flashy execution overshadow your core message. If your team walks away talking about how you said something rather than what you said, you've missed the mark. Always ask: Will this method amplify my message or distract from it?Her other points are just as worthy of consideration, too. -- CAVLink to Original

Special elections in Florida and Wisconsin provided shots across the bow to the Trump Administration, at least according to the Wall Street Journal. The GOP retained two safe congressional seats in Florida, albeit with less-safe margins than normal, and lost the election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Whatever one can glean from elections so early in a term, I think it is fair to say that if there really is a "MAGA backlash," it is nothing compared to what there will be if the worst-case scenario of Trump's "liberation day" tariffs -- 20% or more across the board -- comes to pass; and then either Trump refuses to back down or Congress fails to get him under control by finding the will to take back its authority over tariffs. If that happens, that paper's warnings to the GOP will definitely apply:Republicans can console themselves that they held the Florida seats and thus their narrow House majority. And we hope the results don't scare House Republicans into backing away from their tax and regulatory reform agenda. That's what Democrats would love, so next year they'd get the benefit both ways -- motivated Democrats and sullen Republicans after a GOP governing failure. But the elections are a warning to Mr. Trump to focus on what got him re-elected -- especially prices and growth in real incomes after inflation. His willy-nilly tariff agenda undermining stock prices and consumer and business confidence isn't helping. [bold added]The piece goes on to note the worst consequences of the Democrat victory in Wisconsin:As for Wisconsin, Republicans in that state will now have to live with a willful Supreme Court majority that could reverse nearly everything the GOP accomplished under former Gov. Scott Walker. School vouchers, collective-bargaining reform for public workers, tort reform and more are likely to be challenged in lawsuits by the left. Congressional district electoral maps will also be challenged and could cost the GOP two House seats. [bold added]Given that the only indications of congressional action on tariffs so far has been either merely symbolic or the exact opposite of what is needed, I expect a bloodbath in the midterms. The cowards in the GOP would do well to start fearing their constituents more than the President. -- CAVLink to Original

Mississippi, where I was born and raised, has made headlines for being the first state to eliminate an existing income tax. Unfortunately, any notices concerning the death of the income tax there are premature. Having followed the news lately, I knew that the elimination would follow a timetable, as almost any such reform would. What I didn't know is how long a timetable that is:The new law put Mississippi on a path to become the first state to eliminate an existing income tax, per the Associated Press. The measure reduces the tax over time, dropping .25 percent annually starting in 2027. Once the rate reaches 3 percent in 2031, further reductions must be offset by "growth triggers" to ensure the state has adequate resources to operate. In addition to the move on income tax, the new law also cuts the state sales tax on groceries from 7 percent to 5 percent and boosts the gas tax by 9 cents to 27.4 cents per gallon. ... Neva Butkus, a senior analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, estimated the state will lose $2.6 billion from its current $7 billion budget as a result of phasing out the income tax. Additionally, as Butkus told Mississippi Today, the action may be ill-timed given Washington's current cost-cutting mentality. As AP reported, Mississippi's economy and budget are among the most reliant on federal spending in the nation, and therefore, any future budget cuts or federal grant freezes by Congress would be felt more deeply than in other states. [bold added]Hmmmmm. I advocate limited government and ultimately the abolition of all taxation. I am under no illusions about time tables: I am sure there will be taxation until the day I die, and I have no reason to believe that we are anywhere close to turning the tide against continued growth of the welfare state. (In other words, the process will take time and we are nowhere near starting it.) Even the "cost-cutting mentality" cited by Butkus is a mirage, given Trump's refusal to even consider phasing out entitlement spending, which isn't a proper function of government, and yet consumes the lion's share of the budget in today's welfare-regulatory state. (Ironically, the transience of this "mentality" might end up helping the plan work, but at the likely much higher cost of the federal government raising taxes.) So, while I love the idea of eliminating the income tax, I am highly skeptical of the eventual success of even this plan, given that I have heard of no corresponding cuts in Mississippi's own spending, and that's even before we account for the state's heavy reliance on federal money. None of this means I won't be pleasantly surprised some time in the future -- Reaching zero could afford well over a decade. -- and even this measure was a pleasant surprise. But rolling back the welfare state is even harder than this measure was to accomplish, because it requires a revolutionary improvement in our culture to occur first, that will cause at least a sizable minority to loudly demand freedom over the illusion of safety and security. This attempt at a shortcut was hard, and there are no shortcuts. -- CAVLink to Original

As if the President's hiring of an anti-vaxxer to head the HHS, a buddy of Bashar al Assad to head intelligence, and a media figure to head defense weren't enough of an indication, his handling of the fallout of SignalGate should show that Trump values personal loyalty to the point that he scorns merit. Consider the following from the Times-Union:A responsible administration would want to immediately get to the bottom of this. Instead, from President Trump on down, the response has been, at various turns:to deny the seriousness of the matter; to falsely state that no war plans were discussed; to parse the meaning of the word "classified"; to deflect responsibility; to refuse to answer questions from Congress; and -- of course -- to attack the journalist who reported the story. We would normally urge the inspector general for the Department of Defense to review this failure. But Mr. Trump fired the person in that post in January, part of a purge of 17 inspectors general in various agencies and one of many actions the president has taken to reduce accountability in government.Like a bad punchline, the next sentence is, "That leaves any hope for accountability, once again, to Congress." Congress? You mean the guys who went along with these horrendous choices in the first place? This is alarming and I am largely in agreement with the editorial, although I would also like to add a point I gleaned from Yaron Brook's commentary on the matter. I unfortunately do not remember which episode of his podcast this came from, so cannot point you to it or verify my recollection. The gist was that the main government actors in SignalGate failed to respond even like adults to their exposure by the Atlantic: An adult would admit the mistake and pledge not to let anything like it happen again from the outset. (And I think Brook may have a point that the original breach alone might not have been worthy of a firing had they chosen this course.) Instead, we have gotten the childish pattern displayed above, which the President himself adopted over the weekend when he said:"I don't fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts," Trump said, calling the story "fake news" throughout the interview. "I do," the president said when asked whether he still has confidence in Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also in the Signal chat and sent a detailed timeline of the planned strikes before they happened. "I think it's just a witch hunt and the fake news, like you, talk about it all the time, but it's just a witch hunt, and it shouldn't be talked [about]," Trump added. "We had a tremendously successful strike. We struck very hard and very lethal. And nobody wants to talk about that. All they want to talk about is nonsense. It's fake news."We got away (this time) with planning a strike over a channel known to be of interest to (and possibly already compromised by) hostile regimes. Faced with proof of a security lapse that could have cost the lives of servicemen, all Trump does that we can tell is pretend nothing went wrong. This isn't the same thing at all as, say, We are conducting our own investigation of this breach and putting a plan in place so that nothing like it happens again. It's just more "owning" the "leftist" establishment, rather than defeating the left, much less doing his job or, heaven forbid, using his bully pulpit to promote a positive agenda of returning our nation to the founding ideals that make it great. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. I've heard of people opting for dumb phones and hunting for dumb television sets and cars with actual knobs for controls. And then there was that spamming refrigerator that made the news a while back. But now, people are rightly getting upset about dishwashers that require an internet connection to do simple things:You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle. That doesn't make any sense to me. An app? I mean, I can understand maybe adding some neat convenience features for those who want them. Like on my new fridge -- which I chose not to connect to WiFI -- it has an app that would allow me to monitor the inside temperature or look up service codes more easily. If I wanted those add-on features, which my old fridge didn't have, I could get them. But requiring an app to access features that used to be controllable via buttons on the dishwasher itself -- or are still if you pay $400 more for the fancy "800" model? That's no bueno.Sure, companies ought to be free to offer whatever kind of garbage they want on an open market, but I'll be damned if I'm going to reward ridiculous things like this with my business. And no thanks: I don't want the prospect of things like having to pay a subscription to do something I used to be able to do by pressing a button -- or suddenly being unable to use an appliance if its vendor goes out of business. This may or may not bother you, but I'm going be very careful and picky the next time I have to buy an appliance, even if no one in his right mind would think the internet is necessary for something like it to work. 2. An nice bonus to law and order is that, once in a while, you get to read a good dressing-down of a bad actor who chooses the wrong person to threaten with a lawsuit. I encountered a good example of this recently in the form of a letter written in response to a company with a reputation for extorting settlement money by threatening infringement suits over its intellectual property:I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not. [emphasis in quote from blog post]Tort reform, including a "loser pays rule, would go a long way towards rectifying this situation, since many victims of this strategy can't afford to fight back. 3. There is a nonzero chance that the star Betelgeuse will go supernova in our lifetime. That sounds neat, but what will it be like when that happens?It will be visible during the day. It will be brighter than any planet. It will be almost as bright as the full moon. You'll be able to read a book by the light of the Betelgeuse supernova at midnight. But it will actually be painful to look at because unlike the full moon that is this gorgeous disc in the sky, Betelgeuse is still going to be a tiny pinprick of light. So it won't be comfortable to look at, and it will last a few months before fading away as all supernovae do. But as impressive as it is, it won't be dangerous.Bright enough to read by at night? Good thing it won't last more than too long, then. 4. It was through spell-checking a blog post that I first learned that restaurateur has no n. If that strikes you as odd, here's why:A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these "restorers" became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called "restaurant." It wasn't until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. After the French Revolution of 1789, chefs who used to be in the service of aristocrats began opening public eating places serving all kinds of foods -- not just healthy soups. That's when the restaurant as we now know it by its current name and style began to take shape.You'll have to go there for the main part of the answer, which is in the paragraph before the one quoted above. I found my knowledge of Latin helpful in understanding this, although absent the knowledge of the origin of the terms, I never connected the grammatical dots on my own. -- CAVLink to Original

Miss Manners takes a question from someone who recently suffered the double misfortune of being hospitalized and having to share a room with a proselytizer:A few months ago, I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks. For most of that time, I shared the room with a very friendly, talkative woman who had been in the hospital for a long time. While still needing medical care, she was clearly on the mend; she was bored, a little lonely from her long stay, and pleased to have a new roommate to talk to. It immediately became obvious she was a committed evangelical Christian and all she wanted to talk about was religion. I started by making short, noncommittal responses and trying to change the subject, but my lack of enthusiastic response made her decide I needed to be "saved." For the remainder of our time sharing the room, I was bombarded by "give your heart to Jesus" appeals...The confrontation-averse patient ended up pretending to be asleep on the order of 23 hours a day to avoid the incessant evangelizing. Miss Manners gives good advice, as usual, but the most important lesson I took from her reply was not to forget that even hospital patients have agency. I wouldn't have trouble telling someone like this to can it, if my answers at the start didn't succeed in putting her off, but the solution of asking for a room(mate) change is gold, and one I will not forget. About a decade ago, a medical condition I did not know I had (and which I can easily control, now that I do know) landed me in the hospital for a couple of days. Believe me: There is no rest night or day, and the last thing on earth I'd want to deal with in such circumstances is being the captive audience of a magpie. Thanks again, Miss Manners, and may I never actually need this advice! -- CAVLink to Original