Gus Van Horn blog

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

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

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

Suppose you developed an interest in a lucrative field and suspected you could do well in it with a small amount of additional training. Suppose further that, for whatever reason, you didn't have the time or money to attend college classes. Or maybe, already being educated and having work experience, you simply didn't see the need to go back to school just to pick up a few new skills. In such a situation, you might, say, arrange to work intensively on the skills with an expert for a time. Common sense says you'd vet the expert beforehand and pay for his services in the meantime. Of course, there is the risk that what you'll "learn by doing" isn't the marketable skill set you originally sought: Instead, you may learn the hard lesson that you just aren't cut out for the new field -- or even that you simply don't want to spend much of your time doing it or try to build a career on it. You might even learn one of these other things quickly enough that you decide to cut your losses by ending your proposed immersion program before finishing it. Oops! According to the state of California, you aren't able to make an intelligent decision like this on your own and need the government's help every step of the way -- at least if your way of going about this is to attend a "hacker boot camp": They aren't your traditional vocational schools. There are no grades, no degrees, and no diplomas. They're usually staffed by professional coders, not licensed teachers. Many of the teachers are volunteers -- even though the schools are usually private companies, not non-profit organizations. And many schools are backed by investments from big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms. The article goes on to note that, "the state would rather get the schools into [regulatory] compliance and licensed", rather than closing them down. Of course, since the state could have butted out, but it didn't, this brings another, similar situation to my mind... I'm sure that your average mugger would rather get you "into compliance" with his request for your wallet rather than have to actually carry out his implied threat, too. But he didn't just let the person he didn't want to "shut down" walk by, did he? The article raises the legitimate issue of fraudulent outfits purporting to offer training, but fraud is already illegal. This is all about extorting loot and control from a new set of victims. -- CAV Link to Original

1. Tom Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute makes the following incisive observation regarding a recent remark made by a meddlesome politician: What buoys my spirits is not only that the proponents of big government recognize Rand as their enemy, but also t hat they realize it's too late to exclude her ideas from the debate. Too many millions of people are aware, on some level, that Atlas Shruggedoffers a real alternative to the stale pseudo-choices offered by the two major parties. [bold added] This gives me the urge to smirk and say, "Amen!" 2. My daughter, having observed me fix some of her toys, broke in her new toolbox by pretending her toy laptop was my "becuter" and fixing it. She pronounces many multisyllabic words quite well, so I can only speculate that she has picked up this cute -- hah! -- mispronunciation at daycare. Oh, and she got her first Big Girl haircut yesterday. 3. As I've noted, my football-watching has dropped off precipitously with fatherhood: I think my total NFL viewing time was about a quarter of the Super Bowl last year. It will likely be about the same this year. Nevertheless, I still manage to follow things enough to appreciate the creative way Boeing got behind the Seattle Seahawks as "twelfth man". 4. If you have had your camera stolen, there is a web site that uses metadata from any picture you have taken with it to help you locate it. -- CAV Link to Original

Walter Williams examines the use of envy by leftist politicians, explaining in the process the curious double standard that exists for sports and entertainment figures vis-à-vis corporate executives. [P]romoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It's not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically. ... This explains quite a lot, but it doesn't explain everything. Williams soon after notes something that seems borderline obvious once he explains it: Why the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees $40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts, why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million? Why must Williams point this out? Anyone can see that they are incapable, say, of playing football as well as Drew Brees. It isn't too hard for most to gauge their own acting abilities, either. These are things most people have seen lots of or have tried themselves. But running a business? Probably not, and we can probably also blame the cultural penetrance of Marxism -- which treats physical labor as the only source of added value in work -- for making people even more confused about the matter. But in any case, one must use indirect arguments to show most people why CEOs command high salaries. So the left is also exploiting ignorance, using what one might call a "reverse bike shed argument" to foment envy among people not too interested in thinking very hard or deeply. It's too bad that, while success might allow leftists to micromanage businesses or commandeer already-created wealth, neither is the same thing as running a business (i.e., creating and sustaining wealth). This reliance on ignorance by the left to further its political agenda reminds me of that of creationists, whose "argument" is sometimes called the "God of the Gaps". Amusingly, when searching that term, I discovered that this is not the first time Barack Obama and his ilk have reminded me of that reliance on ignorance. -- CAV Link to Original

Senator Ted Cruz issues a stern warning about numerous actions by Barack Obama that undermine rule of law. After a long catalogue of abuses, Cruz concludes: All that is missing is a call for impeachment and removal from office. For that (and an even more damning case against this "President") I remind my readers of the words of M. Northrup Buechner: I don't know if Senator Cruz has called for impeachment and removal elsewhere or some consideration (e.g., protocol) forbids him to do so. Regardless, there is no excuse for the Republican Party to fail to at least attempt this obvious next step. At worst, they will be thwarted by the Democrats, who will be exposed for what they increasingly seem to be. -- CAV Link to Original

Although his latest column does not take a particularly strong stand for proper government, A. Barton Hinkle offers his readers quite the catalogue of abuses of power by government officials from our two big-government parties. Here's a sample: Campaign finance laws are making retribution easier. Witness Edmund Corsi, an Ohio blogger who needled Ed Ryder, a local Republican member of the Board of Elections. The Election Commission went after Corsi, seeking to impose fines and other penalties because he has spent perhaps a few dozen dollars expressing his political views on his website and in pamphlets without incorporating and registering as a political action committee. Credit Hinkle with pointing out that we should all be concerned about laws that enable politicians to cater to their pettiest whims -- even when they are "our guys" at the moment. -- CAV Link to Original

Glenn Reyolds notes, approvingly, a trend that we should actually be quite concerned about: Meanwhile, on the marijuana front, the people of states like Colorado are engaging in an odd, 21st century variety of nullification. Unlike the 19th century John Calhoun version, state laws legalizing marijuana don't purport to neutralize the still-extant federal laws banning cannabis. But the state, and millions of Coloradans, are simply ignoring the federal law and, in essence, daring the feds to do something about it. [bold added] Reynolds draws a debatable parallel between these actions and those of the millions who aren't signing up for ObamaCare -- and a solid parallel to jury nullification. I support both legalization of marijuana and a free market in medicine and medical insurance. However, I disagree that undermining rule of law is an acceptable or practical way to achieve either goal. The fact that the feds can't or won't enforce every law all the time may sound good when the law is bad (and ought to be changed) and the general public supports (or appears to support) the freer side in a given question. But what if the general public somewhere is generally wrong, and individual rights are trampled? One need only think back to the mid-twentieth century American South to see numerous examples of what Reynolds lauds as "Irish Democracy" at work to keep fellow American citizens "in their place" under segregation. And what if the government decides to put its foot down on the wrong side of some issue? We aren't close to something like this yet, but perhaps someone ought to remind Mr. Reynolds of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. (While we aren't there yet, with seemingly every law enforcement agency boning up on military tactics and practically everything being illegal, there is no room for smugness.) Thank goodness "Irish Democracy" failed in the 1960s. Regarding the lack of a heavy-handed government crackdown in Colorado, we shouldn't rest on our laurels and assume that politicians and bureaucrats, of all people, aren't looking for a way to aggrandize their authority. The Old South shows us that individual rights cannot be protected without a proper government; and China shows us that they can be completely ignored by a bad government. Oh, and Reynolds seems also to have forgotten another relevant counterexample to his anarchic screed: The American Revolution, which was first won by pamphleteers, editorialists, and debaters in such places as coffeehouses and taverns. (When did they stop studying The Federalist Papers in law school, Professor Reynolds?) Reynolds opens his column by echoing another author in giving "two cheers for anarchy". He is wrong to offer it even one cheer, as Harry Binswanger recently explained so clearly in a column titled "Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government" : The genius of the American system is that it limited government, reining it in by a Constitution, with checks and balances and the provision that no law can be passed unless it is "necessary and proper" to the government's sole purpose: to protect individual rights-to protect them against their violation by physical force. Individuals (and crowds) who feel like they do not have to answer to authorities can -- mistakenly or not -- violate individual rights. Governments that feel like they can do the same, because there is no principled, vocal opposition on the part of the governed can and will do the same. With our national debate turning from "How can we get better protection for our individual rights from our government," to "How can we get away with breaking the law?", it would appear that we are eager to throw away the republic we were warned long ago was ours only if we could keep it. -- CAV P.S. I must make it clear that I agree with Ayn Rand that civil disobedience can be a valid way to challenge a government practice that violates individual rights. Link to Original

Now We Know A French soccer player has unintentionally helped decent people everywhere learn to recognize a cowardly, bigotted gesture for what it is -- by performing it on live television as part of a goal-scoring "celebration": To perform a quenelle, you hold your left hand, blade-like and flat, to your right shoulder. Then you raise your right hand as if performing a Roman salute, but stop when your arm is at about 30 degrees from your body. But, as [Nicolas] Anelka and a slew of other athletes are discovering, you probably shouldn't.This is because the gesture is one of the calling cards of notorious French provocateur Dieudonné M'bala M'bala. Dieudonné has a long and unfortunate record of anti-Semitism, but claims that the quenelle is an anti-establishment gesture rather than being against Jewish people specifically. ... Graham MacAree gets right what other commentators have missed: Will there be imitators? Certainly. But the real ripple effect is that performers of the quenelle will be exposed for what they are -- bigots who want to get their thrills without suffering the consequences. They've lost, at least temporarily, their secret handshake. This is not to say that Nicolas Anelka deserves any thanks or that the Football Association shouldn't throw the book at him. Weekend Reading "Noted educator Maria Montessori once said, 'Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "How Maria Montessori Understood Children" at The Delaware Coast Press "Parenting is hard, but setting boundaries and establishing consequences not only make for a happy, secure child, but also a responsible and productive adult." -- Michael Hurd, in "How to Be a 'Child Whisperer'" at The Delaware Wave "Long before Obamacare, the government also restricted the kinds of health insurance products which could be sold." -- Rituparna Basu, in "Obamacare Is Suffocating an Already Sick Health Insurance Patient" at Forbes "Obamacare's individual mandate, far from ending free riding in America's health care system, institutionalizes it on a national scale by force: the old and sick free ride on the young and healthy." -- Rituparna Basu and Yaron Brook, in "Obamacare Creates a New Class of Free Riders" at The Daily Caller "Like the Marxists, who prate about 'exploitation' and 'wage slavery,' the anarchists are ignoring the crucial, fundamental, life-and-death difference between trade and force." -- Harry Binswanger, in "Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government" at Forbes In More Detail Related to her two opinion pieces, Basu has also published a study on "The Broken State of American Health Insurance Prior to the Affordable Care Act" [PDF] through the Pacific Research Institute. Not Quite the Kind of Attention They Wanted... Applying for vanity plates? Be extra careful if you're extra picky. In 1979 a Los Angeles man named Robert Barbour found this out the hard way when he sent an application to the California Department of Motor No plate Vehicles (DMV) requesting personalized license plates for his car. The DMV form asked applicants to list three choices in case one or two of their desired selections had already been assigned. Barbour, a sailing enthusiast, wrote down "SAILING" and "BOATING" as his first two choices; when he couldn't think of a third option, he wrote "NO PLATE," meaning that if neither of his two choices was available, he did not want personalized plates. Plates reading "BOATING" and "SAILING" had indeed already been assigned, so the DMV, following Barbour's instructions literally, sent him license plates reading "NO PLATE." Barbour was not thrilled that the DMV had misunderstood his intent, but he opted to keep the plates because of their uniqueness. Soon, DMV computers started matching him to numerous unpaid citations meant for people who didn't have plates on their vehicles. --CAV Link to Original

The "War on Poverty" is nearly half a century old, and Thomas Sowell catches its supporters (HT: Steve D.) moving the goal-posts in order to bless off a resounding failure as a success: The same theme was repeated endlessly by President Johnson. The purpose of the "war on poverty," he said, was to make "taxpayers out of taxeaters." Its slogan was "Give a hand up, not a handout."When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation into law, he declared: "The days of the dole in our country are numbered." Now, 50 years and trillions of dollars later, it is painfully clear that there is more dependency than ever. [bold added] Sowell is right to call this bluff, but I don't think he goes far enough. For example, he notes the following: Ironically, dependency on government to raise people above the poverty line had been going down for years before the "war on poverty" began. The hard facts showed that the number of people who lived below the official poverty line had been declining since 1960, and was only half of what it had been in 1950. And this is after he states, "The real question is: What did the 'war on poverty' set out to do -- and how well did it do it, if at all?" This is a trickier question than it looks, especially when we consider the fact that there are doubtless numerous examples of individuals who haveturned their lives around after receiving government assistance. (Indeed, it may be the wrong question.) Such examples allow leftsts to remain, as Sowell rightly calls them, "fact free" and, worse, unaccountable. The so-called War on Poverty was enacted in the face of two other basic alternatives regarding the government's role in the economy: changing nothing or making the economy more free than it was at the time. Put another way -- since all that money had to come from somewhere -- JFK and LBJ could have pushed for the government to take about the same or less from the productive, and meddle with the personal decisions of millions of people about the same or less. They chose to do more of both, and the failure to achieve the stated objective, while important, tells only part of the story. Sowell hints at the other half when he makes it apparent (as in the last excerpt) that staying the course woud have been preferable. But this leaves only to the imagination what might have been had our nation taken the path of greater economic freedom fifty years ago, and it leaves unaddressed how much worse off we all are after fifty years of economic plunder from the most productive. It also fails to call the unaddressed end of wealth redistribution what it is: theft, the inexcusable violation of the property rights of American citizens by their own government. I am grateful to Thomas Sowell for his reporting, but I think he is too generous in his assessments of this fifty-year-old fraud and its evasive supporters. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for Commentary, Peter Wehner argues that a repeal of ObamaCare is a realistic scenario, quoting extensively from Avik Roy of Forbes, including the following: ... With about ten weeks left in this year's enrollment period, we're looking at a coverage expansion of less than a million. Remember also that as many as 100 million previously insured Americans will endure higher premiums--and higher taxes--under Obamacare. The political constituency of the newly insured could be dwarfed by the political constituency of those harmed by the law. If that turns out to be the case, President Obama's signature legislation may not be long for this world. [link dropped] I have noted others making such optimistic forecasts twice here already, but the same caveats apply. Unless the altruistic moral basis of this fiasco is widely examined and found wanting -- and if the GOP simply offers a more "competent" version of the same wrong and inherently broken thing -- we will miss a golden opportunity to start rolling back the entitlement state once and for all. -- CAV Link to Original

Michael Barone considers why so many young voters have grown disenchanted with Barack Obama, after twice helping afflict us with him. I disagree with much about his column, but I found the following analysis of spiraling education costs worthwhile: t's obvious that the vast sums government-subsidized student loans have pumped into higher education over the last three decades have been largely captured by colleges and universities and transformed into administrative bloat. Economics blogger Timothy Taylor notes that if you count prices in 1982-84 as 100, the average cost of all items in the consumer price index increased to 231 in September 2012. Energy, housing and transportation all increased about that much. But college and tuition fees increased to 706 -- seven times the level when the government started pumping money into higher ed. Medical care increased to more than 400. Some things that young people buy increased much less -- apparel (127), toys (53) and televisions (5, thanks to quality improvement). I have long suspected that the perverse incentives of government-backed student loans as well as outright government bestowals of loot have caused educational costs to skyrocket. The numeric comparison of this government-distorted industry to part of the relatively free electronics industry is especially instructive. How on earth did televisions get so much better without the government backing consumer loans or outright footing the bill so that as many people as possible could own them? -- CAV Link to Original

The Obama Administration has been cynically waging a war against discipline in the very schools that need it most. Thomas Sowell reports: What makes this playing politics with school discipline so unconscionable is that a lack of discipline is one of the crushing handicaps in many ghetto schools. If 10 percent of the students in a classroom are disruptive, disrespectful and violent, the chances of teaching the other 90 percent effectively are very low. Like the New York Times, Attorney General Holder has made this an issue of "The Civil Rights of Children." More important, the implied threat of federal lawsuits based on racial body count among students who have been disciplined means that hoodlums in the classroom seem to have a friend in Washington. [minor format edits] Sowell reminds us that Obama is also fighting to make sure that such "schools" are the only option for the poor. In both cases, Obama is sacrificingeducation to leftist ritual, with the practical result that there will remain downtrodden individuals in search of a savior. Some strong souls will survive, but the President is deliberately making it much harder for them to do so. This story reminds me of a column suggesting that Hugo Chavez, by allowing unabated lawlessness in Venezuela's cities, had "outsource[d] the dirty work of socialism to criminals". Another blogger had called the column "eerily prescient", but I didn't see why: Perhaps there was recent news from Venezuela that I'd missed. Nevertheless, I think I am beginning to understand. -- CAV Link to Original

1. A computer hobbyist, building a working one-tenth scale replica of a Cray supercomputer, has had a surprisingly hard time obtaining a copy of the operating system of the original. The story is more interesting than it sounds, and compares the old workhorses to modern tablets along the way: Considering that an iPad packs far more computing power than a Cray-1, it wasn't difficult to find a board option that could handle emulating the original Cray computational architecture. Fenton settled on the $22 5 Spartan 3E-1600, which is tiny enough to fit in a drawer built into the bench. Considering the first Crays cost between $5 and 8 million, that's a pretty impressive bargain. [links in original] And I bet the author didn't factor in inflaton... 2. One evening, I told my wife, "Love is an unnecessary Dora Band-Aid on the hairiest part of your arm". I'd gone in for a "check-up" with my daughter, who had been playing doctor that day. 3. I like soccer and football, but almost all of my limited sports viewing time goes to soccer. A comparison of the two as spectator sports goes a long way in explaining why I make the choice. Fact: From the moment a soccer game kicks off until the full-time whistle, you will watch at least 90 minutes of play with, guaranteed, with just one interruption. Noted earlier as one of the reasons soccer's commentary is superior to football's was the fact that actual play takes up only 11 minutes of the average football game, leaving about three hours for the network to fill with gibberish and commercials. Commercials account for about an hour of a given football broadcast, making it nearly impossible to just sit, watch and enjoy a single football game without doing something else at the same time... Not having to sit through (or skip) commercials more than once is nice, but I never really thought about how much actual playing time there is. 4. Need to compare two blocks of text that are almost identical? I had to do that a mind-numbing number of times recently and found the Text Comparison website extremely helpful and easy to use. -- CAV Link to Original

MIchelle Malkin, through the crab-in-the-bucketmetaphor at the end of her column, correctly identifies envy as the motive behind the kind of spiteful attacks leftists dish out to "people of color" who dare to live their lives as they judge best -- especially when doing so does not conform to what is expected of them based on some accident of birth. Malkin writes from experience as she speaks up for an actress who married outside her race: Time doesn't lessen the vitriol or hostility. Take it from someone who knows. "Oriental Auntie-Tom," "yellow woman doing the white man's job," "white man's puppet," "Manila whore" and "Subic Bay bar girl" are just a few of the printable slurs I've amassed over the past quarter-century. You wouldn't believe how many Neanderthals still think they can break you by sneering "me love you long time" or "holla for a dolla." My IQ, free will, skin color, eye shape, productivity, sincerity, maiden name and integrity have all been ridiculed or questioned because I happen to be a minority conservative woman happily married to a white man and the mother of two interracial children who see Mom and Dad -- not Brown Mom and White Dad. Such behavior tells us much more about the the people who do it -- and the multiculturalist left -- than it does about any of its targets. Were multiculturalists really about ending bigotry, they would refuse to perpetuate it by recycling racist slurs. They might also decide not to waste time speaking to anyone who was really helping perpetuate racism, unless something could be gained in the good fight. (And if they did, they would deliver much more devastating blows -- based on facts and arguments -- than the multitude of twenty-first century synonyms for "uppity" that they actually spout off.) As it stands, what we get are numerous examples of what Ayn Rand called "hatred of the good for being the good". My thanks and admiration both go to Michelle Malkin for helping me understand this phenomenon better for myself and for standing up to it. Understanding and courage are the only way not to fall victim to such spite. -- CAV P.S. The following excerpts from the piece on multiculturalism linked above bears repeating here: and It is precisely this confidence that is under attack in every example Malkin provides in her column. Link to Original

Dick Morris has penned a column about more of the goodies in Nancy "Pandora" Pelosi's ObamaCare Box. Just one of the many things that stood out to me was the following: Robert Laszewski, a healthcare consultant, points out that ObamaCare is really a giant reinsurance program, capping the liability of health insurance companies. Under its provisions, the first $45,000 of payments to an insured patient come from the company's coffers. The taxpayer, through the federal government, then obligingly will pick up 80 percent of the remainder. In addition, insurance companies are to estimate their payouts during the coming 12 months every year. If they miss, or the costs are greater than they supposed, the feds will pick up 80 percent of the overage. It is a kind of cost-plus deal for insurance companies. All told, insurance companies are to get $1 trillion in subsidies over the next 10 years, a staggering amount of tax money. They will make out far better than General Motors, defense contractors or any TARP recipient banks. [links removed, emphasis added] If by "make out better", you mean, "get some loot and lose all autonomy", then Morris is absolutely right. The rest of the carnage is of the nature of what voters will feel on their own hides when, for example, "their current policies were shot out from under them by Health Department-forced cancellations". Like Karl Rove, Morris predicts electoral disaster for the Democrats. I expressed my doubts about that then, so I won't repeat myself now. But I will add another misgiving: Let's say the Democrats doget what they deserve in November. Will the Republicans do anything remotely serious in the vein of permanently removing this albatross from our necks and moving our economy back in the direction of more freedom? Hint: The problem isn't that this enormous scheme of theft and meddling wasn't rolled out smoothly enough; it's that it exists al all. -- CAV Link to Original

The "'70s child of a health nut" (HT: Snedcat), whose childhood bore the brunt of anti-vaccination hysteria questions some of her mother's wisdom: I find myself wondering about the claim that complications from childhood illnesses are extremely rare but that "vaccine injuries" are rampant. If this is the case, I struggle to understand why I know far more people who have experienced complications from preventable childhood illnesses than I have ever met with complications from vaccines. I have friends who became deaf from measles. I have a partially [blind] friend who contracted rubella in the womb. My ex got pneumonia from chickenpox. A friend's brother died from meningitis. Anecdotal evidence is nothing to base decisions on. But when facts and evidence-based science aren't good enough to sway someone's opinion about vaccinations, then this is where I come from. After all, anecdotes are the anti-vaccine supporters' way: "This is my personal experience." Well, my personal experience prompts me to vaccinate my children and myself. I got the flu vaccine recently, and I got the whooping cough booster to protect my son in the womb. My natural immunity--from having whooping cough at age 5--would not have protected him once he was born. I am not so sure that even Amy Parker's words will sway someone for whom facts "aren't good enough", but what she is saying could well give pause to some parents who are genuinely confused on the issue of vaccinations. -- CAV Link to Original

Jack Kelly writes of a ship of AGW alarmist fools that is icebound in the Antarctic: Aboard the vessel were 22 scientists headed by Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales, four journalists and 26 tourists. By comparing their measurements with those taken by Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson in 1913, they hoped "to prove the East Antarctic ice sheet is melting," noted the Australian, a newspaper in Sydney. ... There's more sea ice around Antarctica than at any time since the U.S. Snow and Data Center began keeping records in 1978. "Mawson's ship was never icebound," the Australian noted. [minor format edits] Kelly duly notes what this expedition was an obvious attempt to gloss over: that weather conditions taken out of context prove nothing one way or the other about climate change. As this attempt to dramatize a contention about climate blows up in the faces of its perpetrators, it seems opportune to point out something else they like to paper over: Even if it were smooth sailing for this ship of fools, that would in no way mean that their individual rights-violating political agenda logically follows. The solution to such a problem, as the joke might go, isn't "more government" any more than it is to "What are two and two?" -- CAV Link to Original

Degree Inflation A Wall Street Journal article titled, "How the College Bubble Will Burst" offers some interesting statistics to ponder, such as the following: [T]he 2013 Center for College Affordability and Productivity report, found explosive growth in the number of college graduates taking relatively unskilled jobs. We now have more college graduates working in retail than soldiers in the U.S. Army, and more janitors with bachelor's degrees than chemists. In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do. [bold added] The article correctly notes that, as colleges face declining enrollments, they should cut costs. That said, it should have delved into why colleges have become so expensive in the first place. There is a strong stench of money made artificially easy to come by through such perverse government incentives as too-easy-to-get student loans and outright redistribution of loot obtained through taxation, Weekend Reading "Psychological self-reliance is the ability to be alone without being lonely." -- Michael Hurd, in "Be an Outlaw!" at The Delaware Wave "Outspoken Las Vegas magician Penn Jillette says it perfectly: 'Luck is probability taken personally.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "Make Yourself Lucky!" at The Delaware Coast Press "What would never occur to the inequality-haters is a simple fact: it is to the interest of the poor man that those around him be as wealthy as possible." -- Harry Binswanger, in "President Obama, Stop Damning the Achievers for Their Virtues" at Forbes My Two Cents I have seen various attempts to make a point similar to Michael Hurd's contention that luck is a state of mind, but they have often verged on kicking the unlucky while they are down. A sincere desire to help on Hurd's part comes across in his treating the negative view of chance as a mistake that one can correct with some effort. This is far more constructive (and appropriate for advice intended for a general audience) than focusing on the moral aspect of that problem. Ricky Gervais on Success Via HBL, another gem from the famous comedian: ... I was the laziest man in the world before I made The Office but now I'm addicted to that sort of success. Pride in my work. Now I'm a workaholic, because I realize that the hard work is sort of a reward in itself. Winston Churchillsaid, "If you find a job you really love, you'll never work again." That's what it feels like most of the time. I love it so it's less like work and more like play. Although I'm a strong believer that creativity is the ability to play. Gervais also has an interesting take on market size for truly creative work. --CAV Link to Original

1. I suspect that fellow fans of Richard Feynman will enjoy reading this short talk about him by his colleague, Stephen Wolfram. One thing about Feynman is that he went to some trouble to arrange his life so that he wasn't particularly busy--and so he could just work on what he felt like. Usually he had a good supply of problems. Though sometimes his long-time assistant would say: "You should go and talk to him. Or he's going to start working on trying to decode Mayan hieroglyphs again." He always cultivated an air of irresponsibility. Though I would say more towards institutions than people. There is also an amusing vignette about his suspicion that Wolfram had somehow intuited the solution to a problem he had actually used a computer to brute-force. 2. Via HBL, I learned about a thoughtful and benevolent holiday message from Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office. Why don't I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? He eventually gets around to relating how he became an atheist, which reminds me a little of my own thought process, although he was much younger than I when he did so. 3. Speaking of active, independent, young minds, a couple of high schoolers figured out why the wounds of some soldiers in the Civil War glowed in the dark: Based on the evidence for P. luminescens's presence at Shiloh and the reports of the strange glow, the boys concluded that the bacteria, along with the nematodes, got into the soldiers' wounds from the soil. This not only turned their wounds into night lights, but may have saved their lives. The chemical cocktail that P. luminescens uses to clear out its competition probably helped kill off other pathogens that might have infected the soldiers' wounds. Since neither P. luminescens nor its associated nematode species are very infectious to humans, they would have soon been cleaned out by the immune system themselves (which is not to say you should be self-medicating with bacteria; P. luminescens infections can occur, and can result in some nasty ulcers). The soldiers shouldn't have been thanking the angels so much as the microorganisms. This work won the lads first place in a national science competition back in 2001. 4. Three cheers for my daughter's curiosity. During our descent on a recent flight, she told me her ear -- singular -- felt funny. We'd had grommets installed in her ear drums almost a year ago after months of ear infections, so I knew one must have fallen out. I made a mental note, which prompted us to have her checked when something that looked like garden-variety "daycare crud" (as her pediatrican calls it) took too long to clear. Sure enough, that ear proved not to have a functional grommet and was infected. -- CAV Link to Original

Karl Rove delves into what the "Adjusted Community Rating" provision of ObamaCare is, and what it will mean for young people who want health insurance over the next couple of years. The adjusted community rating forbids anyone from being charged a premium more than three times anyone else's. This ratio is called an "age rating band." Before ObamaCare, 42 states allowed "age rating bands" of 5:1 or more. This accounts for much of the sticker shock this Administration has been doling out during this first year of ObamaCare. (It's interesting to me that Rove doesn't discover or report what the young could be paying were states not already butting into the financial transactions of consenting adults to begin with.) It also portends even worse rate hikes as young people understandably choose not to enroll: According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans age 18-34 make up 40% of the potential enrollees for the exchanges. If they decide ObamaCare is a bad deal, then they could make up less than 40% of its enrollees. That could be a disaster for ObamaCare as insurers pay out more this year than what they collect in the premiums, then raise premiums for 2015 to make up for losses. Kaiser predicts that may happen if young Americans comprise one-third of the program's enrollees, which just might be happening. Rove predicts disaster for the President. I appreciate his analysis of this provision, but cannot share his optimism. Rove appears, at best, to be either unaware of or tone-deaf to the power of philosophy to overcome practical considerations for even intelligent and well-educated voters. Until the rest of the GOP understands this about him (and that about voters), it will continue to fail to offer a real alternative to Obama and his ilk, and it will continue losing political ground in the long haul. Horse-whipping someone won't cause him to start acting like a free man if he believes he deserves the whipping or thinks in some way that freedom is wrong. Catering to such people will not make them pro-freedom voters nor will it inspire confidence among those who want to be. Facts are necessary -- but not sufficient -- to make a case for freedom. -- CAV Link to Original

There is an interesting profile of AGW skeptic Richard Lindzen in the Weekly Standard which includes the following contention on his part: Lindzen also says that the "consensus"--the oft-heard contention that "virtually all" climate scientists believe in catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming--is overblown, primarily for structural reasons. "When you have an issue that is somewhat bogus, the opposition is always scattered and without resources," he explains. "But the environmental movement is highly organized. There are hundreds of NGOs. To coordinate these hundreds, they quickly organized the Climate Action Network, the central body on climate. There would be, I think, actual meetings to tell them what the party line is for the year, and so on." Skeptics, on the other hand, are more scattered across disciplines and continents. As such, they have a much harder time getting their message across. There are hints about what "structural reasons" might be at play throughout the article. The primary one Lindzen himself has in mind is the fact that most scientists, funded as they are by the state, have a strong incentive to fan hysteria as a means of continuing to see their work funded. There are others, a major one (although not the fundamental one) being the fact that we live in a mixed ecomomy. This becomes more obvious when the practical consequences of the anti-AGW politial agenda are considered. Assuming that AGW is a real threat for the sake of argument, what is the one thing all the proposed energy use regulations, emissions "markets", government-gun-backed "incentives", and taxes -- anything but capitalism -- have in common? All involve the use of government force -- in violation of individual rights -- to enforce orders against individuals who would otherwise act on their own best judgement towards their best interests. Unlike legitimate cases of the government pursuing actual criminals or foreign belligerents, these acts would be justified based on what might happen in the future. This sets too a strong precedent for the government issuing orders to individuals (versus making it possible for them to act freely) for busybodies of any stripe to resist. We currently already live in a mixed economy, where the government runs all manner of things without the propriety of that state of affairs being questioned often enough. This fact makes the goal of the government running practically everything much more realistic to all the little dictators out there than it would be under laissez-fairecapitalism. Busibodies thus have a real chance of success motivating them to organize. (As for those who want to mind their own business, many are some combination of (1) too busy doing just that and (2) oblivious to the threat the mixed economy represents to bother organizing around a political goal.) -- CAV Link to Original

A long time back, I encountered a thread on a discussion board I occasionally browse. The original post asked why there weren't any higher-profile participants in the discussion. Although the discussion board in question isn't about software, a post about the same phenomenon occurring on software discussion boards shed some light on why there might be a dearth of expert opinion in many online discussions. The post also raises some issues regarding what might be missing from such discussions: That we're unable to learn from the silent majority of experts casts an unusual light upon online discussions. Just because looking down your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion doesn't mean that those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to build amazing, finely crafted software. An appealing theory that gets frantically upvoted may have well-understood but non-obvious drawbacks. All we're seeing is an intersection of the people working on interesting things and who like to write about it--and that's not the whole story. And this is for a topic about which it can be relatively easy to lay out one's reasoning. On more complex topics, it can take even more time to address a question, meaning there is much more territory for a potential author to cover: More time and less enjoyment, at least for those who aren't interested in rehashing basics. Needless to say, rudeness or trolling, or even the impression that, say, most of the participants in a discussion are non-objective, will often further discourage expert participation. -- CAV Link to Original

John Cook considers the question of whether to delegate and shows that it is both more interesting and more complicated than it looks: Comparative advantage is often illustrated by a hypothetical lawyer and an assistant. A lawyer who can type very quickly is still better off hiring someone else to do the typing because he can make much more per hour practicing law. If he could type twice as fast as an assistant, and he could earn more than twice as much practicing law as it costs to hire an assistant, he makes money by delegating. This illustration makes sense at one level, but it also sounds a little quaint. In fact lawyers do quite a bit of typing. That's explained by another economic idea: transaction costs. It costs time to recruit and hire an assistant. And once you have an assistant, it takes time to explain what you want done, time to wait for the work to come back, time to review the work, etc. Highly paid executives type their own emails, at least some of the time, because it's not worth the transaction costs to have someone else do it. But for a larger task, say typing up hundreds of handwritten pages, it's worth paying the transaction costs to get someone else to do the typing. Not only do many executives type some of their own emails, they probably do so out of common sense, and without really thinking about it. Sometimes, though, it pays to take the time to understand explicitly what many understand only on an intuitive level. I am sure there are lots of people who nail this exception to the Law of Comparative Advantage without having heard of it or even knowing what "transaction cost" means. Such people may therefore fail to recognize other situations in which a similar analysis applies. -- CAV Link to Original