Gus Van Horn blog

3-17-12 Hodgepodge: Potential donors spout Marxism instead. An article in the New York Times describes an innovative way of solving a telecommunications problem at a technology conference: roaming hotspots. The idea was that people would roam the South by Soutwest technology conference carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices and dressed in easily-identifiable garb. Unfortunately (in the eyes of some conference goers), the company that came up with the idea didn't offer high enough-pay and benefits for walking around and talking -- or use college students instead. Rather, it offered very poor people twenty dollars a day and any donations attendees chose to give in return for the free wireless. [A]s word of the project spread on the ground and online, it hit a nerve among many who said that turning down-and-out people into wireless towers was exploitative and discomfiting. Tim Carmody, a blogger at Wired, described the project as "completely problematic" and sounding like "something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia." [bold added, links dropped] One man who works with the homeless and at least one "human hot spot" disagreed with the Marxist assessment of the project as "exploitative": "It's an employment opportunity, regardless of who is offering it," [charity development director Mitchell] Gibbs said. The human hot spots seemed unconcerned as well. One volunteer, Clarence Jones, 54, said he was originally from New Orleans and became homeless in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "Everyone thinks I'm getting the rough end of the stick, but I don't feel that," Mr. Jones said. "I love talking to people and it's a job. An honest day of work and pay." [links dropped] Nobody forced anyone to do anything here, so this idea was not exploitative. I guess that it was easier (and cheaper) -- but discomfiting -- for an attendee to spout platitudes about "exploitation" and inequality in a show of concern, rather than thank the "hot spots" and perhaps dig a little deeper into his own pockets, if, knowing the circumstances, he wanted to help a stranger. Weekend Reading "It's been well over a generation since U.S. investors dealt with an inflationary period of higher interest rates -- so long in fact that most of today's investment class has little memory of investing in such an environment." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "The End of the Bond Bull Market (Finally) " at SmartMoney "[T]oday's bias is overwhelmingly in favor of the notion that 'biology is destiny.' Nobody seems interested in the possibility that concepts and beliefs could contribute to emotional states." -- Michael Hurd, in "Disorders are not a Free Pass" at DrHurd.com From the Vault Three years ago today, I learned from Stanley Crouch that a classic of American literature had been chopped in half and its second half discarded before I read it in high school: [Richard] Wright's original title for his autobiography, American Hunger, was changed and the second half of it was removed. That vital second half was set in the North and pulled the covers off the urban Communist movement. Now, in its full form, the book is remarkable. I'd forgotten about this: Time to add one to the reading hopper. Tax it, and they will leave. Jake Ludington notes that an Illinois pipe dream has failed in dramatic fashion. January thruough June 2011, the months before the law went into effect saw the Illinois Department of Revenue collect approximately $139 million use tax. From July 2011 through the end of the year, Illinois collected $127 million in use tax. That's right, Illinois collected less use tax after their affiliate nexus tax went into effect. The loss of tax revenue is just part of the fallout. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Anti-Man is not Pro-Woman: Right on the heels of hearing about a foolish conservative petition to take Bill Maher off the air, I have learned that there is a "trend of female lawmakers submitting bills regulating men's health". In other words, leftists opposed to restrictions on abortion are proposing bad legislation of their own just to send a message: Before getting a prescription for Viagra or other erectile dysfunction drugs, men would have to see a sex therapist, receive a cardiac stress test and get a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming impotency, if [Ohio] state Sen. Nina Turner has her way. Turner has proposed this legislation in response to a so-called "heartbeat bill" that would ban abortions whenever there is a fetal heartbeat. She is correct that, as a health law, her bill is analogous to the heartbeat bill, but that fact doesn't make what she is doing an effective way of promoting her own position. This is because the real problem with the heartbeat law is that only actual (not potential) human beings have rights, and that using mere possession of a heartbeat to define what constitutes a human life is wrong. Violating the rights of even more individuals is not a way to protect the rights of anyone, and failing to even broach the subject of individual rights when a defense of same is urgently needed (and essential) to one's cause is to forfeit the fight. Turner and her ilk should concentrate on making cogent, pro-individual rights arguments for women's reproductive rights, rather than proposing legislation that, in today's morass of confused political philosophy, actually stands a good chance of being passed -- on top of strongly resembling other legislation already on the books that ought to be repealed, such as anti-abortion legislation and ObamaCare. To re-cast a recent comment about American bishops suddenly being angry about the contraceptive/abortion implications of ObamaCare: "If women Democrats had previously opposed ObamaCare and supported free market health care reforms on principle, they would now have the moral high ground to argue for reproductive freedom." That is, if Turner wants the state's hands off her body, she should argue against them being on anyone's body. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

The War on Drugs Justice: According to a story in The New York Times, one casualty of the so-called "War on Drugs", could well and relatively easily be a criminal justice system that functions at all: After years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: "What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn't we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?" Michelle Alexander, whose answer is in the affirmative, explains why she thinks so: n this era of mass incarceration -- when our nation's prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement -- these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty. ...In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors. The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Alexander comes across to me a little bit as a soft-on-crime leftist: There's nothing wrong with being "tough on crime" as long as the sentence is appropriate and there has been an actual crime committed (i.e., the individual rights of another person have been violated or threatened). Nevertheless, she raises a good point about the folly of making non-crimes illegal -- a point which conservatives, with their fixation on legislating morality, seem to me quite likely to miss. Between leftists eager to quit punishing crime at all and theocrats wanting to continue prohibiting activities that do not violate the rights of others, I am hardly eager to see what might come of such a crisis. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Why not (really) privatize?: An interesting article in The American notes that the budget crisis in California is resulting in increased private involvement in the funding and maintenance of government recreational programs, such as parks and university sports teams. One of those organizations with an imaginative approach is the Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma. The company's founder, Tony Magee, is in negotiations with California State Parks to assume the maintenance of the local Samuel P. Taylor State Park. Magee believes that through volunteer staffing and a more creative marketing approach, he can "come pretty close to breaking even" on a budget that currently runs at $1 million annually. Further creative solutions can be seen in nearby Jack London Historic Park, also designated for closure. Working with the Los Angeles-based Transcendence Theater Company, the Valley of the Moon Natural History Association is producing an "under the stars" concert to raise the money needed to keep Jack London and other area parks open. Transcendence's Amy Miller says, "The first time we walked into the gorgeous venue we knew it was the most remarkable space for a theatre." If the fall shows prove popular, the theater company is looking at a full slate of productions in area state parks next summer -- inspired new uses for park land. [links dropped] To its credit, the article does not call any of this "privatization", but calling such efforts "partnerships" is bad enough, since the government, as a coercive entity, ultimately calls the shots, and shouldn't be involved in such matters anyway. On the bright side, however, such efforts may well raise numerous opportunites (which The American has missed) to ask the following question: Why not get the government completely out of owning and running things like public parks? One rationale for having the government do this is already being refuted: the idea that were it not for the government's deep pockets, there would not be, for example, parks open to the public. Other rationales, such as the kinds noted by Brian Phillips in his book, Individual Rights and Government Wrongs (excerpted below), should also come into question. These proposals are usually met with indignant opposition. Private companies, it is claimed, would despoil the parks by building condos on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Motivated by profit, they would erect a Starbucks in front of Old Faithful. They would raise prices and turn parks into the playgrounds of the rich, leaving the poor and middle-class with few opportunities to enjoy outdoor recreation. And, as the acting director of the National Recreation and Park Association stated in 2006, privatizing parks is un-American: "Public parks embody the American tradition of preserving public lands for the benefit and use of all." I will note that Phillips provides plenty of examples of successful private parks, libraries, roads, and other things the government needn't -- and shouldn't -- be involved in. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Weber Gets Cheap Lesson: A company beloved by backyard barbecuers has been bitten by the very cause it self-destructively supports. Robert X. Cringely reports that Weber-Stephen Products LLC, which manufactures grills and other barbecue equipment, is the target of a class action suit because the company had, for a time, included a foreign-made valve on one of its grills. The product was thus no longer (completely) "Made in America", contrary to its label. Interestingly, Weber stopped using the part when its quality was found to have suffered. Cringely quotes a friend on the circumstances: My charcoal grill has a propane starter. I put in the charcoal, turn a knob, push a button, and 10 minutes later my charcoal is lit. It is very nice. My grill uses the small 14 oz propane bottles. One summer I noticed my bottles were running out too fast. There was a small leak in the control valve. Weber sent me a new valve, for free. It was a different type and design of valve. They sent me some other parts to fit it to my grill properly. One of the makers of their valves had sent their production overseas and the quality was suffering. Weber found another domestic maker of valves and had redesigned their products to use them. You know me, I have an insatiable curiosity. I examined the old, leaking propane valve from my grill. I did some Google'ing and found the manufacturer. Most of their products go into small propane heating products, like the stoves in RV's. Weber was smart enough to figure out this supplier was now making lower quality products. Setting aside the question of the propriety of truth-in-advertising laws, which strike me as unnecessary since fraud is already a crime, it is ironic that Weber would not be in trouble now had it not pandered to the "Buy American" brigade in the first place. Brigade? Yes. As Harry Binswanger noted long ago in his essay, "'Buy American' Is Un-American": Collectivism reflects the notion that life is "a zero sum game," that we live in a dog-eat-dog world, where one man's gain is another man's loss. On this premise, everyone has to cling to his own herd and fight all the other herds for a share of a fixed, static, supply of goods. And that is exactly the premise of the "Buy American" campaign. "It's Japan or us," is the implication. If Japan is getting richer, then we must be getting poorer. But individualism recognizes that wealth is produced, not merely appropriated, and that man's rise from the cave to the skyscraper demonstrates that life is not a zero-sum game -- not where men are free to seek progress. ... The patriotic advocates of buying American would be shocked to learn that the economic theory underlying their viewpoint is Marxism. In describing the influx of Japanese products and investment, they don't use the Marxist terminology of "imperialism" and "exploitation," but the basic idea is the same: capitalistic acts are destructive and free markets will impoverish you. It's the same anti-capitalist nonsense whether it is used by leftists to attack the United States for its commerce with Latin America or by supposed patriots to attack Japan for its commerce with the United States. There was nothing inherently wrong in Weber's prior use of a foreign-manufactured valve. In fact, had quality remained high, its use in the grills would have saved its customers money. On top of that, Weber switched suppliers when the valve was foud to be of low quality. The folks at Weber acted the part of true capitalists regarding their components, but, through labeling, paid homage to Marxism (and betrayed themselves). The company is now getting a taste of what it asked for: the government penalizing it for how it makes its own grills. Cringley ends his blog posting with a shrug. "I don’t have a solution to offer here." Indeed, the problem of massive government interference in our economy, including advertising regulations and the kinds of trade restrictions many people misguidedly advocate out of patriotism, is huge, and too big for any one man to solve. But one way to start would be for manufacturers like Weber to stop voicing support for ideas that are inimical to its ability to use the best parts and equipment possible for its bottom line and its customers. Weber's getting in trouble for a label, but that's actually a cheap lesson: Restictions of all kinds on trade -- both across borders and within our own country -- are among the biggest enemies to businesses like Weber and to the prosperity of indivdual Americans alike. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

"Scientific Spectacles" Not Enough: It's a few years old, but Malcolm Gladwell's review of James Flynn's None of the Above is worth reading and keeping in mind for the next time the subject of IQ and race comes up, as it has a few times in comments here in the past. The book calls into question the tidy assumptions some people like to make regarding race and IQ, by considering such matters as the method used to measure intelligence in individuals (i.e., tests that have to be "re-normed" periodically to account for cultural and technological change) and how analyses of the data are performed (e.g., whether two sample populations really are comparable; or whether some relevant, explanatory variable, such as age, might have been omitted from the analysis). I'll excerpt a couple of clear cases, starting here with a striking example of how one's culture can affect how one answers test questions: The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. "A wise man could only do such-and-such," they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, "How would a fool do it?" The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the "right" categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement -- that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about? This problem isn't confined to distant tribes: Flynn famously observed that IQ, as measured by standardized tests, rises by 0.3 points per year. Gladwell restates this: "If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120..." Extrapolating backwards, Gladwell notes that "[T]he average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 [would be] around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded." Clearly, there is some problem with the test. Flynn also dispenses with a couple of common racial stereotypes perpetuated by people Gladwell aptly calls "IQ fundamentalists". For example, Flynn considers the question of whether there is a genetic or environmental reason for low IQ scores among American blacks relative to whites: Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4 -- only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4. That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children -- and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. ... Flynn considers other evidence, but this should serve to show how difficult it can be to correctly interpret differences in scores among demographic groups, even if questions about the measuring instrument are set aside for the sake of argument. This is just a taste of how thorny a question it is to measure human intellectual potential, and its lessons are much more broadly applicable than as a hammer to use against the claims of racists: Even people who are not simply bigots eager to dress their foolishness up in the garb of science have accepted some of these scientific-sounding sterotypes. Furthermore, "scientific" fads occur among laymen in other disciplines, as well, when people who do not understand the complexities of a given area are tripped up by a combination of ignorance and misapplied common sense. After all, it isn't entirely unreasonable to conclude that a group that performs worse on a test than another group has less native ability -- but it's still not necessarily correct. It may well be that most people in modern Western culture go about wearing what Flynn calls "scientific spectacles", but that plainly doesn't make everyone scientists. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Great Data, Wrong Lesson: In The Atlantic is an article about the rapid development of sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade that describes dramatic improvements in the economies of many of its nations: What changed? Partly, the boom in commodities. Sky-high copper prices have lifted copper-rich Zambia. Record cocoa prices are bringing $2 billion annually into Ghana. Kenyan farmers, mostly small, are responsible for $1 billion in annual exports of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, a figure that dwarfs the country's traditional coffee and tea exports. And, of course, high demand for oil and gas has helped a number of countries enormously. But even countries without such natural resources, such as Rwanda, have seen significant gains, mostly because of improved economic governance and the return of money and skills from Africans who left their countries during the dog days. Rwanda, for instance, long an importer of food, now grows enough to satisfying the needs of its people, and even exports cash crops such as coffee for the first time. [bold added] Along the lines of the phrasing "improved economic governance", the article credits an alliance between "a diverse group of determined African technocrats" and "technologically savvy, globally oriented capitalists" with this boom, as if government planning had finally worked "this time". Unfortunately, African governments have in the past so egregiously violated individual rights, especially the right to property for so long that almost any mixed-economy arrangement will lend surface credibility to such a claim, if only because some parts of the economy would function freely by default (i.e., because the government isn't yet trying to run things), as happened in parts of Iraq shortly after the American invasion. Indeed, the article both alludes to the real savior of Africa in passing and allows a peek at some evidence for this contention in the following three paragraphs. Technology also plays an important part in the new African boom. Probably the most astonishing development success since 2000 in Africa has been the communications revolution. A dozen years ago, merely making a phone call (or receiving one) was virtually impossible even in Africa's most important commercial centers. An elite business person might hire two or three people fulltime simply to repeatedly dial phone numbers over the crumbling, puny, and perversely sub-optimal government-owned telephone systems. Nigeria, at the time a country of 100 million people, had at most 100,000 working dial tones. It was not remarkable for one call out of every 50 made to be completed. Naturally, the effect on productivity was devastating, but equally as bad was the sense of isolation. Everything had to be done face to face, consigning people to long trips for even trivial maneuvers. Waiting became a way of life. No longer. The advent of mobile telephones has brought instant communications to hundreds of millions of Africans, rich and poor, urban and rural. Africans are now on the move. Text messaging and digital money-transfer services, such as Safaricom's M-pesa in Kenya, have transformed ordinary life. Yet this most visible of all African advances, this gigantic step forward in linking Africans to each other and to people around the world, occurred with virtually zero assistance from the professional development community of donors and economists, aid workers and development agencies. Uniformly, these "experts" said Africans were simply too poor to benefit from mobile telecommunications, so they provided scant assistance in the 1990s and early 2000s when African governments, in the main, relaxed their long hegemony over telecommunications and permitted private companies to lead the push into mobile phones. Some Africans have made fortunes. The Sudanese engineer Mo Ibrahim even became a billionaire from piecing together a regional network of mobile companies. In virtually every single African nation, the leading mobile phone company is now the leading taxpayer to the government, the leading local donor to local causes, and one of the leading employers. [bold added] Please note that the mysterious "advent" of modern telecommunications in Africa is belatedly mentioned as being due to the efforts of entrepreneurs, at least one of whom has become a billionaire -- in Africa. During the world's "Great Recession". Please do note that the agricultural booms mentioned above are a direct result of the telecommunications boom. Of course, these companies are being taxed and, worse, the "lesson" this article claims Western development gurus are drawing from this is that, "The new thinking on development is to share Africa's wealth more equitably." Do they not see that governmental chopping-down of the likes of Mo Ibrahim has been the problem all along and that this is precisely what needs to be stopped entirely for Africa's development to continue and accelerate? If Africa attempts to "share wealth" by redistributing -- i.e., stealing and giving away -- the money and property of individuals, its boom will prove short-lived. A society can either pretend to share wealth by violating property rights -- or share prosperity by respecting them. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Confess and Project: In The Weekly Standard is an amusing and instructive wrap-up of a leftist attempt to manufacture a sort of AGW skeptic ClimateGate. I'd vaguely heard about this, but hadn't followed the story at all and, in fact, was induced to read the story by its headline of, "Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning". If you're in my former shoes, take a look: You'll find a scientist, Peter Gleick, confessing to having tricked someone at the Heartland Institute, which puts on a conference of AGW skeptics each year, into sending him some of its internal documents. Kaminsky and a second blogger, Steven Mosher, piled up the anomalies: The leaked board documents were not scanned but were original software-produced documents, which moreover have a time stamp from Heartland’s Central time zone. Hence the "strategy memo," if authentic, would have had to be obtained by some other channel. These and other clues led both Kaminsky and Mosher to go public with the accusation that the most likely perpetrator was Peter Gleick, a semi-prominent environmental scientist in Oakland, California. The article goes on to note that Gleick confessed to the deception, although he claimed to have done so after receiving a "strategy memo" allegedly from Heartland which reads more like the psychological projection of how a leftist imagines the folks at Heartland would think, rather than anything remotely plausible, as this excerpt should demonstrate: Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as [Andrew] Revkin at Dot­Earth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW [anthropogenic global warming] communicators ... [bold added] This reminds me of something Heidi "Lysenko" Cullen might say. Furthermore, the piece goes on to note that Revkin, an AGW fellow traveler who nevertheless finds himself in hot water with his "community" from time to time when his reporting doesn't toe the party line, has since speculated that Gleick himself may have authored the fake strategy memo. The piece ends with an amusing demolition of yet another silly AGW extrapolation/attempt to demonize AGW skeptics for some of the very things that characterize the AGW movement. The piece ends by alluding to its title. The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn't even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn't need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead. In the sense of competing on the merit of one's ideas in a free marketplace, this is true. Unfortunately, just as the scientific question of what is going on with climate has been conflated with the political one of what (if anything) to do, scientific inquiry has been politicized with government funding and there is always the threat that scientific results (correct or not) will be used as an excuse for more central "planning" of the economy. When government force is misused in this way, even the most meritorious argument can "lose" in terms of people being unable to live according to its implications. Excuse me for being a wet blanket, but doesn't the above optimism seem a little misplaced in this context? If conservatives would fight central planning on principle, they would feel much less anxiety about what climate science has to say, and focus on getting rid of the centrally-planned entitlement state. Perhaps the over-optimistic title and conclusion of this piece are a sort of conservative confession of relief: One who won't stand for freedom on principle will regard the industrial civilization one enjoys, but won't defend, at risk over a the outcome of a scientific debate, of all things. In that vein, I would summarize too much conservative AGW commentary as follows: Whew! They're a wrong -- and pack of liars -- after all! -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Truth Smarts: Cecil Adams recently fielded a reader's query about whether it is true -- as the news media would have us believe -- that people from the so-called "blue states" are more intelligent than those from the conservative "red states". In the process, Adams not only debunks that myth, he raises some methodological questions along the way besides just the question of what IQ might actually measure. [Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi] Kanazawa has been at the forefront of attempts to demonstrate that red states are awash in ignorance. One groundbreaking effort was a 2006 article entitled "IQ and the Wealth of States," in which he tried to link intelligence with economic performance. A difficulty was the lack of a reliable measure of statewide IQ. (I'll ignore the side issue of what IQ tests measure.) Kanazawa got around this by using SAT scores, making the simplifying assumption that if you didn't take the SAT, you were stupid. Kanazawa came up with an IQ score of 63 -- well below the cutoff for mental retardation -- for Mississippi, a result that screamed for, and got, a second look. Michael McDaniel ... point[ed] out that not taking the SAT didn't necessarily mean you were stupid; often it just meant you'd taken the ACT instead. McDaniel thereupon produced his own more plausible set of average state IQs, ranging from a low of 94 for Mississippi to a high of 104 for Massachusetts. At first glance numbers like that might seem to support the red-states-are-dopes hypothesis. Some further research by one of Adams's staff members came up with something a little different, however: Result: average IQ for red states vs. blue states was essentially the same (red 99, blue 99.5). Conclusions: Are liberals smarter than conservatives? Some social scientists sure think so. Are blue states smarter than red states? Sadly for us cyanophiles, no. But here's the most significant data point, I think: in the purple states -- the ones that swung back and forth -- the average IQ according to Una's spreadsheet was 100.9, appreciably above that for either the blue states or red states. In other words -- and this has the shock of truth -- the people in the purple states weren't rigidly liberal or conservative, but rather had enough on the ball to consider the choices before them and occasionally change their minds. Whatever IQ actually measures, Adams comes to within a hair's breadth of making a very good point about how one ought to use one's mind in an election, assuming the choices actually matter: If one can't be bothered to think before casting a vote, all the potential in the world won't make a damned bit of difference. The fact that "purple" states scored higher for IQ than red or blue states, whatever it might mean, seems like a distraction to me. As someone who finds the self-congratulatory use of words like smart annoying, often because it short-changes rationality, it is satisfying to see this silly "scientific" belief so easily unraveled. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Tesla Motors Beats "Range Anxiety": Electric cars are, as I have noted in the past, a ridiculous idea because they are impractical as transportation and they fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, anyway. (The latter sets aside the whole question of whether human activity causes global warming, if that is happening at all. And that is not to mention whether global warming would be a problem and, if so, whether it ought to be addressed by the government.) That is, electric cars fail to provide adequate transport, as evidenced by the popular phrase, "range anxiety", and they fail to achieve their alleged purpose of reducing the need to burn fossil fuels. But Tesla Motors, makers of the first electric roadster, recipients of $465 million in government loans, and beneficiaries of government "incentives" to car buyers for purchasing electric cars may well have licked "range anxiety": Tesla Motors' lineup of all-electric vehicles -- its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X -- apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a "brick": a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla's warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss. The article goes on to note that the wheels of these "bricked" cars cannot be electronically unlocked (for "tow mode"), so transporting these "bricks" to the shop is an expensive hassle on its own, and that the $40,000 is a special "friends and family" price for the battery replacement. Tesla Motors has, furthermore, been less-than-forthcoming about the underlying problem, yet sneakily tracking car locations and charge levels of owners' cars before calling them to warn against battery depletion -- and even, in at least one case, dispatching staff to plug in a car. Since the government is picking my pocket -- just for starters -- to make this absurd story even possible, I feel no qualms about openly mocking the government, its automotive lapdog, and the AGW alarmists who are customers of Tesla Motors: At least the government seems to have found a solution to the whole problem of "range anxiety" for owners of electric cars. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

As Peikoff Predicted: In Vanity Fair is a Christopher Hitchens piece titled "Assassins of the Mind", in which Hitchens discusses the self-censorship that is going on in the publishing world, even including video games (!), in the long wake of the terroristic threats made against Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 -- and our government's appeasement of those threats and the many similar ones since then. So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn't have to. But he is very well understood. The late playwright Simon Gray was alluding to him when he said that Nicholas Hytner, the head of London’s National Theatre, might put on a play mocking Christianity but never one that questioned Islam. I brushed up against the unacknowledged censor myself when I went on CNN to defend the Danish cartoons and found that, though the network would show the relevant page of the newspaper, it had pixelated the cartoons themselves. And this in an age when the image is everything. The lady anchor did not blush to tell me that the network was obliterating its very stock-in-trade (newsworthy pictures) out of sheer fear. Hitchens gives other examples and rightly goes on from the above paragraph to note that "ometimes this fear -- and this blackmail -- comes dressed up in the guise of good manners and multiculturalism". Hitchens summarizes the current state of affairs succinctly as follows: "We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal." The Hitchens article is worth a read, but not without also considering that Leonard Peikoff predicted this state of afffairs back in 1989, and why he was able to make his prediction. The ultimate target of the Ayatollah, as of all mystics, is not a particular "blasphemy," but reason itself, along with its cultural and political expressions: science, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution. And, much later: The clear and present danger is that writers and publishers will begin, as a desperate measure of self-defense, to practice self-censorship--to speak, write, and publish with the implicit thought in mind: "What group will this offend and to what acts of aggression will I then be vulnerable?" The result would be the death of the First Amendment and the gradual Finlandization of America. Is the land of the free and the home of the brave to become the land of the bland and the home of the fearful? Peikoff saw this coming because he understood why it had to turn out like this, and this pathetic state of affairs will continue and worsen until we respond appropriately to these threats in the manner he recommends. I think both articles are worthwhile, but if you have time to read only one of them, read Peikoff's. -- CAV Updates Today: Corrected a typo. Original entry: See link at top of this post

Jim Crow for Anyone: Some time back, I encountered an article about a particularly odious figure, Walter Ashby Plecker, whose feverish work to expand the reach of Jim Crow laws must not be forgotten. This is particularly true today, when so much progress has been made towards eradicating racial bigotry that it can be easy to forget that there is still work to be done. On that last score, I once considered the idea that perhaps reminding certain kinds of people about Plecker's evil work could be helpful. From 1912 to 1946, Plecker served as the first registrar of Virginia's newly-created Bureau of Vital Statistics. An avowed white supremacist and advocate of eugenics, Plecker believed that the state's Native Americans had been "mongrelized" with its African American population. The General Assembly's 1924 "Racial Integrity Act" recognized only two races, "white" and "colored." Because Plecker believed that "colored" people were attempting to pass as "Indian" he ordered state agencies to reclassify most citizens' [ sic] claiming Indian identity as "colored." Specifically, he ordered them to reclassify certain families whom he identified by surname, as trying to pass and evade segregation. To anyone who has one ounce of nostalgia for those days -- and I have bumped into/discovered a few over the years -- I imagined I would ask something like: "Could you prove to the satisfaction of a government official that the 'one drop rule' doesn't apply to you?" "What if the person demanding proof got to decide what counted as proof?" "What if your basis of proof were under the care of the person demanding proof?" "What if that person had something against you?" While the above questions do not explicitly raise the real issue -- "By what right does someone coerce someone else based on a mere accident of birth?" -- I wondered whether perhaps, except for the most obdurate, they would illustrate on some level the fact that unleashing arbitrary government power over some individuals leaves all individuals vulnerable by precedent. Perhaps, after seeing that Jim Crow could, in principle, easily be unleashed against themselves, they might, lacking empathy, at least realize that their own hides would be at stake. However, the more I thought about such a strategy, the less sanguine I became about it. As Ayn Rand once put it so well: Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge -- for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment -- and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem). Even the scheme I concocted above is likely asking for too much effort and imagination on the part of someone so inimical to difficult thought. Why do I say this? Plecker was white. The fools who put him in charge were white. The part of the public that could do anything about this was white. Plecker was, to these people, "one of us", and exempt from the kinds of questions I would ask. Indeed, I am sure that such questions would have been considered rude, and would have perhaps been dangerous to raise in some contexts. Walter Plecker is better remembered, by the good people who oppose tyranny, as the kind of monster that can arise when evil goes unchallenged among the public for too long: A monster in human form who will openly, and with the approval of others, destroy freedom. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

2-11-12 Hodgepodge: You Can't Prepare for All Contingencies There is, apparently, a new reality series out on what it aptly calls "doomsday preppers": Each episode will feature a few individuals from the prepping subculture, and the effectiveness of their preparations will be assessed by experts. In the series premiere, viewers meet a retired couple who have 50,000 pounds of food stored in their doomsday-proof home built of steel shipping containers, an urban survivalist in Los Angeles prepping for a severe earthquake and a young, outgoing Texan ready to bug out when an oil crisis creates havoc. "It's not a hobby," prepper Gloria Haswell tells National Geographic, "it's a lifestyle." Haswell and her husband spend 50 hours a week preparing for a shift in the North and South poles, which could cause severe climate change. [link omitted] In addition to this being a particularly puzzling and amusing form of people adopting Pascal's Wager as a way of life, it is highly impractical to spend most of one's spare time preparing for doomsday. Just for starters, I wonder how such people, with their bunkers and stockpiles, imagine how long they can hide from and fend off the enormous hoards of people who have not prepared similarly -- or with whom they will trade once their supplies inevitably run out. And then, considering people preparing for particular disasters, it is amusing to consider them being blindsided by some other disaster, say, a meteor strike or the eruption of a supervolcano. (Not that I waste time worrying about things that, but if something like that happens, I won't have wasted my life building a freaking bunker...) And would life in a post-apocalyptic wasteland really be worth living, anyway? To confine myself to that which I can influence: Given the choice between spending part of my free time working on the assumption that mankind will destroy itself -- or working to persuade mankind not to, I find the latter far more productive, enjoyable, and likely to really succeed. This is because a truly human life is far more than just bare physical survival. This consummate introvert does not in any way underestimate the value of the opportunities to trade both physical goods and spiritual values (like friendship) with other human beings. Weekend Reading "In almost all cases, cheap stocks are cheap for a reason." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Penny Stocks Aren't Worth a Dime" at SmartMoney "n personal relationships, respect and love should go hand-in-hand." -- Michael Hurd, in "Respect: The Key to Romance" at DrHurd.com My Two Cents I found Hurd's comment that "Like beach erosion, the loss of respect happens slowly," very thought-provoking. I thought I disagreed with it at first, recalling one occasion in particular of which I have said, "I lost lots of respect for [that person] that day." But thinking back on that with the aid of Hurd's examples, I see that a slower process of revising one's estimate of another person -- a slow dawning of awareness that things don't add up the way one thought they did -- may well be at play. Not a "Dropbox-Killer" As a very big fan of Dropbox and someone who detests vendor lock-in, I am relieved by the sound reasoning of a commentator who makes the case that the roll-out of Google Drive will not pose an existential threat to the cloud data storage service: Dropbox said "no" to all that. It wants to be the next Apple or Google, and its valuation seems optimistic about that possibility. Apple's cloud is totally integrated with its devices, using hardware as the platform. Google's cloud is integrated with its services, using the Web as a platform. Dropbox is a platform. Dropbox lets different clients on different systems read and write to it. Dropbox doesn't have a Google Docs because anyone can build a word processor on top of it. We can build a thousand word processors on top of it, and if they can all read the same file format, they can all work together. Dropbox's platform ubiquity is what it's all about, and that's why Google (and Apple) can't copy it. Amusingly, it is for the very reasons I like Dropbox -- and don't want Apple's or Google's version of the cloud -- that I may have nothing to worry about. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Legally Hidden Envy: Over at Slate is an article about a legal case in Florida which is receiving a huge amount of publicity, but for the wrong reason. On Feb. 10, 2010, Palm Beach air-conditioning mogul John Goodman allegedly ran a stop sign. His Bentley convertible struck a Hyundai being driven by Scott Wilson, a 23-year-old civil engineer. Wilson's car landed in a nearby canal where the young man drowned. The near-billionaire then fled the scene. Police say Goodman had a blood alcohol content of 0.177, twice the legal limit. Not surprisingly, Goodman is being sued by Wilson's parents for a great deal of money. (He also faces criminal charges that could put him in jail for 30 years). The article continues, mentioning that many of Goodman's assets, having been diverted into a trust fund for his children, cannot be touched by the jury -- although "West Palm Beach Judge Glenn Kelley ruled early in the Goodman civil lawsuit that the jury could not be told of the large trust's existence because it might encourage jurors to impose a larger verdict against Goodman, despite the fact that he, in theory, has no control over the trust." This is apparently because one of Goodman's adopted children is his lover, and Goodman's attorney set up the trust as a tax dodge. The case has aroused an enormous amount of interest, not because Wilson's family may receive less of an award, but because Goodman's relationship is, in a strict legal sense, incestuous. It is, of course, ridiculous to use a legal technicality as a substitute for objective moral judgement, especially when it is clear that the legal definition of incest might need revisiting. What I find truly amazing is why such a setup is actually quite common. (It has similarly been used by homosexual couples who don't have recourse to marriage to establish a legal familial relationship.) Our society so reflexively condones confiscatory taxation that some people are left with the ridiculous choice between having their property taken by the state -- or making some screwball arrangement like this. It is so clear that this is a tax dodge -- and that the "incest" here is only a legal technicality -- that I strongly suspect that much of the animus against Goodman -- at least for his "incest" -- is motivated, psychologically, by envy. Indeed, it is those who are casting the stones here who are using a legal loophole for nefarious purposes: to condemn a man for an evil of which he is innocent and to hide their true motivation from themselves. -- CAV P.S. I have not thought carefully about whether incest should actually be illegal. That said, laws should definitely be in place against adults having sexual relationships with minors. Under such laws, incest that is not between consenting adults is already illegal. Updates Today: Added a P.S. Original entry: See link at top of this post

Privatization: Not Critical Enough: There is an interesting anti-privatization column up over at Salon that attempts to appeal to advocates and opponents of privatization alike. The column levels a variety of criticisms against privatization, some of them quite valid, but its overall argument is wrong: The ideology that the government is just one among many providers of goods and services is a seductive one in this age of markets. But the government isn't simply just another agent in the market, and firms that are empowered to carry out the role of the state can be as abusive as the worst bureaucracy. We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won't always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether. The part about the government not being just another market player is correct. As Ayn Rand once pointed out, "A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area." Nobody else can legally make anyone do anything, and it is the government's job to stop anyone who does. (Sadly, too many people forget about the second part, which is why we have such an institution in the first place.) The problem with this piece lies with its unstated assumption that the government ought to be doing many of the things it does now, and its passive acceptance of (or active reliance on) a common misconception that what we call privatization really is the proper way to either (a) have some legitimate government services provided by the private sector, or ( get the government out of those parts of the economy that it now operates in, but which are actually beyond its proper scope (i.e., of protecting individual rights). As I pointed out some time ago: Although this massive wave of "privatization" looks and feels like capitalism in some ways, it is not. In fact, it is merely a shifting from socialism (i.e., government ownership of the means of production) to fascism (i.e., government control of the privately-owned means of production) being done in the name of capitalism -- and with, I suspect, just as much potential to unjustly tarnish the reputation of capitalism as the mess created by the so-called deregulation of electric utilities in several states some time ago. The problem with privatization (as we usually see it today) is not that government is less powerful or is retreating from some area of the economy. (Regarding the latter, there are laws in place against theft and fraud, just to start with.) The problem is that privatization does not actually represent a retreat of the government to its proper scope or a return of the affected part of the economy to actual capitalism. If either of those occurred, there would neither be government-granted advantages to any one company over its competition, nor the cronyism that comes when you basically have a referee joining one of the teams and taking to the field in the middle of a game. The government has a proper role in capitalism, but for it to serve that role well -- and for capitalism to function -- that role needs to be questioned and better understood by the voting public. Taking our current government-run economy for granted is not the right place to start criticizing the flawed practice of "privatization". -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Happy Randsday!: Harry Binswanger recently brought up a brilliant suggestion he made on his mailing list last year, which I second, and agree should go viral. He has come up with a good name for the anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, as well as a fitting way to celebrate it. To celebrate Randsday, you do something not done on any other holiday: you give yourself a present. Randsday is for getting that longed-for luxury you ordinarily would not buy for yourself. Or for doing that long-postponed, self-pampering activity you cannot seem to fit into your chore-packed schedule. Randsday is for reminding ourselves that pleasure is an actual need, a psychological requirement for a human consciousness. For man, motivation, energy, enthusiasm are not givens. Pathological depression is not only possible but rampant in our duty-preaching, self-denigrating culture. The alternative is not short-range, superficial "fun," but real, self-rewarding pleasure. On Randsday, if you do something that you ordinarily would think of as "fun," you do it on a different premise and with a deeper meaning: that you need pleasure, you are entitled to it, and that the purpose and justification of your existence is: getting what you want -- what you really want, with full consciousness and dedication. I have had Ayn Rand's birthday marked in my calendar for years and yet, despite my appreciation for the depth, breadth, and great originality of her artistic and intellectual work, it had never occurred to me to treat it like the holiday it truly is, in the etymological sense of the word (i.e., "holy day", but with an emphasis on what is actually holy). I have now corrected my calendar to read, "Randsday" when February 2 rolls around. I celebrated my first Randsday early, yesterday afternoon. For some time, I'd known about a pub in a part of Boston that is off my beaten track just enough to cause me to not go every time I thought it would be fun to see an Arsenal match in a pub full of other fans. This was something that could well be worth doing regularly, if the atmosphere of the place was right, but I needed to find out one way or the other. The place did not quite live up to expectations, but I finally got that out of my system. I now better appreciate the place I usually go when I do go out for a game, and I had fun exploring Boston a little bit. The baby was hardly any trouble, and the afternoon trip saved my wife from being dragged to this particular pub on a weekend. In fact, there are a few other promising-sounding pubs that I'll probably explore like this from time to time, now that I've gotten a solo trip under my belt -- of that range and time extent, with the baby -- and still had a good time. Oh, and this reminds me that I can tackle a few more mini-tours of Boston whenever the weather is nice. Thinking long-term, I had a pretty good first Randsday. I hope you do, too. -- CAV Updates Today: (1) Changed a sentence to not read like I'm running around Boston with a "baby under my belt". (2) Clarified a sentence. Original entry: See link at top of this post

Bastiat on Crony Government: Via RealClear Politics is a link to a blog that excerpts a comment made by the economist Frederic Bastiat 150 years ago that is, I agree, as "fresh as a daisy". Here is the excerpt: But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law -- which may be an isolated case -- is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system. The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen. Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it. [bold added by Adam Sharp] Notice the clarity here! Bastiat states that the government is acting the part of a criminal enterprise above the law. Note, too, the recognition that controls breed controls, from the standpoint of the crime victims seeking reprisals. (Other victims will also run to the government for "redress" when the economic distortions caused by central planning inevitably -- but not always obviously -- harm their interests. This "redress" will also excuse the creation of more economic controls, rather than the repeal of the ones already on the books.) The only thing I can add here is that I strongly object to the term "crony capitalism". Capitalism exists only when the state does not attempt to run any part of the economy, and political cronies can only exist when it does. Perhaps "crony government," a term I recall Harry Binswanger suggesting, would be a better. Whatever we call it, we should keep from blaming capitalism by association for a problem it does not cause. -- CAV Updates Today: Changed "Other crime victims" to "Other victims" in parenthetical comment. Original entry: See link at top of this post

Egypt's GOP: Over at Salon is an article that likens the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Republican Party in the United States. [T]he Brotherhood is a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment while spurning labor unions and the redistribution of wealth. Like the Republicans in the U.S., the financial interests of the party's leadership of businessmen and professionals diverge sharply from those of its poor, socially conservative followers. While I disagree with Avi Asher-Schapiro that the economic interests of wealthy individuals and poor individuals differ, I think this writer has a point. Since privatization, as the term is too-commonly used today, does not necessarily even really mean "privatization", and many people who are said to be "free market" are not really pro-capitalists, but advocates of a less government-controlled mixed economy, I think that the article is right to note that each political party is a coalition between such "free market" types and theocrats. (I wouldn't tout either party as "pro-capitalist".) The article clearly depicts this as a bad thing for the wrong reason: Asher-Schapiro seems to regard any vestige of capitalism in post-Mubarak Egypt as a bad thing. What is actually bad about this is that Islam (like Christianity) is, in fact, ethically incompatible with capitalism. These businessmen are already soothing foreign investors: If their economic policies really do represent a loosening of the economy, the theocrats in their coalition will be in a position to falsely gain credit when, as often happens, the loosening of state economic controls brings about an economic boom. The "free market" part of this coalition is, like that of the GOP, serving as "useful idiots" for the theocratic part of the coalition, and will, ultimately, either have to leave the coalition or lose after the theocrats entrench themselves and some choice has to be made between businessmen remaining wealthy (or free to enjoy their wealth) and the dictates of Islam. In the meantime, watch for other unwarranted or premature sighs of relief from the West. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Graham on "Resourcefulness": Venture capitalist Paul Graham considers why it is that, in hindsight, the most successful and least successful start-up groups stand out in two seemingly unrelated metrics: [T]he startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take care of themselves." The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is. However, [T]he least successful startups ... all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. Graham resolves his conundrum by making the following connection: It turns out there is, and the key to the mystery is the old adage "a word to the wise is sufficient." Because this phrase is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the subject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know what it means. What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and they'll understand immediately. You don't have to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the implications. [italics added] Equally interesting are Graham's and one of his partner's thoughts on why some people are not wise (or, as Graham calls it "conversationally resourceful"). Graham sees the absence of wisdom as denial, while his partner sees a more passive, semi-automated process at work. I think either or both can be at work in any given situation, with active denial being a moral flaw and the semi-automated process falling into the realm of the psycho-epistemological. Some of the unwise may well be unaware of that aspect of their thought process, but they can be made aware of it, and they can change their habitual mode of function through effort and self-monitoring. That said, someone who, "desperately tries to munge [possibly good advice from a clearly good source] into something that conforms with [his] decision" will have his work cut out for him. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

1-21-12 Hodgepodge: New (as in Coke) Google FarhadManjoo hitsthe nail on the head whenhe discusses Google's tampering with search results in the name ofturning everything into a social network. For more than a decade, Google search wasn't"social" in any way. When I searched for a new car or a European hotelor the best way to plunge a toilet, Google would give me results thatreflected the collected view of all Web users. That worked really well! Not once during those years did I get to aGoogle results page and lament that I couldn’t see my friends' ideasabout the car I should buy or the hotel I ought to book. While myfriends are thoughtful and knowledgeable people, their views on thetens of thousands of large and small inquiries that I bring to Googleevery year are almost always irrelevant... And,much later: Google just broke its search engine. It didso under the guise of an improvement, an effort to mesh traditionalsearch results with stuff from your social network. Within hours ofannouncing the change, Google took fire from tech pundits andcompetitors. Most of the criticism focused on implementation: Insteadof drawing content from many different social networks, Google’s newresults will lean heavily on its own network, Google+. [link removed] Yearsago, before Google became popular, I randomly discovered it when Inoticed how bad most search engines were. (One kept changing what "AND"meant between narrowing its results to having BOTH terms and expandingits results to include EITHER term.) What caused me to adopt it as mysearch engine -- and tell other people about it -- were its simplicityand the fact that I knew what I would be getting out of it would bebased on (a) my actual query and ( relevance to most people, and notjust a possibly biased group of people. Maybeit's time to start looking around for a search engine again. Weekend Reading "CharlesDow's original stock index wasn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average, butthe Transportation Index, first calculated in 1884 as a leadingharbinger of the economy." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Playingthe Rally in Transport Stocks", at SmartMoney "...I frequently suggest that couples start with separate sessions, ratherthan meeting me as a couple." -- Michael Hurd, in "DoesCouples Therapy Work?", at DrHurd.com "If we wish to continue enjoying the benefits of capitalisticinnovation, we should regard 'making a profit' as praiseworthy as'creating value,' and give those who earn honest profits the respectand gratitude they deserve." -- PaulHsieh, in "WhyIs Creating Value Good, Profits Bad?" at RealClear Markets "[T]he fact that bad people can misuse a technology does not justifyrestricting the freedoms of honest users." -- Paul Hsieh, in "SOPA,Guns, and Freedom" at PJ Media My Two Cents MichaelHurd's column has several choice quotes about how the question forwhich he names his column often arises for the wrong reasons. I alsofound his discussion of what he calls "triangulation" interesting. Calltriangulation, "the bane of the second-hander",since the very problem someone who does this needs to solve is gettingin the way of him solving it. And the winner is ... KompoZer. A couple of weeks ago, I blegged for ideas on HTML editors.I was leaning towards the first suggestion I got, which was a Chromeplug-in, but saw lots of complaints about its latest version on its website, so I dug a little more and found something that works well for me. Noteto Google: Using Chrome as the browser sped things up very nicely, andthe new Blogger editor would be okay -- except that it drives me crazythat when I'm done with a paragraph and want to skip down a line, Ihave to hit a down arrow after hitting ENTER. Also annoying: When Itype something in bold, like the title of this sectionof the post and then skip down a line to start writing, why does youreditor (a) assume I want the paragraph in bold even after I toggle boldoff, and ( make me switch to the HTML view to fix it. WithKompoZer, I have restored order to the computer-aided editingexperience: I tell my computer to do something, and the computer doesit. --CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Make-a-Wish Politics: Via HBL comes a story that, even in this day and age, is a little hard for me to believe. The New York Times reports that energy producers are being fined by our government for not selling a biofuel that doesn't even exist. When the companies that supply motor fuel close the bookson 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasurybecause they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into theirgasoline and diesel as required by law. In 2012, the oilcompanies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend inthe fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plantslike corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons intogasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallonsthis year. ... Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrateswhat happens when the federal government really, really wants somethingthat technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seemharsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. [bold and hyperlink added] In a sense, there is a strange logic to these fines: This law is, ofcourse, supposed to remedy global warming, a phenomenon that may or maynot exist, that may or may not be a problem if it does, and wouldn't be the government's problem to solve even then. When you start acting on the arbitrary, why draw a line anywhere, including whether what you want is even possible? -- CAV P.S. It is worth noting that President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law. Original entry: See link at top of this post

What People Are Missing About Property: Over at Rondam Ramblings is a very interesting post about the debate over some Internet-threatening legislation (the Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA) that Congress is considering. The author, "Ron", makes quite a few very interesting points, and shows himself to be quite astute about the importance of naming all the premises in any debate. Unfortunately, he reaches a dangerously wrong conclusion, which he claims is what "everyone is missing in the SOPA debate": ntellectual property [is] a granted right, not a recognized or fundamental right... Ron reaches this conclusion by considering the clause in Article 2 of the Constitution that establishes patents and copyrights, and noting several differences between these rights and property rights, both legally and culturally: [T]he "right" to "intellectual property" does not exist unless explicitly granted by Congress at its discretion. Furthermore, Congress is constrained to grant this right only in service of a specific purpose. namely, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and only " for limited times". ... " ntellectual property" is clearly on a different legal footing from the "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to which people are endowed by their Creator, as recognized in the [D]eclaration of Independence. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution mentions "property" by name [correction: the 5th amendment does mention it. See the comments.], but it is quite clear that the right to physical property was universally considered an inalienable fundamental right by the Founders.Ron clearly is grappling with the issue of what the Founding Fathers might have meant by their clause, as he looks for historical evidence within the Constitution and other historical documents. Unfortunately, two aspects of his approach lead him astray. First, it seems to me that the Founding Fathers were themselves unclear about the exact nature of property. For one thing, a quick search of the web site usconstitution.net reveals that they themselves did not use the term "intellectual property". This suggests that perhaps the concept of intellectual property hadn't been fully formed yet (or at least was very new, or not yet widely accepted), although the Founding Fathers realized on some level that there was something about creative work that merited protection. For another thing, the fact that slavery was recognized in the Constitution suggests that the way that many people held "property" as a concept at the time was wrong. Otherwise, the idea that people could be property would have been widely ridiculed, rather than codified into law in any way whatsoever. The Founders thus were sincerely attempting to protect individual rights, while at the same time (and like anyone), facing errors (e.g., the slavery question, for some) and incomplete knowledge (e.g., an incomplete grasp of the nature of intellectual property) of their own, as well as whatever virtues or limitations the culture of their time placed on what, politically, was possible. Second, and proceeding directly from the above, while I do not fault anyone with looking at history, an attempt to grapple with the question of whether intellectual property is an individual right is hampered without also considering the philosophical question of what property really is. Any errors or incompleteness of knowledge on the part of the authors of the Constitution will limit any such inquiry that does not account for (1) the essential purpose of the document (setting up a government that protects individual rights) and (2) the nature of those rights. It is at this point that I defer to Ayn Rand, who made the following argument in a chapter of her book ("Patents and Copyrights"), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal: What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mentaleffort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’scontribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject ofpatents and copyrights is intellectual property. An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. Aninvention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; astory has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protectsis not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. Byforbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, ineffect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’svalue, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not beused without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mindto that which it has brought into existence. It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot bepatented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, whichidentifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previouslyknown, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he didnot create it, and ( if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming itto be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoodsexcept by his permission. He can copyright the book in which he presents hisdiscovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery beacknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit forit -- but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrightspertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of aspecific object which did not exist in nature -- an object which, in the case ofpatents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in thecase of copyrights, would never have existed. The government does not "grant" a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift,privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it -- i.e., the governmentcertifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive rightof use and disposal. [bold added] Rand is arguing that, as a type of property (i.e., something obtained through individual effort), intellectual property is a fundamental right. Elsewhere in her article, Rand explains that the time limits on patents and copyrights are essential aspects of securing these rights: When the originator of the idea dies, his ideas cease to exist as property. She goes further: Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue. If they were restricted to the originator's life-span, it would destroy their value by making long-term contractual agreements impossible: if an inventor died a month after his invention were placed on the market, it could ruin the manufacturer who may have invested a fortune in its production. Under such conditions, investors would be unable to take a long-range risk; the more revolutionary or important an invention, the less would be its chance of finding financial backers. Therefore, the law has to define a period of time which would protect the rights and interests of all those involved. Intellectual property is a fundamental right, and the differences in how the government secures that right from other property rights are not concessions to its being a granted favor or a civil (rather than a fundamental) right, but rather recognitions of the fact that intellectual property differs from tangible property in fundamental ways. I disagree with Ron's conclusion about intellectual property: Intellectual property is a fundamental right, regardless of whether the Founding Fathers regarded it as such. That said, breaking the Internet is not the proper way to secure that right, and for that reason, I agree that Congress should scrap SOPA/PIPA. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

Why They're Good: I have noted several times here already that I am a big fan of New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton. And while I'm grateful for his turning the team from a perennial laughingstock to a perennial powerhouse, there's much more to like. Yahoo! News notes that this year's squad, "currently 14-3 and headed full throttle into Saturday's divisional round playoff game at San Francisco", has a roster loaded with my kind of player: Nineteen of them share a similar background -- they went undrafted coming out of college. Six more Saints were picked in the seventh round (most by other teams), meaning 25 active players, or more than 47 percent of New Orleans' team, got here the hard way. Having this concentration of such players -- on a team as good, as talented and as explosive as New Orleans -- though is stunning. Around the locker room they point to the keen eye of the scouting staff and the savvy of general manager Mickey Loomis. More often than not, though, they cite the culture created by head coach Sean Payton, who perhaps more than anyone in the NFL has managed to block out résumés from his week-to-week evaluations. Instead, he trusts what he sees, not what someone else, or even himself, saw previously. [bold added] "I think it's a lot easier to be fair than to try to be fair," Payton said. What I like particularly about Payton is his willingness to admit mistakes and correct them. He's in it to win, not to fool anyone else or himself: What isn't easy is being so willing to replace players that you've invested draft picks, money and your own credibility in selecting in the first place. For many, that's an ego bruise that clouds the entire evaluation. Not Payton. "Sometimes you miss them in the evaluation process," he said with a shrug. "And then sometimes maybe you over-evaluate a player. "I think what we ... do is evaluate the performance of each player once they get here and really try to separate ourselves from how they arrived here. [We] really try to look at getting the best players on the field regardless of whether they were drafted or signed as free agents or in some cases even in workouts situations." And there's more. The article describes how Payton sets the tone in training camp (One player is quoted: "You don't have a security blanket here.") and fosters a culture of accomplishment. And it's not with a roster stuffed with former college All-Americans or glamour picks and big-name free agents. Instead it's a disproportionately large collection of guys who, finally given their crack at stability, have wound up playing like they belonged all along. "You give a guy an equal opportunity," Collins said, "and some will surprise you." In particular cases, perhaps, but this is not a surprise, in general. Read the whole thing. -- CAV PS: Geaux Saints! Original entry: See link at top of this post

Honesty in Yoga: In the New York Times is an interesting article titled, "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body". Not having looked into the subject at all, I have no strong opinions one way or the other about whether yoga, at least as a kind of physical training, might be worthwhile. I am open to the idea that this discipline could, despite its dubious philosophic and scientific foundations, offer some benefits to its practitioners, but not inclined to look into the matter beyond that point. What does interest me about the article is the following, particularly if we assume, for the sake of argument, that yoga does manage to offer physical benefits through its physical regimen: When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, "Don't do yoga." "They look at me like I'm crazy," he goes on to say. "And I know if they continue, they won't be able to take it." I asked him about the worst injuries he'd seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. "It's ego," he said. "The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego." He said he had seen some "pretty gruesome hips." "One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints," Black told me. " The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements." I asked if she still taught. "Oh, yeah," Black replied. "There are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs they have to lie down to teach. I'd be so embarrassed." [bold added] Unsurprisingly, at the root of both the injuries and the persistence lies a mystical view of yoga as not needing to be understood rationally and intrinsically good. (Practicing anything this way is analogous to the following approach to travel: Toss out the road map and, if someone or something tells you you're headed the wrong way, press the accelerator to the floor.) If yoga can, in fact, offer benefits, those benefits arise in some way. Therefore, there would necessarily be some basis in reality, understandable by reason, for such benefits. In that sense, yoga practitioners who ignore their own physical limitations in the name of "yoga" are failing to truly practice yoga -- at least in the rational sense of attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff regarding what that discipline might offer. Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life. But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain. [minor format edits] There's not much else I can add to this, but to say that if you're taking classes in yoga from someone with self-inflicted yoga injuries, unless you know why those injuries occurred and how to avoid them, you are getting exactly the kind of instruction you deserve. -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post

An Unexpected Bonus: In the process of going through some old files, I learned that the complete works of "Underground Grammarian" Richard Mitchell, an old favorite of mine, are online for free. I already own three of his four books, lacking only The Graves of Academe, which I look forward to reading at some point after I slowly work down a rather full book hopper with the help of my new ebook reader. In the meantime, I'm enjoying back issues of Mitchell's Underground Grammarian newsletter. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy his sense of humor, and find his ability to laugh even while besieged with incompetence and foolishness -- whose consequences he understands -- quite bracing.One of Mitchell's opening statements of purpose provides a fair and entertaining introduction to Mitchell's style, for anyone lucky enough to have all of his work to look forward to: The betterment of fools, Goethe tells us, is the appropriate business of other fools. The Underground Grammarian does not seek to educate anyone. We intend rather to ridicule, humiliate, and infuriate those who abuse our language not so that they will do better but so that they will stop using language entirely or at least go away. There are callings in which the abuse of English doesn't matter; ours isn't one of them. When Bole Administration Building is loud with the clatter of ball-point pens falling from the trembling fingers of frenzied administrators, when semi-literate instructors furtively eye the classified ads looking for honest employment as salesmen in discount stores specializing in floor-covering, when the Faculty Senate disbands because no one is willing to risk uttering gibberish in public, then The Underground Grammarian will have reached some of its goals. If we do our job well, more and more people at Glassboro State College will emit fewer and fewer memoranda. The taxpayers of New Jersey will be spared the cost of thousands of reams of paper; duplicators will consume less energy; professors could put into teaching the effort now expended in replying to inane surveys and checking meaningless ballots that will choose one mediocrity rather than another to serve in a position of no significance; and tall trees saved from destruction will stand for long years in noble forests.Virtues foster one another; so too, vices. Bad English kills trees, consumes energy, and befouls the earth. Good English renews it. I've read three issues of the newsletter so far, and thought I'd share a few quotes from the first here, in the order I encountered them. "We cannot honorably accept the wages, confidence, or licensure of the citizens who employ us as we darken counsel by words without understanding." Regarding a poorly-written memo: "And furthermore, directness and precision would have relieved Yeldell's nagging fear that his readers would not easily identify his committee. He might then have avoided the ugly legalese of said committee in two places." "[T]he clause implies that this assertion is, at least, arguable, or that the committee may be dead." "The Underground Grammarian does not advocate violence; it advocates ridicule. Abusers of English are often pompous, and ridicule hurts them more than violence. In every edition we will bring you practical advice for ridiculing abusers of English." "This month's target is any barbarian who says advisement..." Happy reading! -- CAV Original entry: See link at top of this post