Gus Van Horn blog

Farhad Manjoo of Slate looks at the recent, bizarre-sounding decision by Netflix to make its DVD rental and online streaming services into separate businesses. He starts off by ticking off the many reasons the move looks so boneheaded -- and then manages to make a decent case for why it may be a good move after all. The key advantage of Netflix's new model is that it will give each side of the business -- the DVD side and the streaming side -- flexibility to manage its service in a way that pleases its own customers. As a combined service, any move to strengthen one side of the company over the other would have been perceived negatively by one group of customers. Netflix believes that its DVD shipments will peak in 2013; after that, as fewer and fewer people subscribe to DVDs, it's going to have to raise prices to support the physical infrastructure needed to ship out the discs. Now it will be [Netflix DVD spin-off] Qwikster that will suffer the negative reaction to all future price hikes -- and Netflix that will benefit from the customers getting rid of their DVD plans. This plan is also straight out of The Innovator's Dilemma: "With few exceptions," [author Clayton] Christensen writes, "the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms' managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology." Christensen argues that setting up a separate organization allows the disruptive side to ignore customers who like the mainstream side. "There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers," he writes. [link for "disruptive technology" added, format edits] In essence, Manjoo argues that Netflix founder Reed Hastings sees the writing on the wall for DVD rentals and wants to get out while the getting's good -- but continue making money on them in the meantime. This will be inconvenient for those of us who want to use both formats, but I bet many people will pick one or the other. Hastings will get lots of people off the fence that way, have a lock on the streaming subscribers, and have name recognition with the DVD subscribers when that method of home entertainment finally shrivels up. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

The following headline appeared this morning at The Drudge Report: "City Orders Couple To Stop Home Bible Study..." Although I am an atheist, I advocate individual rights, and oppose efforts by the government to prevent the free exercise of the rights to both speech (which includes religious speech) and property (which includes using one's home as a church). If a couple wants to hold regular meetings at its house, and does not interfere with the rights of others in the process, these meetings are nobody's business but their own. This story will doubtless raise the hackles of many people, but I think it does so for the wrong reasons. The emphasis of Matt Drudge's headline, as well as a statement on the web site of the Pacific Justice Institute, which is taking legal action on behalf of the couple, make the case sound tantamount to religious persecution. Property rights (for everyone), the real issue, sound like an afterthought. The PJI statement makes a perfunctory reference to a legitimate issue the meetings could be raising: whether having fifty people meet each week in a residential neighborhood might interfere with the property rights of the couple's neighbors. There was no noise beyond normal conversation and quiet music on the home stereo system. They met inside their family room and patio area. Many neighbors have written letters of support, denying they were disturbed by the presence of the Bible study. So far, so good, but omitted are some issues that the news story brings up: "The Fromm case further involves regular meetings on Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons with up to 50 people, with impacts on the residential neighborhood on street access and parking,: City Attorney Omar Sandoval said. [bold added] This is a legitimate concern. Unfortunately, the city government seems ill-equipped to deal with it properly. Instead of, say, stepping in to enforce something like a restrictive covenant or pursue the parking problem (if there is one) through nuisance law, it is resorting to illegitimate zoning laws: An Orange County couple has been ordered to stop holding a Bible study in their home on the grounds that the meeting violates a city ordinance as a "church" and not as a private gathering. Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what city officials called "a regular gathering of more than three people". That type of meeting would require a conditional use permit as defined by the city, according to Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), the couple's legal representation. Running a church does not, in and of itself, violate anyone's individual rights, and thus the government has no business telling people whether they can do so. It is unclear to me that PJI sees the issue this way, which is ironic, since the best way to protect religious freedom would, in fact, be to do whatever best promotes government protection of property rights for everyone. The problem isn't just that the law is preventing a homeowner from religious activity in his own home. The problem is that the government is telling us how we can use our own homes at all, regardless of how that use might affect others. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

As I recently noted (and, to set aside the validity of the goal), electric cars are a such a ridiculous way to reduce the burning of fuel that even children could figure this out. But that little detail is hardly where the risibility of the idea ends. Adults who actually drive could, with some knowledge of how electric cars work vis-a-vis their own needs, easily anticipate any number of the other difficulties Louis Woodhill of Forbes discusses. My favorite is "range anxiety:" On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range. ... The short and highly variable range of a BEV [(battery-electric vehicle)], coupled with its very long recharging time, creates the phenomenon of "range anxiety". The car takes over your life. You are forced to plan every trip carefully, and to forgo impromptu errands in order to conserve precious electrons. And, when you are driving your BEV, you are constantly studying the readouts worrying about whether you are going to make it through the day. Reviews of the [Nissan] Leaf are filled with accounts of drivers turning off the A/C in the summer and the heat in the winter. Some drivers even decided that they couldn't risk charging their cell phones, using the radio, or turning on the windshield wipers. I guess "thought experiments" are okay if you intend to scare yourself silly about how your "emissions" are dooming "the planet," but they are taboo when considering the problems you need to solve in order to live your own life. I saw an electric car -- it might have been a Chevy Volt -- at a car show, once. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about global warming I keep hearing, I expected the person showing the car to have some idea about its operating costs and capabilities, but she was unable to give me a coherent answer about how it would stack up, cost-wise, against a gas-powered car in an urban setting. Perhaps the automakers who go along with this trend realize on some level that it's all about getting government loot, and parting fools from their money. In the face of such massive stupidity, that would actually be comforting in a perverse way. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

The title of a recent posting by John Cook over at the Endeavour indirectly raises a question. In "Bad Science Is Tolerable, but Resume Padding Is Not," Cook discusses a scandal in cancer research conducted by Anil Potti that took the finding of resume padding on Potti's part to set off. Of course, no one but a fraud would really "tolerate" bad science, so the first question, "Why?" that comes to mind is wrong, or perhaps rhetorical. This quickly becomes evident in Cook's post from the fact that some scientists have been crying foul ever since 2007. The real question is this: "Why does it often take something unrelated to bad science to draw attention to bad science?" Cook quotes Keith Baggerly, one of the scientists who worked to expose Potti: "I find it ironic that we have been yelling for three years about the science, which has the potential to be very damaging to patients, but that was not what has started things rolling." An important part of the problem I think lies in the nature of scientific research itself. How many members of the general public are going to be capable of critically analyzing a new result in a highly specialized field, or even understanding a calling-into-question like that Baggerly helped perform several years ago, and that Cook describes as "extraordinary" in another post? Often, peer review is hard enough for scientists in a position to understand the results and how to think about them. Published analyses of complex data sets, such as microarray experiments, are seldom exactly reproducible. Authors inevitably leave out some detail of how they got their numbers. In a complex analysis, it’s difficult to remember everything that was done. And even if authors were meticulous to document every step of the analysis, journals do not want to publish such great detail. Often an article provides enough clues that a persistent statistician can approximately reproduce the conclusions. But sometimes the analysis is opaque or just plain wrong. ... Baggerly explained the extraordinary steps he and his colleagues went through in an attempt to reproduce the results in a medical article published last year by Potti et al. He called this process "forensic bioinformatics," attempting to reconstruct the process that lead to the published conclusions. He showed how he could reproduce parts of the results in the article in question by, among other things, reversing the labels on some of the groups. (For details, see "Microarrays: retracing steps" by Kevin Coombes, Jing Wang, and Keith Baggerly in Nature Medicine, November 2007, pp 1276-1277.) But the fact that science, unlike philosophy, is not always accessible to the layman is hardly the whole picture. Cook goes on to explain that Baggerly and his colleagues went out of their way to make it easy for others to reproduce their analysis of the disputed result. The Economist article Cook points to in his first post discusses some other aspects of the way the peer review process works that can result in shoddy work flying under the radar for some time. I suspect that another piece of the puzzle is cultural. It would take effort to understand what Potti's opponents did, no matter how easy they made it to do this (and probably no matter how well-described they might be in popular science media). Many laymen might not make the effort to understand what was going on, and perhaps many popular science reporters, responding to the prevalence of this type of reader, stick to stories that sound exciting, as Potti's results did when they were first reported. The bright and shiny new result can be exciting to anyone, but few have the patience for real-life detective work. When most people are not in the habit of integrating their knowledge, too many things people could actually grasp end up getting neglected, and the only "arguments" many people ever engage in are of the pointless, "bike shed" variety. And all too often, the term "bike shed argument" would be generous to a fault. In such a cultural atmosphere, the lie on the resume gets the headline. I am left wondering: Had critical thinking deeper prevalence in our culture, would the "Australian Rhodes Scholar" who perpetrated this fraud ever been hired in the first place? -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

You have a stack of, say, a hundred letters and envelopes to mail. You must process these by hand. Is it faster to do each step of the process for all the letters before progressing to the next step (again, for all the letters), or is it faster to everything for each letter, one letter at a time? The answer may surprise you: Why does stuffing one envelope at a time get the job done faster even though it seems like it would be slower? Because our intuition doesn't take into account the extra time required to sort, stack, and move around the large piles of half- complete envelopes when it's done the other way. It seems more efficient to repeat the same task over and over, in part because we expect that we will get better at this simple task the more we do it. Unfortunately, in process-oriented work like this, individual performance is not nearly as important as the overall performance of the system. Another writer elaborates further, in response to people who were skeptical of this claim: The shorter stuff and seal times, though, are due to the fact that you are already holding the item from the previous step. You gain 1 second each time from not having to find and pick it up... You lose between 2 and 5 seconds every time you move the pile around between steps. Also, you have to manage the pile several times during a task, something you don't have to do nearly as much with [one piece flow]... Returning to the first post, there are other advantages that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the process: magine that the letters didn't fit in the envelopes. With the large- batch approach, we wouldn't find that out until nearly the end. With small batches, we'd know almost immediately. There are other advantages to doing work in small batches that apply even for processes that are, or can be, automated: All these issues are visible in a process as simple as stuffing envelopes, but they are of real and much greater consequence in the work of every company, large or small. What if it turns out that the customers have decided they don't want the product? Which process would allow a company to find this out sooner? Lean manufacturers such as Toyota discovered the benefits of small batches decades ago. When I teach entrepreneurs this method, I often begin with stories about manufacturing. Before long, I can see the questioning looks: what does this have to do with my startup? But the theory that is the foundation of Toyota's success can be used to dramatically improve the speed at which startups find validated learning. This last point is impressive, and it reminds me of how an engineer once solved a challenging problem by learning how to "fail faster". I have to admit that I was highly skeptical that stuffing one envelope at a time could outpace batch processing, but I suspect that it was my passing acquaintance with the great advantages automated manufacturing can offer in terms of time savings. It is interesting to learn that batch processing not only doesn't always save time, but has other disadvantages. This post is a reminder that our thinking about even simple things like stuffing an envelope can be limited by implicitly-held premises or assumptions. Checking against reality can very easily refute one's "wisdom," and discovering why one was wrong can both correct and lead to new knowledge, including about matters that are not obviously related to one's original query. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Joel Kotkin, like many other recent commentators, notes the rapid deterioration of California's state-run economy. The following passage about the systematic destruction of its agricultural sector by "greens" struck me as particularly ironic, given the state's historical role as a destination for "Okies" fleeing the Dust Bowl back in the Great Depression, and who is causing it to happen: Nowhere was California's old technological ethos more pronounced than in agriculture, where great Californians such as William Mulholland, creator of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Pat Brown, who forged the state water project, created the greatest water-delivery system since the Roman Empire. Their effort brought water from the ice-bound Sierra Nevada mountains down to the state's dry but fertile valleys and to the great desert metropolis of Southern California. Now, largely at the behest of greens, California agriculture is being systematically cut down by regulation. In an attempt to protect a small fish called the Delta smelt, upward of 200,000 acres of prime farmland have been idled, according to the state's Department of Conservation. Even in the current "wet" cycle, California's agricultural industry, which exports roughly $14 billion annually, is slowly being decimated. Unemployment in some Central Valley towns tops 30 percent, and in cases even 40 percent. And now, notes my friend, Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue, green regulators are imposing new groundwater regulations that may force the shutdown of production even in areas like his that have their own ample water supplies. As with anything else that promotes human life, so it is with water: If we don't have it, we're supposed to do without it, and if we have it, we're supposed to do without it. -- CAV Updates Today: Corrected spelling of "Okies." Cross-posted from Metablog

Rachael Larimore of Slate epitomizes a serious problem among Americans, including many who are beginning to realize just how absurd many nanny-state laws (in force or proposed) really are: She fails to appreciate how dangerous such laws really are, when considered in the context of other, similar, laws and the enormous, intrusive, and often improper reach of our government. State assemblyman Tom Ammiano (shockingly, a San Francisco Democrat) has introduced legislation that would require worker's comp and substitute caregivers to provide break time for all domestic workers, and by domestic workers, he is including the teenager you hire to come watch your kids so you can catch dinner once a month at a restaurant that doesn't offer crayons with its menus. Larimore sees the absurdity, and correctly realizes that something like this is basically impossible to enforce -- uniformly, anyway. But with only the conspiracy theory-like fears of social conservatives as a foil to her conventional, altruistic focus on the "little people" most obviously affected by the law, she remains oblivious to its actual danger. I suspect that even teenagers are smart enough to know that if they go around demanding detailed pay stubs and worker's comp insurance that parents they work for will be only to happy to find someone else. So enforcement won't likely be high. But why pass legislation that is unlikely to be enforced? It could still have a chilling effect [on parents hiring babysitters and result in poor teenagers]. That chilling effect won't end with date night, however. Suppose a parent gets on the wrong side of some government functionary with enforcement power (or a favor to call in with someone who does), or someone with a good lawyer? How hard would it really be to establish the use of an illegal baby-sitter or, worse, a pattern of such activity? Laws like this -- and there are plenty -- serve as a means for people in government to arbitrarily hassle people, with the added benefit (but not for the people whose rights government is supposed to protect) that any example of enforcement will make others more timid in the face of a government with its hands in everything. Speaking about arbitrary laws, Ayn Rand once had this to say: The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamedoffenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatoriallaws. It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one: to please the authorities; to please -- blindly, uncritically, without standardsor principles; to please -- in any issue, matter or circumstance, for fear of anunknowable, unprovable vengeance. Granted, this law does spell out what it forbids, but with so many prescriptive laws already on the books that nobody can keep track of; and with so many things that are illegal that shouldn't be, and so aren't apparent to common sense; and so much capricious enforcement, this proposed law might as well be arbitrary. Consider how an average Joe might see this: If something so blatantly stupid as worker's comp for baby-sitters is on the books, God only knows what other mundane activities can get you in trouble! If Rachael Larimore wants to know why some lawmakers make such asinine proposals, this is her answer. -- CAV --- In Other News --- An excellent and very accessible essay about the role of natural selection in evolution by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin recently came to my attention. I highly recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in understanding that subject. I love my new smart phone, but find the atomization of much of the web into individual "apps" a little odd. Apparently, that's not the way things are done everywhere. One writer who visited Taiwan with a WebOS phone learned from his experience that, "As long as you have a good browser, your device won't become a brick." An article in the Wall Street Journal defines several commonly-cited measures of our national debt and makes the following valuable point: "[T]he intra-governmental debt should be counted as though it were publicly held debt, as that's exactly what it will be in the fullness of time." (via HBL) Cross-posted from Metablog

Tuesday, I noted that, in a more rational culture, superstitions -- such as the fear, endemic and unique to South Korea, that sleeping in a room with a running electric fan can be a fatal proposition -- would quickly die out: In particular, anyone with the habit of relating one item of knowledge to another would quickly reject any of the "explanations," if he somehow ended up considering them seriously at all, regardless of his level of scientific training. Today, I ran across a column about "green" technology that busts a few myths about electric cars. Among the myths, Margaret Wente addresses a couple I can only attribute to magical thinking about the origins of electricity: Here's another catch: Electric cars aren't necessarily green at all. Electric vehicles require large amounts of electricity -- so much that Toronto Hydro chief Anthony Haines says he doesn't know how he'd get it. "If you connect about 10 per cent of the homes on any given street with an electric car, the electricity system fails," he said recently. And if the extra electricity isn't generated by renewable energy, then overall carbon dioxide emissions will go up, not down, Prof. Smil says. "The only way electric cars could reduce global carbon emissions would be if all the additional electricity needed to power them came from carbon-free energies." He also makes the essential point that the world's energy infrastructure is based on fossil fuels. ... All true, but it strikes me as incredible that anyone is having to say this at all and, now that Wente mentions it, it positively blows my mind that so much development of this blatantly questionable technology is going on. Electric cars use electricity, and electricity has to come from somewhere. Philosophical ideas have consequences. Neither the collectivism that justifies the government interventions behind electric car development nor the altruism that says we must sacrifice prosperity to nature have rational justifications. Is it any wonder that when we keep tossing reason out at the ballot box, we wake up one day to find our society making mistakes schoolchildren could have anticipated decades ago, and on a massive scale at that? -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

A few days ago, reader Jim Woods responded to my post about the Chinese housing bubble by pointing out an by Journeyman Pictures on huge, modern, and mostly empty cities being built in China to provide "investment" opportunities. I unfortunately can't embed the video here, and it is a good fifteen minutes long, but I can't recommend it highly enough. In one of the most ironic moments of documentary film-making I have ever witnessed, a couple living in a Beijing slum about to be razed for yet another luxury development is frustrated about being unable to afford their own home. "The government needs to intervene," the husband says at one point. Sadly, a man in a later interview notes the possibility of a Marxist type of uprising if the situation continues. This is both exactly what you'd expect of a populace steeped from childhood in the idea that government appropriation of property is a legitimate (and practical) solution to basically everything, and precisely the last thing China needs. --- In Other News --- I think the comparison is between apples and oranges (sorry!) in the sense that Apple is a primarily a hardware company and Google is primarily a service company, but Jesse Brown makes good points in his argument that Google is the more revolutionary company. David Letterman shows us how to respond to an Islamist death threat. (via Amy Peikoff) Does Rick Perry believe any of his rhetoric? Christopher Hitchens asks this question explicitly regarding his religious positions, and I wonder the same thing about Perry's oft-supposed fiscal conservatism after learning of his past praise of Hillary Clinton's efforts to further socialize medicine. So what if this letter was written before all the details of the plan came out? I regard it as revealing that his tack was not to question her approach, but to lobby for his particular pressure groups. Cross-posted from Metablog

Over at Brave New Climate is a very good post that looks at the parallels between a modern superstition -- the notion, common in South Korea, that sleeping in a room with a running fan can be fatal -- and anti-nuclear hysteria. I particularly like the following passage: It's only natural to be cautious about something new, and bundle what information you have into a grab-bag to establish a first-take danger zone around the thing in question, especially if what is either known or believed about it suggests problems. The trouble is, these preliminary responses are supposed to be just that, an initial assessment followed up with a more in-depth investigation to clarify the danger. They should not be taken for a map of uncharted territory forever off limits to understanding. The second step is the beginning of the journey into proper insight from which sound judgements can be made. It cannot be sidestepped without aborting that journey and rendering you helpless when assessing the potential danger. Consider the matter of fan death. Due to a misattribution of cause and effect, a whole nation is now convinced that it's better for the elderly to put up with a heat wave than cool themselves down with an electric fan. People have almost certainly died unnecessarily from this belief. These sorts of superstitions are a direct danger to people's health, yet they often stand unchallenged. This is a lesson which needs to be learned by the citizens of modern nations if we are to make wise choices for the future. Unchallenged assumptions need to be challenged, and the most fatal path is to react with impression and instinct. The article takes note of some of the more interesting rationalizations -- most obviously wrong to anyone with a decent understanding of science -- for these fears, and offers a reasonable theory for how the superstition arose in the first place. But there is a shortcoming: The article does not account adequately for the role of epistemology in the rise and continued existence of this strange idea throughout South Korean culture, and this drawback is most evident in the type and degree of effort the author holds it would take to eradicate this not-even-mistaken belief: ... None of the above 'explanations' are worth anything except possibly as research material for a study in psychology, but their existence seems to satisfy some need on the part of believers for a body of material to refer to, and besides that, "Everybody knows it's true!". This belief is now so entrenched in the South Korean national psyche that it would likely take generations of counter-propaganda to root it out. No-one has any inclination to undertake such a task, so they're probably stuck with this idiotic meme. I agree that it could take a long time to wipe out this idea, but not because it would take counter-propaganda. Considering the various "explanations," and the near-basic level of scientific knowledge required to refute any of them, what is clearly required is for the population to adopt a more generally rational approach to knowledge. In particular, anyone with the habit of relating one item of knowledge to another would quickly reject any of the "explanations," if he somehow ended up considering them seriously at all, regardless of his level of scientific training. (It is at this point, with the science of nuclear power being less generally accessible, that the parallel Barry Brook draws runs into some difficulties.) For that habit to take root in a culture is something that might require a huge amount of effort and education in the proper principles of rational thought, but once that happened, the pervasiveness of superstitions of all kinds would quickly subside, with reality serving as universal "counter-propaganda." Belief in fan deaths would dissipate in the cool breeze of reason. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

In Foreign Policy, Charles Kurzman considers at length the following question: "Why is it so hard to find a suicide bomber these days?" He introduces the question and his discussion by considering an incompetent attack in North Carolina that failed to cause even one fatality, pulled off by someone who was easily deterred by gun laws, and who didn't even know the difference between the two major sects of his religion. If terrorist methods are as widely available as automobiles, why are there so few Islamist terrorists? In light of the death and devastation that terrorists have wrought, the question may seem absurd. But if there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, many of whom supposedly hate the West and desire martyrdom, why don't we see terrorist attacks everywhere, every day? Kurzman comes up with five answers, from which I'll excerpt single-sentence quotes below. My interpretations follow each in bold. [M]ost Muslims oppose terrorist violence. In addition to possible differences of interpretation of Islam, I would credit cultural influences outside Islam, and free will and decency for this. [M]uch of the support for Islamist radicalism is soft. This can be another manifestation of the above, or due to personal hypocrisy. Islamist revolutionaries are divided, and that is a third reason for their relatively small numbers. True, but how important is this? [T]he combination of democratic politics and cultural conservatism is far more popular among Muslims than the revolutionaries' anti-democratic violence. This is a rehash of the first reason, but perhaps also with a measure of the second-handedness I'll discuss below thrown in. The more that terrorists target Muslims, the less popular the terrorists become -- the fifth reason that their numbers are so low. Both legitimate self-interest and mere tactical considerations can manifest in this way. Regarding the latter: With something like CAIR and an aimless established government around, who needs terrorism? One thing Kurzman leaves out is what role the terrorists' motivating factor, Islam itself, might play. If one accepts an ideology on blind faith that demands unquestioning obedience, exactly how enterprising will one be? This plays out in different ways and to different degrees depending on how strongly one accepts such an ideology. In my experience, most people are rather second-handed. That is, they are mentally passive, and accept things, like their religious beliefs through a sort of osmosis from those around them. It takes some degree of independence to question something like one's religion -- or the myriad other cultural influences one grows up with. (And that independence will be ultimately be self-defeating if the conclusion one reaches is to stop using his mind.) This fact works against both apostasy and radicalism, but more so the latter, given what Islam demands of its followers: complete mental surrender. (The rampant relativism of our culture, however, can and often does make Islam look like viable guidance, anyway.) So, someone who is Moslem "by default" will be unlikely to go out on a limb to embark on a career of religiously-motivated murder. But what of the truly radical? To what do they adhere so rigorously? A religion that neuters their minds by demanding the very opposite qualities that a truly effective warrior would need. People can compartmentalize, and act very shrewdly in isolated aspects of their lives, while adhering to ideas that, if acted upon consistently, would kill them. (And shrewdness is much better-motivated by the prospect of personal gain than by that of annihilation.) Despite Kurzman's opening example of Mohammed Taheri-Azar, someone with an incomplete understanding of his religion, the astounding lack of mental acuity and initiative he displays epitomize the end result of someone who has completely surrendered his mind. The leaders of any movement, even Islamic totalitarianism, must necessarily be able to function above Taheri-Azar's level, but what kind of foot soldiers will such a movement produce? I think that last question is yet another answer to Kurzman's question. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Not long ago, I heard about a drug that shows promise as a broad-spectrum antiviral.The below comes from the second link. In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them -- including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever. The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. "In theory, it should work against all viruses," says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory's Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology. Because the technology is so broad-spectrum, it could potentially also be used to combat outbreaks of new viruses, such as the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, Rider says. The paper linked in the above excerpt reports that the regimen "appeared promising in proof-of-concept trials with adult ... mice." -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

The other day, I learned of an admission of philosophical bankruptcy that was particularly amusing because of its resemblance to the plot of a B-grade science fiction movie: It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control -- and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. Or -- because a civilization doesn't become "advanced" on the basis of making broad, knee-jerk conclusions based on single data points taken "from afar" -- they might dig slightly deeper, and learn that the scientists we revere endorse suicidal political prescriptions and create bogeymen out of whole cloth to scare the rest of us into accepting their orders. On such a basis, the aliens might conclude that, with such wannabe witch doctors in charge, we'll revert to savagery within a few generations, and settle here when there are fewer troublesome natives around. Or, maybe a truly advanced civilization would not automatically regard the success of another civilization as a threat. Or... We could play this silly game until the cows come home. It astounds me without fail when I see something like this coming from people who have achieved success in a discipline (e.g., science), presumably because they are rigorous about what they regard as evidence and how they draw conclusions from such evidence. To ask a partially rhetorical question: Why on earth do such people turn around and treat another discipline (e.g., philosophy) as if whatever they happen to imagine might or ought to be true should be treated like a sound conclusion based on actual evidence? -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Anyone with any doubts that Rick Perry is a theocrat can mosey on over to a Yahoo! News writeup of seven changes the governor of Texas would like to make to the Constitution, as he explains in his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. They look like quite the grab-bag at first glance, but they are uniformly bad or unnecessary: Abolish lifetime tenure for federal judges by amending Article III, Section I of the Constitution. Congress should have the power to override Supreme Court decisions with a two-thirds vote. Scrap the federal income tax by repealing the Sixteenth Amendment. End the direct election of senators by repealing the Seventeenth Amendment. Require the federal government to balance its budget every year. The federal Constitution should define marriage as between one man and one woman in all 50 states. Abortion should be made illegal throughout the country. Notice that Perry's first two proposed changes are both direct attacks on the independence of the judiciary. The third sounds good, but would be unnecessary if the electorate really were in favor of lower taxes, and (if not), it would be easily circumvented with another tax. The fourth is unnecessary. The fifth is absurd: In a time of national emergency (like a real war), the government should be able to borrow and, absent a free banking system, the amendment could be overridden by the confiscatory mechanism like inflation, anyway. Finally, the last two reveal as a misconception that Perry considers "states' rights" a check against tyranny, or (and, much more important) that he believes the Constitution serves as a check on government power. That last is particularly disturbing, given Perry's track record as someone who is good at quietly amassing lots of power. If we elect Perry, we may well find ourselves wishing we had an incompetent President. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

... is not necessarily my friend. Via HBL come three must-read articles about a couple of the early GOP front-runners for the 2012 presidential election, both of whom currently have significant Tea Party support. The first discusses a fundamentalist Christian movement to which Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry both have ties. Since I knew he was from a family of Holocaust survivors, I asked him what he thought of the mandate that all non-Christians would have to convert or die. Oscar said that if his relatives refused to become Christians or submit to forced exile, then they would suffer the civil penalty for practicing idolatry. He would carry out the execution himself if called upon to do so by the Christian state. Oscar was the first self-consciously Christian fascist I ever met, but he wasn't the last. Eventually, the movement, which was scorned by many leaders of the Religious Right for being "too crazy," went underground as its leaders died or fought among themselves. Today, two of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, reportedly have ties to the Dominionist movement. ... The second goes into more detail about Bachmann's sordid intellectual and political past. Bachmann and her political consultants also know that her inoffensive ode to liberty is necessary because many voters don't respond well to religious language. The more Bachmann talks about God, the more she is likely to be asked about [Francis] Schaeffer, [John] Eidsmoe, [David A.] Noebel, and some of the other exotic influences on her thinking. The success of her campaign will rest partly on her ability to keep these influences, which she has talked about for years, out of the public discussion. As I started getting deeper into a conversation with her about Schaeffer, she abruptly ended the interview. She said she had to leave for an appearance on "Hannity" but would try to set up another time to talk. I didn't hear from her again. Her press secretary later told me that Bachmann "wasn't comfortable with the line of questions, and that's why there wasn't a follow-up conversation." [minor format edits] Schaeffer is a fundamentalist who "condemns the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism"; Eidsmoe is a fundamentalist legal activist who has been disinvited from a Tea party appearance because of a previous appearance at a national convention of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens; and Noebel is, basically a fundamentalist conspiracy nut. The third piece notes that Rick Perry is, in its title's words, a "massive statist." This article reiterates a fact I mentioned a few days ago (i.e., that most of the new jobs in Texas have been in the government sector), but it elaborates further on why Texas has been less severely effected by the nation's current moribund economic conditions. It isn't because Rick Perry is its governor. All of these are very good, but the first and the last of these are quick must-reads, and show that a second term for Barack Obama is not necessarily the worst thing that could befall America. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Froma Harrop, a typical modern pragmatist (scroll down) with leftist sensibilities, floored me this morning with her latest, a column in the Detroit News titled, "There's Something to Be Said for States' Rights." What floored me wasn't that a lefty would take a shine to that poorly-understood aspect of our federal system of government, but that she described a stand taken by Texas Governor (and presidential candidate) Rick Perry as, "principled." Texas Gov. Rick Perry ... recently raised some conservative hackles by saying it was "fine" for New York to legalize gay marriage. But then he lowered some conservative hackles by characterizing abortion as a states' rights issue. Perry deems himself "pro-life," and we know that letting states ban abortion requires first overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that effectively legalized the procedure. ... "You can't believe in the 10th Amendment for a few issues," Perry said, "and then, (for) something that doesn't suit you, say, 'We'd rather not have the states decide that.'" That principled statement is one drug war advocates should recall when federal agents invade the backyards of Californians growing medical marijuana consistent with their state laws. Of course, such states' rights arguments have been used to defend such evils as legalized racial discrimination. And a patchwork of 50 different sets of laws on the same matter can cause headaches. I have already discussed states' rights here, and won't belabor the point, but I will note that, unless it is understood within the context of a proper government protecting individual rights, the idea can easily lead to the establishment of fifty local tyrannies rather than one national tyranny. Harrop herself plainly realizes this on some level, given her brief allusion to a thing called Jim Crow. Oh, and "headaches." (!) And yet, Harrop goes ahead and calls Perry "principled." This is what I wish to focus on for the moment. If a principle is, as Ayn Rand put it, "a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend," by means of which we become able to "set ... long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment," which principle is Perry following here? Harrop's mention of Jim Crow conveniently eliminates, "Government should protect individual rights," for us. So, perhaps Harrop means something like, "To enjoy the benefits of rule of law, we must all obey the law, and the government must uniformly apply the law." This sounds plausible enough, until we recall Perry's eagerness to speak about secession: Unless one really is prepared to rebel against a tyranny, the way to apply this principle is to change the law by, say, provoking test cases, or introducing legislation in order to eliminate or change laws one disagrees with, or by civil disobedience, accepting one's unjust punishment as a means of demonstrating to others that a law is wrong. Certainly, saying, in effect as Perry does, that it's fine for some states to make marriage illegal for certain classes of people, or that some states can enslave women to fetuses, neither protects individual rights nor upholds rule by law (a necessary means of doing the former) at the federal level. Insisting on a uniform application of a law, such as the tenth amendment, may well be what a principled man who supports properly limited government would do. However, it is clear to me that, whatever Rick Perry's motivations are for doing so, either they are not principled or if they are, the unspoken motivating principles are not ones I would agree with. Sadly, Harrop doesn't mind this, being eager for the "our national politics" to get over the headache of, "a never-ending war between irreconcilable views" concerniing abortion. Is abortion murder or is forbidding it slavery? Harrop's "principled" stand is that this is no concern of our federal government. Pragmatism is the rejection of principles on principle, and sidestepping life-and-death issues out of momentary convenience is an excellent example. I can't say the same for Perry (although his lip-service to the Constitution is probably expedient), but Froma Harrop shows her true pragmatic colors in this column. Conveniently, she feigns magnanimity and thoughtfulness by calling her opponent (and, by extension, herself) "principled." -- CAV P.S. Harrop's take on this is not the same as noticing that, as currently understood, states' rights accidentally protects the whole nation from being subjected to tyranny all at once. Cross-posted from Metablog

Musician John Mayer, addressing students at his alma mater, Boston's Berklee College of Music, urges the aspiring musicians to "manage the temptation to publish [themselves]," and uses his own experience with Twitter to make his point: John Mayer's main reason for discouraging promotion came from his own struggle to curb using social media, which should have been an outlet for promotion but eventually became an outlet for artistic expression. Mayer shared that he found himself asking himself questions like " Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet? Which used to be is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?" And possibly more alarming, Mayer realized that pouring creativity into smaller, less important, promotional outlets like twitter not only distracted him from focusing on more critical endeavors like his career, it also narrowed his mental capacity for music and writing intelligent songs. [minor format edits] As Mayer himself puts it: The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You're coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long... I realized about a year ago that I couldn't have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn't write a song. [minor format edits, my emphasis] I see some parallels with other creative efforts, including writing, although the parallels with writing are not exact for two reasons (with opposite implications): First, whereas writing is a mode of communication and music isn't, social media can supplement one's other writing, so social media can help a writer, such as by helping him find subject matter or hash out ideas. Second, since writing is a method of communication, it can suffer from additional limitations: If the goal is to convey new ideas to a wide audience, the fragmented, self-selecting nature of social media audiences (i.e., collections of followers), can lead to merely preaching to a choir, which will (1) do nothing to help an author figure out how to reach people who might be receptive to what he says, but do not necessarily agree with him, and (2) limit the potential audience to like-minded people. The headline in Berklee Blogs, on Mayer's urging to manage self-promotion got closer to articulating Mayer's point better than the body of the article did later on, when it claimed that Mayer, "discourag[ed] [self-]promotion." It is clear from what Mayer says in the article that he doesn't discourage self-promotion across the board: If you don't advertise, you won't sell, no matter how good you are, so self-promotion is necessary. However, self-promotion requires a different-enough thought process that it can become a serious distraction if there is not a clear distinction in the mind of the artist (or other creative type) between self-promotional activity and the creative activity it is supposed to support. Some time ago, I became aware of problems with my writing and had concluded that the habit of blogging probably had something to do with them, and began taking some steps in the direction of spending less time blogging. At the same time, blogging has also been helpful to me in many ways, so I find Mayer's comments helpful in pinpointing the problem: Blogging mixes the truly creative aspect of writing with the tasks and temptations of self-promotion. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Yesterday, I came across an example of creative problem solving that is as amusing as it is instructive. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was campaigning for his third term. Three million campaign posters were printed with his photo and about to be distributed, until it was discovered that the campaign didn't have the rights from the photographer to use the photo. The copyright laws of the day allowed for the photographer to claim as much as $1 per poster, which adds up to over $60 million in today's dollars. The campaign couldn't afford to pay the photographer, but also couldn't afford the time and money to reprint the posters. Josh Linkner of ePrize frames the problem in terms of a multiple choice test, and along those lines says that, for the Roosevelt campaign, "The multiple choice options seemed bleak." But Linkner's point is that, many times, those who succeed can find or devise a less-than-obvious answer, and choose that answer. (He calls this an "unconventional alternative.") This is exactly what the Roosevelt campaign did: [A] brilliant campaign manager sent a telegram to the photographer that said, "We are considering using your photo in the campaign. How much do you offer to pay for the publicity?" The photographer ended up paying $300 for the exposure instead of bankrupting the Roosevelt campaign and perhaps costing him the presidency. What I see the campaign manager as having done, at least in this example, is back away from the ugly dilemma created by the initial mistake enough to see the broader context, which is that copyright protects the ability of the creator of intellectual property to trade his work for profit. This broader context allowed the manager to see the opportunity to do exactly that -- rather than just the "choice" between breaking the law or throwing away money he was responsible for. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Via RealClear Markets comes a short, amusing send-up of Paul Krugman, the Keynesian economics columnist for the New York Times. I particularly enjoyed this part of the set-up, in which Robert Higgs notes the irony of Krugman's dismissal of his arguments as relying on a "confidence fairy:" The irony in this dismissal, as others, including my friend Donald Boudreaux, have already pointed out, is that Krugman's own vulgar Keynesianism relies on a much more ethereal explanatory force for its own account of macroeconomic fluctuations–namely, the so-called animal spirits. The master himself wrote in The General Theory: "Thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die. . . . ndividual initiative will only be adequate when reasonable calculation is supplemented and supported by animal spirits. . . ." (p. 162). Because Keynes conceived of his "animal spirits" as "a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction" (p. 161), he of course had no way to explain their coming and going or to measure or evaluate them in any way. They are as surreal as a ghost -- when and why they come and go, no man knows or can know. Such is the force that drives the ups and downs of private investment in Keynesian economic theory, and such theory unfailingly drives Krugman's commentaries on the recession and on the possibility and effective means of recovery from it. [link omitted, minor format edits]And do go on to read the punchline, in which Keynes's "animal spirits" are revealed to be, if anything, a reflection of the assessments of people in the marketplace of the general hospitality of the political and economic situation to the conduct of their affairs. (Higgs notes that Keynes does not sufficiently acknowledge a rational basis for these evaluations.) Thus Krugman not only advocates a discredited theory, he does so ignorantly of the theory itself. -- CAV --- In Other News --- Caught on the nanny (state) cam: The Feds have conducted an armed raid of a health food store for selling raw milk. I don't advocate the consumption of unpasteurized dairy products, but it is not the proper function of the government to dictate how people feed and care for themselves any more than it is to make people pay for the same. The problem, being cultural, was inevitable, but an interesting item I learned from a recent Christopher Hitchens piece is that joining the EU hastened the Islamization of Turkey by subordinating its military to civilian control. This is yet another example of how merely imitating the institutional arrangements of a Western-style republic is not enough to protect individual rights. James Taylor of the Heartland Institute argues that new NASA data "blows a hole" in AGW "alarmism." This may well harm the case for AGW, but it is in the nature of the alarmist to ignore or explain away data that indicate that there is no cause for alarm. This is part of why I regard it as a waste of time, past a certain point, to argue against global warming (assuming that it isn't happening) without also at least bringing up the idea that it would be improper for the government to do anything even if global warming were occurring. [Update: A reader emails me with a piece that is far less enthusiastic about the paper discussed by Taylor. It starts off with this: "The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not.] Updates Today: Added update to last section on AGW. Cross-posted from Metablog

Standing in a line during an errand over the weekend, I came across a blog post featuring a bullet list titled, "How to Work with Me," that the blog author received in preparation for working with a bigwig who, in the blogger's words, "doesn't have time for bullshit." I wouldn't exactly call the list items principles, but they are close to being that useful. The items are too tailored to said bigwig's temperament, personal style, and workday milieu to be principles, but I would say that the principles behind the advice are so close to the surface that almost anyone could glean some useful ideas about how to make working on a team a more productive experience. You will find items that strike a nerve, perhaps because you've always wanted to complain or do something about someone else's miscommunication or poor use of your time; and you will find items that leave you thinking something like, "Huh. I've never considered that before," or, "I think I'll start being clear about that issue myself, from now on." Here are a few of the items: 10. Be consistent in your communication. Use words consistently. Use email headers consistently. Strive to make your work immediately comprehensible. 11. If you disagree with me, voice your differences. I welcome and invite dissent. If this makes you uncomfortable, feel free to prepare your thoughts after the meeting and then later return to make your case. 12. Ego-driven debates annoy me. Check your ego at the door: I'm only interested in reaching the best, most elegant solution -- I don't care if it's your idea or mine. 13. Don't be afraid to ask questions if you're not clear. I have more patience for explaining and clarifying my position before you start than I do patience for fixing a wasteful, incorrect approach after the fact. Whoever this is, I also particularly like his approach to meetings, which I recognize as necessary, but usually hate because so many of them waste so much time. The work you trade with others brings you more profit the more effective its product is for your customer and the more efficiently you deliver it. Both sources of profit depend on clear communication and good use of time. This executive clearly understands this and is nipping several common problems related to communication and time in the bud. -- CAV --- In Other News --- I agree that it was time for a coaching change for the U.S. Men's national soccer team, but am not as sanguine as many seem to be about the choice of Juergen Klinsmann for the role. George Vecsey of the New York Times raises two big concerns: How is the man as a tactician, and does he really understand the psyche of the American player? I can feel the annoyance of the school marm who got kicked out of Starbucks after not using its silly vernacular -- memorably dubbed "Starbucks Esperanto" by Joe Queenan. However, I found her confrontational attitude silly and unproductive. The proper response to being told, "You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese," isn't to call the barista an "asshole" and give him a reason to call the cops. It's to say -- if you really are that annoyed -- "I'll get a plain bagel now, or your complaint department and all my friends are going to hear about how Starbucks made me stand in line for nothing." I'm not sure I'd agree with the author's "evolutionary explanation" for procrastination. (Sure, one will be reluctant to implement a plan he doesn't trust. One can reach this conclusion through introspection, minus any comprehensive theory of psychology. This conclusion thus neither depends on EP nor lends credence to it.) Nevertheless, I think the following idea of his has merit: [O]ne of the most effective ways to sidestep procrastination is to find the story of someone who personifies what you want to accomplish, figure out how they accomplished what they did, then base your process on their approach. [my emphasis] One reason for procrastination is that one has no idea how to accomplish a goal -- or, perhaps (as in the case of "have a successful career") hasn't really set a definite goal. Looking at a successful model can at least provide a framework for clarifying one's objectives or finding a path towards achieving them. Cross-posted from Metablog

Nicole Gelinas, appearing in the Los Angeles Times, advocates a free market fix for California's ridiculous housing prices. I agree with her that the free market needs to be allowed to work, but dislike her formulation of this solution as "forcing lenders to accept responsibility for their bad lending practice," for two reasons: First, it lets the government off the hook for its role, blatant from the rest of the piece, in encouraging these very bad practices. Second, the whole problem with our economy is the wide acceptance of the idea that the government should be issuing economic marching orders to private citizens. If you flush your own money down the toilet, and the government doesn't offer you relief, it isn't forcing you to do anything. While I'm offering criticisms of a still-worthwhile piece, I think its scope necessarily creates an incomplete picture. Another major source of California's affordable housing woes is government meddling with the use of private property, as Thomas Sowell, among others, has indicated. So, while Gelinas's recommendation is in the right direction, it needs to include more than just the banking sector. With that out of the way, Gelinas presents some sobering numbers about the poor fiscal shape California is in. Notably, just as taxation and inflation fail to account for all the costs of the government, so do deficit numbers fail to adequately capture just how badly in debt the citizens of that state are, due to government interference in the economy. Measuring debt alone, we could say that things are actually at least three times as bad as the figure for the state government's debt would have us believe. To put the numbers in perspective: $200 billion [of dead-weight housing debt] is more than twice the $79 billion in general obligation bond debt that Californians owe. State bonds, though, generally pay for something useful, like road repairs. Dead mortgage debt doesn't pay for anything but a forehead-slapping "what were we thinking?" It would cost California's underwater homeowners more than $12 billion annually over 30 years to pay off this debt, even at today's super-low interest rates. That's money that people can't save for retirement or their kids' education, or can't put into businesses to create jobs. Think about this for a moment: Just as the social "safety" net is unraveling, people already unaccustomed to planning for things like retirement are hamstrung due to the consequences of other government actions! (And we haven't even considered what inflation can do to compound these difficulties.) The rest of the article goes on to discuss the futility of the various government mitigation measures so far, and the folly of continuing them. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Russia's Act of War Russian military intelligence has been linked to an explosion at the American embassy in Georgia. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a classified report late last year that Russia’s military intelligence was responsible for a bomb blast that occurred at an exterior wall of the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, in September. [links removed] It may be too much to ask of the Obama Administration, but I hope this derails the President's "reset" policy towards relations with Russia. Weekly Reading "To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context." -- Alex Epstein, in "Nuclear Power is Extremely Safe: That's the Truth about What We Learned from Japan" at Fox News "Not even the socialistic, fiscally-reckless, and morally despicable Democrats could bring themselves to endorse Obama's vulgar vision of an ever-expanding state." -- Richard Salsman, in "Washington's Spending 'Cuts' Would Boost Spending 50%" at Forbes "If the debt ceiling is not raised, it would represent a 16% decrease from Bush's 2009 budget request of $3.11 trillion, decried by both the right and the left as overspending." -- Wendy Milling, in "The Truth about the Debt-Ceiling Fight" at RealClear Markets "Bad therapists often stir up feelings and emotions for their own sake, leading a new client to think that the therapy is profound and deep." -- Michael Hurd, in "Good Therapy for Your Marriage" at DrHurd.com "[M]any new readers of [sun Tzu's The Art of War] may be surprised to find that the text isn't primarily devoted to warfare and fighting -- but to planning and waiting." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Stock Market Warfare is about Planning -- Not Fighting." at SmartMoney My Two Cents Wendy Milling's piece starts off with the following sentence: "In any scientific endeavor, one must quantify a phenomenon in order to understand it." Her piece does just that with the debt limit fight, and, in the process, shows that neither side (at least in the Senate) is dealing with our debt problem forthrightly. In a similar quantitative vein, Salsman's piece is also very illuminating. Fun with Distillation I'm not a Scotch connoisseur (or even a "Scotch snob," if there is such a thing) by any stretch of the imagination, but I found this article about separating the flavors of scotch through vacuum distillation very enjoyable. I would pay for a bottle of the separated-out 18-year-old. It's got more complexity than any of the younger ones, and I even taste that saltiness Eben mentioned, which I think comes from the used sherry casks in which a portion of this Scotch is aged. Dave Arnold has taken the wood component of the 18-year-old and made it, with cream and sugar, into an ice cream, which he freezes in a messy shower of liquid nitrogen before our eyes. The idea of oak ice cream is not the most appealing, but what comes through is the vanilla, spice, and maple notes of the wood -- as well as an inescapable flavor of briny lumber, like I'm eating an ice cream cone while strolling on an old sea pier. Wash down the wood ice cream with the matching gray dog whisky and the combination instantly comes together as a creamy aged Scotch on the tongue. Later on, the same technology is applied to make a mint- and carraway- based vodka. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Via RealClear Politics, I ran across an article from Texas Monthly called, "Dear Yankee," in which Paul Burka offers journalists, "Eight things you ought to know before you start writing stories about Rick Perry." This is (or could be) timely advice to journalists and voters alike, especially since Perry polls well and some are practically begging him to throw his hat into the ring for a possible Presidential run against Barack Obama. The article is more human interest than anything else, but I found the following, from Burka's fourth item, rather disconcerting, given what I know of Perry. Texas is not a "weak governor" state. A common misconception. It used to be true, but during his historic governorship, Perry has reinvented the office as a power center. This may be his greatest accomplishment. Yes, our state constitution, written the year before Reconstruction ended, created a weak governor's office (as did most constitutions of the states of the former Confederacy). We had two-year terms (the Legislature changed it to four-year terms beginning with the 1974 election) and a fragmented executive department with power divided among the governor, the lieutenant governor, the comptroller, the land and agriculture commissioners, the attorney general, and the railroad commission. But Perry has used his appointment power to install political allies in every state agency, effectively establishing a Cabinet form of government and making him vastly more powerful than any of his predecessors. In this regard, the Texas politician he most resembles is LBJ, who, Robert Caro reports, once told an assistant, "I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it and how to use it." Rick Perry, to a tee. [bold added] At a time in which the biggest threat to individual freedom is excessive government power, someone who is good at consolidating power can potentially do enormous immediate harm, as well as set the table for a successor to abuse such a consolidation. Regarding the havoc that one powerful Chief executive can wreak, we need only consider the man to whom Burka just compared Perry: LBJ. Johnson's legacy most notably includes his "Great Society" program, which greatly expanded the welfare state into the life- and liberty-threatening monster that it is today. (It is an interesting exercise to see what comes up from a search of the terms "Lyndon Johnson Great Society site:capitalismmagazine.com".) Of course, a Tea Partier might counter, a powerful man could do great good. True, but that good can only arise if such a man does what we need him to do, which is to start dismantling the welfare state. For all his alleged fiscal conservatism, Perry has shown no such inclination. Rather, he has displayed a tendency to merely transform the welfare state into a religious welfare state. For example, Perry signed into law a nanny state measure that penalizes couples for not taking marriage counseling classes, in addition to "[o]ther such laws, passed by the majority-Republican Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, [that] take aim at such 'deadly sins' as gluttony and sloth." Not that I regard raising a child alone as optimal, or advocate laziness, but by what right are such matters the concern of the government? Perry is also, crucially, indifferent (at best) to freedom of speech, as witnessed by his signature of a bill that, "has a provision that allows film grants to be denied 'because of inappropriate content or content that portrays Texas or Texans in a negative fashion.'" The state shouldn't be funding movies in the first place, much less dictating their content. The fact that Perry spoke of secession a while back, rightly described by Burka as opportunistic on Perry's part, also indicates to me that the man is unprincipled and sees speech only as a means of acquiring political power, and not as an instrument of effecting meaningful cultural change by persuasion. I don't see how such a person would come to the conclusion that he should be vigilant about protecting that right. The Burka piece mentions that many people underestimate Perry. That fact; Perry's record of co-opting for religious purposes the welfare state that his fellow Texans, LBJ and George W. Bush, greatly expanded; his indifference to freedom of speech; and his knack for acquiring political power all show him to be a menace to the cause of individual rights. A despised incumbent President and the relative economic success of Texas compared to the rest of the country may be just the opportunity he needs to become Chief Executive. I disagree that Perry has a substantially different agenda than LBJ, or that he has little in common with Dubya. These men are three peas in a pod, and Americans concerned about where our country is heading would do well to look elsewhere than Perry for our next President. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Congratulating us on the recent birth of our daughter, a relative emailed us the PDF version of a "children's book for adults." Said book, by Adam Mansbach, catapulted to bestseller lists last month, when it was released, as a result of what Wikipedia calls "unintended viral marketing:" Booksellers had released PDFs of the book ahead of time. Some time after we read the book, my wife saw it on sale while out shopping for the baby and bought several for other new parents in our circle. One friend, upon receiving a copy of the book, told me he believed there was a video somewhere of Samuel L. Jackson reading the book. That reading has been released as an audiobook and it appears on YouTube, but I think Jackson botches the reading by going too much into "frustrated parent" mode. I find the book much funnier if read as if to a child. (Of course, as a first-time parent of a newborn, I could be lacking the context to fully appreciate the Jackson reading. Perhaps I'll revisit that question in a few years...) Hamming things up for the in-laws, I read the book to my daughter while rocking her after a meal, and ended up with "before and after" pictures, since the baby was crying in the first and sound asleep in the second. In addition to the style of the prose, I find the illustrations by Ricardo Cortes to be ingenious. He captures the idyllic sensibility of many children's books and the innocence of young children -- as well as the fact that, in any given illustration, the child alone is wide awake. Part of what makes the book so humorous to me is the juxtaposition of short- and long-range values, along with the focus on the short-range problem of getting a child to -- em -- sleep. Something I've noticed as a parent is that much of what I had imagined would be inconvenient or frustrating -- like changing diapers or having my sleep schedule pretty effectively annihilated -- hasn't been so bad (when it hasn't simply diminished to the status of something-that-has-to-get-done or even been amusing in some unexpected way). The wonderful feeling of being a parent -- described well by Leonard Peikoff recently -- puts such things in perspective much more than I imagined beforehand. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog

Google hopes to apply algorithms to the problem of identifying start-ups worthy of venture capital investment. To some, it is a telltale sign of an overheated industry, symptomatic of a late and ill-advised rush to invest during good times. But Google says it has a weapon to guide it in picking investments -- a Google-y secret sauce, which means using data-driven algorithms to analyze the would-be next big thing. Never mind that there often is very little data because the companies are so young, and that most venture capitalists say investing is more of an art than a science. At Google, even art is quantifiable. "Investing is being in a dark room and trying to find the way out," said Bill Maris, the managing partner of Google Ventures, the corporate investment arm. "If you have a match, you should light it." The point about investment being an art is well-taken. First, the fact that human beings have free will would, alone, make it impossible to reduce the whole process to an algorithm. Second, and setting that aside, any attempt to model the decision process would require the accounting-for of a mind-boggling number of variables. But that doesn't mean there is no way to take advantage of the brute strength of computation. On that score, it is interesting to see how Google has separated the wheat from the chaff by evaluating what their algorithms have unearthed. Google says the algorithms have taught it valuable lessons, from obvious ones (entrepreneurs who have started successful companies are more likely to do it again) to less obvious ones (start-ups located far from the venture capitalist's office are more likely to be successful, probably because the firm has to go out of its way to finance the start-up.) The second finding exemplifies the saying, "correlation isn't causation;" and if anyone thinks Google is going to start investing on the basis of "distance from Mountain View," I have bridge to sell. Distance has actually been eliminated as a relevant variable (if it was really being considered as one), but the finding with respect to distance may lead to other relevant data: Perhaps the "longer-distance ideas" were better (in and of themselves, or better-promoted). If there were some way to compare the overall merit of the successful long-distance proposals to successful ones from nearby, perhaps Google may be able to estimate how many successful ideas have been missed nationwide by looking at a ratio of successes to failures in its own back yard. Perhaps other findings will tell them how to hunt for talent nationwide. Is investing an art, in the sense of requiring good intuition about the character of the innovators and market conditions? Or is investing a science that can benefit from algorithms and computational techniques? Yes. -- CAV Cross-posted from Metablog