Gus Van Horn blog

Chalk up another win for the good guys at the Institute for Justice: They just won an award for damages for a man arrested in Louisiana for a satirical post he put up on Facebook at the height of our government's lunatic response to the recent pandemic. Here's how it started:On March 20, 2020, four days after several California counties issued the nation's first "stay-at-home" orders in response to an emerging pandemic, [Waylon] Bailey let off some steam with a Facebook post that alluded to the Brad Pitt movie World War Z. "RAPIDES PARISH SHERIFFS OFFICE HAVE ISSUED THE ORDER," he wrote, that "IF DEPUTIES COME INTO CONTACT WITH 'THE INFECTED,'" they should "SHOOT ON SIGHT." He added: "Lord have mercy on us all. #Covid9teen #weneedyoubradpitt."That night, Bailey was subjected to a SWAT-style raid culminating in his being ordered to stand on his knees and put his hands on his "fucking head." He was arrested for a felony and faced up to 15 years in prison, although the district attorney declined to prosecute for good and what should be obvious reasons. Here's how it ended:Image by Joel & Jasmin Førestbird, via Unsplash, license.Last week's verdict against [Detective Randall] Iles and the sheriff's office validated all of those claims. "It is telling that it took less than two hours for a jury of Mr. Bailey's peers in Western Louisiana to rule in his favor on all issues," said Andrew Bizer, Bailey's trial attorney. "The jury clearly understood that the Facebook post was constitutionally protected speech. The jury's award of significant damages shows that they understood how Mr. Bailey's world was turned upside down when the police wrongly branded him a terrorist." Institute for Justice attorney Ben Field noted that "our First Amendment rights aren't worth anything if courts won't hold the government responsible for violating them." Bailey's case, he said, "now stands as a warning for government officials and as a precedent that others can use to defend their rights."Observing our government so egregiously and stupidly violate our rights throughout the pandemic was shocking and frustrating to say the least. It is truly good news that the Institute for Justice has moved the needle a bit back in the right direction on our most important right, free speech. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge I often come across how-tos that I can't follow up on in the moment. I bookmark them for later. Here are four of them.*** Image by Pop & Zebra, via Unsplash, license.1. Before we decided to move, I was getting in a good hour-long walk most days, and I often read things from the web during those walks. Since many web pages are nightmares of poor formatting and blitz visitors with distracting A/V content, I began to wonder if I could use bookmarklets on my phone to fix this, as I do on my "real" computers. The short answer appears to be that you can, sort of. We decided to move around the time I learned about this, so the daily walks went out the window and I never got around to trying the advice in "Use Bookmarklets on Chrome on Android," as easy as it seems to be, now that I'm looking at it again:I was today years old when I learnt that you can find bookmarks via the Address Bar, and they keep the context of the current page. This means that you can run Bookmarklets. Voila. Now that I know you can use bookmarklets via the address bar, this opens up a lot of options for slightly deeper customisation on Android than what is possible today.If I recall correctly, it is possible to insert a title field within the code for a bookmarklet that can facilitate using this method, by serving as a more memorable/typeable search term. 2. Moving along from Android to Linux, I found the following technique to clear out directories more efficiently in a post titled "Unleashing Daily Productivity with Five Shell One-Liners:"rm !(*.pdf|*.epub) The above will, for example, remove everything that is not a PDF or an epub file from the current directory. 3. Here's another for Linux, and one that I can personally vouch for. A little over a year ago, I bought a new laptop, which was mind-blowingly good, except that its battery life was apparently less than three hours. Linux has a reputation for not having great battery life, but I knew that partly came down to people not knowing how to get more out of their systems. And besides, I have a Chromebook that I installed Linux on that can last over eight hours. So I investigated and very quickly learned that something called "Apport" was chewing up my battery and making my CPU fan wail like a banshee sometimes. A quick search turned up "How to Disable/Enable Automatic Error Reporting in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS." Yes, Apport is the error reporter for the Ubuntu flavor of Linux. Turning this off immediately helped quiet my computer and reduced its power consumption. (This is running 22.04.) I turned it off for that computer permanently and it now has a much more tolerable 4-6 hour battery life. Some may sniff at this, but it's good enough for my current purposes. 4. Even if you don't follow the steps in "I'm Now Using the Right Dictionary" -- which shows how to use the 1913 edition of Webster's dictionary as the dictionary for the Emacs text editor, you might enjoy or even want to use that dictionary on its own. The link takes you to a sparse page featuring a box in which to type the word you wish to look up. -- CAVLink to Original

Writing at Slate, Alison Green informs her readers that "The five little words [We're like a family here] should send you running from any job." Green cites several examples of people writing to her about dysfunctional workplaces whose management described them this way, and why it is a red flag:What they want you to think of is very different from what they actually have in mind. (Image by Jessica Rockowitz, via Unsplash, license.)Almost invariably when workplaces claim to be "like a family," they're using the phrase to mean that they expect employees to show the same sort of patience, commitment, and loyalty (and sometimes guilt!) that we generally associate with families. But they're certainly not offering the benefits people normally expect from their families in return, like love, emotional support, and a financial safety net (nor should they, in most business arrangements). A much better model for employment is that it's a team -- a group of people working together toward a common goal, with the understanding that either party can leave the arrangement if they determine it's no longer in their best interests. Dysfunctional employers don't like that framing, because it underscores that employees are independent agents who can and should prioritize their own needs, but it's a far more accurate one. It's also healthier, since workers should advocate for themselves, expect to be paid fairly, and feel free to move on without guilt.Green is absolutely right about this, and even quotes a letter from someone whose dysfunctional family life helped him catch on quicker to his dysfunctional workplace than he otherwise might have. This reminded me a little bit of a part of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which a company ran itself into the ground by adopting an explicitly altruist-collectivist work and compensation arrangement, after its management misused the term "family" to describe it ahead of a vote. A former employee describes the hellish conditions that resulted in part:"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day -- together, and you don't all get a bellyache -- together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht -- and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth -- why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? ... Oh well ... Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars -- rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family,' and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his 'need' -- so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm -- so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot? (pp. 610-611)This might sound over the top compared to Green's examples -- Well, maybe not the one from the guy who left a job because he developed health problems -- but it has happened politically many times, as countries have adopted socialism or communism because it is allegedly "humane" or more "like a family," the latter based on the all-too-common confusion of altruism with the benevolence or kindness that, say, a parent should show a child. Perhaps family is almost always a red flag in our current culture. -- CAV P.S. The theocratic right is, if anything, even more guilty about misusing the term. Family values is code in that quarter for enforcing Christian morality via government force.Link to Original

John Stossel gives an informative update on how things are going in Argentina, which elected as its president Javier Milei, a professed capitalist who campaigned on a promise to reduce the size of the government. One of the things I wondered about when I'd heard he was elected was how much he'd actually be able to accomplish. The short answer is more alone than an American president could:The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him. But already, "He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls," says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already "eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen." "He can just do that without Congress?" I ask. "The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States." Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly. "Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!" says Di Martino. [bold added]This is quite interesting and, given Milei's apparent popularity with Trumpists, I hope they notice the huge chasm between Trump and Milei on imports (for starters). The article is a very interesting read, but has a major drawback: Although I think both the author and Milei are well-meaning, they are under the false impression that big-L Libertarianism is a friend to capitalism, and regard Murray Rothbard favorably. This is interesting to consider in light of a recent hour-long interview (also embedded below) titled, "Libertarianism: Big Tent or Big Mess?," between Ben Bayer of the Ayn Rand Institute and Nikos Sotirakopoulos of the Ayn Rand Center UK. Within, Sotirakopoulos delves into "[t]he connection between libertarianism and the progressive left," which was largely initiated by Rothbard. Stossel, Milei, and other better Libertarians correctly blame the left for Argentina's current mess: They and their fans would do well to consider how and why this alliance during the foundation of their political movement might undercut and ultimately defeat the battle to achieve capitalism. This engaging interview, which I listened to about two months ago, would be a great place to start. -- CAVLink to Original

For years, I've heard complaints from the less-liberty-friendly parts of the conservative movement that the news aggregator Drudge Report, lost its mojo when Donald Trump won in 2016. Today, I see that one of the few conservative sites I still respected, Issues and Insights has joined that bandwagon en route to providing a sort of short, annotated bibliography of alternatives. Before I get to that, let's consider the following complaint about a recent set of headlines at the the site started by Matt Drudge:This Monday, for example, the top of the fold featured a long list of links to stories about Trump's alleged mental lapse (while completely ignoring Biden's more egregious one the day before), plus links to stories pumping up the left's current favorite Republican, Nikki Haley. The stories listed that day were almost entirely from a handful of (mostly) liberal-leaning news outlets -- AP, Politico, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, SFGate, the Guardian.Does anyone in the conservative movement know how to play Devil's advocate anymore? Might the reason so many of these stories come from leftist partisan media be that right-wing partisan media have become largely a pro-Trump echo chamber? Have conservatives memory-holed the idea that a true friend is one who is willing to talk about bad news? If I were a Trump supporter, I'd be concerned about signs of mental decline. Might the case be not so much Matt Drudge leaving the conservatives so much as they left him? (Here's a Trump toady who incidentally notes the post-Trump change in the conservative movement.) And finally, is it really news to Biden's opponents that he is quite the senile "embalmed Soviet corpse of an incumbent," as Dan Hannon recently put it so aptly? Sorry, Issues and Insights, but Our guy isn't as senile as their guy is weak sauce as a defense and the fight song for a ship of fools. I&E even stoops to Trump's rhetorical style, dismissing Nikki Haley as a "neoCon" and "the left's current favorite Republican." This pro-capitalist reader of I&E wonders: Will that site start kowtowing to Trump's economically illiterate protectionism? His anti-American xenophobia? His threats to misuse government to punish political opponents? With those questions in mind, here is their list of recommended sites that are "better than the Old Drudge:"It may remind you of it, but this is not your father's Drudge Report. (Screen shot by the author. I believe my use of this image is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.)The Liberty Daily is the most Drudge-like in appearance -- same font, same general layout, same use of red to flag hot stories -- but has a tendency to add lots of zing and nicknames, such as Crybaby RINO NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger or Bribery Biden, NeoCon Nikki Haley. Discern Report and Off the Press sport more modern front pages. Whatfinger, which describes itself as "The Conservative answer to the Drudge Report" and aspires to be "The Greatest Aggregate Link News Site On Earth" has a huge mélange of stories from conservative news and blogs. But we find ourselves increasingly drawn to Citizen Free Press, which has taken Drudge to the next level and is almost entirely a long list of links.I will admit that these sites can be useful in the same way as Drudge -- which was never perfect and has always tended to sensationalize things. Indeed, they might be more useful than the original now in the sense that, just as one should slum around in the likes of the Huffington Post or Mother Jones to get news the right ignores and get the pulse of the left, one should do so with sites on the right -- whatever "the right" means now. I'll close with a link from each site: Don't Listen to Woke "Pastors", Christians Can't Just "Agree-to-Disagree" on Degeneracy -- The Liberty Daily (The story should -- but won't -- bother anyone who says America is a "Christian" country. The aggregator is my pick of the litter for "looniest Drudge alternative." Also: I am not cherry-picking. This one is from The Federalist.) Healthcare Students Still Forced to Inject Vaccines -- The Discern Report (Nobody's being forced to do anything, here. I am old enough to remember when being anti-vax was "for hippies" and when a conservative would acknowledge that an institution can require such things as proof of vaccination as a condition for membership or patronage.) Supreme Court To Hear Abortion Pill Case -- Off the Press (This site seems the most substantive of the lot.) 89% of 'American Elites' Back WEF's Plan to Ration Meat, Gas, Electricity for General Public -- Whatfinger (Mostly substantive, but seems comfortable with that brain-dead, populist term of blind rebellion, "elites." This site has layout options.) Inside America's Covid Lab ... Deadly viruses manipulated in Wuhan-style experiments. -- Citizen Free Press (Like most of these other alternatives, there is pandering to populist nuttiness about covid.)Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand and historian Brad Thompson declared conservatism dead long ago. They were correct to do so. Whatever the right has become, it isn't even conservative in the sense of pretending to be pro-capitalist or pro-individualist. It pains me to see people who call themselves conservatives turning off their minds and descending into mere populism, which might win elections -- so theocrats and nationalists who have very anti-American agendas can carry them out in the name of patriotism. I do appreciate I&E bringing some new news aggregation sites to my attention, including helping me more quickly learn what the other other side is saying about any given issue. -- CAVLink to Original

In a thought-provoking analysis, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times observes of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade:Interestingly, this image of a quasi-military "policeman" was also tagged with such terms as "Pandemic, "Covid," and "Omicron." (Image by Alec Favale, via Unsplash, license.)One thing to recognize about the scope of states' power from the founding to the Civil War is that it was broader and more expansive than we tend to recognize under modern conceptions of constitutional law. States, as most Americans understood them at the time, were governments of general jurisdiction with far-reaching police powers that gave them almost total discretion to regulate internal affairs. The federal government, by contrast, was a limited government of enumerated powers -- a government that could take only such action as allowed by the Constitution. The police power, the historian Kate Masur notes in Until Justice Be Done, "was grounded not in the idea that a government's duty was to protect individual rights but, rather, in the conviction that government's most important obligation was to secure the health, safety and general well-being of a community." [link omitted, format edits, bold added]Re-read that last sentence. I can't count the number of times I have read news articles or opinion pieces that pertain to individual rights, suspected that the term rights appears nowhere in the piece, and confirmed my suspicion with a negative result by searching for the term. Here, we not only have that near-forgotten word, but the whole phrase. There is promise! Bouie comes tantalizingly close to saying what I wish someone would say -- or would have said when the "police power" was used to excuse the wholesale violation of individual rights during the pandemic: The police power of the state, to the degree that it violates individual rights, is as contradictory to proper government as slavery was. That connection is not lost on Bouie, who brings it up, but he does not note the contradiction explicitly. I am no legal scholar, but I did some reading about the police power during the pandemic. Back then, I noted:... I am very uncomfortable with the vagueness that the legal idea of police power has had from its inception and the fact that (predictably for that reason) it gets abused. Indeed the FDA, which the authors cite as an anodyne example of government regulation (which I gather is one sense of "police power" as it is used today), would appear to be a disastrous abuse of late. Surely, there are or should be limits on the police power, if it is at all a legitimate concept...That said, Bouie comes to a conclusion I largely agree with:For as much as it is important to defend reproductive rights -- and other key rights -- on a state-by-state basis, this is why it is also important to defend and protect them at the level of the federal government. The goal is not just to secure rights but also to restrain the states.If the Constitution does not restrain the governments of the individual states as much as it does the federal government, it is useless as a protection of our individual rights. As more states start criminalizing interstate travel (e.g., for the purpose of helping a minor get an abortion), we are starting to see exactly what that means. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. We're enjoying our larger, much less-cluttered house, and -- since we have a dining ROOM instead of just a dining area, that table stays clear -- which has lent itself to nightly dining there and, in turn to one of my favorite pastimes, cards. The kids are finally old enough to be interested in card games, and able to play them well enough that we now sometimes play spades after dinner. Image by Kowloonese, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.2. Citrus grows here on the Gulf Coast, and a tree of a pomelo-citron hybrid called the "ponderosa lemon" grows in our yard. It produces fruit year-round and makes an interesting lemonade. Most who have sampled it say it tastes ... like lemonade. But I get a hint of grapefruit. One day after we juiced a bunch of these and made the lemonade, my daughter decided it should be named "ponderade". 3. With us being in New Orleans, it was only a matter of time -- in this case, on my first trip to the nearest grocery store -- before I'd find a good hole-in-the-wall place that makes great food. A seafood and sandwich shop, only a few blocks away, makes a great muffuletta, and we're going to have one -- yes, a single one of these is huge -- and some shrimp for dinner tonight. 4. Silver lining first: I now know where the nearest urgent care clinic is. It's oddly-situated, and I'm glad I was only having to put pressure on a wound with one hand while I drove. (And I'll be glad to know exactly where it is if I ever need it again.) Glass doors and I don't get along, and I am relieved that the one I walked into was tempered glass, and that my eyeglasses cut me where they did. I went in because the bleeding hadn't stopped after 15 minutes of constant pressure. I am also glad the nurse practicioner on duty used glue rather than stitches to close and protect the wound. I won't have to go back to have stiches removed, and I shouldn't have a bad scar. (On reviewing this, I think I'll add Find and drive to nearest urgent care clinic to my list of things to do the next time I have to relocate.) -- CAVLink to Original

I often look at advice columns on Thursday morning. Doing so today, I came across an "ask the readers" reply at Carolyn Hax's Washington Post column. While I'd never want to see my favorite columnists completely quit, I am glad that several of them toss one up for their readers to tackle from time to time. In this column, the questioner is having to deal with the emotions evoked by once again having a long-past, unrequited romantic interest back in her social circle. The reader replies run the gamut from You know the best way to ensure you won't jump? Stop walking toward the edge through calls to introspect to [P]ut a college crush where it belongs: in the past. All were thoughtful, and touched on different aspects of the problem as the readers saw it. Some of these concerns might not have applied precisely to that reader's particular situation, but they plausibly could, and they did for that kind of situation, at least for the people speaking from experience. My favorite reply was the first, which I'll quote below:Image by Greysen Johnson, via Unsplash, license.I recently had this exact situation happen to me. I hadn't seen my what-could-have-been friend for a number of years. During this time I got married and had kids while he was unhappily married and eventually divorced. When I saw him again a month ago, I started having fantasies, mostly about him realizing I was the one who got away. However, all those fantasies weren't about me wanting him. They were about my wanting to feel wanted. I wanted to be the object of that initial obsessive, head over heels, fiery part of an early relationship. I wanted to feel like a mystery to be discovered again. I wanted to be pursued. I love my husband and we have a great relationship, but we've been married a long time and that kind of spark is hard to come by after almost two decades together. Identifying my feelings and what these weird intrusive fantasies were actually about helped me re-approach my relationship in a new way. I asked for things -- emotional, sexual -- from my husband that filled that need for me and those fantasies went away. I don't mean to for this to sound pat and easy, it required me to be very vulnerable (although I didn't say what brought these requests on). However, I knew my husband was who I really wanted, and I found away to feel wanted by him in a better way. [bold added]This is gold: She admitted her feelings to herself, introspected, got to the bottom of what caused her emotions, and greatly improved her life with what she discovered. As someone who has had to deal with the X that got away and resurfaced at an awkward time in multiple areas of my life, I am extremely impressed with what this respondent did, and will admit wishing I'd read or done something like this myself a couple of times when I was much younger. That said, it's never too late to learn from or move on from the past. These kinds of columns combine the advantages of "crowdsourced" advice with the those of curation by someone who has spent lots of time thinking about how to help people with personal problems. If you're inclined to skip these, as I used to be, you might reconsider that policy. -- CAVLink to Original

Donald Trump managed to eke out a win over Nikki Haley yesterday in New Hampshire. Haley is not dropping out of the GOP primary yet, but her battle is more uphill than I was hoping to learn from yesterday's vote. The outcome likely means that too many Republicans are part of Donald Trump's personality cult for that party to nominate a serious candidate for President and that not enough independents appreciated the need to have a better choice than Trump or Biden in November. That is awful. The war for freedom is hardly over, but this particular battle appears to be lost, and we will almost certainly have one of Joe Biden or Donald Trump and -- if either drops dead while in office -- one of their Vice Presidents continuing to damage our country for another four years. This is both a bigger deal and a lesser concern than Oh well, I'll leave President blank again in the next election. Two articles do an excellent job of explaining why. On the bigger deal side is the first, which I learned about from the excellent Yaron Brook's Twitter feed. It's by Briton Dan Hannon, and its title is, "This Isn't About Trump Anymore -- It's About Whether America Is the Country It Always Was." The whole thing is worth a read, and ends as follows:The country that was founded as an antidote to arbitrary power has fallen for a personality cult. The city on the hill is set, this time knowingly, to make a liar and petty crook its first citizen. The things that elevated and ennobled America -- optimism, political pluralism, the ability to disagree with civility, respect for the law, respect for the ballot box -- are scorned by those who claim to be patriots. God help them. God help the rest of us. [bold added]In the short term, things look bleak. This election cycle and no matter who wins, we could be moving from a discussion of breathing room, of how much time we have to turn the ship around -- to wondering if we can politically further the cause of liberty at all, any time soon, in America. On the not as big a deal side of the ledger we have Ayn Rand's 1972 essay, "What Can One Do?", which I first encountered in Philosophy: Who Needs It:To gain perspective, one must focus on the right things. (Image by topntp26, via Freepik, license.)Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them? Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? Are you immune from the fallout of the constant barrage aimed at the destruction of reason -- and can you provide others with antimissile missiles? A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability. This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles, Objectivist or otherwise: knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action. This does not require omniscience or omnipotence; it is the subconscious expectation of automatic omniscience in oneself and in others that defeats many would-be crusaders (and serves as an excuse for doing nothing). What is required is honesty -- intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one's knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction. This means: the development of an active mind as a permanent attribute. When or if your convictions are in your conscious, orderly control, you will be able to communicate them to others. This does not mean that you must make philosophical speeches when unnecessary and inappropriate. You need philosophy to back you up and give you a consistent case when you deal with or discuss specific issues. [bold added]The essay was written with people concerned about the state of the world in mind, but it has a deeper meaning than is apparent, as is frequently the case with Rand's writings. The passage above is a reminder, frequently needed anyway, about the nature of current trends, particularly for people interested in improving the world around them: Politics is the end product of a long conceptual and causal chain. Philosophically, it arises from ethics, and the dominant form of politics (increasingly, collectivism today) derives from the dominant ethics in the culture, which is altruism. Until enough voices in the culture challenge altruism and its philosophical underpinnings (of mysticism and primacy-of-consciousness), our society will remain dominantly altruistic and political movements appealing to it -- be they leftist crusades to redistribute wealth or save "the planet" or right-wing crusades for nationalism or theocracy -- will always threaten to gain ground. Change the dominant philosophy and the politics will take care of itself. That's the easier part to see of a philosophical battle is a nuclear war. On a deeper level, one should ask, Why do I want to improve the world? My answer is because I live in it, and I would hope any fellow travelers are at least equally selfish in that regard. That is the only good reason to want to participate in an intellectual movement. One cannot improve anything without knowing how, and one cannot know how without knowing why, and having a solid grasp of facts. In the process of getting one's house in order and developing an active mind, one will consequently improve the quality of one's daily life by applying what one has learned. Rand shows that the battle to improve the culture is long-range, and -- barring a true cataclysm -- much bigger than any single election. But she also shows that it is a personal battle for self-betterment that is always within the grasp of anyone who seeks it. Speaking for myself: Short-term, while I might be unfortunate enough to be witness to the start of a dark time in American history, I'm glad I am doing so with open eyes, and am not deluded enough to see either of Donald Trump or Joe Biden as America's savior. I know that the constant media blare about Trump isn't worth too much of my time, and I can spend it on better things. Politics can help or hinder one's life, but it isn't the whole of one's life. Thank God for that, so to speak. -- CAVLink to Original

New Hampshire holds its presidential primaries today. Ron DeSantis has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. (I'd wager, given his earlier pledge to save the GOP from Trump and his over-the-top pandering to the Trump base, he's hoping Trump's legal problems represent a reentry path later.) We thus have an early primary in a state that allows independent voters to participate in party primaries, and a two-person contest between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. This represents as good a chance as there is for a sane candidate to begin to break the stranglehold of Trump's personality cult on the Republican Party, and give Americans a real choice in the next election. According to a headline from the Boston Globe, it is unlikely that Haley will win, but buried at the end of the story is what I think will be the decisive factor:Most Americans are tired of this... (Morph via FaceShape from pubic domain official portraits of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.)[T]here is one wild card that is hard to figure out: turnout. Despite the primary week being low energy overall, the New Hampshire Secretary of State is predicting there could be a record turnout. Traditionally, there is higher turnout when voters are motivated to send a message against the status quo, in which case that could be against Trump. Given that the contest in New Hampshire is largely a binary one between Trump and Haley, Haley could be the biggest beneficiary of a higher turnout. Then again, she isn't turning out people in big numbers to her own events in the final weekend. [bold added]Haley isn't drawing big crowds -- and doesn't have me raving about her here -- because she keeps committing unforced errors. So she doesn't have people excited about her candidacy so far. (I think the excitement -- or at least noticeable support -- might come if she does well, and offers real hope of keeping Trump out of office.) The real question then, is How sick are independent voters of Donald Trump and Joe Biden? If they're annoyed enough, they don't have to like Haley to want to vote for her, and they will. I'd show up and vote for Haley if I lived there, but I don't know the answer to that question. Today, we will find out. -- CAVLink to Original

I often wince from afar at the anti-freedom political and legal climate in California, but even I was shocked to read the litany of its sins against freedom penned by Joel Kotkin and published recently by Sp!ked. The whole thing is worth a read, as an update and as a warning for what the far left has in mind if it achieves dominance elsewhere. Three things stood out to me: (1) the number of ways the "climate crisis" has been used to excuse improper government, (2) how intrusive, on the level of interfering with normal daily business the government has gotten there, and (3) how blatant the government is at redistributing wealth. On its anti-fossil fuel energy policy, Kotkin writes in part:The sun is setting on California -- and the rest of America -- in more ways than one. (Image by TravelScape, via Freepik, license.)Nothing has accelerated California's decline quite like the state's climate-change fetish. Under Newsom, California has passed a series of laws that make it almost impossible to build affordable housing. The state has essentially banned single-family zoning as a part of its 'war against suburbia', which is precisely where most Californians reside. Instead, in a bid to slash CO2 emissions, it seeks to increase housing density and restrict development to places where public transport is widely used. Outside of San Francisco and inner-city LA, this is essentially nowhere. Local control of zoning has been all but eliminated in favour of the state's climate-oriented policies. Ultimately, California's climate policies erode the lives of middle- and particularly working-class Californians. Environmental attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls such policies 'the green Jim Crow'. The industries that have traditionally helped nurture upward mobility -- manufacturing, construction and energy -- are all being systematically undermined by climate regulation, not least as they have led to some of the highest energy prices in the US... [links omitted, bold added]That's just a sample of the impact of just one far-left "fetish" destroying freedom in California. It comes after any pro-freedom reader will already be reeling, and the punches don't stop there: This is only about half-way through the piece! I highly recommend reading this a few times, perhaps in installments so it all sinks in. That said, my main reservation is that, as with almost any American political commentary one encounters these days, it has ideological blind spots. Kotkin, for example -- while correct to call out California for violating freedom of speech on the internet -- lets red states off the hook too easily:While supposedly 'repressive' Republican states like Texas and Florida work to prevent online censorship, Newsom's California attempts to control social-media content from Sacramento. [links omitted]The GOP, from the rash of red states requiring government ID to view porn all the way to Florida's proposal to make bloggers register with the state and Nikki Haley's proposal to abolish online anonymity, doesn't strike me as a good alternative -- and boy do we need one! So my full recommendation: Read this as a small sample of what today's electorate takes for granted, but which its politicians want to take away from you, and keep in mind that while partisans from each side will point to the other, they aren't giving the full picture of just how much trouble we're in. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Over the years, I have taken to task various installments of National Review's war on Ayn Rand. (Here's a good one I'd forgotten about.) Scratch war on Ayn Rand in the name of accuracy: It's really a war against anyone learning what Ayn Rand had to say, and it began in earnest with an infamous non-review of Atlas Shrugged by professed ex-communist Whittaker Chambers. I recently learned via New Ideal that Leonard Peikoff penned a rebuttal, in the form of a letter-to-the-editor. National Review, true to form, elected to memory hole it, but now it appears as a chapter of the collection, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged -- and as the blog post linked above. It reads in part:Mr. Chambers is an ex-Communist. He has attacked Atlas Shrugged in the best tradition of the Communists -- by lies, smears, and cowardly misrepresentations. Mr. Chambers may have changed a few of his political views; he has not changed the method of intellectual analysis and evaluation of the Party to which he belonged. And the National Review, an ostensibly [pro-capitalist] publication, permitted these tactics to be used on the first book which has ever provided a philosophic, rational basis for capitalism.I am glad to see not only that this thorough rebuttal is now available for anyone to read, but also that it is now easy for anyone to ascertain the true character of the National Review, as exemplified by its treatment of Ayn Rand. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn asks, in the form of her title, a question she clearly hopes to make non-controversial one again. "Instead of ESG and DEI, how about value creation, justice, and independence?" Here is an excerpt regarding justice:Not all companies follow these principles, to their detriment. Destroying value instead of creating it, through deception, fraud, or exploitation is unsustainable because not only is it immoral but illegal. Companies that engage in fraud or coercion will be prosecuted and punished. Not trading value for value, even when not illegal, is unjust and leads to a loss of customers, employees, suppliers, and profits. Giving up first-handed adherence to reality is similarly unsustainable, resulting in copy-cat investment in such value-depleting programs as ESG and DEI that violate the principle of justice.This essay is a much-needed corrective for both ESG/DEI and the alleged rationale for them, the latter of which is part and parcel of widespread ignorance about the nature of capitalism and suspicion of self-interest that permeate our culture. Image by wirestock, via Freepik, license.3. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger economically addresses a couple of favorite conservative myths behind the ridiculous idea that there is a "border crisis." Regarding terrorism, Binswanger reminds us of what really needs to be done:One site breathlessly reports that 169 people on terrorist watch lists were spotted and/or apprehended. The same site reports 3.1 million "encounters." But the two facts are not put together: 169 of the "encounters" is 1 in 20,000. So, conservatives want to stifle the lives of 19,999 people to block entry to 1 person on a terrorist watch list. The answer to terrorism is not retreating to a bunker. It is moral certainty in the rightness of America combined with decisive, overwhelming military action against the states that sponsor terrorism.I completely agree with his contention that, "The only crisis on our border is the outrageous refusal to recognize that 'All men are created equal, endowed ... with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" 4. Brian Phillips of the Texas Institute for Property Rights alerts us to a proposal in New York that is as obscene as his post title ("The Right to Eat Fried Chicken") is ridiculous:The New York legislature is considering a bill that would require Chick-fil-A to be open on Sundays. The bill would essentially establish an alleged right to eat fried chicken. The bill's author said, "Look, if you want to eat fried chicken while traveling over the holidays, then Chick-fil-A should be open on Sundays." In other words, it is the responsibility a business to satisfy every consumer desire, regardless of the business' own desires. [link omitted]As annoyed as this atheist is that Chick-fil-A closes on Sunday, I recognize and support the right of its owners to set their own schedule, and I am outraged that this little dictator in New York wants to set their hours for them. -- CAVLink to Original

Back when I lived in Maryland, I noticed that large numbers of people backed into parking spaces, rather than simply driving into them. I tried to learn why then, and the answers I could find basically consisted of vague assertions that it was "safer," sometimes festooned with statistics that may or may not have been inaccurate, incorrectly applied to the question, or irrelevant. Such drivers stand out to me, and have had me scratching my head since. Sometimes, they waste my time in parking lots with their antics, and have even -- because of unintuitively switching to reverse as I was getting ready to park -- nearly caused me to have an accident. (!) (To be fair, it can sometimes make sense to park this way. For example, my next-door neighbor in Florida owned a very large pickup truck that he'd back into his driveway. It's relatively easy to do, and the prospect of a toddler wandering into his driveway when he needs to drive is much greater than that of a parent allowing a toddler to wander in a parking lot.) Enter one Matthew Dicks, who is not content to stew in mild bewilderment or frustration. He decided to try to understand this odd practice, and decided to try it for a week. His conclusions after doing so pretty well confirm what I concluded after some time observing this phenomenon and occasionally having to interact with the drivers. I especially like his sixth item, which comes after his consideration of other aspects of this practice and its alleged benefits:The biggest drawback to backing into a parking spot, and the reason I will not be backing into parking spots in the future, is time. Not only do I sacrifice my own time by backing into a spot (which always takes longer), but I discovered that if there is a vehicle following you in a parking lot, backing into a parking spot delays that vehicle considerably from moving forward and finding their own parking spot. Rather than pulling forward into a spot, I must instead drive past the desired parking spot, stop the car, turn my body so it's in position to drive in reverse, shift into reverse, and then begin the slow process of backing into the spot. If I'm backing out of a parking spot, I can do all these things without delaying anyone. I can take my time because I am safely tucked away into my own spot. When I'm in the middle of the lane with other vehicles waiting to find a spot, this process becomes a serious delay for others. In two instances, the driver behind me pulled close enough to me that part of their vehicle was blocking the spot that I planned on backing into, and in both cases, I didn't blame them. They had no idea that I was preparing to engage in this ridiculous maneuver and simply continued moving forward until I could no longer access the desired spot. In both cases, I instead drove forward to a new spot, feeling foolish while doing so. [I have been that driver more than a few times. --ed] If everyone backed into their parking spots, I am convinced that parking lots would become nightmares to drive through. Vehicles would constantly be delayed as drivers executed the required steps to back into a parking spot. [bold added]Let me say I fully agree with the following alternate recommendation:In fact, if you want to be safer in a parking lot, experts advise that you park farther away from the entrance, where pedestrian and vehicular traffic is less congested. This is the single best way to avoid an accident in a parking lot. This is true and, on really busy days, it is a great way to save time. In fact, I sometimes do this specifically to save time, and have walked past cars that I saw hunting or waiting for spaces close to the store as I drove up. A big bonus to this is that for the one undeniable benefit of parking front-out, one can often drive forward through an empty space to be in position to do this near the fringes of the lot. Then you get to park quickly and have fast egress. -- CAVLink to Original

Snatches of two bits of political commentary pretty well encapsulate my assessment of the "landslide" outcome in the GOP's Iowa caucuses the other day. First, Iowa hasn't exactly been predictive lately:In 2008, holy roller Mike Huckabee won the caucuses in the red-shaded Iowan counties shown above. (Image by Kroisaurus, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)[Nikki] Haley caught some flak from DeSantis when she told a group of New Hampshire voters that they "correct" Iowa's results, but her statement is supported by recent history. Remember Presidents Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz, the last three winners of the Iowa caucuses? Neither do the history books. One must travel back nearly a quarter-century to the year 2000 to find the last winner of the GOP Iowa caucuses who went on to secure the nomination. [bold added]Caucuses aren't polls of the general public, and whoever it is -- strong partisans, I presume -- who participate in the Iowa caucuses have been out of touch in the theocratic/social conservative direction lately. Trump is the man for that anti-freedom lot in this election. Second: 51%. That's all? I agree with Phil Boas, who argues in USA Today that this result is a weak showing, because Trump is, for all practical purposes, running as an incumbent. (And that would be true despite polling showing that 65% (!) of the caucus participants there are brain-dead enough to believe Trump actually won the 2020 election.) Taken together, the "not Trump" coalition of candidates won nearly half the vote in a state that ABC News calls "overwhelmingly white and rural." In other words, these were ideal conditions for a Trump landslide. But Iowa is not the national electorate. And Trump's Iowa triumph can hardly serve as a bellwether for the fall. [bold added]Boas notes a big incentive for independents who want a choice other than Trump or Biden to vote in New Hampshire's Republican primary at a time when polling shows Haley smoking Biden by 17% in a head-to-head matchup. Overall, while it was disappointing to see Trump run away with Iowa, his winning there was predictable. But his margin there -- under ideal conditions for him -- wasn't the catastrophe Democrats and Trump supporters were hoping for, albeit for different, co-dependent reasons. New Hampshire will give a better picture of whether Nikki Haley can topple Donald Trump. -- CAV P.S. One bit of good news out of the caucuses: DeSantis, who has come to represent a more competent (and therefore dangerous) version of everything bad about Donald Trump, may have fatally wounded his future political aspirations:The DeSantis campaign was fundamentally a product of a certain class of the GOP's elite: people who admired Donald Trump's willingness to break the traditional norms of American politics but saw him as basically déclassé or ineffectual. These are the sorts of conservatives who look admiringly at Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, seeing his use of legalistic arcana to crush liberal opposition as a model for how to fight a culture war and win. [links omitted]This is the direction a significant part of the conservative movement has been headed for some time, and unless we get a "more competent DeSantis" in the near future, the Iowa caucuses may well have bought some time to fight for freedom.Link to Original

At RealClear Markets is a shocking story about the IRS coming after someone over a debt incurred by a relative:The IRS once again spits in our faces and tells us it's raining. (Image by United States Department of the Treasury, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)Two years later, and twelve years after her last interaction with the trust, the IRS tried to make up the difference by holding Pickens personally liable for the entire $10 million tax bill, as the trustees were out of cash for the IRS to seize. Never mind that by that point the IRS had had nearly fifteen years to protect its interest in the trustees' tax debt with all the tools at its disposal, or that the tax bill exceeded what Pickens had received from the trust in the first place -- the IRS still simply chose to target the next closest relative.It is bad enough that the IRS exists at all, but so long as it does, it should at least confine its looting to the money of whatever individual taxpayer violates a given matter of tax law. This is a new low. Curious about the case, I briefly searched the news for the victim, and learned that, on top of the sin of possessing more money than another person, she will probably be relatively easy for the media to kick around. This does not matter: It is an outrage that someone is being subjected to this kind of treatment, and the article rightly warns us of the principle at stake:[T]he IRS tends to apply its most aggressive tax enforcement tactics against rich and poor alike. If the IRS is saying that it thinks taxpayers should be held liable for their relatives' tax debt, taxpayers of all income levels should believe it.Pickens may not be the most likable person around, but she is hardly in a league with the Nazis and Klansmen often held up as examples of what we must tolerate in the name of protecting freedom of speech. Nor is she the guilty criminal who escapes jail in the name of due process -- which, by the way, she is entitled to. Madeleine Pickens does not deserve this, nor does anyone else unfortunate enough to be related to a deadbeat. -- CAVLink to Original

A few years ago, I came across a Marginal Revolution post by Tyler Cowen, who was re-reading the collection of essays first published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and then later in an expanded edition known as The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Regarding its chapter on racism, Cowen cites a quote and expresses an admiration that I share:"Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned." Ouch, it would be good to resuscitate this entire essay (on racism).That would indeed be a wonderful thing, especially considering how far our culture has fallen short of Martin Luther King's dream of Americans living "in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." We instead have a culture obsessed with race and seemingly determined to keep it that way, with hypocritical virtue signalers adding a new "anti" variety of racism to the mix with plain old-fashioned bigotry -- the former helping revive the latter by giving it an appearance of credibility it does not and never has deserved. Cowen's quote deserves a fuller context, so I shall oblige:Image by That's Her Business, via Unplash, license.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). To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a "tribal self-esteem" by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.I love this quote, because it shows how easily racism can die, and yet how hard at the same time. While one cannot end racism in society today, in part because one cannot make others think, one can start today, by purging it from one's own soul as a happy by-product of pledging to put in the work to judge everyone's character objectively, and first-hand, starting with one's own. This is a sacred obligation to oneself, for the simple reason that one's life is best served by having the most accurate, true-to-reality appraisal of everyone -- good or bad -- that one deals with. It was shocking to me when I realized that the second blog post I linked above was written over twenty years ago. Things were bad then, and have gotten much worse since. But just as individualism is the cure for racism, it is also the basis for hope. One can continue the noble and life-improving fight for equality by starting today, with oneself, and continue by helping the best people one knows understand how they can join the cause and why they should. -- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. At Ask a Manager is a post titled "Scolding Strangers, Kids Using Corporate Lingo, and Other Ways Our Jobs Follow Us Home," which you may find amusing. Within, Alison Green shares reader contributions, such as:I teach English as a second language in Toronto, the most multi-cultural city in the world. I have to stop myself from saying "Speak English!" when I hear other languages outside of school.I originally read this with some mild puzzlement and memories of irritation with others for doing things like this in the past. You're not at work, I recall once saying to a friend using work lingo on an unsuspecting layman. Intending to ... circle back ... to this because I was curious as to whether the multilingual or others used to code-switching were better at avoiding such lapses, the above example is the first I laid eyes on. I guess I learned some patience instead... 2. While I do recognize Steve Jobs as a great innovator, I am not a great fan of Apple's software, and someone has supplied the ideal quote for me to explain part of why:If Apple products were so intuitive, I would intuit them.The other part is my general gripe with closed-source, proprietary software, at least in the way it gets produced (read: changed unnecessarily and often for the worse) in our modern culture: Any work flow or store of knowledge you might develop is at risk of being decimated by some unforeseen change you may or may not find helpful. I like learning new things and building on them; I hate learning basically the same thing over and over again. 3. A bit related to my rare desire for changes in software to be confined to improvements is an interesting blog post praising the "beauty of finished software." Among other things, you will learn that George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, which was the basis for the television series, A Game of Thrones, using Wordstar 4.0. Says Martin of his 40+-year-old word processor:George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire with this word processor. (Image by Posi66, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.The blogger discusses his concept further and rightly points out that Unix-like software has many commands that exemplify it. 4. On a walk before our big move, I enjoyed reading a PBS story on "the lucrative world of undead brands." The piece explains how it is that you keep bumping into brands and wondering things like Didn't they go bankrupt a year or so ago. Good News: You're not out of touch or misinformed:In simplest terms, the business model works because "not everybody knows the store is closed," says James Cook, director of retail research at the commercial real estate firm JLL. "People are Googling that brand all the time." Right now, online home-goods retailer Overstock.com is trying this with the intellectual property of bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond, shedding its old Overstock self and relaunching under the newly purchased Bed Bath & Beyond name. Buyers of the Toys R Us brand have tried to keep it alive through several iterations.One company in this business, Authentic Brands, reported nearly half a billion in revenues in 2020, of which about half was profit. -- CAV Link to Original

The thrust of John Stossel's recent piece on driverless cars was to marvel at the relative restraint Californian regulators showed after problems surfaced with the GM Cruise. I share his relief, especially after reading the following:Image by Dllu, via Wikimedia Commons, license.[M]ost people who try them like them. "It's one of the few things you can do today that makes you feel like people must have felt 100 years ago," says [former Argo AI executive Alex] Roy. "First time they saw a light bulb, first time they saw a plane." Fully driverless cars are here, and they're a very good thing. [bold added]Stossel is correct to note that this new technology is life-saving and that regulation is its main threat. But, despite his clearly good intent, I think Stossel understates both the threat and the benefits, as good as lives spared from accidental deaths may be. Overregulation? This marvelous new technology exists as the mercy of the reasonability government officials. This would not be a problem in a world where independent agencies like the Consumers Union competed to provide us with the information we need to strike the best balance between innovation and safety. And as for the spiritual lift Roy describes, it is arguably an even greater crime that our nation's sense-of-life is in danger of being slowly snuffed out by such a circumstance. I have no doubt that a vicious cycle of cultural risk-averseness and omnipresent regulation is a major part of why it is now so rare to enjoy the thrill of a new technology. Americans need to see the evidence of -- and experience the feeling of -- human efficacy that new technology affords much more often than we have in recent times. -- CAV Link to Original

Over at FEE is a piece by Lawrence Reed whose headline reads, "Indians, Property Rights, and Ayn Rand," and whose blurb elaborates: Ayn Rand got many things right, but on the issue of Native Americans she made a big error. Interesting I thought. I don't recall Rand specifically positing or critiquing a general Amerindian stand on that issue. As a labor of love (which my respect for intellectual property rights will otherwise keep obscure and thus financially unrewarding), I have been gradually creating a searchable database of the works of Ayn Rand and some of her students. (It is, albeit incomplete, a superset of this one.) Although I like to imagine myself a good researcher, I found nothing directly or indirectly addressing this issue by Ayn Rand herself. (Anyone knowing otherwise should feel free to point to a source in the comments to this post, or by emailing me directly. But read the rest of this before you do.) This is odd by itself, but it was hardly the only swipe at a position allegedly held by Ayn Rand, but unsubstantiated. The piece actually, and bizarrely, starts its out-of-the-blue swipe at Rand with the following:Philosopher Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) got many things right, but she also got two very big things wrong. One was that life is the result not of intelligent design but of pure chance, an observation that science is increasingly debunking (see Science Is Affirming Creation, Not Accident). [link to creationist web site omitted]This attack is quite easy to refute:I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. ("The Missing Link" in The Ayn Rand Letter, vol. II, no. 17, May 1973)Since, as of now, I have heard Rand accused of both dismissing and espousing evolution, I think it's worth also quoting Leonard Peikoff, her most important student, on this matter:Darwin's theory, Ayn Rand held, pertains to a special science, not to philosophy. Philosophy as such, therefore, takes no position in regard to it. (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Chapter 11, footnote 19)So on at least one count, FEE's piece is demonstrably wrong, which is the best that can be said for it. (To be clear, this is not to say that Rand espoused creationism.) As far as I can tell, its assertions about Rand's opinion on what "the Indians" thought about property rights is, as Wolfgang Pauli might put it, "not even wrong," as far as any casual reader of the article is concerned. That said, in a comment on the article, Reed cites an off-the-cuff answer Rand gave to a question on the matter after her West Point address as the source of his allegation about Rand's views. Nevertheless, it is clear that this matter was not a prominent theme she developed in her commentary, and one wonders if she might have said the same thing had she known more about some Amerind cultures. (It is instructive to consider what she says about so-called "collective rights.") Conversely, if we take Reed's assessment of the Nez Perce at face value, it is likely incorrect to apply it to all Amerind tribes. All in all, it behooves anyone looking to FEE for help defending capitalism to consider how slipshod this piece is, as well as why it goes out of its way to attack Ayn Rand, whose defense of capitalism is so sorely needed today. I don't have a good answer to that question, but Ayn Rand, who wrote the following in 1946 to FEE's founder, Leonard Read, would doubtless have been unsurprised by something like this coming:Image by Ritam Baishya, via Unsplash, license.The mistake is in the very name of the organization. You call it The Foundation for Economic Education. You state that economic education is to be your sole purpose. You imply that the cause of the world's troubles lies solely in people's ignorance of economics and that the way to cure the world is to teach it the proper economic knowledge. This is not true -- therefore your program will not work. You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis. The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral. People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism. You cannot reverse cause and effect. And you cannot destroy the cause by fighting the effect. That is as futile as trying to eliminate the symptoms of a disease without attacking its germs. (Letters of Ayn Rand, pp. 256-257)As we see, Read ignored Rand's advice about the name and purpose of his organization. And now, nearly eighty years later, we see it not just ignoring the need for the right premises to promote capitalism, but actively undermining Rand in part for not espousing Creationism -- in an article supposedly making a case that at least some Amerindian cultures upheld a theory of property rights in some form. In light of the above, I would urge any reader to consider for themselves Rand's commentary on the ethical origins of collectivism and how they relate to mysticism, i.e., religion. -- CAV Link to Original

If you've ever heard of bike shedding, you might get a whiff of déjà vu from a piece by Alex Papadimoulis at The Daily WTF. To begin with, his example discussion arises from a cyclist's desire to keep his hands warm in the winter. Image by Axel Brunst, via Unsplash, license.That coincidence aside, if we take bike shedding to mean have a lengthy, unproductive discussion over a minor issue, then we see that Papadimoulis describes a kind of bike shed discussion. Usually, bike shedding occurs when people out of their depth focus on some minor issue they know something about (e.g., "it is easier for a committee to approve a nuclear power plant than a bicycle shed"). But here, we have knowledge domain experts beating a solved problem to death, apparently oblivious to said solution, which a quick reminder causes them to realize they do know of and understand. In the example, a bunch of engineers got going with an idea for heated handlebar grips for bicycles until someone who wasn't zeroed in on the discussion casually popped the whole thing like a balloon:The reason that this "hand warming system" does not exist is because most people have found a pair of gloves to be a perfectly suitable way for keeping one's hands warm.Most of us have seen or participated in discussions like this, and Papadimoulis proposes that the word gloves, with his full example in mind, might be a good, quick way to help oneself step back and gain perspective long enough to identify such discussions or, better yet, avoid them altogether. I think that's great advice, and I appreciate that a single, memorable word tied at once to a common object and a good example of failing to keep the big picture in mind can help one implement that advice. -- CAV P.S. The kind of discussion Papadimoulis describes is common and has been around enough to give rise to such unflattering stereotypes as the proverbial professor who lacks common sense. It is interesting to consider how much of this phenomenon comes down to fascination with interesting problems vs. a kind of dis-integrated thinking, in which a person is prone not to relate knowledge he has across domains. I have often seen intelligent people failing to make connections I deem near-obvious en route to mini-versions of the discussion at The Daily WTF. Unfortunately, in those cases, there isn't a well-developed thread one can puncture with a single word, or time to help make an immediate correction. Still, it can be helpful to know that this might be going on. I have found that time can help, at least in cases where ethusiasm for a given subject overwhelms thoughts about other concerns. Revisiting a topic after some time has passed often helps when that is possible.Link to Original

We're finally here! Image by Ketut Subiyanto, via Pexels, license.Actually, between my in-laws taking care of the kids for over a week and holiday travel, all of us have been here only about a week, now, but the house already feels like home. Chalk that up to a combination of Home is where your stuff is and our current house being roomier -- in more than one sense of the word -- than the one we left in Florida. And that's even though we left a relatively inexpensive part of that state. This was my first move to involve both buying a house on one end and selling one on the other: Even if government meddling every step of the way didn't make that more annoying/difficult than it would be anyway, I think it's fair to say that those transactions made the move an order of magnitude more stressful than the ones before. Logistically, the worst is over, but it will probably be another month or so before we're operating on what I would call a normal routine. In the meantime, the kids love having an upstairs and an area more their own, and, fogies that my wife and I are, we're enjoying the fact that this house, being older than our last, has an interior feature called "walls" that divide our living space into distinct areas -- called "rooms," I believe. Among other things, we can hang more of our art and photos! Despite the fact that we'll still have to drive everywhere, the place our particular suburb reminds me most of so far is Boston. We'd lived in a new development in Florida, and in a sparsely-populated area. I did expect to be able to drive less, and for there to be more amenities in our immediate vicinity, simply because it is better-established. But all kinds of things I used to have to drive 20-30 minutes to reach are within five minutes or so of us, now. These kinds of things might sound banal, but I am amazed at how they've summed up to greatly improve our daily quality of life already. -- CAV Link to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge Each year, I take two or three weeks off from blogging around this time. This year, it will be at least three, but I may require four since this is when we finally move to Louisiana. Expect me back here as early as January 1, but possibly on January 8. I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. *** The pelican, which is the state bird of Louisiana, sometimes makes an appearance at the pond behind our house. (Image by Pete McGowan, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)1. If I could take one thing from our home in Florida with me to Louisiana, it would be the pond behind our house, which is home to about a dozen beautiful ducks and serves as a fishing hole or migratory stopping point for all manner of fascinating birds. This house has a huge sliding glass door with an unobstructed view of the pond, and spotting strange birds in the pond or in our back yard has been a near-daily occurrence. I may be a bit odd in this regard, but birds often amuse me. There is something about the juxtaposition of beauty with they way they move while they walk or hunt for fish that makes me chuckle. (My daughter may share my fond amusement at birds: She came up with a very funny imitation of the walk of a huge, ungainly bird that pranced across our back yard once.) I like the new house, but it doesn't have a pond. I will miss the birds! 2. Ditto for alligators. While I suspect that Florida is more of a bird-watcher's paradise than Louisiana, both have plenty of alligators. Again, though, there is no pond behind the new house, so I won't as often get to see if there's an alligator lounging around outside. People who are unfamiliar with gators are often a little bit alarmed to learn that basically any pond in the warmer parts of the South has them. But gators -- unlike crocodiles -- are not aggressive, and will leave people alone unless they approach too closely and provoke them, or swim around them, or have a yipping, small, natural-prey-like dog in tow. 3. If I loved the view from our living room, I hated our kitchen sink, not-so-affectionately nicknamed "The Time Sink." I never want to deal with a "farmhouse" sink again. Clean, they look good, and are especially tempting to people like me who cook partly as a hobby. And, yes, it is easy to clean pots and pans in them. But if you are busy and use your kitchen a lot, know that every time you are dumb enough to actually use that sink, you'll have to hose any and every food particle down a foot or so over to the disposal since the bottom doesn't slope. If you don't do this, the sink will become gross even quicker than if you do. Oh, and there's a grate over the bottom since it's stainless steel and will get ruined if anything scratches it. So that little chasing task either requires lifting the grate (which has to be cleared first) or spraying through it, which often deflects the water enough to send the food the wrong way. And the flat surface gets filthy very quickly anyway in large part because things like milk don't drain completely unless you waste time chasing those, too. The sink requires daily cleaning to shine, only a couple of days to look dirty, and only a couple more to look disgusting. After one really busy week, I realized that cleaning a toilet compared favorably because it is an easier chore with longer-lasting results. We have a traditional sink at the new place. Hallelujah! 4. I will not miss Florida's ... challenging ... hurricane evacuation decision matrix and logistics. Hurricanes are something to be aware of anywhere in the South, but it was ahead of sheltering in place across the state from Hurricane Ian that I realized how much worse evacuation logistics are in Florida than anywhere else. Louisiana famously gets its share of hurricanes, too, but we will have friends or relatives only a few hours away in several directions if we need to evacuate, and while evacuations are never easy, deciding whether to do so won't be as complicated: There aren't as many people there, and they aren't all having to stampede through a narrow freaking peninsula. -- CAV P.S./Bonus: Just ahead of posting, I recalled us seeing a bird at an intersection which looked like a ball of white yarn supported on two toothpicks, and with a stray piece of yarn -- its (tiny!) head and neck -- swaying, snake-like above the ball of its body. My daughter laughed and then said Awwwww! So I guess she does share my amusement with/love of weird birds. Link to Original

Someone asked advice columnist Carolyn Hax if a recent decision to turn down the offer of a "high voltage" job was a sign of depression. Hax's reply wasn't bad, and amounted to this was a difficult, multifactorial decision and coming to such a conclusion about one's mental health requires weighing many things, including why you made that decision about the job offer. Hax will sometimes also promote intelligent comments from people who follow her column, and one of those seemed particularly astute:It's okay to have other priorities than living up to fevered steorotypes. (Image by Alejandro Ortiz, via Unsplash, license.)What would you do with the extra life the FINE job frees up? Valuing that could reframe defeat into an accomplishment. Rewarding work for more money can be a good life, too, so I'm not pulling for either side. Just honesty about what we value, and the true costs and benefits of each path. Some decisions are wrenching not because one path is wrong, but because both meet different standards of "right." That could ease the pressure a bit.That comment, valuable as it is for hindsight, reminded me of a decision-making tactic I learned from Jean Moroney's Thinking Directions called decision cards. I think the technique bears mention because it can be hard even to know what the "true costs and benefits" are, or how to weigh them no matter how dilligent one is trying to be. That technique might have made the choice easier for the writer, and given her peace of mind with her choice. That technique is designed specifically to tackle such difficult, consequential decisions. Indeed, the example Moroney used in a course to teach the technique was ... evaluating competing job offers. Here is a brief description:Roughly speaking, you create a card for each option, putting positives on one side, negatives on the other. Then you systematically examine all of the negatives to translate them into equivalent positives for the other options. There's a bit more to it than that, but the effect is that you reconceive the decision entirely in terms of values, and then you can choose your direction while "holding all of the values with care."This technique takes into account our two basic motivational systems -- motivation by love and motivation by fear -- and provides a way to resolve any conflicts between them, while also framing the choice in a way that lends itself to maximizing long-term values -- which may or may not be financial, depending on an individual's priorities. -- CAV Link to Original

According to the Wall Street Journal, the NCAA is considering the "radical" idea of permitting colleges to pay actual money to the grown men and women who play spectator sports under their brands. Do note that the term radical is not my sarcastic description, but the newspaper's, and is used unironically in its headline. Here's what they're calling "radical":The proposed changes would create a new top tier, or subdivision, for the richest programs. Those schools would be required to set aside at least $30,000 per year for at least half of their eligible athletes in an educational trust fund designed to serve as a launching pad fund. The subdivision would also require schools to work together to make their own rules for things like scholarship limits, recruiting windows and transfer requirements. This neither challenges the altruistic premise that amateurism is morally superior to professionalism in athletics, nor grants professionalism a (long-overdue) moral sanction: It's just a new flavor of hypocrisy. And it is a sad joke compared to what athletes of similar ages abroad and in other sports are making. I argued years ago that football of the American gridiron variety should adopt the more capitalist (and thus more truly American) multi-tiered league systems of association football (aka soccer) already found in Europe: An expectant mother roots for Ajax FC, renowned for its youth development program. (Image via Pixabay.) The good news is that we are now speaking openly of compensating college-aged athletes. The bad is that we continue doing so on the unimaginative premise that they must play for college teams. Fortunately, we have the [counterexample] of European soccer abroad ... to help people see that there are far better ways -- morally and practically -- to foster young athletes...Interestingly, the article discusses several compensation-centered legal actions pending against the NCAA, including a unionization attempt by a baseball team. While that is occurring within America's hyperregulated and litigious legal environment, and unions are hardly friendly to capitalism, I would bet that has a higher chance of freeing college athletes to turn pro (even if accidentally) than the NCAA's "radical" proposal to continue not really paying college(-aged) athletes. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at Jewish World Review, Carl Leubsdorf handicaps the early Republican primaries, and concludes that Nikki Haley is in a strong position to emerge as the main alternative to Donald Trump after Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. I mostly agree with his analysis, but I think New Hampshire might be more interesting for Democrat voters and political junkies than Leubsdorf realizes. His take on New Hampshire:Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, license. A second-place finish for Haley in Iowa would likely create momentum for a two-person Trump-Haley race in New Hampshire and South Carolina, less than would a DeSantis second-place finish. That's because Haley already has the stronger campaign in New Hampshire, a state that loves outsiders, and in South Carolina. Her New Hampshire success may hinge on whether most of the large number of unaffiliated voters flock to the Republican primary, since the Democrats won't recognize the winner of their Biden-less contest. [bold added]Important here is why the Democrats won't recognize that winner, and the name of that why is Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who is challenging Biden in large part because of the President's age. Phillips is in that "Biden-less contest" and stands to get headlines as the winner, regardless of what his party does. Absent Phillips, what Democrats ought to do in New Hampshire is a no-brainer: Vote for Trump in the Republican primary since running against Trump again is Biden's best shot at getting reelected. But with Phillips? Any Democrat who shares Phillips's concern about Biden's age and wants to send a message to the DNC should seriously consider voting for Phillips, even if only to show other younger possible candidates -- like Gavin Newsom -- that Biden is vulnerable. Yes, this might narrow or outright derail a Trump victory, but that might not be a bad thing: After all, running against Biden is Trump's best shot at getting back into office, so maybe sticking with Slow Joe isn't a great idea... On top of that, and especially if Haley (or DeSantis) actually wins or does well in Iowa, Trump will have been shown to be vulnerable, and the Democrats will be looking at Biden running against a younger and less-disliked candidate than Trump. In that case, telling the DNC to dump Biden while there's still a chance to do so might be a compelling reason to vote for Phillips, who has other strong points, as I wrote earlier at the link above. And the fun doesn't stop there. With RFK, Jr. in the general, there is high protest vote potential that can go any number of ways. If Biden is in the general, RFK, Jr. is leftist-enough to attract dissatisfied Democrats. (I hear that he's a hit with younger voters.) If Haley (or, less likely, DeSantis) is in the general, RFK, Jr. -- as an anti-vax conspiracy nut -- is kooky enough to draw support from a significant number of disgruntled hard-core Trump supporters. Either prospect could motivate Democrats in New Hampshire to vote for Phillips in their own (unofficial) primary or for the best non-Trump alternative in the Republican primary. -- CAVLink to Original