Gus Van Horn blog

Although I am not sure I agree with his conception of freedom of religion, David Limbaugh does succeed in raising a good point in his latest column: This nightmare began Oct. 7, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated Idaho's marriage laws and legalized same-sex marriage in that state, which allowed Idaho county clerks to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses a week later. On Oct. 17, the Knapps declined a request to perform a same-sex wedding ceremony. According to a lawsuit filed by the Knapps, the city of Coeur d'Alene is "unconstitutionally coercing" them to perform these weddings at their Hitching Post Wedding Chapel in violation of their religious beliefs, their ordination vows and their consciences. City Ordinance Section 9.56 bars sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations, which forces the Knapps to choose between betraying their religious convictions and following them and facing up to 180 days in jail and up to $1,000 in fines. According to their complaint, they arguably commit a separate and distinct misdemeanor each day they refuse to perform such ceremonies, with the potential criminal penalties piling up cumulatively. [links removed] Limbaugh opens his column by asking, "Where are all the atheist freedom lovers we always hear about?" To Limbaugh, I say, "Yoo-hoo!" For the same reason -- the individual right to make contracts with others or not -- I support government recognition of same-sex unions and I oppose the government forcing someone who does not wish to officiate same-sex marriages to do so. Limbaugh is correct that this latest leftist crusade has nothing to do with freedom, although freedom does entitle some people to form unions that others may find abhorrent for whatever reason. The left has such a long history of perverting just causes that I am amazed that anyone accepts its help anymore: Racial equality has practically come to mean government handouts and quotas; reproductive rights somehow became the "right" to purchase abortions with other people's money; and now, same-sex unions have been perverted into micromanagement of marriage chapels (among other things). Limbaugh blathers on about the scriptural basis for the Knapps' objection to performing these ceremonies (as if nobody knew about this), but the truth is, the government has no business forcing them to perform a ceremony for anyone for any reason whatsoever. But Limbaugh's blathering is worse than superfluous, or pandering to theocrats, or baiting the non-religious: It distracts from the fact that the causes of same-sex unions and what we could call "freedom of conscience" since the issue is bigger than religion are one and the same: the cause of the individual. First they wouldn't let the gays marry, and I said nothing. Then, they came after the chaplains, and I said nothing. Is the picture getting clearer now? One man's rights do not diminish another's and certainly do not call for the violation of another's. To fail to make this connection does not impugn the stated cause of the advocate, but it does raise suspicions of the advocate and his actual cause. Limbaugh is right to impugn the left, but this "atheist freedom lover" has his own doubts about someone who makes more noise thumping a Bible than advocating individual rights. -- CAV Link to Original

Conservative commentator Bruce Bialosky describes some particularly asinine scheduling practiced by the Internal Revenue Service: ... [W]hen we received this message from our tax software service we were quite taken aback; "The Internal Revenue Service's electronic filing system will be shut down for maintenance from October 11-13 reopening sometime on October 14 th." I contacted some colleagues who were just as stunned. They expressed they were mystified as to what the IRS was thinking shutting down this close to the end of [the extended] tax season. One then informed me that not only is the IRS system for electronic filing (required for all tax preparers and the predominant means of filing all tax returns today) shut down, but their system for electronic payments would be inoperable also. Many taxpayers today either prefer electronic payments or may be required to do such. Bialosky complains that "[t]he IRS still does not get they serve the people of the United States". I was with him until then: Confiscating money from American citizens in violation of their right to property is not and can not be service -- not in the sense of proper government service, anyway. I am unfamiliar with Bruce Biaolosky, but he comes across as someone who would have no problem with the IRS continuing to subject us to myriad ridiculous rules en route to taking our money, if only it would do so more efficiently and politely. I beg to differ. (That said, the IRS ought to be made to make compliance as easy as possible until the day we are able to abolish it.) The imperious disregard for just how anyone is supposed to live up to its rules, as described by Bialosky, may be incredible, but it is really just a symptom of a greater problem. When a people become comfortable with the idea that the government can take money from some to give to others, how can they complain about niceties such as being able to fork it over easily? And when so many demand abuses on a grand scale (such as income taxation) from our government, neither outrage nor surprise at such lesser abuses (as Bialosky describes) is really appropriate coming from anyone who isn't completely opposed to doing so. Rather than whine about bureaucrats taking Columbus Day off, Bruce Bialosky should have warned us that we are being kicked around, and that we ought to stop asking for it. -- CAV Link to Original

1. Little Man, save for a short nocturnal stint, has always been a far better sleeper than his older sister. Even now, he seems to be "sleep training" himself. Wednesday evening, around his usual bedtime, he kept arching his back uncomfortably as I tried rocking him to sleep. Eventually, I put him down and he walked over to the couch and climbed up there. I sat next to him and watched him fall asleep. I have since rocked him to sleep, but I think I am near the end of an era. I will miss some aspects of rocking babies to sleep. I will not miss having to -- or failing at it for no apparent reason. 2. Call it a form of "parentsplaining" if you must, but this post -- on things a stay-at-home dad would love to say to many of the mothers out there -- helps me see that one man's tedium is another man's fellowship. The following especially cracked me up: #10. If I never see your husband at after-school potlucks or fundraisers or Sunday afternoon birthday circuits, I start to think he may just be a loser. (#10a. Unless he works for Goldman Sachs and really is out making millions -- but then why don't you have a nanny?) [reformatted] Not all of these resonate with me, but several did. And don't get me started on sippy cups, most of which I detest almost as much as folding laundry, a task which is amazingly resistant to my efforts so far at usually doing efficiently. (Mental note: Now that I think of it, I really should look at this some time.) 3. Hah! This brings back an old memory from college that still makes me laugh: There is now a web interface for the old game of Diplomacy. (It looks good, but it will never live up to the real game. Read on.) Back in the day, one of my circles of friends liked such games. That circle included a guy obsessed with war, an obsession that manifested in everything, such as the papers he wrote for both of his majors, every Dungeons and Dragons character he ever created, and ... the way he approached this game. In short, he took alliances in games too seriously, making him a ripe target in a game like this. He was Russia and I was Turkey (or was I the Ottoman Empire?). Together, we were steamrolling westward, he throwing everything up front and I with lots of units hanging back. And then I struck. He immediately screamed, momentarily placed both hands around my neck as he gurgled, picked up the board, and then threw it across the room like a frisbee. Having no hope of ever replicating such success again, I retired from the game then and there. 4. The latest gem forwarded by my mother is the following joke titled "Male Logic", which also appears here: Woman: Do you drink beer? Man: Yes. Woman: How many beers a day? Man: Usually about 3. Woman: How much do you pay per beer? Man: $5.00 which includes a tip. Woman: And how long have you been drinking? Man: About 20 years, I suppose. Woman: So a beer costs $5 and you have 3 beers a day which puts your spending each month at $450. In one year, it would be approximately $5,400. correct? Man: Correct. Woman: If in 1 year you spend $5400, not accounting for inflation, the past 20 years puts your spending at $108,000, correct? Man: Correct. Woman: Do you know that if you didn't drink so much beer, that money could have been put in a step-up interest savings account and after accounting for compound interest for the past 20 years, you could have now bought a Ferrari? Man: Do you drink beer? Woman: No. Man: Where's your Ferrari? [minor edits] This joke reminds me of the following economics joke: Two economists walked past a Porsche showroom. One of them pointed at a shiny car in the window and said, "I want that." "Obviously not," the other replied Although this joke has stuck in my mind for over two decades, I am not sure I agree with the point it is supposed to illustrate. -- CAV Link to Original

Here's a question for any XML jockeys who might be following my blog... <br /><br />For my blogging and -- now that my kids are starting to sleep more reliably -- other writing projects, I have been intermittently working on a sort of home-grown <a href="http://www.acuriousmix.com/2014/09/03/designing-a-personal-knowledgebase/">personal knowledge base</a>. Towards that end, I have realized that a smooth way to import bookmarked and annotated URLs into markdown documents would make my work much more mobile (e.g., platform-agnostic) and faster. (Just dumping the HTML code for the bookmarks into the markdown document, although it would work for some purposes, is worse than useless for others.)<br /><br />My bookmarking service gets me about half-way to where I need to be: I can export my bookmarks into an xml file. From there, it is a snap to filter for what I want, but I have hit a wall on the problem of switching formats. <br /><br />Basically, I want to extract a few fields -- the URL, its title, and my notes -- from each entry and make them look like this: [title](URL) -- notes. Using a <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11664831/extracting-values-from-xml-file-into-field-delimiter-format-using-unix-script-co">solution I found to what I take to be a very similar problem</a>, I seem to have hit a wall. I get the formatting marks for the correct number of records, but no data! I know next to nothing about XML, so I could well be barking up the wrong tree, but I don't think so. I suspect that I am missing some aspect of how data is referenced that another pair of eyes might spot right away.<br /><br />I will have to provide more data by email: Blogger completely butchers regular HTML, let alone anything involving displaying HTML-like markup. If you think you might be able to help, <a href="http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/p/about.html#9">email</a> me and I'll send you more details.<br /><br />Thanks in advance to anyone offering to help, and to my other readers for their patience.<br /><br />-- CAV Link to Original

Erin Doland, former pack rat and current editor of Unclutterer, shares a seminal observation she made en route to an uncluttered -- and more purposeful -- lifestyle: eing organized and uncluttered is a skill - like playing a sport. No one wakes up one morning able to win a gold medal at the Olympics; you have to practice every day. Even today I slip up, but now I have systems in place, significantly less stuff and years of practice to help me quickly get back on track. [bold added] This comes from an expert interview at Mint. I have enjoyed and profited from Unclutterer for years, and think this interview provides a good introduction to the blog, not to mention inspiration for anyone feeling beseiged by clutter of any kind and wanting to find a real way out. I must add that I appreciated her emphasis on the rewards of uncluttering, which the interviewer's use of the term "minimalist" evoked: "Let me start by saying I'm not an ascetic." -- CAV Link to Original

Edwardo Porter of the New York Times writes an illuminating yet frustrating article titled, "The Risks of Cheap Water". Within, Porter indicates how easily free market mechanisms could solve supply-and-demand issues, particularly in the drought-stricken American Southwest. That's the illuminating part: But the proliferation of limits on water use will not solve the problem because regulations do nothing to address the main driver of the nation's wanton consumption of water: its price. "Most water problems are readily addressed with innovation," said David G. Victor of the University of California, San Diego. "Getting the water price right to signal scarcity is crucially important." The signals today are way off. Water is far too cheap across most American cities and towns. But what's worse is the way the United States quenches the thirst of farmers, who account for 80 percent of the nation's water consumption and for whom water costs virtually nothing. Adding to the challenges are the obstacles placed in the way of water trading. "Markets are essential to ensuring that water, when it's scarce, can go to the most valuable uses," said Barton H. Thompson, an expert on environmental resources at Stanford Law School. Without them, "the allocation of water is certainly arbitrary." ... The price of water going into Americans' homes often does not even cover the cost of delivering it , let alone the depreciation of utilities' infrastructure or their R&D. It certainly doesn't account for other costs imposed by water use -- on, say, fisheries or the environment [ sic] -- caused by taking water out of rivers or lakes. [bold added] The frustrating part is that the governments responsible for this fiasco of central planning invariably respond with ... more regulations. At best, these include such pseudocapitalist measures as setting up "markets" that might have arisen spontaneously had water not been so heavily regulated or subsidized in the first place. (I say "pseudocapitalist" because I have no reason to believe that any of these entities is attempting to transition to laissez-faire.) This is in addition to the fact that other aspects of capitalism (e.g., property rights within waterways) could have prevented the injuries and property damage (which are often decried as "environmental" damage) and blamed on "capitalism". I don't wish to shoot the messenger for not being a radical capitalist; most people are so used to the regulatory state that it takes a high degree of independence to even question something like very low water rates. Porter notes that water rate hikes invariably draw angry reactions. Perhaps that -- a government so pervasive for so long that it seems natural -- is the greatest hazard of all presented by apparently cheap water. -- CAV P.S. Here's another problem caused by the pervasiveness of central planning: Water rates might ought to be higher now than they are, but would they really be cheaper, after a period of transition and in terms of income, for most people? We can only speculate, with good cause to think they would, due to the nature of central planning. Link to Original

The headline just about says it all: "San Francisco Legalizes, Regulates Airbnb With 7-4 Vote, Lots of Amendments". A corporation valued at $10 billion is now legal? Call me crazy, but having been born in the United States, I somehow had the impression that operating a business that neither picked anyone's pocket nor broke anyone's leg was legal. (It certainly should be.) It's bad enough when a government quasi-legalizes something that shouldn't have been illegal in the first place, but this is worse in a sense. Who knew that operating a business or making contracts with other adults wasn't even legal until some band of chiseling local officials said so? Apparently, I was wrong: We need permission, and we'd better be ready to hand over our lunch money when we ask for it. Oh, and be ready to wait hand-and-foot on the gang in charge: I wrote a piece earlier today describing some the law's changes and some of its more controversial points. The key changes include a limit on non-hosted rentals for up to 90 days per year. That's on the concern that Airbnb will eat into the city's limited [by the government --ed] housing stock. Another key point is the creation of a public registry, where hosts will have to pay a $50 fee, register with the city Planning Department and pledge that they'll abide by the 90-day limit. They'll also have to pay the city's hotel taxes. They -- not Airbnb -- are responsible for certifying that they're only hosting 90 days a year and for keeping records that prove this. [link in original] Lots of people see this as good news, but it is really a sign of just how badly our freedom is in jeopardy. We once had a government that protected our rights, and now we increasingly have one that charges "protection" money. -- CAV Link to Original

It's a long read, but if you can stomach contemplating a soul that was obscene to the core, blogger Robert Stacy McCain has written an extensive piece, with numerous quotes, on Andrea Dworkin (via Instapundit). Here's a small sample: Those are the final words of Andrea Dworkin's most famous book, published in 1987, barely a dozen years after Dworkin's first book had extended carte blanche to child molesters, evidently because in 1974 she viewed pedophiles as feminism's natural allies in "a political action where revolu­tion is the goal," where the destruction of the normal family was an objective requiring the abolition of the incest taboo. By 1987, the feminist revolution had already done much "to restructure community forms and human consciousness," as promiscuity, divorce, abortion and homosexuality proliferated. But feminists had to exculpate themselves from responsibility for the accompanying plague of other evils -- rape and incest, pornography and prostitution -- that anyone with common sense could have predicted would result from the revolution. Therefore, by the late 1980s, Dworkin needed an elaborate argument to blame all these evils on feminism's scapegoat, the male-dominated society. Ariel Levy[, in her forward to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse ,] could not remind readers that what Andrea Dworkin denounced in 1987 as an atrocity of male "tyranny" was, in fact, a predictable consequence of an ideology Dworkin avowed in 1974. Although I found McCain's analysis somewhat hit-or-miss, he makes several very good points and, overall correctly indicates that there is a seething antipathy (to put it charitably) for humanity in general and Western civilization in particular in Dworkin's work. As I said, the above is just a sample of the astonishing depths to which someone can sink in the quest for the unearned which, in Dworkin's case, was in the spiritual realm: Just as Blanche Du Bois was a type, so also was Andrea Dworkin a type -- the fanatical self-righteous loudmouth type, who never once in her life admitted to any error, any fault or failure. Everybody in the world was always wrong, unless they agreed with her. Here we have a woman whose anger at half the human race was her professional raison d'etre, for whom hatred of men was a litmus test of one's moral worth: If you did not hate men as much as she did, you were her inferior. And because nobody could ever hate men more than Andrea Dworkin did, this meant she was the most moral person on Earth. Conveniently, then, her worldview had the effect of making her better than everybody else, in her own mind. But what mind? Dworkin's cognitive modus operandi appears to me to be almost entirely arbitrary with the exception of gauging what she could get away with to persuade others to follow her moral code. Her contempt for everyone else is no surprise here, as she hadn't a rational, reality-oriented mind to introspect and so, to begin to form a basis for respect. Dworkin hated men, but I believe she hated herself and everyone else, too. This contempt comes across in her irrational methods of persuasion, which were wholly geared towards supporting her marching orders. (What else could a moral code even be to an altruist/collectivist?) These included: cherry-picking facts that could plausibly support her assertions, context-dropping, unwarranted generalization, fabrication of "evidence", and outright evasion, as seen above. It should go without saying that when one encounters anything like this, anything coming from the same source should be greeted with suspicion. But it takes life experience and a degree of mental fastidiousness to see through many of these tricks, especially when woven together with any degree of cohesion. That is the danger Dworkin's ideology represents to the young, whom McCain notes are usually ill-prepared to challenge what she says. It is also the basis of my contention that Dworkin hates herself: If you see humanity as dupes and you spend all your time focused on seeking their admiration/becoming their puppet master, what does that say about you? I suspect that, on some level, even Andrea Dworkin had a sense of the answer. -- CAV Link to Original

A Leftist Attempts to Defend Football Jonathan Chait, attempting to defend one of the left's new whipping boys, football, makes lots of valuable points, but I was amused by the following passage: Testosterone poisoning? Can the left become any more derivative or second-handed? How is replacing the misogynistic error of equating moral weakness with a caricature of femininity any better than the misandrous one of equating barbarism with a caricature of masculinity? Weekend Reading "If you like the idea of being self-employed someday, start now by developing a 'self-employment attitude.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "'Work for Yourself' Applies to All of Us" at The Delaware Coast Press "If you start to unfavorably compare yourself to others, stop!" -- Michael Hurd, in "The Antidote to Envy" at The Delaware Wave "[P]oorly designed [Electronic Health Records] can impede physician workflow and jeopardize patient safety." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Did Bad EHR Software Lead to Ebola Patient Being Sent Home?" at Forbes My Two Cents Hurd's article on self-employment reminds me of an imperfect analogy I once drew between having an employer and being self-employed: Having an employer is like being self-employed -- and having only one client. As Hurd indicates, this situation can make certain things easier, but it also has major pitfalls. Whatever "security" comes from that situation is due to a trading-off of the insulation -- from the loss of that client -- that other clients could bring. Keeping the Raccoons Out From an article about one man's effort to solve the problem of raccoons getting into Toronto's trash bins, while not making it too difficult for humans to use them: The solution -- which will soon undergo a massive field test -- appears to be to create a latch that requires an opposable thumb. --CAV Link to Original

Some time ago, at Capitalism Magazine, Jean Moroney of Thinking Directions warned against a common fetish for neatness that often stops productive thinking cold. Fortunately, she also offered the following analogy as both an illustration of the problem and motivation to solve it whenever it crops up: Messy isn't better than neat, it's a means to neat. Consider the process of organizing a closet. The first step is to take everything out and spread everything out on the floor. Messy, very messy. But this temporary disorder gives you elbow room and a bird's-eye view, so you can more easily decide what to keep, what to throw out, and where you will put everything back so that the end result is neat. So what if your first stab at a problem you need to think about is messy? As Moroney shows so economically, it's better than not even getting started. So throw some thoughts out on a page, already! As her brief article and main website indicate, she also has numerous helpful tips on how to proceed once the contents of your mental closet have been emptied. --CAV Link to Original

First, a definition: prejudice -- preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience I bring this up in memory of a favorite high school teacher of mine having to explain to a black classmate that the meaning of "prejudice" was not confined to racial bigotry. In a conversation about college, he had described his younger self with the adjective, causing her to laugh. It sounds like a few thousand reporters also missed that memo. At City Journal, Heather MacDonald does an excellent job of distilling two months of leftist "reporting" on Ferguson down to eleven hundred words and change. Here is a representative sample: The next highest categories of driving infraction are blasting loud music out your car and driving with tinted windows. Attend police-community meetings in poor areas and you will regularly hear complaints about cars with deafening sound systems. Should the police ignore such complaints? Are they ignoring similar complaints in white areas because they want to give whites a pass? Do Ferguson's white and black drivers blast loud music from their cars at the same rate? We never learn. Tinted windows pose a possibly lethal threat to the police during traffic stops, since they prevent officers from assessing the situation inside the car before approaching. Ignoring this infraction puts officers' lives at risk. Should the police nevertheless do so? Such is the implication, if doing so would mean fewer fines for black motorists. The New York Timesquotes a victim of the racist Ferguson traffic-enforcement system, who was fined for driving without a license. Why was his license suspended--was he driving drunk? Did he hit someone? We will never know. What is the crime rate in the black areas of Ferguson? Also something that the mainstream press is not interested in finding out. [bold added] Please do note the many potential instances of "profiling" that, if prevented or punished harshly enough, will ultimately harm the very people for whom the anti-profilers profess concern. MacDonald also notes something that has become apparent to me from events and a couple of casual conversations, neither of which I initiated: A grand jury is under enormous pressure to charge Officer Darren Wilson with murder for shooting Brown, with the usual threats of even more vicious riots to come should the grand jury fail to deliver an indictment. On the day the jury was empaneled or shortly after, I went to the bank in Clayton, the county seat of St. Louis County, where the grand jury is empaneled. Upon leaving, I heard a commotion and found a major street -- where the courthouse is located -- blocked off. I determined then and there that I would be nowhere near there when its findings are announced or during any future trial dates. I am also glad that, despite the constant media barrage pre-judging them as bigots, area police, based on evidence the media refuse to consider, are preparing for the worst. -- CAV Link to Original

Regular readers will know that I regard the protection of individual rights as the only proper purpose of government. Accordingly, I oppose ObamaCare, an unwarranted government intrusion into medicine, on the grounds that it violates individual rights. If I am ill and cannot pay for treatment, I do not have the right to steal money for the purpose or to get treatment from a physician at gunpoint: ObamaCare, in which the government effectively does the same for me is worse in the sense that the government is supposed to prevent such things. By the same reasoning, the government should stay out of medical affairs entirely unless the threat of one person causing harm to another deliberately or through carelessness arises. Even then, the role of government is limited to containing and ending the specific threat. It is thus both interesting and -- as Thomas Sowell correctly indicates -- revealing that the same man who wants to tell physicians whom to heal and for how much -- and patients how they may manage their own health -- is worse than failing to do one of the few things he should be doing regarding the Ebola epidemic in Africa: There was a time when an outbreak of a deadly disease overseas would bring virtually unanimous agreement that our top priority should be to keep it overseas. Yet Barack Obama has refused to bar entry to the United States by people from countries where the Ebola epidemic rages, as Britain has done. The reason? Refusing to let people with Ebola enter the United States would conflict with the goal of fighting the disease. In other words, the safety of the American people takes second place to the goal of helping people overseas. As if to emphasize his priorities, President Obama has ordered thousands of American troops to go into Ebola-stricken Liberia, disregarding the dangers to those troops and to other Americans when the troops return. [bold added] Asking what this says about Barack Obama, Sowell verges on understatement: "At worst, he may consider Americans' interests expendable..." Not that we really needed further proof, but has there ever been a clearer indication that this man is unfit for office? Indignant Americans like myself need a brief way to express our disgust and apathetic ones may need help to wake up to what they allowed or helped to occur. For these purposes I might suggest the title of this post, but with reservations: It seems that some have beaten me to the punch, and they are somewhat at cross-purposes with me. -- CAV Link to Original

In the Boston Globe is a short piece on a national glut of postdoctoral science researchers. The glut, which the piece terms a "quiet crisis in science" is ultimately caused by central planning: I was in grad school when Congress doubled the funding for the National Institutes of Health and remember wondering how that could be sustained and what might happen when it wasn't. Hindsight shows that this money, rather than boosting the economy, created a whole raft of perverse incentives that has stunted or misdirected the efforts of a significant number of those who should be among the most productive, in terms of satisfying actual market demand. The direct dollar cost is quantifiable, but we can only guess at the indirect impact on the economy. The personal cost to a generation of scientists is at least an equally complicated matter, as a story with a happy ending from the article shows: What might someone like Ydenburg have accomplished had he not either (a) taken a decade-long detour from a non-scientific career during the best years of his life, or ( found himself in a buyer's market just when his scientific career should have started taking off? We'll never know. Ironically, most scientists do not question the role of central planning in their occupation. This issue has been simmering for some time, but the talk is invariably of reforming an immoral and impractical system, rather than of phasing it out altogether. -- CAV Link to Original

Too Late -- or Not Yet? In a column titled, "Will the West Defend Itself??", Walter Williams answers his own question, at least in the short term: The question appears to be rhetorical: First, that has already happened with the Islamist atrocities of September 11, 2001. Second, in his parting shot, Williams sees a significant obstacle to our nation adopting a principled foreign policy of national self-interest. Weekend Reading "Kids are not born with knowledge that we adults take for granted, e.g., that they should eat healthy food, or that they must think before they act." -- Michael Hurd, in "10 Tips for Navigating Children Through Childhood" at The Delaware Coast Press "A deadline is sort of like having a GPS in your car, or a compass on a ship." -- Michael Hurd, in "Deadlines: Really Such a Bad Thing?" at The Delaware Wave "Whenever the government pays for health care, the government will ultimately decide what care patients may (or may not) receive." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Who Decides What Medical Care You Receive At End of Life?" at Forbes My Two Cents From Michael Hurd's piece on deadlines, I learned that he has been writing two columns a week for nearly a decade. My thanks go to him as a reader for his consistently good writing, and as a writer for the inspiration. Need to Roll Your Eyes? There's an App for That! I can practically hear the ad copy for this one: "Is your shopping list the only thing in your life you haven't yet succeeded in politicizing? There's an app for that." Those of us who don't insist on everyone thinking, speaking, and acting in lockstep can use this app, too, no installation required. Here's how: (1) Find someone staring at his smart phone in the grocery aisle, agonizing with furrowed brow over a choice in brands of something you, too, are about to buy. (2) Strike up a conversation. (3) When said individual obnoxiously broadcasts his choice in brands -- or laments that all brands present deserve boycotts -- select the one he finds most objectionable and leave. Fortunately, I am pretty sure I haven't seen anyone using this in the month-plus since I heard about it. This is not to say that, under some circumstances, boycotts are appropriate and useful, but making a buying decision at this level, for everything, is absurd, at best. --CAV Link to Original

1. My summer has now been bookended with the births of two nephews and a niece! The older of my younger brothers (and the last of us not to have kids) greeted a son and a daughter this week. The earlier arrival was the son of my wife's sister. 2. Thanks to an interesting article with good illustrations, the ice caves at the summit of Mount Rainer now beckon the armchair explorer/scientist: The unique geological formation is the result of volcanic heat melting the base of the mountain's ice cap. 3. Your email-printing boss has nothing on this guy: I created a simple web banner for a client and sent it off a .jpg via email for approval. The client printed out the .jpg, took that paper and put it in a typewriter. Yes, an honest-to-goodness typewriter, and penned a short approval note and a query of "when would this be printed?" The client then scanned the paper with the printed .jpg and typed note before they emailed me back a PDF as an attachment to an email that just stated, "Please see attached." From the comment thread of this freelancer war story came an amusing description of this as, "a creative, steam-punk way to approve the ad banner" [link added]. 4. I must say that I enjoyed seeing Arsenal's new signing, Danny Welbeck, score a hat trick in a Champion's League fixture against Galatasaray this week. While it's still too early in his North London career to say how successful he'll be, he's off to a good start. After languishing at Manchester United over the past couple of years, as a reserve player who was usually played out of position when he was used at all, he is leading the line in every game thanks to an injury to Olivier Giroud. I hope the following proves to be true: Maybe this is what he needed after all - a run in the first team so that every half-chance wasn't an audition. He certainly appears more confident in front of goal than he was for United, and his team-mates have faith in him too. If Welbeck is on, they do not go it alone, they seek him out, they fancy him to score. Already he looks more suited to this group of players than he did to those at United. Self-belief is key for goalscorers: Welbeck has it and suddenly he looks like one. Oh, and let me be the first to thank his former coach, Louis van Gaal, for making sureWelbeck felt he had a point or three to prove. -- CAV Link to Original

Although the analysis is somewhat deterministic, I found an article by Maia Szalavitz titled "Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It: Why Is This Widely Denied?" to be a vast improvement on the conventional wisdom about substance abuse and recovery. Two points particularly stood out. First, Szalavitz reveals a thinking error that lends credibility to one popular myth about addiction: Why do so many people still see addiction as hopeless? One reason is a phenomenon known as "the clinician's error," which could also be known as the "journalist's error" because it is so frequently replicated in reporting on drugs. That is, journalists and rehabs tend to see the extremes: Given the expensive and often harsh nature of treatment, if you can quit on your own you probably will. And it will be hard for journalists or treatment providers to find you. Similarly, if your only knowledge of alcohol came from working in an ER on Saturday nights, you might start thinking that prohibition is a good idea. All you would see are overdoses, DTs, or car crash, rape or assault victims. You wouldn't be aware of the patients whose alcohol use wasn't causing problems. And so, although the overwhelming majority of alcohol users drink responsibly, your "clinical" picture of what the drug does would be distorted by the source of your sample of drinkers. Treatment providers get a similarly skewed view of addicts: The people who keep coming back aren't typical--they're simply the ones who need the most help. Basing your concept of addiction only on people who chronically relapse creates an overly pessimistic picture. [links dropped] Szalavitz is correct to question the pessimism, but does not really get away from the notion that addiction is a disease. That said, her article still offers useful information for those of us who disagree with that idea entirely. Thus, the second thing that stands out about this article is what it has to say about the recovery process and how treatment might be improved: To better understand recovery and how to teach it, then, we need to look to the strengths and tactics of people who quit without treatment--and not merely focus on clinical samples. Common threads in stories of recovery without treatment include finding a new passion (whether in work, hobbies, religion or a person), moving from a less structured environment like college into a more constraining one like 9 to 5 employment, and realizing that heavy use stands in the way of achieving important life goals. People who recover without treatment also tend not to see themselves as addicts, according to the research in this area. While treatment can often support the principles of natural recovery, too often it does the opposite . For example, many programs interfere with healthy family and romantic relationships by isolating patients. Some threaten employment and education, suggesting or even requiring that people quit jobs or school to "focus on recovery," when doing so might do more harm than good. Others pay too much attention to getting people to take on an addict identity--rather than on harm related to drug use--when, in fact, looking at other facets of the self may be more helpful. [bold added] This discussion reminds me of Ayn Rand's discussion of the relationship between life and values, particularly the following: The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics--the standard by which one judges what is good or evil--is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man. Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil. [emphasis in original] Of course, without volition, none of this is relevant to the problem at hand. That said, not only do some recovery stories give good evidence of the role of volition in changing a life-threatening habit, it is plain that recovery from addiction hinges on two things: (1) a realization on some level that the addiction stands in the way of some value (or at least something the individual considers a value), and (2) a decision to choose the threatened value over the addiction. -- CAV Link to Original

A couple of months ago, Thomas Sowell reviewed Jason Riley's Please Stop Helping Us, calling the book "a primer on race". The book is a blistering critique of failed attempts at "helping" black Americans through central planning. One of the book's many strengths, according to Sowell's review, is that it makes available to laymen lots of new information on the subject: When it comes to affirmative action, Jason Riley asks the key question: "Do racial preferences work? What is the track record?" Like many other well-meaning and nice-sounding policies, affirmative action cannot survive factual scrutiny. Some individuals may get jobs they would not get otherwise but many black students who are quite capable of getting a good college education are admitted, under racial quotas, to institutions whose pace alone is enough to make it unlikely that they will graduate. Studies that show how many artificial failures are created by affirmative action admissions policies are summarized in Please Stop Helping Us, in language much easier to understand than in the original studies. There are many ponderous academic studies of blacks, if you have a few months in which to read them, but there is nothing to match Jason Riley's book as a primer that will quickly bring you up to speed on the complicated subject of race in a week, or perhaps over a weekend. [minor format edits] It is interesting that this review came out almost exactly a month before the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the demonstrations that followed. For one thing, it has quickly become apparent that the event and the many real problems associated with it have been co-opted by leftists and political opportunists interested in providing more of the same "help" that has so long dug a miserable, hard-to-escape pit for so many. For another, it is much easier for too many to become distracted and preoccupied by the spectacle of such demonstrations and join in the angry demands -- than it is to gather and evaluate truly relevant facts in order to consider what ought to be done, politically, about such problems. This book can at least make the more difficult (and promising) path much more tractable. Perhaps my belated notice of this review, in light of such obscene and exploitative pandering, will in some way help this book gain more of the publicity it clearly deserves. Sowell opened his review with the following historical vignette: Back in the heyday of the British Empire, a man from one of the colonies addressed a London audience. "Please do not do any more good in my country," he said. "We have suffered too much already from all the good that you have done." We will know we are winning when the title of this book starts showing up on signs at demonstrations like some of the more peaceful ones in Ferguson. -- CAV Link to Original

From the annals of software development comes an interesting illustration of the difference between what one knows and what one doesn't. The below are lessons a coder learned from a bug report that bizarrely (but correctly) stated that attempting to print an example file would jam the printer: Just because a bug seems impossible doesn't mean it is. Abstractions are everywhere, and they can be broken. As a software guy, I believed that getting the paper into the output tray was a solved problem. The author uses the term "abstraction" in a sense peculiar to his area of expertise, meaning an omission of "details which matter in practice, but are immaterial to the problem being solved". The programmer reasonably thought -- but did not actually know -- that a step between the printing command and the physical document was solved. He did not know this because he did not know in detail how the printer worked. It clearly behooves us to be aware of what we really do know versus what we merely assume. -- CAV Link to Original

Being unfamiliar with the work of sports writer Dan Carson, I may be having a Poe's Law moment* here, but... Carson positively drips with sarcasm -- or at least he sounds like it, and he arguably should -- as he writes of a statistical "proof" that the walk-off single with which Derek Jeter closed his Hall of Fame career was staged: I don't follow baseball, but a quick read of the American League standings and schedule shows that Baltimore had a shot at securing the best American League record at the time, and so a slight home field edge throughout its post-season. And that's just one of many reasons to reject out of hand the whole idea that this event, as incredible as it might seem, was staged. A few others: The pitcher, not being a machine and having a psychology, may have simply had a "bad day at the office"; sports are incredibly hard to choreograph; and conspiracies are actually quite rare due to the universal problem of loose lips. This kind of analysis, to have any probative value, would require lots of other corroborating evidence indicating, that -- against even greater odds than a poor pitch being thrown -- some big, pre-arranged conspiracy somehow successfully orchestrated a baseball game with playoff implications to come down to a certain player and to achieve a particularly dramatic result. Strangely enough, our mathematician never tries to tackle those odds, although he needn't. This will sound like beating a dead horse to some readers, but the kind of argument our misapplied mathematician made is quite common, and is an example of what Ayn Rand called rationalism: Will Carson, or I, or anyone else who shoots down this theory deprive it of adherents? No, and the above paragraph goes a long way in explaining why. The problem with rationalism is that it affects how a mind deals with reality. One who starts by ignoring most of the data and sees deductive proof as some kind of a gold standard is unlikely to question such an "air-tight" case in the face of data that any old Joe can bring up. (Indeed a lack of respect for the minds of most other people is one common hallmark of rationalists.) This isn't to say that nobody can, with hard work, change his psycho-epistemology, but this case should highlight how hard it can be -- and why reaching someone like this is often a fruitless endeavor. And so, most people will laugh off this theory, those who don't just laugh it off will ridicule it (or react with sarcasm since ...), and some will go to their graves convinced Derek Jeter's last at-bat was a fake. -- CAV * Regarding the possibility that Carson is serious: I know nothing about him, but many journalists, being of the leftist persuasion, make similar arguments all the time about "big business", hence my uncertainty. Link to Original

Why Stay? A list of the ten states most dependent on the federal government is interesting to me on many levels besides just the states that appear. Consider the write-up for Mississippi: Along with its neighbors Louisiana and Alabama, Mississippi is heavily assisted with federal dollars. So much so, that WalletHub's calculations place them at the top of the list for the most dependent on Washington for subsistence. Mississippi suffers from some serious socio-economic issues, including having the highest poverty rate and one of the lowest income rates in the country. These are issues that have plagued the state for a long time, and there doesn't appear to be any hope for change in the near future . There are a few things that capture federal funding that add to the state's total, including several military bases, but the major issue appears to be the lack of jobs and opportunity suffered by the state's citizens. [ad links removed, bold added] Nowhere is there any hint in the article of any question as to whether the government should be maintaining infrastructure or serving as a charity funded by loot -- let alone performing its proper functions differently. The case of Mississippi begs the following question of its poorest citizens: Why not leave? (Many did, to find employment, a little over half a century ago.) On top of the money being forcibly taken from others, one has to consider the enormous waste of human potential the government is financing by making it possible to remain idle, by stunting initiative -- which in this case might start with a question like, "Can't I do better somewhere else?" I grew up in Mississippi and was always baffled by the government's practice of dumping money into a place that is overall best suited to agriculture, forestry, and other enterprises that typically do not lead to population influxes. Journalists egged this on, too, making a big deal of the state's "brain drain", as if its most promising youth were somehow to blame for the accidents of its history and geography. Weekend Reading "[P]ets bring a value to the human condition that other humans, as important as they are, just can't provide." -- Michael Hurd, in "Life's Little 4-Legged Perks" at The Delaware Wave "From a purely psychological point of view, however, there is compelling evidence as to why physical punishment is generally not appropriate." -- Michael Hurd, in "To Spank or Not to Spank" at The Delaware Coast Press In More Detail In his piece on spanking, Michael Hurd brings up a few things that often seem to be missing in the ongoing debate over child discipline, including when a parent might have to use force against a child: There are exceptions. If your child is in a physical altercation with another child, you might have to use force to end the fight. If your daughter refuses to go to bed, you may have to pick her up and make her do it. If your son is about to do something harmful, such as touch a hot stove or throw Cream of Wheat at his sister, you should use physical force to restrain him. A smack on the wrist or a pull on the shoulder may be the only option under such conditions. Crucially, Hurd notes that these are exceptions, and more crucially, why. It is a breath of fresh air to see such issues discussed within the full context of what a parent is supposed to be doing, as opposed to what I often see: intrinsicist arguments either for corporal punishment for any (read: no) reason, or against it at all times, regardless of the situation. Modern-Day Monument Building Here's a fine snapshot of just how close to outright barbarism the world really is. In a decision "justified" by multiculturalism and, in addition, almost certainly tainted by bribery, Qatar was selected as the host of the 2022 World Cup. Fortunately, there is hope (for many reasons) that this decision will be changed, but if true, the following, alone, should suffice: Since Qatar only has a population of 278,000 (and many are wealthy, making Qatar the nation with the wealthiest population per capita), most of the labor to build the facilities was being imported from poor countries such as Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Due to the long hours of labor plus the extreme weather conditions, 1,200 workers had already died by May of 2014. At that rate, the total death toll for the project would reach 4,000. Additionally, there have been allegations that workers have had their passports claimed by Qatari immigration, effectively making these people prisoners/slaves. [link in original] That this hasn't generated an enormous outcry is no accident in a world where governments -- including those in the United States -- finance the construction of stadia as a matter of course. As Ayn Rand noted in her essay, "The Monument Builders": When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as "human rights" versus "property rights." No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the "right" to "redistribute" the wealth produced by others is claiming the "right" to treat human beings as chattel. [bold added] The frivolity of the engineering projects in question only serves to underscore the enormous wrong of central planning. --CAV Link to Original

As I have indicated here many times, I oppose multiculturalism as a left-wing attack on individualismdisguised as opposition to racism and similar injustices, such as religious persecution. That said, many people who sincerely oppose these injustices subscribe to or are influenced, knowingly or not, by this nefarious doctrine. It is instructive to see how toothless this makes them when they encounter bigotry. For an example, try reading a recent New York Times article regarding the rise of a "new anti-Semitism" in Europe among its Moslem population. After lots of looking for extenuating circumstances, the author concludes in part: I agree that there have been problems with the way Germans have attempted to warn the world against repeating what happened in Nazi Germany. (Incidentally, here is a much better warning and antidote.) However, as someone who has visited Germany, I must say that it is almost impossible to go there without noticing that many, if not most Germans have at least (a) acknowledged what happened, and ( condemned it as unspeakably wrong. Indeed, author Jochen Bittner notes earlier in his article that a particularly virulent rally occurred "just yards from Berlin's main Holocaust memorial". This is not to say that the mere existence of such memorials -- any more than mere exposure to facts of any kind -- will guarantee that someone will reach correct conclusions and thereby attain enlightenment, but: There is a point at which it is proper to condemn an unthinking brute as an unthinking brute. There is also a point at which, a phenomenon being observed over and over again, demands connecting some dots. Such a phenomenon, encountered the world over, is: Moslems advocating brutality against Jews. Rather than look for extenuating circumstances as to why Moslems might have a problem with Jews (let alone want to brutalize and kill them), perhaps it's time to consider what, about Islam, might be encouraging its adherents to hold such opinions. A good place to start would be to consider what anti-Semitism is -- a form of collectivism, a subordination of the individual to the group. But what I advocate above may not help anyone under the spell of multiculturalism, which itself advocates collectivism and the abdication of making moral pronouncements -- value-judgements -- of any kind. That is too bad, to say the least. For if we truly wish to marginalize anti-Semitism -- Men have free will, so it cannot be completely eliminated. -- we must understand what encourages it and fight against that. The idea that all cultures are exempt from critical examination is the surest way to avoid doing this, and so perpetuate such brutality. -- CAV Link to Original

The Weekly Standard brings us an amusing evisceration of an entire genre of advertising, journalism, and what could only be very generously termed pop science: All that's required is a catchy theme--"Generation Nice" is perfect--and a thick filter to block distractions or contrary evidence from entering in. As corrected, [ New York Timesstaffer and "public 'intellectual'" Sam] Tanenhaus's story begins by denouncing the common charge of millennial narcissism. It is a canard, he insists, a cheap shot. How does he know? The correction notice for the article, as indicated by the Standard, has severed all factual links between the conclusions made in the article and reality. As for what might motivate such silliness, the article pretty much nails it. It's never pretty when journalists cross-pollinate with academics. The hacks, clutching "data" and "studies," take on the bogus authority of the eggheads, and the eggheads, startled by the thought that somebody might at last pay attention to their work, reach for the mindless sensationalism of the hacks. Entire segments of Good Morning Americaand the NBC Nightly News often result. Things only get worse when the academics and the journalists collide with marketing consultants, each of them appealing to the authority of the others. The sharp-edged world in which people live and act slips away, and a gauzy world of focus groups and surveys takes its place. I would further speculate that the respective desires for authority and attention often derive from a deep-down suspicion that one isn't really engaging in productive work, or at least a failure to understand what that would entail. The article draws an apt parallel between this and astrology, but it could have gone further, such as by considering some of the many thinking errors (Search "satisfied customer" and see links in following text.) made by their respective fans. -- CAV PS: As of this morning, a quick Google search reveals that I am not the first to come up with the neologism in my title. That said, it doesn't show up at Word Spy, although sevensilly generational labels do. Link to Original

This weekend I was saddened to learn, belatedly, that Burgess Laughlin passed away at the end of August. I knew Mr. Laughlin only through some of his writings and the comments he left here from time to time. Nevertheless, it was clear to me that he was a thoughtful, independent, and benevolent man. He took ideas seriously, all the way from being sure to understand them properly, through to applying them to his own life. This latter included helping others -- including me on more than one occasion -- see the truth for ourselves. One of the best examples of this that I know of can be found in his blog posting on "The Third Greatest Sacrifice?", which reads, in part: I asked him why he was unhappy. "Because," he said, "what I most want in life is to do something creative, like writing novels." I asked, "Why don't you make that your central purpose in life, and throw yourself into the work full-time?" He gestured to the walls of his living room, lined with paintings and the best of sound systems, a way of living that a beginning novelist could not afford. He said, "Learning to write novels could take decades of full-time effort. I would have to give up all this." I was too stunned to respond. Now, with better understanding of the issue, I would reply: "So what?" Although I did not know Mr. Laughlin personally, I found it reassuring just to know that he was out there, fighting the good fight -- or, as he put it so well, "making progress". And, although he is gone, he has left the world a better place for all his friends, in the form of the better understanding he imparted to us and the inspiration his success provides. -- CAV Link to Original

Two-Edged Precedent Over at Forbes, there is an interesting article about a Supreme Court precedent that the Uber ride-sharing service is using to withstand legal attacks from various taxi monopolies: When Chief Justice Roger Taney - later of Dred Scott infamy - wrote the majority opinion in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), he understood its implications for the vibrant economic development of that day. If granting a charter to one company meant the state could not charter competing companies, technological change and its accompanying improvements would cease. Turnpike companies would soon awake "from their sleep," Taney warned, suing railroads and canals to stop them from competing, throwing society "back to the improvements of the last century" instead of permitting it to benefit from "modern science[.]" The Supreme Court held that a charter did not protect a company against competition or being rendered obsolete in the course of progress. This precedent may help Uber in the immediate term, but I see danger in the fact that the ruling is about companies with state-granted monopolies. Certainly, if the state has a need to contract with a private concern, there should be measures in place to ensure that others can compete for future contracts. But the state contracting for services is not the same thing as the state establishing a monopoly. Nor is the state protecting the right of a company doing business the same thing as the state contracting with it. Although large-scale engineering projects are so often undertaken by the state as to usually be called "public works", they should not be, any more than the state ought to restrict market entry into areas like personal transportation. There is a real danger here of the role of the state being taken to be permitting companies to operate, rather than ensuring their freedom to do so. Reliance on this precedent may well thwart the immediate attacks on Uber, but it leaves the door open for (and arguably invites) the state to grant licenses to (i.e., impose similar restrictions or massive regulations on) these new services. This article praises capitalism, but we must remember that capitalism entails freedom to contract between individuals. Unless we start questioning the premise that "public works" and "public utilities" (like Uber?) are legitimate roles for government, Uber may well win the battle against the rent-seeking taxi companies, but lose the war against the many-tentacled, meddling state. Weekend Reading "In Titan, the biography of John D. Rockefeller, the family patriarch required his kids to live for periods of time in relatively humble circumstances, away from the family mansion." -- Michael Hurd, in "How to Successfully Enjoy Your Stuff" at The Delaware Coast Press "Religionists, socialists and other puritanical mentalities sanctimoniously blame 'materialism' for what is in fact an anxiety issue." -- Michael Hurd, in "Do You Spend Too Much?" at The Delaware Wave "By announcing his intention to appoint an Ebola 'czar' in an effort to coordinate the US government's response to the ongoing spread of this deadly disease in West Africa, President Obama is illustrating a shortcoming in our current biosecurity and the ability of our health system to respond to emerging infectious diseases." -- Amesh Adalja, in "The Path Forward on Ebola and Other Public Health Emergencies" at Forbes My Two Cents Because those afflicted by infectious diseases can, through carelessness or intent, harm others by sickening them, there can be legitimate, non-rights-threatening government actions (e.g., quarantines or border crossing restrictions) to prevent their spread. The Adalja article illustrates how government meddling in the medical sector that has nothing to do with its legitimate function is impairing its ability to perform that part of its function. And this is on top of the fact that such meddling often violates individual rights or threatens to do so. The Benefits of Bookmarking Once I found a bookmarking service that lets me focus on being able to find information later -- rather than trying to turn what should be an unobtrusive task into a social networking time sink -- I quickly found it useful in many areas of my life. And yet I am still occasionally am surprised at the usefulness of the practice. This morning, a tip on organizing medicine cabinets popped up during an unrelated search through my bookmarks, solving a problem that had been annoying me over the past couple of days. I had completely forgotten about the tip, as well as the fact that I'd either already thought about the problem at some point in the past, or bumped into it at some time I couldn't act on it -- like surfing on my phone while in a checkout line. --CAV Link to Original

1. Yesterday afternoon, I enjoyed a bottle of Three Philosophers ale, crafted by Ommegang Brewery: Three Philosophers is a unique blend of a Belgian-style dark ale and Liefmans Kriek, an authentic cherry ale from Belgium. Cherry chestnut in color, it's opaque but not cloudy with full carbonation topped by a smooth, tan head. Flavors and aromas of roasted malt, molasses and brown sugar, dark fruits, brandied raisins and chocolate, Three Philosophers has notable sweetness with low hop bitterness. The mid-palate shows a soft malt center which gives way to a dry, warm, wine-like finish. The complexity of this beer make it a good candidate for ageing gracefully, as spicy sherry and port notes should intensify. [bold added] This was my first beer from Ommegang, but after enjoying the beer and visiting their site -- which includes Chef's directions for making a sauce from it! -- I know it won't be my last. 2. Steve Simpson of the Ayn Rand Institute opens an inspiring post about Constitution Day with a the following quote from James Madison: In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example ... of charters of power granted by liberty. Like the author, I can't come up with a more succinct way of describing the proper relationship between individuals and government. 3. If you're around my age, you might wonder what happened to professional bowling, which used to be all over TV. He was caught in a catch-22: if he won, his financial backer would kill him; if he missed the spare, the "unsavory characters" would. Instead, he avoided the entire predicament by faking a heart attack. The above comes from a section on "action bowling" in "The Rise and Fall of Professional Bowling" at Priceonomics. The article may or may not answer the question it raises, but it's an entertaining read nonetheless. 4. Going through a backlog of bookmarks to interesting articles, I see two on baseball: One describes how an Australian cricket ground was readied for an exhibition baseball game; the other describes how a new axe-handled bat might improve swinging power while reducing injuries. -- CAV Link to Original