Gus Van Horn blog

Within an article about Monsanto, which Bloomberg Businessweek notes is "America's third-most hated company", is the following instructive and amusing tidbit: While the debate about the impact of [Genetically Modified] crops on the environment continues, the question of their effect on human health looks increasingly settled. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, Britain's Royal Society, the European Commission, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others, have all surveyed the substantial research literature and found no evidence that the GM foods on the market today are unsafe to eat. One of the few dissenting research papers, a 2012 study in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology that found tumors in rats fed modified maize, was retracted by the journal last fall after questions were raised about the researchers' methodology. [format edits, bold added] The science is "settled"? I'm hardly surprised, but where have I heard this claim before? Isn't the source of the rabid hatred for Monsanto from the left, which is currently in throes of "climate change" hysteria? And isn't it interesting -- setting aside the question of the validity of the claim that climate science is settled -- that the same people who cudgel us to death with that mantra sweep under the rug settled science they don't like? I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to divine what "science" might mean to such cherry-pickers and recommend the article for a much more positive reason: It is very interesting. Near the end of the article, there is an account of an epiphany by one businessman who "hadn't heard many good things" about the company before having to decide about negotiating with it. It concludes: What [Climate Corp. co-founder David Friedberg] realized, though, is that the best way to think about Monsanto is as a technology company. Its technology "just happens to take the form of a seed," Friedberg says. "As I got to learn about it I was like, 'Wow, this company is as innovative and as impressive as Google.' " Read the whole thing, and consider passing it along to any reasonable adult of your acquaintance who might be on the fence about the safety of food obtained from genetically modified crops. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing at PolicyMic, Chris Miles notes a drop in Denver crime and increased Colorado tax revenue six months after the state legalized marijuana. "We are witnessing the fruits of Colorado's legal weed experiment, and those fruits are juicy indeed." [his emphasis] Miles does concede that it may be too soon to draw the conclusion that crime has dropped and we'll overlook his common mistake of regarding the increase in tax revenue (i.e., government looting) as a good thing. He is nonetheless right to take heart from the fact that the sky has not fallen, as Governor Hickenlooper had predicted. But is he is wrong to get too excited about the "fruits" when the vine on which they grow is obviously diseased. For example, later in his article, Miles notes the following: In yet another sign that 2014 is shaping up to be the year of marijuana reform, the Department of Drug Enforcement (DEA) is waving a white flag and surrendering on a crucial policy issue that has kept legalization from gaining traction across the nation. The DEA is now asking the Food and Drug Administration to remove marijuana from its list of the most dangerous and harmful drugs. This could signal a radical shift in the way our government regulates and enforces weed. Marijuana advocates hail the decision as a necessary policy step towards eventual legalization, removing a critical roadblock that has constrained marijuana legalization on the local and federal levels. It is, of course, the first step of many. Then there's the city of Washington, D.C. This November, it's all but certain that D.C. will vote on a marijuana ballot measure and even pass it, setting up a battle with Congress to legalize. This could be the most important battle yet in the marijuana prohibition fight; D.C. is considered a staging ground for many local policies that get enacted throughout the country, and a victory for pot could open the floodgates elsewhere. [link in original] Granted: So long as the government is improperly meddling with our affairs, that meddling should at least be as reasonable as possible. Marijuana is indeed, to my knowledge, no more dangerous than alcohol, so, as long as the government is telling people what to ingest and what not to ingest, it should at least refrain from claiming that marijuana is one of the most dangerous drugs. But it seems that too many people are content with having permissionfrom the nanny state to use marijuana, rather than remaining concerned that it is telling us what we can and cannot consume in the first place. If the proper purpose of the government is to protect individual rights, why is it proscribing behavior, such as drug use, that harms no one but the user (if the drug is dangerous)? (This is a separate issue from the state properly punishing public intoxication, where there is a danger to others.) It is interesting that the word "right" appears only twice on this entire web page -- both times within a copyright notice. The good news, such as it is, is that it may well be that the innocuousness of legalized marijuana will somewhat lessen the credibility of drug laws. The bad news is that such laws will remain on the books and, worse, their precedence left unquestioned, unless those who are interested in using marijuana (among others) stand up for themselves on moral grounds, and work to end government meddling with individual decisions on what foods and drugs we consume. Denver may be a mile high in more ways than one these days, but it isn't really much freer. -- CAV Link to Original

Through an entryin Word Spy, I have seen an explanation of a phenomenon that has annoyed me to no end over the years. Thanks to the explanation, I see that much of my annoyance may have been unnecessary, or at least greater than it should have been. Have you ever been asked a question that at once seems clueless and patronizing? Have you ever innocently asked a question only to be surprised that you caused offense? Either way, this explanation may be for you, either to help you keep your patience or to keep from testing someone else's. The blog posting uses a common type of question fielded via Twitter by the organizers of a yearly convention of Doctor Who fans (aka "Gally") as a springboard. For the sake of brevity, I have shortened some of the author's points to essentials. Read the whole thing for more complete explanations. The con[vention] has grown so much in recent years that tickets sell out quickly. In the run-up to the moment tickets went on sale this year, I saw some twittering to the official @gallifreyoneaccount expressing worry that the system might not work well enough to purchase tickets easily. ... [T]here are a few things going on here: A) This was most definitely done from a place of love. ... However… That concern is irrelevant. Like I said, intent only goes so far. It's great that folks care about the convention, but that doesn't make this kind of tweeting look any better from the receiving end (or to bystanders), and that's because… C) They've already thought of it. That's their job. The people who work for Gally (or the comic store or Big Finish, etc.) think about this stuff all the time. It's what they do. If they haven't thought about it already, there are far bigger problems going on, besides… D) At this point (mere hours before the event), it's too late to do anything about it, so you just look like a dick. If the folks in charge genuinely don't know what kind of situation they have on their hands, the appropriate time to let them know is far in advance, and preferably via some sort of private message. It's only polite. By making a public statement like this… E) You're basically saying (publicly) that you have no faith in the organizers. You might as well just declare "You're an idiot and I do not trust you to do this thing correctly. Oh, and I am also hereby cementing my right to say 'I told you so' after the fact if something does go wrong." Yep. That's how it comes off from the outside. If I was on the receiving end, I'd be tempted to say "Okay, so you don't trust me to get it right? Maybe just stay home and skip the whole thing, how 'bout?" [link and emphasis in original, footnote indicators dropped] I have both hastily asked questions like this -- mostly when I was young -- and have probably misjudged the intent or intelligence of others who have asked such questions of me. Of course, in modern culture, presumptuousness and cluelessness (much of it fostered by endemic context-dropping and dis-integrated thinking that often looks like it) are rampant and there may well be even less to such a question than meets the eye. In any event, I thank the author for making me better aware of the issue, both in terms of improving my ability to judge others and in terms of making sure my own advocacy never comes off this way. -- CAV Link to Original

The more I read about Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran's primary defeat of a strong Tea Party challenger, the less prophetic I feel. First, recall that Thad Cochran engineered his electoral victory by pandering to voters who want government handouts, or at least depend on them and fear that they'll suddenly be cut off. I didn't anticipate this, not being as good as I ought to be at gauging just how low a big government conservative can stoop. And now we have some interesting ratiocinations, albeit from flawed premises, from leftist commentator Froma Harrop. Regarding the great net cash flow of federal loot realized by the Magnolia State, Harrop asks "where do they think that [money] comes from?" She even notes that "not every item on [the Tea Party's] wish list would be bad for progressive America." Taken out of context, she sounds almost like she is beginning to see the light regarding the government taking money from one person and handing it over to another. But -- no surprise here -- she hasn't. The first clue is her use of the term "progressive America", rather than "progressives" or even "Americans". Commenting on the same phenomeonon Harrop indirectly does, of conservatives who are happy to take tax money, I noted: [P]erhaps most relevant to anyone financially dependent on another: What happens when those who are being looted either decide they've had enough, or are themselves ruined? Ayn Rand had something to say about that, too. Harrop's thinking along these lines surprised me a little, though it shouldn't have. She doesn't see ruin in the cards and she doesn't view this problem in terms of the individuals who are being robbed. But she does think of a way, lower federal taxes, to solve the problem of the wrong kind of people getting the goods. States paying most of the federal taxes would be able to retain more of their wealth. They could redirect some of those savings toward things Washington underfunds, say, commuter rail. They could leave more money in the pockets of their own taxpayers to be spent in their communities. Importantly, wealthy progressive regions would have control. They could choose to continue helping poor Mississippi schools as a kind of internal foreign aid. But they could also decide not to send millions to multimillionaire cotton farmers. In Harrop's eyes, it isn't individuals who are being robbed, but states. And, in her own particular dictator fantasy, it's the left-leaning blue states who would be better able to call the shots were they the ones, rather than the feds, pocketing the loot. She even thinks of them as having "internal foreign aid" programs for other states. Not being eager for such "largesse", but well aware of the consequences of governments controlling purse strings, I am reminded less of foreign aid and more of dictators deciding to pass loot to political allies and deprive it from political enemies. If the Democrats want to pretend that an orderly tranistion to a free economy is impossible, they have a reason for doing so, and don't think they won't hesitate to suddenly cut people off if they can convince themselves they're doing the right thing. Harrop wants to, and chooses what she sees as a safe target: cotton farmers. (Let me reiterate that I don't think they -- or anyone else -- have a right to a penny of money taken from another by force.) If Harrop's line of thought is any indication of how voters think in blue states -- and I think it is -- then advocates of individual rights and limited government need to think past mere elections and consider the need for a massive, abolitionist-like campaign of "moral suasion". This includes boning up on why limited government is good. Whether government loot runs out because there is nobody left to rob, or because the people in control of its distribution feel like cutting it off, or because we have decided it's better to be in charge of our own lives is up to us. But that "us" includes voters who may not yet see the dangers of dependence or the propriety of their keeping their own individual money. Harrop is right to ask where the money comes from, but wrong to treat money as government property, or to pretend that individuals, by virtue of consent, aren't part of the government. Individuals in the blue states should continue Harrop's line of inquiry until they see that Connecticut taking their money and their control over their own lives is just as wrong as the United States doing so. (And if charity is important to them, nothing would stop them from creating their own "internal foreign aid programs", using the money they earned.) -- CAV P.S. Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute writes a good blog post on why government theft doesn't bother most people as much as it should. Link to Original

If there's a gift horse you should look in the mouth, it's one coming from a "service" premised on the idea that it's okay to confiscate your money and call the process voluntary. That's what I did Saturday when I received an unexpected refund check from the IRS. Despite recent revelations about the way the IRS handles its own email records, I was still amazed at what I learned. Here's a sample: One tax preparer said that it was common for her clients to receive refunds due to mistakes by the IRS. About five percent of her clients got unexpected refunds last year, and, "Eighty percent of the time, the checks were issued erroneously..." Anyone who cashes such a check will be expected to repay it -- with penalties and interest. According to MSN Money, "The IRS shows no mercy just because it sent the money in the first place." The agency warns against cashing such checks until you have received an explanation, but can take up to a year to send one, if it ever does. Consumer's Digest advises calling the agency and, if still in doubt, voiding the check and sending it back with an explanatory letter. Consumer's Digest notes that "back-and-forth arguments over stiff penalties can get nasty, even if IRS made the error." A tax attorney interviewed for the article noted that only once in his sixteen years of practice had he ever seen a penalty waived. Many of the errors pertain to IRS mistakes related to estimated tax payments -- and are followed by notifications of penalties for the "missed" payments. The last article I cited puts it well: ""[T]he IRS and other agencies make mistakes on a level that would put any of us out of business." Great: So on top of having my money taken, and wasting time preparing taxes, I have to screw around tracking down someone else's mistake -- or else. Any passer-by who feels the inclination to call me a something like a "whiner", or say something to the effect that this is all "part of being an adult" or some other such nonsense should check his premises. Being robbed and harassed on a regular basis is not the way things ought or have to be. I am astounded that so many people tolerate the existence of a band of legalized thieves who can plead incompetence while also brandishing the threat of financial hardship or jail time. -- CAV Link to Original

An article at NPR describes how important kitchens were in the Khrushchev-era Soviet Union as gathering places and centers for civic culture. The piece is somewhat erroneously titled "How Soviet Kitchens Became Hotbeds Of Dissent And Culture", but it doesn't really answer that question. Nevertheless, the piece is still quite interesting for the perspective it lends to our current cultural and political situation: When Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1953, one of the first things he addressed was the housing shortage and the need for more food. At the time, thousands of people were living in cramped communal apartments, and one bathroom with sometimes up to 20 other families. "People wanted to live in their own apartment," says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev. "But in Stalin's time you cannot find this. When my father came to power, he proclaimed that there will be mass construction of apartment buildings, and in each apartment will live only one family." They were called khrushchevkas -- five-story buildings made of prefabricated concrete panels. "They were horribly built; you could hear your neighbor," says Edward Shenderovich, an entrepreneur and Russian poet. The apartments had small toilets, very low ceilings and very small kitchens. But "no matter how tiny it was, it was yours," says journalist Masha Karp, who was born in Moscow and worked as an editor for the BBC World Service from 1991 to 2009. "This kitchen was the place where people could finally get together and talk at home without fearing the neighbors in the communal flat." The emphasis on privacy -- which helps "[set] man free from men" is interesting for many reasons, among them: how much value even a semi-private space brought with it, how much privacy we still have by comparison, and how much privacy has come under attack of late. Anyone blithely says things like, "I have nothing to hide," in reaction to the torrent of news about our deteriorating ability to keep the meddlesome out of our affairs, would do well to read this. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing at the Telegraph, Christopher Booker notes yet another example of cooked-up global warming data: [blogger Steven] Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA's US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been "adjusting" its record by replacing real temperatures with data "fabricated" by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed "Data tampering at USHCN/GISS" [i found only this, in a cursory search. --ed], Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on "fabricated" data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century. This finding, interesting in itself, reminds me of an item I encountered a few years ago in Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth (which I gave a mixed review) to the effect that an apparent warming trend in surface temperatures might merely be an artefact caused by development near once-isolated temperature measuring stations. I am sure that the adjustments unearthed by Goddard would be justified (or excused) as corrections, but it would seem that, if anything, the adjustment should have been made in the opposite direction. That said, it is possible that the data Goddard and I are discussing are from different sources: I am writing based on a skim of his piece and my memory of a lengthy and turgid volume I read over four years ago. Booker concludes his piece by reiterating a past speculation of his: Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology. That's charitable, given that there is a clear incentive to massage the data, in the form of acquiring loot and prestige from the government. -- CAV Link to Original

Consistency Slandered as Hypocrisy Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute notes: Whenever I attack Social Security as an immoral institution that needs to be abolished, someone announces that my arguments are irrelevant because Ayn Rand was a hypocrite who took Social Security. (One version of this "argument" claims that Rand ended up a poverty-stricken welfare recipient, which is only wishful thinking on the part of her opponents.) What most people don't realize -- and what surely is relevant to the debate -- is that Rand herself argued that opposing Social Security and cashing Social Security checks is not hypocritical. Watkins points to a post by Onkar Ghate (also of ARI) that elaborates on this point. It reads in part, as excerpted by Watkins: Precisely because Rand views welfare programs like Social Security as legalized plunder, she thinks the only condition under which it is moral to collect Social Security is if one " regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism" (emphasis hers). The seeming contradiction that only the opponent of Social Security has the moral right to collect it dissolves, she argues, once you recognize the crucial difference between the voluntary and the coerced. Social Security is not voluntary. Your participation is forced through payroll taxes, with no choice to opt out even if you think the program harmful to your interests. If you consider such forced "participation" unjust, as Rand does, the harm inflicted on you would only be compounded if your announcement of the program's injustice precludes you from collecting Social Security. This being said, your moral integrity does require that you view the funds only as (partial) restitution for all that has been taken from you by such welfare schemes and that you continue, sincerely, to oppose the welfare state. This is also a point many conservatives would do well to take to heart. Weekend Reading "It's psychologically healthy to attach conditions to your self-worth" -- Michael Hurd, in "Don't Expect Your Self-Esteem for Free" at The Delaware Coast Press "... I suggested to my client that she suggest to her friend that it pains her to see him so selflessly - yes, selflessly, i.e., with no concern for himself - squandering his life. " --Michael Hurd, in "Remind Them Why You Care" at The Delaware Wave In Further Detail The Hurd piece on self-esteem mentions the issue as it relates to parenting, noting in part that, "[C]hildren are actually quite perceptive and can often see through the unwarranted, feel-good muck that adults (especially in today's society) sometimes inflict upon them." I am glad to hear this since current fashions seem to call for enormous amounts of unwarranted praise to be directed towards children. In reaction, and in the hope of helping my children know they can rely on me for useful feedback, I make it a point to praise actual accomplishments, but not join in the chorus of phony "affirmation". The Art of Oddsmaking Updating myself on the World Cup yesterday evening, I ran into a mesmerizing graphic that allows one to check on the current odds of any given team advancing to: the knock-out stage (winning its pool or placing second in its pool, figured separately), the round of 16, the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, or the final. Last, but Not Least It is hard to believe that I have been a father for three years today! (I have had two children for just a bit over a year, too.) I remember seeing each of my children for the very first time like it was yesterday, and marvel at how much they have grown in that short amount of time. Happy birthdays, Pumpkin and Little Man! --CAV Link to Original

1. I really enjoyed seeing Clint Dempsey score the fifth-fastest goal in World Cup history (30 seconds into the match) en route to the U.S. Men's National Team defeating Ghana 2-1 during round robin play Monday. Our best hope of advancing past the first round hinged on a victory, given that Germany and Portugal are also in our group -- and despite the African nation's having sent us home from the last two tournaments. 2. I like the movie, but I'm not so sure The Big Lebowski merits enough academic study to justify a volume titled, The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies. (HT: Snedcat) 3. Pumpkin, who will turn three this weekend, surprised me a little by throwing an "actually" at me for the first time. She was playing with baby dolls and I mistook a powder dispenser for a bottle. "Actually, that's baby powder," she corrected me. 4. What's it like to be bitten by a black widow spider? I'd take the following, from an account of the work of an early researcher, as a good executive summary: One of the questions [Allan] Blair had in mind when he began his experiment was whether people acquire immunity over successive bites. He never answered this question because, as he frankly admitted, he was afraid of having another experience like his first. But if you're harder to convince, you can find more detail at the above link. -- CAV Link to Original

An information technology expert lists six reasons the government's claim that the IRS "lost" emails pertinent to its targeting of conservative political groups is ... implausible. After detailing the six reasons, the article concludes: [Normal] Cillo, who has been working in IT for roughly 16 years and is currently a consultant for a tech company, said it's possible the IRS is telling the truth if the federal agency is "totally mismanaged and has the worst IT department ever." Other than that, it's just not "feasible," he told TheBlaze. "If the IRS' email server is in such a state that they only have one copy of data and the server crashes and it's gone, I've never heard of such a thing." " I don't know of any email administrator that doesn't have at least three ways of getting that mail back," he added. "It's either on the disks or it's on a TAPE backup someplace or in an archive server. There are at least three ways the government can get those emails." [bold added, minor format edits] Isn't it funny how the question of whether President Obama -- or his minions in the government -- is evil or incompetent keeps coming up? Such a question of a government official would almost always make much less of a difference in our daily lives were voters to demand a government limited to its proper purpose, vice one that runs almost everything. Of course, perhaps on some gut level, Obama senses that many Americans are content to rely on the government as if it were some sort of autopilot. I am no IT expert, but I personally found the assertion that the IRS (for whom record-keeping would presumably be a fine art) lost the emails an insulting explanation. Furthermore, with the domestic spying cat out of the bag, Obama also sounds like he is practically daring Republicans to do what Steve Stockman has done: request the metadata from the emails in question from the NSA. The real question about Barack Obama isn't whether he is evil or incompetent or both, but how long Americans will put themselves in a position in which the answer to such a question is so important. Our government clearly has too much power over our daily lives. -- CAV Link to Original

The case for reparations for slavery has been revived lately by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for whom I once had a fair degree of respect. Fortunately, Walter Williams has made mincemeat of that evil idea on many levels, starting with the moral: ... I also agree that slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is that slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living. Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today's blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there's a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first -- through intimidation, threats and coercion -- confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday? [bold added] But Williams is not done, yet. Many advocates of "reparations" like to claim a superior knowledge of history, as if this bolsters their case for committing wrongs against the innocent. Williams goes on demonstrate that such claims, as judged by the proposed remedies, are just about as ridiculous as the white guilt he lampooned ages ago through his "Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent". It is clear from this piece that advocates of reparations must be ignorant or evasive of almost everything but the facts that slavery once existed in this country, the slaves had African heritage, and persons of European heritage owned slaves. This is a piece well worth reading in full and keeping in mind, in the event one realizes that an otherwise intelligent and thoughtful adult is falling for the kind of nonsense that Coates has decided push. -- CAV Link to Original

In "Rum Deal: Counting Up All the Ways America's Booze Laws Are Terrible", Jim Saksa of Slate exposes an absurd regulatory environment and the perverse incentives it creates. Although these regulations vary quite a bit by state, many of the same economic phenomena play out across the country. Perhaps the most obviously ridiculous regulations, in terms of purchasing alcohol, exist in Pennsylvania: Throughout the article, it is clear that these regulations are vestiges of Prohibition, and do little to encourage anyone to enjoy alcohol responsibly -- not that that would be a legitimate function of government, anyway. The reader will indeed wonder why such silliness remains on the books at all -- and Saksa will have a big part of the the answer. These laws create an artificial set of circumstances that enable some individuals to enrich themselves. This parasitical class sees to it that nothing changes: Let me emphasize that I respectfully disagree with Saksa's use of the term "legitimate" to describe this racket. It may be legal, but the government has no business making such laws in the first place. And that issue leads me to a larger point about the many other similar tales out there about absurd regulations. Too many people take for granted the notion that the government is right to regulate the economy, and see such rules (and their inevitable consequences) as somehow unusual or "excessive". But that glosses over the nature of governmentas having "the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice". What is absurd is not so much any particular regulation, or whatever legalized criminal enterprise it creates -- but the very fact that the government is meddling with ordinary trade. The government should be protecting us from those who would violate our rights -- not doing just that by telling us what to do. Were more of us intolerant of being told what to do, no amount of lobbying or demagoguery on the part of the creatures of government meddling would succeed in maintaining the idiotic -- and wrong -- status quo of the government running practically everything for long. -- CAV Link to Original

Stephen Moore of Fox News has just pronounced himself unfit for commentary on sports (and highly suspect as a journalist) by means of writing a piece titled, "Why I Won't Be Watching the World Cup". This piece falls into a genre I named "The Anti-Soccer Editorial by Someone Who Has No Appreciation for the Game". After first checking that Moore's and Robert Tracinski's respective pieces aren't actually Microsoft Word templates that slipped past editors, I remain confident in calling this "a phenomenon that crops up reliably in America every four years, around the time of the World Cup". Conservatives usually write these. The equally ridiculous leftist equivalent, which I spotted only this time around, might be called "Soccer ISAnti-American, and That's a Good Thing". I will never fault someone for his taste in sports, so long as he either has some solid reasons for enjoying (or not) the spectacle a given sport has to offer, or admits that he just doesn't know enough about a sport to enjoy watching it. Moore does neither: I'm an American. I want scoring. I want action. Maybe it's part of the instant gratification culture but 90 minutes of kicking with zero or one or two goals doesn't exactly move heaven and earth. This is coming from someone who professes to admire golf -- a game whose participants walk (or ride) in between swings of a club and seek to score fewer points than their opponents. (I'm not very knowledgeable about golf, but, having played a little -- and having also realized that its popularity might exist for good reasons -- I can see past these "problems". Or has Moore just enough guile not to claim that he enjoys a "chukker of golf" now and then?) Moore's criticism of soccer is about as even-handed and well-informed as the following hypothetical criticism I made of basketball some years ago: Basketball ... is [racked] with inflation, robbing its players of the value of the successes they have already produced by making them have to score "too many times" to win a game. No wonder it's popular with blacks, who bloc-vote for Democrats (and their inflationary policies), and [is] becoming more so in socialist Europe, particularly in nations (like Greece and Italy) which historically had high inflation and unstable currencies before the Euro! And the spiritual experience for the fans, of seeing points scored, is cheapened by the fact that it occurs so often. By Jove, one might as well watch footage of a printing press reeling off fiat currency! Basketball may allow players to use their hands all they want -- just like men in inflationary economies are free to use their minds -- but it retroactively robs them of the value of their past efforts! Moore intriguingly claims to have argued that soccer is "a manifestation of the labor theory of value applied to sports". But if he hasn't the patience to gain some modicum of insight as to what is going on in a typical soccer game, why should I bother to read these? How would he know, even if, arguendo, he is parroting the words of a completely accurate assessment, a correct conclusion? Moore's article is no more an indictment of persuasive writing than the (illegal!) flops for easy scoring chances he uses to condemn soccer are of that game. No that I know enough to judge Moore's motives in writing this piece, but there is a lesson here for anyone interested in persuasive writing aimed at a rational audience. -- CAV Link to Original

Projection, Anyone? A joke has become the latest excuse for feminists to spew bile online, in the form of a Twitter hashtag campaign to end Father's Day. Apparently, Father's Day is just another way of perpetuating the patriarchal dominance that is so rampant in American society. Forget that Mother's Day is also a thing, that's not important. All that matters is that we end a day dedicated to the monsters among us, or something. While we're surveying intellectual and psychological wreckage... I find it absurd (and revealing) that so many such "outraged" people both emulate in deed their own stereotypes of non-leftists as "haters" and act as boorishly as they suppose "all" men do in a supposed show of "liberation". Weekend Reading "ecause of its vital role, health care should be an industry in which success should be most praiseworthy, given that financial viability is essential for continued operations and the opportunity to purchase health care services." -- Amesh Adalja, in "In Defense of Jeffrey Romoff" at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Apparently, smiling can unleash the power to self-fulfill a happy prophecy." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Health Benefits of Smiling" at The Delaware Wave "[T]here are things you can do to make transition a little less traumatic." -- Michael Hurd, in "Life Is Not Static" at The Delaware Coast Press "If we really want to kill off the campaign finance monster, we need to drive a stake through the wrong-headed view of free speech at its heart." -- Steve Simpson, in "The Campaign Finance Monster that Refuses To Die" at Breitbart In More Detail The Simpson piece, through its historical survey of attempts to regulate spending on political campaigns, demonstrates just how close we are to completely losing government protection of freedom of speech. The "Marriage Problem" I enjoyed Robert Krulwich's explanation of a mathematical solution for quickly making an optimal choice from among a limited pool of options: It works any time you have a list of potential wives, husbands, prom dates, job applicants, garage mechanics. The rules are simple: You start with a situation where you have a fixed number of options (if, say, you live in a small town and there aren't unlimited men to date, garages to go to), so you make a list -- that's your final list -- and you interview each candidate one by one. Again, what I'm about to describe doesn't always produce a happy result, but it does so more often than would occur randomly. For mathematicians, that's enough. Read the whole thing for historical background and quick-and-dirty explanations of the strategy and why it often works. --CAV Link to Original

1. If you live in the St. Louis area, you should make the newest location of this business your beer emporium -- or have your head examined: Craft Beer Cellar was founded in 2010 by ex-restaurateurs Kate Baker and Suzanne Schalow on a desire to create a beer store that they would want to shop at, passion for the industry, and a commitment for changing the world of beer. They fell in-love with craft beer in the late '90s, and began a quest (which they're still on) for amazing beer, the people behind it, and all that it entails! Their focus is on awesome beer with flavor, not those beers whose ingredients are intended to lighten color or lessen quality. This store is amazing. I didn't spend an eternity looking, but they had almost everything I could think of and, for a slight per-bottle premium, it was possible to buy individual bottles, thereby creating a custom six-pack. There is a tasting bar with five taps in the back and the brothers Nickelson, obviously passionate about fine beer, offer outstanding customer service. 2. My son -- now one year old! -- loves puppets, just like his Grandpa. He particularly likes a panda hand puppet and waves back at it when I make it wave to him. 3. A professional in the field of imaging software has devised a technique to produce paintings very much like Vermeer's: It took another seven months to actually paint the picture. The work was tedious and very hard on the back, but the machine worked well. My experiment doesn't prove that Vermeer worked this way, but it proves that he COULD have worked this way. And the impossible white wall came out looking about the way Vermeer painted it. Tim Jenison's efforts are further detailed, with the help of Penn Jilette and Teller in a documentary titled, Tim's Vermeer. 4. Says Greg Ross: Here's a special kind of genius: In 1997 Daniel Nussbaum rewrote Oedipus Rex using vanity license platesregistered with the California Department of Motor Vehicles[.] [bold added] Read it all at the link above. -- CAV Link to Original

In an op-ed I encountered some time back, Eugene Volokh comments on the alteration of the term "white", under the influence of multiculturalism, to refer, not to an accident of birth, but to a socioeconomic status: Calling Asians white also creates new lines, possibly very dangerous ones. "White" has stopped meaning Caucasian, imprecise as this term has always been, and has started to mean "those racial groups that have made it." "Minority" has started to mean "those racial groups that have not yet made it." (A recent San Francisco Chronicle story even excludes non-Mexican-American Latinos from the "minority" category.) This new division is as likely as the old to create nasty, corrosive, sometimes fatal battles over which racial groups get the spoils. So long as we think in terms of "white" and "minority," we risk disaster, no matter which races are put in which box. Volokh initially notes that the usage may partially reflect the fact that, for example, "the Asian experience shows that racial divisions and hostilities can subside over time." Maybe so, but as glad as I am of that fact, I find myself more impressed by the danger. This deliberate sloppiness in usage fails to acknowledge the adversities faced by anyone who has suffered as a result of racism -- either as a victim or as an opponent. This sloppiness also obfuscates the moral virtue of productivity while acknowledging its results as targets for government looting and redistribution. In sum, this sloppiness exposes multiculturalism for what it really is: an excuse from critically examining culture, from judging people as individuals, and for looting the productive for the sake of the unproductive. It does nothing to foster the idea of judging people as individuals to call the prosperous ones "white" and insinuate that that makes them a legitimate target for being taken advantage of. -- CAV Link to Original

Last night's flaying of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a primary by his Tea Party challenger sounds much more like a defeat of Eric Cantor than a win for the Tea Party. Cantor, it seems, alienated both Republican activists and average constituents. Apparently hoping to establish himself as some kind of Republican boss in Virginia, Cantor made initially successful attempts to take over his party's apparatus. These were eventually repelled -- but not before he and his operatives had alienated the more active members of his own party: Starting this spring, Eric Cantor and his chief consultant Ray Allen, along with various other goons from his Young Guns network, invaded county and congressional district Republican conventions and manipulated the rules to slate off Republican activists to deliver congressional district chairmanships to his allies... And, much later: ... Cantor's bullying across the state, his attempt to disenfranchise Republican activists (and not just tea partiers), outraged Republicans across the state. The blogs, Facebook, and Twitter exploded in the last few months over these actions and it gave [challenger David] Brat at the very least statewide sympathy if not an army of potential volunteers who didn't need much motivation. Cantor's district is dead center in the state and its [ sic] not that hard to get to... This account goes on to note in passing that Cantor is "also notorious for not having very good constituent service". That's a bad sign for advocates of limited government since our goal is to disentangle the government from our daily lives, presumably making the elimination of the need for such "services" a goal. Regarding these "services", another commenter notes: Cantor's constituent services moved more toward focusing on running the Republican House majority than his congressional district. K Street, the den of Washington lobbyists, became his chief constituency. In Virginia a couple of months ago, several residents of Cantor's district groused that they were going to support Brat because they did not think Cantor was doing his job as a Virginia congressman. Others no longer trusted him. In today's context of pressure-group warfare, this hardly sounds like the refutation of a big-government Republican. There is a fundamental difference between being afraid one's boy in Washington might not bring home a scrap of pork -- and wanting to be free to bring home some bacon. Returning to the first commenter, it speaks volumes that: Nobody would have given Dave Brat the time of day no matter what he attacked Cantor with if it weren't for this colossal mistake rooted in Cantor's vanity and dream to somehow become the Republican boss of Virginia... The Tea Party may not be dead in terms of being able to secure electoral success, but it isn't exactly thriving in terms of generating electoral interest in limited government: Eric Cantor shouldn't have had to be such a poor candidate to have suffered a primary defeat. The fact that Cantor lost will have short-term repercussions, to be sure, but the manner of his defeat should be taken by advocates of limited government as a sign that much work remains if our cause is to ignite a true revolution. I know practically nothing about David Brat, but an opportunity to advance the cause of limited government, or at least stymie greater government intrusion, has fallen his way. Only time will tell us how he will use it. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing at Bloomberg View, Ramesh Ponnuru takes issue with Republicans who are calling Barack Obama's draconian new regulations on coal a "power grab". He holds that something "more complicated, and ominous," than that is going on: "[O]fficials in all three branches of government have found a way to achieve their policy goals while shielding themselves from accountability." Ponnuru explains: The Clean Air Act, initially written in 1970 and last significantly amended in 1990, was intended to deal with traditional air pollution, the kind that clogs your lungs and clouds your view -- not with the possibility that chemicals emitted into the air might affect the entire globe through their effect on the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, got around that problem by holding that Congress had "carefully" declined to define "air" to exclude those upper reaches. A vast regulatory apparatus is now being built on Stevens's inference. One set of regulations is before the Supreme Court, and it shows how hard it is to fight climate change through the Clean Air Act. To treat greenhouse gases as a conventional air pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency was required to impose stringent rules on anything that emitted more than 100 to 250 tons of it a year. The EPA decided that this wouldn't be "feasible" and set new thresholds at 100,000 tons a year instead. In other words, the EPA can't apply the Clean Air Act to climate change without rewriting it. So the justices will have to decide how much rewriting they'll let the EPA do. [link in original] Past precedent tells me that the sky is the limit regarding how much rewriting the EPA can do. Ponnuru goes on to explain how government officials in all three branches can hide from accountability as the scope of this law is relentlessly expanded. This piece is a wake-up call, for it brings into focus a couple of significant problems facing everyone concerned with correcting our country's political trajectory. First, certain legislation that is bad enough to begin with is both being opened to arbitrary interpretation and will be very hard to repeal. Second, some laws are so bad that their effects could so quickly erode our standard of living (e.g., from skyrocketing power costs) that it could affect the time horizon for affecting the cultural change needed to turn the tide back in favor of greater government protection of individual rights. Aside from laws that blatantly or more immediately threaten freedom of speech, laws like this would seem deserving of a high place on the list of laws that should be repealed. (A Forbes columnist offers a somewhat less pessimistic view of the effects of the latest proposed rules, but this is not the first time a proposed rule under the Clean Air Act has caused alarm.) -- CAV Link to Original

Joseph Stromberg of Vox writes about research on how the use of laptop computers to take lecture notes affects later recall. Even when students using laptops were not engaged in other activities during lectures, they fared more poorly on tests than those who took notes by hand. Interestingly, this discrepancy was in the realm of the recall of concepts from the lecture: The two groups of students remembered factual information about equally well. Intriguing to me is why the researchers think this is the case: Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, the psychologists who conducted the new research, believe it's because students on laptops usually just mindlessly type everything a professor says. Those taking notes by hand, though, have to actively listen and decide what's important -- because they generally can't write fast enough to get everything down -- which ultimately helps them learn. [bold added] This reminds me a little of Objectivist thinking about concept-formation: The process of concept-formation does not consist merely of grasping a few simple abstractions, such as "chair," "table," "hot," "cold," and of learning to speak. It consists of a method of using one's consciousness, best designated by the term "conceptualizing." It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one's impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one's perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one's knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking. [bold added] Mueller and Oppenheimer's findings and their interpretation make sense to me. It also squares with a recent experience of mine with attempting to use lecture notes taken with a laptop. My hand-written lecture notes from college were always a great resource; not so much were some notes I took on a laptop a couple of years ago when I reviewed a course I took some time earlier: Not having boiled things down to essentials, I found myself throwing my hands up at the useless -- albeit fact-filled -- notes. I am no Luddite, but I have always rolled my eyes a bit at the various expensive educational programs that seek to put a laptop into the hands of every student. A computer is a tool: It is only as good as its user. I used to object to the premature introduction of students to laptops on the grounds that their minds were unprepared to take advantage of them. Now, I have a new objection: It appears that the misuse of laptops for note-taking (i.e., when the purpose of doing so is to glean conceptual content from a lecture) can actually interfere with education. -- CAV Link to Original

Judging Edward Snowden, Part 2 Last week, I noted that Peter Schwartz and Amy Peikoff had commented on the possible motives for Edward Snowden's release of sensitive documents (including evidence of illegitimate government spying on American citizens) and his subsequent actions. This week, Schwartz answered his critics, starting with the following: I have found this discussion instructive, not just regarding its immediate subject matter, but also more generally, with regard to making calls on difficult questions regarding the behavior of others. Weekend Reading "The need for tidiness and organization is often a need for control, and this is not necessarily a bad thing." -- Michael Hurd, in "OCD and the Perils of Risk Aversion" at The Delaware Coast Press "[L]ying can be hazardous to your mental health." -- Michael Hurd, in "What Honesty Really Does for You" at The Delaware Wave "[Michael] Rubin's case studies are replete with officials downplaying, whitewashing, and evading their adversaries' flagrant duplicity and brutality." -- Elan Journo, in Review of Dancing with the Devil at The Middle East Quarterly In More Detail In his review, Journo helpfully suggests that we learn from the diplomatic mistakes we made in our Cold War diplomacy with Russia and China -- and apply the lessons to our current failed dealings with state sponsors of terrorism. A Rare, Documented Sasquatch Bill Watterson Sighting A comic strip writer (and fan of Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson) recently managed to get a few installments of his strip drawn by the man himself. Here's the dialog from the strip that got the ball rolling: To see the above strip, and to read the incredible and amusing story behind the collaboration of Watterson with Stephan Pastis, go here. Pastis also provides links to the first three of the collaborative strips. Last but Not Least As I sometimes joke to my friends about my very limited writing time, as a father of a toddler and an infant: I have even less time to monitor such things as site statistics, or I would have noticed some time ago that Gus Van Horn surpassed half a million unique visitors. Thank you very much for your part in helping me reach this milestone. -- CAV Link to Original

<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="1"></a><b>1</b>. <b>Should the government pay women to go on dates with socially-awkward men</b>? Until some time in the past year, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/17/socially-anxiety-dating-government-should-pay-women-date-men_n_3293626.html">there was a blog that seriously advocated such a position</a>. (HT: <i><a href="http://www.wordspy.com/words/incel.asp">Word Spy</a></i>) <br /><br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="2"></a><b>2</b>. Have you a favorite program that its vendor discontinued, or which otherwise disappeared from the market ages ago? <a href="http://vetusware.com/">VetusWare.com</a>, which bills itself as "<b>the biggest free abandonware downloads collection in the universe</b>", might be able to help. <br /><br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3"></a><b>3</b>. There's a web site,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tylervigen.com/"><i>Spurious Correlations</i></a>, that can help make the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation">point</a>, humorously, that <b>correlation does not imply causation</b>. Today's "spurious correlation" <a href="http://www.tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=1597">shows</a> that, for example, <a class="variable" href="http://www.tylervigen.com/discover?type_select=fun&amp;link_var=US+spending+on+science%2C+space%2C+and+technology&amp;exclude_county=ON">US spending on science, space, and technology</a> very strongly correlates with <a class="variable" href="http://www.tylervigen.com/discover?type_select=death&amp;link_var=Suicides+by+hanging%2C+strangulation+and+suffocation&amp;exclude_county=ON">suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation</a>, with a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence#Pearson.27s_product-moment_coefficient">correation coefficient</a> of 0.992.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="4"></a><b>4</b>. After having my sleep interefered with almost nightly for well over a year by my daughter, who fought sleep tooth and nail as an infant, <b>my son's love of sleep</b> is a huge (and much-appreciated) relief. His first attempt to communicate with me (excluding crying, and at least that I successfully decoded) was to tug my pants leg to request bedtime.<br /><br />A couple of nights ago, he nearly made me laugh after a night feeding with how strongly he wants to sleep when he's tired. As I held him bedside to put the bottle away, he lunged for the center of the bed. He's done this for Mrs. Van Horn a few times, too. Bless you, Little Man!<br /><br />-- CAV Link to Original

Calling it the "Mississippi Paradox", E.J. Dionne makes a very interesting point regarding the recent Senate primary in the Magnolia State. (The Tea Party candidate has forced a run-off against Thad Cochran, the most senior Republican in the Senate.) Noting the ability of Senator Cochran to steer federal funds to his state, Dionne asks, "Can you hate the federal government but love the money it spends on you?" He then points out how much the state rakes in relative to tax receipts: [Haley] Barbour and his allies did all they could for their friend, but there was that nagging contradiction at the heart of their argument: Cochran said he was as stoutly conservative and penny-pinching as McDaniel, but also the agent for many good things that come this state's way courtesy of the despised national capital. Mississippi taxpayers get $3.07 back for every $1 they send to Washington, according to Wallet Hub, a personal finance website. The Tax Foundation ranks Mississippi No. 1 among the states in federal aid as a percentage of state revenue. This issue isn't unique to Mississippi, as Tom Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute has noted. Entire demographics "benefit" similarly, and calling their entitlements into question makes many Tea Partiers go wobbly. Meanwhile, however, the tea party's "left brain" harbors the same moral impetus that has justified bigger and bigger government since the Progressive Era. The basic idea is that some people's needs constitute a moral claim on the lives and wealth of others. The list of needs is endless: economic stability, job security, housing, health care, retirement funds. To satisfy those needs, government concocts regulatory and wealth transfer schemes that coercively subject the individual to society. Over the years, each new program -- from the Federal Reserve to Social Security, Medicare, and beyond -- acquires an aura of moral dignity that renders it politically untouchable by later generations. The needs of others permanently displace the freedom of the individual. [links dropped] Tom Bowden's overall argument, which I agree with, is that the Tea Party must fully embrace the moral ideal of individualism or it will perish. While it might be tempting to accept such loot, it is not, as someone Dionne quotes, truly a way to be "anti-Washington politics ... to make sure that we [get] as much of it here as we [can]", if there is not also an active effort to put an end to the practice of government theft. See Ayn Rand on the question of government grants and scholarships" for a more complete exposition of this point, and from which I quote the following: The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims. I am not here to castigate the Tea Party, but to warn it. The Democrats are well aware of this contradiction within the Tea Party and are prepared to demagogue it, as Dionne's piece demonstrates: Indeed. "If Mississippi did what the tea party claims they want ... we would become a Third World country, quickly," said Rickey Cole, the state Democratic chairman. "We depend on the federal government to help us build our highways. We depend on the federal government to fund our hospitals, our health care system. We depend on the federal government to help us educate our students on every level." This doomsday prediction is highly debatable, for many reasons, but three immediately come to mind. First of all, who knows how much better the economy overall would be without the government taxing and regulating trillions from it a year? I suspect that the loot Mississippi gets in exchange for the rest of the country being dragged down (and itself with it) is a mere pittance by comparison. Second, in terms of implementation, have the Democrats ever heard of sunsetting? Taxation and central planning must be done away with, but in an orderly fashion. The contention that, say, Social Security must be abolished is not equivalent to saying that we should immediately cut everyone off from it. Third, and perhaps most relevant to anyone financially dependent on another: What happens when those who are being looted either decide they've had enough, or are themselves ruined? Ayn Rand had something to say about that, too. The real question isn't Dionne's, but the following: "Can you love your life and still leave supporting it to others?" I know what we can call Dionne's implied answer. It is revealing that he relies on fear and feelings of weakness to sell it. -- CAV Link to Original

Like Harry Binswanger last week, John Stossel comments on Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which is being used to fan "income gap" hysteria. The following point is well worth keeping in mind: But focusing on this disparity ignores the fact that over time, the rich and poor are not the same people. Oprah Winfrey once was on welfare. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was a farmhand. When markets are free, poor people can move out of their income group. In America, income mobility, which matters more than income inequality, has not really diminished. Economists at Harvard and Berkeley crunched the numbers on 40 million tax returns from 1971-2012 and discovered that mobility is pretty much what The Pew Charitable Trusts reported it was 30 years ago. Today, 64 percent of the people born to the poorest fifth of society rise out of that quintile -- 11 percent rise all the way into the top quintile. Meanwhile, 8 percent born to the richest fifth fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Sometimes great wealth makes kids lazy and self-indulgent, and wrecks their lives. [bold added] Stossel elaborates, noting that various government programs purporting to help the poor actually harm them. In particular, he notes that Barack Obama's decision to enforce rules against unpaid internships is helping those disappear. Many of "the poor" had been able to obtain skills vice money that way, enabling them to become better off later. (Two side notes: (1) We can see the Labor Theory of Value at work again, in terms of both a failure to appreciate the value of knowledge and in terms of a fixation on monetary rewards for work. (2) It's interesting to see which laws this Chief "Executive" selectively enforces.) All I would add to this is that "the poor" also enjoy, thanks to the elements of capitalism in our economy, many things that had not been available at any price in our more ... level ... past. Televisions, smart phones, the Internet, and automobiles come to mind. This is not a criticism of Stossel's piece, which he has to delimit for the sake of readability, but one of the income gap jihadists, who are counting on (or sufficiently blinded by) envy to keep us from noticing what their reforms ultimately put at risk. -- CAV Link to Original

On the heels of news [subscription required] that Barack Obama intends to further cripple the economy with draconian new regulations on coal comes yet another example of fraudulent data used to fan "climate change" hysteria. In John Hinderaker's words, "A prominent advocate for the endangered polar bear theory has just admitted to an actual scientist that he made the whole thing up". The following "clarification" will appear as a footnote in the next statement issued by said advocate's group: As part of past status reports, the PBSG [i.e., the Polar Bear Specialist Group --ed] has traditionally estimated a range for the total number of polar bears in the circumpolar Arctic. Since 2005, this range has been 20-25,000. It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand. It is also important to note that even though we have scientifically valid estimates for a majority of the subpopulations, some are dated. Furthermore, there are no abundance estimates for the Arctic Basin, East Greenland, and the Russian subpopulations. Consequently, there is either no, or only rudimentary, knowledge to support guesses about the possible abundance of polar bears in approximately half the areas they occupy. Thus, the range given for total global population should be viewed with great caution as it cannot be used to assess population trend over the long term. [bold added by John Hinderaker] Even if these numbers weren't fabricated, it would be wrong for the federal government to dictate how (or whether) we can generate electricity. The fact that Barack Obama's plan will (at best) make thirty-nine percent of our electricity more expensive merely underscores the hazards of having the government being in charge of things outside its proper scope: Our liberty is forfeit and even the most benevolent gang in power can be wrong. But even that best-case scenario is far from what we have now, as John Kerry's recent rhetorical question, "What's the worst that can happen?" shows. -- CAV Link to Original

So-called open "offices" have been the rage in business architecture for quite some time, but they have always struck me as one of the most mind-numbing, hellish settings for any attempt at productive work. (I have been fortunate enough to completely avoid them.) The data bear me out, and it looks like this inane practice is finally being questioned: The open office was originally conceived [pdf] by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow... In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers' attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed [pdf] some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse [he] fared. [links in original, bold added] It is astounding to me that something premised on the idea of helping the flow of ideas would fail to start with the following obvious question: "Where are the ideas supposed to come from?" Following that line of questioning might have averted the need to consider the enormous loss of productivity that treating ideas as if they grew on trees (or come from people cast together in a pit) has caused. In light of this folly, it is interesting to consider what Ayn Rand had to say about focus and the value of being free from distractions: ... Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality--or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make... [bold added] Perhaps I am wrong to be astounded: Being out of focus has been fashionable for even longer, and would preclude the ability to appreciate what being in focus can do -- or the consideration of making sure anyone else can achieve such a state. -- CAV Link to Original