Gus Van Horn blog

A blogger at the New York Times claimsthat Cliven Bundy, a rancher who has been refusing to pay grazing feesto the federal government for his use of public land has "accidentally explained what's wrong with the Republican Party". I couldn't agree more, but hardly for the condescending reason given in the blog post. Bundy, who had been paying his fees until the government wanted to restrct his use of the land to protect an endangered species, is in arrears. When the Bureau of Land Management came in to collect, in the form of confiscating part of his herd, Bundy led, apparently successfully, an armed standoff with the BLM. He has also, in the meantime, basked in the publicity, volunteering an inconsistent hash of opinions on all manner of subjects, including speculating that blacks were better off under slavery than the dole. Both journalists seem quite happy to equate Bundy with Republicans in general, and to label both "anti-government", hence part of the basis for the conclusion by the Times blogger that Bundy has accidentally spoken a profound truth regarding the lack of traction the GOP has with non-white voters: Mr. Bundy, weirdly, is onto something here. The rush to stand with Mr. Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest incarnation of conservative antigovernment messaging. And nonwhites are not interested, because a gut-level aversion to the government is almost exclusively a white phenomenon. I think that the government's ownership of all this land is improper and that the BLM ought to be abolished, but the solution to that problem is not an anarchic revolt. There are ways to change the law, and they involve persuadingothers that the change ought to be made. I also agree wholeheartedly with the local, interviewed for the news article, that, "You just can't let this go by, or everybody is going to be like, 'If Bundy can break the law, why can't I?'" To the degree that the Republican Party attempts to take advantage of anti-government rhetoric (as opposed to arguing that we should reduce government to its proper scope), it deserves the lack of popularity it gets. But the blogger seems too eager to act as if race determines political sympathy. If "minorities" aren't hopping onto the GOP bandwagon, shouldn't one ask why? Might cultural factors enter this equation? Might the relevance of the message to those hearing it factor in, in some way? It could help to recall that, as Ayn Rand once pointed out, "The smallest minority on earth is the individual." On top of that, the blogger is blinded by the following false dichotomy: that our choice is improper government -- or no government at all. (The whole notion of the government "overreaching" in this matter is a manifestation: Either the government ought to be in the business of owning this land (in which case, it can set whatever terms it wants on its use) or it shouldn't. This is not the same thing as assuming that the only way to remove such government intrusions is to rid ourselves of government. It's relevant to the electoral fortunes of anyone opposed to improper government that, as the blogger points out, Asians opposed Mitt Romney by a three-to-one margin, or that: ... 55 percent of Asian-Americans and fully 75 percent of Hispanic-Americans say they prefer a bigger government providing more services over a smaller one providing fewer services, compared with just 41 percent of the general population." [links in original] But it is bigoted -- and something that ought to be ignored -- to add that these fortunes will suffer simply because, "... America is not the overwhelmingly white country it once was." In terms of its actions, the GOP is all but indistinguishable from the Democrats. Furthermore, unless the GOP challenges the assumption that our choice is government meddling vs. anarchy -- by upholding the idea that a proper governmentis one that defends individual rights -- it will never look like a substantive or attractive alternative to the Democrats. This means it must do a better job of explaining how the kind of meddling favored by the Democrats harms everyone, while also repudiating anarchy. If the GOP would only start doing those things I doubt it would matter that America is no longer "overwhelmingly white". The party would start attracting individuals -- who would realize their freedom is at stake -- if not in droves, at least in significant numbers. -- CAV Link to Original

Will Leitch at Sports on Earth sees an indictment of American culture in the following quote by Juergen Klinsmann, coach of the men's national soccer team: Leitch speaks of the "fetishizing" of coaches (and the "pampering" of athletes) in American sport as if coaches don't really matter, which is why I think he gets Klinsmann's advice half-wrong: If this isn't an example of the Marxian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTlEsHuvJpwpermeating the culture, then I don't know what is. Work -- decent or better, anyway -- requires brains, and is not necessarily a heavily physical pursuit. Work, including sports of all kinds -- as Klinsmann's attempted radical overhaul of American soccer demonstrates -- demands that someoneassume some kind of thinking role. In sports, the coach takes on much of that role, whether as provider of inspiration, instructor, tactician, or strategist. Leitch sounds like he doesn't think coaches are working hard, and this would explain his notion that American admiration for good coaches is some kind of hunger for authority, which is out of line. I think he may be right that Americans are more likely to admire good coaches, but I think it is because, at least on an intuitive level, we generally see the need for brainpower to guide physical labor. Perhaps, because the player has to do more of his own thinking in soccer, the role of the coach is not so obvious to many Americans. Perhaps, in addition, the lesser autonomy of players in American sports makes Leitch's charge look more credible than it is. The trend of helicopter parenting does, too, but this is a new cultural development that would appall Americans of past generations. I don't think of Klinsmann as urging Americans to become less American -- and would not regard it as a good thing if he were. Improvisation is an important strand of our culture -- as our scientific and technological leadership, our original form of government, and much of our art (jazz music, for example) attest. If anything, Klinsmann is urging Americans to embrace one of the best aspects of our culture by reminding us that more improvisation occurs on the pitch than off in soccer. Perhaps he is also doing us and our kids a favor by calling off the helicopters. Is U.S. soccer, as Leitch asks, too "hung up on" coaches? I think so, but not for the reasons he puts forth. I think Americans are having to learn what makes a good coach in soccer in much the same way we have had to develop an appreciation of other aspects of the game. -- CAV P.S. Leitch notes -- and I really appreciate this -- that, "Mocking soccer from an American perspective might have felt clever 10 years ago; now you just look like an idiot." I think, though, that part and parcel of that mockery is the idea that the sport is completely alien to our culture. I disagree with both anti-soccer bigots and anti-American ones on that point. Link to Original

The "Squeegee Bandit" View of Obligation Over at Voices for Reason, a post elaborates on an apt analogy -- the roadside "squeegee bandit" -- for a very common rationalization for the welfare state: According to some of the welfare state supporters I've debated, this is the paradigm for a moral society. People do things for you, and now you owe them. Older Americans paid for the government schools that educated you, so now you owe them Social Security. They paid for the roads, so now you owe them Medicare. They slaved and sacrificed for you, and now it's your turn to slave and sacrifice for them. What's missing is your consent. In a free society, other people don't get to impose what they regard as benefits on you and then extract what they regard as a fair price from you. Can you imagine trying to make it through the mall if clerks could stuff iPhones and silk ties in your bag and then force you to cough up your credit card? At last, someone has come up with a better term for this kind of thinking than "social 'contract' theory". Some day, someone is going to attempt to bandy about the term "social contract" in a conversation with me. I can't wait to ask them to elaborate, and then say something like, "Oh, you mean, the 'squeegee bandit' view of obligation!" Weekend Reading "To the extent that government pays for our medical care, it will demand a say in how that money is spent." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Should Doctors Limit Medical Care to Save Money for 'Society'?" at Forbes "The past shapes our attitudes and beliefs, but as thinking human beings we have the power to change faulty attitudes and beliefs." -- Michael Hurd, in "Your Past Does Not Define You" at The Delaware Coast Press "If you don't like doing something, why use alcohol to make you like it?" -- Michael Hurd, in "When Use Becomes Abuse" at The Delaware Wave "L.A.'s riots are a harsh reminder that replacing facts with feelings -- which was done by city leaders, the president and a pack of journalists -- is a matter of life and death." -- Scott Holleran, in "Remembering the 1992 Los Angeles Riots" republished in The 1992 Los Angeles Riots Not Your Father's Physician Paul Hsieh's discussion of the disasterous ramifications of ObamaCare once again comes with some very practical considerations for physicians and patients alike. I, for one, will fire any physician who speaks of third-party "cost control" as a good thing. Computer-Generated Laughs A post at Futility Closet discusses a study of the riddles produced by the 1990s JAPE [Joke Analysis and Production Engine] computer program: "The results showed that the JAPE-produced riddles were identified as jokes just as reliably as the human-produced ones, and both were easily distinguished from the non-jokes," writes Rod Martin in The Psychology of Humor (2007). "Although the JAPE-produced jokes were rated as less funny, on average, than the human-produced jokes, a number of the JAPE riddles were rated as being just as funny as those produced by humans. Follow the link to the post for a few of the better ones. --CAV Link to Original

1. My nearly three-year-old daughter to my nearly one-year-old son on the subject of books: "Those are not snacks." 2. My favorite cloud storage/synching service, Dropbox, has a policy against its customers placing copyrighted material in folders shared with others, but not against keeping such material in one's own folder. It does this without anyone directly inspecting the contents of the files. As a writer at TechCrunch puts it: If you know what "file hashing against a blacklist" means, feel free to skip the rest of this post. Dropbox checks the hash of a shared file against a banned list, and blocks the share if there's a match. Thus the company stays on the right side of protecting both property rights and its users' privacy. The article elaborates for the edification of anyone for whom "those words sound like voodoo". 3. Linux users have an easy way to reorient camera video footage sent from family and friends whose cameras seem hell-bent on making you cock your head in atonement for not buying the same product: mencoder -ovc lavc -vf rotate=1 -oac pcm test.mov -o testOutput.mov Make the obvious substitutions for the file names, and follow the link for options pertaining to direction and magnitude of rotation.) Also, how is such a question "strange", in the words of the author? Perhaps the fact that I only recently thought to search for an answer provides the clue: It probably seems to most people like something that would take expensive software and at least ten minutes of fiddling around per video to fix. This solution was free (as in beer) and took perhaps thirty seconds, most of which was downloading time. (I already had mencoder installed as a dependency for something else. Had I not, I might have had to spend a couple of minutes doing that.) 4. The good news: Uruguay is making marijuana legal. The bad news: Uruguay is giving the world a textbook example of how improper government regulation makes the whole concept of "legal" farcical: Uruguay is the first country in the world to attempt to create a nationwide market regulating the cultivation, sale and use of legal marijuana. Once the system launches, registered users should be able to buy their weed in pharmacies, grow as much as six plants per family and harvest 480 grams a year at home, or join cultivation clubs that can have as many as 45 members and 99 plants. The idea of some pothead keeping all these numbers straight elicits a chuckle from me. I also wonder what the lawmakers were smoking when they came up with this set of regulations. (This isn't even the whole thing.) Might I suggest an alternate title, "Uruguay Replaces One Government-Fabricated 'Crime' with One Thousand, Man"? Of course, this is no different from what other governments around the West have been doing for over a century, except that it looks like a liberalization of policy, at least from one angle. See also "'Privatizing' Our Infrastructure" and "It's All a Federal Case." Were I Uruguayan and interested in smoking marijuana (I am neither.), I think it would be more straightforward and perhaps even less risky to do so illegally. -- CAV Link to Original

Andrew Napolitano and George Will together show just how intellectually lazy our President is. Will likens him to an adolescent, aptly summarizing and illustrating with examples four pillars of his oratorical approach: The invocation of straw men, The proclamation that any given debate is already "settled" and "over", The declaration that there is nothing to discuss because everything is going well, and The assertion that there can be no intelligent or honorable disagreement with him. Will is astute, but even he misses one. Napolitano finds it for us, though: My reasons are a secret.To be clear, the President is not defending the legitimacy of witholding from America's enemies of information that they could use to harm her citizens. Rather, President Obama is claiming that the legal reasoning for something he is doing against the letter of the Constitution is a state secret. That "something" is killing American citizens without due process of law. Napolitano elaborates: Welcome to the strange new world of Barack Obama's war on terror, in which there are no declarations of war against countries that foment or harbor enemy activities, as the Constitution authorizes, and in which the president claims the powers of a king by killing whomever he wishes under a rationale that his lawyers wrote for him and that he has desperately tried to keep secret. The Obama administration is probably right to fear the revelation of this so-called legal way to kill. The appellate court decision is a profound and sweeping rejection of the Obama administration's passion for hiding behind a veil of secrecy... This does not itself prove that Ayn Rand was correct to base her arguments in favor of individual rights, limited government, and capitalism on man's nature as a rational animal. Nevertheless, it is instructive to see this man's ignorance or contempt of our minds going hand-in glove with a complete disregard for our liberty and indeed our very lives. If we aren't entitled to our own lives, why trifle with explanations? if our consent isn't really important, why waste time arguing with us that could be spent further aggrandizing one's power? It is a cultural low point that this country has twice elected a man who routinely shows us such blatant and limitless contempt for our intelligence. -- CAV Link to Original

An editorial in the New York Post warns of the "tyranny of the organic mommy mafia", and introduces a book by one Julie Gunlocktitled, From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes Us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back. That author calls this new "mafia", "an outgrowth of helicopter parenting" [link added], although I'm inclined to say that it's just a variant. And that cultural phenomenon is just a manifestation of the precautionary thinking that permeates modern culture. Fortunately, since my wife and I haven't been in any one location for more than a year and a half with our kids, and they're too young to attend school or interact deeply with other kids, I haven't encountered more than a whiff of this so far. But I have whiffed, thanks to an old friend of ours who was also in Boston while we were there, and has a school-aged kid. She once told us about the meddlesome parent of one of her daughter's classmates coming over and basically telling her that her daughter had to be friends with hers, as if the kids' actual wishes were irrelevant. Our friend politely, but firmly, told the other parent that her daughter was going to get to pick her own friends and she would be behind her choice. Upon telling us about this, she also was clear that this kind of behavior was not unusual coming from the other parents in her affluent suburb. Oh, boy! I'm tempted to buy the book, but it is new enough to have only a handful of customer reviews on Amazon so far. (Both the highest-rated positive and negative reviews were rated helpful by only twelve readers -- and the negative review was both brain-dead and down-rated by five times as many people.) I react to meddling pretty much the way my friend does, and I am not easy prey for alarmist fads: My interest in the book is more in the vein of cultural activism. Now that there seems to be a backlash forming to precautionary thinking, how effective might it be? Does Julie Gunlock indeed know how to fight back -- or is she like too many other conservatives, with her heart in the right place and her wit quick in ludicrous situations, but unaware of the deeper problems that make such silliness even possible? One thing is clear to me: Part of fighting back is making sure both that one's kids learn how to think for themselves and that they know not to confuse conformity -- neither with the passive herd nor those focused on riding that herd -- with objectivity. -- CAV Link to Original

Mitch Albom notes the following, of a black high school student whose video from a left-wing demonstration recently went viral: [W]hen I told her many students write moving essays, overcome odds, have great extracurriculars (like her debate team position) and also don't get in to U-M -- despite higher grades and scores than hers -- she grew frustrated. "I'm doing the best I can in this life," she said. "If it's not reflected in my academics, I don't know what else I need to do." ... And with that, Brooke Kimbrough wasn't white or black: She was one of countless kids today who feel that without their first college choice, their future is doomed. I told her it's not. She can do great things attending Michigan State, Iowa, Western Michigan or Howard -- all fine universities that accepted her. I found much to be indignant about in this episode, but see that Albom did not let that get the better of him as a writer. He got past that and saw the opportunity to reach a young mind, and perhaps many more like her. Polemics have their place, but they are hardly the only means of moral suasion. -- CAV Link to Original

Atlantic Cities describes a new business, Breather, that offers short-term bookings of office and meeting space. The founder realized the need for such a service after a large amount of business travel caused him to become painfully aware of the shortcomings of such places as hotel lobbies and coffee shops. As of late March, there were five Breather locations in Montreal and five in New York, with a rollout in San Francisco slated for May and another in Boston to follow later this year. Naturally, I wanted to test-drive a couple of the spaces, so I downloaded the free app -- the icon, a simple white circle with a friendly little green tree inside, is appropriately soothing -- and quickly booked a Breather near Penn Station, in midtown Manhattan. In the app, you can find Breather locations on a map, browse photos and room details, and reserve a space for anywhere from 30 minutes to an entire workday. Prices are accessible: $25 per hour in New York, $15 (Canadian) in Montreal. ... Breather's Penn Station location is in a nondescript office building on Eighth Avenue. As I waited for the elevator, juggling hot coffee and my bags, I was grateful not to have to talk to anyone to check in. At the door, identified by the little green tree, I punched in the code that was sent to my phone, and entered. And that was it. Did I sigh with relief when I closed the door behind me, taking in the daylight streaming through the large window, the comfy couch, the elegant Edison-bulb chandelier, the worktable with its friendly jar of Tootsie Rolls? Absolutely. The service is similar to the Lyft ride-sharing app, in that it helps people with extra capacity make money from people who need it for a short time: Since one of the best uses of Breather is as on-the-fly meeting space, I visited with [founder Julien] Smith at one of his newest locations, in the Flatiron District. It was so new, in fact, that he hadn't been there yet. The company acquires its commercial spaces through a combination of rent and revenue sharing with local property owners. Because the spaces are small, ranging from 130 to 400 square feet, they aren't easily usable by traditional business tenants. As a result, they are often vacant. But these small, well-situated downtown spaces by definition make for attractive Breathers. This is an idea whose time has come, particularly for business travelers, but Smith isn't limiting himself to that market. His first locations in his home town of Montreal taught him that there is a need -- not always from travelers -- for a similar service in smaller markets. Some time ago, a commenter on a post about an Internet service I used to get a cheap car part shipped to my home noted the basic principle behind the usefulness of the Internet -- lowering transaction costs of information exchange. I never tire of seeing the new ways people keep inventing to take advantage of this economical way of facilitating trade. -- CAV P.S. Lyft just launched in St. Louis, and I saw my first mustachioed car that day, and before I heard about it in local media. Predictably, the government taxi monopoly will seek an injunction against it, rather than improve the way it does business. Link to Original

1. Kepler-186f, as scientists have recently announced, is the closest thing to another Earth found in the cosmos so far: Kepler 186f is not a perfect replica, however. It is closer to its star -- a red dwarf that is smaller, cooler and fainter than our sun -- than the Earth is to its; its year, the time to complete one orbit, is 130 days, not 365. It is also at the outer edge of the habitable zone, receiving less warmth, so perhaps more of its surface would freeze. "Perhaps it's more of an Earth cousin than an Earth twin," Dr. [Thomas] Barclay said. At the end of the article is an interactive feature about the 950exoplanets discovered so far by the Kepler mission. 2. Little Man has become quite the proficient crawler lately. He is now also an avid chaser, although he sometimes gets mixed up and crawls away when invited to play. He is also, much to his father's delight and relief, an ardent napper. A day or so ago, I was washing bottles while Mrs. Van Horn and Pumpkin were out. Little Man crawled into the kitchen, as he often does, but continued over to me, and stood up, clinging to a pants leg for support. (Or was he tugging it?) When I picked him up, he yawned and put his head on my shoulder. He was out like a light in minutes. 3. Google has announced a modular smart phone, which Ars Technica says may be "the last one you'll need to buy": ... Ara, at least as a concept, is fantastic. Who wouldn't want the ability to some day print out new parts for their smartphone at home, expanding its life expectancy to six years and beyond? Google's willingness to try something so ambitious in public is energizing, particularly in the era of the get-rich-quick smartphone app. Project Ara's goals could transform the industry, give people greater control over their own devices, and free them from the annual cycles of obsolescence. It's flexible platform suitable for everyone, everywhere, from every walk of life. It could also make it stupid-simple to take advantage of major hardware innovations, not to mention making certiain kinds of repairs as painless as they should be. (I replaced my first smart phone after I determined that the cost through my carrier was about the same as repairing its power button. I was otherwise quite happy with it.) It's about time. 4. The latest invasive insect species from South America is the "crazy ant". ... Tawny crazy ants and red imported fire ants share an evolutionary history since their native ranges overlap in parts of South America. Their arms race began there, with fire ants evolving venom to defend themselves and crazy ants evolving a detoxification mechanism as a counter-defense. Now the chemical warfare has been re-engaged here on a second continent, playing out across the Gulf Coast. And for a second time in the past century, a new invasive ant species is dominating and drastically transforming ecological communities. The good news is that crazies beat the reds 93% of the time. The bad news is that crazy ants are attracted to electronics. -- CAV Link to Original

Some time ago, I noted that Massachusetts had joined an effort to bypass the Electoral College. Dick Morris provides an update: So far, nine states and D.C. have joined, casting 136 electoral votes, halfway to the 270 needed to put the compact into effect. The ratifying states are Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, California and Rhode Island. Both houses in New York have passed it, and it's on Gov. Andrew Cuomo's desk. And it has already passed one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina and Oregon. These states, plus New York, represent 107 votes. Combined with the others, that's 243 votes. Morris notes that a group funded by George Soros is behind this effort and that Barack Obama carried all but two of these states. In my earlier posts, I elaborated on why this is a terrible idea, but Morris gives a few additional reasons I hadn't considered: Under the electoral vote system, they figure why beat the drums to get a high turnout in New York City when the state will go Democratic anyway? But if it's the popular vote that matters, the big-city machines can do their thing -- with devastating impact. And think of the chances for voter fraud! Right now, the biggest cities, the ones most firmly in Democratic control -- Washington, D.C., New York City, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco -- are all solidly in blue states. Not only does this make it unnecessary to maximize turnouts there, but it also makes it unnecessary to promote double voting, fraudulent voting, and all the other tricks of the trade at which Democrats excel. Morris correctly calls this an "end-run around the regular constitutional amending process" and notes that a simple majority of the states ratifying this arrangement (vice two-thirds of Congress and three quarters of the states) will be enough to put it into effect. We are dangerously close to losing yet another of the checks on unlimited majority rule that our Founding Fathers wisely put into place. -- CAV Link to Original

Tom Purcell does a good job cataloguingthe current absurdity of the income tax. (I can't agree with his suggested remedies, which would treat only the symptoms and not the underlying disease.) My "favorite", because I really felt it this year, was the ridiculous amount of time that we all have to waste (or pay someone else to waste) preparing our returns. The tax code is incredibly complicated -- so complicated that, according to the National Taxpayers Union, Americans spend 7.64 billion hours and $227.1 billion complying with the tax laws every year. Purcell goes on to note that the tax code, originally only sixteen pages long, now tips the scales at 75,000 pages. The American life expectancy is currently just over seventy eight and a half years. Let's be generous and apply it to everyone, just to see how much time we lose each year, measured in human lives: The government bans or severely restricts access to many things that cost far fewer lives each year. It speaks volumes that there isn't a frenzy to abolish taxation. This is not to say that the government should be in the business of prohibiting people from risky behavior that harms no one else, or that equivalent lives lost is a guide to its proper role. The fundamental problem is that the government is violating -- rather than protecting -- our rights. The fact that it might as well be taking over 11,000 lives per year merely illustrates the extent of the problem. And this doesn't even account for the time it took to earn the looted money or the what else it might have cost to prepare the taxes! -- CAV Link to Original

This morning, via Hacker News, I came across a remarkable biographical account, by Flor Edwards, of her childhood in an apocalyptic cult. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the narrative is the independence of its author, who began questioning things at an early age, and who doesn't pull punches when she describes what she had to overcome: When people ask me what compelled them to join, I think back to the times in which they were living: the 1960s. It was a time of protest, political turbulence and school rebellion. Baby boomers were coming of age, exploring sex and lowering their inhibitions. Hippies on the streets of California were looking for answers and Father David believed he had them. He incorporated the movements of the '60s into his evangelical mission, even writing a letter called, "C'mon Ma! Burn Your Bra" and a series of letters on "revolutionary sex." Father David believed that we could return humanity back to the Garden of Eden, the way God intended, a world of peace with humans living close to nature and serving God. He understood that the youth of the generation were ready to believe anything. [bold added] Predictably, the people attracted to this cult, having abandoned their own minds, ended up living like they were in an army, blindly following orders. But this was the choice of her parents, and Edwards' account shows -- from her early ruminations about how she would die, through the continued existence of the world past 1993, to the struggles of her fellow cult members after the death of the leader -- that to remain in this army of fools, she would have clearly had to make a similar choice too many times, and against the grain of a child eager to learn about her world. Perhaps "inquisitive" (as opposed to "independent") would more accurately describe the author when she was very young. Nevertheless, it is clear that she became stronger and more independent than many others who suffered similarly from the poor education and psychological abuse dealt out by the cult: I've heard many storiesabout kids who grew up like me and killed themselves because they didn't how to make it in the world. Some were my friends, others distant acquaintances. They'd blame their parents for not teaching them how to write checks, or fill out applications, or hold their own in a normal social setting. There are girls who became strippers because all they knew how to do was give a powerful " look of love," as taught by Father David during the flirty-fishing movement. They had no skills for working or making money, so they used their sexuality, just like their mothers did in the early days. Against this backdrop, the end of Edwards' story becomes even more inspiring: I was beginning to see that for the first time in my life I had a future. In an honors business class our professor announced that there would be an all-expense paid field trip to UC Berkeley. I raised my hand. "What's UC Berkeley?" I asked. Looking back now, I can see how naïve my question was but I also quickly learned that curiosity was going to be my greatest and only ally. I would have to forfeit seeming dumb for my own survival. [bold added] I recommend reading the whole account, because it exemplifies, on many levels, the maxim that, "To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think." For one thing, as Edwards indicates, one's own life depends on it. For another, anyone selfishly interested in broad cultural change and who understands that it must happen one person at a time, might do well to see that it can and does, and how it can occur. -- CAV Link to Original

Meghan Daum writes of the latest fad in academia: the "trigger warning". ... Originating on certain feminist, self-help and social activist blogs, trigger warnings are meant to inform readers that the ensuing material deals with subjects, such as war or sexual violence, that might upset those suffering from post-traumatic stress related to those issues. She notes the guffawing this will elicit from certain quarters, but not without asking her readers to take a good, hard look at themselves: Liberals stay away from Fox News. Conservatives shield themselves from MSNBC. We choose to live in particular neighborhoods or regions in part because we want neighbors who share our values. We rant away on social media, but we're usually just talking to people who already agree with us. We call that an echo chamber, but isn't it also a way of living inside one big trigger warning? How much difference is there, really, between refusing to read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (a trigger targeted novel at Oberlin) because it deals with troubling racial and religious issues and refusing to listen to opposing views that might make you angry? [minor format edits] Daum goes on to risk being accused of advocating her own cocoon when she adds that, "Given the choice between Fox or MSNBC, we'd be better off skipping both and reading a good book instead." But what makes a book good -- or even better than watching the news? And what is wrong with choosing to live among people who share our values? (I don't think Daum herself has taken any of the necessary steps to move into a prison any time soon.) Wisecracks aside, I think Daum is urging us to ask the right kind of question. If I read her correctly, she is cautioning us that emotion alone is no guide to action, but she seems to run out of steam shortly after. One can also counter with another good question: Can't emotional responses to certain things be appropriate? And that question leads us directly to the one underlying her column, which is, "By what standards should we evaluate our sources of information or commentary?" Daum is right that the misuse of mere emotional responses, particularly those of young and still-developing minds, can impede exposure to information or opinions that can challenge and help develop an intellect. However, some things offend because they are, by any reasonable standard, offensive; and some things are garbage that is unworthy of extensive consideration. The young need to learn the difference, and perhaps should spend some time picking through some trash. The not-so-young have no room for smugness, however: If you cannot explain why something angers you (or elicits any other emotion), it is worth taking a closer look. The difference between a fortress and a cocoon is that the former is designed to allow a look outside, and can either repel invaders or admit reinforcements. The latter provides only the illusion of safety. The Daum piece brings to mind some comments by Ayn Rand on the subject of "open" vs, "closed" minds, particularly the third alternative Daum seems to be grasping at: Do you live in a cocoon or a fortress? It is disheartening that so many "educators" seem intent on luring the young towards cocoons than helping them build fortresses. But at least they -- and we -- can all introspect, and change ourselves for the better, if need be. -- CAV Link to Original

Please Don't Take This Offer The above is the title of an email Amazon sends to each of its employees once a year: ... "The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want," [CEO Jeff] Bezos explains. "In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company." Bezos adopted the practice from a company Amazon took over. That company had figured out that the "quit money" was less expensive than being dragged down by an unmotivated employee. Weekend Reading "Sounds like a paradox, but it's true: In order to find the love you want, you have to be content with being on your own." -- Michael Hurd, in "Attracting a Healthy Romantic Partner" at The Delaware Wave "Biological determinism is the false belief advanced by scientists and even some mental health professionals that we are all hardware and no software." -- Michael Hurd, in "Human Hardware and Software: Do We Have Both?" at The Delaware Coast Press My Two Cents Writing against biological determinism, Michael Hurd takes a brain imaging study as his point of departure. It has become something of a cliche for the press to take whatever grossly simplified explanation comes with such a study and run with it, often adding misinterpretations and plain old error to the mix. But Hurd is right to focus on the the fundamental error driving the sensationalism. There are many parties, from people looking for convenient excuses to paternalistic politicians, who want this view of human nature to enjoy undeserved scientific credibility. Thorium Time? The Economist has run an interesting article about research in China and India aimed at using thorium reactors to meet significant portions of the energy demands of the respective countries. One of the cleverest things about LFTRs [liquid-fluoride thorium reactors] is that they work at atmospheric pressure. This changes the economics of nuclear power. In a light-water reactor, the type most commonly deployed at the moment, the cooling water is under extremely high pressure. As a consequence, light-water reactors need to be sheathed in steel pressure vessels and housed in fortress-like containment buildings in case their cooling systems fail and radioactive steam is released. An LFTR needs none of these. The article also explains why thorium is basically useless for building nuclear weapons. -- CAV Link to Original

1. A BBC piece on the "Great 1980s Dungeons and Dragons Panic" brought back pleasant memories of playing the game with friends during high school and college. It also reminded me of how divorced from reality so many detractors of the game were: "Since fantasy typically features activities like magic and witchcraft, D&D was perceived to be in direct opposition to biblical precepts and established thinking about witchcraft and magic," says Dr David Waldron, lecturer in history and anthropology at Federation University Australia and author of Roleplaying Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic. " There was also a view that youth had an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality." [italics added, other minor format edits] That's right: Kids like me who saw "the occult" for the fantasy that it is were to be protected from the baleful influences of a game -- by people who really believed in ghosts, demons, and such. I recall the perfect response to this coming from someone participating in my gaming group when the movie Mazes and Monsters came out: He named his character "Pardieu". 2. Are you moving? Do you have junk to get rid of? Have you a truck and the desire to make some extra money? The truckplease web site wants to help. 3. A five-year-old boy recently exposed a security vulnerability in Microsoft's Xbox. Kristoffer [Von Hassel] will receive four games, $50 and a year-long subscription to Xbox Live from Microsoft. He also knows what he now wants to be when he grows up: a gamer. His dad is leaning toward something in computer security. By the way, this isn't the first time the lad has found such a problem. 4. Whenever I hear about a final exam like this, I wonder whether the author is either offering his most clever students a quick A or is merely lazy. Write a suitable final exam for this course and supply a key. The answer is here. -- CAV Link to Original

In a piece promoting her upcoming book (The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East), Caroline Glick takes on the "demographic argument" in favor of the "two-state solution" to the problem caused by Palestinian terrorism. In 1997, the head of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics Hassan Abu Libdeh told The New York Times that he was carrying out a census which would serve as a "civil intifada," that is, as a statistical terror assault. And he was right. The goal of terrorism is to force a target population to take actions it otherwise would not have taken. The goal of statistical warfare is to manipulate numbers to coerce a target society into taking actions that it would otherwise not take. The Palestinian census claimed that by 2015, Arabs would be the majority west of the Jordan River. And once Jews were the minority, the Arabs could destroy Israel just by demanding the vote. [format edits] Glick indicates that not only was the original count inflated, but the fertility rates used to project an Arab majority in Israel are also wrong. She could have gone further: Not only has there been an entire book written debunking the premise of doomsday projections, but the implicit assumption, that how we vote is biologically determined, is also wrong. It is also noteworthy that Libdeh felt safe assuming that Israel would simply grant citizenship and voting rights to a large, hostile population within its borders. In short, Libdeh sensed confusion among Israelis and cashed in on it by coming up with a convenient set of numbers. Terrorists are wrong and weak. Just as over half a century of foreign policy appeasement was required to set up the atrocities of September 11, 2001, so have centuries of philosophical decline since the Enlightenment made the body politic easy to whip up into a panic about a trend, that, even if it weren't fabricated, needn't have meant doom. -- CAV Link to Original

John Stossel writes a column -- I mean, just barely scratches the surface -- about what's wrong with the tax code (and would be, even if taxation were a proper function of the government). A quote from Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute within sums things up quite well on that score: " What the tax code is doing is trying to choose our values for us," complains Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute. I think I choose my own values, but it's true that politicians use taxes to manipulate us. Million-dollar mortgage deductions steer us to buy bigger houses, and solar tax credits persuaded me to put solar panels on my roof. Brook objects to every manipulation in the code: "It's telling us charity is good!" [bold added] That's annoying enough to me, but what really drives me batty is the fact that you have to go looking for most of these "breaks" (or waste money paying someone to do so). And then media people and other fans of paternalistic government act like these scraps -- I learned last year that many tax "breaks" are chump change compared to what one must fork over to get them -- are good deals. News flash: Having less money of my own money confiscated is less of a bad thing than it could have been. That is not a good deal or a gift or a windfall any more than having a branch in my window (rather than a whole tree) is a good deal from a tornado. Not to sound like I'm castigating anyone who (as he should) tries to minimize his wallet's exposure to Uncle Sam, the family kleptomaniac, but ... It's bad enough to see government manipulation of private spending decisions carried out on such a massive scale. It's worse, in the same embarrassing way watching a bad comedian is, to see people so enthusiastically lap up such government "largesse". Do people check their brains at the door en masse at tax time, or does the habit of doing everything with an eye for scamming a few cents' worth of tax relief just make most people more pliant? This is a serious question. It's one thing to live in the world as it is, but quite another to forget that we aren't living in the world as it might and ought to be. The tax code is huge and it is the law, but it is a law made by men and subject to change -- not a law of nature. -- CAV Link to Original

Over the past few days, I've noticed mentions of Mozilla's firing of its CEO, Brandon Eich, for a political contribution he made years ago towards a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage. I was a little amazed that this was making much news: After all, a company has the right to hire or fire whomever it wants for whatever reason. It did seem strange to me that the firing had happened, but in more of a "Didn't they do their due diligence?" sort of way than anything else. Consider me newly enlightened, and more than a little alarmed, now. Mark Steyn, after about half a column's worth of wisecracking (and some pandering to the religious right), cuts to the chase and tells us exactly why this firing is (and should be) news: [L]et's not forget how all this targeting of "homophobic" contributions started. The IRS leaked "traditional marriage" donor lists to the gay enforcers at the "Human Rights Campaign". America has a corrupt government - so corrupt that many Americans now think it entirely normal for the state tax collector to target the regime's political enemies. I don't, and for the last year I've called for the abolition of the institutionally corrupt IRS and its replacement by an agency with far more limited powers appropriate to a free society. Surprisingly few Republican candidates seem interested in joining that campaign. But the IRS' wholesale corruption is a free-speech issue, too: it's about using state power - the threat of audits and, ultimately, asset confiscation - to get you to shut up. And the alliance between the IRS and the gay enforcers is a foretaste of where things are headed. If your confidential financial information can be leaked to those who want to take you down, why should your medical information or your vote by "secret ballot" be any more secure? [link removed, bold added] Earlier in his piece, Steyn says that, "the thuggishness and bullying ... ought to disgust people", including those who support gay marriage. Color me disgusted -- as a stating point. Such a willingness discredits anyone willing to resort to such tactics, and is a confession on their part that they themselves do not understand the merits of their cause. (At least, in the case of two consenting adults being able to have a permanent relationship recognized by law, there are merits.) What happened to persuasion and appealing to the better nature of one's opponents? Granted, leftist thugs do not speak for all homosexuals, but it is astounding to me that anyone who has suffered intimidation -- or at least has had to fight merely to have what almost everyone else takes for granted -- could have learned so little from the experience. I don't think the state should be in the business of defining what marriage is, but I support gay marriage in the sense that I see it as one of the state's jobs to recognize and enforce legal contracts (e.g., marriages) between consenting adults. On the other hand and for the same reason, the state has no business enforcing political orthodoxy of any kind (even if it happens to sound correct). When I first heard about this controversy, I was mildly puzzled as to why a software company would conduct a political firing. But now, I see a genuine reason to be concerned (beyond this as yet another example of cultural decline). Firefox, the company's product, is a web browser and, as such, handles secure communications for its customers. The blatant disregard this company has shown the privacy of its former CEO should serve as a warning to its customers. Can you trust your private and secure communications with a product made by a company that condones the release of confidential information for purposes of political intimidation? It may be time to fire the 'Fox. -- CAV Link to Original

Walter Williams writes a column on what he calls "Bizarre Arguments and Behavior", in which he catalogues explicit or implicit political arguments that are "so asinine that you'd have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously". It's hard to tell whether Williams really thinks that even leftists take the arguments seriously, or whether by "bizarre", Williams is focusing more on the affront to common sense or on the fact that so few people get called on them. Here's my favorite, which would fall into the implicit category: [T]o reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me. The obvious question, regarding how the EPA got away with this, Williams had already answered with the first part of the above paragraph: Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots' agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, ... Enough Americans, disliking cigarette smoke, but not being wary enough about the government meddling to make it stop, tossed common sense aside in favor of an expedient excuse for an improper expansion of government power. That is, short-range, disconnected, magical thinking won out. It is an interesting coincidence that I first encountered the Williams column at a web site that also runs a recurring feature on incompetent criminals. The thought process of criminals, the blanking-out of the big picture (i.e., of all kinds of bad consequences of the behaviors that they contemplate) that Ayn Rand termed "evasion", also leads to strange rationalizations and behavior, the latter sometimes farcical. It bears closer examination: Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter--and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it. The criminal wants your money -- so he ignores the fact that you earned it and he could earn some for himself -- and takes it. How is that any different from someone who hates cigarette smoke and has thugs ban cigarettes -- rather than adopting simple measures and exerting a modicum of effort to avoid the smoke whenever possible? And is it any surprise that someone who practices such behavior often enough ends up in (sometimes farcical) predicaments? (Magical thinking by voters is worse, since it causes even innocent people to suffer the same fate unjustly.) America is so rife with asinine rules based on ridiculous premises that people of all stripes are becoming alarmed, but the basic solution is easy to see: If someone advocates a given measure -- no matter how appealing it might sound -- more of us should insist on having a good rationale for it or not support it at all. (This is harder than it might seem: In the case of second-hand smoke, one would need solid scientific evidence that it is bad and sound reasons for thinking that banning tobacco is a proper function of government.) There is no room for evasion of any kind on any point -- or the chickens will come home to roost, in the form of a similar rule you at least find inconvenient. Perhaps if more of us voters insisted on solid arguments from politicians, our neighbors, and ourselves, we would need less solace from "stupid criminal stories", and our society would start becoming less of a paternalistic kleptocracy. --CAV Link to Original

1. On days that we have the kids in daycare, I usually drop off and pick up our daughter, who is closing in on three, and Mrs. Van Horn does the same for Little Man, who will turn one soon. On those days, it is often the highlight of my day to pick up Pumpkin at the end of the day. I love it when she smiles at me, and runs over for a hug -- or to stiff-arm me, while grinning -- or suddenly veers off and runs away, giggling.) Picking up Little Man, now that his personality is more obviously developing, is also similarly rewarding. I did this recently, and when he saw me, he gave me a huge smile and "jumped" up and down. (He's not actually standing, much less jumping, but his arms and body move like he's jumping.) 2. I haven't made a beer recommendation here lately, so let's end the drought with Ska Brewing Company's Hibernal Vinifera Stout: Complex, but not in a "why won't you tell me what you're thinking?" kind of way. Some grapes never have a chance to become anything but wine. But these grapes told us that when they grew up, they wanted to complement the deep, roasty notes and sweet finish of this oak-aged, 8% stout. Once we translated their Castilian, we realized we had to support their dream. We knew you wouldn't let us down, grapes. An oak-aged stout fermented with Malbec grapes. Complex and slightly boozy, yet balanced. Oddly enough, it took me a couple of cans to decide I like it. 3. GMail launched a decade agoon April Fool's Day. Time has an enjoyable piece on how it all came together. As news about Gmail dribbled out on March 31 and continued into April Fools' Day, the reaction did, indeed, include a fair amount of disbelief. "If you're far enough ahead that people can't figure out if you're joking, you know you've innovated," says Harik. "Primarily, journalists would call us and say 'We need to know if you're just kidding, or if this is real.' That was fun." The article shows that GMail involves several innovations and faced its share of doubters within the company. Despite its recent faddish concessions to tablet computing, it's far and away my favorite email sevice. 4. He looks like he could have come up with a better name for it, but all John Cook could come up with was, "looking like you know what you're doing": Neither my nearsightedness nor my facial hair made me an expert on Dutch trains. This was my first time catching a train in a new country where most of the signs were written in a language I do not know. I imagine they've ridden more trains than I have. The only advantage I had over them was my sobriety. Maybe my experience as a consultant has enabled me to give confidence-inspriring advice on subjects I know less about than I'd like. This reminds me of a brief conversation I had way back in my sophomore year of college, at the tail end of a semester I spent at Rome: Map-Bearing Tourist : Parla Inglese? Me: Yes. MBT: Which bus do I take ... By an amazing coincidence, MBT asked about a stop I knew to be on a route I used almost daily. I reeled off the answer without skipping a beat and was told how nice it was to meet a native who knew English so well. (He couldn't have been there for very long.) In the years since, my encounters with this phenomenon have been mainly at stores, when someone assumes I work there and asks me where to find something. -- CAV Link to Original

Scott Berkun offers his advice on how to get one's boss to try new things. I think his advice is good, but think that there are more compelling reasons for considering it than he indicates in his two introductory paragraphs. Berkun's advice follows as bullet points below, but be aware that he elaborates on each within his post. Perform well at your job. Consider what problems your boss needs to solve. Match what you want to try to their goals. Get support from respected coworkers. Look for books and respected organizations that support the thing. Plan for a trial. Make the pitch. Work very hard to make the trial work. There is a saying that took me some time to appreciate when I was young, along the lines of, "Don't bring problems to your boss." Suppose your boss has no character flaws, such as a neurotic need to cling to power, or a fear of change. Your new idea -- no matter how good it is -- is, in a sense, a problem. It will take time and effort to understand and implement. How does your boss know this won't be a waste of time and a drain on his resources? The above steps get him over this hump by establishing your credibility, helping him understand what you want to try and why, showing him that you have thought about how this new thing fits in with his objectives, making evaluation and implementation economical, and giving him the chance to make an informed decision as to whether the idea is actually good. Of course, all of us have had less-than-ideal bosses. I think these suggestions also provide work-arounds in many cases. (e.g. Who is going to summarily kill off an idea that everyone he respects agrees is a good one?) That said, I think it is useful to view your new idea from the perspective of someone who hasn't heard of it, and could lose big time by putting it into practice. Doing so will help you see what it will take to get it a fair hearing. -- CAV Link to Original

In an article about government interference with gambling, John Stossel notes that a casino owner is behind the push to ban Internet gambling. A group called the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling wants to prevent legalization. It warns: "gambling will be available in every home, every bedroom, every dorm room, on every phone, tablet and computer!" It's revealing that its ads are funded by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. He doesn't mind you gambling, obviously. He just wants you to go to casinos, like those he happens to own. Long ago, when various states started lotteries, or introduced such things as riverboat gambling, I mistakenly viewed this as a step in the right direction, towards ultimate legalization. Clearly, this hasn't happened, and it is clear that people like Adelson, who profiteer from such government distortion of the market, don't want it to. (It is also clear how lazy this man is: He has a huge amount of experience in the gambling industry, and yet scorns a clear opportunity for growth.) This example, and many others in the Stossel piece, show that such a view was mistaken. Gambling continues to be treated like a criminal activity by the government: It's just that the government is behaving like a criminal gang, and muscling in. The fact that so many GOP presidential hopefuls are courting the above-named "magnate" is disappointing, to say the least. (Oh, and the manner of it will make you cringe.) -- CAV Link to Original

Regarding yesterday's post (and my comment that my wife had gotten a decent education in public schools), a reader noted the following: ... One of the saving graces of American public education that's being progressively destroyed pretty much on principle ever since the Department of Education was created is that it used to be heavily decentralized, which allowed a great deal of independence in teachers to flourish. The principal in New Zealand I mentioned, who threw out a silly rule book so his students could play during recess, would, I am sure, have the book thrown at him here. But in case anyone needed examples of this problem, A. Barton Hinkle recently wrote a piece replete with them. (He starts with a student facing disciplinary action for possession of a dangerous object. Said student was a girl who stopped another from "cutting" herself -- and then discarded the razor to avoid falling afoul of her school's mindless "zero tolerance" policy on dangerous objects.) Hinkle notes of such incidents and the fact that schools have been "rethinking" such policies for well over a decade: It's great that a school district here and there has second thoughts about first-strike policies. But that doesn't solve the broader problem, which is rooted in a bureaucratic compliance mentality. Just ask Chaz Seale, a Texas 17-year-old who accidentally shoved a Coors into his brown-bag lunch instead of a soda. When he realized his mistake he gave the unopened beer to a teacher. The teacher told the principal, and the principal suspended Seale for three days and sentenced him to two months at an alternative school. So, in our public schools, we're increasingly not just teaching our kids that the real world is dangerous, but acclimating them to one that actually is: one in which mindless bureaucrats wield unchecked power over them. Worrisome to me is the fact that I wasn't particularly looking for an article like Hinkle's, any more than I was the one I discussed yesterday. -- CAV Link to Original

Michael Enright who, like me, is old enough to remember when it diddn't seem like we were trying to rear our kids in sterilized rubber rooms, asks if playgrounds can be too safe. Bruce McLachlan, the principal of Swanson School [in Auckland, New Zealand], was concerned that his 500 students were being restricted by too many playground safety rules. His kids weren't allowed to ride their scooters in the playground or climb trees or rough-house because they might get hurt. So Principal McLachlan threw out the rule book. He did away with all so-called safety measures; he let the kids do pretty much what they wanted. What he discovered was startling. In the first place there were no major injuries. In fact injuries declined. There was a decrease in bullying and vandalism. Children were so busy and physically active at recess that they returned to the classroom motivated, not agitated... [minor format edits] All of this makes sense to me, especially the decline in injuries: (a) teachers could focus on watching the kids, vice enforcing stupid rules; ( students had to become more actively engaged in ensuring their own safety; and © the latter was helped by the fact that the kids weren't bored out of their minds. Enright also correctly notes that our current fads in child care pose a risk far greater than the occasional injury, when "We ... constantly reinforc[e] in their exploding minds that danger is everywhere and they must protect themselves no matter what." I have been astounded at how widespread and crippling the precautionary mentality is among adults today, but had not really considered the idea that we are transmititting it to our children. -- CAV P.S. This column also reminds me of something that seemed odd about an episode of the popular Sid the Science Kid. In that episode, which purports to teach kids about soil, the main characters frolicked about on a rubberized playground -- no soil, anywhere -- before going inside to look at samples in a lab. How exotic! Link to Original

Three Blind Men Describing an Elephant ... ... would do a far superior job than our last three Presidents have of describing Vladimir Putin. I'll let the article speak for itself, although at least Vice President Dick Cheney was on the right track, when he said privately of his impression of the autocrat, "I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B." Why they have failed so miserably to evaluate this former KGB officer might have something to do with their pragmatism. In politics, also, pragmatism presents itself as opposed to "rigidity," to "dogma," to "extremes" of any kind (whether capitalist or socialist); it avows that it is relativist, "moderate," "experimental." As in ethics, however, so here: the pragmatist is compelled to employ some kind of standard to evaluate the results of his social experiments, a standard which, given his own self-imposed default, he necessarily absorbs from other, non-pragmatist trend-setters . . . When Dewey wrote, the political principle imported from Germany and proliferating in all directions, was collectivism. Of all the American politicians mentioned in the article, the only one I recall being demonized as a dogmatist was Cheney -- not that I agree with that charge or am in any way a fan of dogmatism. Weekend Reading "[E]ven though you are sure to benefit people all over the world, directly or indirectly, you are mainly pursuing your self-interest." -- Anders Ingemarson, in "Living the Cool Life: Join the Peace Corps or Corporate America?" at The American Thinker "As someone who cares about this overly self-effacing person, your job is to convey, in words and actions, that, 'You don't have to be this way with me. I want to know what you think. I want to know what you want to do.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "When Bossy/Pushy Meets Self-Effacing" at The Delaware Coast Press My Two Cents I agree with Ingemarson that altruism is regarded as "cool" by the young. The problem I hope he helps them see is that that they don't fully appreciate the wrongness and the consequences (including even failing to help others effectively) of practicing that ethical code to its logical end. Most still naively imagine that we can all be altruists and somehow still live in a prosperous society. Don't Get "Glassed Out"! Word Spy has been great fun this week. An entry on "glassed out"(that mentions a related vulgarism) is quite amusing. Also, my new favorite term for Google Glass is buried within: "Segway for your face". --CAV Link to Original