Gus Van Horn blog

Karen Cheng reports that the question, "What do you mean?" can stop someone who is being rude in his tracks. She gives a couple of examples, including this: I stopped him and said: "So you said that your employees are behaving like a bunch of women. What do you mean?" Immediately he apologized, said it was the wrong choice of words, and said he meant to say "stop behaving like a bunch of children." This example is actually better than the earlier one she gives, which inspired her to try it herself. In that example, an investor admits he might not have funded a startup whose founder then became pregnant. As a parent of two young children, I know how their arrival can radically alter one's time landscape and priorities. As I see it, the investor's worst sin was being too blunt. (At least he tries to be careful with his money.) Indeed, one could even make the case that he did the pregnant founder a favor by helping her see why she has lately had/might have future trouble raising money. Absent further context, I think implying that this investor is an "asshole" is inappropriate. This is not to deny that Cheng's question is valueless: There are many times that putting someone on notice that his attitudes are out of line is warranted. But one must weigh whether his evaluation of that person as immoral is correct and further consider what raising the issue might accomplish. Simply getting an apology over the phone may feel good -- but if someone really is a jerk, the chances are that he knows he can make himself look good to most people by apologizing. The question is better in a few other situations I can think of off the top of my head: The "asshole" is an employee of yours, in which case he now knows you will not tolerate him acting this way on your watch. There are others around who might need to hear that they now have an ally against such a person. He is a friendly acquaintance who you know probably didn't mean what he said, and whom you'd like to gently help realize how badly he is coming across. On the other hand, firing this question first and asking questions later can be worse than saying nothing in several situations I can think of off the top of my head: You seem offended (and not merely confused), giving the impression that you are prejudiced. You put on notice and antagonize a powerful opponent -- and also immediately cede any advantage that might be gained by patience or camouflage. The frequent and careless use of this one-liner can make you look like you will use any random utterance to blackmail any random acquaintance. Neither list is exhaustive. I like the one-liner, but it can't and shouldn't be used in every situation. The real lesson is to think before one speaks in all situations. -- CAV Link to Original

But Would They Govern Like a Different Party? This Time? John Podhoretz offers a rosy forecast for the GOP regarding control of the Senate after this year's elections: ... Republicans are coming on strong in other races no one expected. In Michigan, where another Democratic incumbent is retiring, Republican Terri Lynn Land has shown strength for months, leading her likely Democratic rival, Gary Peters, by a few points in a state Obama carried by eight points in 2012. In New Hampshire, the one-term ex-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen seems to have a formidable foe in Scott Brown, who won the surprising January 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts that portended the huge GOP wave later that year. Ugh. Scott Brown? If he's any indicator, my warnings about the GOP failing to make a difference once in power again will look more like accurate predictions. Weekend Reading "It isn't often that a doctor is mistaken about how many feet his patient has." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Can You Trust What's in Your Electronic Medical Record?" at Forbes "I see the aftermath of a lot of breakups, and one thing that stands out is the denial people exhibit about the flaws in their relationships before the end." -- Michael Hurd, in "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" at The Delaware Wave "nstead of Jim Crow laws, they use public education mandates and taxation, environmental regulation, government health care edicts, and a plethora of other legalized individual rights offences to sacrifice you and your loved ones to their own interests." -- Anders Ingemarson, in "Freeing the Individual from the Conceits of the Collective" at RealClear Markets In More Detail I'll briefly throw something out there for each column today: (1) Hsieh offers concrete advice to readers who want to protect their health from government-incentivized errors-carried-forward in their medical records; (2) Hurd brings up a fallacy ("Heaven's Reward") I'd never heard of; and (3) Ingemarson makes lots of good points, despite, as a newletter I follow pointed out, the fact that the column does not mention that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually violated individual rights with its provisions against non-government racial discrimination. Many Apps Cost Way too Much A widely-circulated Internet joke lampoons people who complain about the noiminal dollar cost of some smart phone or tablet app, but drop a fiver on coffee without batting an eye. The point about the value of a good app is well-taken, but developer Jeff Atwood notices that the argument doesn't apply to all paid apps: Imagine you bought your coffee, only to open the lid and find it was only half full, or that it wasn't coffee at all but lemonade. If only 1 in 5 cups of coffee you bought actually contained coffee, a $3.99 price for that coffee starts to seem unreasonably high. When you buy an app, you don't really know what you're going to get. [link and bold in original] You may have wasted your money, but you will have also paid in time, which is, being irreplaceable, is worse. Mobile phone apps that could be replaced with a decent web site (or mobile version of one) are worse than pointless, as the rest of Atwood's piece shows. --CAV Link to Original

Editor's Note: I have a backlog of "proud father" stuff today... 1. Three cheers for the web, this time for saving me from my own carelessness. One evening, Pumpkin wanted to "work" (i.e., play with my desktop "becuter" in my office area), and I let her. Of course, in the span of a half-second of my being distracted, she managed (I think) to invoke a settings selector a couple of levels down in a right-click menu, thereby accidentally removing the borders and controls from all windows. This "stacked" all my open applications and x-terminals uselessly on top of each other. Persistently, too: Neither logging out nor rebooting changed anything. Luckily, I was able to search the problem on my laptop and find a solutionalmost immediately. Time to create my little girl's first user account... 2. Little Man, my eight-month-old son, impressed me a couple of days ago, just before his bedtime. Rather than start crying, he looked at me and reached for me with both arms -- and got slightly fussy only when I incorrectly guessed he wanted to practice standing. (He pulls himself up now, by the way.) No: He was trying to ask for bedtime. He quickly went to sleep after I figured that one out. 3. Our recent vacation was part of a surprise party for my wife's sister's birthday. It was fun seeing Pumpkin and her cousin -- about the same age, but a head taller -- interact over the course of the trip. My wife has an amusing series of pictures of them fighting over who could dance with Mickey Mouse. Unintimidated by being pushed away, my daughter pushed right back -- not that we encourage fighting as the go-to means of dispute resolution! 4. My favorite moments from the vacation, in no particular order, were as follows: (1) my son buying me a rest on the beach by wanting a nap; (2) visiting an aquarium with my daughter, like we frequently did in Boston; (3) the massage my wife and I got for ourselves as a belated anniversary present; (4) a morning walk alone; and (5) the whole set of three families actually making it to a show on time (hard to do with two toddlers and an infant involved!). It was especially fun to see how Pumpkin lit up whenever it was time to clap. -- CAV Link to Original

Andrew Napolitano describes a federal assault on attorney-client privilege borne of domestic surveillance and some convenient twisting of the "rules", either of which is bad enough on its own: Can the NSA lawfully tell lawyers for the government who are negotiating with Mayer Brown lawyers what it overheard between the Mayer Brown lawyers and their client? The answer, incredibly, is: Yes. Federal rules prohibit the NSA from sharing knowledge with lawyers for the federal government only about persons who have been indicted. In this case, Mayer Brown is attempting to negotiate favorable trade relations between Indonesia and the U.S., and the lawyers for the U.S. have the unfair advantage of knowing in advance the needs, negotiating positions and strategy of their adversaries. In the Obama years, this is how the feds work: secretly, unfairly and in utter derogation of the attorney-client privilege. [bold added, link in original omited] With the government running practically everything these days, does Napolitano even need to ask, "What will they do next?" -- CAV Link to Original

Christopher Groskopf, a software developer and project manager who has been "a 100% remote worker" for over two years, offers his insights and advice for making that sort of arrangement successful. There is lots of practical advice, such as on using technology, but I think the following psychological insight is crucial: It goes without saying that if you're going to be apart from your team, you need to take responsibility for your own organization. What may be less obvious is that you're going to need to take that organization to much greater lengths than would probably otherwise be necessary. Why? The lack of tangible reminders. It's amazing how much we rely on subtle environmental and social cues for how and when things get done. If you never lock eyes with a homepage producer, you might forget to tell them about an impending launch. [bold added] Groskopf soon after uses the term "context" in passing, but it is clear that the idea of there being a psychological context to work is crucial to his thinking. And here's an example of Groskopf implementing this idea in another way: The single best advice I got when I went remote was from Matt Waite, who said, "Put on pants," by which I'm pretty sure he meant, "Act like you're going to work." Get up, put on clothes you'd leave the house in, take a look in the mirror, and go to your work space. It is essential that you have a room (or nook) in your house that you use only for work. You need a place to go to at the start of the day and leave at the end. I even put an office nameplate over mine. Do the same things you would if you were going to the office. This might sound silly, but it will help keep you sane. Think of your home workspace like an exclave of your company's offices. Act like you might run into your editor or the CEO at any moment! It'll make you feel normal. [link in orignal] Do note that his work day doesn't just start at his office: itends there. Implicit in Groskopf's advice to act like one is at work is the idea that one should have clear-cut boundaries between work and leisure. That said, while it may seem counterintuitive to include non-work items -- like picking kids up from school -- in a work calendar, this actually helps one maintain such boundaries by avoiding conflict. (Parent and former Qwest CEO Teresa Taylor even goes so far as to keep one calendar for similar reasons.) I highly recommend this piece, which is explicitly written to be useful for people in any line of work. Link to Original

There are many things I disagree with about his column, but Michael Schulson (or the editor) of The Daily Beast asks a pregnant question in the opening blurb to "Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience" (HT: Snedcat): Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers [ sic], but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It's all pseudoscience--so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others? Schulson comes to the following interesting and relevant conclusion about the predominantly leftist clientele of Whole Foods: ... By the total lack of outrage over Whole Foods' existence, and by the total saturation of outrage over the Creation Museum, it's clear that strict scientific accuracy in the public sphere isn't quite as important to many of us as we might believe. Just ask all those scientists in the aisles of my local Whole Foods. [link added] Schulson also does a good job cataloging the scientfic nonsense peddled at Whole Foods and likening it to religious dogma and practice. That said (and again), there are many things I disagree with about Schulson's analysis. For example, I don't agree with parts of his conclusion, which is that: Bringing sound data into political conversations and consumer decisions is a huge, ongoing challenge. It’s not limited to one side of the public debate. The moral is ... that whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites. I think Schulson is right to look at the questionable "science" tolerated or accepted on both sides of this cultural divide and conclude that neither side is ultimately rational. His exhortation to bring "sound data into political conversations and consumer decisions" is also laudable. But good data isn't enough. What is also needed -- whether we are discussing how to achieve good health, the origins of life, or the proper scope of government -- isn't just good data, but the proper method of evaluating such data. Without it -- as we see time and time again in politics -- all the data in the world won't amount to a hill of beans. We should not just insist on good data, but rational justifications that actually follow from it from each other when conversing. In fact, we should start off by insisting on this from ourselves, because the conclusions we form have life-promoting or -impairing consequences. If enough people start doing this, the political conversations would start improving as a result. It is this last context -- rational self-interest -- that I think is missing from Schulson's analysis, and I think it causes him to miss why leftists get so irritated by the Creation Museum, yet don't bat an eye at Whole Foods. When someone adopts an ideology or a practice that has no rational justification, that person has, somewhere along the line, accepted an arbitrary statement or evaded a falsehood. No matter how much that person distracts himself by performing rituals or making long-winded justifications or getting others to join his folly, he knows what he has done, and the best way to anger him to to hold a mirror up to his face. The Creation Museum is just such a mirror. Add to that a dollop of jealousy of the political powertheocrats have regrettably amassed in recent decades, and you have the perfect trigger for an angry leftist to explode. -- CAV P.S. More than once in the past, I have offered my support here to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his stand against ObamaCare, with which I agree. Considering some of the products he sells and the campaigns his stores support, I regard him as at least intellectually inconsistent, like many too many other businessmen. Link to Original

Vacation time for the Van Horn family is over and a couple of difficult projects, each with its own share of tedious steps, await me. Fortunately, I happened upon a couple of good blog postings that will help me work more effectively. The first I encountered this weekend as I caught up with my favorite email list. In "Keep It Interesting", Jean Moroney offers advice on how to maintain focus by overcoming boredom. For example: One idea is to take a quick timeout to pick favorites. If you're in a meeting, what do you like best about the person speaking? Or the meeting setup? If it's a project, what is your favorite task? What do you think is most important about the project? You can stop to pick favorites anytime, anywhere. It takes only a moment, but it gives you an important mental refresh. [emphasis in original] Moroney, whose Thinking Directions course and site I have mentioned here from time to time, has long offered advice like this through a newsletter, but now also does so through a blog. Links to new installments will show up automatically on my blogrollfrom now on. (Click "View All" to see the link if it is not on the short list of most recent posts from other blogs.) Second, and of longer-range use than tackling an immediate problem with boredom, is an entry from the blog of the Harvard Business Review by Heidi Grant Halvorson, titled, "How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To". This post offers advice on tackling procrastination. One strategy I find particularly intriguing is the following: There are two ways to look at any task. You can do something because you see it as a way to end up better off than you are now- as an achievement or accomplishment. As in, if I complete this project successfully I will impress my boss, or if I work out regularly I will look amazing. Psychologists call this a promotion focus - and research shows that when you have one, you are motivated by the thought of making gains, and work best when you feel eager and optimistic. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, if you are afraid you will screw up on the task in question, this is not the focus for you. Anxiety and doubt undermine promotion motivation, leaving you less likely to take any action at all. What you need is a way of looking at what you need to do that isn't undermined by doubt - ideally, one that thrives on it. When you have a prevention focus, instead of thinking about how you can end up better off, you see the task as a way to hang on to what you've already got- to avoid loss... [emphasis in original] This reminds me of Ayn Rand's definition of value as, "that which one acts to gain and/or keep" [my emphasis]. Note with the "prevention focus" the crucial, but not necessarily obvious difference between avoiding loss and avoiding punishment (which is a poor motivator): The focus is firmly on how one can act to defend values one has already obtained. That is, both kinds of focus are value-based, and therefore positive, but if a prospective gain seems too difficult or abstract, the prospect of losing something tangible can provide better motivation. That said, I would have to think more about Halvorson's other advice before saying which aspects I agree or disagree with. (For example. I wouldn't leave negative emotions unexamined for too long, not that Halvorson necessarily advises that.) Nevertheless, she has lots of interesting things to say. -- CAV Link to Original

Answering a "progressive" who (correctly) sees cronyism as an inevitable consequence of central planning, but is untroubled by it; John Stossel makes the following observations regarding its enormous visible and invisible cultural and economic costs: Politicians doling out favors quietly shift where society's resources flow, who gets employed, what ideas are pursued. It distorts the economy and the culture -- and it turns us into a nation of favor-seekers instead of creators and producers. What about all the new businesses that would have gotten investment money but didn't have Gore on their boards? What new ideas might have thrived if old industries weren't coddled? We don't know. We will never know the greatness of what might have existed had the state not sucked the oxygen out of the incubator. Stossel calls this an argument for "smaller" government, but that is akin to a physician advising his patient to remove only part of a cancerous tumor. This analogy is inexact, as we shall see: What we really need is a propergovernment, which protects our individual rights, and isn't in the business of looting from -- or doling out favors to -- anyone. Without anygovernment, we would have anarchy; but if we merely cut back, we would have the same problems on a smaller scale and would eventually see them get much bigger again with a vengeance. The progressive Stossel mentions knows this on some level, which is why he included the military and prisons (which the government and only the government should control) in his list of things he thinks we should get from the government. (Most people wouldn't have a problem with roads, either, but they are mistaken.) Until opponents of the "progresives" start discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate uses of government, the "progressives" will own the debate -- which will look like a choice between advocating anarchy and merely quibbling over who gets what favors, and whose resources will be raided to pay for it. -- CAV Link to Original

Spotting in this morning's news feeds (1) a post on productivity tips for academics and (2) a link to a blog premised on the idea of parenting as an experimental endeavor; I was reminded of a realization I had some time ago that others might find useful. It may not really merit a special name, but I call it "acceptable incompletion". It's all about finding more stopping points than might be obvious for a task, so that it can be completed more easily, or at a more opportune time, or in a more efficient way than simply performing it all at once. To take a simple example, suppose I notice that the downstairs bathroom needs, say, a new spare roll of toilet paper, but restocking it would require a trip upstairs. There's no hurry to do this immediately and I have no other reason to go upstairs at the moment. Rather than devote a couple of minutes to this task, I spend a few seconds placing the empty roll or some other reminder where I will see it at the foot of the stairs so that the next time I do need to go there, I know to retrieve the new spare. I have saved some time and increased the value of that later trip. Have I replaced the spare? No, but I know I will. (Likewise, I no longer waste twenty minutes every evening getting bottles, pacifiers, and whatnot upstairs for bedtime, thanks to this approach. Generally, these things get spirited up (and counterparts down for washing) over the course of other morning or evening activities.) I have blogged other examples before (specifically, laundry and multiple tool stashes), but hadn't noticed the unifying characteristic of recognizing "new" steps in a process. Considering Matt Might's advice, to which I refer in the latter link, this method falls within his broader theme of lowering transaction costs -- by becoming better at recognizing transactions. Might, by the way, makes a good point along these lines about starting a new project. Call it "Unseen Step One: Devote a blank document to it", if you will. I frequently hear productivity advice -- especially that influenced by David Allen -- warning about "projects in disguise". Depending on your context, what might be a task for most people might well be a project, however simple, for you. Why not take advantage of that fact? -- CAV Link to Original

I always enjoy Thomas Sowell's occasional "Random Thoughts" columns. Their short paragraphs invariably are thought-provoking, humorous, or both. For example, in his most recent edition, Sowell has this to say about history: Not to put words into Sowell's mouth, but it is too easy to observe the many disgraceful and horrific episodes history has to offer and come to the wrong conclusion about man's nature and, consequently, underestimate the power of rational men to change history's course for the better. Time doesn't permit me to elaborate on why Rand has such an encouraging message, but she does a far better job arguing her point than I could, anyway. Suffice it to say for now that, while one cannot assume that men are always rational, one can still understand much of what they do and fight them effectively as a result. I point this out because, as far as I know, Rand's view of history is novel and underappreciated by many of her fans and sympathizers. It is also something her opponents would probably wish never saw the light of day. -- CAV Link to Original

"Why Speed Reading Is for Fools": A speed reader is sure to notice the title. I hope the many good lines sprinkled throughout act as speed bumps, helping would-be passers-by slow down and sit for a spell, as it were. You could drive by the Grand Canyon at 100mph. "I saw 20 landmarks today." "Oh, really, I saw 45". But did they see anything? Did they experience anything? They'd have felt and learned far more if they had tried to do far less. You can race through a foreign nation checking items off a list of "must-sees" or you can dig in deeper and actually experience something of the culture you've taken so much trouble to go and visit. Books, art, movies and meals are no different. Two people can see the same exact thing in the same moment and have entirely opposite experiences simply because of how quickly or slowly they pay attention. I am no speed reader, but I did, at first, think, "But you do sometimes need to skim something or read it quickly." Berkun doesn't deny this, but he does raise the following possibility: If you are rushing through everything, maybe you should consider doing fewer things better. "Haste makes waste" applies to mental activities just as much as it does to physical ones. Man, the rational animal, can neither go through life properly without thought nor can he really think without taking in relevant data. Unwarranted haste deprives us of both, because both take time. -- CAV Link to Original

An article with some interesting polling data about the regulatory state indirectly reminded me of the approach taken by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute in a recent piece in USA Today. In the former piece, we have the following question-and-answer: Americans from fishermen to insurance agents are getting tired of being victimized by their own government, said the report's poll section: "68 percent believe regulations are created by 'out-of-touch people trying to push a political agenda' rather than by 'well-intentioned people trying to address real challenges' (26 percent)." Left unasked, and demonstrating the limitations of polls in the process, was the following question: "Should the government be in the business of telling us how to run our affairs at all?" The whole line of questioning by this "watchdog" group reminds me of the Brook and Watkins piece, where they comment on the question of whether our government is doing too little or too much by stating, "The question we need to ask, however, is not whether the government should do more or less, but what should it do." The flaw in the questioning is very deep, morally and practically. In addition to ignoring the fact that government regulation (a.k.a. prescriptive law, a.k.a. central planning) violates individual rights, the questions assume that benevolent or beneficial regulation is possible at all. Consider the polling questions in light of the following observation by economist George Reisman: The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. [bold added] It is hard to imagine how, in the words of one of the questions asked by the Center for Regulatory Solutions, a government regulatory scheme even could be -- much less end up looking like it was -- crafted by "well-intentioned people trying to address real challenges". Central planning is immoral and impractical. It should be watched, but only with an eye for personal protection and ultimate abolishment. While it can be pruned back or made less harmful in the short term, it will only metastasize again if not recognized as the threat to freedom that it is and removed accordingly. Regarding regulations and entitlement programs, what we need aren't watchdogs, but hunting dogs. -- CAV Link to Original

Today is one of those days I am surprised doesn't happen to me much more often, despite my efforts to keep the wee hours free-ish for writing: I have practically no time even to blog. So it is that writing time is on my mind and writing time is what I will write about. (I am tempted to rant about my intense and growing hatred of snow, but that would only be ironic, as profanity is already the unwanted snow clogging the arteries, driveways, and sidewalks of the Internet.) In the short term, two "unimportant, but urgent" tasks await me: shoveling snow and preparing an experimental crock pot recipe to cook all day. The former I couldn't attend to yesterday evening because my wife needed me to take the kids so she could do some work. The latter I forgot about until I looked at my to-do list this morning. Neither would normally be much of a problem but for the fact that we have an early deadline to meet this morning for my wife to get to work. So I'll risk boring you with half-formed thoughts about time or not post at all today... In the long term, there is good news/bad news for me, timewise, on the writing front. The good news is that our baby boy's sleeping pattern seems to have become somewhat predictable; the bad is that he pretty reliably wakes up between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. Ouch! That was a time I had a taste of being able to use right before he showed up. I might need to contemplate flipping my schedule around a little bit if this holds up since I am eager to have something in addition to perfunctory blog posts back in my routine. Stay tuned. In the meantime, a snow shovel and a cutting board await me. -- CAV Link to Original

Eric Raymond, his curiosity stoked by "The Incomplete Guide to Feminist Infighting", speaks of following links down a "rabbit hole". Two things stood out for me from his report, which concerns "Twitter wars" among various figures in the feminist movement. Raymond nicely sums up the first, "lack of contact with reality": The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze "privilege" from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively "oppressed" blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It's the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years - even decades - without facing a reality check. And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there's a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim. Material comfort and distance from war, anarchy, or dictatorship certainly help such people pretend to be serious and relevant, but they go nowhere near explaining the commonality of this and similar phenomena. But something else Raymond misses does: the role that our society's dominant culture plays in incubating such creatures. For starters, how else do they (could they) hold positions in, for example, academia or the press? (Some time back, the college newsletter, The Undercurrent, made a similar point about another error (i.e., blaming technology like Twitter) that people often make about phenomena like this.) In addition to not having to face real problems, these flowers live in a hothouse devoid of real ideological challenge. And that leads me to the second thing that stood out to me about Raymond's report. He colorfully refers to "Kafka trapping" as how these feminists (a) avoid having to think about criticism and ( how they persuade others of their cause. In his earlier blog post, Raymond even includes a small taxonomy of Kafka traps, but I think it is also helpful to note that his traps fall under a broader logical fallacy, the Argument from Intimidation, long ago identified by Ayn Rand: There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent's agreement with one's undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure . . . [it] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent's character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: "Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X's argument is false." . . . The falsehood of his argument is asserted arbitrarily and offered as proof of his immorality. There is much more at that link, including the following: The Argument from Intimidation dominates today's discussions in two forms. In public speeches and print, it flourishes in the form of long, involved, elaborate structures of unintelligible verbiage, which convey nothing clearly except a moral threat. ("Only the primitive-minded can fail to realize that clarity is oversimplification.") But in private, day-by-day experience, it comes up wordlessly, between the lines, in the form of inarticulate sounds conveying unstated implications. It relies, not on what is said, but on how it is said--not on content, but on tone of voice. It is astonishing to think that this was written in 1964, half a century ago. The Internet is replete with such rabbit holes, and speaking with their inhabitants (or even spending time in them as an observer) is useless unless one attempts to understand what is going on. This one does in order to defend one's own mind and, perhaps, help others understand how to defend themselves against poisonous notions and the unearned guilt that go with them. -- CAV Link to Original

Suppose you developed an interest in a lucrative field and suspected you could do well in it with a small amount of additional training. Suppose further that, for whatever reason, you didn't have the time or money to attend college classes. Or maybe, already being educated and having work experience, you simply didn't see the need to go back to school just to pick up a few new skills. In such a situation, you might, say, arrange to work intensively on the skills with an expert for a time. Common sense says you'd vet the expert beforehand and pay for his services in the meantime. Of course, there is the risk that what you'll "learn by doing" isn't the marketable skill set you originally sought: Instead, you may learn the hard lesson that you just aren't cut out for the new field -- or even that you simply don't want to spend much of your time doing it or try to build a career on it. You might even learn one of these other things quickly enough that you decide to cut your losses by ending your proposed immersion program before finishing it. Oops! According to the state of California, you aren't able to make an intelligent decision like this on your own and need the government's help every step of the way -- at least if your way of going about this is to attend a "hacker boot camp": They aren't your traditional vocational schools. There are no grades, no degrees, and no diplomas. They're usually staffed by professional coders, not licensed teachers. Many of the teachers are volunteers -- even though the schools are usually private companies, not non-profit organizations. And many schools are backed by investments from big-name Silicon Valley venture capital firms. The article goes on to note that, "the state would rather get the schools into [regulatory] compliance and licensed", rather than closing them down. Of course, since the state could have butted out, but it didn't, this brings another, similar situation to my mind... I'm sure that your average mugger would rather get you "into compliance" with his request for your wallet rather than have to actually carry out his implied threat, too. But he didn't just let the person he didn't want to "shut down" walk by, did he? The article raises the legitimate issue of fraudulent outfits purporting to offer training, but fraud is already illegal. This is all about extorting loot and control from a new set of victims. -- CAV Link to Original

1. Tom Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute makes the following incisive observation regarding a recent remark made by a meddlesome politician: What buoys my spirits is not only that the proponents of big government recognize Rand as their enemy, but also t hat they realize it's too late to exclude her ideas from the debate. Too many millions of people are aware, on some level, that Atlas Shruggedoffers a real alternative to the stale pseudo-choices offered by the two major parties. [bold added] This gives me the urge to smirk and say, "Amen!" 2. My daughter, having observed me fix some of her toys, broke in her new toolbox by pretending her toy laptop was my "becuter" and fixing it. She pronounces many multisyllabic words quite well, so I can only speculate that she has picked up this cute -- hah! -- mispronunciation at daycare. Oh, and she got her first Big Girl haircut yesterday. 3. As I've noted, my football-watching has dropped off precipitously with fatherhood: I think my total NFL viewing time was about a quarter of the Super Bowl last year. It will likely be about the same this year. Nevertheless, I still manage to follow things enough to appreciate the creative way Boeing got behind the Seattle Seahawks as "twelfth man". 4. If you have had your camera stolen, there is a web site that uses metadata from any picture you have taken with it to help you locate it. -- CAV Link to Original

Walter Williams examines the use of envy by leftist politicians, explaining in the process the curious double standard that exists for sports and entertainment figures vis-à-vis corporate executives. [P]romoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It's not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically. ... This explains quite a lot, but it doesn't explain everything. Williams soon after notes something that seems borderline obvious once he explains it: Why the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees $40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts, why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million? Why must Williams point this out? Anyone can see that they are incapable, say, of playing football as well as Drew Brees. It isn't too hard for most to gauge their own acting abilities, either. These are things most people have seen lots of or have tried themselves. But running a business? Probably not, and we can probably also blame the cultural penetrance of Marxism -- which treats physical labor as the only source of added value in work -- for making people even more confused about the matter. But in any case, one must use indirect arguments to show most people why CEOs command high salaries. So the left is also exploiting ignorance, using what one might call a "reverse bike shed argument" to foment envy among people not too interested in thinking very hard or deeply. It's too bad that, while success might allow leftists to micromanage businesses or commandeer already-created wealth, neither is the same thing as running a business (i.e., creating and sustaining wealth). This reliance on ignorance by the left to further its political agenda reminds me of that of creationists, whose "argument" is sometimes called the "God of the Gaps". Amusingly, when searching that term, I discovered that this is not the first time Barack Obama and his ilk have reminded me of that reliance on ignorance. -- CAV Link to Original

Senator Ted Cruz issues a stern warning about numerous actions by Barack Obama that undermine rule of law. After a long catalogue of abuses, Cruz concludes: All that is missing is a call for impeachment and removal from office. For that (and an even more damning case against this "President") I remind my readers of the words of M. Northrup Buechner: I don't know if Senator Cruz has called for impeachment and removal elsewhere or some consideration (e.g., protocol) forbids him to do so. Regardless, there is no excuse for the Republican Party to fail to at least attempt this obvious next step. At worst, they will be thwarted by the Democrats, who will be exposed for what they increasingly seem to be. -- CAV Link to Original

Although his latest column does not take a particularly strong stand for proper government, A. Barton Hinkle offers his readers quite the catalogue of abuses of power by government officials from our two big-government parties. Here's a sample: Campaign finance laws are making retribution easier. Witness Edmund Corsi, an Ohio blogger who needled Ed Ryder, a local Republican member of the Board of Elections. The Election Commission went after Corsi, seeking to impose fines and other penalties because he has spent perhaps a few dozen dollars expressing his political views on his website and in pamphlets without incorporating and registering as a political action committee. Credit Hinkle with pointing out that we should all be concerned about laws that enable politicians to cater to their pettiest whims -- even when they are "our guys" at the moment. -- CAV Link to Original

Glenn Reyolds notes, approvingly, a trend that we should actually be quite concerned about: Meanwhile, on the marijuana front, the people of states like Colorado are engaging in an odd, 21st century variety of nullification. Unlike the 19th century John Calhoun version, state laws legalizing marijuana don't purport to neutralize the still-extant federal laws banning cannabis. But the state, and millions of Coloradans, are simply ignoring the federal law and, in essence, daring the feds to do something about it. [bold added] Reynolds draws a debatable parallel between these actions and those of the millions who aren't signing up for ObamaCare -- and a solid parallel to jury nullification. I support both legalization of marijuana and a free market in medicine and medical insurance. However, I disagree that undermining rule of law is an acceptable or practical way to achieve either goal. The fact that the feds can't or won't enforce every law all the time may sound good when the law is bad (and ought to be changed) and the general public supports (or appears to support) the freer side in a given question. But what if the general public somewhere is generally wrong, and individual rights are trampled? One need only think back to the mid-twentieth century American South to see numerous examples of what Reynolds lauds as "Irish Democracy" at work to keep fellow American citizens "in their place" under segregation. And what if the government decides to put its foot down on the wrong side of some issue? We aren't close to something like this yet, but perhaps someone ought to remind Mr. Reynolds of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. (While we aren't there yet, with seemingly every law enforcement agency boning up on military tactics and practically everything being illegal, there is no room for smugness.) Thank goodness "Irish Democracy" failed in the 1960s. Regarding the lack of a heavy-handed government crackdown in Colorado, we shouldn't rest on our laurels and assume that politicians and bureaucrats, of all people, aren't looking for a way to aggrandize their authority. The Old South shows us that individual rights cannot be protected without a proper government; and China shows us that they can be completely ignored by a bad government. Oh, and Reynolds seems also to have forgotten another relevant counterexample to his anarchic screed: The American Revolution, which was first won by pamphleteers, editorialists, and debaters in such places as coffeehouses and taverns. (When did they stop studying The Federalist Papers in law school, Professor Reynolds?) Reynolds opens his column by echoing another author in giving "two cheers for anarchy". He is wrong to offer it even one cheer, as Harry Binswanger recently explained so clearly in a column titled "Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government" : The genius of the American system is that it limited government, reining it in by a Constitution, with checks and balances and the provision that no law can be passed unless it is "necessary and proper" to the government's sole purpose: to protect individual rights-to protect them against their violation by physical force. Individuals (and crowds) who feel like they do not have to answer to authorities can -- mistakenly or not -- violate individual rights. Governments that feel like they can do the same, because there is no principled, vocal opposition on the part of the governed can and will do the same. With our national debate turning from "How can we get better protection for our individual rights from our government," to "How can we get away with breaking the law?", it would appear that we are eager to throw away the republic we were warned long ago was ours only if we could keep it. -- CAV P.S. I must make it clear that I agree with Ayn Rand that civil disobedience can be a valid way to challenge a government practice that violates individual rights. Link to Original

Now We Know A French soccer player has unintentionally helped decent people everywhere learn to recognize a cowardly, bigotted gesture for what it is -- by performing it on live television as part of a goal-scoring "celebration": To perform a quenelle, you hold your left hand, blade-like and flat, to your right shoulder. Then you raise your right hand as if performing a Roman salute, but stop when your arm is at about 30 degrees from your body. But, as [Nicolas] Anelka and a slew of other athletes are discovering, you probably shouldn't.This is because the gesture is one of the calling cards of notorious French provocateur Dieudonné M'bala M'bala. Dieudonné has a long and unfortunate record of anti-Semitism, but claims that the quenelle is an anti-establishment gesture rather than being against Jewish people specifically. ... Graham MacAree gets right what other commentators have missed: Will there be imitators? Certainly. But the real ripple effect is that performers of the quenelle will be exposed for what they are -- bigots who want to get their thrills without suffering the consequences. They've lost, at least temporarily, their secret handshake. This is not to say that Nicolas Anelka deserves any thanks or that the Football Association shouldn't throw the book at him. Weekend Reading "Noted educator Maria Montessori once said, 'Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.'" -- Michael Hurd, in "How Maria Montessori Understood Children" at The Delaware Coast Press "Parenting is hard, but setting boundaries and establishing consequences not only make for a happy, secure child, but also a responsible and productive adult." -- Michael Hurd, in "How to Be a 'Child Whisperer'" at The Delaware Wave "Long before Obamacare, the government also restricted the kinds of health insurance products which could be sold." -- Rituparna Basu, in "Obamacare Is Suffocating an Already Sick Health Insurance Patient" at Forbes "Obamacare's individual mandate, far from ending free riding in America's health care system, institutionalizes it on a national scale by force: the old and sick free ride on the young and healthy." -- Rituparna Basu and Yaron Brook, in "Obamacare Creates a New Class of Free Riders" at The Daily Caller "Like the Marxists, who prate about 'exploitation' and 'wage slavery,' the anarchists are ignoring the crucial, fundamental, life-and-death difference between trade and force." -- Harry Binswanger, in "Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government" at Forbes In More Detail Related to her two opinion pieces, Basu has also published a study on "The Broken State of American Health Insurance Prior to the Affordable Care Act" [PDF] through the Pacific Research Institute. Not Quite the Kind of Attention They Wanted... Applying for vanity plates? Be extra careful if you're extra picky. In 1979 a Los Angeles man named Robert Barbour found this out the hard way when he sent an application to the California Department of Motor No plate Vehicles (DMV) requesting personalized license plates for his car. The DMV form asked applicants to list three choices in case one or two of their desired selections had already been assigned. Barbour, a sailing enthusiast, wrote down "SAILING" and "BOATING" as his first two choices; when he couldn't think of a third option, he wrote "NO PLATE," meaning that if neither of his two choices was available, he did not want personalized plates. Plates reading "BOATING" and "SAILING" had indeed already been assigned, so the DMV, following Barbour's instructions literally, sent him license plates reading "NO PLATE." Barbour was not thrilled that the DMV had misunderstood his intent, but he opted to keep the plates because of their uniqueness. Soon, DMV computers started matching him to numerous unpaid citations meant for people who didn't have plates on their vehicles. --CAV Link to Original

The "War on Poverty" is nearly half a century old, and Thomas Sowell catches its supporters (HT: Steve D.) moving the goal-posts in order to bless off a resounding failure as a success: The same theme was repeated endlessly by President Johnson. The purpose of the "war on poverty," he said, was to make "taxpayers out of taxeaters." Its slogan was "Give a hand up, not a handout."When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation into law, he declared: "The days of the dole in our country are numbered." Now, 50 years and trillions of dollars later, it is painfully clear that there is more dependency than ever. [bold added] Sowell is right to call this bluff, but I don't think he goes far enough. For example, he notes the following: Ironically, dependency on government to raise people above the poverty line had been going down for years before the "war on poverty" began. The hard facts showed that the number of people who lived below the official poverty line had been declining since 1960, and was only half of what it had been in 1950. And this is after he states, "The real question is: What did the 'war on poverty' set out to do -- and how well did it do it, if at all?" This is a trickier question than it looks, especially when we consider the fact that there are doubtless numerous examples of individuals who haveturned their lives around after receiving government assistance. (Indeed, it may be the wrong question.) Such examples allow leftsts to remain, as Sowell rightly calls them, "fact free" and, worse, unaccountable. The so-called War on Poverty was enacted in the face of two other basic alternatives regarding the government's role in the economy: changing nothing or making the economy more free than it was at the time. Put another way -- since all that money had to come from somewhere -- JFK and LBJ could have pushed for the government to take about the same or less from the productive, and meddle with the personal decisions of millions of people about the same or less. They chose to do more of both, and the failure to achieve the stated objective, while important, tells only part of the story. Sowell hints at the other half when he makes it apparent (as in the last excerpt) that staying the course woud have been preferable. But this leaves only to the imagination what might have been had our nation taken the path of greater economic freedom fifty years ago, and it leaves unaddressed how much worse off we all are after fifty years of economic plunder from the most productive. It also fails to call the unaddressed end of wealth redistribution what it is: theft, the inexcusable violation of the property rights of American citizens by their own government. I am grateful to Thomas Sowell for his reporting, but I think he is too generous in his assessments of this fifty-year-old fraud and its evasive supporters. -- CAV Link to Original

Writing for Commentary, Peter Wehner argues that a repeal of ObamaCare is a realistic scenario, quoting extensively from Avik Roy of Forbes, including the following: ... With about ten weeks left in this year's enrollment period, we're looking at a coverage expansion of less than a million. Remember also that as many as 100 million previously insured Americans will endure higher premiums--and higher taxes--under Obamacare. The political constituency of the newly insured could be dwarfed by the political constituency of those harmed by the law. If that turns out to be the case, President Obama's signature legislation may not be long for this world. [link dropped] I have noted others making such optimistic forecasts twice here already, but the same caveats apply. Unless the altruistic moral basis of this fiasco is widely examined and found wanting -- and if the GOP simply offers a more "competent" version of the same wrong and inherently broken thing -- we will miss a golden opportunity to start rolling back the entitlement state once and for all. -- CAV Link to Original

Michael Barone considers why so many young voters have grown disenchanted with Barack Obama, after twice helping afflict us with him. I disagree with much about his column, but I found the following analysis of spiraling education costs worthwhile: t's obvious that the vast sums government-subsidized student loans have pumped into higher education over the last three decades have been largely captured by colleges and universities and transformed into administrative bloat. Economics blogger Timothy Taylor notes that if you count prices in 1982-84 as 100, the average cost of all items in the consumer price index increased to 231 in September 2012. Energy, housing and transportation all increased about that much. But college and tuition fees increased to 706 -- seven times the level when the government started pumping money into higher ed. Medical care increased to more than 400. Some things that young people buy increased much less -- apparel (127), toys (53) and televisions (5, thanks to quality improvement). I have long suspected that the perverse incentives of government-backed student loans as well as outright government bestowals of loot have caused educational costs to skyrocket. The numeric comparison of this government-distorted industry to part of the relatively free electronics industry is especially instructive. How on earth did televisions get so much better without the government backing consumer loans or outright footing the bill so that as many people as possible could own them? -- CAV Link to Original

The Obama Administration has been cynically waging a war against discipline in the very schools that need it most. Thomas Sowell reports: What makes this playing politics with school discipline so unconscionable is that a lack of discipline is one of the crushing handicaps in many ghetto schools. If 10 percent of the students in a classroom are disruptive, disrespectful and violent, the chances of teaching the other 90 percent effectively are very low. Like the New York Times, Attorney General Holder has made this an issue of "The Civil Rights of Children." More important, the implied threat of federal lawsuits based on racial body count among students who have been disciplined means that hoodlums in the classroom seem to have a friend in Washington. [minor format edits] Sowell reminds us that Obama is also fighting to make sure that such "schools" are the only option for the poor. In both cases, Obama is sacrificingeducation to leftist ritual, with the practical result that there will remain downtrodden individuals in search of a savior. Some strong souls will survive, but the President is deliberately making it much harder for them to do so. This story reminds me of a column suggesting that Hugo Chavez, by allowing unabated lawlessness in Venezuela's cities, had "outsource[d] the dirty work of socialism to criminals". Another blogger had called the column "eerily prescient", but I didn't see why: Perhaps there was recent news from Venezuela that I'd missed. Nevertheless, I think I am beginning to understand. -- CAV Link to Original