Gus Van Horn

As I mentioned previously, a trip out of the country caused me to miss the first half of this year's OCON, although it took place in Boston, where I now live. I also decided -- correctly, I still think -- that diving into a full schedule of activities on the heels of that trip and a cross-country move would be a little too much, and went for a relatively light schedule of (mainly afternoon/evening) activities and socializing.

But that doesn't mean I don't wish I could have attended the entire week. I really enjoyed the conference at Telluride two years ago and see that several bloggers who attended this year wrote about their experiences. For my own convenience and for that of any who didn't attend, I present this roundup of information on the conference.

If you have further posts or interesting links I haven't included, feel free to write me about them or mention them in the comments.

1. Not tweeting (yet?) myself, I nevertheless will start by mentioning that Diana Hsieh and others used Twitter to post short notes about the proceedings, often in real time. I do wonder whether Twitter is making roundup posts like this superfluous, but will slog ahead anyway...

2. Kendall J of The Crucible, kept a near-daily log of his experiences: OCON – Day 1 & 2, OCON Days 3,4 & 5, OCON Day 6 & 7, and OCON Final Days. Kendall helpfully breaks his posts down into course-related and social sections. From his post on the final days of the conference:

Diana's OBloggers dinner was a success, with such notable bloggers attending as C. August of Titanic Deck Chairs, the husband and wife duo of One Reality and 3 Ring Binder, Gus Van Horn, TOS's Craig Biddle, and new blogger Rational Egoist's Jason Crawford in addition to Paul (GeekPress) and Diana (Noodlefood). We burned the midnight oil back at the hotel discussing all sorts of topics! [minor edits]

I definitely enjoyed that event and would like to thank Diana for organizing it. This was a very fun group of people to spend time with, and it was my first good chance to become better acquainted with the other Boston-area bloggers.

Speaking of whom, ...

3. C. August attended on a somewhat scaled-back basis, but kept good notes: OCON - Day 2, OCON - Days 3 & 4, and OCON - Day 5. This comes from his first entry, about the second day of the conference.

Onkar Ghate spoke on the separation of church and state, its political/philosophical underpinnings, and the threats it faces from the religious right and secular left. It was a fantastic talk.

At the end, Harry Binswanger prodded Onkar to get it published soon, and Onkar responded that he had a book in the making. Harry prodded further and suggested an op-ed so the ideas would be immediately available, which got a big round of applause. I'd actually like to see something in The Objective Standard, with extensive footnotes, because Onkar referred to many works by John Locke and other Enlightenment figures, and it would be a valuable resource.

I definitely agree with that sentiment.

4. Like C. August, I missed seeing the Boston Tea Party, which benefited from a strong presence of ARI speakers and OCON attendees, but Paul Hsieh posted pictures.

5. Returning to the Boston bloggers... Husband and wife duo SB and LB had lots of worthwhile posts on the OCON. SB's diary consisted of the following posts: OCON Update - July 4 through 6, 2009, OCON Update - July 7 through 9, 2009, and OCON Update - July 10 and 11, 2009. From the last of these:

In a general lecture called "Free Minds and Free Markets," Peter Schwartz pointed out the inextricable connection of liberty and capitalism. As Ayn Rand put it, "A free mind and a free market are corollaries." Mr. Schwartz elaborated upon this with his typical brilliance and intensity, and he illustrated his points with many examples, including some execrable quotes from Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, and Cass Sunstein.

This was one of the two general sessions I attended. The other, also superb, was delivered by John Allison. If I'd ever heard Peter Schwartz speak, it was long-enough ago that I didn't remember just how good a speaker he is.

LB, besides nicely summarizing the social atmosphere of OCON, makes me really wish I'd felt up to attending more of OCON, specifically John Lewis's course:

One of the most immediately motivating things I learned at OCON this week regards the light that lyric poetry of Archaic Greece shines on that important period in the advancement of thought. Dr. John Lewis' presentation of this period was enlightening and inspiring. I will be exploring this period through poetry further, but for now, offer a link to a later bit of interpreted poetry describing the key differences in the archaic poets Homer and Hesiod.

6. I also spent some time catching up with other friends from across the country and over time. Besides being pleasantly surprised to run into a couple of good people I hadn't seen in ten and fifteen years, I walked around the harbor area one afternoon with a friend from Houston. My camera is still MIA, but he had his camera and he's a better photographer than I am anyway. I hope he remembers to send me pictures of the beautiful tall ships that graced the concurrent Sail Boston 2009 event nearby. I may post some of them here later on if he does.

7. Commenter JG notes that Yaron Brook's speech to the Boston Tea Party has been posted to YouTube in two parts.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added link to Yaron Brook speech as Item 7.

Posted at 6:05 AM. Permalink | Comments (2) Backlinks

A conservative blogger I follow bemoans the fact that a recent papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, opens Barack Obama up to attack from the left on economic issues by the Pope. Between the gloating of leftist E.J. Dionne and the open evasion of Robert A. Sirico in the Wall Street Journal, I am reminded of Ayn Rand's essay, "Requiem for Man," in which she responded to Populorum Progressio, by Pope Paul VI.

First, we'll get the gloating out of the way.

Benedict's letter had some good things to say about the market system, but only if it is tempered by both "distributive justice and social justice." He thus spoke approvingly of "the redistribution of wealth" -- not a phrase currently on many American lips -- and caused free-market conservatives to blanch with his call for a "world political authority" to oversee the global economy in the name of "the common good."

Remember: "Capitalism" is fine only as long as we're talking about elements of a market economy subordinated to government conrol, and that's the best this anti-secular Pope can say for it.

And now for the open evasion.

The context [of this encyclical] is of course a global economic crisis -- a crisis that's taken place in a moral vacuum, where the love of truth has been abandoned in favor of a crude materialism. The pope urges that this crisis become "an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future."

Yet his encyclical contains no talk of seeking a third way between markets and socialism. Words like greed and capitalism make no appearance here, despite press headlines following the publication of the encyclical earlier this week. People seeking a blueprint for the political restructuring of the world economy won't find it here. But if they look to this document as a means for the moral reconstruction of the world's cultures and societies, which in turn influence economic events, they will find much to reflect upon.

Never mind that one cannot have a political-economic system "in a moral vacuum," and that the erosion of capitalism over the past century has occurred precisely because the moral philosophy of altruism cannot support capitalism, the political expression of egoism, the morality of rational self-interest: The pope didn't use the word "capitalism."

Also, we're supposed to pretend that the government policies that precipitated the financial crisis were formulated in a moral vacuum and that businessmen somehow function in a moral vacuum -- unless of course, they're being immoral according to the distorting light of altruism.

Ayn Rand's response (search term: "Dark Ages") to Populorum Progressio is just as apt for this, because the very same issues -- within the encyclical and within America's craven conservative movement -- apply today.

The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today's intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.

Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.

No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.

It's either-or. If capitalism's befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.

And there's more where that came from.

When Michael Moore's next "documentary" -- allegedly about capitalism -- comes out, don't forget that he's Catholic, too.

But be sure to remember as well that the title of Ayn Rand's eloquent defense of capitalism is Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

-- CAV

Posted at 11:19 AM. Permalink | Comments (3) Backlinks

Hobnobbing in the Hub

I enjoyed my first half-day of OCON, especially meeting or renewing acquaintances with a fair number of people, most of whom I originally knew through blogging. Making the new acquaintances has been very amusing, because people apparently are expecting to meet some big, burly guy based on my writing. One New Yorker, upon learning my pen name, said "Get OUT!" This doesn't always happen, but I've gotten similar reactions in the past.

I am, in fact, of a little less than average male height and have a slight build, at least when I'm not blogging.


Perhaps I should start saying, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry," when introduced...

On a more serious note, I do second LB's sentiment about OCON. I'd forgotten how nice it is being surrounded with intellectually inclined people who haven't the slightest trace of political correctness, religion, or modern kookiness about them.

Note to Self

Going through the backlog in my feed reader, I ran across a couple of things this morning that I meant to blog some time ago.

First, Andrew Medworth reminds me to stop by ARC TV from time to time...

No Dilemmas for these Prisoners

.. and then Craig Ceeley points to a very interesting story I forgot to blog by Robert Garmong about teaching philosophy to a bunch of prisoners.

My students, too, were singularly unprepared for a class on abstract thought. Many of them had never heard of philosophy and few even knew what the word meant. They were in my class because a federal grant paid their tuition, and a class on just about any topic represented an element of novelty. They were predominantly African-American and in their early 20s, and had mixed educational backgrounds. Yet, as one of my students -- who is serving a life term -- said on the first night of class, "We've got nothing to do but think."

That last line reminds me of a conversation my Mom and I once had about why our native Mississippi is so notable for producing writers and musicians despite its low population. Our partial answer: In a hot, agrarian state like that, we have nothing to do but think, either!

Give Diplomacy a Chance in Honduras

An HBLer alerted me to an outstanding article about Honduras by Roger Noriega. I'd noticed it before, but had been put off by its subtitle ("As the OAS stumbles, give diplomacy a chance.").

Common sense is useful here too: If a traffic cop roughs up a drunk driver at the scene of an injury accident, I doubt anyone would argue the importance of getting the drunk back behind the wheel as the best way to chastise the policeman.

Read it all.

Objectivist Roundup

Stop by One Reality for the latest installment. It includes a good handful of Tea Party posts.

The Chrome OS

Well, I guess I now know when the Linux version of Google Chrome will come out. Having played with Chrome a little bit, I don't care much for it, but I still find this article about "Five Things Google's Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook" an interesting read (HT: Paul Hsieh).

-- CAV

Posted at 7:03 AM. Permalink | Comments (8) Backlinks

From time to time, Glenn Reynolds will catch wind of news so ridiculous that it resembles an Onion parody, and then link to both, often under a headline like "Life Imitates the Onion." As it turns out, Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute may have upped the ante in that game.

Yesterday, Epstein noted that in 2002, Paul Krugman advocated replacing the Dot-com bubble with a government-induced housing bubble. (This remedy Epstein shows later to come from the same lot of snake oil Krugman was selling the year before.)

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. [Epstein's italics]

That sounded eerily familiar to me. Today, the reason for this dawned on me: It sounds just like a parody I read not too long ago at the Onion.

A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

"What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future," said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. "We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution."

Paul Krugman's track record isn't just "inconvenient:" It's laughable.

-- CAV

Posted at 6:56 AM. Permalink | Comments (4) Backlinks

Worse than No Help at All

Regular readers will already know what a low opinion I have of government "welfare" programs. That disdain extends, of course, to the many unforeseen consequences such programs inevitably have.

I must say, though, that even I was blindsided by the following example, which comes from an article about how some researchers cracked the Social Security Number code.

Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego based nonprofit, cited another potential problem. She said many businesses have errantly rely [sic] upon or have moved to redact all but the last four digits of a person's SSN, the very digits that are most unique to an individual.

"Because of the way the SSN has been designed, asking for the last four numbers of the SSN puts people at risk because those are the only numbers that are unique to you and cannot be guessed easily by someone who might want to use your identity," Foley said.

An official from the Social Security Administration is cited to the effect that it has warned the private sector against using SSNs as identifiers, but plenty of other government entities have done the same, at least until very recently.

Nymphomania ...

... isn't terribly fun in real life.

Medication is also helping. She currently takes two kinds - an antidepressant and a birth control pill. Both are proven to reduce libido - and there has indeed been something of a breakthrough in the bedroom department.

"She even turned me down the other day," says [her husband], laughing. "I wanted to sleep with her, but she was the one who said she didn't feel like it. I could have whooped with delight."

This reminds me a little of the of Phineas Gage story -- but read this article if you've heard of it.

Religion in Fiction and in Fact

Myrhaf blogs a short story by Leo Tolstoy, ending with this:

Tolstoy dramatizes his theme perfectly. It is a powerful story. But what a theme! Tolstoy's is not a philosophy for living on earth, but a philosophy of self-abnegation and renunciation of values and happiness. In every fundamental respect Leo Tolstoy and Ayn Rand are opposites, despite their both being brilliant writers of long novels who were born in Russia.

One is tempted to ask whether his earlier use of the term spoiler is facetious!

Myrhaf's mini-review reminds me indirectly of the fact that I read about half of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel during my recent travels. At one point, she matter-of-factly describes the time she, her sister, and her brother -- all well past infancy -- were circumcised, using only enough detail for the reader to appreciate how just how barbaric the practice is.

Some may object to my filing circumcision under religion since Islam technically does not call for it. That may be the case, but Islam is often used to justify it. And besides, there is plenty to spare in Infidel for any reader to understand how vile that particular religion is.

Stupid Question, Snappy Answer

When I was a kid, I read through my parents' entire collection of old Mad magazines and recall a feature they occasionally ran, called Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. The following excerpt, which comes from a job interview transcript is in the same vein, but even funnier:

Annoying Recruiter: How would you move Mount Fuji 1/2 a kilometre to the South?

ME: Why would I do that?

AR: Uhhhh, it's a project you've been assigned.

ME: As part of my work I've been asked to move Mount Fuji?

AR: Yes, so how would you do it?

ME: How could that possibly benefit the business?

AR: What?

ME: As an analyst, my first reaction is the project would be prohibitively expensive and take forever to complete. The first thing I'd want is to see a business case that showed how this would benefit the business.

I learned of this via professional headhunter Nick Corcodilos, who adds that, "All kidding aside, I'd use a personalized version of what he said to the interviewer without hesitation."

-- CAV

Posted at 6:48 AM. Permalink | Comments (8) Backlinks

During a flight over West Texas last week, I spotted something very odd from the window. At first glance, it seemed to be a hilly subdivision, with roads winding through some hills.

I've seen things like that plenty of times, but something drew my attention back to the ground. There was something funny about this "subdivision." What was with the light poles?

Or were they light poles?

I took a closer look and saw that I was actually looking at massive wind farm, most likely part of the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, based on my best guess of our flight path. Its size, to which even the image shown here can't do justice, was mind-boggling. It stretched all the way to the horizon and I probably spent several minutes looking at it, stunned at how huge it is, before simply becoming bored with it. I began to wonder when environmentalists will finally add scarring of the earth along with their complaints about bird deaths to their objections to the technology. Every tower sat on a parcel of cleared land.

In any event, I was also reminded of something I encountered about a year ago concerning a scheme by T. Boone Pickens for the government to force the American economy to shift towards wind generation as a primary source of electricity. Back then, I wondered:

If wind power were really such a great cash cow, why can't or won't Pickens finance this himself? Why insulate him from losses if he's wrong, while guaranteeing that everyone in Texas will subsidize his next fortune at best or take his bath at worst?

According to Wikipedia, the "Pickens Plan" -- of which the fleecing of his fellow Texans was just a part -- would cost $1 trillion. Not that this Congress has shown one jot of resistance to the temptation to spend huge amounts of money or micromanage our lives, but Pickens continues his full-court press for this scheme.

In fact, Pickens even seems to have borrowed a page from Barack Obama's playbook, busy as he is "organizing the New Energy Army in every Congressional District" in the name of "[telling] Congress to reduce our dependence on foreign oil." Too bad this approach -- which is just a type of central planning -- will only result in America needlessly restricting its access to cheap, reliable energy. Think "Terror-Free Oil" -- but without the oil.

Ever since I first moved to Texas when I was seventeen, the "big sky" of its flat landscape always made me think of America's vast potential. But now, thanks to T. Boone Pickens, whose government mooching is a betrayal of his American heritage, it is being transformed into a symbol of massive government waste and tyranny, one windmill at a time.

-- CAV

Posted at 6:40 AM. Permalink | Comments (6) Backlinks

There and Back Again

Objectivist Summer Conference 2009 will be starting in Boston tomorrow, but as chance would have it, I'll be out of the country for the first half of it. However, I will be around from as early as noon to late in the day/early evening for the last three weekdays of it. If you'll be there and you'd like to meet up on one of those days, drop me a line. I may not be able to reply until about the sixth or seventh, though.

And, most likely, there won't be a post here tomorrow.

Objectivist Roundup

Rational Jenn will be hosting it this week.

Lord of the Files

I see that, by coincidence, Rational Jenn has also decided to improve her implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system. I'm not sure whether I'll blog it beyond taking the occasion to toot my own horn, but I just made a huge improvement in my own implementation: Until today, the year-long stint Mrs. Van Horn and I did in separate cites had kept me from getting all of the clutter -- I mean filing -- under control.

That had, in fact, been the one thing I had never fully implemented, and it has occasionally driven me nuts over the past two years. When? Any time I needed something that was still "outside the system." One of those times, it was a car title.

Yeah.

Of course, the camera, not being made of paper, is apparently "outside the system" and doubtless hiding in some still not-quite unpacked corner of our place. That's a shame, because I came up with a really clever way to convert a hanging file drawer to one that can hold manila folders properly.

Nonetheless... What a load off! Especially given how small the new place is.

They're Going after NyQuil!?!?!

Not only are some idiots hoping to run the financial sector as brilliantly as the FDA oversees pharmaceuticals, but others, not content with it preventing new drugs from hitting the shelves, are trying to get it to take what we do have away!

The drugs that could be pulled off shelves are combination medications, such as Procter & Gamble's NyQuil or Novartis' Theraflu, which combine acetaminophen with other ingredients that treat cough and runny nose.

So since some people choose to take too much acetaminophen, I might be forced to be even more miserable every time I get a cold in the future.

Just Because...

I just had this perverse thought -- I get this way when I stay up all night -- "There is nothing so stupid that someone, somewhere doesn't take it seriously." So I throw the most idiotic thing ("ban flushing toilets") that immediately comes to mind into a search engine and get this:

It's a subtle difference in emphasis: from an optimistic vision in which simple technological innovation was used to reshape the planet for human happiness, innovation is now qualified in terms of environmental damage. It becomes a question of "balance", with human health now a factor in a trade-off.

Non-flushing loos are a feature of Britain's "Eco Towns", the harshly regulated and monitored new settlements proposed by the government. Here, where water is in abundance, they're needed to raise "awareness" of resource consumption. But the argument has now become entrenched in development, illustrated by a new documentary Flush It!

No, I'm not watching the clip that follows.

"Prepare for the War on Toilets," the article warns, and ends with an African woman hitting the nail on the head: "It's not only money that's stopping development any more, it's ideas and organisations telling us we need to consume less, and we don't need what the west has." [bold added]

More here, and the date line isn't April 1.

Back to OCON, and Boston

And ideas, as the paternalists of the FDA show us, can reverse development. Boston is steeped in such ideas, but it's still alive and kicking, so why not enjoy it?

If you're going to OCON and had to pinch pennies to do so -- or you just want more money left over to give to ARI in the vein of helping save Boston from itself-- here's a list of 25 Free Things to Do in and around Boston. I will do #6 sooner or later, perhaps on one of those afternoons. And here's an article about Boston pizza, which I haven't tried yet. Last but not least, I was in the area where OCON will occur a few weeks ago and saw that my favorite Boston restaurant chain so far, Legal Seafood, has a test kitchen there. Nice.

Happy Independence Day!

I'll be in America only in spirit this July Fourth, but I, like Joseph Kellard, can thank one of its immigrants for helping me appreciate it much more fully than I might have otherwise.

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on July 2, 2009

Posted at 5:00 AM. Permalink | Comments (3) Backlinks