Stew Van Horn

With all the traveling I've had to do lately, as well as my general busy-ness, I have found myself forgetting to submit posts to the weekly Objectivist Roundup sometimes, and I see that I may be late submitting this to the upcoming Carnival of the Recipes. Well, I'm posting it anyway, and I'll shoot Martin Lindeskog an email to see whether he wants any additional entries.

It's been awhile since I've posted a recipe, and this is one I'll make tonight as soon as I post this and print it out. Unlike the others, which I'd at least scribbled onto cards or into a recipe book, I've never actually committed this one to paper.

Instead, I've used as a loose guide, for nearly -- Oh, Lord! -- for over twenty years, a page of a recipe book (pictured) that came with a crock pot my parents gave me when they sent me off to college.

The crock pot is long gone, having been replaced by a newer one Mrs. Van Horn and I got as a wedding present, but the stained, well-worn book remains. I've tried at least half a dozen of its recipes, and, along with this, developed another of my favorites, Chili Van Horn, starting from recipes on its pages.

The recipe book was perfect for launching my cooking hobby: Its recipes were good enough to produce satisfying, confidence-building results, but appealed to a broad-enough audience (read: "were bland enough") to invite some jazzing-up. Spices, buddy! Spices!

This stew recipe is the product of just such an improvisation. It combines elements I liked from an extremely bland recipe ("Slow-Cooker Stew") and a slightly more interesting one ("Old-Fashioned Stew"). But it still needed jazzing up, not to mention corn. And carrots. And I don't like bell peppers. You get the idea.

So, without further ado, I end my practice of using the pages that contain the recipes mainly to jog my memory, and finally write this sucker down!

Since I typically make this recipe over night, one of my favorite things about it is the way the whole house smells when I wake up in the morning! It's easy to make, hearty, and tasty. Also, very importantly for someone as busy as I often am, it makes excellent leftovers.

Bon Appetit!

And if you like this, you can find more of my recipes here, on the right hand side of the page.

One last note, and this is especially directed towards collegians, cooking novices generally, and busy folks looking for short cuts: Don't blow off browning the meat, like I did in college, or it won't be very tender. You're welcome in advance!

***

2-2 1/2 lb. stew meat
1/3 cup flour
1/8-1/4 tsp pepper
1/8 tsp ground cloves
3 tbsp butter
1 cup water
1 beef bouillon cube
1 large onion, chopped
1/3-1/2 lb baby carrots, chopped
1/3-1/2 lb corn
2 cans Ro-Tel Original
2 tbsp cornstarch
1/4 cup cold water

1. If necessary, cut the stew meat approximately into 1 inch cubes, removing any fat or gristle.
2. Dredge the meat my way (the quick, easy, and neat way) as follows: (a) Place flour, pepper, and cloves into a largish Tupperware container and stir together. (b) Add meat and seal with lid. (c) Shake vigorously.
3. Melt butter in a skillet, add the dredged meat, and brown. Place the browned meat into the crock pot.
4. Pour any drippings into a saucepan and add the water. Bring to a boil and dissolve the bouillon cube. Pour into crock pot.
5. Add the remaining ingredients (except the corn starch and cold water) to the crock pot, set to low, and cook for about 6 hours.
6. Dissolve the cornstarch in the cold water and stir into the stew after cooking to thicken it.
7. Serve with crackers.
   

***

Drat! It looks like I'll be making this tomorrow night, after all! More hangover from Hurricane Ike.... Had to empty my refrigerator before I left town, and somehow failed to put cornstarch on my shopping list after I got back.

If it's worth doing -- and it is! -- it's worth doing right.

-- CAV

Calhoun on the Bubble

Reader Dismuke alerted me via email to an excellent piece at RealClear Markets regarding the current economic crisis, by investor Joseph Calhoun. What I like about it is that it busts two myths at once: that the current crisis represents a failure of capitalism and that there is a shortage of capital in the economy. Each has been used when convenient lately to sow panic and to justify massive new government interventions in the economy.

Last week Goldman Sachs raised $10 billion in new capital in one day. They sold $5 billion in preferred stock and warrants to Berkshire Hathaway and also completed a secondary offering of common stock that raised another $5 billion. Friday, JP Morgan raised $10 billion in a secondary offering to help pay for the Washington Mutual takeunder. Both of these offerings were oversubscribed, meaning that the companies could have raised more capital if they wanted. There is not a shortage of capital for well run financial companies.

There is, however, a shortage of capital for companies that have acted irresponsibly with investor capital in the recent past. For some reason, our political leaders believe this is a failure of the market, but isn't this what should be expected from rational investors? Given a choice,why would a rational investor allocate limited capital to the losers rather than the winners? If capital is really as scarce as it seems, isn't it better for our economy if we make sure that it is allocated wisely? [This can be done only by making sure that people who know what they are doing are free to act on their rational effort. --ed]

The biggest bank failure in the history of the United States happened last Thursday night and by Friday morning, it was business as usual. The only difference was the name on the door and the losses suffered by those unfortunate enough to invest in Washington Mutual bonds or stock. The taxpayers didn't lose anything and depositors didn't lose anything, only investors. That is how capitalism works in case everyone has forgotten. [bold added]

Oh, and scratch what I said about "justifying" government intervention in the economy. The proper verb in my last sentence is really "excuse". Capitalism depends on (and, to the extent that a nation is free, it is the triumph of) countless individuals exercising their own, independent judgement. This is impossible without freedom, which must be protected by the government. In fact, that is the only proper function of the government.

Any time and for any reason (HT, C. August) the government interferes with individual rights, it curtails the ability of some individuals to act according to their best judgement, and threatens to do so for all. Think about what this means in the context of the current crisis.

Those who have made bad decisions in real estate (and related) investments have already suffered their losses, or can probably see them coming.

What good is it going to do for our economy or our freedom for the government to take money away from those who have not made similar mistakes and hand it over to those who have? And what good will "supervision" of the able (in the worst imaginable context, that of threats) by the very people who helped create this mess do? Most importantly, by what right?

In all the disgraceful spinning of campfire ghost stories, cries of "act now, think later", and groveling before Nancy Pelosi (of all people!), not once has any politician in favor of the bailout explained why robbing American citizens for the benefit of inept bankers is the right, American thing to do. That's because they can't, any more than Nancy Pelosi can wave a wand and relieve all of us from the necessity of thinking carefully in order to make a living. Or make socialism compatible with the actual requirements of human life.

Just for starters, a "bailout" will insulate those who deserve their losses from the consequences of their bad decisions, as well as (via the inevitable redistribution of wealth) visit those consequences upon those who don't deserve them and deprive the rewards of sound judgement from those who do deserve them. Isn't the last thing our economy needs right now to throw good money after bad, while removing incentives from those best able to make good economic decisions?

If we allow sympathy for the inept (or the foolish) or envy of the able to cloud our judgement enough to blind us to the fact that government intervention in the economy is ultimately achieved by violating someone's inalienable rights, we will rue that choice sooner or later. A mere bursting bubble will look like a walk in the park. (Calhoun hints at that, too, although he could have gone a lot farther.)

Read the whole article. (Among the things I haven't discussed here, Calhoun succinctly explains how some recent government interventions have already misfired.)

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected typos.

Quick Roundup 365

Articles on the Mortgage Crisis

Via HBL are two must-reads on the government-caused mortgage crisis. The first explores the origins of the housing crisis, pinpointing events in 1999:

Why did it happen? Let's go back to 1999, when Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, was under pressure by the Clinton administration to find a way to get more loans to "borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans." A pilot program was launched, which soon became general policy. Money flowed to people who couldn't afford to pay it back.

Michael Arrington then quotes one Peter Wallison predicting a government bailout resulting from that policy that same year!

The next article, by Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune, ends up asking a similar question to the one I raised the other day: "Who will rescue the federal government?" Unlike myself, he presents the gory financial details behind this question.

Even the government admits this can't go on forever. A report from the Treasury Department says that without big increases in revenue, "Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending and the related deficit financing costs will far exceed the government's ability to pay."

When you spend more than you bring in, you have to borrow to cover the difference. In the next three decades, the government's official debt is on track to triple. But at some point, the Treasury predicts, "the world's financial markets would likely cease lending to the United States."

Then what? David Henderson, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, ticks off the options: We could close the budget gap by drastically cutting spending or raising taxes. The Federal Reserve could print a lot of money, reducing the real value of the debt and making it easier to pay off. Or the government could default -- in short, declare bankruptcy. [link dropped, bold added]

Huge spending cuts, confiscatory taxation, government theft by inflation, or federal bankruptcy, take your pick. Even the only moral or permanently viable answer, the first of these, will be painful, thanks to most Americans having become accustomed to some kind of government handouts.

Now that we're in this situation, what ought we do about it? Through Instapundit and, again, HBL, we have "Key Points on 'Rescue' Plan From A Healthy Bank's Perspective" from John Allison, Chairman and CEO of BB&T. Among other things along the way, he traces the origin of the crisis even further back than Bill Clinton's big assist in 1999:

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are the primary cause of the mortgage crisis. These government supported enterprises distorted normal market risk mechanisms. While individual private financial institutions have made serious mistakes, the problems in the financial system have been caused by government policies including, affordable housing (now sub-prime), combined with the market disruptions caused by the Federal Reserve holding interest rates too low and then raising interest rates too high. [bold added]

As Yaron Brook recently put it so well, this is not a failure of capitalism, but of the "unfree market".

To make matters worse -- as if this bailout bill weren't already bad enough -- some earlier versions of this bill included massive outlays for ACORN, a left-wing advocacy group. That particular measure appears to be gone, but there's plenty more to hate about this bill:

In the interest of "transparency," there will be four layers of oversight, and judicial review of Treasury decisions -- something Hank Paulson tried (with good reason) to exclude in his initial draft. The ACORN subsidy is gone, but mortgage relief is in, through some yet-to-be-determined process of federal mortgage review. [bold added]

Re-read John Allison's analysis of the origins of this crisis and recall that "bailout" and solution" are not synonyms.

Update: Just as I was about to head out the door, I noticed that David Veksler has posted on the economic crisis as well.

The key to understanding economic theory is to grasp that the same principles that apply to your personal finances, and perhaps to your interaction with your local grocer apply equally to the world at large, at all levels of economy activity. The key to understanding politics is to grasp that political success requires advocating policies which violate these basic economic principles - and then evading the consequences of their own policies - with the voters' eager participation in the delusion.

This last sentence indicates why cultural change is the only possible long-term solution to the current crisis. If people do not generally re-gain at least the same level of appreciation of personal independence and freedom that they once had in America, the formula for political "success" will not change.

Bush's Statist Legacy, Updated

In barely over a month since I pointed to an eye-opening MacLean's article about the enormous growth in the size of the federal government under our current President, we have not only seen him accelerate our disastrous domestic policies (above), but have had him doing exactly the same thing in the meantime with respect to foreign policy.

On The Drudge Report, in a single day, I spotted the following collection of headlines. They practically do my job for me:

1. "Israel Asked US for Green Light to Bomb Nuclear Sites in Iran"
2. "US, Russia Reach Deal on New UN Iran Resolution"
3. "Russia Offers Chavez Nuclear Help amid US Tensions"

I leave it up to the reader to determine how (1) stopping an ally from doing (even a part of) what we should have done to Iran long ago, (2) making a deal on Iran with the country that has been helping it become a nuclear threat, and (3) evading the open intercourse between that same nation and an open enemy very nearby, will promote our long-term national security. I certainly don't see it.

Who needs McCain or Obama to take office when we still have George W. Bush until January?

Chavez Echoes the Ayn Rand Institute...

... regarding a fact, but not his evaluation of that fact.

As if recent world events haven't closely-enough resembled some hack attempting to re-write Atlas Shrugged in as grotesquely-exaggerated a manner possible, we have Hugo Chavez saying of the financial crisis, "I am sounding like Bush, more or less. What a novelty!" Sadly for us, the only novelty is that this is now so obvious, even Hugo Chavez can see it.

A press release from the Ayn Rand Institute indicated a year and a half ago that this has been the case:

"In announcing his commitment to achieving 'social justice' in Latin America," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "President Bush is following in the footsteps, not of Thomas Jefferson, but of Hugo Chavez."

In addition to this being old news, this is not a good thing.

Furthermore, both Chavez and Vladimir Putin, who understand this on the level of cunning, see this and appear to be getting ready to use it.

Of course, if any leader really understood this, he would do, as Stephen Borque suggests in a letter he sent to his Congressmen, and "grab the free-market baton that the Republicans have long ago dropped."

Sadly, in a twist too ironic even for a good farce, Chavez and Putin seem closer to doing this than our own government!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added link to David Veksler to end of first section.

The Color of Hypocrisy

Via Arts and Letters Daily is one of those fascinating articles that sneaks up you and leaves you pleasantly surprised with an insight where you'd expected merely to fulfill a twinge of morbid curiosity. Here's the blurb:

Sushi is just what “White People” want: foreign, expensive, healthy, and hated by the uneducated. White People are not snobs or anything...

"Here we go again," I thought, remembering a bus ride in Dallas shortly after college. Some black guy in the front of the bus was very loudly and pointedly slamming "white people" every chance he got.

Was he trying to incite his fellow black passengers against the whites or dare his white passengers to do something about his rude behavior?

I don't know, but I had fun reducing him to a stammer when, as I left, he looked at me and said, "Oh! When I say 'white people', I mean management."

"Well that's funny! I thought you were talking about skin color the whole time," I replied without so much as raising my voice or breaking stride as I continued to exit the bus.

I had hoped to simply not give this idiot the satisfaction of acting irate, but he handed me his own head on a platter instead. Thanks for the memories, Malcolm X!

But back to the article, which discusses the most recent "instant book" based on a blog, this one being, Stuff White People Like, by one Christian Lander. The article, rather than being some sort of elitist slam against American culture actually gives insight into someone who slams an American subculture (and probably does despise American culture).

I'd heard of this blog before, shortly after mentioning St. Patrick's Day and having this guy's entry about it pointed out to me. Kinda funny, but more sarcastic in tone than I cared for. A more recent entry of his on ultimate frisbee, which I played in grad school, is more to my liking:

If you look a little closer, you will see some surprising things. First, you will never see hippies get more upset than on an Ultimate Frisbee field. It can be jarring to see people who look like they should be playing acoustic guitars yelling at each other about whether or not Blake stepped out of bounds. Secondly, you will notice that Ultimate Frisbee matches are the best place to meet white guys who wear headbands. [bold added]

Heh! How true! Maybe I like this one better because I am not a leftist. And my wife really is Irish, and yet never has said a word about being "oppressed". Maybe she's Black Irish....

But Lander is a leftist, and what he means by "white people" is basically the same thing my old pal Malcolm from the bus did: the educated elite. Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic Monthly comments:

Lander's White People aren't always white, and the vast majority of whites aren't White People (he doesn't even capitalize the term). But although Lander's designation is peculiar, he's hardly the first to dissect this elite and its immediate predecessors. ... [David] Brooks calls these people variously "bourgeois bohemians," the "educated elite," and the "cosmopolitan class"). Lander, like many of these writers, traces this group's values to the 1960s, and there's clearly a connection between a politics based on "self-cultivation" (to quote the Students for a Democratic Society’s gaseous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement) and what Lander defines as White People's ethos: "their number-one concern is about the best way to make themselves happy." That concern progresses naturally into consumer narcissism and a fixation on health and "well-being": Lander's most entertaining and spot-on entries dissect White People's elaborate sumptuary codes, their dogged pursuit of their own care and feeding, and their efforts to define themselves and their values through their all-but-uniform taste and accessories (Sedaris/Eggers/The Daily Show/the right indie music/Obama bumper stickers/uh, The New Yorker [And ribbons and wristbands. --ed]). [bold added]

And, much later:

Here and elsewhere, accompanying the book's mockery of the essentially innocuous solipsism of White People is what Lander, a man of the left, described to me as his exasperation with progressives' "cultural righteousness" and "intolerance and groupthink"-- a set of attitudes that enhances and is enhanced by a profoundly smug and incurious outlook.

In other words, Lander has spent a large amount of time and emotional energy banging his head against a cultural wall Ayn Rand identified nearly fifty years ago!

Avowed non-materialists whose only manifestation of rebellion and of individualism takes the material form of the clothes they wear, are a pretty ridiculous spectacle. Of any type of nonconformity, this is the easiest to practice, and the safest. ("Apollo and Dionysus" in The Objectivist, Jan. 1970, p.775)

This irritates the hell out of Lander, who regularly lambastes his "white" fellows for superficiality and laziness ("White People 'like feeling smart without doing work -- two hours in a theater is easier than ten hours with a book.'") and apparently doesn't shrink from the impracticality of the immoral ethos/politics of altruism/collectivism he espouses ([White people] will also send their kids to private school with other rich white kids so that they can avoid the 'low test scores' that come with educational diversity.").

Lander thus seems to have an inkling that poor academic performance and public education go hand in hand -- that his moral code is at odds with the requirements of human survival -- and chooses what he regards as the high road. He is thus intellectually independent to the limited degree that he can call his fellows for "acting white", so to speak, but he ultimately fails, for whatever reason, to stray too far from "white" tradition himself. Rand said something about this, too.

Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists. They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders for generations: the notions that faith and feeling are superior to reason, that material concerns are evil, that love is the solution to all problems, that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live. There is not a single basic principle of today’s Establishment which they do not share. Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years (or longer): the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James and on down. [bold added] ("From a Symposium," Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 174.)

The fact that so many "white people" act the same is certainly irritating (But see the Note below.), but when one understands the source of an irritation, one can, accordingly, learn to accept the circumstance or act to change it. In Lander's case, understanding why so many "white people" are banal hypocrites might help, but he would first have to take time to critically evaluate (and therefore reject) his own moral code and political assumptions.

"White people" are hypocrites in part because their survival depends on it: Altruism and collectivism, if consistently applied, would ultimately be deadly. Some are, doubtless, also hypocrites because they do not want to think. And some, after an entire lifetime of being told that the moral and the practical are at odds, have been beaten into intellectual submission.

Lander seethes about the wrong thing even as he, "acting white" himself, profits from the book he published -- not that there's anything objectively wrong with earning money.

It isn't that personal style, or exotic food, or sending one's kids to good schools is wrong because it isn't altruistic. It's that altruism and collectivism are wrong. Lots of those "white people" out there would have become much more interesting and dynamic people had they not been saddled with an inverted morality their entire lives, and that probably includes the witty Lander himself.

-- CAV

Note: An astute commenter reminded me later today that people acting similarly to one another is also not in and of itself a bad thing. I refer the interested reader to the comments for further elaboration.

Updates

Today: (1) Added a sentence explaining why I thought the article was valuable. (2) Corrected a typo. (3) Added a Note. (4) Having "one of those days", I re-word the Note.

Quick Roundup 364

Noted.

One of the few figures of speech I retain from my Navy days is a somewhat sarcastic use of the term "noted", which is normally just a way of acknowledging some bit of information in informal conversation.

In its sarcastic sense, "noted" is a sort of verbal rolling of the eyes and is a reaction to information that is obvious, not really news, not pertinent to the matter at hand, or is coming from a source not really on the same page as everyone else. Everyone else, that is, with some modicum of rationality and contact with reality.

That is my reaction, for all of the above reasons, to a little care package I received in the mail yesterday at my own expense from my paternalistic government. Its cover is shown at right, and its contents might have been more useful had it arrived nearly two weeks before Hurricane Ike's landfall (or better yet, before the start of hurricane season), rather than nearly two weeks after. Furthermore, there is nothing within that anyone with even the slightest degree of initiative couldn't simply obtain from the Internet at the cost of only a small amount of effort and time. I did that and more. Hell, I even know what the phenomenon known as "lightning" is and that it could be dangerous! But if I didn't, I suppose I could have learned as much from this glossy brochure since, having attended private schools in my youth, I am literate.

The only thing more gauche about this document than its late arrival is the following punchline on its back cover: "If you need a copy of the Hurricane Disaster Preparedness Handbook in Spanish, Vietnamese, [or] Chinese[,] please call 713-794-9954."

And I already had the "disaster plan" it urges me to have had, and got along fine without the government's "help", thank you very much.

Oh yeah! Maybe there is something else more gauche than the late arrival time and the ungrammatical English invitation to non-speakers of English for a translated guide! It's the whole idea of the government "being there" for us (and posing as some sort of cognitive authority) after greatly exacerbating the catastrophe on the coast by subsidizing imprudent development -- again, at our expense!

Eric Berger, a local hurricane blogger whose analysis leading up to the storm I found invaluable, asks whether "we" should rebuild Galveston. I submit for his consideration the view Brian Phillips expresses (in the previous link) that this is not properly a political question, but one for each affected individual to consider on his own and to act on, at his own expense.

(Incidentally, the comments to Berger's post are interesting as a sort of diagnostic measure of where Americans in one of the freest parts of the country stand on the issue, and why. Some of them, as indicators of common beliefs and confusions, go a long way in explaining the man-made component of this disaster.)

Film. Change Clothes. Film Again.

For comic relief, this pair of videos of an explosion (Part I, Part II) after the storm, suggests how the shooting took place! (HT: Michael Gold)

"They will know we are Christians by our love." (Part III)

Awhile back, I noted the spiteful, anti-intellectual tone of an expletive-laden editorial by Christian apologist Doug Giles on "How to Shut up an Atheist if You Must":

I thank Doug Giles for expressing his views on reasoned debate and for providing such an excellent example, in the form of his essay, of how ugly the lack of intellectual confidence that comes with the abandonment of reason can be.

Apparently, while I was swamped, some comments by Nick Provenzo on a woman's right to have an abortion have elicited that and more, including death threats! Like Diana Hsieh, I am horrified by this, but I am not in the least bit surprised.

Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when mean deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, persuasion, communication, or understanding are impossible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. [bold added] (Ayn Rand, in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 66)

If the animals snarling at Nick -- and therefore at me, who am in agreement with him -- would do this to themselves, why should anyone doubt they would also want to murder those of us who really choose life?

I have not yet read the entirety of Nick's posts on abortion, but based on what I know of Nick's character and thinking, I am sure that I would fully, or almost fully, agree with them. And in any event, he has the right to argue for his position. Justice demands that I express my support for his position and for his right to state it openly.

Who Will Rescue the Rescuers?

Regarding tyranny, there is an ancient question attributed to the Roman poet, Juvenal: "Who will watch the watchers?"

Perhaps, with Bush "rescuing" Wall Street from decisions encouraged by our government's monetary policies, and then McCain, whose attempt to grandstand by suspending his campaign was about to go awry, and him, in turn, Obama, who wasn't going to Washington (at first).... Perhaps we need to re-cast Juvenal's question: "Who will rescue the rescuers?"

We need to ask that question very badly, based on the joint statement Obama got McCain to bail him out with yesterday:

This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country.

Never mind that central planning can not run an economy, and thus that "Washington" thus never has been, and never will be "capable of leading the country". Never mind that both speak of statism as is it were as incontestable as the daily rising of the sun. Never mind that substantive change in the course of our country demands better ideas and that, without debate, better ideas will never be heard.

How fitting it is that they may not debate! They both fundamentally agree that our country needs "leadership" from the government, rather than for the government to do what it ought, which is to get completely out of the way of the economy.

-- CAV

Doomsday? Maybe. Maybe Not.

In an article called "269 tie: An electoral college 'doomsday'?", Joseph Curl of The Washington Times speculates on a few plausible Election Day scenarios that could lead to a tie in the Electoral College, and conceivably result in Sarah Palin serving as Barack Obama's Vice President.

There are at least a half-dozen plausible ways the election can end in a tie, and at least one very plausible possibility - giving each candidate the states in which they now lead in the polls, only New Hampshire - which went Republican in 2000 and Democratic in 2004, each time by just 1.5 percent - needs to swap to the Republican column to wind up with a 269-269 tie.

The odds of this happening are slim -- about 1.5 percent -- but higher than they were for the last election. My initial reaction to this possibility was something like, "So what? We're getting stuck with Unity '08 no matter who wins!"

But then I realized that a tie could ultimately be a good thing: It would clothesline any argument that the incoming administration has a "mandate", and if there is one thing we want after Election Day it's anything that will help gridlock happen or destroy any momentum towards tyranny the winner might have. Or almost anything....

The news isn't all good. The law regarding how Congress (or which -- the incoming or the outgoing) should break a tie is not unambiguous, and one particularly nauseating scenario looms: According to Electoral College specialist Judith Best, we could end up handing the reigns over to an Acting President Nancy Pelosi while armies of lawyers duke things out for a couple of years.

In the sad state of confusion regarding the proper role of government, I am loathe to contemplate what could ultimately come out of a protracted constitutional crisis like this. (More foolishness about abolishing the Electoral College, which we should not do, would be just the start.)

This election is potentially a disaster for the cause of individual rights no matter what the outcome. The potential for difficulty in breaking a tie is particularly unfortunate, because a tie otherwise would be just the sort of unintended benefit from the Electoral College we could use right about now.

-- CAV

Updates

9-25-08: Corrected a typo.

Camp Houston

Having just returned from what turned out to be a hurricane evacuation, job hunt, and visit with my wife in Boston all rolled into one, I find myself feeling a little thinly-stretched and pulled in many directions at once.

In addition, I have gathered -- first from a commenter who I am pretty sure follows my blog fairly closely, and yesterday, from a friend who I am pretty sure just stops by here from time to time -- that many of you may be almost as confused as I am thinly-stretched these days about my whereabouts and exact situation.

So, while I don't like to discuss my personal situation in great detail here, let me briefly set the record straight. When, after my last trip to the Land of the Puritans, I said, "That is home now, and as a writer, I am eager to get out of my present holding pattern," I meant by that first clause only that, with my wife and my immediate future both residing in Boston, that I do not feel at home anywhere else anymore.

My physical domicile remains in Houston, where I am wrapping up work on a scientific paper even as I conduct a job hunt. Hence the title of this post, which, very fortunately in my case, is not a commentary on what the physical conditions of life here will be like for me after Hurricane Ike. (I do hear a generator running somewhere behind my house, though. How I still have electricity, phone, and cable with the gauntlet of trash trees those wires have to run through is beyond me!)

That said, I have been in limbo and may remain there for some time longer. An average job hunt lasts four months, if I recall correctly. I did not start job hunting in earnest until June, and my job hunt is being made more difficult by three things, any one of which would be bad enough: (1) I am looking for work not on the traditional career path for people with my training. (2) I am not actually in Boston most of the time. And (3) I am having to build a network of job hunting contacts there starting almost from scratch. You could probably add a fourth factor: This is only my second attempt to gain employment outside of government or academia (and the first that includes finding a position to begin with). Job hunting is, in and of itself a skill and it is, with the amount of time it requires, for all practical purposes, a job.

And until I extricate myself from the necessity of doing that job, I will remain extremely busy and, probably, in a holding pattern as far as my editorial writing exploits go. My thanks for your indulgence and my apologies for any confusion!

***

Regarding Ike, I'll devote just a few words to my initial impressions of Houston a week after the storm. I drove in about 6:30 p.m. yesterday. Damaged trees started showing up as far north as Nacaogdoches. I spotted my first uprooted tree and damaged roofs near Corrigan. Storm damage seemed almost capricious, with perfectly intact trees or structures next to damaged ones. Very few road signs were damaged coming in, although traffic outbound seemed heavy for the hour.

And then -- in a conclusion mirroring the start of our evacuation for Rita -- I ran into a wall of traffic near downtown that made me think there was an accident or an Astros game about to start. I took advantage of the standstill, which was more like an evacuation than normal traffic, to take snapshots of downtown, like this one:


If you click on this shot, you can see the blown-out windows of the JP Morgan Chase tower at right, but overall, things look pretty normal. Notice the reflection of the building second to the left on glass of the one furthest to the left.

My first traffic report disabused me of the notion that this was a normal traffic jam even as it explained the heavy traffic I had just seen outbound. Traffic light outages, it seems, are widespread enough that they are making it hard to exit freeways for miles in the suburbs. This is making trips from downtown that normally take about twenty minutes last more than an hour! I was trapped on U.S. 59 myself for nearly an hour before I exited and took side streets through the Museum District and the Medical Center to get home.

By that time, it was dark, but what I could see looked mostly normal. The Mecom Fountain was running and lit, as this photo I took while stopped by a working traffic signal shows.

Most of the stores I use heading to and from work appeared to be open, too. My area, at least, seems to have held up pretty well, although some people in my neighborhood are running generators, and a friend of mine nearby was, the last time I talked to him a few days ago, still without power. Other than a huge wall of fallen tree branches lining my street (and the Raking from Hell awaiting me this weekend), the neighborhood looks normal. The only damage to the house was that it lost the flimsy roof over its carport.

All I need to do is restock my refrigerator, which I had the sense to empty out before I left, this time!

***

With all systems "go" here, blogging should return to the normal routine in just a day or so. I was in the air much of the day Sunday and on the road all day yesterday, so I do need to get back up to speed on lots of things. All in all, that's a very good homecoming -- I mean, return to camp -- from a hurricane evacuation.

-- CAV

Slow Roundup 6

1. Back when television was king, it was called the "boob tube". Now that we have the Internet, it is sometimes known as "the umbilical cord". Technology advances, but the metaphor regresses!

2. Van Horn's Corollary to Bettye Jean Triplett's Law (i.e., "The cavalry ain't coming."): "And if they do, the bridge will be out." Never count on the damned cavalry. Or bridges!

3. On the flight down from Boston to Mississippi yesterday, I read Andrew Bernstein's piece on Alistair MacLean in the Spring 2008 issue of The Objective Standard and, based on it, plan to obtain and read the following titles by Alistair MacLean: HMS Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, and The Secret Ways (aka The Last Frontier).

4. Before this summer's parade of tropical cyclones harshed my mellow, I was going to remark that this year's endearing semitropical quirk of Houston was the fact that on three occasions (that I can think of) this summer, I have recovered walking stick insects that have strayed into my home! If I find another one, I might try keeping it as a pet.

5. I remember this now because when I stopped north of town ahead of Hurricane Ike, my hosts had tree frogs climbing around the outside of their windows, much like the geckos my brother and I have on our houses. Aside from the garbage can, my geckos like to hunt for prey on my bedroom window at night with the help of a lamp that attracts unwary insects.

6. It is almost as if the southern legs of this trip have had "small, pretty animals" as a theme. Love bugs were out in force as I drove through northeastern Texas, and in Mississippi, my mother showed me a huge, magnificent, black and yellow spider with a beautiful, symmetric web outside her kitchen window. We can't get a good picture of it, though, thanks to the limitations of modern point-and-click cameras. They're all focusing on the screen between the glass and the spider. Mom may have figured a way around this. If it works, I'm posting a picture here.

7. During my research, I encountered a tangentially interesting article by someone whose last name was "Elfgang". Whatever it means in German, it evokes a wholly unintimidating and somewhat comic mental image in the of mind this English speaker!

8. C. August and I were thinking about meeting at a pub he described as "a place on Boylston (near the Publick Gahhden) that has a pretty good selection of beers.... I can picture it, but can't think of the name." We both turned out to be too busy to do so. When I was eating lunch, between errands in Cambridge later that day, I was looking at a tourist map and noticed the location of the Bull and Finch Pub and thought perhaps this was the place he was referring to. So I laughed. I must have seemed odd to the other patrons of the bah, staring at a map and laughing! The Bull and Finch isn't on Boylston, though, so the identity of the bah remains a mystery to me.

9. When Oliver Wendell Holmes described the State House in Boston as the "hub of the solar system", the Bostonians of the time "corrected" him by adopting "hub of the universe" as the nickname of their fair city. Creative and spirited, yes, but I must point out that they were merely being speculative. When I arrive there for good, they will, finally, be correct!

10. And yet, upon stumbling upon what turned out to be the "Hempfest" at Boston Common, I was walking behind a local who apparently self-identified as a prole! (His tee shirt read something like "Boston Proletariat"). I may post the snapshot I took of it later, if it isn't as fuzzy as it looks on the camera's viewer. Hempfest was unintentionally funny and, for about ten minutes, entertaining. Then we left.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected some formatting errors and a typo.

Biden Plagiarizes McCain

At first, it astounded me, although it should not have, that Barack Obama selected as his running mate Joe Biden, whose own 1988 presidential campaign was ended by a plagiarism scandal. Furthermore, by all appearances, this is one dog that, like "a thousand generations" of dogs before it, can't learn new tricks, as Joe Biden himself -- I mean Neil Kinnock -- might put it.

One of the many flaws of John McCain, who heads the Democratic Vice President's opposing ticket, is that he confuses national servitude with individual voluntarism. Alex Epstein put this well last year:

The logical end road of the belief that you have a duty to serve the nation is legislation that forces you to do so--i.e., compulsory national service. Like Time magazine, Senators John McCain and Evan Bayh, who introduced the Call to Service Act in 2003, think that "national service should one day be a rite of passage for young Americans." But there is only one way to make national service a "rite of passage": by government coercion. McCain has long favored compulsory national service, but laments that it "is not currently politically practical." Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution has proposed that every 18-year-old be forced to perform one year of compulsory service. This is nothing less than involuntary servitude of the youth in the land of the free. [minor format edits, bold added]

McCain never tells us how it is that a period of servitude will prepare the young to live lives as free men.

And add Joe Biden to the list of politicians who wish to tread on the last embers of freedom in America while whistling "Yankee Doodle":

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that paying more in taxes is the patriotic thing to do for wealthier Americans. In a new TV ad that repeats widely debunked claims about the Democratic tax plan, the Republican campaign calls Obama's tax increases "painful." [bold added]

It is bad enough that essentially the entire body politic takes government confiscation of property for granted as acceptable, which it is not. What is worse is that Biden is, like McCain, (1) selling a government coerced act as a virtue of altruistic morality -- while (2) ignoring the fact that coerced acts have no moral import whatsoever, (3) evading the demonstrable fact that acting in one's own self-interest (as the Founding Fathers did when they volunteered to fight the British at great personal expense and risk) is demonstrably the moral thing to do, and (3) helping to further set in stone the pernicious, anti-American notion that the government is the guardian of public morality. What is scandalous beyond belief is that none of this so much as raises a brow of the average voter.

Joe Biden is, obviously, not actually guilty of my rhetorical charge of plagiarism, although I wish that were his only sin. But if he and all the other major candidates in the upcoming presidential race seem as if they might as well be, it is because they all subscribe to the same, wrong, moral code. That is, they attach nobility to human sacrifice. Worse still, they all threaten to force America -- the land of the free! -- to endure the consequences of living by this idea by means of a collectivistic, anti-freedom political agenda, that differs between the two major tickets only in the details of its implementation.

What is supremely ironic about all these flag-wrapped calls to self-immolation is that it would be patriotic, and in the proper sense, for Americans to donate money, time, and effort to America -- but only if America consistently protected individual rights, meaning that she never forced anyone to do so! Just look at how the Founding Fathers acted as they rebelled from the tyranny of the British, and why they did so.

As Joe Biden -- I mean Neil Kinnock -- might put it, I wish I were among the first of a "thousand generations" of Americans to see freedom wax rather than wane in my lifetime. I will continue to work to see that happen, but I do not labor under the illusion that either Obama-Biden or McCain-Palin will help this happen. Appearances to the contrary, these tickets are carbon copies of each other.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 363

Mr. Patchoulihead

Well, courtesy of Hurricane Ike, I missed getting my hair cut by my regular stylist before leaving town and instead got a two-fer in the Culture Shock Department when I took care of that in Cambridge yesterday.

I needed a cut some time before 2:00 so I could make it to an evening event in Waltham. Found this place through a Google search of barber shop recommendations, after passing over the top result, which read like its own staff "reviewed" it. The shop is described as "funky" by one customer. Consistently good reviews. Call 'em, explaining my situation, and they fit me in, no problem.

I've been using a stylist (rather than a barber) for a little over a year now. She won my loyalty by devising a new hair style for me that solved all the problems that normal thinning had been causing for some time with my old style, while updating it, making it far easier to maintain, and yet not radically altering the basic look. Ingenious. If a stylist can be an artist, then she certainly is one. She can work magic with any head of hair.

Nobody cuts hair like she can, but I did wonder how well I'd be able to convey what she did to this new guy. I've heard her describe what she does to the sides as a "fade". I don't know whether white barbers use the term, but yesterday makes me suspect that the answer is, "No." Still, I was satisfied overall with the final result.

So I navigated the business end of things well enough, but was too stunned by the conversation in the shop to miss the salon as much I expected to. Some kind of high-falutin' far-left news/talk radio was going on in the background. (Bonus: Until yesterday, I had never heard a radio ad for Matlab!) The other patron was talking about how his normally apolitical and "somewhat conservative" wife was livid about Sarah Palin and getting ready to donate huge amounts of cash to the Obama campaign. The barbers were on the same page as this guy, who was going on about "the lies" of the McCain campaign.

In Texas, such a conversation would be unthinkable among such "men on the street". Ordinary people there may lean a little to the left, but these people were so far out there, I am not sure how I could have even begun to engage them in a political conversation. Some time in a blue state will definitely be good intellectual practice for me. I hope.

The second wave of the culture shock came later, on the subway back. My barber had applied some kind of styling goop to the top of my head. In the shop, I got a strong whiff of mint. "Interesting," I thought with some indifference. I normally avoid using fragrances, but I was heading straight home to wash my hair anyway.

But I started sensing that there was some odd undertone to the scent of the goop that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Mint and .... What?!? At some point on the Red Line, the answer hit me: It was patchouli! Where I come from, only hippies use patchouli!

This place is nuts!

Case Closed

Via HBL is an instructive look at what should be the end of the "controversy" surrounding the conviction of the Rosenbergs for espionage. What I found most interesting about it was how much the Left did to cover for them. Even I was stunned.

To this day, this received wisdom [that the Rosenbergs were persecuted merely for being communists] permeates our educational system. A recent study by historian Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton has found that very few college history textbooks say simply that the Rosenbergs were guilty; according to Schweikart, most either state that the couple were innocent or that the trial was "controversial," or they "excuse what [the Rosenbergs] did by saying, 'It wasn't that bad. What they provided wasn't important.' "

Being curious about how bloggers would react to this, I did a cursory blog search and found a ton of conservative commentary and little left-wing commentary. Many conservatives seemed of the mind that now, finally, the Left would "have to" admit they were wrong about the Rosenbergs.

This is wrong, of course. Men have a capacity for evasion of facts that would be unlimited but for natural selection. Amid the deafening silence are whispers that the whole thing is unimportant because the messenger, Ronald Radosh, holds a grudge and, besides, the events of the case happened so long ago. And, oh yeah, the LA Times marks the piece as "opinion".

Context and Lessons

Curious awhile back about an aspect of the job hunt that was causing me to wonder whether I was doing something gravely wrong (and worse, completely oblivious to), I stumbled upon an interesting pair of articles. The first half of "Job Search Pet Peeves" was of commiserative value, but a blog entry by a corporate recruiter offers an interesting explanation that at least makes sense of many of the items on that list -- and what not to do about a common job hunting situation.

If you find yourself in perpetual limbo about an interesting position, take a look at those articles -- and then keep on hunting. The more options you have, the less any one of them matters, and the less it will bother you for it to remain unresolved or go to someone else.

With that, I don my hunting gear and head out the door!

-- CAV

An "F" in Reading

Via Arts and Letters Daily is an article from the site's parent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, that discusses the pedagogical pitfalls of online content, both in terms of how people read content from a computer screen and in terms of how delivery through the Internet can affect comprehension.

Given one of the points it makes -- that we go for the "nut" as we browse the web -- I can't resist the temptation to provide a short, pithy excerpt, this being a quote from web researcher Jakob Nielsen. (But I do recommend reading the whole thing.)

We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets -- so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts. [bold added]

The educational fad of exposing children to computers at a very young age has bothered me for a long time because a computer is just a tool and, as such, it is no better than the person using it.

The article argues that the widespread use of computers in educational settings may be detrimental to cognitive development. That point is well-taken, and I agree that much could be gained by having children do more learning without all the distractions of a computer to compete with the lesson at hand.

But it is noteworthy that the article describes a study of how "student achievement" in New York was influenced by a laptop program. Laptop use was found to have no effect on student achievement. If computer use is so detrimental to the development of young minds, shouldn't laptop users have scored lower on such a test?

More important, other than in the narrow skill set of knowing how to use a computer, why would we necessarily expect students to score better simply by virtue of familiarity with the use of a computer? Calculators are superior to abacuses and slide rules in many respects, but were we to test for a student's understanding of mathematical concepts, why would the use of a tool really matter, unless one tool gave better practice in the use of the concepts in question? (I dare say, I can easily imagine that inferior tools could often be better in this regard!)

Not mentioned in the article is the elephant in the room of the dismal quality of our educational system and its systematic, purposeful resemblance to the "hidden television set" of the modern, networked computer. Computers can be distracting in many ways, yes, but were we to consider that the dominant school of thought in education fails to "emphasize systematic study of the academic disciplines", we would probably better understand why our students can't make better use of computers than they do.

Conceptual development (which Nielsen alludes to above) and self-discipline are two qualities that are systematically omitted in today's dominant Progressive school of educational thought. Blaming modern technology for our failing classrooms now is as wrong-headed as expecting computers alone to somehow save our children from public education was in the past. (I don't think the article makes this error, but making the computer less prominent in education will not alone accomplish much in our current context.)

Rather than snatching tools from their grasp, perhaps we should save our children from the clutches of public education and its entrenched cadre of comprachicos.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 362

(Just Part of) The Difference between Houston and New Orleans

As my property sits unattended after Ike's unwelcome visit Saturday, I find the Houston Chronicle news report containing the following to be encouraging:

Houston police have arrested almost 100 people suspected of looting since Hurricane Ike barreled through the area. Sixty-one were taken into custody from 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. on Sunday and another 33 during the following 24-hour period.

"We expect those numbers to continually decrease," said HPD Sgt. John Chomiak. He said additional police patrols are working 12-hour shifts.

At Sonny Ngo's east Houston convenience store, the S&T Food Mart on Navigation near Wayside, two men on Sunday tried to force their way into his business. "I didn't let them inside," Ngo said. "They weren't from the neighborhood."

Ngo said a group of regular customers confronted the two men, keeping them there until police arrived. "The good people in the neighborhood supported me," Ngo said. "They backed me up." [bold added]

The paper is also keeping tabs on power restoration efforts on its front page -- except that I'd prefer this to be listed in terms of "percent restored" rather than "percent out". This is, after all, only the biggest power outage in Texas history!

Wordweb Environmentalism

Dinesh Pillay used a software program called "Wordweb", until he read its unreasonable licensing conditions:

WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue to use it after a 30-day trial period.

In better days, an airline executive would hear about this and find a way to bankroll a competitor, and there would be a critical mass of people calling for the boycott of this software that it deserves.

The Case for Abstaining

I will not be casting my vote for John McCain in the upcoming presidential election because he has a track record as an enemy of freedom of speech. So should I help elect his collectivist twin, Barack Obama, or should I abstain?

A recent posting at HBL by Harry Binswanger points the the below video of Barack Obama as food for thought for those considering voting for him. It comes from the time before he moderated his stated positions in order to broaden his appeal among the general electorate.

After considering his suicidal views on national defense, it is also worth noting his dearth of character witnesses, something Charles Krauthammer recently discussed:

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama's life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I've been with Barack Obama. We've toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.

The strategy of the Democrats, ever since the party was taken over by the New Left, has been to conceal its agenda from the voting public, and Barack "the human Rorschach Test" Obama would seem to be the very incarnation of this strategy. Electorally, this strategy can easily backfire, as Myrhaf (from whom I learned of the Krauthammer piece) describes: "An undefined man is vulnerable to hostile definition."

I don't want McCain, but I am afraid he will win.

Update: See also, Myrhaf's post, "The Blank Screen President", for another take on Obama's changing "positions".

Two Interesting Reads

Darren Cauthon recently read -- and strongly recommends -- the book based on Randy Pausch's inspiring "Last Lecture".

Meanwhile, Apollo points to some talks by Michelle Goldberg on her book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

-- CAV

Updates: (1) Changed "Abstention" to "Abstaining". (2) Added update to "The Case for Abstaining".

The Road Forward

With this post, I'll end my blogging focus on Hurricane Ike and start easing myself back into a more normal routine, at least in terms of subject matter....

I'm sitting here at the edge of the bed in Mom's guest bedroom to keep the cats company after not spending much time with them yesterday. I wrote from in here Saturday to avoid waking Mom, but she's up today. I was about to move into the kitchen, when I came back for my power cord only to find Jerome racing straight towards me, purring up a storm, and Miss Maple waddling up behind. They normally like to hang around while I'm typing, so that sealed the deal.

I am not happy about leaving them in a strange place for a week, but taking them back home seemed risky. Through the web site of The Houston Chronicle (which I highly recommend to any fellow evacuees who happen by), I learned that in more than fifty places, the highway system had lane closures due to flooding as of yesterday. All major freeways were affected at one point or another with closure of all main lanes. On top of that, debris in the streets would have made my cat sitter's trip difficult, if not impossible. And it's hard to find gas. And there's a curfew. What a mess!

On top of that, I couldn't get a straight answer from my airline on whether they'd resume operations in time for me to fly out Tuesday. The drive back is nine hours long, so by about noon yesterday, I was on the phone with Hertz for over half an hour to extend my car lease. (I could have done this on the web in about two minutes if their web site were more clear about what number I needed to punch in to identify my car.) I then changed my airline tickets to depart from and return to Jackson. The changes shortened my time in Boston by about half a day and caused the price of my trip to quadruple, but if this leads to my being able to move there sooner, it will have been more than worth it.

This report from the Wall Street Journal would appear to offer the best executive summary of the consequences of the storm for Houston generally: "Damage appeared to be widespread, but far from catastrophic." That's my sense from Internet news coverage, blogs, and several successful phone calls to neighbors, friends, and coworkers.

I stopped watching the cable news coverage after seeing the blown-out east-side windows of the JP Morgan Chase building for the fiftieth time. (I want that particular shot and, now that I do, I can't find it anywhere!) The first thing I noticed about that picture and the journalists' perseveration on the damage was that the surrounding buildings all looked fine. Why didn't that merit a word?

Shortly after the storm, there were reports that the lights were out for more than 95% of Houston's electricity customers. This morning, the Houston Chronicle reports that they're back for "only" a quarter. Somebody needs to think about all the downed utility towers and lines snapped by flying debris and rewrite that one! I'm impressed.

In terms of property losses, I got lucky, and perhaps exceptionally so. I recall a report of one woman dying due to a tree falling on her house, and there are some pretty good pictures of what a tree can do to a house if you look for them. However, none of the pine trees I was concerned about at the house did anything but drop branches, according to a neighbor who stayed behind. In fact, the power is already back on there. If I don't return to find windows in the back blown out or learn that our storage unit took damage, I will have escaped with only the inconvenience and higher traveling expenses incurred by my decision to evacuate.

No complaints here: I get to see my wife and continue the job hunt, rather than sit on my hands (or wait in gas and grocery lines) for a week. By the time I come back, things will probably be under control enough that I can get useful work done again. In the meantime, I'll enjoy the unplanned visit to Mississippi this evening in Meridian, where one of my brothers will be firing up his grill.

Returning for a moment to that picture of the JP Morgan Chase Tower, the tallest in Texas. I find the iconic status of a financial institution's offices as a symbol of nature's wrath ironic, given that that there has been more ominous news from that sector over the weekend (HT: Alan Sullivan).

... Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary, decided to draw a line and refuse such help. After the Fed had bailed out Bear Stearns in March and the Treasury had taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last weekend, expectations were high that they would do the same for Lehman. And that was precisely the problem: it would have confirmed that the federal government stood behind all risk-taking in the financial system, creating moral hazard that would take years to undo and expanding taxpayers’ liability almost without limit. Conceivably, Congress could have denied Mr Paulson the money he needed even if he had been inclined to bail Lehman out. [bold added]

Sullivan also links to another story that indicates the degree of peril that government interference in the economy really presents.

The government, because of its nature, can force men to take actions (and assume risks) they would not take if free to consider the consequences. Hurricane Ike merely blew out windows on one side of a bank tower. The government, through bailout crack, has encouraged an enormous degree of recklessness in the financial sector and unjustly incurred liability on millions of innocent citizens.

As I always say, "At least you can run from a hurricane." Too bad an improper government is capable of doing far greater damage, and making it impossible for us to avoid.

-- CAV

My Hand, and How I Play It

I woke up this morning at my mother's home in Mississippi to the brightness of cloud-scattered sunlight in a happy, tranquil emotional state it is impossible for me to describe adequately. There are elements of the feeling that goes with my very distinct recollection of playing in a sandbox in the shade during a sunny morning just before my first day of kindergarten -- the rest of that day escapes me -- and a somewhat "tropical" mood (to use a crude approximation) I sometimes get when I listen to some of Bob Marley's music.

That feeling, fortunately, has not entirely dissipated, but I do recall thinking it odd, in a very good sense, to feel that way as I woke up further and remembered that today, Hurricane Ike is probably doing -- or has done -- whatever it will do to the house in Houston.

I write now -- before looking at any hurricane news -- partly to enjoy the small dose of normalcy that writing can afford me and partly to collect and record some very interesting thinking I have done over the last couple of days. If I recorded the mundane details of the Rita evacuation, my chronicles of the travails of Ike will look inward a little more, to how I dealt with them.

***

As I mentioned just before boarding up here, I had planned an evacuation in three stages: (1) Get out of immanent danger. (2) Evaluate the post-strike situation. (3) Act accordingly.

As with Rita, Ike demanded an evacuation just before a week-long trip out of town I was already planning. In the one case, I was to take a trip down memory lane, heading to Jackson for the twenty year reunion of my high school class. In this case, I am headed to Boston to see my wife, who has already relocated there, and for purposes related to my job hunt.

My flight to Boston is Tuesday, or at least it is scheduled for Tuesday. An event I must attend for networking purposes is Wednesday: I would really like to attend it because it may offer me a chance to meet someone in a position to help me get a job with one of my favorite companies. In addition to preserving my life, then, I needed to have a way to keep building my future.

Houston's official disaster plan, of "hiding from the wind", was foolish advice for me for two reasons. (I worry that it was bad advice generally.) First, any one of the enormous pine and ash -- or is that "trash"? -- trees surrounding my house could fall on it to turn it into a death trap during the storm. Second -- and I was not accounting for this when I decided to leave -- the lack of electrical power and the logistical nightmares brought on by littered and blocked streets would have limited anything I could do for at least a week afterwards to physical labor and "guarding" whatever was left at the house. Did I mention that I don't own a gun?

How does one react to such a potential disaster, whose effects can range from practically nil to a near-total loss of possessions? My plan was not a bad first stab, but the nature of the storm, compounded with its huge size, ruined Stage One. Removing to a location north of town looked good at the time. I would, in fact,be safer there than at the Houston house. But at minimum, my kind hosts were going to be without power the next day, and my cell phone connection was unreliable as it was. I'd take a step back to look and see, only to be blinded by the power loss, and immobilized by impassable country roads.

So I checked some track maps of the storm, and the traffic conditions along U.S. 59 to be sure that my customary "northern route" to Mississippi would allow me to outrun the storm and head to an unaffected area. Now, thanks the fact that I am such a fine son, I can use the DSL connection I helped Mom set up in July to follow up on the storm.

(Cable and radio are useless. "The real problem is the storm surge," isn't just the particular way that the moronic products of modern journalism schools happen to be bragging to others and fooling themselves about how "on top of things" they are. And it isn't just something that can drive you crazy if you need real information. It could also be the refrain of a musical farce about the television "coverage" of this storm, which has been wrong or ambiguous in content and patronizing in tone. These ass clowns are so collectivistic that they're gearing their news coverage to a mass rather than to their own individual customers. The wind is a big deal -- to anyone not on the coast.)

I can do what I need to do now. I can call people in Houston, if they are reachable, about matters pertaining to my current job and what the house looks like. Failing that, I can probably at least see if I still have a roof through Google Earth or something like that. I can follow the progress of the storm through the National Hurricane Center and a few good storm bloggers. I can change travel plans, if need be, and contact anyone I need to in Boston -- and the storm preparations have put me behind on that already.

Today, I plan Stage Three. For the extreme cases of a late miss -- There was still hope, the last time I checked, that my area could see the "clean side" of the storm. -- or the total disaster of a dirty side hit from an intensified storm, my course of action is straightforward. If the storm "misses", I may be able to drive back to Houston today and more or less proceed as if Ike never happened. If there is utter devastation, I change the flights to Boston to start and end in Jackson, or possibly New Orleans. It will be at least a week before I can get to the Houston house, and probably longer before I would be able to act effectively there anyway. My time is better-spent in Boston.

My biggest concern, next to the state of the house, is the possibility of looting, but I have our most important things with me, and that is what insurance is for. I think I made a very good decision yesterday.

***

Before I post this, answer some comments, and then get back to the business at hand, I briefly note an interesting observation on how the prospect of losing most of one's possessions can lend perspective.

Now, I'm all for checking into things and learning that I have agonized over nothing and made a long trip that was ultimately unnecessary. That would be great. May all my coworkers turn me into the butt of a running in-joke involving paranoia about high winds and pine trees! But there is a certain amount of freedom that would come with such a loss. Most material possessions can be replaced fairly easily. I essentialized this best in a joke I made to my mother: "Well, a claim check is a lot easier to transport than a bunch of furniture." There can, perversely, be upsides to this disaster. There's no use spending too much energy mourning losses when one ought to be seeing how to use them.

My wife is safe in Boston. The cats and I are safe in the forests of Mississippi. And Ike may have volunteered to downsize our furniture for us. I just hope he leaves that one photo album I forgot in the living room alone!

***

Before I turn to answering some comments -- and I thank all who wrote in to wish me well -- I note that while I am back to blogging, how regular I can be will depend on whether things in Houston are as bad as they could be, and then on how quickly they can be improved or I can get myself to Boston.

-- CAV


PS: Incidentally, I think that the state of serenity I felt before, coupled with some sort of implicit realization that not all aspects of an "act of God" are necessarily bad, are often expropriated by hucksters of religion. (e.g., "Everything God does has a purpose.")

Before I saw the potential upsides of a direct hit and had made, I'm guessing, some subconscious adjustments to my potential losses, I thought something like, "Any worshipper of 'nature' or a God who could do something like this is an utter asshat!" My remark stands for nature-worshippers, but religious people are being helped in their folly by people who are more than happy (and prepared) to help them mis-integrate life's lessons with arbitrary religious dogmas.

Boarding Up

Hurricane Ike is currently forecast by the National Hurricane Center to hit a portion of the Texas coast just south of Houston-Galveston, where I am still located, as a major hurricane. The forecast is close to this area's "worst-case scenario".

That said, both the location of the hit and its intensity are far from certain, but the time for me to prepare to evacuate is now. If I do have to leave, I will head to a point north of town tonight or tomorrow morning, and what I do from there will depend on what, if anything, happens and how it affects me.

So I'm "boarding up" the blog for now...


I will be back as soon as possible.

In the meantime, the more lasting significance of this date is not lost on me: Today is the anniversary of what has so far turned out to be a significant new low in the passivity of Western Civilization in the face of savagery.

You can read my thoughts on this matter, as well as those of others who hope to change this situation for the better here.

-- CAV

Another One Joins the Fray

Don't think that just because C. August has set up shop selling political paraphernalia up in the Land of the Puritans that things have been quiet down here in Hurricane Alley....

Recently, at the end of a sub-post, I said the following:

Hmmm! Awhile back, I saw a bumper sticker saying something like, "Keep Austin Weird". Perhaps as the zoning fight heats up, supporters of freedom in land use could similarly display our sentiments: "Keep Houston Free". I like that.

Later that day, Brian Phillips of Houston Property Rights wrote me to say that he liked it, too, and now he's selling just such a bumper sticker!


I'm glad to see that this bit of thinking out loud on my part led to such a good idea on his part, and it reminds me of something I read about writing recently:

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

This isn't exactly the same thing. In this case, we see that one can realize unforeseen benefits not only by writing, but also from participating in some online forums. In fact, the bouncing-around of ideas here goes a step beyond what Brian recalled: It was a remark of his, to the effect that Houston is America's freest city, on an email list we both participate in that I had in mind when I was writing that post.

As you ponder the benefits of refining your ideas by writing, and by bouncing them around with others, don't forget to stop by Brian's blog to make a donation and get your bumper sticker today -- especially if you live in or near Houston!

-- CAV

Theocrats Try for Two-fer

I have commented here numerous times on how the applicability of that that old saw in economics, "controls breed controls", is not limited to economics.

Do not think that just because enemies of individual rights fail to understand the nature of rights or to appreciate the dire consequences of the government trampling them for everyone (including themselves) that they do not grasp the above fact on the level of low cunning. They do, and they will never refrain from helping the process accelerate if they see a chance to increase or consolidate their political power. Yesterday, for example, I learned that some theocrats see in the labyrinth of federal tax law an opportunity to start telling people whom to vote for each Sunday:

Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.

The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.

"For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church," ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. "It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It's not for the government to mandate the role of church in society." [links dropped, bold added]

What "cloud of intimidation", Mr. Stanley, would that be? That churches can't enjoy a government-granted exemption from taxation and act to influence the government? And what of the real "cloud of intimidation" that exists for enyone who has to consider the Byzantine rules of taxation in so many areas of his life?

The truth is that taxation violates the individual's right to property and that everyone has the right to freedom of speech. Were the government not so busy confiscating everyone's property (with occasional exemptions that, predictably, have strings attached, as we see with the exemption on churches), the issue of pastors feeling hemmed in by an inconvenient rule would never even arise.

So are the pastors emulating their forebears who spoke against slavery at the pulpit by crusading against taxation? (Taxation is another form of slavery, after all.) No. They are instead making the problem worse by accepting taxation of everyone else but themselves, while demanding only that the attached strings be cut. (In the process, they more closely resemble leftists who correctly hold that a woman has the right to an abortion, but incorrectly hold that the exercise of this right ought to be subsidized.)

If we are going to have taxation, it is already arguable that exempting churches from it verges on a violation of the separation of church and state. What the pastors have in mind will make this problem worse: They are effectively demanding government subsidies for the preaching of political sermons.

The right to freedom of speech does not equal the right to make others subsidize its forum or transmission, especially in the name of the government. Yet this is exactly what these pastors hope to achieve.

The right solution to this dilemma is not to add yet another bad rule onto the heap. Nor is it to "reform" an inherently corrupt taxation system. The right solution is to abolish taxation. As these pastors demonstrate, we will not only see our property rights better respected in doing so, we would also remove a beachhead for the establishment of religious tyranny at the same time. No wonder I haven't heard about any anti-taxation sermons lately!

Let the pastors endorse political candidates -- but without government help or the appearance of a state imprimatur.

-- CAV

PS: The Wall of Separation discusses this "pulpit initiative" in more detail.

Updates

Today: Minor edits.