Boston

The very windy day below twenty Fahrenheit ahead of us here in Boston may mean that today, I will get to learn yet another hue on the "color wheel" %#&& cold. That fact may make it seem very odd on my part to be posting about Boston, of all places, on the day I reserve for writing about things I enjoy. Such a sentiment would be understandable, but completely mistaken.

Let me explain.

For some time now, I have devoted each Friday's post to things I enjoy, and I plan to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. One of the hazards endemic to writing about politics and culture today is that one can easily become too focused on what's wrong with the world at the cost of forgetting too easily what's right with the world in general and, much worse, what's right with one's own "universe" in particular. To lose sight of the latter would be a shame, to say the very least.

The exact impetus of my weekly practice of exploring things I value is unimportant, but suffice it to say that after a series of very unpleasant confrontations, I had had it. Were I to summarize my overall reaction in words, I would put it something like this: "I refuse to live like this."

Obviously, I did not quit writing in disgust, but I realized that I was doing something wrong. At the time, I was not sure what that was, but the fact that I was not enjoying my hobby of writing as much as I could be was what really stood out in my mind. Why, after all, had I started this blog in the first place?

I decided that the answer to my dilemma probably had something to do with values and that I would do well on many levels to explore that theme. In a "philosophy for living on this earth," such an exploration is not and can not be a wholly abstract exercise or, worse, navel-gazing. (And it can't be done entirely by blogging, even for someone who, like me, loves to write.)

That line of inquiry has, philosophically, proved very fruitful, and not just in the sense that it helped me avoid (or correct much earlier) a fundamental and disastrous error. For instance, I have found first hand that keeping one's values in mind greatly aids the processes of integration and induction both by keeping one motivated and by providing a natural framework for organizing one's thoughts.

But overall, this shift in focus has helped me realize that not only do I not want to "live that way," I can not "live that way" and I am right to refuse to allow myself to slip into anything like it. (Well, partially right. Read on.) Wars may well happen in life, but life is not, fundamentally, a war, no matter how greatly the war affects one.

On a more positive note, my focus has shifted away from how I don't want to live my life to how I do want to live it. That is far less trivial or easy than it might sound. In fact, this -- and not polemics or changing the world -- is the whole point of the philosophy I advocate. As an Objectivist, let me be the first to say that one philosophizes to live. One does not live to philosophize.

So that's a glimpse at the big picture of where I have gone with my thinking. Today, I'll apply what I've learned in a small way...

It's bitter cold today. Yes. Let's check the weather every morning and overcome it on the physical level. But why waste any more time on that than one has to? I live up here for a reason (She's first on the list below.), and there are many other things that are making my stay up here well worth what is, in the grand scheme of things, really just a minor fuss.

With that, I present the following top ten list, which started out seeming like it would be a tall order, but ended up seeming too short.

1. My wife lives here because of her job.
2. Employment also drew to this area half a dozen very good old friends, some from way back.
3. Also, parts of Mrs. Van Horn's family live up here.
4. I'm making lots of new friends here.
5. It's gorgeous here, often even in the dead of winter.
6. As a fan of trains, I enjoy using them to get around all the time.
7. Oh, and there's lots of model railroading going on up here. (I'd forgotten to blog on that!)
8. The area abounds in cultural opportunities we haven't even touched yet.
9. And we live in the middle of it all -- but not in a drafty brownstone!
10. It's easy to visit, since Southwest flies straight into Logan Airport. (Mom, I'm talking to you!)

Take that, snow miser!

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 501

The Lucidicus Project

It wasn't until around the time of the special election for "The People's Seat" in Massachusetts that I had heard of the Lucidicus Project, but it's a cause that cannot receive too much extra publicity, so I'll pitch in:

The Lucidicus Project encourages young people entering the medical profession to examine the moral and economic foundations of individual rights and capitalism. The project was founded in 2005 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. Our mission is to provide the Medical Intellectual's Self-Defense Kit to medical students across the United States and around the world.

As Barack Obama has indicated, the Scott Brown victory is only a breather in the fight to keep the government from dictating our medical choices.

Organizations like the Lucidicus Project, Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, and Americans for Free Choice in Medicine need and deserve our continuing support.

Bolivarian Death Throes?

This means more misery for many Venezuelans as it plays out and I am concerned that Chavez will attempt to use a war with Colombia as a solution to his political problems, but Jackson Diehl explains why the clock may be ticking for Hugo Chavez. Along the way, he offers the following encouraging sign from the recent presidential election in Chile:

Sebastián Piñera, the industrialist and champion of free markets who won [and] has already done something that no leader from Chile or most other Latin American nations has been willing to do in recent years: stand up to Chávez.

Somehow, I don't see the President of the United States being on the right side of history factually or morally on this one, either.

I agree with a Democrat for once!

Or, more precisely, I agree with the sentiment:

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., did more than ask. In a private meeting the day after Republican Scott Brown won Sen. Edward Kennedy's Senate seat, Titus used a profanity to describe to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and freshman lawmakers the Democratic Party's prospects in the midterm elections if it ignores the lessons of Massachusetts.

Unlike Titus, I will not, however, allow the need to describe Nancy Pelosi accurately to cause me to lower my standards for polite discourse.

Portable Ubuntu

One luxury I miss from academia is the freedom to run Linux at work. Cygwin (if you have admin privileges or can get it installed) or MobaXVT can at least help one make up for some of the lost Unix utilities, but I recently learned through Lifehacker of something that might be far better: An entire Linux distribution that lives on a (large) thumb drive, runs under Windows, and allows persistent changes (like installation of new software). I'm testing this on a virtual Windows machine at home and look forward to trying it out at work if all goes well.

Growlers Make a Comeback

In my home brewing days, I'd occasionally see some of the members of my beer club bring what looked like moonshine jugs to some of our meetings. The jugs, I learned then, were a special type of beer bottle called a "growler."

According to the New York Times, these folks were on the bleeding edge of beer fashion:

Mr. Granger, who says growlers constitute a large percentage of his sales, has tried to avoid [the] possibility [of beer spoilage due to improper filling]. He has a system in which bottles are filled under pressure through a plastic hose to keep out oxygen. Filled that way, he said, they could stay fresh for months unopened, and three to five days when opened.

That last sentence was important for me to hear. I don't drink enough beer in any given day to justify getting a growler for use at home. But if the beer remains fresh for several days, that's a whole other ball game!

Poker Etiquette

Reading this entertaining post on poker by Michael Bahr, I got a minor lesson in poker etiquette.

Mike McDermott, Matt Damon's card-playing protagonist from the movie Rounders, observed that a card player generally will not remember the play of most of his or her winning hands, but will recall with great accuracy the most outlandish bad beats he or she has suffered. In pro poker circles, this tendency is accepted at face value to the degree that telling a bad beat story is a social faux pas, the approximate equivalent of telling someone in detail about how one went to the bathroom.

Recalling a recent post of my own on the subject, all I can say is: Oh dear!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Corrected spelling of Lucidicus Project. (2) One minor edit.

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Warm in New York

The good news is that while Barack "the human Rorschach test" Obama can seem to be all things to all people, he can't be all things to all people. The bad news is that this won't stop him from trying. The worse (and most important) news is that his audience largely wishes someone to do just that -- but perhaps no longer Obama in particular, at least for now.

That's my reading of a story out of New York that has residents of the tri-state area around Gotham not in love with the "'new' Obama."

From his war on the banks -- the lifeblood of the metropolitan area economy -- to his health care reform which could cost taxpayers here over $1 billion, President Obama's policies have sent a strong message to the tri-state area that Washington doesn't care about the middle class.

Seeing predictions of political gold in these tea leaves, even Charles Schumer chimes in, but it's the Republican and a couple of man-on-the-street reactions that tell me where things really stand after the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts.

"No, I don't see any real relief coming from Barack Obama to the middle class. I think he is still on a very liberal agenda. He's mouthing some words which maybe will play in some states but his policies are devastating to New York," Rep. Peter King said.

So far so good.

Congressman King said one thing that would help taxpayers in our area is a cost of living adjustment on federal taxes that takes into account how expensive it is to live here.

Granted, talk of repealing the income tax is a tad premature for now, especially in New York, and the high local cost of living is largely caused by local taxes and regulations that are not his bailiwick, but still... Why is King not proposing smaller government and a reduction in the tax rate for everyone? And why not throw the ball of high local living expenses back into the court where that game is being played? King could have done wonders for the political debate by mentioning that Barack Obama is not, alone, to blame for the problems of New York's middle class.

"If he's serious about the middle class there should be an allocation or adjustment made for people living in a high-income area, high-expense area, high cost of living area," the Republican from Long Island said.

No. He'd talk about reducing the size and scope of the federal government, rather than cooking up such a stop-gap measure or, worse, a new entitlement program -- as would you, Mr. King.

But politicians are a timid lot, and their backbones are no stiffer than the wind of public opinion. If you want to know why King, of the allegedly pro-business GOP isn't in the hunt for smaller government, just test that wind:

"Who wouldn't like to have some extra help in a place that's really expensive?" asked Tom Falcone of Queens.

"Everybody needs a little more money in their pocket. It would stimulate the economy," added John Forst of Brooklyn.

There is a huge difference between wanting "help" from the government and wanting to be left alone by it, and thus free to secure one's own welfare. People like Tom Falcone and John Forst will not elect better than a Peter King, a Charles Schumer, or a Barack Obama because they fundamentally agree with the principles behind the massive stimulus package and the government takeover of our bodies whose projected consequences just convulsed their counterparts in the Bay State.

But until the man on the street can see the essential similarity of the recent big government "bailouts," individual income confiscation, and a whole host of other government intrusions, he will keep typically selling his vote and being disappointed in what he gets for it.

This news article reminds me of the fable of the slow-boiled frog. I'd say that the water temperature remains on the warm side, and the frogs mostly comfortable.

-- CAV

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Automaton Nation

My foraging through the news and commentary sites this morning led me to two very different examples of the same fundamental mistake. First, we have the President of the United States achieving self-parody through his use of a teleprompter to address a bunch of sixth-graders. And second, we see conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, reading the tea leaves of the recent Scott Brown electoral victory and concluding that politicians can indeed "count votes."

First, let's look at President Obama. What's important here is not so much the fact that he chose to use a teleprompter in the situation he did, but the fact that he does so with such regularity that his habit became a national joke long ago. Clearly, Barack Obama, who has bragged about his oratorical prowess, places a high value on making sure his speeches are delivered perfectly. The question is: Why?

We don't need Thomas Sowell's intellect or vast reserves of knowledge to tell us that Barack Obama can count votes. We have that from Obama's own telepromp- -- I mean mouth: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president..." Obama at once confirms Sowell's main point -- that the will of the people is still what drives American politics -- and turns that into cold comfort. But more on that momentarily.

We still have the matter of why Barack Obama is so obsessed with what he deems to be oratorical perfection that he'll risk looking like a fool. As Sowell indicates with ObamaCare -- and we have seen in Obama's disdainful comments about "bickering" as well as his snitch line -- Barack Obama is not merely proposing his side of an argument from the bully pulpit. Rather, he sees himself as a teacher delivering content to heads full of mush. There is, in his mind, as much room for debate about his agenda as there would be for debate about English grammar in grade school. This is doubtless why it seems not to have occurred to him that a teleprompter in such a setting would be ridiculous: He doesn't see a kids' classroom as a different situation than, say, his upcoming State of the Union Address.

To such a mind, a speech is an opportunity not to convince rational voters of the facts of reality that support one's opinion, but an opportunity to mold a consensus in a world where facts don't really matter because reality is shaped by social consensus. And, if facts don't matter, neither do rational debate nor reason.

But what of Sowell? His column actually makes some very good points, and could have been a clarion call for intellectual activism. It deserves a full read for this reason, as well as to see what he missed. Sowell is right that Americans intuitively grasped that something was wrong about ObamaCare. ("[T]he way it was being rushed through in the dark ... told us all we needed to know.") But his assurance about the soundness of the judgment of the American people falls flat the moment we remember that Obama won his election decisively!

Sowell's major intellectual shortcoming I have elaborated long ago:

His error is a common one, in which he treats an implicitly rational, reality-oriented philosophical outlook as a given, rather than as an implicit example of just another possible ideology. My last would doubtless strike many, probably including Sowell himself, as moral relativism at first blush, but it is not. For if the rational, "adult" ideology that Sowell implicitly favors can be judged as an ideology, so must all other ideologies be examined under the cold light of reason, and compared against the facts of reality, which include the requirements for man's survival.

Sowell fails to regard (and, in doing so, also, in an important sense, dismisses) the implicit political philosophy that elected Scott Brown as a political philosophy, and in doing so, rejects the premise that reason is the sine qua non of republican government.

Sowell's mistake will allow a few battles (like Massachusetts) to be won, but will ultimately concede the war to the likes of Obama -- or a more "competent" version, if you will. People do not have an innate desire (or appreciation of the meaning of) freedom: They have to learn it from somewhere, and that "somewhere" is the culture. An Obama does grasp that a culture can be shaped. But only the de facto forfeit of a Sowell's will permit such to win.

The will of the people saved us this time. However, unless someone with a firm, rational grasp of the principles underlying American greatness appeals to the minds of the American people -- to encourage them where they are right and to change their minds where they are wrong -- we will not be able to count on a Scott Brown some other time down the road.

The American people don't have everything right -- they elected Barack Obama. But they don't have everything wrong, either -- they voted against him later when they could. Likewise, neither preaching to them nor assuming they'll eventually "get it" will improve our current cultural trajectory. To do that, we have to do what the Founding Fathers did and fight a battle of ideas, starting with a proper identification of the right ideas and continuing with proper advocacy of those ideas. As with Obama, the American people need to see for themselves what is wrong, and not just with his particular policy ideas, but with his whole approach to government.

Obama fears the rational mind and Sowell thinks that it doesn't exist past a certain point. Both men are wrong. We are not a nation of automatons.

-- CAV

Updates

1-27-10: Minor edits.

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Quick Roundup 500

Win-Win

Torn between a favorite team and a favorite player, that's how I decided to look at yesterday's NFC Championship game going in. Either the Saints would finally appear in the Super Bowl or Brett Favre, my favorite quarterback, would be there again. Favre even made the downside of the eventual outcome easy for me: He threw one of his occasional ill-conceived passes for an interception near the end of regulation. He's just one year apart from me and I was sad to see him lose the game. But ... the wily veteran should have known better. That decision arguably cost the Vikings the game.

I recall one of the commentators speak of Favre's wife getting calls from friends and relatives also torn about the game. Favre, a fellow Mississippian, hails from a small town fairly close to New Orleans. Having watched Favre since college* and grown up listening to Yat-accented prophecies of Super Bowl glory, I knew exactly what they were talking about.

And now, for the Super Bowl: Archie Manning's old team against his son, Peyton's, team!

* I like Favre all the more now because I like seeing someone my age doing so well as a pro. Or, as my wife likes to joke: "Brett Favre makes you feel useful!"

Related: The accuracy of Drew Brees and a little Dr. John.

Venezuela's "Fat Cats"

A popular leftist conceit is that the bulk of the political opposition to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela consists of wealthy "fat cats." Not only is this notion wrong on the count that mere possession of money on someone's part does not ipso facto strip him of the right to moral consideration, but most of these individuals are, to the contrary, struggling to make ends meet.

As you'll have guessed by now, Carola and Andrea are the same person. She's just one of many of my friends who occupy a strangely contradictory social space I like to think of as the Hard-Up Elite: high-status professionals living off their salaries who are vastly better off than the average Venezuelan but struggle hard to afford the kind of lifestyle a truck driver in Madrid or a school lunch lady in Columbus, Ohio take for granted.

Read the whole thing. (HT: Dismuke)

BK to Open Biergartens?

I was intrigued to see that Burger King, whose hamburgers are tastier than McDonald's, but whose cooking methods are less well-suited to the lunch-hour rush, will open a restaurant in Miami featuring beer on the menu:

Morningstar analyst R.J. Hottovy says adding beer at selected locations around the world is part of Miami-based Burger King's effort to reinvent itself as a fast-food restaurant with a sit-down feel.

This strikes me as an excellent move on Burger King's part, although the beer selection sounds disappointing to me. Still, perhaps if this move meets with enough success, something more interesting than "macro-brew" will eventually make its way to the beer list. It just about has to since this segment of the market is already served by Beck's Prime.

As for Africa, so with Haiti

As I head out the door, I see that someone is arguing that foreign aid has actually been harming Haiti. I have noted similar arguments being made regarding foreign aid to Africa during the past few years.

-- CAV

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Downtown Train

The good news is that I'm finally mastering the complicated experiments I have to run at work. (Yes. It takes weeks of practice even for someone with experience.) The bad news is that all the overtime has come at the expense of writing time. Fortunately, I think I'm over the hump now. I ought to be able to work more regular hours soon.

That said, for this week's (abbreviated) post on things I enjoy, I'll share with you Tom Waits's "Downtown Train," from his album, Rain Dogs, which I listened to last night as I cooked dinner at 10:00 p.m., with my wife sacked out on the couch, recovering from a long night of studying yesterday.

I was tired and really jonesing to do some more substantive writing, but still enjoying the simple routine of cooking in solitude after a long, but very good day at work.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 499

Is such a question appropriate, let alone "necessary?"

I learned by accident the other day of a book titled, Are the Rich Necessary? According to the web site of its publisher, Axios, the book is:

An introduction to economics for laymen, the book covers both sides of the great economic arguments of our day. In an always lively, point-counterpoint style, he challenges conventional positions on both sides of each issue.

Fair enough, but I'm having a hard time getting past the urge to prepend, "For Whom," to the title of the book. By what right can one ask whether another human being is "necessary?"

Lest you think I'm jumping the gun, Axios continues:

[Hunter] Lewis proposes a new way to bridge the extremes of super rich and poor, of free markets and safety nets; a solution that would involve a massive expansion of the nonprofit sector through tax credits. His solution is to build up the nonprofit sector so that it will become a full partner of government and the private sector and be able to provide real solutions in the areas of social services, health, housing, and education. Lewis's solution offers a forward-thinking alternative to the bitter and often sterile debate between friends and foes of "big" government regarding taxing the rich and creating economic equality.

There is nothing "forward-thinking" about the government continuing to loot private property and set up redistribution schemes.

Does the question posed by the title of the book ever segue into a discussion of how the productive incidentally benefit everyone else as they deploy massive amounts of capital in the pursuit of their own self-interest? If so, it would seem that Hunter Lewis quickly loses sight of that very real and very necessary side-benefit of the right to property -- and never even considers the idea of individual rights.

Nail, meet coffin?

Barney Frank may have scuttled the various scenarios I have heard floated over the past few days for how the Democrats might attempt to pass ObamaCare despite the election of Scott Brown to the Senate yesterday.

I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. ... [O]ur respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Frank is now on the bandwagon to do away with the filibuster.

Philip Klein of The American Spectator elaborates on how damaging Frank's remarks are to ObamaCare and goes on to say that, "it will be difficult for Democrats to revive Obamacare after tonight." I hope he's right.

Update: Frank later backed off from these remarks. I had been on the very brink of thanking Mr. Frank for respecting the voice of the people. Oh well.

Quote of the Day

"[F]or the first time in my life, I am proud to live in Massachusetts. Today, many of us have actually deserved to walk on the hallowed ground of Lexington and Concord." -- SB

Continued Clarity

With the commentariat in overdrive after the Brown election, one might expect to be hard-pressed to find anyone who has any doubt that Americans reject Barack Obama's far-left agenda -- until one checks with Obama himself.

We'll have to think through this next year from the standpoint of tactics but in substance the mission can't change.

Well, then! It looks like three more years of "ideological clarity," as John Lewis might put it. Let's not waste them.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

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But Which Idea(s)?

David Harsanyi's column on yesterday's special election in Massachusetts shows both the power and the limitations of the intuitive grasp of the political issues by someone armed with common sense and what Ayn Rand would call the "American sense of life."

The power of a sense-of-life grasp of the general political situation is that it exists on an emotional level, and thus has tremendous motivational power. If I may sum things up for my countrymen: I'll be damned if I'm going to live under anyone's orders, much less those of the likes of Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Martha Coakley. They do not run things in my house.

The fact that they intended to do so had become very obvious, to the point that it had become inescapable, as Harsanyi indicates:

... Democrats continue to convince themselves that the party's problem is flawed candidates or poorly communicated messages, as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs conceded this week -- because, presumably, the idea of socializing medicine is too nuanced and intellectually rigorous for the average voter to digest.

Hardly. The predicament Democrats face is the opposite. Too many voters appreciate exactly what health care legislation entails.

This is why Congress conducts clandestine negotiations on legislation and trashes promises of transparency. This is why leading Democrats have embraced procedural tricks and senatorial bribery -- and now the possibility of "reconciliation" -- so they can adjust health care reform and pass it with a 51-vote majority. You're gonna get it whether you want it or not.

Or, as Tom Daschle once summed it up so nicely, "Details kill."

Like children whose parents spell naughty words to each other as if they hadn't already learned to spell, the stooges his party took for granted yesterday eventually caught on -- to both the Democrats' attempts to fool us and to their attempts to fool themselves. People read and understood the plan when it became available and were oddly reluctant to take sitting down closed-door meetings about how (or whether) their own bodies would be attended to should they become ill.

But it is here -- as we see with Scott Brown himself -- that the power of a pre-conceptual feeling that one ought to be captain of one's life hits its limits. Many things, the medical sector for one, are a mess. What to do? As a commenter to yesterday's post pointed out to me -- and I had learned myself later that day -- Brown himself supported the very plan for socialized medicine that is currently failing in Massachusetts. His election may serve as a much-needed brake on the headlong rush into the nationalization of our bodies that is ObamaCare, but it will not ultimately do much good if we slowly nationalize our bodies under a slightly different plan.

The title of Harsanyi's piece, "The idea is the problem," is on the right track, but its sights are set too low, and this is a serious problem. It takes more than a love of freedom and a pinch of common sense to appreciate the fact that Obama's reviled plan and the one that Brown once supported are fundamentally the same thing. It takes a grasp of the fundamental philosophical ideas that not only undergird our political philosophy but inform the way we use our minds to understand the world. Without such a grasp, we will never really move forward towards a real solution to the problem of government interference with medicine, and we will keep on making do with stop-gap candidates such as Brown and watching our backs from fear that they will propose foolish plans of their own.

We need to become, as a society, once again, able to discuss political issues in terms of principles, and to become able once again to articulate why freedom is as precious to human life as water in a desert. Only then will our culture once again have the likes of George Washington or Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson as our representatives in government -- rather than the would-be "leaders" we have today.

If we are lucky, we averted catastrophe yesterday, but we are far from out of the woods. Scott Brown is no Thomas Jefferson, but if he wants any future support from me, he'd better come up with a far better imitation than I think he can.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

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Show Up

Not needing to drive on a regular basis and putting off the fees to switch to a Massachusetts driver's license, I find myself in the bizarre position of wishing I could head to the polls today, and in the unfortunate one of being unable to so. But since I don't have that particular means of fighting socialism at my disposal today, I will do what I can do: Urge anyone in Massachusetts who happens by here and shares my opposition to Barack Obama's attempt to enslave our physicians to head to the polls today and vote for Scott Brown.

I do not know that much about Brown, other than that he has pledged to be the missing 41st vote against the attempted government takeover of medicine. However, particularly with Barack Obama's recent trip to the Bay State to back the odious Martha Coakley, it almost doesn't matter what Brown's other views might happen to be: Obama has made it undeniable that this election is a referendum on his plan. I probably would not support Brown other than for this pledge.

The fact that this election is a referendum at all ought to give the Democrats pause, but it does not. Rather, there is talk of Obama doubling down even if Brown loses, and there are concerns that Massachusetts will stall a Brown swearing-in long enough to effectively nullify such a result. And it could well be true that despite a Brown victory, the Democrats will still sign some form of their legislation into law.

However, Democrat grandstanding and threats aside, the fact remains, a Brown victory would, at the very least, cause the Democrats to either have to become even more openly opposed to the founding principles of the United States and will of the American people -- or give up this legislation. In either case, the legitimacy of the most anti-American President in United States history will be called into question in terms that no thinking adult can evade.

I had to work yesterday. My occupation is highly specialized, and so I am surrounded with very well-educated people. Thanks in large part to the left's decades-old stranglehold on our state-run education system, of I am probably the only person there who wants Brown to win. A major official of my company was urging people to vote yesterday and then took half the day off to "canvas for Coakley voters" as another co-worker put it. Do not permit Brown's recent polling data to make you complacent: Scenes like this, I am sure, are playing out all over the place in the Boston area. And, sadly, I am doubtless not the only recent Bay State transplant who would have happily voted for Brown to have put off registering to vote.

Obama may like to claim that his opponents march in lockstep, but he's the "community organizer," and it will be his hoardes of sixties retreads, young fools, ne'er do wells, and methadone clinic zombies who will be fumbling for the lever today if they can be rounded up in time, and that will be before whatever behind-the-scenes shenanigans his party's machine can arrange.

The best electoral result today would be for Brown to win decisively enough that there will be no need or excuse for a recount. That result is unlikely, but possible. This is no time for complacency. This is not the time to be intimidated. There is no margin for error.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 498

MLK: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The good: Martin Luther King's dream of black equality has been largely realized. Barack Obama's election to the presidency, which required the support of a majority of white Americans, is ample evidence that skin color is no longer the barrier it once was. [Update: This was not actually the case, although Obama did poll at least as well as the past two Democrat candidates for President did among white voters.]

The bad: Said President seems oblivious to the fact that central planning is a form of slavery, and he seeks to impose it on another class of citizens, namely physicians. Neither skin color nor the possession of valuable skills and knowledge justify legalized coercion of individuals.

The ugly: Obama's trip to Massachusetts to shore up support for Martha Coakley indicates that he is unable or unwilling to reconsider his own prejudices against capitalism and, by implication, individualism.

To top all this off: How un-self-aware (or brazen) can someone be to claim that Republicans are "walking in lockstep" even as he campaigns for someone who will do just that with 59 other Democrats to pass a bill that is plainly very unpopular?

Where will they go with this?

Despite my distaste for vendor lock-in, Apple gained my respect when it rewrote its OS on top of a Unix kernel and my interest with its iPhone success. But where will it go with the tablet it's going to release around March? That's the question Farhad Manjoo asks at Slate:

[A rumored price of over $800.00 is] exactly what makes Apple's move so risky. A machine that seeks to supplant a laptop can't offer just a "lean-back" experience -- it's got to let you enter text, too, and that's where tablet machines have long failed. Let's assume that Steve Jobs and his minions have come up with an amazing solution to this problem. In the same way that Apple managed to build an intuitive, easy-to-learn interface into a phone that lacked a physical keyboard, they could figure out a way to make it easy to type long e-mails on a screen that you've got to hold with both hands. But any new system will require a learning curve, and it's likely that some people will never get used to it. Indeed, I still type on my iPhone only grudgingly. When I've got to pen a long e-mail, I wait until I'm near a keyboard.

Even if they've found a way to make inveterate keyboard users like myself buy a work computer without a keyboard, they'll have to be prepared for many of us to let the early adopters be the guinea pigs, especially in this economy.

Venezuela on the Precipice

Dismuke points me to an blog posting that predicts national collapse for Venezuela within 120 days based on the unavoidable consequences of Hugo Chavez's gross mismanagement of the power grid.

"National collapse" would be sparked by the forced shutdown of at least 5,000 MW of Venezuela's hydro-power generation capacity.

The lights would go out in large swaths of Venezuela including Caracas for days, weeks, perhaps even for months, according to Edelca's report.

Even worse, [hydroelectric producer] Edelca's best-case forecast is that Venezuela will only barely avoid "national collapse" – assuming that it starts raining by March and the emergency conservation plan launched on 12 January 2010 is effective – but when has the Chavez regime been effective at anything besides destruction, corruption and bullying?

Caracas Gringo goes into more depth on this and other aspects of the situation in Venezuela in this post and elsewhere in his blog.

Japan, too?

Economist Ambrose Evan-Pritchard thinks that, "2010 will prove to be the year that Japan flips from deflation to something very different:"

Japan's deficits are already within the hyperinflation "red flag" zone identified by historian Peter Bernholz (Monetary Regimes and Inflation ... the Bible on this subject). As you can see from the charts below, prices start to spiral into the stratosphere once the deficits as a share of government expenditure rises above a third and stays there for several years.

More there on how Japan may have escaped hyperinflation so far and why it might cease doing so soon.

How have we not had (much) inflation?

I don't know enough about economics to be sure of the soundness of his argument (and wonder how a Japanese collapse would affect it), but Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw explains why he thinks we are not necessarily in store for it.

And as a result of legislative changes in October 2008, the Fed has a new tool: it can pay interest on reserves. With short-term interest rates currently near zero, this tool has been largely irrelevant. But as the economy recovers and interest rates rise, the Fed can increase the interest rate it pays banks to hold reserves as well. Higher interest on reserves would discourage bank lending and prevent the huge expansion in the monetary base from becoming inflationary.

Not only does he wonder aloud whether the Fed will use this "new tool," however, he also indicates that the Fed may want to use "a little inflation" to spur the economy. This immediately reminds me of the seventies.

When all is said and done, the value of my bank account remains at the mercy of mere politicians. Color me less than reassured.

Objectivist Roundup

The latest is over at Titanic Deck Chairs.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a factual error.

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Shepherd's Pie

After my last few posts on cooking, one might think that I lack appreciation for simple fare. Not so, and the winter months seem especially well-suited to hearty, not-so-elaborate dishes like the one that got my current creative burst going: shepherd's pie. Thank my wife for introducing me to this dish after you try it.

This recipe is a slightly dumbed-down and economized version of a Rachel Ray recipe. I always would make it at my wife's request, but never really cared for it much myself -- until I made it Monday and remembered to salt and pepper the meat as I cooked it. (I hadn't made this in a while, so I was paying close attention to the instructions.) I may be absent-minded, but the vast improvement this made in the end result will help me remember to do this in the future. That may be soon: I've lunched on the leftovers all week and am not tired of it.

Bon appetit!

-CAV

PS: I just recalled that SB has an interesting list of culinary links, filed under "FFavorites" in his sidebar, that I will want to explore some time in the near future. A favorite of my own is Cajun Grocer. I can now make gumbo again after receiving from my brother some much-needed supplies from there.

***

30-Minute Shepherd's Pie

Ingredients

salt
black pepper
paprika, 1 tsp
chopped parsley leaves, 2 tbsp
beef bouillon cube, 1
butter, 2 tbsp
all-purpose flour, 2 tbsp
soy sauce, 2 tsp
olive oil, 1 tbsp
milk, 1/2 cup
red potatoes, 2 lbs (No. Don't peel them.)
ground beef or ground lamb, 1 3/4 lbs
carrots, 2
onion, 1
frozen peas, 1/2 cup

Directions

1. Add water and salt to pot for boiling the potatoes. Set to boil.

2. In the meantime, perform the following:

a. Wash and cube potatoes, setting them aside in a bowl.
b. Chop the onion and place in a second bowl.
c. If needed, peel the carrots. Chop carrots into small pieces and place in bowl with onion.
d. Place peas in a third bowl.
e. Place butter in small skillet.
f. Measure 1 cup water into saucepan for broth.
g. Mise en place: bouillon cube; containers for salt, pepper, paprika, parsley, olive oil, and soy sauce; measured-out milk and flour; bowl and spoon for mashing potatoes; and casserole dish.

3. Boil potatoes for about 12 minutes.

4. While the potatoes boil, perform the following:

a. Start preheating large skillet over medium high heat.
b. Defrost meat in microwave, if necessary.
c. Set water for broth to boil.
d. Coat hot pan with olive oil and add meat.
e. Season meat with salt and pepper, and brown for 3-4 minutes.
f. Dissolve bouillon cube in boiling broth water.
g. Add onion and carrot to meat. Cook 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

5. Drain potatoes and pour into mashing bowl.

6. Melt butter over medium heat in small skillet.

7. Preheat broiler to high.

8. Add milk to potatoes and mash until almost smooth.

9. Cook flour and butter together for 2 minutes.

10. Whisk in broth and soy sauce. Thicken gravy 1 minute.

11. Add gravy to meat and vegetables. Stir in peas.

12. Fill rectangular casserole dish with meat and vegetable mixture.

13. Spoon potatoes over meat evenly. Top with paprika.

14. Broil 6-8 inches from heat until potatoes are evenly browned.

15. Top with parsley and serve.

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GOP Joins Thought Police

At FrontPage Magazine, Jacob Laskin correctly cries foul on the Republican response to Nevada Senator Harry Reid's recently-publicized "racist" comments about Barack Obama. Laskin notes that the GOP is acting on an ill-conceived premise of expediency by adopting the childish tactics of the multiculturalist left. Doing so, while bemoaning the obvious double-standard applied to those who make such remarks, he argues is foolish because it wrongly legitimizes these tactics:

[GOP National Chairman Michael] Steele is of course right about this double standard. But the chairman does nothing to restore integrity to the political debate by validating the political left's pernicious smear that any and all comments about race, however innocuous, must be treated as an act of racism, with their author forced to prostrate himself before various racial lobbies or risk banishment from polite society.

As I have noted in the past with other, similar, cries of "Hypocrisy!" from the right, it is fine to call someone a hypocrite, but not enough when that person's precepts are wrong to begin with and it would thus be immoral to actually follow them anyway.

The right, unfortunately, does this all the time, even going so far as to dare the Democrats to be more consistent collectivists from time to time. But in this case, it's worse: The right is doing the job for the left rather than taking this golden opportunity to stand up for freedom of speech and against the attempted thought control that is multiculturalism.

Until the right definitively repudiates collectivism and its undergirding morality of altruism, such moral cowardice will be the order of the day. For the guilty secret of many conservatives is that they aren't individualists, either. This is why we see them, time and time again, toss tomatoes at the Democrats, only to "show them how it's done" in exactly the wrong way.

This is not the first time the GOP has aped the left right after noting one of its shortcomings, but it is one of the more obvious examples in recent memory.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 497

The US Never "Bullied" Castro

Via Dismuke is an interesting look at the actual history of the Cuban "revolution," in which Humberto Fontova even calls a spade a spade regarding the nature of Cuba's nationalization of American assets:

The Castro regime has never settled a penny of this mass burglary with its U.S. victims. Search for any mention of the above in an MSM article on the so-called U.S. embargo of Cuba (in fact, we've been Cuba's main food supplier and fifth largest trading partner for close to a decade now) and you will draw a complete blank.

Between Oliver Stone and the abysmal history curriculum in the typical public school, this editorial is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Where There's Smoke, ...

... and the U.S. Treasury smells it, there's fire.

We may be about to see what can happen when an arsonist tries to avoid getting caught. Karl Denninger quotes Business Week:

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

This move Denninger variously calls, "an attempt to prevent the collapse of the Treasury market," "a forced "CALL option on the future taxing ability of the government," and "the most dangerous investment of all."

He was most succinct the first time, though, when he called it a "screw job." (HT: Dismuke)

The Anti-Filibuster Movement

Claiming that the filibuster violates the intent of the Constitution because it "renders [the Senate] even less representative," Timothy Noah calls for its elimination at Slate and notes what he hopes is growing momentum for same. This is one of the last things I needed to hear about today.

Needless to say, Noah fails to adequately consider the intent of the checks and balances added to the Constitution, which exist in part to protect Americans from unrestrained democracy. To the extent that he does, he parrots James Fallow's charge that the filibuster,"converts the Senate from the 'saucer' George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might 'cool,' into a deep freeze and a dead weight."

Given the amount of serious deliberation that occurs in a legislative body that has gotten into the habit of passing major legislation unread -- and which is, incidentally, unconstitutional -- Noah should be thanking his lucky stars for the longstanding precedent of the use of this happy accident of history.

When, like socialized medicine, the drink is a hot tea made from the leaves of a poisonous weed, I for one would rather it be placed in a deep freeze permanently than into a mere saucer.

Heh!

Regarding my mentioning to him over email that, on my way to work every day, I walk past Stata Center, in whose bowels nests Noam Chomsky, reader Snedcat opines: "One of the few valid circumstances in which to wear a cross! Though garlic works just as well, I hear...but you're probably safe so long as you keep in direct sunlight."

-- CAV

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A Clear Agenda of Repeal

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Clark S. Judge offers some surprisingly sound advice for the Republican Party in the form of a ten point plan for the 2010 mid-term elections, although it does not go far enough. My favorite item, because it reintroduces a much-needed idea into the mainstream political debate is his Item 6:

6) For the midterm election, unite around a clear agenda of repeal. The party should give its candidates a list of programs and spending that will be up for cancellation the hour a Republican Congress is sworn in. At the top of the list should be the Troubled Asset Relief Program, unspent stimulus funds, and the health-care overhaul.

I've long said that the voting public and politicians alike should become reacquainted with the "r-word."

Although the above suggestion is a good place to start, it is too bad that Judge didn't make a more principled case that recommended a "clear agenda of repeal" extending well beyond the next election and did not stop at only the newest incursions against individual rights foisted on us by Bush and Obama-Pelosi.

For instance, why focus on penny-ante earmarks...

The House and Senate GOP caucuses should walk away from earmarks, leaving Democrats alone to defend this symbol of D.C.'s degeneracy.

... or stop at mere "reform" of social programs that are inherently corrupt, rather than formulating a strategy to phase them out?

3) Start talking about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare. Swing voters know these programs could devastate federal finances. They want assurance that politicians know this, too, and are committed to fixing them. Talk of reforming these programs is no longer the third rail of politics. It will win the swing voters' respect.

The fact that Judge does not go quite far enough in his suggestions to the Republicans should serve notice on all who favor individual rights. The kind of substantive, principled reform of which Judge's suggestions can really only be a first baby step will never occur unless we renounce all party loyalty and treat every election as an auction with the winning bidder being the politician who believably (preferably via a solid track record) pledges to increase government protection for individual rights at every opportunity.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 496

Hitler's "Human" Side

Oliver Stone's idea of providing historical context would appear to be to drop moral context:

"Stalin has a complete other story," Stone said. "Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person.

We can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect...

...


"He's not saying we're going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler," emphasized professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the project. "But we're going to describe him as a historical phenomenon and not just somebody who appeared out of nowhere."

Stone said that conservative pundits will dislike the show.

"Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of ignorant attacks," said Stone...

Hitler and Stalin were responsible for millions of deaths within their respective countries. Much is known (and already easily-enough learned) about the lives and intellectual influences on each.

Stone's denigration of moral judgment as "scapegoating" and "ignorant" are a direct result of determinism. Of course "we're [not] going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler." How could you have a positive view of anyone if, like Stone, you see the common (and correct) view of Hitler as an evil monster as foolish?

The creation of a historical account shares with fiction the element of selectivity, except that, because the ideas men accept and and act upon drive history, the historian's criterion for selectivity is which facts best illustrate what ideas motivated one historical figure or another.

Stone's rejection of the normative aspect of his job as a historian will lead him to dwell on nonessential details and create an account that will hinder a proper understanding of the people and events he covers. And, his prattling to the contrary notwithstanding, he will portray Hitler in an undeservedly positive light. Even to paint him an an ordinary human being is far better than he deserves.

There is a reason certain details about Hitler and Stalin are not more widely discussed: They're insignificant -- just like Oliver Stone's contribution to the field of history will prove to be.

Well, at least it isn't Avatar!

Eric Raymond makes some interesting comments on Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes:

The Holmes we have become used to from later interpretations is sort of Holmes-as-Vulcan, the Mr. Spock of the gaslight era; cool, cerebral, controlled, a bit disdainful. Forgotten in the Holmes-as-Vulcan version is that the original Holmes was an eccentric drug addict who went to pieces in the absence of a degree of mental stimulation ordinary life could not afford him.

I am not terribly familiar with the literary character or the Spock-like movie portrayals, but this Holmes sounds closer to Gregory House.

Raymond gave it a positive view overall and he disliked Avatar, which sounds abysmal to me. That's not saying much, but still...

Heh!



Because I haven't posted the results of a silly quiz here in quite a while.

Objectivist Roundup

Amy Mossoff hosts last week's edition. Hopefully, I will have recovered by Tuesday from my post-vacation backlog/adjusted to my new daily routine enough to submit a post for this week's edition.

Blah! Blah! Blah!

And speaking of catching up, I found the below observation spot-on:

My final thought on the comment that I find appropriate is the capitalization of "BLAH." In netiquette (i.e. network etiquette), capitalization is typically used to indicate a shout. This completes the perfect image of the modern leftist: a lout with nothing to say . . . and shouting it to drown everybody else out.

But that's just the summary of SB's analysis of a comment consisting of the word, "Blah!" repeated 262 times. Be sure to read the rest.

-- CAV

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Silk Thermals

Growing up in Mississippi, I had just enough experience with cold weather to know that it placed me in a quandary with regard to thermal underwear: Thermals could keep me warm outdoors, but, thanks to my rat-like metabolism, I would always bake to death indoors whenever I wore them. Fortunately, cold weather was not a constant feature of my life for weeks on end in those days, so this was never really a problem.

It is now, though! And, yes, just as primitive cultures discovered the color wheel by degrees, I have gradually learned to distinguish varying intensities of coldness. There is a noticeable difference between twenty degrees and thirty -- a matter about which ignorance was bliss. I had been quite happy to refer to that entire range simply as "cold" before. Not any more... I was only half-joking when I referred to, "the mercury hit[ting] a blistering thirty-six degrees," the other day: It actually felt kind of warm when it did. I am afraid I will have to revisit my winter terminology before too long.

Fortunately, I can thank my wife for introducing me to silk thermals, courtesy of a tip from some friends who moved here a few years before we did. My morning subway commute ends with a brisk eight-to-ten-minute walk in the cold, but I work in a warm lab all day. These silk long johns have made what would have been miserable (freezing my legs off) or annoying (changing out of the long johns at work) barely noticeable. They add no bulk and I notice them only when I realize it's cold and feel grateful to have them.

Sometimes a really simple thing like this can make a big difference.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

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Nanny's Burqa

Still catching up with the news when able, I learned through HBL of some trenchant observations by Christopher Hitchens about airline "security" after the Christmas bombing attempt. His observations also go far to explain anarcho-tyranny, of which his subject matter is an example.

Hitchens notes that for every news story about a Moslem fanatic waltzing through security on his way to attempt murder, there is another one about additional "security" burdens borne by the rest of us. He comments:

Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can't--or won't. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to "feel safe." The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens' toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.

Binswanger rightly notes that the solution to this problem remains to go on offense. He mentions a foreign policy proposal that I happen to agree with, but I have noted in the past that a freer economy could do wonders to enhance travel security, too.

The Islamic totalitarians are coopting the apparatus of the nanny state. All the more reason to disband it, then. The task is daunting because the real power lies with the people who are willing to accept a nanny state. Their overall opinion needs to change to an appreciable degree before the nanny state will be eliminated. But once that occurs, the Islamic totalitarians will drop like the flies they are.

In today's world, when one can feel beset on every side by enemies, that kind of economy of effort is heartening when one realizes it, but it is a direct result of the fact that rational principles are highly practical.

Protect individual rights consistently. The wolf of big government and the fleas of Islamic terrorism that hitchike in its fur will both be taken care of.

-- CAV

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The Missing Crime Spike

Heather MacDonald notes that the leftist conceit that poverty breeds crime has been thoroughly discredited.

The recession could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating. Public safety is the precondition for thriving urban life. In 1990s New York, crime did not drop because the economy improved; rather, the city's economy revived because crime was cut in half. Keeping crime rates low now is the best guarantee that cities across the country will be able to exploit the inevitable economic recovery when it comes.

Unfortunately, her identification of a likely cause of our nation's relatively low recent crime rate is inherently a warning, given who's in charge.

-- CAV

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Quick Roundup 495

Adieu, 2009

I was out of the States and off the Web when it was compiled, but I do like this "Best of 2009" Objectivist Roundup over at Rational Jenn.

And, while we're reviewing 2009, I got a big kick out of Dave Barry's year-in-review column for 2009. He both essentialized the absurdity of that craptastic year and made me laugh out loud about it several times.

I am in awe.

Obama's Piece Prize



By now, it's an oldie, but it's still a goodie. (HT: Mom)

Leave it to Psmith

While on vacation, I enjoyed reading my first P. G. Wodehouse novel, Leave it to Psmith. I recall hearing rave reviews of Wodehouse in Objectivist circles at some point, and that helped the book catch my eye while I was Christmas shopping. Unfortunately, I can dredge the source of the recommendation from neither memory nor Google.

Pure, benevolent fun! Whoever that was has my thanks.

Amen

That's about all I can say about this list of "Ten Things You Need to Stop Tweeting about."

-- CAV

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River Boat Epistemology

Last week, my in-laws treated my wife and me to a welcome break from the New England winter in the form of a Caribbean cruise. One of the highlights for me occurred one afternoon when I participated in a Texas Hold'em poker tournament I learned about from my wife's mother, who remembered that I used to play poker regularly during grad school around the time Mrs. Van Horn and I started dating.

Back then, my group didn't play Texas Hold'em that much, and I have since indulged my interest in the game only intermittently, watching games here and there on television and occasionally joining co-workers in informal Texas Hold'em tournaments with very small buy-ins.

Playing for a few hundred dollars and facing complete strangers were both new to me, and the buy-in was just enough so soon after starting to work again that I did have to think it over a little bit. But I wanted to know what it would be like and how I would do enough that I finally decided at the last minute to play.

Although I did not win -- only the top two players won money -- I did far better than I expected to, finishing third after eliminating four of the other ten players directly (two of them in one hand) and leading my closest opponent at one point by a factor of three. Bragging aside (not to mention probably also admitting that I don't know what to do with a huge lead), what really fascinated me were a few thoughts I had about the process of learning as a result of that game.

Poker is simple in some respects and complex in others. It is fairly straightforward to estimate the potential strength of one's hand at any given point and, at least in Texas Hold'em, to come up with reasonable estimations of what an opponent might possess.

Betting patterns can help one refine one's estimate of what an opponent might have, but the ability of an opponent to bluff has to be accounted for. (e.g., There are whole books about "tells" -- minor expressions or actions that can indicate deception -- that have been written with the object of determining whether an opponent might be bluffing.) So the rules of the game are simple, but its strategy is actually quite complex. What interests me here is the fact that both explicit knowledge and intuition are both involved at all levels of the game.

As I just indicated, there are different mixtures of explicit knowledge and gut feel for different aspects of the game and I suspect that this might vary over certain ranges by individual. For example, I am almost certain that it is possible to calculate the mathematical odds for any given hand to win. (I'd normally check on something like this and provide a link, but I'm writing this on a plane and probably won't be home until after midnight... [Actually, it ended up being 2:30 am. I woke up at six, for work beckons. Oh, and I'm less sure that this can be done, but the question is still interesting to consider. --ed]) I don't know how to perform such calculations, but I did notice myself feeling generally better or worse about my pocket cards after the deal as I played different hands even before thinking something like, "Hmmm. An ace and a seven in diamonds. Good high card and a fair chance for a flush." Clearly my subconscious was working from previous experience on some level.

Thinking about what I did right and wrong after the game, I wondered whether I might want to learn how to calculate the odds of my hand winning. Strange as it might seem, decided against doing so -- for now. At the time, I was not able to state explicitly why this seemed like a bad idea to me, but on reconsidering this point, I now think I understand what I was grappling with: The details of such calculations (and maybe the results) would distract me from learning other aspects of the game, among them figuring out how strategies generally evolve over the course of a game and how they can vary among individuals.

Among the reasons I might have run into trouble later in the game was that I realized too late that the risk of staying in a hand changes in multiple ways as the game goes on. For one thing, due to increasing initial bets it's more expensive to see the up-cards and this fact in turn seemed to make players more reluctant to stay in with the weaker hands they might have chanced earlier in the game.

On top of that, bluffing can really pay off at such a point: One of the two players left after me took advantage of this fact to bluff me successfully, one of the three most important plays in the game as far as I was concerned. (This is not to say that I got bluffed easily. I did call a bluff by the other top player early in the game after considering a fold. I decided to stay in when I realized that his bet made no sense. I remember feeling quite comfortable with that decision, although not completely sure about why. This first-hand experience of using intuition was part of what I was after when I decided to play.)

So I would say that eventually, I could improve my game by learning how to calculate odds, but that at this point, I still need to learn too many other things about the parameter space of the game before going into that much detail. Something I observed suggests that I am right: The people who talked before the tournament about their gaming on-line dropped like flies early on. I strongly suspect that this was due to their concentrating too much on the mathematical aspects of the game and too little on learning how to read their opponents: You don't see your opponents in on-line poker and so cannot observe everything they do. (Incidentally, I considered and rejected the idea of playing on-line poker for that reason alone: On-line gaming in general and on-line poker in particular do not appeal to me. That said, people who are weak at estimating how good their hands are might do well to practice on-line.)

I wouldn't call myself a serious student of poker, but if I were to study anything at this point, it would be tells. But still, it's really too early to do that in much detail, either. At this point, I'm a rank beginner and not too sure that the cards weren't a little bit kinder than average to me. What I would really need to see are more examples of play before I can gain an overall grasp of what a game of poker typically entails and where I am strongest and weakest. (The best advice for someone like me would be of a general nature that touches on all the important points of the game without dwelling on any one of them.)

In parallel with gaining experience, I could conceptualize the knowledge by making it more explicit or studying certain issues in more detail as I feel ready for them or in need of them. (This is an example of the spiral theory of learning. To get lost from the outset in details about one issue or another as the on-line players may have would be an example of what I have heard called "over-thinking," although I regard that colloquialism as misleading. Such an approach strikes me as rationalistic, but there could be any number of other reasons someone might make such an error.)

Poker appears to be a good model for certain aspects of how we learn generally. In a certain respect, I am almost glad I didn't win that tournament. I might not have learned as much as I did about how to approach poker in particular and knowledge in general.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

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