Q: What's in a Name?

A: Not much.

I ran into an example of confirmation bias that was almost flabbergasting in its blatancy the other day, courtesy of the following item from a list of bizarre family reunion stories.

The stories of identical twins' nearly identical lives are often astonishing, but perhaps none more so than those of these identical twins born in Ohio. Jim Lewis and Jim Springer first met February 9, 1979 after 39 years of being separated. They had grown to adulthood completely unaware of each other's existence. When Jim Lewis finally found his twin brother, Jim Springer, after years of searching through court records, he knew their unwed mother had put them up for adoption shortly after giving birth. When the two first met, Lewis described it as "like looking into a mirror." For starters, both had the same first name. They were physically identical. [Jumpin' Jehosophat! --ed] But when they got talking, the similarities were astounding. Both had childhood dogs named Toy. Both had been nail biters and fretful sleepers. Both had migraines. Both had married first wives names Linda, second wives named Betty. Lewis named his first son James Allen, Springer named his James Alan. For years, they both had taken holidays on the same Florida beach. They both drank Miller Lite, smoked Salem cigarettes, loved stock car racing, disliked baseball, left regular love notes to their wives, made doll furniture in their basements, and had added circular white benches around the trees in their backyards. Their IQs, habits, facial expressions, brain waves, heartbeats, and handwriting were nearly identical. The Jim twins lived apart but died on the same day, from the same illness.

Except for the fact that this set of separated twins ended up with identical first names (assuming that either both were named Jim or both were named James), this story is actually somewhat typical of accounts of identical twins raised apart. (And it would be even if we set aside similarities known to be caused by their nearly identical genetic makeups.) When such accounts appear in popular media, they will often emphasize how similar the twins are as adults, while downplaying their differences.

But what really piqued my interest was what I found at the source cited by the web site Oddee: an Internet posting from a back copy of the newsletter of a group that attaches mystical significance to names in the same fashion that astrologers do the positions of celestial bodies when we are born. That source, after providing substantially the same information as the quote above, elaborates further:

The understanding of name and its influence on our lives is a facinating [sic] study. More importantly it gives one an undersanding [sic] of the cause of many of our qualities of intelligence and the experiences we attract.

Because these twins were named almost identically, they expressed similar traits. Some would argue this was heredity given their twin status. Most of us know a set of twins where the personality differences are distinct and obvious. In this case, because they were raised separately, they developed the qualities in their names without reference to a sibling. They demonstrate the principle of names in a dramatic fashion...

The Skeptic's Dictionary say the following about confirmation bias:

Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs. For example, if you believe that during a full moon there is an increase in admissions to the emergency room where you work, you will [if you are not careful --ed] take notice of admissions during a full moon, but be inattentive to the moon when admissions occur during other nights of the month. A tendency to do this over time unjustifiably strengthens your belief in the relationship between the full moon and accidents and other lunar effects.

As a stark example of ignoring evidence contradictory to their beliefs, kindly note that the "Kabalarians," blatantly eager to substantiate their view about the importance of names, say that the twins are, "named almost identically" -- despite the fact that they have completely different last names. And note that they home in on the differences -- but blow off the similarities -- commonly seen in identical twins raised together. There is also no mention at all of the twins' middle names (if one or both of the Jims had them), although one can be sure that if those were also the same (and were available -- I couldn't find them), the Kabalarians would have eagerly supplied those as well.

The account posted at their site -- as another post threaded in months later shows -- also left out aspects of the reunion story available in other accounts that would have cast doubts on the assertion that this story provides "evidence" that names somehow determine our lives. The additional post notes some differences between the Jims, but even it doesn't really provide all the context necessary to evaluate their claim. (Yes. It's an arbitrary claim and can be dismissed out of hand, but bear with me as I explore this line of thought, anyway.)

For one thing, there are common-sense issues, such as the following: Just consider how many twins -- raised together or apart -- possess different names -- and how many non-twins possess completely identical names. Consider further how easy it would be to find people among such groups either more -- or less -- similar to each other than these twins.

On top of that, consider how one comes up with lists of similarities (or differences) between individuals. I'm named after my father, for example. I'm sure I could come up with two lists: one of astounding similarities between the two of us, and one of equally astounding differences. (The same thing could even live on each list: We both liked to relax with a beer after work. Or: My dad liked Old Milwaukee, but I never touch the stuff.)

And then there is philosophical context. On what basis is this claim made? Do men have free will or not? Does correlation necessarily imply causation? Does this assertion fit in with everything else we know?

Confirmation bias can cloud thinking on any issue, including claims that are neither arbitrary nor absurd, and even about something that happens to be true. But a mind lapsing into confirmation bias is not engaged in cognition. Confirmation bias, while sometimes amusing, can thus be deadly to a rational animal.

-- CAV

Statutory Unemployment

Some time ago, I reacted to legislation that made the old, but perfectly good car I was driving at the time obsolete, for all practical purposes. I called the effect "statutory obsolescence," likening it to a short-sighted approach to manufacturing, called "planned obsolescence," that a former auto worker once told me about. I then brought up the very real possibility that a certain type of "businessman" might support such legislation, seeing a range-of-the-moment "advantage" of the effect, like a goosing of the sales numbers for new units.

While I think the story behind the trouble American car companies were having back then is a little more complicated than he made it sound, I would not put such practices past businessmen in certain industries, given the unfortunate pervasiveness of pragmatism within our culture.

I suppose I can feel grim satisfaction in, once again, being right about a "gut feeling" of mine: General Electric, the very company founded by the inventor of the light bulb, put its weight behind passing the legislation (HT: Paul Hsieh) that will outlaw the Edison bulb by 2014, unless repeal efforts succeed. Here are a few speculations from a news story as to exactly why and to what degree General Electric chose to betray the memory of Thomas Edison:

• GE supported the regulations. Many Winchester workers, noting that the CFLs are made in China by lower-wage workers, say GE wanted to force the higher profit-margin bulbs on consumers, and Winchester is collateral damage.
• ... GE had opposed early regulations that would have totally banned incandescent technology, but supported the efficiency standards as less bad. "As long as you know that the legislation is coming one way or another," she said, "you want to influence it in a way that makes sense for your customers and your business."
• Teresa Golightly, after working her last shift Thursday, said GE CEO Jeff Immelt supported the rules to cozy up with politicians: "He got on Obama's economic team. I feel like we were sold out."
• But one worker, who went out of his way to talk to me, said the regulations are just a "scapegoat." GE wanted to send their jobs to Mexico, and the regulations provide political cover. [bold added]

Most interesting to me is the gutless desire to get political cover for the loss of jobs related to closing a U.S. plant -- something the company has a right to do. But might the inordinate expense of continuing operations there have been, at least in some part, due to past failures by the company to oppose other regulations, such as the Wagner Act (or any number of environmental or energy "efficiency" laws), that drive up the cost of doing business?

In any case, it is staggering to see the management of a company whose industry its founder practically brought into existence single-handedly functioning in almost every way like every shopworn (but wrong) stereotype of (real) businessmen as near-criminals. Rather than offer cheap, quality products to customers who may take them or leave them -- a proven strategy for success -- GE is forcing junk on customers at gouging prices, making back-room deals with fat cat politicians, and saying "we can't help it" when some of those deals make it hard for them to continue doing some of its business the honest, productive way.

-- CAV

Moral Revolutions: How?

Over at Slate is a really interesting piece by Paul Berman that considers a point raised by Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code. Under consideration is the following question:

Vast moral revolutions do take place once in a while, but it is hard to figure out exactly what sets them into motion or brings them to success. A high-minded prophet in some part of the world denounces an old and dreadful social custom. A smattering of do-gooders plead for reform. The reform in question appears, at a glance, to be impractical, unpopular, and unlikely. And yet enormous masses of people somehow--but how?--end up suddenly embracing the revolutionary idea, and they bend to the task of digging a new foundation for the whole of society. The improbable reform, upon completion, turns out to be irreversible. And in retrospect, absolutely everyone, or nearly so, solemnly agrees that good has, in fact, been done, and moral progress on the grandest of scales is more than a figment of the wistful and naive imagination.

Appiah's answer, according to Berman, is that the reformers both re-cast the notion of personal honor and appeal to the sense of honor of those they are hoping to persuade. Berman, while sharing Appiah's enthusiasm for the moral progress he recounts, isn't persuaded. He looks briefly at the milieus in which these changes occur and finds, as a common thread, the involvement of Christian missionaries.

... Appiah's own account of moral revolutions over the centuries makes me wonder whether something deeper and vaster hasn't ultimately been driving the grandest of the reform campaigns--something deriving from Christianity, maybe.

In the sense that each man seems a little to me like a blind man attempting to describe an elephant, I have to say that I think that each man is on to something. The same thing.

As I have noted in the past, Christianity is a package deal of some very good and some very bad elements. One of the very good elements is that it has, in the sense of each human being being regarded as special by the Creator, a rudimentary concept of individualism. Granted, this concept isn't moored to a rational consideration of man's nature, and it is severely compromised by the Christian ethics of (human) sacrifice (committed by the victim himself). Nevertheless, individualism is even less well-developed, or of a much lower priority in most other religions and philosophies, so even this is an improvement over many of them. (This holds, of course, only so long as that element of Christianity is dominant. Clearly, that is not always the case.)

With the conception that one's self is holy, it follows that others are, as well. Wherever and whenever this idea is common in a culture, I think there is fertile soil for people to develop magnanimity of the soul, a genuine benevolence towards others, an ability to empathize with the suffering of others, and a powerful indignation when such suffering is due to the actions of others. (Note further that all of the examples under discussion involve an end to sacrificing others to self, and none involve enforced self-sacrifice, such as instituting a massive welfare state.) Appiah's sense of honor is an expression of the magnanimity, but it arises from the seeds of individualism -- the "something" Berman doesn't quite see, although he has a good guess about who's casting those seeds around.

Of course, for all the moral progress discussed -- the ends of slavery in the British Empire, foot binding in China, and dueling among the British aristocracy -- humanity still has a long way to go, including in those parts of the world most strongly influenced by Christianity. This is a direct result of the deficiencies in the Christian ethic and its concept of the individual -- coupled with the fact that benevolence, although a very powerful force for cultural change, needs to be channeled by rational guidance for such change to be positive. One need only consider the darker episodes of Christian history to see this.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added a clarification.

Phil Hare Doesn't Care

Reader Dismuke alerts me to the following video, which depicts Congressman Phil Hare (party affiliation irrelevant) of Illinois saying, "I don't worry about the Constitution," regarding whether it grants him the authority to force people to purchase medical insurance.

Hart, incredibly to me, claims concern for "lives" as the basis for this disdain, although the very purpose of the Constitution is to protect the lives of individuals -- from the predations of others who might, for example, steal from them in order to pay medical bills.

-- CAV

Regulating Us to Death

A pair of articles at OpenMarket.org illustrate in different ways the pervasiveness of the modern regulatory state.

In the first, Ryan Young notes that, according to a recent report, federal regulations alone were costing the U.S. economy $1.75 trillion per year in 2008. State and local regulations cost extra, and all those costs have undoubtedly increased since then. He points to the report (PDF), and quotes the following from it:

The findings in this report indicate that in 2008, U.S. federal government regulations cost an estimated $1.75 trillion, an amount equal to 14 percent of U.S. national income. When combined with U.S. federal tax receipts, which equaled 21 percent of national income in 2008, these two costs of federal government programs in 2008 consumed 35 percent of national income.

The report elaborates that this cost amounts to $15,586 per household, which is more than the $10,500 each household spent on medical care the same year. The report looks also into several aspects of this burden and notes that it is particularly hard on small businesses. This suggests that the government could help private citizens enormously in the realms of medical costs and job creation simply by stepping aside via massive regulatory repeal.

In the second post, Ben Liebermann notes:

Just weeks after taking office, the president announced an accelerated process to create stringent new energy efficiency standards for nearly everything around the house that uses energy. The Department of Energy is well on its way towards accomplishing this goal, boasting of more than 20 such regulations since President Obama came to office.

If past experience is any guide, these regulations will raise the purchase price of appliances — in some cases more than is ever likely to be earned back in the form of energy savings. Worse, several may adversely impact product performance and reliability. There are potentially problematic regulations on the way for virtually every room in the house.

It is a common trope of public awareness campaigns for various difficult-to-detect illnesses that they are "silent killers."

Considering the fact that government protection of individual rights is vital to our lives -- since we must be free to set our own priorities and need to have the products of our own labor at our disposal to do so -- we ought to regard the regulatory state as a "silent killer" of the same order. It's already here, and what most people do know about the problem, they incorrectly regard as normal.

-- CAV

9-25-10 Hodgepodge

Even He Knows

Jonathan Chait, in exposing a tactical flaw with the GOP's foolish "repeal and replace" pledge that I hadn't thought of, simultaneously makes an interesting confession.

Remember, unlike 1994, Republicans could not afford to defend the health care status quo in 2010. The public demanded health care reform, and Republicans took the position that they favored some superior alternative proposal that would do all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff. Actually formulating a plan that satisfies those requirements is impossible. [bold added]

Unless such a plan is opposed on a moral level, the playing field of this debate will be tilted by the assumption that such "bad stuff" is a necessary, but unavoidable side-effect of the "treatment."

Bleeding with leeches, once a common medical treatment, can have the "side-effect" of causing the patient to pass out, but that doesn't make the fainting a necessary evil, either. Chait's moral premises are about as up-to-date and sound as bloodletting.

Weekend Reading

"[W]hile you may have received financial rewards, satisfaction, and the respect of your peers, the one thing you haven't gotten for your achievement is moral credit." -- Don Watkins and Yaron Brook in "The Guilt Pledge," at Forbes.com

"An official policy of redistribution to autoworkers, bankers and 'struggling homeowners' reinforces the administration's faulty fixed-pie belief that there's a limited amount of wealth for the government to allocate in the 'right' way." -- Jonathan Hoenig in "There's Nothing Good About the 'Common Good'," at SmartMoney (HT: Amit Ghate)

From the Vault

Today in 2006, I played, "complete the thought." I still both chuckle and kick myself over answer 5 -- and I now own the album I mentioned in answer 23.

The Flip Side of "Get Rich Quick"

The Software Nerd warns against the "stoicism" of what I see as a modern variant of asceticism.

Many are rightly wary of "effortless-success" schemes, but it's also important to be wary of "high-effort success" schemes. Through experience, [people] often develop a heuristic that puts an extra sheen of value around high-effort schemes, even while they might reject them for their "cost".

Very interesting.

A Fairy Tale

I haven't posted a good email forward from my Mom in quite a while...

I met a fairy today who said she would grant me one wish.

"I want to live forever," I said.

"Sorry," said the fairy, "I'm not allowed to grant wishes like that!"

"Fine," I said. "I want to die after the Democrats get their heads out of their asses!"

"You crafty bastard," said the fairy.

Who needs the Brothers Grimm?

-- CAV

Reggae Cowboys

Rearranging some shelves the other day, I noticed a CD I'd forgotten about that I am pretty sure I picked up in a used bookstore a few years ago: Tell the Truth, by a band out of Canada called the Reggae Cowboys. As the name suggests, they are (or were, at least until last year) a western-themed reggae band.

[Oops! I just noticed that embedding is disabled for each of the YouTube videos I was going to post here, so you'll have to follow the links to "Searchin' for de Outlaw" and "Jed." Each clocks in at around eight minutes.]

I'd forgotten how much I like their music. To give you an idea of what their sound is like, I'll borrow from a blurb on their press page: "reggae mixed with blues, country, R&B, and jazz." Enjoy!

-- CAV

P.S. This sure makes me miss Texas.

Updates

Today: (1) Minor edits. (2) Added PS.

Ideals, Tips, and Dogs

The recent blog template update seems to have brought with it a small pile of questions. Time to dispose of some more of the backlog...

***

Dear Uncle Gus,

When you discovered Ayn Rand and started talking about her philosophy, did people label you as an "idealist"? It's happening to me. I feel like that's their "subtle" way of telling me that the world is crap and I'd better get used to it .

What is an idealist, anyway?

Signed,

Josef

Dear Josef,

Since I discovered Objectivism while I was attending a religious college, I managed to escape being charged with "idealism." Instead, I got slammed, when I did, for being an atheist and for being selfish.

I'll address two aspects of what may be going on in your case: the slamming itself and the specific accusation.

When someone acquires new knowledge of any kind, a natural impulse is to share it with as many people as possible. The urge is normal, but some people overdo it and some people react to it badly. This happens to some new Objectivists, but it is hardly unique to new Objectivists.

We all know, for example, a [fill in a computer operating system here] fan-boy who touts its virtues to the point that it seems like it's all he ever talks about. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but it does annoy some people. I know this, because I have found myself, at different times and on different issues over the years, on each side of that particular fence -- and, no, I haven't always handled it gracefully.

I don't know whether the above might describe your situation, but if you're catching flak all the time, the subtle message may simply be, "Can we please talk about something else for a while?" You may well want to be more selective about when you bring up your philosophy.

As for "idealism," what else that might mean depends on too much context for me to be able to do anything but throw out a few other possibilities. Many people wrongly see theory and practice as unrelated and, yes, have given up on the whole idea of understanding the world, as you hypothesize. (And, in those cases, since misery loves company, ...) Others are suspicious of any philosophy since every other philosophy they have ever encountered is hogwash. (Rand, though not using the term "hogwash," has noted this problem.) Others may be reacting badly to being challenged on issues they have strong opinions about.

Having said all that, it is clear that the word, "idealist" has many uses. Indeed it has multiple definitions, including:

a person who cherishes or pursues high or noble principles, purposes, goals, etc.

You are an idealist in this sense, and that is a very good thing. Keep that alive.

Strange world, isn't it, where a word frequently used as an insult is actually a compliment?

***

Dear Uncle Gus,

Is it true, as Myrhaf says, that you are anti-tipping? If so, can you explain your stance?

Signed,

The Reluctant Tipper

Dear Reluctant,

In "Dear Uncle Gus Jeopardy," you get bonus points for stating the question with a salutation and a closing. Well done!

Let me state for the record that, as tipping is an established rule of etiquette, I abide by that rule and am actually a good tipper.

That said, I don't like the rule for the reasons that Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners) has laid out.

***

Dear Uncle Gus,

Recently, a friend of mine from Barcelona was telling me that the government in that region of Spain is banning bull fighting because the majority of Catalonians believe it is inhumane. What should be the proper role of government in this (e.g., regarding dogfights in the U.S.)?

Signed,

Juan Belmonte

Dear Juan,

The proper role of government is the protection of individual rights, which only rational animals (i.e., human beings) possess. As inhumane as bull fighting and dog fighting are, bulls and dogs are property, which their owners may dispose of as they see fit, so long as they do not violate the rights of others in the process. Dog fighting, however barbaric, should be perfectly legal. Bull fighting, too, I am inclined to think, although I could see an argument against that, based on the danger it poses to the matador.

Neither majority opinion nor a laudable revulsion at how certain animal owners behave should be permitted to trump protection of the individual in the legal system of a nation.

-- CAV

If you'd like to ask a question, just type it into the box at the upper right labeled, "Ask Uncle Gus."

Updates

1-8-10: Added hypertext anchors.

A Tough Problem

Dear Uncle Gus,

You mentioned starting [Gary Taubes's] Good Calories, Bad Calories, and commented about the early sections on government-sponsored research. If you've finished the book, has it changed the way you think about diet etc. too? If so, in what way?

Signed,

Bill Banting

Dear Bill,

As I noted at the time, I was dubious about being able to finish the book any time soon, and was undecided about whether I would discuss it any further here. I was right about the first and now know the answer to the second. I haven't touched that tome since, due to personal and professional obligations, and it may be a while -- as in well after the holidays -- before I do.

That said, I can still answer your question in some respects. Although nutrition is not my field, I am a bioscientist with training and work experience in another interdisciplinary area. As such, I appreciate both the difficulties scientists encounter as they work within their own fields and the further challenges of building on work in fields not one's own.

Contrary to media portrayals, science is hard and, often, messy work. Furthermore, science doesn't always immediately answer questions, and sometimes takes forever to even start zeroing in on the answers. The early sections of the book do a decent job of illustrating this.

So, while the government has interfered greatly in the investigation of human nutritional requirements, it doesn't deserve all the blame for the fact that they haven't been completely pinned down yet. The problem itself is difficult, and answering it definitively will require work in multiple fields to yield reliable information.

I regard the difficulty of answering that question as being on a par with answering the question of whether human activity causes global warming. Regarding the formulation of complex theories, I recall that Amit Ghate once linked to an excellent example, written for laymen, of what it would take to show definitely that human activity causes global warming. I think nutritionists face a similar degree of difficulty in determining human dietary requirements, perhaps including establishing what traditional foods may be dangerous and why.

It is here that I am pretty sure that I will take issue with Taubes, for he starts outlining a positive argument of his own. I think he offers good evidence that something about traditional Western diets is probably involved in causing a variety of illnesses, just as it is there is evidence that the overall temperature of the world's climate has been increasing in recent history. But why? For reasons I will not get into here -- in part because I haven't read his whole argument and in part because I doubt part of what I have read -- I am so far not buying his explanation.

So, in the sense that I have always regarded nutrition as a difficult science, Taubes hasn't changed how I think about nutrition, except to confirm that view. He has certainly given me a greater appreciation for what might need to be done to advance the field to the point that it can offer reliable advice. In doing that, he has shown me that there may well be a light at the end of that tunnel. Indirectly, because of his work, I know of a few things to keep an antenna up about. In that respect, you could say he has changed my mind. But this leads me to the following...

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I did completely or substantially agree with Taubes after I read his book. Should I change my diet? This is where things get really interesting to me. I have noticed that Objectivists who have read this book fall out into two general camps. Some make major changes to their diet shortly thereafter and some do not.

I suspect that members of the former group are more influenced by Taubes's discussion of "diseases of civilization" and (naturally) want to avoid them. Conversely, it appears to me that those in the latter group (which will probably include me), are more impressed with Taubes's observation that bad nutritional advice can be worse than none at all. (Other personal variables, of course, are superimposed on this, like whether one has health issues possibly related to diet and what one's diet actually is to begin with.)

So, should I make major changes to my diet based on the reading of one book, assuming, again, that I mostly agreed with it? (Please note that I do not assume that people who change their diets soon after reading the book have limited their reading to just it.) Plainly not, any more than I fully agreed (or should have) with Ayn Rand after I first read (just) Philosophy: Who Needs It. Any one book doesn't (and can't) contain the sum of human knowledge about any given discipline. But in considering your question, I have noticed that there is an important difference between philosophical guidance and non-philosophical guidance that is worth bearing in mind.

Philosophy is more difficult to think about than other disciplines in terms of being much more highly conceptual, but it is easier to think about than any in terms of the availability of data: Everything you know about is potentially useful in evaluating philosophical arguments, and nobody needs specialized training or data to progress. For example, if you aren't familiar enough with the concretes pertinent to a given philosophical question, you can, if you are careful, find other concretes that you are familiar with and make good progress. Any ordinary, reasonably well-educated person can, with sufficient persistence and no specialized training, understand and evaluate a philosophical argument -- and without having to read vast quantities of specialized literature at that.

That situation is reversed in other disciplines, particularly in the sciences. Practically all the data Taubes presented regarding how the addition of refined carbohydrates and processed grains coincided with increased rates of certain diseases in several populations, for example, was news to me. Assuming causation, you would have to have that specific type of data to formulate, let alone evaluate, a theory of "diseases of civilization." You would need to be sure that the data were collected properly in each study before you could even get to the question of how to interpret it. And, to interpret such data, one would need knowledge of (at least) biological, medical, and statistical methods. On top of all that, there may be data -- already discovered or yet to be discovered -- you haven't even considered that has a bearing on your question.

The last time I mentioned this book, someone put in a good word for Taubes's honesty. I never questioned Taubes's honesty, and the fact remains that the most honest person on earth can make any number of mistakes along the way of formulating such a hypothesis. This is why -- even without the government mis-allocating research funds -- enormous literatures would still exist in the sciences as workers found new data and interpreted what it meant according to their (often) very different theories. I feel reasonably sure, without even having looked, that for all its footnotes, Taubes's book is not a comprehensive review of any of the relevant scientific literatures. (Please correct me if I am wrong.) Nothing in this paragraph is intended in any way as a slight to the hard work Taubes did.

So, in evaluating a non-philosophical argument, one often has much less recourse to preexisting data or other knowledge, and may need to obtain special training -- or consult someone with such training. Knowing this, I can safely say that even if I agree with Taubes's argument by the end of his book, I will not (immediately) change my mind: At the end of the day, that book remains one man's best interpretation (including honest errors) of the specialized data and knowledge he had at his disposal when he wrote it. It is, therefore, frequently of paramount importance in evaluating an argument in a specialized field to seek out the opinions of dissenters in that field.

Having said all this, my observations about how Objectivists react differently to this book, as well as how different people reach conclusions about the causes of global warming, have given me a keen appreciation for a very important problem: We can't all be specialists in every field. We all, at one point or another, end up having to delegate part of the mental labor in such fields to others.

Knowing whom to rely on in fairly well-established fields, such as medicine or architecture, is fairly easy, and not too difficult to reassess from time to time. It is not so straightforward in new fields that are in flux, like nutrition, psychology, or the science of climate. (Indeed, if a field is new enough, it is legitimate to ask whether it can offer much valuable guidance at all.) This is true for reasons that have, more often than not, nothing whatsoever to do with the moral character or even the competence of the potential delegatee.

-- CAV

If you'd like to ask a question, just type it into the box at the upper right labeled, "Ask Uncle Gus."

Note: Although I am a scientist, I regard myself as a layman in the field of nutrition. As such, I will not offer nutritional advice or further comment on any particular theory of nutrition here.

Updates

Today: (1) Minor edits. (2) Added a note.

Timmy Does Small Business

Reader Dismuke emails the following and points to a story about a CNN interview with Bernie Marcus.

[T]he founder of Home Depot is coming out of retirement to speak up against Obama's assault on business. ...

I heard him on a talk show driving home tonight. If the business world had more people like him speaking up the way he does, we would be in far, far better shape. [minor edits]

The article notes:

"My solution is that you take a guy like Timothy Geithner and put him in a new reality show. It's called 'Timothy Geithner Does Small Business', something like [the porn movie] 'Debbie Does Dallas', and it ends up the same way," said Marcus. "Basically, what they're doing to small business is very similar in this case [to what 'Debbie' did to Dallas.]"

Figuring that the above quote, while somewhat amusing, probably didn't do Marcus justice, I listened to the video (scroll down) of a segment of the interview. That was much better.

Here are some notes I jotted during the segment, which clocks in at just over sixteen minutes. If you're pressed for time, Marcus really gets going around the 12:00 mark.

• About a "rich" businessman: "He only works twelve to fifteen hours a day."
• Regarding the tenured academicians Obama has "running" the country. "That's not the way America is."
• At 12:00, he offers a scathing mock apology for the "kind of person" he is.
• At 13:30, he notes that small businessmen, for the first time he remembers, are concerned about the national debt on a concrete level.
• At 15:30, he warns about the upcoming lame duck Congress, which he warns will pass cap and trade (which will "kill" one of the businessmen he spoke to). He says also that card check is being slipped in administratively.

Marcus's strengths lie in two areas. First, he provides good information regarding what life is like for small businessmen, both in terms of how Obama's policies directly harm them, and how uncertainty about the next government decree makes them unable to plan ahead. Second, he paints a sympathetic picture of the members of America's most persecuted minority as actual human beings. His own affable manner exemplifies this.

-- CAV

New Template

Well, I finally got over that hump!

I was planning on taking my time upgrading to the new type of Blogger template, but I noticed that my monthly archive pages were getting truncated. As it turns out, that was due to Google not fully supporting old style Blogger templates any more.

The pages for the individual posts were still there, but since I download the last few monthly pages as archives each week, I figured it was time to bite the bullet and do that last ten percent of the job that always takes ninety percent of the time.

Cheers? Jeers? Problems? Let me know. There are a few small things I need to fix, but I'm fairly happy overall. Switching over was a pain, but it will be easier to do lots of things now than it used to be.

-- CAV

Update

9-21-10: It appears that archive pages remain truncated, but that they at least indicate the fact at the top of the page. Odd.

Resumes to Obama?

I laughed at the title of Caroline Baum's piece about whether Obama should be attempting to "create" jobs: "Mr. Obama, Here's My Resume, Where's My Job?" Although I think the initial part of her argument could have been stronger, I did appreciate the following:

What we know is that lower taxes on income and capital provide more of an incentive to take risks and start a new business. If ... that's what the country needs to create jobs, then by all means the president and the Congress should do everything in their power to ensure taxes stay low.

Instead, like the bureaucrats in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, they keep promising to unveil yet another plan -- the John Galt plan, named after Rand's hero -- to save the economy. [minor edits]

I agree with the spirit of Baum's argument, except that she does not go far enough. Repealing all central planning measures and government looting would do wonders.

Getting to that point would, ironically, require a plan, but the final, ideal result would be a complete lack of what Baum rightly calls "central planning." Once again, life under the Obama Administration looks like a page out of Atlas Shrugged. The only thing I could support Obama planning is the one thing he won't consider: getting out of the way.

-- CAV

Not a Good Sign

A Wall Street Journal article about what the Republican plan to do in the event they regain control of Congress this fall does not bode well for 2012. For one thing, the Republicans are already planning to lose the (moral) battles whose lines Barack Obama's socialist agenda have drawn so clearly over the past couple of years:

[T]he Republican plans are more modest than those advanced in the party's 1994 "Contract with America," ...

...

"This is all about the art of the doable," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, one of eight Republicans on the White House's debt commission. "Is saving the country from bankruptcy a matter of doing or undoing? I think it's a mixture of both."

It's one thing for the GOP, on a tactical level, to take into account the fact that it will have, at best, "a majority in the House and a razor-thin hold in the Senate," and that there remain factions within the party that remain, "wedded to their free-spending ways under President George W. Bush." It's entirely another thing, in the face of an even more statist administration than in 1994, to propose a lesser agenda and permit control of Congress to be "all [only? --ed] about the art of the doable."

The various machinations to thwart those parts of the Obama agenda that have been passed and can't be undone outright until at least 2012 are fine -- but only as stop-gap measures. This means that the Republicans must boldly state why they are thwarting these programs at every opportunity, or they will risk looking underhanded and, worse, unsure that the cause of limited government occupies the moral high ground. (Which it does.)

Kathleen Sebelius ominously notes the following:

"What the Republicans will be faced with is really taking those benefits away," said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services. "They will have to face their constituents who have their children enrolled on a family plan and say, 'That can't happen anymore.'"

This is why the Republicans must bring up for a vote a repeal of ObamaCare, and anything else they want to thwart via control of finances, for that matter. They must do this and be prepared to explain why the limited government alternative is better. Only in that way can they turn the tables on Obama, and show that he and the Democrats are the real "obstructionists," planting themselves firmly between the American people and their freedom -- while both hiding behind their sick children and holding them hostage.

In a free market, affordable health insurance would not even be an issue. When the Republicans fail to point this out, but try to stop Obama's plan in a sneaky way, they help opponents of freedom portray them as the bad guys, and freedom as dangerous.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: As Jennifer Snow rightly notes: "Limited government is RIGHT, not necessarily 'better' for each person involved." Focused as I was on the improvement to the general welfare while composing this post, I managed to forget to mention that essential aspect of the upcoming fight.

9-18-10 Hodgepodge

More November Opportunities?

Paul at Power Line reports that, for once, a bright idea is being floated in Washington.

Representatives Joe Barton, Michael Burgess, and Marsha Blackburn have just introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (or BULB). The legislation would repeal the de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb contained in Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

And, on top of that, Alex Epstein of ARI notes the following:

According to a story in Politico, there is a good chance Republicans will at least partially gut the EPA's dictatorial power to control carbon emissions -- and therefore the entire carbon-centric American economy.

Should the GOP find itself in a position to do these things, we have to hold their feet to the fire. Remember, I don't call CFL bulbs "Bush Bulbs" for nothing.

Weekend Op-Eds

"In effect, we need to turn the Billionaire's Pledge on its head." -- Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate, in "Our Moral Code is out of Date," at CNN.com.

"Lie, cheat, steal, roll the dice and cut corners: People think that's the easy path to business success." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "How to Succeed in Business: Really Try,"at Forbes.com.

"Risks must therefore be evaluated -- and often accepted -- in the context of our individual value pursuits. It's this personal weighing of risk and reward that the right to our freedom of action is meant to protect." -- Amit Ghate, in "Risk and Regulation," at PajamasMedia.

"[U]nder ObamaCare 'medical homes' will be more like 'medical government housing projects.'" -- Paul Hsieh, in "Get Ready for your Health Care 'Re-Education'," at PajamasMedia.

What "Bridge-Building" Really Means

I found Stephen Bourque's post on this matter brilliant:

During the Punic Wars, the ancient Romans had an indomitable army but their Carthaginian enemy was superior at sea. How does an army fight a navy? The Romans devised the boarding bridge as a means of fighting a ground war on the water. A Roman ship would pull alongside a Carthaginan vessel close enough to drop the bridge, which had a huge "tooth" or spike at the end, onto the enemy deck. This would bind the two ships together, permitting Roman soldiers to storm the Carthaginian vessel, thus turning the sea battle to their strength of land combat.

Read the whole thing to learn about a modern parallel. We're the ones being boarded, by the way.

A Repeal Amendment?

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial raises an interesting idea for a constitutional amendment:

William Howell, the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, and [Randy Barnett] have an op-ed ... making the case for a constitutional amendment giving 2/3 of state legislatures the power to repeal any federal law or regulation.

I haven't yet thought enough about whether I could support this effort, but I can't say I see a big problem with it off the top of my head, either.

Note: Jennifer Snow raises the following appropriate red flag: "Replacing 1 tyranny with 50 is not the answer here, no matter what guise it comes under." Consider any legitimate federal law that might excite strong opposition in "red states," and you can see the problem.

-- CAV

Updates

9-19-10: Added note to last section.
9-26-10: Corrected spelling of "hodgepodge."

Good News from Delaware

This is nothing to get complacent about, but over at Slate is an interesting story about a possible unexpected casualty in the recent Republican primary for Delaware's Senate seat: the DISCLOSE Act.

Tuesday's defeat of Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, in his Republican primary Senate race against Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell, spells doom for campaign finance bills in the next Congress. And the defeat of Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who lost to Rand Paul in Kentucky's Republican Senate primary in May, could jeopardize the chance for a desperately needed federal fix for how we run our elections.

Campaign finance reform has long been a signature issue for Castle: He was one of only two House Republicans to vote for the DISCLOSE Act, which, among other things, would require effective disclosure of the steady flow of corporate and union election spending unleashed by the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year in Citizens United v. FEC. If Castle had moved to the Senate, he likely would have led on this issue and provided cover for some of his more skittish Republican counterparts. Maybe he could have persuaded them to vote with him on a more modest disclosure bill than the current version of the DISCLOSE Act, to which Democrats had added new corporate spending limits. Castle also was an important supporter of a bill that aims to fix our broken system of public financing of presidential elections. [bold added]

The last thing we need is to resurrect McCain-Feingold (which is the purpose of DISCLOSE), and we frankly ought to get rid of all federal funding of elections rather than working to "fix" something that is inherently broken.

Castle, incidentally, left the House to make his failed Senate run. Good riddance!

-- CAV

Update

9-18-10: Corrected a typo.

"Politics" vs. Principles

Writing in the New Republic, Jonathan Chait writes one of those pieces you see from time to time, in which some pundit offers half-gloating "advice" to political enemies he claims (and hopes) are destroying themselves. In this case, we have a leftist slamming the Tea Party for throwing its support behind Christine O'Donnell against the GOP establishment candidate, Mike Castle, in this year's Republican primary for Delaware's open Senate slot.

Christine O'Donnell is a theocrat who opposes abortion under all circumstances and supports teaching creationism in public schools. Given that, there were plenty of valid reasons for supporters of freedom and individual rights not to support her, but that isn't Chait's message -- except to the extent that, as a leftist, he probably equates capitalist sentiment with support for theocracy. (Many conservatives, including quite a few tea partiers, unfortunately suffer from the same misconception.)

No. Chait never urges the tea partiers to get a better grip on what principles actually support individual rights, or to consider whether theocracy and capitalism are really compatible, or to ask whether O'Donnell -- or either Republican -- deserved their support. He attacks the tea partiers for sticking to their guns -- for having principles (however muddied) at all.

And so it has been amusing to watch Republicans as they desperately attempted to persuade Republican voters in Delaware to support moderate Mike Castle over Christine O'Donnell. The political logic is obvious: Castle would have been a near shoo-in to win, while O'Donnell is a near shoo-in to lose. Castle may be a moderate, but half a loaf is better than none. ...

Castle, as Chait indicates, is behind a bill to repeal ObamaCare (for whatever that might be worth), but he also supports one of the few pieces of Obama's radical agenda that hasn't been passed yet: cap-and-trade. (O'Donnell opposes cap-and-trade.) For anyone who thinks that issue is dead after ClimateGate, remember that the premise behind that political debate is all wrong: As soon as someone can credibly claim that the science supports AGW, many anti-warmists will be disarmed since they concede the incorrect idea that if there's AGW, we must therefore adopt state control of the economy. Would O'Donnell necessarily reject such a conclusion (assuming it's wrong), or would the desire to be a good "steward" of God's creation flip her?

Setting aside whether Chait's advice is sincere, consider the following question: Are a soccer team's chances of winning a game better if they have to suck it up and play one man down -- or if they field a full eleven that includes a player whose actions stand a good chance of throwing the game to the other team? I'm not sure I agree that O'Donnell was the better choice here, but I can understand why tea partiers would choose her. In the sense that their choice reflects their keeping their eyes on the prize and their understanding that big government conservatism is no ally of freedom, I applaud it.

Chait may have a valid point about Castle being easier to "send into the game," but what's the point of being able to say there's a Republican majority if said majority does the same things a Democrat majority might? (There remains, in this election, the symbolic value of sending a sharp rebuke to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.)

Chait closes his piece cynically. If one sees ideas solely as tools for manipulating useful idiots on the way to acquiring power, that's the only way it can end.

But the Republican base has been taught not to think this way. This isn't just politics, remember? This is a twilight struggle for freedom. And Mike Castle didn't just cast a couple bad votes. He acquiesced in a sinister plan to undermine capitalism. How could they ever support a candidate like that?

Moreover, Republican voters have luxuriated in the belief that they represent the true majority of the American people. Obama may have won by fooling the voters, or possibly by stealing the election with Acorn, but the enduring majority of the public is staunchly conservative. Indeed, Republicans only lost because they strayed from the true faith.

Now, most elite Republicans understand that the red meat fed to the base isn't exactly right. It's useful to scare the daylights out of the activists, but writers for the Standard and the Journal editorial page understand that "freedom," as most people understand the term, is not really at risk. They understand as well that politics is a little more complicated than "if Republicans stay true to conservatism, they cannot lose."

I doubt there's really a "true majority" in America today. And Chait is probably right that many in the Republican establishment are soul-mates of his in the "our professed principles are only propaganda" department. But Chait is dead wrong about the relationship between principles and practice. Freedom is in trouble, because America long ago strayed from accepting the principle that individuals have rights that must be protected by the government.

The tea partiers grasp this at least on some level, and Jonathan Chait's sneer barely hides the fact that this really bothers him.

-- CAV

Voting Problems in Gotham

The fact that there were problems with a new e-voting procedure in yesterday's New York primaries may induce a feeling of deja vu among regular readers here. After all, only a month ago, various leftist "advocates" were carping about how "confusing" it was to use the new voting machines -- which were called for by a law whose stated purpose is to make voting easier, the Help America Vote Act. This law, incidentally, also sets standards for such machines.

Strangely enough, the difficulties didn't lie with massive voter confusion, but with equipment glitches and with poll workers being unfamiliar with the new machines.

The New York Times reported that several polling sites in Brooklyn postponed their openings for up to 90 minutes, and at several locations, the foreign-language ballots had not been delivered. (A Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn was especially out of luck). Voters in Manhattan also reported seeing "system error" messages after submitting their ballots, which pollsters reassured them had been showing up all morning. In Westchester County, three of the new optical scan machines just weren't working at all. At some polling places, voters complained that the principle of secret ballots was completely disregarded. [emphasis in original]

Some voters did, as Glynda Carr predicted, "walk away from the polls without voting," but not for the reason she voiced concern about. That is bad enough, but following links takes us to an interesting story out of Arkansas about these same machines throwing an election a couple of years ago, after "flipping" the totals of an Ohio race a couple of years before that.

Bruce Haggard, an election commissioner in Faulkner County, Arkansas, is baffled by a problem that occurred with two voting machines in this month's state primary elections. The machines allocated votes cast in one race to an entirely different race that wasn't even on the electronic ballot. The problem resulted in the wrong candidate being declared victor in a state House nomination race.

The good news is that the paper record produced by these machines could be compared with an electronic record stored in a memory card within the machine to check the results. The bad news is that now, one wonders at what point the goal of ironclad verifiability will be used to justify a "feature" once noted of Venezuelan Smartmatic machines.

[T]he opposition demonstrated that Smartmatic voting machines to be used in the election could be used to keep track of individual votes.

For an individual machine, if each paper ballot had a unique identifier, which was then recorded with each time-stamped electronic vote taken from it, a few corrupt poll workers could easily do this. Such a prospect makes hanging chads and drawn-out recounts -- or even a race thrown the old-fashioned way -- look appealing by contrast.

Our best protection against such things is our own vigilance.

-- CAV

Cherry-Pickers Beware!

Googling around for something else, I ran into a piece by Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic on "What's Wrong with 'X is Dead'." In that piece, Madrigal considers the latest attention-grabbing (but wrong) technological obituary -- Wired's "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," which Paul Hsieh's GeekPress first brought to my attention. I duly smirked at Hsieh's quip about not getting the memo about "Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, [and] Facebook" all being dead, and duly followed his link to an entertaining list of several other technological "deaths."

In his Atlantic piece, Madrigal considers a couple of interesting aspects of the Wired argument. First, he looks at it as an example of a type of argument about how technological progress occurs. Second, he looks at the notion that such a change is "inevitable."

Regarding how Chris Anderson of Wired portrays technological progress, Madrigal notes that the argument was discredited long ago and simply doesn't stand up to any degree of scrutiny. He quotes Australian historian Carroll Pursell's summary of the argument:

An obsession with "innovation" leads to a tidy timeline of progress, focusing on iconic machines, but an investigation of "technology in use" reveals that some "things" appear, disappear, and reappear...

Afterwards, Madrigal notes that, quite often, "newer and older technologies happily coexist." My experience in the submarine force gives me an excellent example of exactly that: We used the energy from a nuclear reactor to heat water for use in a steam engine. I guess the internal combustion engine wasn't the final nail in the coffin of steam power.

In addition to Anderson's failure to consider how technological progress has occurred in the past, Madrigal notes that, while the graph of bandwidth share in his article (upper right) seems to support the idea of the web dying, with its share (red) in decline, that simply isn't the case. According to BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza, who considers the same data:

So with actual total traffic as the vertical axis, the graph would look more like this. [lower right -- ed]

Clearly on its last legs!

Assuming that this crudely renormalized graph is at all accurate, it doesn't even seem to be the case that the web's ongoing growth has slowed. It's rather been joined by even more explosive growth in file-sharing and video, which is often embedded in the web in any case. [bold added]

Madrigal doesn't put it this way, but a major problem with Anderson's argument is that there is an enormous amount of missing context -- in terms of both the history of technological progress in general and the relationship of web traffic data to all other Internet traffic. (Beschizza notes later that it may even be somewhat misleading to compare traffic volume for those different uses directly: "Does 50MB of YouTube kitteh represent more meaningful growth than a 5MB Wired feature?")

Another point that leaps out from a reading of Madrigal's article is that the "tidy timeline of progress" makes the conceptual error of ignoring how technological progress occurs, which much more often than not, entails building on the previous work of others. That is, one could think of such progress as representing division of labor (or even collaboration) over time.

Shifing gears to Madrigal's second point -- that he suspects that Anderson is allowing personal interests and ideological considerations to cloud his judgment... Near the end of his article, Madrigal notes:

[T]he great irony is that with this article, Anderson has done a masterful job of showing exactly how and why human beings try to shape the technological narrative of their worlds. We make arguments for personal and intellectual reasons based on our experience, desires, and ideological leanings.

Anderson doesn't work on, nor believe in, the economics of content on the web, and so while he's making his case against the web generally, he's also making the specific point that print and tablet editions of Wired make sense, but its website (which he doesn't edit) does not.

I don't know much about Madrigal or Anderson as thinkers, so I cannot speak to either of whether Anderson is a libertarian or Madrigal understands that many strands of libertarianism have a somewhat Marxist view of history, but I thought the following point on the "inevitability" of the change Anderson claims is occurring sounded spot-on:

Later, Anderson writes, "This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control."

I wonder how many historians of technology would agree with him. It sure seems suspiciously like a "tidy timeline of progress," tinged with a little libertarian cynicism.

This is not to say that patterns of development in new industries don't naturally occur in economies. However, Anderson is wrong about at least part of what he thinks these patterns are, and these mistakes color how he looked at the data. In any event, even such patterns are not inevitable, given the pervasive interference of the government in our economy -- another piece of context Madrigal indicates that Anderson ignores.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Anderson is a libertarian, and that he is attempting to argue that "his" editions of Wired make sense, one conclusion is inescapable: he did himself no favors by trying to "shape the ... narrative," as Madrigal puts it, in an unobjective way.

-- CAV

This is no "Tea Party."

Finding myself uncomfortable with Glenn Reynolds and The Corner's Stephen Spruiell echoing Michael Lewis of Vanity Fair by referring to Greek strikers as that nation's version of the Tea Party, I became interested in the lengthy Lewis piece about the Greek financial crisis in Vanity Fair.

First, to get the reason for my discomfort out of the way...

Granted, there are many valid criticisms of the Tea Party movement. First and foremost among these is that, although the Tea Party is generally a pro-individual rights/anti-central planning movement, it remains a more or less blind rebellion. As such, "its" candidates are a wildly inconsistent lot -- not just being at odds with each other, but with individual candidates holding self-contradictory positions, including positions at odds with individual rights.

That said, comparing kleptocrats and even domestic terrorists from Greece to American Tea Party activists strikes me as verging on the unjust. In fact it bothers me even more, coming as it does from sympathizers of the movement, even qualified, in some respects than the usual accusations of racism and bigotry served up on a daily basis by America's leftist media.

This is what Lewis was referring to as, "Greece's version of the Tea Party:"

[T]ax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don't really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. Here they are, and here we are: a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves. The Greek public-sector employees assemble themselves into units that resemble army platoons. In the middle of each unit are two or three rows of young men wielding truncheons disguised as flagpoles. Ski masks and gas masks dangle from their belts so that they can still fight after the inevitable tear gas. "The deputy prime minister has told us that they are looking to have at least one death," a prominent former Greek minister had told me. "They want some blood. Two months earlier, on May 5, during the first of these protest marches, the mob offered a glimpse of what it was capable of. Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bank’s employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests.

I'll grant Lewis that many people who are unhappy here in America do not fully grasp the fact that they must become willing to forgo all vestiges of the welfare state. Nevertheless, these "tea partiers" differ in kind from those in America. They are not rebelling, however blindly, against their government, and what they seek is anything but freedom from central planning. There is a profound moral and political difference between what they seek and what the tea partiers seek. The tea partiers are individualists who want freedom, at least on at a sense-of-life level. These mobs are "selfish" only in a commonly-understood, but mistaken sense, and want to maintain an impossible status quo of collectivism and abundant loot.

The root of Lewis's confusion is clearly evident in the following passage:

The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.

I agree that the credit boom encouraged immoral behavior, but I see the economic structure of Greek society and the endemic thievery that is its "real structure" as anything but opposites: Rather, they are two sides of the same coin. Just as selfishness is not predation (which, in turn, is not the "opposite" of sacrifice, but merely a change-of-recipient) , so is anarchy not the opposite of tyranny, but functionally the same thing for an individual. If this is an accurate picture of Greek culture, then it is anything but an individualist one.

I am not done with the article yet, but I will say that, despite several disagreements I find myself having with its author, it is well worth a read. I'll leave with a single quote that reminds me of a scene from a certain "prophetic" novel I first read many years ago.

"This is the secret of success for anywhere in the world, not just the monastery," [Father Arsenios] says, and then goes on to describe pretty much word for word the first rule of improvisational comedy, or for that matter any successful collaborative enterprise. Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. "Yes ... and" rather than "No ... but." "The idiot is bound by his pride," he says. "It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him--criticism, ideas--and he works with them."

Like many aphorisms on which the above is based ("The smart person accepts. The idiot insists."), there is a grain of truth. However, in the context of global looting, the above attitude amounts to mere arrogant pragmatism, and it will lead to a similar result as that described in the novel I just mentioned if society as a whole does not begin to reject it soon.

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

...

The man in Bedroom F, Car No. 13, was a lawyer who had said, "Me? I'll find a way to get along under any political system." (p. 568)

The Comet was a passenger train that stalled in a tunnel, asphyxiated its passengers, and was crashed into by a military train loaded with munitions in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged -- after a politician bullied its railroad into sending it though a tunnel with an inadequate, coal-burning locomotive. Many of its passengers were culpable for their own fates to the extent that they simply accepted the unacceptable political climate of their time.

The thing a smart person accepts is reality -- not what other people imagine it to be -- the wishes of smug opportunists notwithstanding.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed the fourth paragraph to back off from calling the comparison "unjust."

Never Bow

Nine years ago today:

... men from the opposite side of the world I never met and wanted nothing to do with had decided that that beautiful day was not mine to live, but mine on which to bow and scrape for mercy [from] the imaginary psychopath ... they worship as a god and on which to mindlessly take orders from their "prophet".... And not just that beautiful day, but the whole of my life.

Our "leaders" may have forgotten that we are at war, if they ever really understood that fact, and that war ought to have been won and over with long ago. Nevertheless, those of us who realize what's at stake must continue to fight back in whatever way we can, and that includes living our lives for their own sake to the degree that we can.

Those obscene events, still celebrated by Moslems the world over as "holy," violated all of us, and it is from that violation I think I noticed myself recovering this morning. I realized on a deeper level that while it may be necessary to fight back to continue living, that my cause is holy and untouched. It is my life, it is my spirit, and it is my blue sky.

In one sense, we must never forget, but in another sense, we must move on.

-- CAV

A Moslem Reformer

Via HBL, I have learned of an American Moslem activist who, through his American Islamic Forum for Democracy, champions "separation of mosque and state," calls for "reform" of his religion, and hopes to lead a worldwide pro-"individual rights" intellectual movement among the "silent majority of Moslems." (The preceding terms in quotes are all his.) Many Moslems, according to this activist, have already, "through their practice, ... reformed their faith."

Dr. Zudhi Jasser, the son of Syrian immigrants, has seen that, "the struggles faced by my family ... have followed us to the United States." He has decided to take a stand, and he can be heard below outlining his ideas and plans in a speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum 2010.

In a time when it can often seem like every Moslem is an enemy of freedom, it is encouraging to see someone like this. Based on my own somewhat limited personal experience, I think there is a decent number of Moslems in America who would be receptive to Jasser's message. (For example, not long ago, I heard a Moslem acquaintance say offhand, in the normal flow of conversation, that there was no place for limits to freedom of speech, and that any such limit threatened all speech.) Fascinatingly, Jasser notes that many Moslems are presented with a false dichotomy between "secular fascism" and theocracy regarding the relationship between their religion and the state. (Certainly, until I learned of his organization, I had never encountered a Moslem group whose stated positions sounded so pro-freedom.) If Jasser is right, then perhaps his efforts to promote freedom (which he sometimes calls "the third alternative") can gain ground quickly. In any event, it always does one good to see someone who understands freedom this well fighting for it.

The video is about twenty minutes long, but it is definitely worth watching.

-- CAV

My Kind of Ecotourism

If you're in the Northeast, Tom Bowden of ARI has a great day trip for you: the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. After pointing to an article about the park in the Wall Street Journal, Bowden notes that admission will be free for a day in a couple of weeks, on September 25, and again on November 11. Taking a look at the park's web site, I was mildly startled by something about the opening of its welcome message:

Imagine your day ending at sunset. Life without music, motion pictures, radio. Life without light itself. Our modern lives began at the turn of the century in West Orange, New Jersey. ...

I, for one, am certainly thankful for "our modern lives," but how many times have you heard the content of the first two sentences of the above, slightly altered, and delivered with a sneer as an indictment of our civilization by some hippie? While there's plenty to be said for enjoying the great outdoors, am no worshiper of untamed nature any more than untamed nature would suffer my existence for very long. In fact, man's tool of survival is his mind, which he must use to understand nature, and thereby command it to meet his needs. If we don't do exactly this, we die.

Without Edison, the environment I have to live in would be far less suitable for sustaining or enjoying my life as a rational animal. The whole idea of ecotourism, with its focus on worshiping "unspoiled" nature is a farcical condemnation of what makes us human, an onerous substitution of unearned guilt for relaxation, and an ironic homage to environmental conditions that would threaten our own species with extinction.

I see a trip to this park as the diametric opposite of "ecotourism," and, as such, one of the best possible opportunities there is to partake in real ecotourism, in which we celebrate our ability to improve the conditions around us. I particularly look forward to the day I can get to do the next best thing to meeting this great man -- seeing where he worked, particularly his magnificent library:

Most fascinating of all, however, is the main laboratory building, containing Edison's three-story paneled library. Here you really feel the presence of the man, smiling benignly in his rumpled suit and comfortably insulated from the noise of machinery and colleagues by his partial deafness. His 10,000 scientific volumes, furnishings, paintings and numerous tributes are just as he left them--his roll-top desk open to reveal pigeonholes crammed with notes and jottings. In a corner alcove is the cot where he took the famous catnaps that enabled him to work long days into his mid-80s.

At times, just the prospect of going to a place that isn't saturated with anti-industrial propaganda sounds fantastic, but this goes well beyond simple relief. This is a chance to bask in the glow of a more benevolent time, to see what genius is like, and to see that people can generally embrace rational values enough to appreciate greatness.

As someone who values the many wonders and conveniences of modern civilization and fights to uphold those values, such a trip reminds me of something my favorite author once said: "Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today."

-- CAV

Advice on Writing

Via Arts and Letters Daily, I came across Michael C. Munger's list of "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly." Munger specifically addresses writing (and thinking) as a skill needed to succeed in academia, but what he says applies to almost anyone who sees writing as either a long-range pursuit of its own or as otherwise integral to his life's work. What I like about his list is that Munger understands both the exploratory nature of intellectual pursuits and the frustrations attendant on communicating exactly where one is during the intellectual development that comes with the territory of such pursuits.

Munger starts off each paragraph with a bullet, which he then elaborates upon. His points, taken from these first sentences are below.

1. Writing is an exercise.
2. Set goals based on output, not input.
3. Find a voice; don't just "get published."
4. Give yourself time.
5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant.
6. Pick a puzzle.
7. Write, then squeeze the other things in.
8. Not all of your thoughts are profound.
9. Your most profound thoughts are often wrong.
10. Edit your work, over and over.

One thing I really appreciate is that Munger gives, with his advice, a way to overcome the frustrations inherent in an enterprise where progress can seem elusive or excruciatingly slow at times: remembering that writing is hard work, and reminding yourself that you are doing the work.

5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. And the more unwritten it is, the more brilliant it is. We have all met those glib, intimidating graduate students or faculty members. They are at their most dangerous holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, in some bar or at an office party. They have all the answers. They can tell you just what they will write about, and how great it will be.

Years pass, and they still have the same pat, 200-word answer to "What are you working on?" It never changes, because they are not actually working on anything, except that one little act.

You, on the other hand, actually are working on something, and it keeps evolving. You don't like the section you just finished, and you are not sure what will happen next. When someone asks, "What are you working on?," you stumble, because it is hard to explain. The smug guy with the beer and the cigarette? He's a poseur and never actually writes anything. So he can practice his pat little answer endlessly, through hundreds of beers and thousands of cigarettes. Don't be fooled: You are the winner here. When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired. If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough.

If you are a writer -- or simply someone working on a long-range project, particularly if it is of a somewhat exploratory nature -- you should make time to read the whole thing. I'm glad I did, both for the advice and for the encouragement.

-- CAV