It's Already Illegal

I ran into an interesting article over at Salon that discusses the current enthusiasm among conservatives for making it illegal to follow sharia.

[A]n anti-sharia movement is growing in the United States. Last year Oklahoma voters approved a measure that bars courts from considering sharia. Similar measures have now been introduced or passed in at least 13 other states. Indeed, anti-Muslim political operatives have been warning of "creeping sharia" and "Islamist lawfare" for years, though the anti-sharia efforts have gained new prominence in recent months. [links removed]

I vehemently disagree with many aspects of Justin Elliott's article, but three things in particular stand out, namely: (1) he pooh-poohs the threat to our rights posed by Islamist lawfare; (2) he sweeps aside legitimate concerns about Moslem enclaves ignoring our laws; and (3) he smears anyone concerned with such a threat as "anti-Muslim." (While I am morally opposed to religion, I do recognize the right of anyone to practice any religion he pleases, so long as he violates nobody else's rights in the process of doing so. I also recognize that individual followers of any religion can see the merits of "live and let live" regarding such matters.) These flaws, combined with its thoroughness in other respects do the cause of liberty a disservice.

That said, here are two things that do come up in the article that I think are interesting and helpful to keep in mind for anyone concerned with the threat of Islamist lawfare. First, there are times when sharia is a legitimate consideration, as interviewee Abed Awad points out:

In the past 12 years as an attorney, I have handled many cases with an Islamic law component. U.S. courts are required to regularly interpret and apply foreign law -- including Islamic law -- to everything from the recognition of foreign divorces and custody decrees to the validity of marriages, the enforcement of money judgments, probating an Islamic will and the damages element in a commercial dispute. Sharia is relevant in a U.S. court either as a foreign law or as a source of information to understand the expectations of the parties in a dispute.

If considering sharia in this delimited way still ends up resulting in a violation of individual rights, perhaps that can be remedied. (I'm hardly a legal expert, nor am I a legal philosopher, so my speculation ends on that matter for now.) From the next point, though, it would appear that even this much may not be a problem.

Awad indirectly brings up a far more important point:

As long as a provision in Jewish law, canon law or sharia does not offend our constitutional protections and public policy, courts will consider it. Otherwise, courts would not consider it. In other words, foreign law or religious law in American courts is considered within American constitutional strictures.

The elephant in the room here is that our laws are intended to protect individual rights, or (if our courts were in the habit of living up to that intention as a matter of principle): Sharia, in the sense that many people are concerned about it, is already illegal. Furthermore, as the article says, it is actually illegal to forbid following it (to the extent that doing so does not violate the law of the land).

I cannot help but note a similarity between this push from the right to an age-old fixation of the left: the drive to regulate every aspect of our lives. As a commenter to that post put it (and frequently comes up):

But what about fraud, one may ask. That is not solved by regulation. Fraud would always be illegal and is best handled through law enforcement. Regulation does nothing to stop it. Observe the Bernie Madoff fiasco. He complied with all regulations, and still committed a massive fraud. [emphasis added]

The real question here isn't, "Should our laws protect us from religious meddling or fraud?" They should. Rather, it's this: "Why are we being asked to support laws that are unnecessary at best -- in the name of doing something the law already does?"

-- CAV

2-26-11 Hodgepodge

"Bike Shed" Arguments

Ever since a friend told me about The Endeavour some time ago, I've enjoyed occasionally poking around the blog of applied mathematician John Cook. One of my more recent finds is a post on a type of argument (or, perhaps, a new perspective on a type of argument) called a "bike shed argument."

C. Northcote Parkinson observed that it is easier for a committee to approve a nuclear power plant than a bicycle shed. Nuclear power plants are complex, and no one on a committee presumes to understand every detail. Committee members must rely on the judgment of others. But everyone understands bicycle sheds. Also, questions such as what color to paint the bike shed don't have objective answers. And so bike sheds provoke long discussions. The term bike shed argument has come to mean a lengthy, unproductive discussion over a minor issue. See Jeff Atwood's post Procrastination and the Bikeshed Effect.

I think the above description is on the right track, but its focus on matters of taste is overly narrow, since some of the kinds of questions about bicycle sheds can be about things for which people can have objective answers that still differ based on their individual contexts or priorities. (Although, perhaps in the context of the discussion, the answer is so irrelevant that it might as well be a matter of taste.)

That is, bicycle shed arguments can include mini-"Ford-Chevy" arguments. Indeed, I now wonder whether these are each essentially the same thing, with the "bike shed" name emphasizing the lack of importance of the debate, and the "Ford-Chevy" name calling attention to the rancor. (I can't resist making the following joke: Am I inviting a Ford-Chevy (Chevy-Ford?)/bike shed argument by bringing this up?)

I have to admit that I'd never explicitly considered this type of argument (or at least considered it from this perspective) until I read this post: I have always just bailed at the earliest opportunity when I noticed things becoming unproductive in this general direction.

Weekend Reading

"The new medical ethics allows doctors to salve their consciences by telling themselves that restricting care to patients serves the greater 'social' good." -- Paul Hsieh in "The Wisconsin Protests and the New Medical Ethics," at PajamasMedia

"[T]here's a distinct practical and psychological advantage that comes in playing the cards already in your hand." -- Jonathan Hoenig in "Don't Stand in Way of Rallying Stocks," at SmartMoney

"Emotional pain or discomfort over an error in judgment or a mistake can be a valuable opportunity for a child to learn." -- Michael Hurd in "Four Tips for Good Parenting," at DrHurd.com

From the Vault

Four years ago today, I linked to an article that discussed a pet peeve of mine, oversimplification of complex scientific topics in popular media. Here's a quote from the article:

Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world - possibly none - have a sufficiently thorough, "big picture" understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem. [bold added]

If science is supposed to help us understand the world and better our lives, why not acknowledge that a question is difficult or not-yet-answered?

And here's what I had to say about that.

Isn't it funny how Leftists attack any and all certainty when they want our ear, but feel powerless -- and yet suddenly know everything when they feel strong? If anything shows that Leftists regard philosophical ideas cynically, this shift in attitude is it.

That's often a big part of the answer.

Rock on Bones

In the process of answering a comment on yesterday's post, I ran into the interesting image at right.

Their apolitical views, neutral or negative attitudes toward Soviet morality, and their open admiration of modern, especially American, lifestyles were key characteristics that slowly developed during the 1950s. In the mid 1950s, many people were arrested for making recordings on "bones" (developed X-ray films). Those found guilty of manufacturing and distributing such recordings received from three to five years of imprisonment in labour camps for profiteering. Today, the stilyagi are regarded as part of Russian historical social trends which further developed during the late Soviet era (notably the Stagnation Period) and allowed "informal" views on life, such as hippies, punks and rappers. [links and notes removed]

A comparable phenomenon to Russia's stilyagi also appeared in Nazi Germany, the "swing kids."

-- CAV

American Wife

A good friend recently pointed me to the below YouTube video, which I enjoyed. (The lyrics are translated here.)

I'd never heard of the group Via Gra before, so I looked them up.

Nu Virgos is the name used to promote the group VIA Gra ... outside of Russia, Ukraine and other nearby countries. The name VIA Gra is both a reference to the drug Viagra and a play on words, since the first three letters stand for "vocal-instrumental ensemble" in Ukrainian, and "gra" means "game" (or "play") in Ukrainian. VIA Gra is a Ukrainian/Russian girl group that hit the charts in these countries in September 2000 with their first single "Popytka No. 5." Their first success outside the Russian language area was in May 2004 with the single "Stop! Stop! Stop!", an English version of their 2002 Russian song. [minor edits, links removed]

The group has a rather limited discography and lots of turnover, so it'll be interesting to see what their other work sounds like the next time I'm in the mood for some background music while I'm working. In any event, this was a nice change of pace from my usual listening habits, much like the Gregorian chant I blogged about the last time I found myself unexpectedly busy on a Friday morning.

Enjoy!

-- CAV

Cuban "Ribbon Culture"

Cuban expatriate Ernesto Hernandez grades the first three years of Raul Castro's reign and, in the process, reveals an uncanny parallel between life under perpetual "revolution" and life among the New Left in the 1960s (not to mention its modern cultural offshoots). Here is what life has been like in Cuba lately:

Where Raulism has brought no progress is political freedom. Timid and circumscribed debates and discussions on specific topics have been accompanied by heightened repression and systematic violations of human rights. A process of cathartic debate at workplaces mediated by organizations such as the Cuban Workers Union and the Communist Party have failed to go beyond propaganda-focused formalities. Independent media and opinions continue to be penalized. Censorship and exclusion have become brazen. Political decadence and corruption within the party structure remains a taboo subject; the absurd mantra of "new thinking" in the party is best represented by a decree making Cuba's "national shirt," the guayabera, compulsory at official functions. [link for guayabera added]

That bit about the national shirt reminds me of the following:

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

This is not so different from the avowed "reformers" (Or, should I say, "updaters"?) whose only manifestation of improving the status quo is, unsurprisingly, to make everyone wear tacky clothing. Note, too the "cathartic" workplace debates (whose sole purpose is to dissipate pent-up discontent) as well as the tightly-circumscribed, time-wasting discussions (which serve to waste time and energy).

The silver lining here is that these things are all signs of a tired regime that perhaps senses that it is living on borrowed time.

-- CAV

The Cost of Ignorance

An interesting John Stossel column on government interference in prediction markets has me pondering the vast damage done by other government programs that keep us ignorant (or prevent us from applying our knowledge) in various ways.

The Hollywood Stock Exchange allows people to bet on which movies, actors, directors, etc. will take home Academy Awards. You can also bet on how much money a movie might make. It's called a prediction market ... except unlike other prediction markets, bettors can't use real money.

What fun is that? It's not only less fun, it's also makes the prediction market less accurate. People are more careful when they have real money on the line, and the chance of losing money weeds out the frivolous guessers. Prediction markets are valuable for predicting all kinds of things because the prospect of making money attracts people with knowledge, judgment and a good sense of the future. More information is better than less. The people most confident in their information bet the most. That's why speculation is a sound market institution. [bold added]

Stossel goes on to note that Intrade, which is based in Ireland and allows bets, predicts a Best Picture win for The King's Speech.

The stated motivation behind laws against the non-crimes of gambling and "insider trading" is concern for people who might lose large sums of money as a consequence of such transactions. It is worth considering what gets forgotten or evaded whenever the spirit of such goody-two-shoes meddling overtakes those who say they are looking out for "the little guy."

For one thing, such laws represent yet another way we are prevented from deciding how to use our own money. That is, they violate our property rights. So long as such laws remain on the books, they are also precedents for the government to do even more of the same.

Furthermore, in focusing on the plight of those who lose money in this way, supporters gloss over its cause: that the "victims" permitted themselves, through carelessness or ignorance, to lose large sums of money. In doing so, they also distract attention from the actual victims of their proposals, those who can make money through their expertise, either by backing an investment they have good reason to consider sound, or even by simply offering their expertise (for a price) in a prediction market. Sound investments are discouraged or stopped altogether, and everyone, from the would-be investor to anyone he would have traded with, loses.

As many others have noted before, information is what drives an economy. The above is just one particularly blatant example of how government interference in the economy impedes the flow of information, preventing people from applying their knowledge to the problem-solving they need to do in order to live. The economist George Reisman once noted how sweeping in scope this problem actually is:

The overwhelming majority of people have not realized that all the thinking and planning about their economic activities that they perform in their capacity as individuals actually is economic planning. By the same token, the term "planning" has been reserved for the feeble efforts of a comparative handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions, and to call that planning. (as quoted in Andrew Bernstein's Capitalist Manifesto, p. 345) [bold added]

Again, the restriction on information flow is excused by professed concern for those who look, comparatively, like "losers" in a market economy, at the expense of the potential winners -- which really means that we all pay.

-- CAV

Lurking Laggard

The better part of a year ago, I ran across a rare article, by Clive Thompson of Wired, about the tech market segment I inhabit, which I ended up calling the "leaping laggards" after Thompson discussed how many of us actually just "skip generations" of innovation. Thompson argued that our segment of the market deserves more attention than it is getting. I thought he was right then, but for a couple of reasons, I am now even more solidly in his camp. Why?

I'm in no rush to buy, but I have decided that my next cell phone will be some kind of smart phone, almost certainly one using the Android operating system. Or, as Paul Graham might put it, I will start carrying around a very small tablet instead of a phone. A parallel question floating around in the back of my mind has also been, "Do I want or need a larger tablet, like an iPad?" With those questions floating around in the back of my mind, I've had an antenna out for articles pertinent to such questions.

The first reason I better appreciate Thompson's line of thought pertains to seeing my own thought process about the new technology vindicated. Last May, I put it this way:

[S]keptics ... will, as I do in such situations, delegate testing for quality and usefulness to earlier adopters. But there are doubtless many people who merely pass as skeptics simply because their (lower) sales thresholds aren't being reached by advertisers. I think Goldberg is painfully close to rediscovering a legitimate purpose of marketing, which is to inform potential customers of the actual advantages of owning his employer's product or using his service.

Absent a compelling reason to spend over five hundred dollars on an iPad, I now have ample data from people who have been using them, have played around myself with one owned by a family member, and have even noticed after-market products, such as this keyboard-stand-case designed to address some of the iPad's more obvious shortcomings.

A great example of this kind of data is a Slate article in which John Swansburg asks a bunch of iPad owners how he can overcome his ambivalence about his own purchase. What I like about this article is that it touches on quite a few of the uses people have found for the iPad, including one of the more likely ones I'd be interested in:

For work, however, the iPad is not just bad, it represents a net reduction in productivity. One of the great things about the new Web is that you can manipulate text, but the iPad treats you like a child. (Not unlike the way iTunes treats you like a child with your own music.) I can't copy text out of the New York Times app or the Washington Post app or most other apps for that matter. Doing it from a Web page on Safari takes about the time required to make a cup of tea. I feel like I spend all my time poking at the screen trying to get the little blue box to behave. It's like I'm on an endless search for a button in the sewing box.

Apparently that keyboard thingie won't be quite enough on its own to make an iPad a suitable replacement for my aging netbook. Most of the other uses I see for an iPad are either not worth the money to me, or will be taken care of at least as well by a smart phone.

The second reason pertains to the rise of competitors in the marketplace for tablets (by which I mean smart phones and iPad-like devices). A recent article in Wired claims that nobody will be able to match Apple's combination of price and value for tablets of larger than smart phone size, but I am not so sure. For one thing, there is probably demand around the "edges" of the iPad's niche for devices without some of the limitations built into it by Apple. For another, just as Microsoft's lack of vertical integration made it possible for hardware vendors to beat Apple computers on price way back when, Android's independence from any single hardware vendor appears to have already resulted in many advantages emerging for Android phones, including a much faster rate of innovation and improvement, major inroads on the smart phone/"tiny tablet" market share (which will attract developers), and a soon-to-be huge price advantage.

Eric Raymond explains the last of these:

The story doesn't end in 2011. Android SoCs aren't generally deployed yet. When they start shipping later this year in third-generation Android phones, the parts count on a minimal smartphone is going to drop to a single chip, a capacitive display, a speaker/mic, a couple of microswitches, and the PCB to mount them on. Qualcomm is already predicting retail unit costs of $75 or less, and it's going to be less once the chip development costs are amortized out.

The key to this possibility is that most of what used to be hardware costs in a smartphone have been ephemeralized -- converted into information complexity inside the SoC [system-on-chip --ed]. The combination of ephemeralization and open source is the fundamental of the fundamentals here.

I see no reason for this trend to stop with tiny tablets/smart phones while I continue using my netbook. (There are quite a few other interesting posts on smart phones over at Armed and Dangerous, for anyone interested in reading more, including a post on "How to Buy an Android Phone.")

Simply by being patient, I've saved hundreds of dollars on a smart phone already, and have seen that I don't really want an iPad, at least for the nonce. So, I'll continue to lag and lurk.

-- CAV

A President's Day

In honor of Presidents Day, and because my own schedule is a little packed, I refer my readers to Unclutterer, which has posted examples of the daily schedules of a couple of our past Presidents.

For example, on Friday, June 20, 1947, President Harry Truman had 13 meetings and spoke to more than 100 people. On Thursday, June 20, 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower had a 12-hour day that also included meeting with close to 100 people.

...

Could you handle continuous meetings, appointments, conferences, and the responsibilities of a presidential schedule for four years or eight? [first link corrected]

No, thanks! In fact, as one who values solitude and prefers to work on what venture capitalist Paul Graham has called a "maker's schedule," the very thought of abiding by such a schedule on a regular basis gives me the heebie-jeebies. That said, Truman did cap off his day by telling the American people why he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Bill. Were I electable and there were a huge head of steam behind cutting our government back to its proper role, I guess I could suck it up. But, of course, if that were the case, I'm sure I wouldn't have to...

Happy Presidents Day!

-- CAV

2-19-11 Hodgepodge

365 Ways to Declare Intellectual Bankruptcy

Over the past week, I've slowly whipped the filters of a Yahoo! email account into shape, finally making my Inbox useful again. One of the fruits of my efforts is that when I clean my new "Junk" folder of mailings from conservative publications, items of actual interest stand out more easily. One of these is Item 49 of a serial called, "365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy." The suggestion is as follows, and makes this advocate of freedom cringe.

49. Praise Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

Sure, like his Commie predecessor Salvador Allende, he had his faults, but his economic legacy has made Chile the richest per-capita, healthiest, least corrupt country in South America. Liberals hate being told this. Their hero is the "martyred" Allende. But under Allende, inflation was running at 1,000 percent, whereas thanks to free market reforms introduced by Pinochet-taking advice from Milton Friedman's "Chicago Boys"-the Chilean economy thrived. We saw the results of this from two earthquakes-the one in Haiti in January 2010 that claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives; and the one in Chile a month later which, though 500 times more powerful, claimed just over 700 lives. Why? Because rich economies can afford to build earthquake-proof buildings. But impoverished ones dependent for their survival on international aid can't.

Postcript: When Milton Friedman collected his Nobel Prize, he was heckled by leftists for having advised so repugnant a regime. He wryly noted that he had Given Communist dictatorships the same advice-but strangely no one attacked him for that.

While I can definitely understand the temptation to annoy leftists -- and have to admit that I have succumbed to the urge myself in the past -- lending credibility to the leftist practice of package dealing capitalism with fascism (which is actually a close cousin to socialism and communism) is too steep a price to pay, especially if anyone actually open to reason gets wind. Bye-bye, chance to make a solid argument!

Chile is as well off as it is despite the state controls (including continuing to use fiat money) it still had in place when Pinochet partially freed its economy and has in place now. Just because Pinochet was not as bad as Allende in some respects is no reason to praise him. Making such a case would do far more to advance an understanding of how to win and keep freedom than playing into a leftist's hands for the sake of a cheap laugh. (For what little it's worth, I am sure that this, too, would enrage many leftists, anyway.)

It says something when a publication puts out a series about annoying -- rather than defeating -- leftists.

Weekend Reading

"The more you evangelize a position, the more you invest into talking about it, the more likely you are to become attached to it." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "With Stock Picking, Mind Your Own Business" at SmartMoney

"In a marriage or family relationship, money often becomes the means through which conflicts are played out." -- Michael Hurd, in "Love, Marriage and Money" at DrHurd.com

My Two Cents

We have today two pieces that appear to be about money, but which are each much more broadly applicable.

Jonathan Hoenig makes a great point about finance that applies to many other areas as well, when he argues that the quest for validation can easily backfire. A good way to hold his lesson is this: The cash value of confirmation bias is less than zero. (Even if you come out even, financially (for example), you have wasted time trying to fool yourself, and lost out on any productive activity you could have pursued during that time, too.)

Michael Hurd's piece about disagreements over finance is also generally applicable to other situations: He advises us to step back and figure out what's really being disputed. It's very easy to see how a dispute that seems to be about money is really about other things since money is itself only a means of storing effort for later use in acquiring things of value. But money is certainly not always the merely apparent cause of a dispute. It is worthwhile to step back from any dispute in order to better understand what it is that one is upset about.

Gunning for Four

Last week, I had what turned out to be Arsenal's 2-1 defeat of Barcelona in UEFA Champions League competition on the tube as background for some mindless chores. I must say that the result was a nice change of pace from last year. Apparently, the team's skipper has much more in mind for this year:

Arsène Wenger has said Arsenal can make history this season by completing a clean sweep of major trophies, lifting the Premier League, the Champions League, the FA Cup and the Carling Cup.

...

Wenger's confidence is fuelled by the fact that several of the obstacles that have undermined previous campaigns appear to have been overcome this season. First, with the Belgian centre-back Thomas Vermaelen the only major enforced absence, Arsenal are approaching the business end of the season with almost all of their key players available. Second, Wenger believes his team have matured and shed the mental frailties that cost them in the past – he identified the midweek win over Barcelona and December's 3-1 Premier League home victory over Chelsea as crucial milestones in his team's development.

Third, the manager's own strategy has changed. Wenger has tended to neglect the domestic cup competitions in order to concentrate on the Premier League and the Champions League but this season he has fielded strong teams both in the Carling Cup and in the FA Cup, seemingly reckoning that progressing in those tournaments would boost morale and momentum.

I hope Wenger is right about that last, and not flirting with exhausting his team. Highlights are below.

I love that first Arsenal goal (starting about 1:05), and it reminds me of my only collegiate goal, which came from the right hand side. (Alas, my similarities to van Persie end right there.) "I have no angle, therefore I'll shoot!" was how a teammate re-told it later.

-- CAV

Cigar Time?

Business and her sister's baby shower take my wife to Texas and various points west. Yes: Without me even bringing it up, she said I could skip the shower. Upon hearing this, a friend said, "I'd take that any day of the week and twice on Sundays." As always on such trips, I miss her terribly, but take advantage of having more time, with fewer interruptions than normal to get things done.

Mrs. Van Horn has traveled enough lately that I've noticed a pattern: Although I know I'll miss her, I look forward to the extra time and make plans -- only to surprise myself anyway by how much I miss her. In particular, I don't sleep nearly as well when she's not around. Life is still good: It's just not as good.

One of the small things on the plus side of the ledger about such absences is that I sometimes indulge in activities that she would be willing to tolerate, but that I don't do often, because I know she doesn't want me doing them when she's around. The one I'm considering right now is a prime example: smoking a cigar. For starters, it ruins smooches for her and makes me reek of smoke.

Now that I think of it, the pattern with cigars bears an amusing, if exaggerated, resemblance to the one surrounding my wife's trips: I look forward to lighting up, enjoy the smoke, and then swear off tobacco indefinitely the next day when I notice that I can taste my own mouth. This is a big part of why the last time I smoked a cigar was a couple of years ago when I was in Mexico and realized I could buy a Cuban. It's also part of why there's a question mark in the title of this post.

My best cigar was, by far, my first. I was in the Navy, then, and we were on a port visit to Antigua, where, too, I realized I could buy a Cuban. No other cigar since has matched its smoothness. My best smokes both took place in Texas, and I liked them for different reasons.

The first of these took place on the porch of the small apartment I moved into during the middle of grad school, during a time in my life I'll always remember fondly. Looking back, I'd say that that was the time I'd really recovered from a divorce a few years earlier and was finally moving forward in life again. The apartment was a step up in many ways from the cheap, crime-ridden place I'd crash-landed in before: I chose that place. I liked it there. I was in charge. One spring evening, I decided to break out the grill, crack open a beer, and enjoy a cigar. I still remember the sound of frogs filling the warm, humid Houston air and the glorious solitude of that dark, starless evening. I don't think the cigar itself was even particularly good, but that evening called for one, so it really didn't matter.

The second "best smoke" took place a few years later, in Nacogdoches, where my then-fiancée, my mother, and I were visiting one of Mom's sets of aunts and uncles. I'd never met them before because there had been a longstanding argument between Mom's aunt and her mother that had estranged them for practically my entire life. Mom ended the rift and we made the drive up from Houston to visit them. Mom's uncle was a veteran World War II submariner and we were having a great conversation. At some point, he showed us around their home, pointing out his shed in the back yard at some point. He mentioned that that's where he smoked his cigars and asked if I'd join him for one later on. Needless to say, I did. As we left after that visit, he gave me his officer's sword, which I used to cut the cake at our wedding. I got to see this charming, benevolent man only one other time after that memorable visit.

What makes a good smoking session? As a first stab, I'd say that the quality of the mental activity that goes with the cigar has to be top-notch, although I would not say it has to be of any particular type. I am not so sure that it has to (or should) be focused, either, based on the above two examples and a couple of others I can remember. In the first case, I think I was enjoying, on some not-quite-explicit level, that I was back on track. That was a contemplative (or maybe even a meditative) smoke. In the second case, I was socializing with a very interesting person from a time better in many respects than my own. Smoking is a relaxing activity, and I think it is best enjoyed when one feels fully in command of his life and eager to consider what the world has to offer.

Having thought about this a bit, I think I know what kind of mood I ought to be in before lighting up, to make that evil, persistent taste the following day worth my while!

-- CAV

Free Our Light

Manny Lopez of the Detroit News reports that there is a grass-roots effort, called "Free Our Light," whose focus is on getting Congress to repeal the ban on incandescent bulbs:

"The light bulb ban is an outrageous government limitation on consumer choice and intrusion into the home of every American," Myron Ebell, director of Freedom Action, said in an interview for TheMichiganView.com.

His goal now is to get millions to sign an online petition to be delivered to Congress to force a repeal of the bulb law. [link to online petition added]

The petition reads as follows:

The undersigned demand that you repeal the ban on incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012 that was enacted in 2007.

Although I am not familiar enough with Freedom Action to state definitively, right now, whether I could support it as an organization, I do support this goal and urge my readers to sign this petition, and to spread the word about it. This is particularly important since there have, apparently, been false reports that a lifting of this ban is being considered.

Rep. Upton, now Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said that his committee will hold a hearing on the ban, but he has not promised to repeal it, as was erroneously reported in the press in December. The 2007 law makes the sale of standard incandescent 100-watt bulbs illegal as of January 1, 2012, 75-watt bulbs as of January 1, 2013, and 60- and 40-watt bulbs as of January 1, 2014.

That said, I do not support the goal of lifting the ban in isolation. In particular, I regard a bill like HR 91, which proposes to repeal the ban on incandescent bulbs, as a symbolic first step at best, because the entirety of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 should ultimately be repealed. By what right should any aspect of how Americans produce and consume the energy we need to live our lives be dictated by Washington?

I'd love it if this year's Edison Hour (aka "Human Achievement Hour") could be more an act of celebration than a show of defiance. Repealing this ban would be a small step -- in the right direction, for a change.

-- CAV

Dumbed-Down "Debate"

Over at Slate is a book review of Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear, which "traces the history of the myth that vaccines cause developmental disorders like autism." Among the many thought-provoking points raised by this review is the following:

Here is what baffles Mnookin most: How so many caring, well-educated, affluent parents came to buy leaky theories that vaccines cause autism. How 48 states allow parents to exempt their kids from vaccines for religious reasons, and how in 18 states all you need is a philosophical reason. How, in 2010, the journal Pediatrics reported that a staggering 25 percent of parents believed that vaccines can cause developmental disorders in healthy children. How, even after a 2002 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found no link between MMR and autism, the anti-vaccine camp grew stronger. (A well-known study claiming to link vaccination to autism has recently been retracted and called an "elaborate fraud.")

I was about to omit the second sentence of the above excerpt as irrelevant to the issue I am focusing on here -- until I realized that legal requirements for vaccination may well be part of the problem.

Why would so many educated, concerned parents not vaccinate their own children? Momentarily assuming, for the sake of argument, that forcing vaccination is a proper role for the government (It isn't.), one might say that vaccination programs are victims of their own success. Until recently, for example, such resurgent childhood diseases as whooping cough were all but forgotten. Certainly, not having to think much about them played a part of why parents' guard was down. But might a blanket legal requirement for vaccination have also taken the question of whether to vaccinate off most parents' agendas, as well?

What if the state didn't threaten parents with jail for not vaccinating their children? For one thing, many schools would voluntarily require proof of vaccination for enrollment. Some would not -- at least until some school-wide outbreak of disease gave them a well-deserved reputation for not requiring vaccinations. (Also, today's situation of unvaccinated children running around in public schools, freely spreading disease would not obtain, thereby better limiting the spread of such diseases to the children of parents who don't vaccinate.) Practically all parents and educators would be more aware of these diseases, and would give serious thought to the question of whether children should be vaccinated.

In other words, the question would become a fully medical question, and not the part-political and part-medical one that we see here. Parents could focus on the medical facts, and would generally be more used to thinking about such matters for themselves, rather than assuming that the government will have their back or, tragically, throwing out the baby of vaccination with the bathwater of tyranny.

The above is just one aspect of the curious phenomenon of how a quack achieved so much influence among so many well-meaning people. For one thing, a free market in education would better prepare more people to evaluate scientific questions properly. (Note that although the fraud was exposed more recently, Wakefield's 1998 "results" were called into question by 2002.)

In attempting to rescue us from the fact that there are no guarantees in life, the nanny state can cause us to think less effectively about even life-and-death issues like vaccination when it hasn't duped us into not thinking about them at all. And then, as the reviewer I quote above shows when he complains about loopholes in vaccination laws, too many resort to the only solution they can imagine: more of the nanny state.

-- CAV

Far from Perfect

A couple of postings about tackling difficult, long-range projects have come to my attention recently. Each considers how what is colloquially (and imprecisely) known as perfectionism can -- and often does -- get in the way.

First, there is the notion that, if one can concentrate as much as possible on the project, one will do better and, perhaps, even more work. Ben Deaton (via John Cook) relays an anecdote from physicist Richard Feynman's experience:

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Part of the problem here is that, for the kind of work these men were doing, teaching classes is not actually a distraction, but part of keeping one's mind stimulated, more in touch with reality (by, for example, reviewing how principles are tied to reality, or seeing new aspects of such a relationship), and even getting intellectual distance from the project from time to time. The fantasy of having much more time free for research met the reality that a stagnant or out-of-touch mind isn't such a hot tool for conducting research. The concept of this research setting erred because it treated as a mere distraction an important component of serious intellectual work! Removing distractions is fine and dandy, but one must first know what a distraction is.

As with imagined (but unverified) ideas about what kind of setting is ideal for a project, notions about what constitutes the best way to proceed can similarly cripple a project. Some programmers refer disdainfully to "architecture astronauts" -- people who lose touch with coding reality and get stuck on what Jeff Atwood calls "proper development patterns and practices." Atwood then quotes Joel Spolsky on the problem:

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.

These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line.

Atwood reacts against this phenomenon, saying, "Patterns and practices are certainly good things, but they should always be framed in the context of a problem you're solving for the users."

The "oxygen" Spolsky speaks of is the same vital component that Feynman sensed was missing at Princeton: contact with reality. Or, as Ayn Rand might have put it, the "ideal research environment" and "proper method of creating software" noted above are mere "floating abstractions," or "abstraction[s] without relation to the concrete." See also Marv Marinovich's ideas on physical training and child-rearing.

There is a tension between the need to guide creative work with principles and the need to be open to the idea that one has not discovered or correctly formulated some of the principles by which to proceed with that work. Perfection is neither a Platonic Form nor a product of a runaway imagination: It is contextual, discoverable only by a mind that constantly checks its abstract conclusions against reality, and achievable only when those abstractions are successfully put into practice.

-- CAV

Deadly Alarms

The problems caused by warning fatigue and false alarms have intersected to kill hospital patients, as a story from the Boston Globe reports.

[Madeline] Warner died after nurses failed to respond to an alarm that sounded for about 75 minutes, signaling that her heart monitor's battery needed to be replaced, state investigators found.

...

Hospitals, monitor manufacturers, researchers, and federal regulators are similarly grappling with how to reduce the rash of unheard and ignored alarms and other patient monitor problems -- which the Globe reported yesterday was linked to more than 200 deaths nationwide between 2005 and mid-2010, and, experts say, probably far, far more. But they are finding answers elusive. [link added]

It is sad to see anyone die like this, but the involvement of regulators in "solving" this problem immediately causes me to wonder what role rights-violating prescriptive laws might have played in causing these two hundred plus deaths.

For one thing, it is clear that such alarms are being over-used:

Klugman decided to conduct a study of patients on cardiac monitors at UMass Memorial and three other Massachusetts hospitals over the course of one week in 2008. He found that at UMass alone, 40 percent of patients, or 73, didn't need to be on monitors at all, based on American College of Cardiology criteria.

"Cardiac telemetry saves lives, there is no question about that," Klugman said. "But there's the potential of unintended consequences and that's what's happening here. It's overused."

One wonders whether government regulations or defensive medical practices caused by a tort system in dire need of reform might account for over-use of (just) this type of alarm (by nearly 70 percent at this hospital). Also, might the costs of these (and many other similar) regulations and the related problem of defensive medicine help account for the nursing shortage?

These questions never arise in the article, but based on a Thomas Sowell column on another safety-related topic, perhaps they should have:

Since there were thousands of airline flights cancelled in the name of safety, this means that there were at least tens of thousands of passengers unable to take the flights they had booked.

Some of those passengers drove cars to reach the destinations to which they had originally planned to fly. Since automobile fatality rates per mile have long been several times as high as airline fatality rates per mile, this means that the dangers to life and limb have not been reduced by this political grandstanding.

Instead people have been exposed to greater dangers -- in the name of safety!

Along similar lines, it is a fair question to ask whether hospitals would be faced with "alarm fatigue" at all if doctors felt freer to use their own judgment about whether a patient actually needed a monitor or an alarm of some kind.

Ominously, all the solutions under consideration involve more expense, more regulation, or both. At no point is the "need" for even more of what might have led to these deaths questioned.

-- CAV

2-12-11 Hodgepodge

Good News from the Oil Patch

I'd heard about huge amounts of oil in North Dakota, but had always been under the impression that this was due to the discovery of unknown deposits. What I didn't catch was that getting the oil depended on the invention of a new extraction technique.

Petroleum engineers first used the method in 2007 to unlock oil from a 25,000-square-mile formation under North Dakota and Montana known as the Bakken. Production there rose 50 percent in just the past year, to 458,000 barrels a day, according to Bentek Energy, an energy analysis firm.

It was first thought that the Bakken was unique. Then drillers tapped oil in a shale formation under South Texas called the Eagle Ford. Drilling permits in the region grew 11-fold last year.

The news isn't all good, particularly from a regulatory perspective, but the technique and some newly-discovered formations it opens up will cause American oil production to increase for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.

Weekend Reading

"People who sit around and wait for real self-esteem to 'happen' will be waiting for a long time." -- Michael Hurd, in "Self-Esteem Must Be Earned" at DrHurd.com

"[B]eing a [market] contrarian isn't about what you buy, it's about how you think." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "It's Not Comfortable Being Contrarian" at SmartMoney

"But what we have today is not a health insurance market -- not really." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "The Road To Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Pre-existing Conditions" at Forbes

"Court challenges to the constitutionality of Obamacare have exposed the broader agenda of those who are committed to the permanent expansion of government power which that legislation represents. " -- Richard Ralston, in "Constitution or Obamacare -- Not Both" at The Orange County Register (HT: HBL)

My Two Cents

The points Michael Hurd raises in his column cause me to realize that the government's decades-old "War on Poverty" is, in fact, a "War on Self-Esteem." Forget, for a moment, the monetary costs, direct and indirect, of the massive welfare state. Consider the millions of people who have had their motivation sapped, either by having things handed to them, or by having had their earnings handed over to others by force.

Also, each of the two pieces on ObamaCare raise points I haven't seen before. Brook and Watkins take on the most reasonable-sounding current argument for socialized medicine, and Ralston gives an outstanding executive summary of the many ways our Constitution is under attack.

Neal Stephenson on Innovation

The author of the even more thought-provoking, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line," considers (HT: John Cook) what "the strange persistence of rockets" can teach us about innovation.

Vast, nation-bankrupting expenditures were now directed to the development of such rockets. In Dark Sun, Richard Rhodes estimates the cost of the nuclear weapons and missile programs at $4 trillion in the United States and the USSR each.

...

The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

Stephenson's focus isn't on central planning, but it's easy to see how it pertains to the problem he discusses. Setting aside, for the sake of argument, (1) the fact that military spending is a legitimate function of the government and (2) whether we could have avoided an arms race through military action or a non-appeasing foreign policy: $8 trillion is a pretty bloody big "broken window."

-- CAV

Go, Packers!

Yes. My favorite Super Bowl remains last year's, when I got to see my childhood home team, the New Orleans Saints, win the Super Bowl, but I had a great time watching the Green Bay Packers win Super Bowl XLV.

For one thing, the golden arm of the Packers' quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, helped me check, "Win it all in fantasy football," off my bucket list this year. I normally play fantasy football with a group of friends I made in grad school. That league is twelve years old, and we're all pretty casual players. I was more casual than even most of them until this year, though. That would change...

The NFL was to begin play in a week or so, and I'd heard nothing from my old league's commissioner. I didn't want to spend enormous amounts of time on fantasy football, but I did want to play. So, when Brian Phillips emailed the folks from the Houston Objectivism Society about starting a league, I joined. Then, about three days before the start of the "real" season, I found an email I'd missed from my usual league's commissioner, who was too busy with a baby to run the league and wanted to hand it over. Not wanting to see our old league fizzle out (and satisfied that I wouldn't be consumed with the task), I took the job -- and decided that, now that I was commissioner, I'd do something novel this year: I would try. Until this year, I'd had a few barely-winning seasons here and there, but never made the playoffs.

Neither team exactly had a dominating record, but both were good enough to make the playoffs. One was 8-6 and the other 8-5, but I'd made some shrewd pick-ups from waivers and, most important, didn't let being at or below .500 late in the season cause me to throw in the towel. My Boston Night Riders (a character-limited play on "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere") won the HOS championship and my other team came in second in my usual league. (Commissioners went 0-2 in those games.) But enough of that...

I also have, for quite a while, liked the Packers, anyway. (And, even if I didn't, their fans roasting a bear before the NFC title game with Chicago might have won me over.) So the wife and I donned green and yellow and headed over to another couple's house to watch the game. That couple has a young son that we sometimes baby sit, and we all noticed during the game that he would join me in shouting, "Go, Packers!" So I started hamming it up. I shouted more gruffly and began to shake my fist in the air. And I didn't let commercials get in the way, either. Someone got such a kick out of that she either took pictures or a short movie clip of it on her phone.

Two great Super Bowls in a row! Last year offered lots of suspense for me, and I marveled at how much work went into the Saints' win. This year, I had a great time as a more casual fan.

Go, Packers!

-- CAV

What about the GOP's "Cuts?"

Via Glenn Reynolds and Slate, two things are already crystal clear: (1) The GOP is not serious about reduced spending. (2) The GOP will attempt to use President Barack Obama as a foil in order to avoid actually moving towards limited government.

Reynolds links to a blog featuring a pie chart showing the parts of Obama's proposed $3.8 trillion budget: (1) to be paid for by taxation (i.e., money stolen from us now), (2) to be paid for by borrowing (i.e., money to be stolen from us later), and (3) proposed for cuts by the President. These are labeled "Obama's 2011 Budget," "Projected 2011 Budget Deficit," and "Obama's Proposed Cuts," respectively, and appear as blue, red, and green wedges of a pie chart. Needless to say, one must a zoom in closely see the green wedge of $775 million within the $3.8 trillion pie.

I immediately wondered what the proposed Republican cuts would look like on a similar chart, so I created one and have posted it at the right. (Click to enlarge.) At least one needn't zoom in to see that slice, but I find its yellow color strangely appropriate for reasons that will soon become apparent. (Without the cuts, the red portion of the graph representing debt becomes even larger.) For starters, the yellow slice is generous by more than a factor of two!

It is interesting to note where I obtained the $100 billion dollar figure for the GOP budget-shaving proposal: I learned from a short posting at Slate that Republicans in the House are already having problems agreeing even to this much!

House Republicans will unveil their plan to finance the government through Sept. 30 on Thursday, reports the New York Times. They hope to slash $40 billion from the budget by eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and AmeriCorps (among 58 other programs) and by making deep cuts in funding for the EPA, energy conservation programs, and high-speed rail investments. But at a closed-door meeting Wednesday night, some Republicans argued that the party needed to deliver on its promise to decrease the budget by $100 billion. "We said we would do it, and so we should," said Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. Not all Republicans were thrilled with the idea. [link omitted, bold in original]

Americans concerned about government spending still have our work cut out for us, and we would even if the GOP did honor its election pledge. We cannot allow ourselves to be satisfied with a party that gloats over Obama's minuscule budget cuts -- and then proposes cuts that are "large" only by comparison.

-- CAV

Quasi-Exploration

Over at Instapundit is an amusing link I feel somewhat qualified to comment on despite the fact that much of my own past single life would probably remind people more of Don Quixote than Don Juan.

As other research has found, women who believed the men liked them a lot were more attracted to the men than women who thought the men liked them only an average amount. However, the women who found the men most attractive were the ones who weren't sure whether those men were into them or not.

"Numerous popular books advise people not to display their affections too openly to a potential romantic partner and to instead appear choosy and selective," the authors write. Women in this study made their decisions based on very little information on the men -- but in a situation not unlike meeting someone on an internet dating site, which is common these days. "When people first meet, it may be that popular dating advice is correct: Keeping people in the dark about how much we like them will increase how much they think about us and will pique their interest."

This phenomenon is so well-known that Reynolds jokingly calls this study result, "shocking," and the few comments on the post so far include other emotional reactions to familiarity that range from whining to the equivalent of eye rolling. And, of course they bring up other tropes about dating. One such comment touches on a related matter: How many men and women gauge solid interest later on in the game.

I've noticed that women will fall all over you until you tell them you love them, then they act like you are their property, and no longer worry about doing things you may hate, and start becoming more critical and demanding.. They constantly criticise men for never expressing their feelings. But once a man does, they lose.

Of course men do a similar thing with women, but in their case it is having sex for the first time, rather than hearing the I love you words. They will do anything for the gal before having sex, but are much less attentive after. [minor edits]

If we set aside the cynicism and consider these measures briefly, I think we can better understand the result/stereotype above, and see that it actually also applies to men, as advice I've heard for women to be "mysterious" suggests.

What would it say about a total stranger if he said, "I love you," out of the blue -- or she wanted to sleep with you for no apparent reason? You'd rightly wonder why, and such behavior would almost always remove such a person from serious consideration as a romantic partner. Why? Because this person knows basically nothing about you: One can not value or care about a cypher. Something else is going on.

Now, moving on from extreme cases, we can, I think, better understand these results. Finding a partner is a journey of self-discovery. It has to be if one is looking for another self. Assuming good self-knowledge on the parts of the subjects, the other extreme cases -- of men whom they were told liked them or not -- make perfect sense. The women liked the interested men better. But what about the the ambiguous cases? The story suggests part of the answer:

"But what if Sarah is not sure how much Bob likes her?" This might lead Sarah to spend a lot of time thinking about Bob, wondering how he feels, and she might find him more attractive the more she dwells on him.

Yes, Bob gets more "face time" with her mind's eye, but why, from Sarah's perspective, might this be? I think it stems from the nature of getting to know another person. Whether you are a ruggedly handsome, tall, and wealthy man; or a beautiful and accomplished woman; an over-aggressive suitor would cause you to wonder whether there was anything "real" going on at all. (And this would actually be much more the case if you weren't generally regarded as attractive for some reason.)

In normal circumstances, one falls in love gradually because it takes time to learn about another person. So, in this study, I think that the ambiguous cases pique the most interest because this "type" most closely resembles what one might usually encounter. Conversely, non-committal types, "bad boys," and girls playing "hard-to-get" thus end up mimicking this type of exploration, and enjoying a huge advantage on the dating scene, at least in terms of getting a foot in the door. In that sense, such people look like they are being more deliberate, and that they are moving past a superficial level of interest. As well, inexperienced suitors often "blow it" just as they are close to gaining someone's interest, by looking desperate or insincere.

I think my courtship with Mrs. Van Horn is an exception to the stereotype that illustrates why there is a stereotype. We both knew each other, having been introduced by a mutual friend. We were "movie buddies," and at some point, I clumsily made it clear to her that I was interested in her. She wasn't, then. I told her that was fine, but that if it ever changed, it would be up to her to let me know. I wrote her off romantically, but would go out with her from time to time. She eventually wised up, showing wrong all the cynical stereotypes that arise from the simple fact it takes time to know another person, and so to be able to love another person.

-- CAV

Dangerous Precedents

Barrack Obama has bowed to enough foreign potentates, treated old allies rudely, and favored ruinous policies so routinely that it is impossible to retain in conscious memory all of even his most recent antics. Case in point: I'd managed to forget a recent Drudge Report headline about Obama selling out British nuclear secrets to Russia.

Fortunately, Thomas Sowell remembered this, and, taking it as his point of departure, he argues quite well that Obama is setting horrendous precedents for our national security on at least two levels.

First, regarding his betrayal of Great Britain, what kind of ally does this make us look like?

Glib talk about setting the reset button on American foreign policy raises the question whether any alliance with the United States can be relied on beyond the term of a particular administration. To nations that have to think in terms of their own national survival, four years is a very short time.

Second, and far worse, Obama's actions regarding Egypt (and I would say Britain, too) lend surface credibility to the left-wing trope of America-as-imperial-power:

Even in the worst days of the dictatorship in the Soviet Union, neither Stalin nor his successors publicly told the leaders of the satellite nations in Eastern Europe what to do. There is no question that Eastern European leaders were puppets of the Soviet Union, but Soviet leaders had the good sense not to say so to the whole world. Yet Obama makes allies look like they are puppets.

The philosophy of pragmatism, which makes range-of-the-moment morons out of so many of America's leaders, is thus easily seen to be not at all practical, given the temporal and moral blinders it places on them.

-- CAV

"Ford-Chevy" Arguments

Over at the Endeavour, John Cook has commented a few times on a common type of acrimonious dispute he calls a "Ford-Chevy argument." In the first of these posts, he generally describes the type of argument.

[A] Ford-Chevy argument is an emotionally charged debate over the merits of two similar things with each side fiercely loyal to its position. These arguments look silly to outsiders but are serious to insiders. We all have our Ford-Chevy topics.

Have you ever gotten into a Mac versus PC argument? Emacs versus vi? Your favorite programming language versus some inferior language? How about your profession versus some rival profession? Your favorite sports team versus a competitor?

Save for the last of these, the dispute is over something of practical value and it is not always completely clear to those having the argument what the relevant standard of value is, for purposes of drawing a comparison. For purposes of my further discussion here, let's omit things (like favorite sports teams) for which a choice is usually only a matter of taste, and let's also set aside the fact that taste can influence choices about things that do have practical ramifications.

The point about having a clear standard of value for such comparisons I bring up on my own, having seen Leonard Peikoff immediately address it when asked whether he regarded Ayn Rand or Aristotle as the "greatest" philosopher. Interestingly, as Cook points out in another post (and Peikoff shows in his answer), it is common for one of the things being compared to be better or worse than the other in different ways:

[I]f one alternative were uniformly better than all others, word would get out. These arguments rage because they involve comparisons along multiple (often implicit) criteria and no alternative is simultaneously better by all criteria.

The need to be clear about a standard for comparison is, however, just one of the many things that can make such arguments unnecessarily charged. Poor communication can contribute, but so can something else: Cook quotes programmer Thomas Gideon on one (in the context of high tech), which I think could occur, at least initially, even between good communicators who are on the same page about the basis for comparison:

[F]eature differences, ones that may paint your chosen tool in an unflattering light, can make you defensive without realizing it. ... how much effort you put in is being called into question, and to a degree, if only subconsciously, your intelligence or judgment may also be questioned by implication. [Cook's bold]

In such a case, it behooves one to satisfy oneself one way or the other whether the other side is right to raise such a question: There is plainly new information of some kind lurking around.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Minor edits. (2) Added a clarifying comment.

2-5-11 Hodgepodge

Williams on Constitutional Limits

Pursuant to a new rule regarding legislation brought before the House, Walter Williams takes a look (HT: HBL) at what our Constitution actually permits:

Here's the House of Representatives new rule: "A bill or joint resolution may not be introduced unless the sponsor has submitted for printing in the Congressional Record a statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the bill or joint resolution." Unless a congressional bill or resolution meets this requirement, it cannot be introduced.

If the House of Representatives had the courage to follow through on this rule, their ability to spend and confer legislative favors would be virtually eliminated. Also, if the rule were to be applied to existing law, they'd wind up repealing at least two-thirds to three-quarters of congressional spending.

Much of the rest of his column includes quotations from past politicians on this very point. For example, Thomas Jefferson once said the following: "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."

Weekend Reading

"[R]ather than predict how markets should act, it's preferable to maintain an open mind and observe how they're acting in the here and now." -- Jonathan Hoenig in "Gold Isn't Playing Its Part", at SmartMoney

"And a leading cause of this problem [that production costs of certain drugs outstrip profitability --ed] is the federal government, specifically in the form of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." -- Paul Hsieh in "America's Other Drug Problem", at Pajamas Media

"Rather than buying a book or taking a seminar on how to convince yourself to feel better, people can best help themselves by improving their thinking." -- Michael Hurd in "When Self-Help Doesn't Help", at DrHurd.com

"To the extent honest, productive businessmen absorb this view of their profession [as immoral --ed] -- and most do, to some extent -- they experience unearned guilt over their work, and are unable to morally challenge the ever-increasing taxes and regulations foisted on them for the 'public good.'" -- Alex Epstein in "Forget Groundhog Day -- Why Businessmen Should Say Happy Birthday to Ayn Rand", at Fox News

My Two Cents

Michael Hurd's column presents an excellent example -- finding a romantic partner -- of how improving one's thinking can help one become better, and feel better, regardless of ultimate success in some particular goal. Notice that the reflective, integrated, and value-oriented approach he advocates will lead to both all-around self-improvement and greater enjoyment of life regardless of success at any particular goal. This approach both puts such problems into perspective and makes one far more likely to solve them.

Glick on Egypt

Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head (HT: Amit Ghate) regarding the "revolution" in Egypt:

The problem with this recommendation [to back the ouster of the Mubarak regime --ed] is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak's regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

I also completely agree that the Obama Administration is choosing the worst way of playing a terrible hand in this situation.

-- CAV

"Great Barbecue"

Our mixed economy routinely causes politicians to substitute such red flags as bribery and flattery for rational forms of persuasion. One result is that such flags end up being missed altogether -- or even, in a sense, being mistaken for political bunting -- in a sort of "warning fatigue." But another, happier, result is that howlers, such as Michelle Obama's recent declaration that Charlotte, North Carolina, is some sort of barbecue capitol, become inevitable.

In listing Charlotte's many virtues, Obama named southern charm, hospitality, diversity -- "And of course, great barbecue."

That was news to residents, who know that North Carolina's best barbecue lies farther afield. "We appreciate the compliments, and they're all spot-on until that last one," the editorial board of the Charlotte Observer newspaper wrote in a blog post titled, "Charlotte = great barbecue? Who knew?"

"Everybody knows to get the best stuff, you gotta drive north to Lexington," the board added.

A local Associated Press reporter quoted a barbecue expert, retired University of North Carolina professor John Shelton Reed, who said that Charlotte for barbecue was "like Minneapolis for gumbo."

The gaffe was enough to make you wonder whether the White House had simply cut and pasted Southern clichés to create the first lady's announcement. [links dropped]

Needless to say, the siting of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was, itself, both bribery and flattery, and was plainly motivated by a desire to win crucial southern support in Obama's 2012 reelection bid.

Interestingly, the 2012 Convention will also be called, the "People's Convention," and is to feature more "grassroots" involvement. The name and theme seem calculated to echo both Scott Brown's reference to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat as the "People's Seat," as well as the grass roots Tea Party movement. If imitation is, indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, this week's Senate vote on ObamaCare reveals the nature of the sincerity: The Democrats imagine that populist cliches and nodding (-off?) references to the New South will win votes. But the sincerity stops there.

As an educated southerner who sees a beleaguered Democratic Party running short of new ideas and struggling to connect with the citizens of the greatest nation on earth, let me suggest, as a measure of good will and a show of my own level of grass roots involvement, an even more plainspoken and down-to-earth theme for the 2012 convention: "A People's Convention for a People's Republic." Call it, "The People's Name" for the Convention.

-- CAV

So Near, and Yet So Far

John Stossel says he can balance the budget now.

As the bureaucrats complain about proposals to make tiny cuts, it's good to remember that disciplined government could make cuts that get us to a surplus in one year. But even a timid Congress could make swift progress if it wanted to. If it just froze spending at today's levels, it would almost balance the budget by 2017. If spending were limited to 1 percent growth each year, the budget would balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington would limit spending growth to about 2 percent a year, the red ink would almost disappear in 10 years.

Stossel concludes that, as easy as reaching a surplus is on paper, "Only politics stand in the way."

Really?

On some level, Stossel knows otherwise, and even half-admits that politics isn't the only obstacle when he refers to the big, budget-busting entitlement programs as "untouchable" and even concedes privatizing social security "for now," since "our progressive friends won't like that." One need only ask why such programs are untouchable -- and why progressives like a government-run pyramid scheme so much -- to being to understand.

Hint: It's for the same reason we don't need (even) more data to show that socialized medicine is a bad idea, and that if we had that data, we'd still end up with socialized medicine, all other things being equal. The political ideas that people espouse and use as a basis for choosing elected officials arise at least in part from their moral convictions. When "Help others," is regarded as the right thing to do -- to the point that most people equate altruism, a type of morality, with morality -- and there is a conflict between reaching a balanced budget and what is regarded as helping others, the balanced budget will lose. That is because we will have elected politicians who regard helping others as what's really important.

That part of the picture fleshed out, I do find Stossel's column encouraging for two reasons. First, he mentions the Unmentionable. We will have to back out of entitlement programs to avoid national bankruptcy, and he does bring up that very idea. Second, Stossel's relatively modest proposals show that even a modicum of progress in this direction can buy our country time -- for the intellectual spadework that substantive and lasting change will require.

-- CAV

Government "Neutrality"

Over at Slate is a piece by Bruce Gottlieb called "The Myth of Government Neutrality," which discusses how what it calls "economic regulation" of communications media can influence availability and content in unanticipated ways.

The piece is worthwhile for some of the information it brings up in its slide show, but very frustrating due to its lack of clarity about the difference between legitimate functions of the government, such as copyright protection (including clear rules on fair use), and illegitimate interventions, such as the establishment of monopolies. Both have non-obvious effects on what we can get from communications media, and would regardless of how well our right to freedom of speech is protected by the government.

For example, I found the following point thought-provoking:

Why is it that, in the 1830s, the United States had roughly 1,300 newspapers, while Great Britain and Germany (both more populous) had only 369 and 23? Two reasons, both related to government. First, early American democracy extended the franchise more broadly than in Europe. More voters meant greater demand for information on politics. Second, the U.S. government subsidized newspaper's postal rates and lowered tax burdens. The conscious purpose was to ensure broad distribution of political media. In the 20th century, the United States would go on to lead the world in public education -- further expanding the audience for newspapers and magazines.

The above paragraph perfectly illustrates why I am ambivalent about this piece. I do not dispute that our form of government creates demand for news coverage and political commentary, but the comparison with Europe obscures the fact that newspapers became successful here despite taxation. Also, since subsidy money has to come from somewhere, whether postal subsidies actually increased the demand for newspapers is a debatable point. (The subsidies did, however, violate the property rights of the involuntary underwriters.)

I am not bothered just by the fact that the analysis of non-obvious effects of government regulation of news media suffers from a lack of clarity about which interventions are legitimate and which aren't: As a result of this lack of clarity, the danger of even regulation of content is made to look less serious to people who share many common misconceptions about the government's proper purpose. An advocate of government censorship can point to this article and say something like, "less regulation of content can be just as beneficial as less taxation," or, "freedom of speech is granted judiciously like the right to property: for the good of the republic." The propriety of government control of property and content -- or doing anything that isn't protection of individual rights -- is never questioned.

In fact, this article provides a great deal of information that could have shown the benefits of the government properly protecting the rights to freedom of speech and property, and the problems that improper government intervention can cause. For a similar reason (i.e., a lack of a consistent pro-capitalist perspective), it also failed to bring up other things the government should have considered that could have resulted in even better availability and content. For example, consider the "three" options considered by the government for distribution of a new type of property, the airwaves:

(1) nationalize the system (like the BBC),

(2) give licenses to local nonprofit entities (a bit like public radio today), or

(3) give licenses to commercial entities affiliated themselves with national broadcasting chains.

Entirely omitted is what should have been done: (4) auction them off as private property.

Finally, government regulation of the economy at the expense of protection of individual rights is always done on the basis of some consideration that wrongly supersedes individual rights. That is, some other standard is used to justify government policy, including distribution of resources and distribution of content. This fact alone is what makes a myth of government "neutrality." The idea of a redistributionist government being impartial about anything is baloney. An economics professor once gave me a simple, elegant example:

You're in a dictatorship and want to give a speech. You have to give it somewhere, but a bureaucrat tells you that the auditorium you'd like to use is "needed" for something else. You have no other recourse since there isn't private property. You never give your speech, and yet the government never explicitly censored it.

The problem isn't that we should learn to recognize and accept the fact that a government that runs everything isn't neutral: It's that our government shouldn't be running everything.

-- CAV

Of Crying and Compromise

Two major political developments vie for attention this morning, one domestic and one foreign.

Domestically, a federal judge has ruled ObamaCare unconstitutional because it forces individuals to purchase health insurance, and because this requirement not severable (i.e., It will void the rest of the law if it is found unconstitutional.) Given that we have been slowly approaching de facto socialized medicine for decades and even this judge finds its redistributionist goal "laudable," it is clear that, if this opinion ultimately prevails, it merely buys time for the real fight for freedom in medicine.

The Obama Administration's response to this ruling is amusing, given both Obama's previous position on the mandate and his recent declaration of lip-service to the idea of eliminating bad regulations:

Much of Judge Vinson's ruling was a discussion of how the Founding Fathers, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, saw the limits on congressional power. Judge Vinson hypothesized that, under the Obama administration's legal theory, the government could mandate that all citizens eat broccoli.

White House officials said that sort of "surpassingly curious reading" called into question Judge Vinson's entire ruling.

"There's something thoroughly odd and unconventional about the analysis," said a White House official who briefed reporters late Monday afternoon, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Not only is this not an odd reading, it would seem to be a typical one, given the metastasizing regulatory power of, for example, the EPA over such things as carbon dioxide, dust raised by farming equipment, and now, as Thomas Sowell notes in an appropriately titled piece, milk spills!

[T]he EPA has decided that, since milk contains oil, it has the authority to force farmers to comply with new regulations to file "emergency management" plans to show how they will cope with spilled milk, how farmers will train "first responders" and build "containment facilities" if there is a flood of spilled milk.

Granted, the anonymous official is referring to a legal analysis and, for all I know, he's right in that narrow context, but still... Were we only crying over spilled milk!

On the international front, Egypt looks to my eyes like the next Iran and Tony Blankley agrees. Blankley's analysis is hampered, though, by the following misunderstanding of what an actual political revolution is like:

Revolutions - French, Russian, Chinese and Iranian - have a typical trajectory. They are won on the street with the masses calling for freedom; they are stolen afterward by the best-organized, usually most malicious thugs (Napoleon, Lenin, Mao and the mullahs).

Once in a while - as in our Revolution - the cry of the street slogans becomes the principle of the government that follows - but usually not.

This ignores the crucial distinction between a blind revolt and an actual revolution, which one can understand in terms of whether principles are clear or murky, as Ayn Rand once wrote in her essay, "The Anatomy of Compromise," as quoted by Paul Blair.

When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

Blair's analysis of the compromised conservative movement is brief, and worth reading on its own.

Judging by the inability of many pundits to make head or tail of the stated beliefs of the Egyptian body politic, it is plain to me that this uprising is blind and, therefore, ultimately doomed.

-- CAV